ArtReview March 2016 by ArtReview

Cao Fei

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION BROOCH IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

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HAUSER & WIRTH

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TO ZURBARAN, 2015 HORSE SKIN, FABRIC, WOOD, IRON, EPOXY 120 × 160 × 130 CM / 47 1/4 × 63 × 51 1/8 IN PHOTO: MIRJAM DEVRIENDT

HAUSER WIRTH & SCHIMMEL

REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING ABSTRACT SCULPTURE BY WOMEN 1947 – 2016 13 MARCH – 4 SEPTEMBER 2016 901 EAST 3RD STREET LOS ANGELES CA 90013 WWW.HAUSERWIRTHSCHIMMEL.COM

RUTH ASAWA, INSTALLATION VIEW OF UNTITLED (S.113), UNTITLED (S.035), UNTITLED (S.036), AND UNTITLED (S.155), 1958–1962. COPPER, BRASS, AND IRON WIRE DIMENSIONS VARIABLE ARTWORK © ESTATE OF RUTH ASAWA IMAGE © SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART COLLECTION OF THE SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART. GIFT OF THE ARTIST WITH ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FROM THE MUSEUM’S COLLECTIONS COMMITTEE IN HONOR OF THE SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART’S 35TH ANNIVERSARY. 2003.28.01-.04. PHOTO: JKA PHOTOGRAPHY

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

09/04 – 21/05 2016 James Lee Byars East Room Sonia Gomes North Room

Independent, New York 04 – 08/03

Haroon Gunn-Salie West Room

Art Basel Hong Kong 24 – 26/03 SP-Arte, São Paulo 07 – 10/04

Mend e s Wood DM

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EMILIO VEDOVA SALZBURG MARCH – MAY 2016 ROPAC.NET

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

ROBERT STURM KERAMIK 1969 – 1993 MARCH 12 – APRIL 16, 2016 — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10, D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE

ISA MELSHEIMER ÜBER DIE DÜNNHÄUTIGKEIT VON SCHWELLEN MARCH 12 – APRIL 16, 2016 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ARCO MADRID FEBRUARY 24 – 28, 2016 STAND 7E06

ART BASEL HONG KONG MARCH 24 – 26, 2016 STAND 1B13

2016 HONGKONG PEDDER BUILDING NEW OPENING MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS HIS NEW GALLERY IN HONGKONG WITH AN EXHIBITION BY YAN PEI-MING.

2009 LONDON MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS HIS GALLERY IN LONDON WITH AN EXHIBITION BY ROB PRUITT. YAN PEI-MING, PORTRAIT DE JEUNE PICASSO, 2015, OIL ON CANVAS, 61 X 46 CM

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

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ROB PRUITT, SAFE AND WARM, 2009, GLITTER AND ENAMEL ON CANVAS, 183 X 138 CM (DETAIL)

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MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS HIS FIRST GALLERY IN MILANO WITH AN EXHIBITION BY OLIVIER MOSSET.

OLIVIER MOSSET, UNTITLED, 1987, ACRILIC ON CANVAS, 432 X 216 CM

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1987 MILANO

Kerlin Gallery Art Basel Hong Kong Hall 1C, Booth 11 22–26 March 2016

Dorothy Cross Liam Gillick Isabel Nolan Jan Pleitner Sean Scully www.kerlingallery.com

John McAllister riot rose summery

A L M I N E R E C H G A L L E RY B R U S S E L S

March 10th - April 14th, 2016

Raymond Pettibon Homo Americanus Collected Works Foreword by Dirk Luckow and Sabine Breitwieser Editors’ introduction by Ulrich Loock and Harald Falckenberg Texts by Ulrich Loock, Raymond Pettibon, and Lucas Zwirner Hardcover, 7 x 10 1/4 in (17.8 x 26 cm) 692 pages, 575 color plates $65 US & Canada | £40 Exhibitions Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, Germany February - September 2016 Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria November 2016 - February 2017

David Zwirner Books New York & London

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Malick Sidibé March 17 – April 23

513 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 | Tel: 212 645 1701 | Fax: 212 645 8316 | www.jackshainman.com | info@jackshainman.com

ArtReview vol 68 no 2 March 2016

Swivellingleakyeye Recently someone approached ArtReview (it’s not so good with names) and informed it that it was not Asian enough, unlike its sister publication, ArtReview Asia, which was representing the Asian perspective on art more than adequately. The nerve! Still, ArtReview has always thought of itself as a magazine of the people, and however bizarre the request, or its formulation, it’s an organ that listens to its readers as much as it listens to all the latest rumblings and grumblings from the artmakers and discourse framers within the artworld itself. That, after all, is why it has two ears. It has two eyes as well, so, like most of the rest of the West, ArtReview is swivelling one of its eyeballs to face East this month. Not just because it’s packing its bags for a trip to Art Basel Hong Kong (though it is), but also because running an art magazine in today’s globally interconnected, image-saturated world is a process of constantly refining and adjusting the filters through which ArtReview sieves the barrage of art information to which it is constantly subjected. Art, after all, might attack from any direction. You’ll not be surprised, then, to know that while one of its eyeballs has been pointing East, the other one has been rotating in all kinds of directions. Not least because when it came to the cover image, ArtReview had its minions shoot Chinese cover artist Cao Fei in the West, when she turned up for the opening of a show that featured her work in Paris this January: East, West – the whole business is much more confusing than the words we use to describe it might make you think. And she’s now preparing for her first solo institutional show in the us, which opens this month. Is her current exposure in the West (she’s also creating an ‘art car’ for bmw) to do with her representation of the East or is it a reflection of the fact that her art, with its investigations of contemporary social being, appeals to audiences in the West?

Earthly European paradise

Context, when it comes to art, is something that is often in flux. That’s one of the reasons ArtReview chose this month to take a look at the Thai art scene in the wake of recent political change within the country. How has that change been reflected in the country’s art? It hasn’t really, as Max Crosbie-Jones reports. If the danger in that is that Thai art becomes ‘a distraction from what’s really going on’, as Bangkok-based curator Somrak Sila says, then elsewhere in this issue you’ll find Erik Morse arguing that the rise of social media, as revealed by the art produced in its wake, does reflect something of the truth about average suburban living in the West – in that, if nothing else, it perpetuates a sense of emptiness that affects much of that society today. So does that contrast reveal an essential difference between the art of the East and the art of the West? Or what does it tell us about the relative circumstances of artists producing work in Thailand as opposed to Europe and the us? And how does all this fit with Mark Prince’s analysis of the ways in which Berlinbased British artist Ceal Floyer manufactures artworks that operate within their own tightly controlled frames of reference? Does the only truth lie in artworks that seal themselves off from the confusions and contradictions that rule global society at large? ArtReview knows, it knows! You turn to it for answers, not questions, but just as much as the Asia-baiters provoke it, ArtReview also exists to provoke you. Or at least to encourage you to explore the artworld for yourselves. Indeed ArtReview likes to think that it encourages people to explore their worlds with or without the art bit. Although obviously the art bit is the bit that ArtReview loves the most. You can tell that from its name. At this point, you’ll understand that ArtReview’s wandering eyeball is beginning to hurt. Quite a lot. Partly because of all the swivelling and constant refocusing on particularities and the generalities of art around the world (it takes that pain for you – the people), but also because it’s shedding a tear for poor old fashion-conscious Gallery Girl, its long-serving backpage art gossip, who this month, after an adventure more dangerous than most, signs off this magazine one last time. Sniff, sniff… Right, enough of that. Off to lunch with her replacement. Look out, artworld! ArtReview

Sri Murugam’s heavenly chariot, Singapore

Qiu Xiaofei Double Pendulum

510 WEST 25TH ST NEW YORK MARCH 11 – APRIL 23, 2016

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Art Previewed

Rosa Luxemburg on Art Fairs Interview by Matthew Collings 56

Previews by Martin Herbert 35 Points of View by Mike Watson, Sam Jacob, Brad Phillips, Jonathan T. D. Neil, J. J. Charlesworth, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Maria Lind 45

Kelly Ying Interview by Mark Rappolt 60

page 36 David Hammons, Untitled, 2004, rock and hair, 31 × 23 × 13 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

March 2016

Art Featured

Cao Fei (and me) by Doretta Lau 68

Cai Guo-Qiang by Joshua Mack 80

The Art and Literature of the Social Media Banal by Erik Morse 74

Thailand’s Silent Period by Max Crosbie-Jones 84 Ceal Floyer by Mark Prince 90

page 68 Cao Fei, Haze and Fog, 2013, c-print, 70 × 105 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing & Guangzhou

ArtReview

Laurent grasso

É LYSÉ E Exhibition March 22 — April 30

Art Reviewed

A Scratching Not a Biting, by Iona Whittaker Martin Wong, by Joshua Mack Saloua Raouda Choucair, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Paciﬁco Silano, by Brienne Walsh Coco Fusco, by Dan Udy Totemonumento, by Claire Rigby Carlos Bunga, by Stefanie Hessler

exhibitions 100 Wu Guanzhong/Chua Ek Kay, by Adeline Chia Sonia Leimer, by Kimberly Bradley Daniel Dezeuze, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, by Raimar Stange Walter Swennen, by Sherman Sam Hanne Darboven, by Kate Sutton Kostis Velonis, by Michelangelo Corsaro Inbetween Baselitz – McCarthy, by Mark Rappolt Melvin Moti, by Dominic van den Boogerd Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, by Mike Watson Darren Bader, by Barbara Casavecchia How Did We Get Here, by Sarah Jilani Gerard Byrne, by Robert Barry Ellen Hyllemose, by Kiki Mazzucchelli This is Today, by Gabriel Coxhead Andrew Norman Wilson, by Orit Gat Simon Denny, by Oliver Basciano Rose English, by Helen Sumpter Rafaël Rozendaal, by Jonathan Griffin Michael Henry Hayden, by Andrew Berardini Sam Pulitzer, by David Everitt Howe

books 130 My Dear bb… The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959, edited by Robert Cumming Berlin Artists, by Till Cremer Ellsworth Kelly: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, edited by Yve-Alain Bois Ellsworth Kelly, by Tricia Y. Paik Please Send This Book to My Mother, by Sarah Entwistle the strip 138 off the record 142

page 113 Barıs Doğrusöz, Paris time: ‘The map and the territory’ (video still), 2012–14. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

POPE.L THE INDEPENDENT ART FAIR MARCH 3 – 6 SPRING STUDIOS, NEW YORK

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH WWW.MIANDN.COM

The Armory Show 3 – 6 March 2016 Pier 92, Booth #214

Cortesi Gallery

Agostino Bonalumi I Wish to Meet Architects Curated by Marco Meneguzzo 15 March – 21 May 2016

41 & 43 Maddox St. W1S 2PD – London

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41 & 43 Maddox Street W1S 2PD London, United Kingdom +44 20 74 93 6009

Agostino Bonalumi, Bianco, 1969, shaped canvas and vinyl tempera, 190 × 813 cm, eleven elements (detail). Courtesy: private collection.

Art Previewed

The rice wrapping layer can be found in the list of ingredients in the uk as ‘Edible Glutinous Rice Paper (edible starch, water, Glycerin Monostearate)’ along with liquid maltose, white granulated sugar, whole milk powder, butter, food additives (gelatin, vanillin), corn starch, syrup, cane sugar and milk 33

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Previewed David Hammons Mnuchin Gallery, New York 15 March – 27 May Biennale of Sydney various venues 18 March – 5 June

Liam Gillick Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto through 3 January 2017 Jesse Wine Soy Capitán, Berlin through 2 April

fluidity Kunstverein in Hamburg through 10 April

Playgrounds Museu de Arte de São Paulo 17 March – 31 July Richard Sides Carlos/Ishikawa, London through 2 April

Peter Fischli David Weiss Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York through 27 April

Allison Katz Giò Marconi, Milan through 19 March

Daido Moriyama Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris through 5 June

7 Daido Moriyama, Dog and Mesh Tights, 2014–15, slideshow of 291 black-and-white photographs, 25 min, music by Toshihiro Oshima, video concept: Gérard Chiron. Courtesy the artist; Getsuyosha Limited, Tokyo; Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Tokyo

March 2016

1 For two decades, David Hammons’s angle on survey shows could be précised by one of fellow Chouinard Art Institute alumnus Ed Ruscha’s painted axioms: ‘I don’t want no retro spective’ [sic]. Also spurned by the Illinois-born, New York-based artist during much of that time: gallery representation, personality-driven publicity and a showy lifestyle, ie the trappings many artists appear to covet. Hammons, who in recent years has nevertheless landed among the top ten living American artists at auction (and the only one of those to put up the work himself, thus profiting from sales, as most artists do not), long ago realised that, after a certain point, if you don’t chase, you’ll likely be chased. Of course it helps that his art – which, since the late 1960s, has scathingly filtered the readymade and assemblage formats through the quiddities of African-American experience – is stellar, and that his refusals are part of it. In the past decade, however, perhaps because he’s been self-financing his own gallery in

Yonkers, New York, possibly mindful of how history will view him (or not notice him sufficiently), Hammons has switched tack. White Cube apparently represents him, and now Mnuchin – with whom he’s collaborated twice before – is mounting Five Decades, Hammons’s first retrospective since the 1990s. The exhibition will move from early engagements with Arte Povera and Dada (greased body prints, spades, American flags) through endlessly inventive deployments of bottle caps, chicken bones and hair as signifiers of blackness, and on to his recent potent engagements with abstraction, which have ranged from blacking out massive spaces (and giving viewers tiny blue flashlights) to concealing abstract paintings under tarps. Whenever he breaks cover, Hammons rarely misses: if at all possible, don’t miss this. Unlike Sheila Hicks, Jumana Manna, Ming Wong, Nina Beier, boychild, Dayanita Singh, Heman Chong, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler and

scads of others, Hammons is not included in 2 the current Biennale of Sydney, inaugurated in 1973 and now in its 20th edition. But he could be present in spirit, given that artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal’s show is divided into seven ‘embassies of thought’ and one of them is named the Embassy of Non-Participation. If embassies are states within states, these function as subdivisions within a state-ofcontemporary-reality address: Rosenthal, chief curator at London’s Hayward Gallery, borrows her title, The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, from cultural pulse-taker/ future-glimpser William Gibson and asks, we’re told, ‘If each era posits its own view of reality, what is ours?’ Expect the various pavilions to suggest a compound answer in which fresh developments meet perpetual loops: the vaunted intermingling of the physical and the virtual, the loss of cultural memory, the primacy of performing, cycles of life and death, rites of passage and more.

2 Dayanita Singh, Museum of Chance (detail), 2015, photobook. Courtesy the artist

1 David Hammons, Orange Is the New Black, 2014, glass, wood, nails, acrylic, 64 × 41 × 33 cm. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

ArtReview

3 Mladen Stilinovic, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, 1992, artiﬁcial silk. Photo: Boris Cvjetanovic. Courtesy the artist

4 Liam Gillick, Factories in the Snow, 2007 (installation view, Philippe Parreno, Anywhere, Anywhere out of the World, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist

Over in Hamburg, it’s been decided that the presiding condition of contemporary reality is… well, deduce away from the title of 3 fluidity. While assessing the moment, the group show’s curators also scan the last halfcentury: this exhibition, curated by Bettina Steinbrügge, Nina Möntmann and Vanessa Joan Müller (hey, no umlaut, no curatorial presence) notes that it’s now 50 years since the outset of the conceptual art zenith covered by Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973), and argues that artists today no longer use dematerialisation strategies as a commerce-frustrating, object-refusing ‘response to political issues’, but that a ﬂuid, shapeshifting, evanescent art is, today, a reﬂection of the state we’re in. The exhibition list, meanwhile – ranging from Lee Lozano, Eleanor Antin and Mladen Stilinovic to Jason Dodge, Maria Eichhorn, Simon Denny and Melanie Gilligan – bridges the temporal gap between one vanishing point and another.

‘discussion platforms’. Talk among yourselves ‘Liam Gillick already noticed that concepfor a moment… tual art basically no longer existed after the And we’re back. Jesse Wine’s exhibition 5 1960s and 1970s’, remarks fluidity’s advance at Soy Capitán, Wonderful Audience Member, info, noting that afterwards global capitalism comes prefaced by a quote from Jacques simply swallowed art up: it was no more. In lieu Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator (2009) that of making standalone works of conceptual art, concerns looking as a transformative act, but Gillick is currently embarked upon Campaign, that’s as top-heavy as the English artist gets. a yearlong processual work for the Serralves Wine’s glossily glazed ceramic sculptures, Museum, Porto, involving fluctuating sculpwhich include deadpan plates of food, snakes tural interventions in the gallery: ‘spatial and conversing with snails, tiled wall reliefs and performative situations’ tracking back to works body-part mobiles, and on occasion appear that Gillick has made or contemplated making named after manufacturers of lavatories, are since the 1990s. These will include Factories in pleasurably mismatched amalgams of reference the Snow (2007), his work for piano and falling points from the modernist (Calder, Giacometti, artificial snow; a 1:1 scale model of Gillick’s De Stijl and St Ives potters such as Bernard ac/dc Joy Division House, a social centre for Leach and Shoji Hamada, among others) to the Milanese teenagers proposed during the early autobiographical (and the jokily referential, 90s; ‘a large-scale sculptural translation of eg bottles of wine), tangled together in a way Guy Debord’s A Game of War’ [the Frenchman’s that positively invites, as per Rancière, active 1987 book with Alice Becker-Ho, later turned parsing. Besides his first showing in Berlin, into a strategy game]; and the rainbow-hued Wine is also flowing – sorry, but he started it – neomodernism of the artist’s signature

ArtReview

across Europe, in the touring British Art Show, might be their self-help list How to Work Better this that his second Fondation Cartier show, in a solo presentation at the Gemeentemuseum Daido Tokyo, is focused. Characteristically his eye (1991), which this writer has seen pinned to flattens, often with ironic intent, distinctions Den Haag (to May 16) and, five days after the many an artist’s studio wall. (It works!) During between real people and the ghost cast of figures latter closes, in That Continuous Thing: Artists and the show’s run, the Public Art Fund will present that appear in advertising hoardings; here, the Ceramics Studio, 1920 – Today at Tate St Ives. the list – which also serves as the exhibition among other works, is a new commissioned Ceramics, while being a continuous thing, title – as a mural on the corner of Houston and series titled Dog and Mesh Tights (2014–15), shot is experiencing a notable revival today – see also Mott streets. Expect productivity, and eyebrows, over nine months in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, renewed interest in the work of figures like Ken to rise accordingly in Lower Manhattan. Arles, Houston and Los Angeles. Nosing around Price and Ron Nagle – and for this, aside from If you know Daido Moriyama’s street 7 in deserted alleys and urban corners, it showa current interest in the handmade generally, photography (and, reader, you should), what 6 we might in part credit Peter Fischli and David you’ll know best are likely the black-and-white cases a masterful eye for the unheeded, but also an act of self-orientation that conveys what Weiss. Suddenly This Overview, begun in 1981, the images of Tokyo, particularly his home district Moriyama calls ‘the confusing interaction of pair’s 200-plus assembly of small unfired clay of Shinjuku, that he has made since the 1960s: people and things’ in the cityscape. sculptures – a miniature, ambiguous world of pacey communiqués driven by skewed angles People and things will meanwhile unquesscenarios that tangle together historical figures, and blurs, push-processed into grainy high myths and speculative scenarios – appears in contrast (under the spell, specifically, of William 8 tionably be interacting in Playgrounds, the Museu d’Arte São Paulo’s reboot of one of the their comprehensive Guggenheim retrospective, Klein and Robert Frank) and capturing postwar inaugural exhibitions for the museum’s Lina initially planned during the lifetime of Weiss Japanese society’s tense overlap of tradition and (who died in 2012), alongside films, further sculp- modernity. But Moriyama also shoots in colour Bo Bardi-designed building. It’s the second in tures, slideshows and more. If Fischli/Weiss a sequence of revivals of shows that followed – indeed, since his photographs went digital spent three decades walking a knife-edge between at the start of the millennium, even his blackthe building’s opening in 1968, after last year’s the trite and the elevating, exemplary of this presentation of the farsighted Bo Bardi’s and-whites have originated as such – and it’s on

5 Jesse Wine, Jesse’s wine, 2014, glazed ceramic, 3 parts, dimensions variable. Photo: Colin Davidson. Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary, Glasgow

6 Peter Fischli David Weiss, How to Work Better, 1991, screenprint on paper, in six colours, 70 × 50 cm, unlimited edition. © the artists

8 Playgrounds, 1969 (installation view, Museu d’Arte São Paulo, 1969). Photo: José Xavier. Courtesy Museu d’Arte São Paulo

March 2016

concrete-and-glass easels – which gave institutional space a newfound feeling of lightness – and points to the architect’s desire for a different model of viewership: more participatory, democratic and playful, and skewing away from stiff Eurocentric models. Here, as a fresh swathe of artists – six in total, including Yto Barrada, Céline Condorelli and Ernesto Neto – takes up the everybody-join-in approach, Bo Bardi’s rehabilitated reputation ought to ratchet up a few notches more. As opposed to a group show with a focused agenda, solo shows that resemble group shows are (at least) as old as the work of Felix GonzalezTorres: still, class-of-2012 Royal College of Art 9 graduate Richard Sides takes the method to a consciously disharmonious extreme. His previous show at Carlos/Ishikawa, in 2013, not 10 only cycled through apparel, video, projection, sound, indecorous sculpture and press clippings on paedophilia, but was also schismatic on a

case-by-case basis, for instance soundtracking footage of an anti-child abuse ﬁlmmaker with manipulatively emotive music. Sides, it appears, has a strong interest in how narratives are constructed and/or thwarted: alongside numerous partially signifying collage-based works, he’s made work relating to the ending of The Usual Suspects (1995), and his 2014 show at Kunsthalle Winterthur found him presenting don’t blow it in the vector (2014), a documentary about electronic musicians that is unapologetically insular and unaccommodating. Call us masochists, but we take pleasure in this kind of thing, not least because – another internal conﬂict – usually there’s some nice bright colour to bathe in along the way. If we move straight from here to the smartly poised yet off-beam paintings of Allison Katz, it might appear that one sensible strategy today is to position oneself at 180 degrees from a prevailing orthodoxy: that documentaries

should communicate, that an artist should have a style, or – in the London-based Katz’s case – that paintings should have some kind of gravity and consistency. She often appears to paint whatever strikes her eye – a showerhead and potted plant, a person, ﬁsh, snowy balconies, a landscape, an arrangement of strawberries – and to reﬂect, in her changeable painting style, the varying length of her attention spans and the weight and evanescence of emotional responses to the world. As if that weren’t enough delicate hopscotching, Katz also breaks periodically into other formats: folding screens, ceramic (eg little sculptures that fuse noses and asses), graphic works. In Italy – an apt locale for an artist with a dash of Francesco Clemente in her aesthetic – we’re looking forward to something to do with dogs and eggs; and thus, probably, also many things that aren’t dogs or eggs. Mostly, though, we’re just looking forward. Martin Herbert

10 Allison Katz, I, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 180 × 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and Giò Marconi, Milan 9 Richard Sides, don’t blow it on the vector, 2014 (installation views, Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2014). Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa London

ArtReview

James Clar False Awakenings February 25 - April 2, 2016

Render(Tree); 2016 tree, rubber, paint, metal, LED lights, filters 60 x 60 x 225cm

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

WWW.ARTCOLOGNE.COM

L AUREN LU LOFF MARCH 17 - MAY 14, 2016

GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON GENEVA www.bernardceysson.com

Points of View

The artwork as the residual trace of an individual’s self-expression does not generally hold any kind of use value for people other than the artist. In the rare cases that it does, it may be sold, though the issue of how a price is decided upon is a complex one, making it very difficult to ﬁt art into the framework of any mainstream economic analysis. Dave Beech’s recent book, entitled Art and Value: Art’s Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (2015), aims to address the complex relationship between art and the economy by revisiting economic analyses of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. In so doing he draws out their internal contradictions, asserting that the artwork is economically ‘exceptional’. In an epic study that, at least in its thoroughness, raises the bar for theoretical analyses of art and society, Beech argues for a rethinking of arts funding mechanisms that goes beyond the public and private binary. Casting art as a kind of ‘merit good’ (a good that generates a greater value during its consumption than is expended in its manufacture and which can therefore be enjoyed for free), Art and Value concludes, following Antonio Negri, that we ought to adopt a ‘commons’ style approach to the dissemination of art. Culture, ultimately, should be as freely available as air or water. While laudable in its depth, Beech’s account arguably falls short in its failure to see in art’s production and consumption precisely the kind of exploitation that he, as a committed leftist, opposes. Accordingly, art’s supposed exceptionalism lets it off the hook at a time when it appears in many ways utterly complicit with the pernicious form of ﬁnance capital that has, for the last eight years, made light work

artistic standards In which

Mike Watson, provoked by a recent publication, argues that it’s time for a rethink when it comes to art’s supposedly arm’s-length relationship to money and power

of wrecking the world’s economies one at a time. Indeed, before making the case for their exceptionalism, Beech would have done well to consider the mechanisms that govern artistic value as absolutely exemplary of how economic value is generated. One only has to take an English £5 note and read the text printed on its fascia, to the left of the Queen’s head: ‘Bank of England – I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ﬁve pounds’. This pledge effectively forges a bond between the bearer, a vendor (of goods or services) and the Bank of England whereby the three parties agree on value in goods denoted by the £5 note, which was backed up by a gold deposit held by the central

March 2016

bank until a point came (in 1931) when the value of the gold could simply not sustain the money pegged to it. The subsequent abandoning of the gold standard demonstrated that it was never really the gold kept in reserve that generated the value of paper money in Britain. It was, rather, the ever-changing agreement between individuals as to what the purely symbolic denomination of ‘£5’ means. The trick played perpetually by the powerful is to convince the majority of people that value derives from the powerful and the assets they control (gold, oil, minerals, shares, etc). The production of artistic value is generated in a similar way: ie by the assent of an artistic producer and an audience as to the artistic merits of a given work. What Duchamp’s readymades so brilliantly demonstrated is that we can declare anything to be art so long as one or more other people are in agreement with that declaration. However, as with the generation of financial value, various mediators (critics, curators, museum directors, gallerists, dealers and a plethora of other ‘experts’) exploit the flexibility of the statement ‘this is art’, pegging it to perceived standards of which they are the guardians. Accordingly art is inexorably entwined with power, and also with money. Art’s increasing use as finance commodity by investors seeking to spread out their portfolios is not in this sense a historical anomaly that can be glossed over. It is, rather, an astute exploitation of art’s properties by the wealthy and one that needs addressing before – wittingly or not – exonerating art from the malpractices of the powerful. As such, the particular properties of power need examining in their relation to art before art can be honestly appraised in isolation from it.

Do we shape our tools? Or do they shape us? When you ﬁre up your laptop, swipe your phone, switch on your tv, what exactly are you bringing to electric life? These objects are presented as things that are there to help us work, play and organise our lives. But what if, rather than facilitating our needs and desires, they mould us? What if tools act as devices that format our behaviours to the templates encoded within them? Social networks provide templates for your digital interaction with the world: forms that format friendship, prompt you to disclose what’s on your mind, tout for your opinion, encourage you to connect. Their insistent format is not just a mode of self-expression but something that begins to change the way we think of friendship and social relations. At least social networks require a proactive signup, but what about the preprogrammed apps on your phone that you never asked for and never use? What is that stocks-ticker app really doing there? In a sense it is symbolic, a totem that links you to the idea that the phone itself is part of the global, networked world and the free ﬂow of capital. It’s reminding you of the kind of citizen you should be: someone on the move who keeps an eye on investments, perhaps checking the price of their recently ipo’d tech company. Even as you wonder how you could get rid of it, decluttering your screen and freeing up your memory, it’s there reminding you that you are part of the free market. Tools have always done this. The clock, for example, organised time in a new way, dividing the day in accordance to labour requirements. Tools shape more than behaviour, transforming the physical world around us. Maps have always been about more than just information. They have been representations of world power, instruments of imperialism and war.

all that junk The thing about tools, Sam Jacob discovers, is that they’re all ultimately useless

The iPhone’s undeletable stock app

ArtReview

For all the intentionality of tools, however, their real product might actually be junk. Like Newton’s third law, every tool has an equal and opposite reaction: uselessness. The architect Rem Koolhaas memorably described the landscape of airports as ‘junkspace’: the weird half-formed spaces between the moments of necessary infrastructure, the gaps in between border, security and runway. Expanding on this idea, we could imagine that the majority of the substance of the world is junk: the countryside we know is just the junkspace of agriculture; streets are the city junk between buildings; work is full of work junk; homes are full of home junk. We’re surrounded by it: leisure junk, history junk, future junk, infrastructure junk, friend junk. Every intentional act – every tool for living – proliferates into a multiverse of unintentionality, expanding like foam, a vast wake of interstitial flotsam. The real products of our age, of course, are the vast oceans of digital junk we now produce. Spam, deletions, 404 errors and so – infinitely – on. Even more voluminous is the info junk, the self-generated social junk rapidly filling data farms full of nothing but junk, from Instagrammed breakfasts shouting into the void, to camgirls’ bedrooms, eBay garage shots and listings of spare rooms and old couches. A seamless and fluid patchwork of the domestic and suburban grown to the size of the digital planet. If the digital world has erased boundaries between once distinct institutions or qualities (of, say, public and private or work and leisure), perhaps we now look from the archive to the junkyard and already find it impossible to say which is which. In other words, don’t believe that new tools offer solutions. Instead see that they are simply devices that produce new conditions – inevitably strange and unexpected conditions. And the very same tools that are producing this new junk world are the ones we rely on to navigate it.

I stopped watching pornography a few years ago. My conscious effort to ignore the trauma and exploitation, the consistently sad stories that bring people into the industry, was broken one day when I saw the sad and depleted eyes of a woman being fucked by a group of men. After that I saw those same eyes every time I watched any skin flick. That scene also coincided with my stumbling onto roll calls on YouTube that memorialise members of the porn industry who have died over the past year. With shockingly few exceptions, the causes of death for both male and female performers were suicide, murder or drug overdose. Not just a few – dozens each year, occasionally breaking a hundred. Recently, however, a friend of mine started sending me screenshots of porn sets with Mark Rothko prints hanging in the background. I was curious. Since these were just stills, in order to dig further I had to revisit for a few days the living grave of adult entertainment. Chocolate Chicks on Cracker Dicks 4 (2009), starring Bella Moretti, is one title that features three Rothko prints in the background. Diesel Dongs #29 (2013) was shot in a different location, with different Rothko prints visible. Often the same house or apartment is used in hundreds of porn films, so these and other Rothkos appear over and over again. This seemingly high occurrence of Rothko prints decorating the sets of adult films is almost certainly a fluke. Rothko prints are popular everywhere. There’s one in my dentist’s office. For most people not inculcated with the common sentiment that Rothko’s works stand for some great gaping sadness, some existential void writ large, spurred on by the cult of tragic personality that grew after his suicide, they’re just soothing paintings: unantagonistic combinations of soft-edged colours drifting into each other. That’s how I see Rothko’s paintings: they’re like Helen Frankenthaler’s work, just geometrically different. I don’t see any sadness, in part perhaps because I don’t buy into the idea that red and black and deep brown are inherently bleak and mournful. Of course some people do experience the paintings as such, and I don’t think they’re wrong. Art is subjective, and abstraction, designed to offer multiform readings, is even more so.

rothkos, gangbangs, porno and me You haven’t seen the sad in a Rothko until you’ve seen the Rothko hanging at the back of a porn set, claims Brad Phillips

Chocolate Chicks on Cracker Dicks 4, 2009, 132 min. Courtesy Juicy Entertainment

March 2016

Conversely, porn is only after one reading. The producers of pornography want you to cum. True, many different people get off on different things, and so every desire has its own porn, but the aim is always the same. Abstraction has remained relevant by doing away with any determined ends. Its function is as tabula rasa; any and all reactions to an abstract painting are valid. So it is fitting, perhaps, that with Rothkos one hears such constant refrains as ‘they make me cry’ and that the works are meant to serve as some solemn ‘site for reflection’. I find this corny, when not achingly pretentious. Certainly Rothko’s work can be seen as sad (and he did say his last paintings were about death), but what I find most fitting is the way, a very American way, that porn is the ultimate locus of the tragic, suicidal sadness that Rothko’s paintings are thought to exemplify. On porn sets the Rothkos, blurry shadows in the background of deep-throating and double penetrations, are witness to a far more intense and active sadness than the faux solemnity a place such as the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, could ever provide. The performers in porn almost always come to the industry with a tragic backstory related to abuse or abandonment. The actual filming of the sex acts is in itself a tragic performance, because in spite of what porn apologists might say, there will be and always has been an element of exploitation inherent in the shooting of commercial adult films. And once made, the films serve their performers only as tragic reminders of that exploitation, reminders that seem to lead so many porn stars to put guns in their mouths and needles in their arms. All porn fails its performers. The sanctity that Rothko sought in his work was through impenetrable fields of colour. The titles offered no access points. Rothko did not want to help you ‘get inside’ his paintings. And his paintings are fetishistic sites for the projection of fantasies and ideas about sacredness. The sacredness of solemn colour connects in the prints hanging dimly on walls in rooms where women are exploited and laid bare, where women and their bodies function as nothing more than different fields of colour in which other sorts of buried desires and emotions are activated. If Rothko’s work is as horribly sad as it’s said to be, it’s doing its job much better in the San Fernando Valley than it ever will in a chapel in Texas.

OFFICIAL GALLERY LAUNCH 9 MARCH 2016

REZA DERAKSHANI

The Breeze at Dawn 9 March – 23 April 2016

Party at the Red Castle (detail), Oil on canvas, 188 x 168 cm, 2016

SOPHIA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY 11 Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 4QB, UK 9 March – 23 April 2016 www.sophiacontemporary.com

It’s a real pleasure to be asked to write this guest column for ArtReview. You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Why does Donald care about the artworld? Doesn’t he have a campaign to run? Shouldn’t he be worried about his declining popularity in the primaries?’ First of all, if you think my popularity is declining, look at my poll numbers. I haven’t been this popular since season two of The Apprentice. And second, the truth is, I care about everything. I’m very careful. Just ask my social media guys. Let me just get this out of the way: I’m not here to get votes. ‘Retail politics’ is for losers. I don’t shop retail anyway, I’m a purely custommade guy. Here’s the problem with the artworld today: it doesn’t win any more. And why not? Because New York isn’t its centre. Whose fault is that? Five words: ‘O’ ‘B’ ‘A’ ‘M’ ‘A’. That’s right. Just look at this magazine’s Power 100 list. Personally, I’m above lists. Truly. If I’m not in the No 1 spot on a list it’s because I’m usually higher, like at .5, or zero. But look, after seven years of Obama, who is at the top of the list? The Swiss! Who is at number two? The Chinese! The year Obama was elected Larry was at No 2. (Larry’s a great guy. Good friend. Doesn’t like pink marble though; it’s a weak spot.) Look, if this wasn’t a British magazine, we all know Larry would have been No 1. By the way, I love Damien Hirst. He was ﬁrst that year. Great artist. Practically the only thing this magazine has ever gotten right. I commissioned him to do a self-portrait

listen up, you losers! The shoutiest candidate for us President will make the New York artworld great again – as told to Jonathan ‘The Donald’ Neil

Photo: Gage Skidmore

March 2016

and he came up with Golden Calf (2008). Hirst gets me. But it’s as I’ve been saying all along: the New York artworld doesn’t win any more. And if New York can’t win, then America can’t win. And if we can’t win in the artworld of all places, we can’t win the world. Period. End of story. That’s why I’m running for president. To win the world. So how do I plan to make the New York artworld great again? Easy. First I’ll build a wall around Manhattan to keep out all of the Brooklynites. Let’s face it, Brooklyn is ruining it for everyone. When Brooklyn sends its artists over here, they’re not sending their best. Their not sending guys like Jeff Koons. They’re sending artists that have lots of problems. You know the type. Whiny art school grads who hate the market because they can’t sell anything – it’s very sad; they’re Bernie Sanders voters. Or they have problems with straight-leg jeans and visible upper-lips. They’re bringing ‘provisional painting’ and bag-lady fashion. They think museums are for slumber parties. They’re Marxists. We don’t want them here. Second, these guys at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. They’re idiots. They’re falling all over themselves to win big consignments. They negotiate with guarantees and end up giving away all of their proﬁts. They’re in bed with the Chinese. It’s disgraceful. No one over there knows how to do business. Not like me. So, I’m going to open Trump International Auctions. Only in New York. You have to come here to get it. I’ll get the best art and the highest prices. You know I will. I’ll slap a Trump sticker on every work and boom! – instant premium. I’ll start with a White House estate sale. It’ll be a reality show too. I’ll get that funny little man with the bald head and glasses to host. What’s his name? That’s right. Jerry Saltz. It’ll be a hit. Like Antiques Roadshow, but for winners. Finally, regulation. That’s right. Now normally I think regulation is bad. Very bad. But everyone knows there isn’t enough regulation in the artworld. It’s the ‘Wild West’, they say (only because they haven’t been to Trump Alamo International – now that’s the real Wild West; no one remembers the Alamo like Trump). Anyway, it’s bad for business. It’s bad for America. So when I’m President, I’m going to regulate the shit out of the artworld. It’ll be beautiful.

There was something predictable about the response to the photograph that Ai Weiwei released in February, of himself lying facedown in the shingle, at the sea’s edge, on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was shot by an Indian photographer who was accompanying Ai as the artist wandered the coast to document the migrants that daily make the hazardous crossing from North Africa to Europe. Ai had stopped to pose himself in the manner of the body of the little Syrian-Kurdish boy, Aylan Kurdi, who had washed up dead on a Turkish shore in September last year, and whose image quickly became an icon of the refugee crisis on Europe’s door, as millions ﬂee the Middle East to ﬁnd a better life in the prosperous and stable European Union. As Ai’s photograph was picked up by online news and across social media, responses divided between those who thought the image was an urgent reminder to the world of the ongoing plight of the refugees and those who thought it was a crass stunt – an insensitive exploitation of a moment of human suffering, serving little purpose other than to remind the world of Ai’s status as a serious political artist. Most couldn’t decide either way. Here is how Artnet’s Henri Neuendorf summed things up: ‘It is important to raise awareness on an undoubtedly urgent issue, but this is not the right way to do it.’ But there’s the thing. Raising awareness. It’s a good thing, right? And yet the problem lurking in Ai’s awarenessraising/attention-grabbing image is that, in truth, ‘raising awareness’ actually does very little. Raising awareness does nothing to deepen anyone’s understanding of tragic realities such as the migrant crisis. Of course an image of a dead child is awful. How could it not be? Of course the displacement of millions by war is a human catastrophe. But once your awareness has been ‘raised’, then what? Ai’s quandary is that of many successful artists who have discovered the media value and global reach of their identity as personalities, and tried to capitalise on their political potential for activism. The limit of such interventions is quickly apparent, because, as relatively mobile media personalities, they have very little real connection with the situations to which they direct their attention. And their gestures towards live political issues can easily become partial and incoherent; a few days earlier, Ai caused a stir by closing down his

nothing but gestures Can artists be effective as activists? asks

J.J. Charlesworth

Photo: Rohit Chawala. © India Today

ArtReview

solo exhibition at the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen in response to the Danish government’s passing of a law to confiscate valuables from asylum seekers in order to help pay for the cost of harbouring them. The Danish law came across as petty and mean-spirited, though Ai was quick to insist that he was not singling out Denmark, instead ‘pointing at all those governments who are not really facing up to this humanitarian crisis. And are not solving the problem, how to end this tragedy. It has not ended, it still continues. No nation can separate themselves.’ The trouble with such generalised, emotiondriven finger-pointing is that it offers no real discussion of what are profoundly political problems, whose solutions demand more than emoting. The migrant crisis is a humanitarian crisis, yes. But at its root it is a political one: about Europe and the West’s incessant geopolitical meddling in the fate of the Middle East, for starters; and at a more universal level, it’s a crisis in our attitude to migration, and to our attitude towards other people’s desires to make their lives better, whether they’re fleeing a war or not. After all, what is the difference between an ‘economic migrant’ and a ‘refugee’ in the current crisis? Patronising people with the emotional tag of ‘refugee’ lets us off the key question – do we, that is to say the West, want people to come to live, settle, work here? The artworld is of course full of ‘economic migrants’. Ai’s departure from China wasn’t just to escape the victimisation he had had to endure there, but also, in plain terms, it was to earn a living. Globetrotting artists are the elite of the creative class’s privileged economic mobility. And mobility is the one thing that states everywhere, especially in the wealthy north, seek to ration, regardless of how many ‘refugees’ they declare they can ‘take in’. Rather than shed tears for the humanitarian plight of refugees, artist-activists like Ai could make the more positive argument for the aspirations of the millions who are prepared to cross continents on foot – not at 35,000 feet – to better their lives. But that means making properly political arguments, arguments that divide us on the ground of politics, not bring us together in collective gestures of empty emotionalism. Are art activists really up to the job of being truly political?

the grossmalerman files

ArtReview

Alongside museums and galleries, most major cities boast an artist’s former home, now open to the public after their death. In New York, Louise Bourgeois’s apartment is about to fulfil this role. According to recent reports, it is going to be ‘exactly how she left it’ when she passed away, in 2010. Since 2013, Tallinn has also had its own publicly accessible artist’s house-museum, founded by the then twenty-eight-yearold Flo Kasearu, who in many ways follows Bourgeois’s old dictum: I am using the house – the house is not using me. Having inherited a restituted wooden house dating from the 1910s in Tallinn’s Pelgulinn district and finding it a challenge to maintain and in other ways care for, the young artist decided to turn it into an art project: one with plenty of room for the loving mockery of museological manoeuvres. Kasearu installed a museum café and a giftshop offering the official guidebook as well as mugs, matchboxes and postcards. The self-proclaimed ‘museum’ archives and storage facilities are specially constructed cupboards placed in the attic; the same space also holds ‘an interactive urban installation’ – a flap in the roof that allows for both ventilation and a view of the city. In the basement is a workshop where small creations reflective of the creative industries of Estonia are fabricated – most eye-catching is a standard glass jar adorned with fake flowers. A sandpit with toys installed in the back of a real pickup truck makes up the children’s corner, and the museum library is placed in the restroom. Kasearu’s House Museum performs the emulation of the established artist’s housemuseum in great detail. However, unlike most buildings preserved as an artistic homage, this one is inhabited by the artist herself, who lives there with her family and a couple of friends. As a consequence it has a functional feeling (enhanced by the presence of a sauna in the garden, which can be booked by anyone). The shoes placed outside the tenants’ doors, for example, are not part of an installation: they are simply too dirty to be worn inside. While sharing a certain level of eccentricity with Kurt Schwitters’s 1920s Merzbau, especially the slide that allows quick movement from the first floor to the ground floor, Kasearu’s House Museum mostly reminds

home works In the ﬁrst of her ‘gwangju series’ of columns, written as she assembles work for the South Korean biennale’s September opening, artistic director Maria Lind visits the ‘house museum’ of Flo Kasearu in Estonia

from top Flo Kasearu, House Museum, 2013–ongoing; collection of artefacts in House Museum. both images Courtesy the artist

March 2016

me of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The latter’s ingenious display systems and clever use of crammed space were designed by the architect himself during the early nineteenth century, creating a place with an epic atmosphere. The wit and the literary qualities notwithstanding, Kasearu has at the same time firmly grounded her project in a mundane local fabric where neighbours come by for coffee, people place notices on the doorpost declaring an interest in renting an apartment in the house and she takes part in the annual street festival. The house itself is a trace of Estonia’s twentieth-century geopolitical situation: having been built by Kasearu’s great-grandparents roughly a hundred years ago, it was subsequently expropriated by the Soviet state and then returned to the family during the 1990s, following Estonia’s independence. Today, the degree to which the museum is embedded in its locality extends to issues of real estate and property relations, of gentrification and other forms of urban development. To own and maintain a big house is demanding on many levels. However, even the challenges brought about by this can prove fortuitous: the necessity of replacing the roof turned out to provide the perfect excuse to make a video filmed from a drone, showing how the handymen fold the tin into giant ‘paper airplanes’, a homemade defence measure. This occurred right at the time when Russian fighter jets started to fly into both Estonian and Swedish airspace. This is where the constant force of entropy enters: despite the artist’s ambition to use the house rather than the reverse, the museum is full of references to threats like fire, plane crashes, storms and – slightly less likely – tsunamis. A series of pencil drawings by Kasearu depicts numerous such hazardous scenarios in a manner that would surely have received Robert Smithson’s approval. Like any artist’s house-museum with dignity, it contains a monument to the artist in question. In this case a bust filled with seeds that will grow and give true expression to the artist’s relentless creativity. While at the same time destroying the bust itself. Flo Kasearu will participate in the 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2 September – 6 November

Ibrahim El- Salahi Black and White The Armory Show: booth 631 Vigo Gallery 21 Dering Street, London #vigogallery vigogallery.com

Ibrahim El- Salahi Alhambra March 1 - April 17, 2016 Salon 94 Bowery 243 Bowery, New York #salon94 salon94.com

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 45

Rosa Luxemburg on Monet, Biggs and Collings, and David Bowie Interview by

Matthew Collings In which

the German revolutionary clears up some misunderstandings about ‘ethical socialism’, the essence of art and the purpose of painting, while also providing a simultaneous analysis of the motivations behind her interviewer’s own art productions, currently on their way from London to Dubai Rosa Luxemburg, born in Poland in 1871, was a Marxist philosopher and revolutionary. With Karl Liebknecht she cofounded the antiwar Spartacist League, which was transformed into the Communist Party of Germany. Both Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered during the Communist uprising in Berlin in 1919.

ArtReview

artreview What are you thinking about? rosa luxemburg Transience, things come and go. Art’s supposed to last – life is brief, art eternal – but in fact art comes and goes too. ar You’re a revolutionary socialist, what intellectual work does that involve? rl In my time it was all about imperialistic competition and intensified class struggles, whereas for Marx, a generation earlier, the focus of investigation was on rapid capitalistic development. ar What were your books about exactly? rl Political economy. But this is within a framework of Marxism. Marxism must be understood not as a primarily economic preoccupation. Rather, it’s the struggle to alter society so that it is more humane. Marx wanted to get onto writing about the higher things in life. He found himself stuck with the study of money because humanity was stuck with capitalism. The validity of political economy therefore is specific to capitalism, and will cease to exist with the demise of this system. ar What’s your most famous work? rl The major ones, including The Accumulation of Capital, which came out in 1913, are all analyses of economic phenomena, looking at capitalism’s inherent tendency towards global expansion. I was interested in the contradiction of production on the one hand and a limited capacity to consume on the other, with the consequent contradiction of repeated crises. The system has to keep inventing new solutions. One that was important for my generation, which Marx wrote about but I took to greater depth, was Western powers exploiting non-Western resources. Western powers would fight each other for exploitation rights, and when it reached boiling point, global war ensued. The same crisis is imminent in 2016 now that the world has been transformed by capitalism into a single productive mechanism. ar What happened to revolution? rl Marx considered it inevitable at some future date. For my generation it was in the process of happening. When it turned out not to have happened and a realisation settled in that it was less and less likely in anyone’s lifetime, thinking along Marxian lines became more and more internal. An interest developed in the inner being, the question of what makes us up as subjects, how identity is formed. ar What was the endpoint for you?

rl I was arrested as part of the defeat of the socialist revolution in Germany in 1919. Rebel workers and soldiers occupied the newspaper district and other key buildings in central Berlin, while the rebel committee, which I was on, argued, dithered and fractured. I actually thought the revolt was premature. In any case the government moved in well-organised regiments of Freikorps: these were governmentsponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of extreme rightwing First World War veterans led by reactionary officers. Following orders from their leader, Waldemar Pabst, the Freikorps men who had charge of me tortured me and then beat me with a riﬂe butt, shot me in the head and dumped my body in a canal. The soldiers were never punished and Pabst himself went on to live a long life and become a highly successful industrialist and weapons manufacturer. During the 1960s he was still boasting

Life is a struggle against the distortion of life. And distortion is apparent everywhere. That’s why socialism exists. But art doesn’t stand either for or against the struggle, it’s neutral, it’s about a kind of sensuous pleasure, something like dancing. But also it can be inﬂected, so it’s something like the Bible about his actions in relation to me. He died in 1970. My murder was depicted as a martyrdom in a lithograph by Max Beckmann created in the year it happened. He served in the First World War and suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence of the horrors he experienced. ar Wow, you must always think of art as tuned in to horror and injustice. rl Everything is tuned into that, not just art. Life is a struggle against the distortion of life. And distortion is apparent everywhere. That’s why socialism exists. But art doesn’t stand either for or against the struggle, it’s neutral, it’s about a kind of sensuous pleasure, something like dancing. But also it can be inﬂected, so it’s something like the Bible. ar Uh? rl Or science, or the heights of philosophy; that is, it can have the purpose of explaining reality.

rl The end of my life? ar Yes.

facing page Rosa Luxemburg

March 2016

ar What about Monet, that’s just colours, isn’t it? rl Many would say it’s just picnics. They see the subject matter, gardens, water lilies, they don’t necessarily think abstractly. They don’t see colour as such. ar Yes, but they don’t see injustice and ethics, they want to have Monet blockbuster exhibitions all the time because they want the escapism. rl An audience that can tell what a painting is, is small compared to the one that longs for endless Monet blockbusters. The two overlap but the broader audience doesn’t see the painterly meaning. ar How does it stop injustice? rl An intense looking brings art into a relationship with reality that is metaphorical and inherently political. ar Do you think Monet’s Water Lilies series is figurative or abstract? rl The separation is a mental thing for the purpose of analysing what you’re looking at. I don’t think Monet, when working on a particular Water Lilies painting, thought, ‘Now I’m being figurative and now I’m being abstract’; for him it was all one thing. The richness of the experience of seeing those paintings, if we acknowledge it’s rich, is to do with a single, fused thing. However, it’s important for a critic who’s genuinely thoughtful to draw attention to abstraction in figuration not in order to blindly deny what’s there but to think about how it’s achieved. ar Yeah, but they are pictures, aren’t they? rl Something is happening besides picturing, even if it only exists – whatever it may be – because of Monet’s goal of picturing. A cultivated garden has all sorts of associated symbolic meanings. To follow up some of them would be pretty much to stay with the depiction reading. If one purpose of a garden is to make people feel safely and pleasurably lost in nature, then the large scale of the painting might be said to aid that purpose. But why be lost, what’s attractive about it? The question is explored as Monet generates painterly content. He shows you a scene but also how the scene is constructed. The painting is frank about its processes. You see the crude smearing that its illusions are really made from. The picturing theme starts to open out so attractiveness itself becomes a theme within a theme. You’re forced to consider it. Gardens are attractive, painting is sensual and both elicit a bodily response because each is aesthetic. The mind is doing something or being caused to do something that allows for this bodily meaning. A whole history of art plays a role in your appreciation of that Water Lilies

painting. It could be paintings of saints: think of Monet’s theme of glowing and shimmering. Plus it could be architecture not paintings – if you think of the enormous scale of the Water Lilies. ar What’s your view of art today, do you know about art fairs, for example? rl Yes, I’m looking forward to Art Dubai. In fact I associate it with your own collaborative painting practice with Emma Biggs. I was in the Vigo Gallery in London the other day, mesmerised by an abstract work called Generations, which turned out to be one of yours, and I understand it’s being shipped out to Dubai. ar Oh gawd, I suppose with your ethical concerns you’ll be telling us off about supporting a regime that represses women and exploits foreign workers? I wouldn’t blame you. rl It’s funny, because the term ‘ethical socialism’ was initially originated by myself as a pejorative against reformist socialists. These are people who evoke Kantian liberal ideals and ethical arguments in favour of socialism but who aren’t necessarily anticapitalist. Using moral terms, it could be said you and Biggs attack the bad social system that Dubai has with the good values of your painting. You’d be intervening in ideology by being at the fair. But I would add that any moral or ethical meaning has to be transmitted through some kind of artistic efficiency. So in the case of a painting, you’ve got to think about what ‘painting’, as a cultural form, actually is.

the time of the early Christian Fathers or the Mesopotamian kings or Hillary Clinton’s contest with Bernie Sanders. At these different points in time, painting has different things to say, but it’s surprising how continuous are its means. ar Are painters really so interested in ideas? rl They’re always dealing with them. If you compare paintings with novels, you can see the author both knows and doesn’t know what he or she does. Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now is full of unconscious expression. As if Trollope compressed 1870s reality into pure meaning. Think of the assumptions the narrator of his tale expresses about the limits on freedom a woman ought to expect, the moral rightness of a ﬁxed class position and the benign purpose of English dominion over foreign lands. These are equally undermined or shored up, by Trollope, as he creates an intricate, highly wrought, luminous portrait of a society. The book is about ﬁnancial scandals. His moralising criticisms, though wise, are less compelling than the sheer vividness of his portrait. What is the conscious aim that you and Biggs have? Painters not novelists: no doubt it’s something like mutability. Considering the glow of light that painting of yours I was just talking about has, as its formal theme, with objects constantly altering position because of its tonal effects. Change is powerful, used as a metaphor. It’s badly needed. I take it you both imagine a framework in which change doesn’t mean chaos.

ar What is it?

rl I was interested in the nine-day wonder of everyone publicly mourning him. In one sense it’s fair enough. And then there’s the distortion of it. ar Respecting the dead? rl Yes, the distortion where eulogising becomes self-advertising, as in supposedly thoughtful articles in The Guardian and suchlike. I think the real issue is freedom. I wrote in one of my books that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently, the freedom of the dissenter. You could apply it in this case. What is an artist and what is an ordinary person no different to anyone else? Everyone’s pretty ordinary, really. But in order to get something across, you might create an identity. It’s useful to the process. In fact it often happens. ar David Bowie is rock, though, isn’t he, so your earlier argument about tradition doesn’t apply to him. rl On the contrary, it’s inescapable. The plodding rhymes of The Bewlay Brothers are made genuinely marvellous by Bowie’s soulful merging-in of different aural traditions. In any case it was all up with him musically after the 1970s. ar You like his ﬁnal album, surely? rl Of course, but I wouldn’t expect to be playing it much in years to come. next month Anthony Trollope on the moral dubiousness of the art collections of billionaire hedge funders being showcased in posh old museums

rl A discipline that comes from the past, it communicates ideas via sensual means. There are different ideas in the time of Monet than in

Claude Monet, Lady in the Garden, 1867, oil on canvas, 80 × 99 cm. Photo © The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Photo: Vladimir Terebenin

ar You mentioned identity earlier. What do you think about David Bowie dying? He was always changing identities.

ArtReview

VISIT Artist in Residence Programme of the RWE Foundation

The VISIT programme of the RWE Foundation promotes young artists. At the invitation of the Foundation, selected artists develop their projects over a period of about six months. Depending on the topic, the artists work at an RWE location in Germany or possibly even abroad. The artistic work should explicitly refer to the topic of energy and its social relevance. The artists will receive a grant of € 1,000 per month, plus production costs. Moreover, they will be given the opportunity to stage an exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue. A jury will examine the submitted applications and select two fellowship holders for the year. In 2015, the members of the jury were Dr. Tobia Bezzola (Museum Folkwang, Essen), Prof. Mischa Kuball (Academy of Media Arts, Cologne), Dr. Andreas Beitin (ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) and Sepp Hiekisch-Picard (Kunstmuseum Bochum). Deadline: 31st March 2016

Find out more at rwestiftung.com/visit and facebook.com/rwestiftung

Other People and Their Ideas No 28

Kelly Ying In China’s growing contemporary artworld, many of its leading figures occupy multiple roles. But when do they conflict? And when do they complement each other? Can a collector be an art-fair director? Or are those very distinctions simply the remains of an ossified Western classification system that’s on its way out? Interview by

Mark Rappolt

Based in China’s biggest city, Kelly Ying is a signiﬁcant collector, with her husband, David Chau, of both Chinese and international contemporary art, and, having originally been involved in the fashion industry, is a partner in the Huayi fashion group and the cofounder, alongside Yifeng Bao, of the Shanghai art fair Art 021

ArtReview

artreview Why did you decide to found an art fair? kelly ying One reason is that the opportunity was there; the other is that I felt it was a duty. At the time of the ﬁrst fair, in 2013, my business partner, Yifeng Bao, and I, who are both collectors of contemporary art, thought it was strange that an international city like Shanghai did not have an art fair, so we decided to found one together. ar Why does Shanghai need art fairs? And what is the relationship between yourself and other art fairs in Shanghai such as West Bund Art and Design? ky As an international metropolis, Shanghai needs its own art fair. Maybe even two or three, as is the case with a city like New York. The relationship with West Bund, as well as other art fairs, and us is quite healthy and we are developing together. Moreover, Shanghai has always been a very open and international city as a result of both historical and geographical factors. China is a big country, so good-quality art fairs are in demand. We need more, actually.

collection. I have bought more art since running Art 021. I’m seeing more and I discover more work that is suitable for me. ar Do you feel obliged to buy work from Art 021? ky I would not say that I will deﬁnitely buy things at the fair: it depends on whether the works being shown are consistent with my collection. I also buy art at other art fairs. So, my identity as the cofounder of an art fair does not affect my decisions when it comes to buying works as a collector. ar How do you judge the success of your fair? Purely through a quantity of sales?

ky I do not put a limit on my collections. I do have ten years of collecting experience, but I am still a small ﬁsh in this world, so I am still in the process of accumulation. There is no limit. ar Where do you keep your collection? ky My collections are stored in many warehouses in China and abroad. I have artworks at home too of course. But there is a difference between the art I keep at home and in the warehouse. I consider the size and colour match if it is for home. If it is for the warehouse, I think about the consistency with the other work I own. It is different.

ky Certainly it does. You can get a vague picture of the collector through his or her collection. You can ﬁnd out what kind of person he or she is and his or her outlook on the world, their life and values.

ky China is huge. Each city within it has its own dna. Compared to Hong Kong, Shanghai’s culture has its very unique Shanghai style: it is something that is sensed rather than explained in words. Shanghai has a 100 -year history of being colonised by other countries, which has brought as much of the West to its culture and style as the East. It is a very inclusive city with a relatively advanced attitude towards contemporary art for China. It is welcoming to new things and styles. In business terms, the biggest difference between Shanghai and Hong Kong of course is that Shanghai still has very high taxation.

ky To have two identities is stronger than just having one. As a collector, I can have a view of the quality of the galleries and their artists. I can also feel for the buyers from that perspective. As an art fair director, I can also have an overall view of the whole picture. To do that I need to keep learning. I need to go to galleries quite often to understand the latest art. So this identity also helps me with my personal

ar Can a collector have too much art? Is there a limit?

ar What does your art collection tell people about you? Do you think that visitors who see it get a view into your soul?

ar What are the differences or particularities about running an art fair in Shanghai rather than in, say, Hong Kong?

ar You’re also a collector (and other things besides). Is this easy to combine with running the art fair? Does a fair director think differently from a collector? Do you have to compartmentalise these two pursuits?

viewers. Media coverage is also very important. Sales numbers are not the only thing.

ar You started collecting contemporary Chinese and then moved to collect international artists; what made you want to collect work by international artists?

ky There are so many factors that make an art fair success. Of course sales number is a mandatory indicator. But this number is not very reliable. The more dependable indicator is the returning rate. For example, 30 galleries attend the art fair, and they keep coming for the next year. An art fair is an academic platform as well, giving a good experience to exhibitors and above Mark Hagen, A parliament of some things (Additive and Subtractive Sculpture, Titanium Screen, Panels 3, 4, 5), 2014, anodised titanium on aluminium honeycomb panel, dimensions variable. Collection Kelly Ying and David Chau

ky We were among the first Chinese collectors who got to know contemporary art. I’m from a generation who have got to see more and travel internationally. Considering the fine-art history of China and the world from the perspectives of time and geography, contemporary art is imported from the West. Contemporary art’s development in China lags far behind than that internationally, no doubt. Yet nowadays, the young generation in China are quite international and so is their language. Having developed an understanding of China’s contemporary art, and having invested in it, it is natural that we begin to pay attention to work beyond our borders. We find it is a big ocean that needs to be studied and searched for the pearls. ar Do you think that contemporary art speaks a universal language or are there different dialects in different places? ky The essence of art is one thing. But each country and area has its own uniqueness. It is meaningless to just copy.

facing page Kelly Ying. Courtesy Art 021, Shanghai

March 2016

P420 Inaugurates its new space with the exhibition

NAIVE N SET THEORY TH Paolo Icaro I Bettina Buck Marie Lund David Schutter

30 January — 26 March 2016 curat rated 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

A major initiative for early-career artists working in moving-image

2016 AWARDS: BORROWED TIME

2017 AWARDS: NEITHER ONE THING OR ANOTHER

Karen Kramer and Alice May Williams: Two new major commissions

Call for entries on the theme of ‘Neither One Thing Or Another’. Closing date Friday 11 March.

Jerwood Visual Arts 9 March – 24 April 2016 171 Union Street, London, SE1 0LN

CCA 28 May – 10 July 2016 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD

Image: The Eye That Articulates Belongs on Land by Karen Kramer

JerwoodFVUawards.com

Iain Ball PRASEODYMIUM INTRACRINE SIGNAL AGGREGATE

M IC H A E L A Z I M M E R 2 5 . 0 2 . 2 016 2 6 . 0 3 . 2 016

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158 New Cavendish St London W1W 6YW foldgallery.com info@foldgallery.com

Harris Museum & Art Gallery Market Square, Preston, PR1 2PP

www.harrismuseum.org.uk

List on 2/02/2016 | * new participants

Lampe - Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (Paris) | Stéphane Erouane Dumas - Galerie Fred Lanzenberg (Brussels) * | Evrard & Koch -

Art Featured

White Rabbit sweets have been advertised with the slogan ‘Seven White Rabbit candies is equivalent to one cup of milk’ and positioned as a nutritional product in addition to being a sweet. The candies hence accompanied the growth of a generation 67

ArtReview

Cao Fei (and me) by Doretta Lau

March 2016

above Cosplayers Series: Ah Ming at Home, 2004, c-print, 75 × 100 cm preceding pages rmb City: A Second Life City Planning 05 (detail), 2007, digital print, 120 × 160 cm

ArtReview

Once during grad school, a friend asked me, “Which director’s films would you want to live in?” He was likely high at the time, but I took the query seriously. And after some deliberation I chose Wong Kar-wai. I could imagine myself whispering my secrets into a hole in Angkor Wat or eating cans of pineapple after a breakup. I’ve since turned this question to contemporary art. In whose worlds would I like to reside? A decade ago I may have chosen the dark glamour of Nan Goldin or the whimsy of Marcel Dzama. I was younger then, more susceptible to a certain kind of drama. At the start of this year, I thought: might I consider the work of Beijing-based artist Cao Fei, whose art exhibits, in my opinion, the perfect ratio of funny to sad? Cao Fei was born 1978 in Guangzhou, China. That was the year the country opened to international trade and Deng Xiaoping became its leader. Her parents are artists; her father is Cao Chong-en, who is known for his sculptures of movie star Bruce Lee and the Republic of China’s founding father, Sun Yat-sen. She graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001, and two years later she exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In 2006 she won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Young Artist. By this time, her point of view was clear: it came with a sense of humour, a flair for the macabre, a propensity for the way in which new technologies could serve her art and a tremendous ability to create an emotional resonance when photographing people, no matter how absurd their comportment. In 2010 she became a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum Hugo Boss Prize. moma ps1 in New York is mounting Cao’s first solo exhibition in the United States, curated by Klaus Biesenbach with Jocelyn Miller, in April of this year.

When I started writing this essay I wanted to have my engagement with her art to remain mediated through the objects, not her words. So I chose not to interview the artist. Instead I hoped to replicate the distance created by an avatar, a game, a costume, an online platform, in order to retain the qualities of disconnection and loneliness I associate with the men and women who roam through her landscapes. My first encounter with Cao’s work was her 2004 Cosplayers series, which consists of an eight-minute video and photographs featuring young people dressed like anime characters. For me, the image from Cosplayers that best encapsulates her work is Ah Ming at Home: a girl dressed in a purple top and black pants bound with white fabric (a kind of futuristic turkey look) sits with her leg up in a modestly furnished living room. She is staring at a handheld electronic device, likely a phone. Her costume begs for attention; it seems to say: look at me, please see me. Next to her, a shirtless man, presumably her father, reads a newspaper, oblivious to her presence. I can read this image as a personal tragedy: daughter and father cannot connect. Or I can posit that these two figures stand in for China new and old, wherein the new is styled as a shiny fantasy, unreal. Perhaps when we can’t figure out who we are in the context of a society it is easier to invent new rules rather than embrace a way of living that will soon be obsolete. As I think about this series, I wonder: is the isolation experienced by these youths a rite of passage found in every industrialised society over the last one hundred years (as captured in novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, Less Than Zero, Generation X and Shanghai Baby) or is it particular to this specific generation in China? Cao continued to investigate contemporary communities in Whose Utopia (2006), i.Mirror (2007) and rmb City project (2007–11).

rmb City: The Fashions of China Tracy, 2009, c-print, 30 × 50 cm

March 2016

Whose Utopia is a video shot at a factory in the Pearl River Delta, where Hiroshima Mon Amour, whose screenplay is by Duras, on the dialogue workers share their dreams and fantasies from the production floor, of La Town.) There’s a postapocalyptic feel to the setting, which is while the latter two works are associated with the 3d virtual world composed of distressed toy models. Abandoned cars line the roads. Nearby, there is a camel. Blood-drenched creatures that may or may Second Life. Years ago, I tried playing Second Life but my computer was too old not be zombies haunt the streets and buildings. The man and the and my Internet connection too slow to spend any meaningful time woman continue to talk. Giant sea monsters terrorise the surviin this online space. Cao did not have my tech problems. i.Mirror is a vors. In a crumbling building a couple has vigorous sex. Santa Claus, three-part documentary chronicling her engagement with the online his reindeer and a sleigh cause a train crash. A museum that is priscommunity via her avatar, China Tracy, over the course of six months. tine compared to all the wreckage has an exhibition on La Town. The All the landscapes seem desolate. I never imagined that a virtual space spectacle is strange and mesmerising and brings together thematic would have so many decrepit buildings and random fires – here, tech- concerns from previous works. The air of loneliness pervades. nology does not deliver perfect environments or lives. Cao Fei as a world-maker. She’s like George R.R. Martin or George After Cao exhausted her exploration Lucas or, to add another George to the Perhaps when we can’t figure out mix, George Saunders. In her work, of how the self operates in Second Life, she took on the challenge of building a who we are in the context of a society, she turns to fantasy to investigate the human condition. Life is hard, but if city called rmb that includes elements it is easier to invent new rules we glance at it through another lens of different Chinese locales. It’s the sort of place where a giant panda floats above temples and highrises. and celebrate the idiosyncratic and strange, maybe it becomes bearTiananmen Square, with a panda portrait in the place of Mao, comes able or more true. into view. Something is burning. There’s a rotating sign for a pawnOn 31 January a picture of a woman I didn’t recognise appeared on shop that features prominently. What has been sold? What has been my Facebook wall as a memory from eight years prior because she had lost? In the distance a giant looms in the water. Day drifts into night. tagged me. She is standing in front of Cao Chong-en’s Bruce Lee sculpThe video ends with fireworks over the city, a very Chinese way to ture in Hong Kong, on the Avenue of Stars. Upon closer inspection, mark the end of a momentous occasion. I realise the stranger is Elizabeth, whom I’ve never met in person – she It so happened that the museum where I work screened Cao Fei’s used to read a blog I kept and we had exchanged emails for a time. stop-motion film La Town (2014) while I was doing research for this Though I haven’t made a choice about the contemporary artist whose essay. During the opening scene, a man and a woman speak to each art I’d like to embody, perhaps in the case of Cao Fei’s work the deciother, off camera, in French. It reminded me of Marguerite Duras. sion has already been taken: for it becomes clear to me that via a conflu(In the credits, Cao acknowledges the influence of the 1959 film ence of chance and circumstance I already reside in her worlds. ar

Live in RMB City, 2009, video, colour, sound, 24 min 50 sec

ArtReview

La Town: White Street, 2014, c-print, 120 × 80 cm all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou & Beijing

March 2016

The Art and Literature of the Social Media Banal by Erik Morse

Recent feminist authors and visual artists explore the ‘trending’ parallels between vernacular architectures in virtual and (sub)urban spaces 74

ArtReview

In author Natasha Stagg’s debut novel, Surveys, a coming-of-age the premillennial, dial-up template of cyberspace. Comparing social parable of feminism in the era of Web 2.0 that is to be published media’s structural effect to the Second Empire’s demolition of Paris’s this month, the author traverses the culturally vulgar worlds of the many narrow galleries and walkways for the grands magasins, the writer shopping mall and the social media network to decode the shared laments that Facebook is the modern heir of Baron Haussmann, who complexities of their market attractions. Stagg’s distaff protago- in destroying the last vestiges of urban occlusion rendered all movenist, the rarely named Colleen, works as a postcollegiate minimum- ment visible beneath the technocratic gaze. wager at a nameless Tucson mall until her increased visibility on In contradistinction to Morozov’s unrepentant Modernism, social media video/chats – Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, etc – elevates Darling’s more nuanced, subcultural reading of the digital domain her into the strata of B-list celebrity endemic to the reality-tv genera- suggests a practised, electronic flânerie reminiscent of de Certeau’s tion. With her new partner, Jim, the two become the Serge and Jane open-ended framework of ‘everyday life’ – or what Darling irrever(or perhaps, in keeping with the times, the Victoria and David) of ently calls ‘post-corporeal territorial pissing’ – within the stratified vlogdom, shuttling from one chain-hotel suite and nightclub party codices of Web 2.0. Like the mallrats, skaters and other disaffected to the next and living almost exclusively through their MacBook groups loitering in the mall corridors, cyberflâneurs will continue to and iPhone screens. Suggesting the plot of a classic 1990s Bret Easton carve out and communicate from the Internet’s mercantile interstices. Ellis novel, in which salacious Hollywood bacchanals immediately (The artist’s subsequent lecture-performance series Habeas Corpus Ad give way to gang rape, serial murder or mass casualty, Surveys instead Subjiciendum, or: Body of Work? You’re Looking At It, 2013–, largely reverses narrates the banal repetitions of Colleen and Jim’s virtual daily lives this claim.) as their keystroke celebrity disintegrates around them. Darling is not the only post-Internet feminist to interrogate the At its most perspicacious, Surveys makes a fascinating cultural linkages between architectures of commodified space in the physargument for the inherent intersections and cross-pollinations ical and virtual realms. Perhaps most famously, Argentine-born artist of vernacular – or more to the point, suburban – architectures and Amalia Ulman’s high-gloss oeuvre (explored in ArtReview, September the wholesale commodification of the Internet through social 2015) deploys elaborate codes of middle-class wealth and status networking, media posts, apps, memes and other detritus, which has through social media (Excellences and Perfections, 2014) while mimicking characterised most of its landscape in the last decade. For Stagg, the professional market spaces through gallery exhibitions (The Destrucalternation between these ‘outer’, suburban spaces and the hyper- tion of Experience, 2014; International House of Cozy, 2015). British artist trophic, ‘inner’ spaces of airports, freeHeather Phillipson, whose work with Mirroring the serialised franchises ways, hotel rooms and nightclub backhypertrophic, Edward Kienholz-inspired rooms – those cultural geographer Marc and tract-house plans of the suburban installation often combines novelty inteAugé once dubbed ‘non-places’ – exrior design with Tumblr-like visualigrid, social-media models promise plores the symbiotic American myths ties, chose a vacant department store a celebrity that is always recognisable of (suburban) sprawl and instant celebin Sheffield to stage her final days rity, where virtuality and cartography (2015) collection of purchasing moni– as both everywhere and nowhere often meet. Mirroring the serialised tors. Divided according to shopping franchises and tract-house plans of the suburban grid, social-media departments, each screened display of advertised goods within the models promise a celebrity that is always recognisable – as both every- outmoded bricks-and-mortar shell highlights the sensorial and emotive shifts entrenched in the virtual marketplace. Similarly, poet where and nowhere. “Internet celebrities would logically live in the places that more and installation artist Bunny Rogers’s six-month project Sister Unn’s people can relate to, the way Middle America apparently relates to (2011–12), a collaboration with Filip Olszewski, consists of a rented Middle American sitcom families,” Stagg opines as we discuss their storefront in a gentrified, commercial strip in Queens, New York, shared constructs. “It’s as if people have to create their own wilder- within which the artists simulated a shuttered flower shop littered ness in the event of lacking it. I love the heightened sense of identity with dying bouquets. Although entrance to the store was restricted you find in areas of isolation. It’s similar to the idea of celebrity.” (only the large front windows allowed visual ‘access’ to the purported In a 2012 article for The New Inquiry entitled ‘Arcades, Mall Rats, and commodities within), rendering it a literal ‘non-place’, a subsequent Tumblr Thugs’, ‘postdigital’ installation artist Jesse Darling contends website revealed its true status as an installation and allowed visitors that the shopping mall itself is a paradigm of the mercantile sprawl to interact by leaving virtual roses to mourn the ‘business’s’ passing. of Facebook-inspired platforms, links and junk-spaces, ‘where the In both Phillipson’s and Rogers’s works the replacement of retail kids all hang out in their outlandish avatars, talking to one another property with the increasing visibility of virtual commerce accentuin a broken argot of phonetics and hieroglyphs’. Darling points to ates the current social trend in the dematerialised marketplace but media and technology critic Evgeny Morozov’s New York Times article simultaneously détourns the redundant physical footage into a site ‘The Death of the Cyberflâneur’ (2012), in which ‘[he] delivered a spec- of creative labour and fantasy. ulative eulogy for the “cyberflâneur” – who died, or perhaps failed to The critical engagement with these commercial ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ materialize, in the face of Facebook and Groupon and the totalizing spaces is not solely the purview of young feminism. But writers/ influence of the “app paradigm.”’ Although they both agree that, in artists like Stagg, Kate Durbin, Molly Soda, Joanna Walsh, Karolina Darling’s words, ‘the Arcade was the original iron-and-glass shopping Waclawiak and Miranda July – many of whom were influenced by likeminded scribes from the preceding genermall, and the flâneur – affluent, indolent, and out facing page Jesse Darling, Darling’s Room ation like Chris Kraus, A.M. Homes and Lydia for a good wasted time – was the original mall (video still), 2014. Photo: Imran Perretta. Davis – have turned away from centres of urban rat’, Morozov’s nostalgic utopianism mourns for Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

March 2016

Heather Phillipson, final days, 2015 (installation view, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 with Serpentine Galleries). Photo: Jacqui Bellamy. Courtesy the artist.

ArtReview

Heather Phillipson, final days (still from multiscreen video), 2015. Courtesy the artist

March 2016

elitism to concentrate on the outer purlieus and quotidian narratives empowerment it delivers by jettisoning her outside the mundanity associated with vernacular culture. And, in so doing, they reveal some of victimhood. of the consonances underlying this culture’s elusive geographies and But the Internet stardom that Colleen covets only substitutes one the erotic image-making of the ‘young girl’ who is often packaged and sexualised marketplace for another. In the cloistered hotel suites, taxinarrativised as a principal coordinate of its fantasies. cabs and vip rooms, she comes to view the sponsorships and parties as From the opening chapter of Surveys, Colleen is niggled by the performative extensions of the disingenuous rituals of her mall duties reveries of celebrity, as both a practical application of her sexuality – except that the cognitive labour required never subsides, because and an escape from the banality of everyday life. She sees its analogies she is now tethered to an invisible add-community demanding realeverywhere, from the metal grate she hoists in her morning duties time ‘content’ in perpetuity. Her new ‘status’ is made all the more speculative by the appearance of the at the mall offices to the endless fashion advertisements and branding sponLike the mallrats and skaters loitering younger, prettier Lucinda, a Lana Del Rey-meets-Marshall McLuhan technosors she is forced to sift through with in the mall corridors, cyberflâneurs her lumpen clientele, whom she presciprophet whose affair with Jim causes an will continue to communicate from the unspoken rivalry with Colleen despite ently compares to a classroom of horny their never having met outside of the men. ‘I can’t decide whether I wish I had Internet’s mercantile interstices screen. With Colleen’s ‘insta’ self-exile started off famous, the child of a famous person, just because then I would have ended up oblivious to the vast- Stagg shares Morozov’s brand of dystopian pessimism: the feminist ness between one status and the next,’ she narrates with the acerbity prospects of Web 2.0 transcending vernacular culture’s marketing of a washed-up starlet. ‘One day, I was not famous, the next day, I was architectures have long been nullified by its reification of the young almost famous and the temptation to go wide with that and reject my girl’s libido. The celebrity image bestowed upon Colleen has immured past was too great. When I was legit famous, it was hard to tell when her in its own virtual ‘non-place’, difficult to escape through mere the change had occurred.’ Hers is the fantasy life of a middle-class flânerie or physical retreat. As she writes in one of an endless series underachiever, uninspired by her bureaucratic job and ogled and of email drafts to her nemesis from a nondescript hotel room: ‘The objectified by her male coworkers, neighbours and even boyfriends, biggest fear of anyone is aging, but the scariest part of aging isn’t the last of whom she no doubt discovers largely through dating apps. certain death, but uncertain irrelevance.’ ar When she is offered money in return for a night of sex, she not only accepts the solicitation but also admits to liking the sense of casual Natasha Stagg’s Surveys is published by Semiotext(e)

ArtReview

above and facing page Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski, Sister Unn’s, 2011–12 (installation view in a disused shop, 72–32 Austin Street, Brooklyn). Photo: Filip Olszewski. Courtesy the artists

March 2016

Cai Guo-Qiang With Chinese contemporary art caught between the weight of Western expectations and the weightlessness of its own burgeoning scene, one of China’s leading artists seeks to return the heart to its contemporary art Interview by Joshua Mack

Cai Guo-Qiang, born 1957, is a Chinese artist currently living in New York. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the artist lived in Japan, he gained recognition for a series of works that used gunpowder as a drawing material and explored the use of explosives on a large scale. In relation to this phase in his work he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and subsequently was appointed director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Cai has also worked on numerous curatorial projects, including the ﬁrst Chinese Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). Opening this month at the Qatar Museums Gallery Al Riwaq, Doha, What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China is the artist’s latest curatorial venture. Featuring 15 contemporary artists and collectives from Mainland China, Cai’s exhibition aims to redeﬁne the way we look at and assess contemporary art from China, questioning the intrinsic artistic value and originality of the art – rather than its commercial performance. artreview In organising the show, you looked at almost 250 exhibitions of art from China. What were some of them, and how did you conclude that art in China had been presented? cai guo-qiang There were some great exhibitions, for example Inside Out: New Chinese Art at Asia Society [1998–99] or Alors, La Chine at the Centre Pompidou [2003], and of course China’s New Art, Post-1989 [1993], curated by Johnson Chang. And a lot more recently, a large-scale exhibition across Germany (China 8

artistic language and their attempt to dialogue with art history. ar Is there a speciﬁc trend or focus you are trying to bring forward in this show, then? Or is your intent to recontextualise the way people look at work from China conceptually?

– Contemporary Art from China on the Rhine and Ruhr, various venues, 2015). Very vibrant indeed. However, generally speaking, exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art focused on how Chinese artists use political symbols to create ‘political pop’. A large number of exhibitions attempt to represent the changing Chinese society and its energy by presenting artists as a group. This phenomenon also reﬂects a situation of intense conﬂict between Chinese and western cultures. Overall, points of discussion focused on contemporary Chinese society’s collective form, history, political system and big cultural themes. ar What is inaccurate about that approach? What is missing from the dialogue? cgq More attention should be given to the individual artistic expression and exploration undertaken by each and every artist. The individual journeys that every artist takes as their practice evolves, the crystallisation of their Cai Guo-Qiang, 2013. Photo: Shu-Wen Lin. Courtesy Cai Studio

ArtReview

cgq Exactly! In other words, this exhibition raises questions. It doesn’t state that contemporary Chinese art is innovative or has artistic merit, but rather it raises an issue: it is necessary for us to discuss individual artist’s creative practice. For example, if we disregard that your painting is about Mao, and everything related to Mao, and we examine your painting to ask: is it a good painting? What is the style? Can we discuss your art in an equal way to how we discuss an artist in Japan or an artist based in the us: to treat you as an individual? Over the past two years, I discussed my ideas with curators all over the world. Those in Japan, after hearing my concepts, felt a similar urgency to start a conversation and to ask: how is contemporary art in Japan doing these days? Other curators and scholars, such as JeanHubert Martin, who was the former director at the Centre Pompidou and who curated Magiciens de la Terre [1989], also felt the need to start a conversation like this worldwide, particularly in the context of biennale culture that foregrounds grand curatorial concepts in shows where hundreds of artists are included. Each and every artist’s work always ends up being obscured by textual and contextual analysis. As a result, their creativity is not fully presented today.

top Jenova Chen, Journey, 2012, video game. Courtesy thatgamecompany Inc. above Yang Fudong, East of Que Village, 2007, 6-channel video installation, 20 min 5 sec. Courtesy the artist, Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai and Marian Goodman Gallery, London, Paris & New York

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top Wang Jianwei, …the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes, 2013 (installation view, Long March Space, Beijing, 2013). © Wang Jianwei Studio above Hu Xiangqian, Xiangqian Art Museum, 2010, video, performance. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

ar Clearly, from what you’ve said, it’s something that is needed in terms of international curatorship, but is it also something needed within the context of artists from China or artists working in China? cgq This topic is especially urgent in the context of contemporary Chinese art, though it is also extremely useful globally. ar Why? cgq Because of the world’s sustained focus on Chinese contemporary art. For a while no other country has attracted this kind of attention. No other country is, like China, building thousands and thousands of museums every year. And the auction results as you know go from record to record. All these superficial phenomena reveal a lack of individual creativity, as everyone’s attention turns to auctions and sales. At the same time, the world’s expectation of Chinese artists relies on their being the voice for a political agenda. ar But then the question is how do you define ‘political agenda’? Because some of the work that’s included in this show does have a political resonance. cgq Of course art can discuss and should pay attention to political issues. However, this discussion needs to originate from an individual creative voice. Because as an artist, you ultimately need to express yourself using the language of art. ar How does the work you’ve chosen for this exhibition elucidate that dynamic? Is there something that unites it? Why this choice of artists? cgq Each of these 15 artists is focused on developing their individual artistic language. That doesn’t mean that they only focus on process. A lot of them are talking about political issues. Some of them are portraying stories and narratives quite personal to themselves, their lovers, their families. However, despite the topics they explore, all of these artists are exploring their unique expression. ar In the press release (and earlier in our discussion) you mention that these artists are challenging a dichotomy between traditional Chinese aesthetics and the historical Western canon. Could you tell us about that idea? cgq I am talking about whether an artist reflects on his or her cultural and aesthetic roots and is concerned about extending from these roots – and how they do it. For example, when faced with Western contemporary art, these artists are resisting just borrowing a formula and take it as a given: while dialoguing with it, they are also actively searching for other available methodologies. They may decide to incorporate an international contemporary presentation with traditional Chinese aesthetics.

Whatever they do, they are conscious of these fundamental issues. Take Jenova Chen. The videogame, formally speaking, is an identiﬁably Western presentation. However, he’s using virtual reality as a means to tell deeper, universal, maybe eternal stories about existence. In one game he designed, a single character goes on a lonely life-journey [Journey, 2012]. He may encounter another character, and the sense of surprise, and the mutual understanding and support that might arise are conveyed only through subtle movements. There’s no talking. In order to create these aesthetic and emotional qualities, the artist needs to turn to his own philosophy and his craftsmanship. ar It seems that a number of the other artists you include are working with philosophical issues – we could say ethics – about the position of the individual in life or in society. cgq That’s one aspect of their work that resonated with me. The fact that they are acutely aware of an individual’s fate and the journey one goes through in search of the individual voice. ar Is that a role art should serve? Is it something needed particularly in the cultural evolution of China? cgq In my opinion, that is very important, the pursuit of the individual voice. Throughout the modern history of China, art has been used as a tool for other ends. In order to evoke a general emotion among the people, to move the country in certain directions, say. And because of this purpose, art needed to be simple and understandable. At the end of the 1970s and in the 80s Modernism started in China. The modernists too tried to use art as a tool, in their case to help the country become more modern and free and democratic. Other than being an intermediary tool for other purposes, art ultimately is the pursuit of each and every artist. Only when each and every artist’s value and what they want to say with their art is respected by society can the society itself be creative and healthy. ar Is this awareness becoming more common? cgq Yes, you can say that, because you can see the work of the new generation of artists is more independent. We do face a serious problem with the overcommercialisation of art though. ar Not only in China! cgq In China, even at the academies or during college, art students are pushed to interact with gallerists. Everyone hopes that their art can sell. It’s a phenomenon we see elsewhere; however, we do see more young artists outside China resisting the commercial impetus. So I do hope that this exhibition along with the catalogue, which is a research-based publication,

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will evoke some thinking and discussion among young artists. ar Do you think of yourself as a mentor or someone who would like to facilitate conversations for younger artists? cgq I am very afraid of being seen as that! What I try to do here is of course to say what I want to say and to present my conversations with all these fellow artists, curators and scholars of my generation, truthfully. ar As an artist, I assume you have a different perspective than curators? cgq Slightly different. Ever since the 1980s, I watched myself develop and evolve alongside other artists all over the world. A lot of my old friends are hosting retrospective exhibitions these days. Discussions among artists are more direct, and more speciﬁc. Because artists discussing artists is like animals discussing animals, whereas when curators and historians discuss art it’s like zoologists discussing animals. ar In terms of this exhibition, why Doha? cgq In 2011 when I had a solo exhibition in Doha, Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa and I had in-depth conversations. I spent about 100 days in Doha, including 50 days of installation, I lived there and interacted closely with local communities. I worked with a wide range of people from elementary school students to young artists. Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa saw that interaction and invited me to come back to realise another project down the road. Well, I can’t have another solo exhibition, so in our discussions the idea of my curating a group exhibition came up. ar How long have you felt it’s been necessary to dial back and look at fundamentals again? cgq Perhaps subconsciously as an artist I have always asked myself this question. When I was in China in the 1970s and 80s, I never participated in any government or state-organised exhibitions. Nor was I an artist who used art to contradict the government. I was this individual who tried to see how gunpowder could be used in creating art. And I was trying to use my individual creativity to explore an adventurous method to free myself from the overall suppressing atmosphere in society and to emphasise the value of my own existence. When I arrived in Japan, I realised, ‘Oh, I’m not alone. All these artists are like me, they are just making their own art.’ So I guess you can say that the theme for this exhibition is a continuation of questions I’ve always been asking myself. ar What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China is on show at Qatar Museums Gallery Al Riwaq, Doha, from 14 March to 16 July

ArtReview

Thailand’s Silent Period by Max Crosbie-Jones

Why have the country’s visual artists chosen to say so little about conditions in the kingdom since the 2014 military coup? Are they frightened? Just riding out the storm? Or do they like (some of) what they see?

March 2016

Lots of strange and surreal things have happened in Thailand since litany of authoritarian measures that, as of writing, are being a bloodless coup on 22 May 2014 cleared a path for a new military deployed in scarily ad hoc fashion in an effort to curb free speech: government. Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, a hot-tempered from summonses for ‘attitude adjustment’, to the trying of civilians army general prone to rambling speeches and off-script outbursts, in military courts with no right of appeal, to a marked increase in has released two syrupy ballads (one is played, per government prosecutions for lèse-majesté – Thailand’s harsh law against insulting diktat, on radio stations ad nauseam). Student agitators looking the monarchy – and the amount of jail time dished out (in August to circumvent a ban on political protests have been arrested for 2015, a man and a woman were sentenced to a record 30 years and 28 reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), for giving a three- years respectively, both for a series of Facebook posts deemed critical fingered salute (à la The Hunger Games) or for eating sandwiches in of the royals). public. A 2016 calendar featuring images of former pms Thaksin and Do Thai artists have anything to be afraid of? Despite these Yingluck Shinawatra – the political dynasty that the junta are ham- developments, recent history suggests not. From the 1970s on, fistedly trying to purge – was banned. And in early January, some of many of the kingdom’s conceptually astute painters and photograThailand’s press corps joined the phers have articulated their views pm for a party at Government on Thailand’s social and politiHouse, and – this is where things cal realities, albeit subtly. Think get truly surreal – dressed up like of self-taught painter Pratuang Emjaroen’s brand of surrealism, children for the occasion. photo-artist Paisal TheerapongHow have Thailand’s visual visanuporn’s allegorical studio artists chosen to respond to such a bizarre Orwellian climate? Fitphotographs filled with quotidian fully, if at all. While the performobjects and, more recently, painter ing-arts scene has recently come Natee Utarit’s toy figurines and into its own, with some smart animal signifiers in his neoclasand quietly subversive shows by sical-inspired canvases. Even those two physical theatre companies artists who have adopted a more hard-hitting stance, such as Vasan (B-Floor and Democrazy), and the Sitthiket, whose body of acerbic Internet has spawned satirical memes in the thousands, the viimpressionism includes depictions sual arts scene has largely steered of politicians fornicating and reclear of broaching the state of the ceiving fellatio, have escaped nation, or life under the ruling censorship. National Council for Peace and “Our art scene is under the raOrder, even obliquely. dar, unlike film, which experiences A few artists have responded, strong censorship,” says Manit though. Staged concurrently at Sriwanichpoom, the acclaimed the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre photographer behind series such as Coup d’Etat Photo Op (2006), in (bacc) and Paris’s gb Agency, Pratchaya Phinthong’s thoughtwhich members of the public posed provoking installation Who Will with soldiers after the September Guard the Guards Themselves (2015) 2006 putsch that ousted the elected centred on a lightbox image of a caretaker government of Thaksin 7-Eleven convenience store taken Shinawatra. This observation is backed up anecdotally. While talks during the postcoup curfew. deemed political have, since the Thepnara Kongsawang’s Unity Management Course (2015), at Bangkok’s Speedy Grandma gallery, saw recent coup, been cancelled on request of the authorities, and a wordvisitors being given foam ak-47s to take home in a sendup of the mili- less performance piece, Bang La Merd by B-Floor, was watched and tary’s omnipresence. And two shows at Chiang Mai’s Lyla Gallery gave recorded by military officers throughout its run in early 2015, never in a voice to the people. Though overwrought, Paphonsak La-or’s Silent No my years spent covering the Thai visual arts scene have I encountered More (2014–15) was especially searing: a series of photorealistic paint- a case of monitoring or censoring what private galleries show. Nor has ings of radiation-contaminated rural Japan overlaid with phrases any gallerist ever mentioned one to me. inspired by Thailand’s recent troubles. But these are the exceptions, Be this as it may, many artists are choosing not to exercise that not the rule. As Gridthiya Gaweewong, a major freedom. A serviceable theory as to why this above Manit Sriwanichpoom, figure on the scene best known for her role as is: many artists and gallerists are sympathetic The Election of Hatred, 2011, photographs, artistic director of Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art towards the military government and its mis60 × 90 cm each. Courtesy the artist sion to purge Thailand of cronyism and corCenter, puts it: ‘We are now in a silent period.’ preceding pages Apichatpong Weerasethakul, This is perhaps understandable. Not so much ruption. Some, such as Sitthiket, were vocal Cemetery of Splendour, 2015. Photo: Chai Siris. supporters of the Bangkok shutdown: the strange or surreal as downright disturbing is the Courtesy Kick the Machine Films

ArtReview

Paphonsak La-or, Silent No More, 2014–15, acrylic and dust on canvas, 250 × 450 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lyla Gallery, Chiang Mai

March 2016

Pratchaya Phinthong, Who will guard the guards themselves, 2015, lightbox, duratrans and steel frame, 161 × 200 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist and gb Agency, Paris

ArtReview

whistleblowing, tricolour garb-wearing street protest movement young but fast-rising Korakrit Arunanondchai, but other wellthat paralysed much of downtown Bangkok in late 2013 and early established names staged important shows, including the reclusive 2014 in an attempt to oust the then ruling Pheu Thai Party – and painter Chatchai Puipia, who reemerged with a two-part exhibition which got its wish on 22 May, when the military stepped in on the at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Gallery, and Navin Rawanchaikul, who last pretext of preventing bloody street clashes and ‘returning happiness year staged a retrospective across three venues in Chiang Mai up in the to the people’. northwest, including his dad’s fabric shop (see the Winter 2016 issue Another theory: subversive artists have decided to ride out the of ArtReview Asia). There was also an exciting first: PhotoBangkok, storm, either by not showing at all or only showing abroad. Chiang a many-pronged photo festival organised by contemporary photograMai-based conceptual artist Thasnai Sethaseree, for example, chose pher Piyatat Hemmatat and slated to return in 2017. to present his latest work – partly comprising archival images of Two private museums founded by collectors with sizable holdpast student uprisings, riots and tyrants layered in paint as a meta- ings of contemporary art are in the pipeline. One is a new-build phor for factual distortion and concealment – in a group show at the construction in central Bangkok (Bangkok University chairman and former pop star Petch University of Chicago’s Logan Osathanugrah’s O Museum, unCenter (on through 13 March). He has no plans to show it in officially announced for 2019), Thailand. Meanwhile, multithe other a converted warehouse media artist Prapat Jiwarangsan on the outskirts of Chiang Mai (French art patron Jean-Michel hasn’t presented work in BangBeurdeley’s micam). The latter kok since Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southopens 3 July with a retrospective east Asia (2014), a group show by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. of relational installations and This is something of a surprise – a pleasant one – given that conceptual agitprop at the bacc the Palme d’Or-winning filmthat ran, somewhat serendipimaker and installation artist tously, as Bangkok shutdown announced last October that he protesters rallied. One last theory: Thailand’s won’t be releasing his 2015 sylvan art institutions are self-censorcine-poem Cemetery of Splendour ing even more than they used in Thailand due to the likelihood to, restricting the few artists who of it being censored, nor will he be making any more films there do want to raise the volume to underground spaces. Luckana for as long as the army is in power. Kunavichayanont, director of Back in Bangkok, the Culture the bacc, adamantly denies that Ministry’s new headquarters this is the case. A recent spike on busy Ratchadaphisek Road is in honorific retrospectives and set to include the Asian Culture didactic shows, and lack of more Gateway, a B| 900 million (£17.5m) scholarly and socially pertinent museum that will house its exhibitions, is, she explained via growing collection of heritage and contemporary art as well as email, to do with time constraints and a lack of resources, namely temporary exhibitions (opening funds, curators and administradate: unknown). tors, not a calculated decision to Despite all this, a sense that visual artists are underperforming lingers. “I’m totally underhelp keep the peace. Still, the perception exists among some. Since the coup, there have also been positive developments. whelmed with the scene. It is by no means dead but its function Despite scant government support for artists and a weak market has dramatically changed due to self-censorship,” says Somrak Sila, with few buyers, Thailand’s visual arts scene is undeniably sprightly. the co-owner of wtf Bar & Gallery, and the curator behind several Driven by passion projects and a diy ethos, things are happening. postcoup shows aimed at prodding the Bangkok community out Commercial gallery scene stalwart Thavibu closed but some new of its stagnation and ennui, such as Conflicted Visions (2014) and This white cubes opened (Bangkok CityCity, YenakArt Villa), as have is not a Political Act, an exhibition about forced disappearances that a small cluster of experimental, mixed-use spaces in Chinatown opened in February. “We’ve been seeing a lot of art festivals in recent geared mostly towards collaboration and photography (Cloud, Cho months, such as Bukruk and Bangkok Edge,” she adds. “But none Why, nacc Club). Meanwhile, galleries with international connec- of the art in these festivals has any political message. It’s just art for aesthetic pleasure, which is perfect for gentritions – and plenty of inoffensive/apolitical paintSutee Kunavichayanont, ings on the books – are blossoming. A-list artists fying neighbourhoods. It definitely creates a lot of My Motherland, 2012/14, foam sheet, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pinaree Sanpitak and Natee hype – and distracts you from what’s really going 58 × 55 cm. Utarit have stayed away since the coup, as has the on here.” ar Courtesy the artist

March 2016

In Floyerland by Mark Prince

How Ceal Floyer invites viewers into a world in which everything that is asserted is denied 90

ArtReview

The art of Ceal Floyer presents itself, and is typically presented, in banally deterministic terms. The pairing of reproduction and textual summary reduces an artwork’s conceit to an itemised recipe. A title wittily encapsulates an installation’s point. The catalogue accompanying last autumn’s Floyer exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn is a page-by-page directory of her works to date, presented in this vein. Each double-page spread has a photograph on the right, facing a title, a date, a list of constituent elements and an explanatory paragraph on the left. The text /image binary is presented as a transparent equivalence. The layout issues paragraphs in the spirit of keys required to activate the images, which are mostly perfunctory. This pattern is familiar from the exegesis around Floyer’s art, which often reads like a self-satisfied explanation of a series of one-liners. Whereas most art catalogues are intent on generating an aura of mystery and significance around the art they document, Floyer’s are as tersely factual as a pharmaceutical brochure. Many of the images show what at first glance looks like an empty gallery in which a second glance reveals a minor intervention. If the work is an audio piece, the gallery may actually be empty of art objects. The effect is to emphasise the correspondence between concept and form, and the latter’s synonymity with the former, casting the image – or visuality itself – as subservient to the reflexive conceit it manifests. But the experience of Floyer’s art belies this cut-and-dried format, and returns us to it aware that the emptiness of the images is a positive value. Her work is brief but it claims the space it occupies as its fictional world. Those almost-empty galleries signify the precincts of that world, not merely the expedient foils against which art objects articulate themselves. The Canadian poet Anne Carson once remarked that she considers the imaginative worlds created by certain writers – Beckett, Euripides – to be too bleak to dwell in. Something similar might be said of Floyer. Her spaces are sparely furnished, comfortless, almost colourless, repetitive, tautological, self-circling, indeed full of circles of all kinds, or signs reiterated to the point of dysfunction, like words repeated until they cease to make sense. They are mostly white

– a white broken only by a few black glitches. It is a world of logical processes that wind into Escher-like conundrums. It keeps telling us that our presence and engagement is pointless. It makes us feel foolish for persisting in the face of such hostility. It is always clean and dry. If you’re not wearing the chic artworld uniform of all black, minimally cut, you feel like an eyesore. That it presents itself as a hipsterish decor is a joke on us – the viewer, the culture – and on the expectations we bring to looking at art. Floyer is always using simple illusions to make us think about our vulnerability to delusion. The resolution of an abstraction into the materialism of decor, and the conﬁrmation of an assumption in order to reject it, are both forms of irony, which is another reversal given that Floyer’s crucial antecedent is early conceptual art of the late 1960s and 70s, which was unwaveringly earnest. Irreverently, she bites the hand that feeds her. Early Conceptualism was telling us that art should be an objective communication, a missive in the consensus terms of language. It should transmit a datum instead of resting, like a modernist painting, on the laurels of its aesthetic autonomy. It was saying – in the words of Queen Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet – ‘more matter, with less art’. The idea was the thing, the look of it a delivery mechanism that should dematerialise once it has served its purpose. But visual art can’t escape its look, and what this intention produced was not a ‘non-look’, but a déclassé, plain, objective look, which, of course, as the technologies on which it was contingent have dated, has begun to look very much like a look. It is now difficult to know whether British conceptualist Stephen Willats’s recent silkscreens – with their Xeroxed, typewritten layouts – are art in the early conceptualist style or a nostalgic referencing of that style – a retro idiom. What was originally intended to circumvent art’s reliance on appearances – its ‘retinalness’, in Duchamp’s phrase – has become a set of appearances. That Floyer’s art conforms to the look of art aloof from a concern with its look, and converts that look into a form of brand decor – the corporate identity of Floyerland – is an act of historical assimilation as well as a remote satire. It intimates that ideas

above Domino Effect, 2015, domino tiles, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin facing page Half Full, 1999, colour photograph mounted on aluminium, 105 × 105 cm. © the artist, vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Lisson Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York

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Light Switch, 1992, 35mm slide projection, dimensions vartiable. © the artist, vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Lisson Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York

ArtReview

are contingent on the world in which they find form, the space that dissolving an object into the abstraction of a sign, a sign for a light expresses them and brings them down to earth. Conversely, her titles switch but also for the medium of light. Light is both material (particle, always have the air of too-clever puns, self-consciously summarising in the language of quantum physics) and archetype – a symbol for the conceit that sublimates idea into object, as though reminding illumination and enlightenment, as the cartoon image of the ‘eureka’ the object of the idea that triggered it, and which it can’t escape. I’m moment is the lightbulb coming on above the genius’s head. reminded of something the critic Adrian Searle said of the painter In Bonn, Light Switch differed from the version I saw in Manchester Gary Hume – that his paint never belies the look it had in the pot. in that the image projected was of a German-style switch, as much a That Floyer, like Hume, was among a generation of British artists who standard for its context as the English one in Manchester. The varying emerged during the late 1980s to international acclaim, most of whom versions (there have also been Japanese, Irish, American, French, were associated with Goldsmiths in London, makes her early-concep- Italian and Turkish ones) denote the specificity of the wall onto tual inheritance anomalous. Producing bold, Pop-effective, art- which they are projected. As much as the generic form of the switches professional products, these were abstracts their images into an unloWhat is the point of a light switch that not catable language, their variety specartists whose work had more to do with the pragmatism of the postifies the place the image occupies only doesn’t work but needs the energy it 1970s British market state, with its (ie a wall in Manchester or Bonn), is meant to release in order to appear? distrust of anything too abstract, as that place claims it as local. This Platonic and economically unviable, than with what might be its ambivalent site-specificity was underlined by the Kunstmuseum’s antithesis: Conceptualism’s severe distrust of art’s commodification. installation of Light Switch in a large unlit gallery, otherwise empty. The contrast between Floyer’s work and that of her peers was imme- The projector placed the switch image at the end of a wall, where diately apparent when I saw it for the first time in Manchester, during it gave onto the entrance into another gallery, as if the switch were the early 1990s, in one of the first British Art Shows, in which Steve an afterthought, or rather – like a switch in relation to its domestic McQueen and Douglas Gordon also participated. All three showed setting – an appendage to the interior it serves. Floyer’s passivefilmic or photographic projection, but the gallery-filling installa- aggressive claiming of a context through the agency of an overtions of McQueen and Gordon couldn’t have been further removed seeable intervention is the equivalent of her catalogue installation from Floyer’s apparently humble Light Switch (1992) – a lifesize cut-out shots, in which the almost-empty gallery that appears to be a superphotographic image of a standard British domestic switch panel fluity signifies the negative space that each work’s narrative draws projected onto the white wall of an entranceway by a slide projector on into its orbit. a plinth so close to it that it seemed to belittle the image it produced. But if her interventions claim the context they occupy, they treat Light Switch looked like a rogue, nihilistic cell in the midst of it squeamishly. They demand an ideal, white-cube gallery, and given the exhibition’s youthful self-promotion; a tautological construct that that is always an ideal, proceed as though the space were a neutral so airtight it cancelled itself out in an endless loop of form and backdrop against which they can enact their conceits with as few meaning. Light triggers an illusion of the object that triggers light impediments as possible. The genericism of the objects is matched by (even that sentence resembles an extended palindrome). Light Switch that of the interiors the objects can only require and imply. The empty heralded Floyer’s programme by proposing an artwork’s occasion as black Garbage Bag (1996), puffed up and scrunched in to look full, one of futility. It asks us to pay attention to the image of an object that languished in a corner. It looked just like it always has. This continuity is usually there to be unobtrusively functional, and exacerbates the depends on the generic bag, as ideally standard as the ‘ordinary flashfutility of this demand by making the image contingent upon what light’ that Jasper Johns told David Sylvester he had in mind to use as the object would be only there to produce: light. Whereas Duchamp a model for a work, and expected to find in every hardware store, only divested his bottle rack of its function, releasing it into functionless to discover that it was far more elusive a product than he had imagart space, Floyer makes an object’s ined. But in Floyerland, the ideally function the tool by which to denote Floyerland is like the ultrasanitised hospital standard trash bag, light switch, the art object it produces as futile. ward that brings to mind the bacterium that ladder or handsaw is always at hand, She uses its function to invalidate no amount of disinfection can exterminate ready to divest itself of its specificity and resolve into a sign for its funcrather than liberate the object. Light Switch’s lack of function – except in the sense that an artwork is a tion. It is as if the conceptual reversal on which Garbage Bag turns – an calculated trap for aesthetic contemplation – is made synonymous image of content that proves to be its absence (we take on trust the wall with its futility. After all, what is the point of a light switch that not plaque’s listing ‘air’ as one of its ingredients) – were paramount, and only doesn’t work but needs the energy it is meant to release in order the specificity of the bag had to be disowned in order to manifest it as to appear? The piece even goes so far as to qualify aesthetic contem- transparently as possible. plation itself as futile. The paradox is that Floyer’s reduction of her objects to generic And yet in its power to generate conceptual narrative, Light Switch signs makes us conversely aware of the specificity they reject. Floyeris anything but miserly. A sign (‘light switch’) unpacks as both illu- land is like the ultrasanitised hospital ward that insistently brings to sion (photograph) and material (light – in the sense that light is Dan mind the bacterium that no amount of disinfection can exterminate. Flavin’s material), each a sign for the other (photography requires It makes us conscious of a sign’s inadequacy, either by forcing it to overlight); only for that material to signify and name the sign it creates. compensate in its function – to get stuck in a reiterative loop; to keep Even minimalist materiality – defined by its resistance to figuration saying, but saying nothing – or by exposing it as a covert particular. and analogy – is here double-edged. Light is revealed as capable of Her two identical photographs of a half-filled glass – one entitled Half

March 2016

Empty, the other Half Full (both 1999) – expose the cliché of the upbeat adage their titles allude to by presenting us with photographs – representations that insist on an empirical reality that the blithe saying and Floyer’s bland photography are set on disregarding. The medium is a spanner in the works’ abstraction. The photographs further expose the pretensions of conceptualist abstractions by satirically alluding to a famous but facile work of British conceptual art: Michael CraigMartin’s (one of Floyer’s Goldsmiths tutors) An Oak Tree (1973) – a glass of water on a shelf that a text explains has been transformed into an oak tree as though by the power of language. Floyer’s photographs are the critical inverse of Craig-Martin’s gung-ho alchemy. They show that language’s – and, by extension, reason’s – possession of reality is pathetically limited; that reality is neither half-full nor half-empty but inexorably resistant to such glib generalisations. Interpreting the generic object, the cliché, the mean value, as forms of wishful thinking belied by recalcitrant reality, Floyer qualiﬁes her conceptualist heritage as of the British kind, which was always more concerned with empirical pictorial representation than its American or German counterparts. This is the lineage of Richard Wentworth’s (who also taught at Goldsmiths) photographic series Making Do and Getting By (1973–) or Susan Hiller’s Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76). Wentworth’s photographs capture makeshift manifestations of human ingenuity applied to urban entropy. Minor adjustments to the prevailing chaos – a shoe used to prop up a sash; a railing spike proffering a lost glove – are models for a rational, human ideal (many of the ‘interventions’ are endearing and charitable). Hiller’s diptychs combine grids of vintage British tourist postcards, representing stormy seas bombarding a coastline, with typewritten analysis. It is impossible to determine whether the statistics are ironically assiduous, or if we are projecting irony onto an earlyconceptual mindset that precludes it. Either way, the images function ﬁguratively. The shorelines cannot contain the sea’s battery, as Hiller’s art is overwhelmed by the information it strives to assimilate.

She can only rail against the impenetrability of history to her act of remote representation. As Hiller alludes to an art convention through a mass-produced cipher, and takes that contrast as a cue for a meditation on the resistance of history to representation, Floyer’s Monochrome Till Receipt (White) (1999) pitches a disposable receipt as a white monochrome – a modernist form that abjures information and reference in favour of optical purity. The list of purchases intimates a world of consumer objects as overwhelming to the carte blanche of the monochrome as the high waves to Hiller’s Romantic coastlines. That all the listed products are white makes them symbolically invisible by imaginatively converting them into art signs, putative readymades, aligned – in their art-ness – with the monochrome paper. White paper and white objects expose the words describing the purchases (in black ink, the colour of the exception in the white of Floyerland) as an unassimilable excess. Their local specificity (each time the work is realised, the items are purchased from a nearby supermarket) is another aspect of their clashing with the generic monochrome they qualify. As the receipt is abstracted, so the purchases – but not the language that represents them – are generalised as white objects. The black print in its local language represents all that threatens the dominion of abstract art’s aesthetic preserve, and that it consequently rejects. It is consistent with the anticommodity stance of Floyer’s conceptual models that this threat is made synonymous with consumerism. Sold (1996) imputes the travesty of specific objecthood to the clumsy, dated art-market convention by which a gallery indicates paintings as sold by sticking a small red circle on the wall. But it may also be imputing that travesty to painting as the default medium of the art commodity. In Bonn, a hole was drilled in the wall at the corner of a Georg Baselitz painting and filled with red paint. Perhaps it was not coincidental that Floyer had chosen to place her dot in conjunction with the work of one of the avatars of the resurgence of large-scale figurative painting in the 1980s, which at the time was considered

Sold, 1996, cadmium red oil paint, 7 mm hole, 7 mm diameter. Photo: Axel Schneider. © the artist, vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Lisson Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York

ArtReview

by proponents of Conceptualism as a travesty of the advances that movement had made in the 60s and 70s. This miniature minimalist vignette overcompensates for its occasion – the abstraction of the red dot – with its material specificity: a hole drilled into the plasterboard wall and filled with cadmium red oil paint, as plump as putty. Extrapolating phenomenological experience from a cipher, the paint redeems the convention it mimics, transforming the artwork as a sign of market value into a specific object. A cynical confirmation of consumerism proves to be its discreet nemesis. But the fact that Sold is also a painting – a modernist monochrome as much as a demonstration of minimalist materialism – derails any simple binary between painting as commodity and the red dot as its anticonsumerist inverse. Parity between Baselitz and Floyer is restored at the last moment. Sold’s conflation of conceptualist abstractions and Minimalism’s phenomenological specificities, each undermining the other, is the structural baseline of Floyer’s art. As much as the specific object challenges a sign’s abstractions, the sign’s slippery illusiveness, its refusal to correspond to any particular object, challenges the certainties of empirical perception. Floyer likes to make something that looks like an objective phenomenon – the light under a door; a drip landing in a bucket – prove to be an illusion, a sign that stands for all the instances of which it is not one. This making generic of the object by its image is a means of holding the nostalgia of the found object – its function as a trace of its own past – at arm’s length. When Floyer engages with nostalgic sentiment, she places it in inverted commas; has it default to her medium, by making it synonymous with the artwork’s self-reflexivity. Hence her use of pop songs – that most nostalgic of artforms – as in Things (2009): 50 white plinths with embedded speakers, each emitting a clip of the word “things” extracted from various pop tracks. The ideal minimalist object, a plain-sided box, is forced to do what minimalist orthodoxy forbids: refer. And yet, by making reference an act of self-reference – as the installation’s title implies, the plinths double

as the ‘things’ they are naming – the minimalist object is made selfconscious (nostalgia, of course, is one of the forms self-consciousness takes), and this self-reference is extended to encompass art-historical allusion (a kind of art nostalgia), in this case to Robert Morris’s seminal conceptual/minimalist Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961). Containing a tape recorder playing the sound produced by its construction, Morris’s plywood box compromises the ideal, minimalistic art object – the unadorned cube – by means of the recording it contains which enables its self-reflexivity. Helix (2001) is a curious exception in Floyer’s art, in its accommodation, rather than testy rejection, of the function of objects as traces, even as nostalgic keepsakes. The exception is signified by the work’s buzz of consumer-product colour, a telling crack in Floyer’s sternly black-and-white universe. Various found objects are inserted into a metric template’s holes to precisely fit their spectrum of circumferences. The work’s title is even more ingenious than usual. It refers to the template’s product name at the same time as comprehending how the objects three-dimensionalise the holes by extending them into vertical space, transforming a geometrical abstraction into a foundobject particular, resonant with traces of individual history. It is as if the found object were managing to squeeze itself into the parameters of an abstraction, while remaining standing within it to flout its attempt to generalise it. A dictionary defines ‘helix’ as a three-dimensional extension of a geometric shape, as a coiled spring extends a circle. But the extension is also temporal, into the pasts of the objects. Standing in their allotted holes, a shower head, a jumbo marker, an egg timer, a perfume sampler, a keyring, a button and a screw resemble a miniature model of a New York-style highrise skyline (Helix was first produced in the year of 9/11), another image improvised out of the stuff of a reality that belies it. ar Ceal Floyer: On Occasion is at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, through 10 April

Helix, 2015, shelf, Helix template, assorted objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

March 2016

Still (the) Barbarians Curated by Koyo Kouoh

16 April – 17 July 2016 Previews 14 + 15 April Limerick City, Ireland

Pio Abad Larry Achiampong and David Blandy Philip Aguirre y Otegui Kader Attia Kostas Bassanos Eric Baudelaire Hera Büyüktaşcıyan Tiffany Chung Criodhna Costello Jonathan Cummins Godfried Donkor Samuel Erenberg Theo Eshetu

Mary Evans Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley Liam Gillick Yong Sun Gullach Carsten Höller Dorothy Hunter Jeremy Hutchison Joanna Hutton Alfredo Jaar Michael Joo Journal Rappé Kapwani Kiwanga Abdoulaye Konaté Syowia Kyambi Kemang Wa Lehulere Leung Chi Wo Charles Lim Yi Yong Alice Maher Bradley McCallum Naeem Mohaiemen

Pádraic E. Moore Otobong Nkanga Uriel Orlow Ulrike Ottinger Alan Phelan Johannes Phokela Sarah Pierce Deirdre Power and Softday Public Studio Ican Ramageli Amanda Rice Willem de Rooij Tracey Rose Catarina Simão Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor Vo Tran Chau John Waid

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Former students of the early Deng Xiaoping era in China (1978 to the early 1990s) have been reported to have taken this slogan literally and made ‘hot milk’ in their dormitory cooking rings by dissolving the candies in a pan of hot water 99

Chua Ek Kay After the Rain Wu Guanzhong Beauty Beyond Form National Gallery Singapore 26 November – 3 May When National Gallery Singapore opened to the public last November, only two artists, both relatively recently deceased, were honoured with solo exhibitions. The first is Jiangsu-born Wu Guanzhong, who died in 2010, aged ninety-one, as a towering figure in twentieth-century Chinese art; the second is a local representative, the Singaporean Chua Ek Kay, who, by the time he passed away eight years ago, had become one of the Lion City’s most lionised artists. Placed side by side in the gallery, and sharing the same introductory panel, the shows are constructed so as to invite comparison; and the formal correspondences are clear. In their own ways, both artists spent their lives interrogating traditional Chinese ink painting, stretching the medium’s various conventions to develop a personal language. Wu, who was partly trained at Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des BeauxArts, described his career as ‘a snake swallowing an elephant’ – the elephant being Western art. Though he painted in both oil and ink, the exhibition focuses on the latter, and shows his journey from expressive though fundamentally representational landscapes to bolder and moodier forms of abstraction. Meanwhile, Chua, who moved to Singapore from China when he was a child, was concerned with finding an appropriate register and an original subject as a Chinese

ink painter living in twentieth-century Singapore. His experimentation takes him through different phases, from doing old-school-literati poetrycum-painting tributes to the masters, to updating the classic shanshui format with local, urban ingredients such as shophouses and mosques. By sheer verve, clarity of vision and scale of output, Wu is by far the more monumental artist. Any painter working in Chinese ink inherits a complicated legacy – various schools of thought governing ‘proper’ line work, brushstrokes and composition, systems that are in turn linked to larger philosophical frameworks about art and life. While Wu seemed to have eaten up the classical rulebooks and spat out a new and defiant orthodoxy, Chua was skittish and respectful, a New World student grappling with Old World traditions, and the uncertainty showed in the output. In his prime, Wu’s ink pieces are virile, joyous, sui generis – soaring symphonies of line, dot and colour. In River Of No Return (1984), a mountain becomes liquid, delineated with thin, almost pendrawn lines flowing thrillingly in all directions. Following them, the eye glides, soars and dives as if tracing the paths of birds. His fluency continues in The Great Wall I (1986), where the architectural icon becomes a voluptuous river moving up to the horizon in long, swinging strides.

The energy in his work comes mostly from his laserlike focus on form. In that sense, the title of the exhibition – Beauty Beyond Form – is a bit of a misnomer – for Wu is all about form, and wrote endlessly about universally pleasing arrangements of lines, shapes, and colours. This was true in his early days as a plein-air artist, describing the structural juxtapositions of mountainous expanses and skinny, bone-white trees in Trashilungpo Monastery (1961) in Tibet, or later during the Cultural Revolution, when he, together with other artists, intellectuals and ‘counter-revolutionaries’, was sent for ‘reeducation’ in the countryside. On Sundays, with his brushes and paints in a manure basket, he painted weeds, sunﬂowers and cornﬁelds. Former New York Times art critic Karen Rosenberg pointed out in her 2012 review of his Asia Society solo that Wu’s apolitical formalism, as well as his apparent lack of rancour with respect to his term of hard labour, makes him ‘the sort of artist the Chinese government is eager to celebrate and export’. To a certain extent, this is true. But it is worth noting that the largest donation of his works is not to the motherland, whose architecture, plants, animals and people he had so lovingly captured in his lifetime, but to an outsider: the Singapore national collection. Of the 300 or so paintings he gave away before

Chua Ek Kay, After the Rain, 2004, ink and colour on paper, 244 × 120 cm. Collection Singapore Art Museum

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his death, Singapore received 113 – a lot more than any other Chinese museum. Why the generous bequeathal to a seemingly random heir? Well, it’s not that random: his connection to Singapore dates back to the 1980s, when a few local dealers recognised his genius, staged a few shows for him and arguably opened the doors to his international career. The eldest of his three sons also lives here. But the exhibition wall text hints at more pragmatic concerns: Wu considered his artworks his ‘daughters’, and he needed ‘to ﬁnd a good family for each and every one of them’. Rich, cosmopolitan, clean-cut Singapore was the groom he picked, and the country’s top arts institution has duly returned the honour by naming a gallery after him and by permanently rotating his works in it for public viewing. Betrothed or not, Singapore has received a stupendous gift. The pleasures of Wu’s works are direct and irrefutable. Their structural integrity isn’t a cold art; it’s warm-blooded and alive. This is present in the exhilarating and stormy strokes of A World Of Ice And Snow (1997) or the extraordinary stillness in Twin Swallows (1981), which has gone into a list of paintings I have compiled called ‘Happy to See While Dying’. In the ink-onpaper work, a traditional waterfront house from his hometown Jiangnan is described in limpid

straight lines and glimmering reflections. The only sign of movement is the pair of titular birds, reticently painted, nothing more than a crescent and a line in the distance – a fillip of activity at the corner of the eye. Lifted by the swallows, the entire scene has a deep, meditative calm. It is silent but not lonely, with the simple clarity of birdsong. Wu is a tough act to follow. In comparison, Chua’s work is gentler, murkier and more careful. As the title After The Rain suggests, there is something water-based about his art: something diluted, unevenly diffused and unresolved. His pieces are hit-and-miss; but when they do hit, a cloudy poetry osmoses from them. Chua’s investigation of the possibilities of Chinese ink took him in different directions in his lifetime, and with varying degrees of success. There is the muddy blur of Dream Of Borobudur (1996), where Buddhas, dancing figures and architectural curlicues are half-glimpsed in a wash of browns and blacks mimicking the ancient stones of the ninth-century temple. There is also an indifferent nonrepresentational phase with wild-goose-chase titles, such as the bland, grubby washes of grey-green in Portrait Of A Woman (1993) and A Silent Figure (1993). Some of Chua’s strongest works are the latecareer, Zen-inflected abstract ones inspired by

lotuses. Born 30 years after Wu, Chua considered the elder painter one of his influences, and in these abstract pieces one can see a flickering, avuncular relationship between the two. Chua’s lotus paintings display the musicality that Wu so prized, though it is a scratchier and more fragmented sound, such as the loose, staccato rhythms of hundreds of crosshatch strokes in First Light Lotus Pond (2007), or the louche jazziness of Untitled (Lotus) (2003), where broken stalks float over spongy washes of grey-brown and milky jade. As for Chua’s visions of home, the recurring scenes of decrepit shophouses, desolate alleyways and crowded buildings done in sombre blots and smudges leave me cold. They feel dutifully local in content and suffused with a samey mood of dogged, monsoon joylessness. The notable exceptions are Catholic High School Old Campus Grounds i and ii (2005), two gifts to his alma mater that have the tender and shaky quality of an ancient home video. Evoking memory and movement, the rickety lines of buildings are made by dry brushes giving up the last of their juice, and the tall spire of the church leans to the right, as if Chua was seeing it from the corner of his eye while whizzing by on a bike, as he did when a child. Adeline Chia

Wu Guanzhong, Hometown Morning, 1960, oil on board, 61 × 46 cm. Collection National Gallery Singapore

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Sonia Leimer Above the Crocodiles Galerie Nächst St Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna 4 November – 9 January It seems a quaint concept these days – conquering outer space, ogling our big blue-marble world from a lofty vantage point. But it’s one of humanity’s most tenaciously recurring desires, one so strong that private space travel is a booming business even if operations like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic have yet to get off the ground. Vienna-based artist Sonia Leimer’s exhibition Above the Crocodiles underscores the simplicity of this wish, but juxtaposes it with our complex relationships to the spaces we actually live in. In a titular looped video (Above the Crocodiles, all works 2015) of found tv footage from a Russian space station showing in Nächst St Stephan’s backroom, two male cosmonauts cruise above the earth, zooming their view to ships they see in the ocean, asking in subtitled Russian whether a city they see might be Jeddah, commenting with interest on what they say is a crocodile farm below them. Joining the two male voices is a female voice that Leimer edited into the audio track and whose role remains a bit of a mystery.

The film represents both the starting and finishing point for the rest of the show, which confronts us with the many rules of the physical, terrestrial world. Just past the gallery’s entrance, a rectangular white wall suspended by a complex system of wire pulleys and ceiling hooks blocks the way. Forced to walk around it, we see that it’s counterbalanced by an oversize black dropshaped sculpture (Instabil auf Unstabil) that looks like a fat punching bag. It’s almost fun to discover that what appears immovable is in fact hanging in the balance – the barricade floats above the floor; the weight is filled with water and swings gently if nudged. Matters get even more earthbound in the next room, where Leimer has placed rectangles of asphalt – scarred fragments of Vienna’s streets – as ersatz islands on the gallery floor; we are forced to walk between them or step from one to another, while a wire sculpture (Place Holder) seems to direct the way, a signpost of sorts. On the walls, three shiny windshield screens are printed with abstracted images. All titled

Pale Blue Dot, the silvery-striped image fragment printed on each is apparently a shot of earth from one of the Voyager space probes. The two-dimensional works seem superﬂuous here, as we navigate Leimer’s minimalist obstacle course and are then lifted into the video’s dreamy atmospheric zone (as seating for video viewing, the artist provides I-beam sculptures upholstered with jaunty maritimethemed fabric made in the former Soviet Union). Leimer’s explorations of space, usually architectural and tangible, have in the past gone far above crocodiles and much more: she once asked an astronaut to photograph a Viennese housing complex from an aerial vantage point, and send her a postcard thereof. But in this exhibition, notions of stability and instability, physicality and perception are so strongly contrasted with transcendence and desire that we are ultimately left pondering both the dream of ﬂoating high above it all, and the inescapable weight, the gravity in every sense of the word, of life on earth. Kimberly Bradley

Above the Crocodiles, 2015 (installation view). Photo: © Markus Wörgötter. Courtesy Galerie Nächst St Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna

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Daniel Dezeuze Tableaux-valises et dessins Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris 9 January – 20 February Entering Tableaux-valises et dessins, Daniel Dezeuze’s sixth solo show at Daniel Templon, viewers familiar with his work will most likely be surprised to discover that half of the artworks displayed are sketchy pastels of butterflies in flight – a total of 39 insects spreading their wings and smearing their colourful trajectories over more than a dozen drawings titled Papillons (1997), Vol de papillons (2003–04) or, for the most part, Persistance du taoïsme (2003–05). Although not recent, they are exhibited here for the first time in Paris. These, the artist has said, are attempts to grasp the ungraspable: namely, the erratic flight paths of butterflies. In my case, the momentary dread that arose on seeing these works wasn’t due to my irrational fear of fancy moths, but to the seeming puerility of the lively motif, considering that Dezeuze was formerly a leading member of Supports/Surfaces, the shortlived, modernist and ultimately last French avant-garde movement, which he cofounded in 1969 with nine other painters and that had dissolved by 1972. While completely rejecting the illusionistic space of the canvas, Supports/Surfaces furthered the essentialist deconstruction and reinvention of painting through bricolage by exposing and experimenting with its structural elements, using poor fabrics, found objects and scraps, an aesthetic that Dezeuze has never ceased to

explore. In the light of this, his now-disclosed obsession with fluttering butterflies might thus appear, at first glance, somewhat uncanny. At the core of Dezeuze’s vocabulary since the late 1960s have been extensible panels and ladders, meaning that they can be easily folded or rolled up and down, and which he uses as flexible supporting frames (also his signature forms); when these are not left bare, he additionally employs see-through fabrics such as open mesh and gauze instead of canvas. All of this has allowed him not only to purge painting of its illusionistic space, but also radically to unsettle its fixed format. For instance, in this show, among nine assemblages – ‘paintings’ in Dezeuze’s conception – commingling on the walls with the butterflies, Fragment d’espace and Isis Extension de l’Univers (both 2014) are diamond-shaped cutouts of extensible wood lattice fences, which the artist more or less spread out before applying onto them blue and white paint respectively. While on the former he left the thin, unpainted delineation of a rectangle to recall the shape of the traditional pictorial frame, he also nailed a T-square onto the latter, a rather ironic touch given that the dimensions of these artworks, which do not care for right angles, are not fixed but potentially alterable. Holding that thought, and very figuratively speaking then, metamorphosis – of which the butterfly is the symbol

par excellence – has always been the essence of Dezeuze’s diy approach to painting; so I suppose it was only a matter of time before some of his art, at least, burst from its conceptual cocoon. That said, along with the wandering flights of the decade-old pastel daubs of butterflies, all the other artworks presented in the gallery revolve around these notions of transformation and its route, none of them as stunningly and improbably as Tableaux-valises (2015), an ensemble of 20 hybrid suitcase-paintings installed on the floor in the middle of the single exhibition room. After removing both sides (the lid and bottom) of each suitcase, leaving only the edges and handles intact, Dezeuze filled three with cross timbers to suggest the supporting frame of a canvas and covered the others with fishnet, onto which he scattered paint with a large brush, in hues ranging from red, pink, blue and green to yellow. The slightly oblique position at which he placed the suitcases for this show, pulling them together and angling them all in the same direction, makes them look like a swarm ready to take off. And as your gaze wanders through the multicoloured maze of these gauzy portable paintings, the effect is absolutely dazzling, leaving me convinced that Dezeuze still has plenty up his sleeve; although perhaps, here, too many butterflies in the belfry. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Fragment d’espace, 2014, painted wood, 72 × 44 cm. Photo: B. Huet / Tutti. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris & Brussels

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João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva Papagaio kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 29 November – 24 January A parrot flies through the projected image just after saying ‘Good Morning’, or so the work’s title would lead us to believe. In the sevenminute 16mm film Glossolalia (“Good Morning”) (2014), the bird moves in extreme slow motion, its captured flight shown in a loop so that it performs the same flight over and over again. This work is typical of Portuguese artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva: a simple motion sequence filmed with a static camera, unedited and greatly decelerated. All that can be heard is the rather loud clatter of the film projector. The effect of this aesthetic strategy is a greatly reduced ‘movement image’ – as Gilles Deleuze employs the term – that seemingly relates to a particular moment in time, yet is staged to provoke a wide range of philosophical inquiry. For example, the question of the difference between human and nonhuman, living being and object, is continually under inspection. Simultaneously, this cinematic art reflects the technical specifications of its medium. Glossolalia not only applies the operating sound of the projector as a substitute for the putative language of the bird, it also creates a scenario in which the animal approximates a machine through the repetition – as stoic as it is exact – of its movements as it flies away.

kw Berlin’s retrospective exhibition Papagaio, which has already been to the Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and to London’s Camden Arts Centre, presents some 20 short films (plus two camera obscuras) within a labyrinthine exhibition architecture fashioned from the kind of wooden partition walls you might find on a construction site. In lieu of a linear narration that would seem to feign a sort of temporality, the films here are shown simultaneously, their images – juxtaposed with one another through minute calculation – in such close proximity that they seem almost to overlap. Just as the cinematic form of the loop has no beginning and no end, this exhibition has no route predetermined by the curators or artists, no prescription for the sequence in which to perceive the films. The short film Donkey (2011), like the parrot film, focuses on the moment of movement. The viewer sees a donkey being ridden through a square in a small South American town, again in slow motion and as a loop. And again the resulting, almost nagging repetition of the action creates the impression of a machine. Moreover, it’s no accident that the film Wheels (2011) refers also to running, fixating on the movement of spinning wheels, and this time

even the camera is spinning. The running star of Donkey, though, refers to an icon in the history of the depiction of movement: The Horse in Motion (1878) by Eadweard Muybridge. This movement study was not only a cinematic pioneer; still today it acts as a reminder – indeed clarification – that motion pictures are nothing more than still images played back at high speed. In many respects, Papagaio (Djambi) (2014), the title work of this convincing exhibition, ultimately represents a creative turning point in Gusmão and Paiva’s cinematic output. Not only is its 43-minute runtime significantly longer than that of their previous short films, but it also forgoes the distanced restraint and uninvolved posturing of its predecessors. Papagaio documents a voodoo ritual on the African island of São Tomé, no longer employing a single static camera for the purpose, but rather capturing the events with a handheld camera provided by the artists to those carrying out the ritual. As a result, the incessantly wandering images seem to be caught in a trance, appearing themselves to be an integral part of the religious ceremony. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

Glossolalia (“Good Morning”), 2014, 16mm ﬁlm, colour, no sound, 7 min 10 sec. Produced by Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan. Courtesy the artists and Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; Galeria Graça Brandão, Lisbon; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf; Zero, Milan

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Walter Swennen Ein perfektes Alibi (A Perfect Alibi) Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf 28 November – 14 February Walter Swennen’s large painting Labyrinth (2015) depicts a maze, most likely copied from a children’s activity book (the original page is also on display, together with other archive material, and features on the invitation card). It is painted onto a mottled blue-grey ground and at its centre is an elephant. A wavy handpainted red line, contrasting with the stencilledin grid, enters the maze at top left, heading downward only to quickly upswing into a dead end. It leads the eye, shows the hand of the artist and, one might conjecture, provides a neat suggestion of Swennen’s philosophy or self-invented logic concerning painting. This and the 35 other paintings in Ein perfecktes Alibi (A Perfect Alibi), which date from 1980 to the present and are hung across two galleries, form a succinct miniretrospective. At first glance it would be easy, given the predominance of loosely painted figurative imagery here, to classify the Belgian, now turning seventy, as a neoexpressionist. However, like his friend and mentor Marcel Broodthaers, Swennen, who first studied philosophy and psychology, was a poet before turning to art. Yet instead of directing

verbal and visual play towards the institution as Broodthaers did, Swennen’s approach to painting seems to be that of a poetry of corrections – or stalled corrections, like leading his viewers through a maze only to deposit us at a dead end. In a 1990 interview, Swennen noted that he had no aptitude to be a philosopher, while poetry for him equalled nostalgia, hence his turn to painting. Two early works on large paper scrolls, nailed to the wall, depict roughly illustrated animals and objects in black oil paint with words next to them. Next to the oilcan in Alphabetum (1981), for example, is the word ‘rabbit’; a rabbit sits beside the word ‘glass’, an elephant accompanies ‘oil’, and ﬁnally appears a crocodile with ‘secret love’ painted in a pale pink. If paintings such as this are Swennen’s most Broodthaers-inspired in their play of word and image, they connect with his other works via their unlikely juxtapositions. The later combinations, though, rest more on roughly scratching out a space between the painterly ground and – at times – imagery, in the form of cartoons or ideograms drawn from popular culture. Their murky ﬁelds suggest

that Swennen constantly edits and reworks, as if trying to find the right fit. Take Zes min vijf (Six Minus Five, 2010), which depicts a series of six rectilinear cartoon faces in black outline on a flat, pale greyish, lightly brushed ground. Five of them are crossed out with a red X. The result is at once humorous and numerical: a process, as its title suggests, of addition (of faces) and then negation (crossing out). Could Swennen be teaching us to count? More likely, I imagine, he’s figuring how many crosses are required to make the right painting. In Untitled (Room) (2001), he paints the letters ‘m o o r’ diagonally across the painting, and provides an arrow pointing the other way that suggests, as per the title, that the reading may really be ‘room’. That is reading while seeing, which may offer another way to look at his paintings. Swennen’s, then, is a poetry of materiality, like that celebrated by the Nouveaux Réalistes, but his easing together of words, images and materials seems altogether less festive than theirs. ‘Stupidity’, he has written, ‘is the name of the real with which the thinking is in dispute. Painting has to do with the real. So I keep myself busy with stupidities.’ Sherman Sam

Labyrinth, 2015, oil on canvas, 170 × 150 cm. Courtesy Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

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Hanne Darboven Enlightenment Haus der Kunst, Munich 18 September – 14 February When, during the late 1740s, Denis Diderot joined forces with mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert to take over as principal editor of the Encyclopaedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts (1751–72) – something of a holy book for the French Enlightenment, comprising over 70,000 articles from intellectual luminaries including Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu – his stated aim was no less than ‘to change the current way of thinking’. Diderot’s first order of business was to restructure the traditional organisation of information, by dividing articles into three categories: Memory, Reason and Imagination, which loosely corresponded to history, philosophy and poetry, respectively. By introducing such a flagrantly humanist metric (as opposed to one that privileged nature or religion), Diderot and his colleagues openly advocated for the secularisation of education, profoundly impacting the way knowledge would be formed and recorded throughout Enlightened Europe. Like Diderot, Hanne Darboven could be seen as blazing new taxonomic trails in her quest to find alternative forms by which to represent information, testing out various frameworks across thousands of sheets of paper. But while Diderot intended his encyclopaedia to be a means of wresting control from the Church, Darboven’s ledgerlike serial works, with their relentless coding, calculating and transcribing – ‘writing without describing’, as the artist called it – almost revive selected mechanisms

of the Church, whose monks churned out manuscripts in languages all but indecipherable to the lay public. When Darboven invented her own series of handwritten correspondences, linking letters, numerals, shapes and even musical notation – which she would present, typically, as wall-spanning gridded sequences of framed works on paper – she did so with an eye towards hermetic consistency, rather than widespread legibility or functionality. With Enlightenment, the ﬁrst major retrospective of Darboven’s work since her death in 2009, Haus der Kunst curators Okwui Enwezor and Anna Schneider explore the artist’s relationship to knowledge production and distribution. An accompanying exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Time Histories, surveys Darboven’s political and biographical work, freeing Enlightenment to focus speciﬁcally on Darboven’s experiments with literature, the natural sciences and music. Structurally the exhibition centres upon Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983, 1980–83) – an expansive installation of 19 found objects, ranging from two tracksuited mannequins, a carousel horse and a statuette of Otto van Bismarck, to 1,590 found or photocopied documents, from postcards, to textile patterns, to magazine covers, all in identical frames, the totality serving as a visual condensation of a century. Enwezor, however, proposes that the exhibition’s ‘black box’ lies not in this massive showpiece, but rather in the smaller

gallery behind it. Dubbed the ‘music room’, the gallery poses personal effects alongside an assortment of musical instruments from Darboven’s family home, ranging from her mother’s grand piano to lutes, glockenspiels and a contrabass. The gesture reminds viewers that when the artist spoke, as she repeatedly did, of making ‘mathematical music’, she did so as a trained pianist and composer. In scholarly studies of her work, this status is often seen as secondary to Darboven’s selfidentiﬁcation as a writer or artist; and yet, as Enlightenment reveals, music remains a critical cipher for much of her creative output. The artist conscientiously structured works as ‘opuses’, planting musical devices such as recurring themes and variations within works like Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 or the 32-volume Schreibzeit (Writing Time, 1975–99), excerpts of which were included in this exhibition. Even more directly, Darboven collaborated with an organist and later a musicologist to convert her transcriptions and calculations into musical scores. Enlightenment infuses its galleries with performances of selected scores, which can be listened to on headphones, under speakers or in live concerts at a nearby church. The pieces are surprisingly melodic, far from the atonality one might expect when scanning the scores; but, as Darboven’s work teaches us, information is always open to interpretation. Kate Sutton

Enlightenment, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Maximilian Geuter. © Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg / vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Haus der Kunst, Munich

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Kostis Velonis Mount the Air Kalfayan Galleries, Athens 26 November – 16 January Inspired by El Lissitzky’s Lenin Tribune (1920–24), Kostis Velonis created, in 2006, a tall pinewood sculpture titled How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population (‘pet sculpture’ series). As in Lissitzky’s unrealised architecture, the Greek artist’s construction – included in this show – rises high and leans forward, topped by a platform that dominates the space below. Unlike Lissitzky’s design, however, this structure is not intended for a statesman to address crowds and galvanise their political consciousness. It’s a tribune for cats: a tower wherein to sleep, observe and relax, high above the ground. The tribune, an architectural expression of a politician’s desire to appear loftier than the public, here turns into a diy piece of feline furniture choreographing the coexistence of collective and private life – for which read: the political versus the domestic. The pompousness of political discourse falls victim to Velonis’s irony, as does Lissitzky’s Constructivism – and speciﬁcally the idea that art can be an agent of social change. The political commitment of contemporary artists isn’t spared either, being relegated to the domestic sphere, where pets remain a reliable source of inspiration and private affects often conﬂict with the obligations of class struggle. Could it be that in Velonis’s

work the cat functions as a sort of rationalisation in response to an artistic impasse? How to recompose personal desire and private affect vis-à-vis the drive towards political investment and social utility? Beyond the tribune for cats, Mount the Air features new works in which inconsistencies between the political and the private in the work of art further unravel. Never had a hearth (2015) is a dark wooden sculpture reproducing the design of a Greek ﬁreplace. Deviating from its traditional design, Velonis has put a couple of holes in it, one on top and one in the back, turning it into a playground and/or toilet for cats. Is this Constructivism gone bad or, rather, a desperate attempt to recondition an anachronistic ideology? Another sculpture, Speakers’ Corner (2015), reinforces the emphasis on ideological failure: made of salvaged wood and granite bricks, the work is nothing other than a portable podium with built-in storage space for stones, the sort of square cobblestones often used in riots, in case the speaker felt the urge to throw some at his or her audience. Help desk (2015) is a wooden sculpture resembling a cart, of the type used to promote petitions, political initiatives or solidarity actions; but it is a wonky one, with inherent structural ﬂaws: is this, given the

work’s associations with processes of change, maybe a metaphor for utopian ideals? As in Bertolt Brecht’s 1920 play Drums in the Night, where the poor proletarian Andreas joins the Spartacists’ revolt after losing his beloved Anna and deserts the insurrection as soon as they are reunited, in this show the (in)compatibility of revolution and private life is tested once again. Whereas Velonis tries to reconcile the urge to be part of both a civil body and a familial one (the speaker’s podium versus the domesticity of cats), he seems to arrive relentlessly at a series of deadlocks. If he manages to get away with conveying irresolution, it is thanks to two stratagems, ones recurrent in his work. One is the irony that exposes the rift between the utopian feelings that underlie many a leftist imagery of revolution, and the ridiculous and miserable details of everyday life, as a reminder of the failure of revolutionary ideologies – including, in art, that of the Constructivism that was promoted by Lissitzky. The other is craftsmanship, proudly exhibited in Velonis’s works both in terms of materials employed and construction techniques, which survives as the only possible political discipline: that of making, with one’s own hands, for the household, for the society at large and, ultimately, for both at the same time. Michelangelo Corsaro

Mount the Air, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Paris Tavitian. Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens & Thessaloniki

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Inbetween Baselitz – McCarthy The George Economou Collection Space, Athens 21 June – 5 October On the face of it, there’s something utterly unholy about the union of these two giants of postwar art. While both may at one point have occupied critical positions that were outside art’s mainstream (Georg Baselitz exploring figuration when abstraction dominated; Paul McCarthy an early pioneer of performance), the two were born seven years apart (Baselitz before the Second World War, McCarthy after it) and shaped by contexts – in broad terms, the struggles of post-Nazi Germany and the oppression of postwar capitalist triumphalism in the us – that, on the face of it, couldn’t be more different. Indeed the two large-scale sculptures that introduce this 11-work (six by Baselitz; five by McCarthy) exhibition – the three rustic, crudely hewn figures of Baselitz’s patinated bronze bdm Gruppe (2012, cast from a sculpture originally carved in wood) and the Disneycute of the smoothly crafted Siamese twins of McCarthy’s White Snow, Flower Girl (2012–13, executed in walnut, but with computer-controlled slickness) – seem only to emphasise this. The cover of the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition features juxtaposed photographic portraits of the two artists, both wearing baseball caps. And such apparently arbitrary formal connections play a role in the exhibition as well. A pair of alpine boots and the need to satisfy a penis in McCarthy’s mechanical sculpture Alpine Man (1992), in which a man clad in alpine costume, the lower part of which is worn

around his ankles, appears to be humping a large keg, is set up alongside a painting by Baselitz, Ökonomie (1965), that features similar boots, together with a giant central ﬁgure offering a toy wheelbarrow in his open palm and apparently both proudly and accidentally displaying his engorged member. Once you’ve made the footwear–cock connection and observed a shared interest in debunking Romantic mountain-man motifs, the almost-30-year gap between the two works, let alone the difference between a sculpture that performs an action and a painting in oil and canvas that explores a symbol, comes across as seemingly irrelevant. But nevertheless, while this indicates the artiﬁciality of the comparison, it also forces you to realise that this show is just that – an opportunity to compare works outside the taxonomical and methodological rigidity that frames most public art institutions. Indeed at times this exhibition operates in a manner not so far removed from the idiosyncratic ‘wall ensembles’ (a juxtaposition of different types of objects from a variety of times) that characterise Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation education model. All of which, one would imagine, is precisely the preserve of a private collection or exhibition and what makes such things worth seeing: an invitation to let loose and have fun, or at least to watch someone else doing that. Certainly that’s the case with the juxtaposition of Baselitz’s P.D. Stengel (1963) and McCarthy’s

facing page, top Georg Baselitz, bdm Gruppe (bdm Group), 2012, bronze, patinated, 366 × 242 × 149 cm. Photo: Jochen Littkemann. Courtesy the artist

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sc, eck (2014). The first is a relatively small painting of a pathetic fleshy penis-cum-plantshoot erupting from a darkly desolate landscape, but bent, to the point of being broken, as the stalk ascends to the bud. The second is an almost frenzied painting of a male and a female figure, hung by the necks, surrounded by collaged pornography and variations on the words ‘erection’, ‘action’ and ‘subject’ scrawled in paint. At first glance, the hysteria of one seems to overwhelm the bathos of the other; give it time, though, and which is pathetic and which hysterical becomes a more difficult decision to make. You could of course argue that if you stare at any two things for long enough, you’re bound to find something that connects them. And against a backdrop of the floundering Greek economy, protests in Athens’s city centre and preparations for a Documenta (which will be partly based in the Greek capital) with a significant focus on the status and traumas of the Global South, it would be all too easy to dismiss this exhibition as the indulgent, private art-historical experiment of a wealthy patron – irrelevant to the problems and realities of current daily life. And yet that is not wholly the case. Somewhere between Baselitz’s exploration of broken and twisted European symbolism and McCarthy’s debunking of the consequencefree pleasuredome of capitalism you can find many of the issues that have led to Europe’s current crisis. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Inbetween: Baselitz – McCarthy, 2015 (installation view, The George Economou Collection, Athens, 2015)

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Melvin Moti Spectral Spectrum Hermitage, Amsterdam 25 November – 6 March To mark his being awarded the abn amro Art Prize, Melvin Moti has made an installation in which he combines his own work with that of others. His points of departure are two notes by the Dutch artist jcj Vanderheyden (1928–2012). One note says: ‘What is space other than an expansion of conscious being, in which the possibility of becoming conscious creates its own environment.’ This mind-expanding insight is represented as a precious trinket in a display case. The other note is a table of frequencies, ranging from the rotation of the solar system to the rhythm of breathing. Both notes speculate about a mysterious connection between time, space and consciousness. In Spectral Spectrum, Moti presents drawings, archive works and pieces from the abn amro Bank collection: a viewer familiar with the artist’s moving-image works concerning portentous dreams and visions might elect to paste them together into an imaginary ﬁlm. The theme of ageing features in Miamalism (2008) – a Life magazine cover from 1967 featuring a portrait of Mia Farrow. The actress is deathly pale, her eyes steel-blue. This is because the print’s yellow and magenta inks have bleached. The ashen face mirrors that of Farrow’s character in the 1968 horror classic

Rosemary’s Baby: the young woman who wastes away after she has been made pregnant by Satan himself. Further along in the exhibition is another pale creation, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mary Barnardiston (1750). Because the painter used pigments for the skin that were not colourfast, Mary now appears as if made from porcelain. Art may be meant to last forever, but the muse is not able to escape the ravages of time. For Moti’s diptych A Century of Light (2010), two red ﬁelds have been artiﬁcially aged by a hundred years in a paint laboratory, rendering them dull pink. A dot at the centre, applied later with the same paint, could be regarded as an indication of the now, a small beacon in a sea of oblivion. Moti’s exhibition is thus full of references to the passing of time and the changeability of external appearances. There is a white relief, Reliëf r72-43 (1972), by Jan Schoonhoven, that looks different with each turn of the head – nothingness given form. Elsewhere hang four drawings made after a book about ritual hand movements in Japanese Shingon Buddhism (Secret Seals, 2015). These so-called mudra gestures are, like murmuring a mantra, a method by which Buddhists attain a state of enlightenment. The secret technique is passed on from master to pupil

and, with one exception, has never been written down. The artist has copied the hieroglyphiclike drawings and accompanying text closely, as if drawing itself was a rite of passage. The ﬁnal room contains Paulus Justus Determeyer Weslingh (1730–1793) en zijn dienstknecht (Paulus Justus Determeyer Weslingh (1730–1793) and his servant, 1765), a painting by Julius Quinkhardt from the bank’s collection. It shows merchant Paulus Weslingh sitting at a table while his servant hands him a letter. The chairs to the right of the table are empty. There is something odd about that emptiness. On the table are two coffee cups and a ball of wool. A small dog is looking expectantly into nothing; his playmate is missing. Research has shown that the merchant’s wife had been portrayed here at some point. For some unknown reason she has been painted over, disappeared from history. The visitor guide mentions casually that the merchant is alleged to have had a relationship with this servant. All at once the scene looks less complacent and you think you see a ghost of your own imagining. The margin between what we see and what we think we see – this is where Moti’s subtle and ingenious installation belongs. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

Melvin Moti, Miamalism, 2008, title page of Life magazine, 40 × 50 cm. Photo: Gert-Jan van Rooij. Courtesy the artist

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Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys I Piccoli Sporchi di Pruppà Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome 24 October – 23 December Presented in Gavin Brown’s pointedly unpolished new Rome space – a deconsecrated church near the river Tiber – I Piccoli Pupazzi Sporchi di Pruppà (literally ‘The Little Dirty Puppets of Pruppà’, a reference to a small town in Southern Italy) sees Belgian duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys create a sculptural installation comprising 164 jute figurines, each 35cm tall. The work continues an artistic collaboration that began in 1988 and has largely been focused upon the production of videos and three-dimensional artworks depicting individual humans as depressive, perverse and awkward units acting out empty, sad roles both alone and together. The figures, made by a six-person team in a workshop in Brussels during the summer and autumn of 2015, follow up on a series of 54 lifesize jute figures made during 2012 and 2013. Those earlier works were collectively exhibited in Brussels, in Antwerp and – most recently – at the Power Station in Dallas, under the name Die Schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern (‘The Dirty Dolls of Pommern’, referencing

a small village in the German Rhineland). Dressed in trashed shell suits, jogging bottoms and lumberjack shirts, Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts and – in one case – a Hilton hotel bathrobe, the 1:1 scale figures represented the great unwashed. Perhaps most disturbing about them was the extent to which their expressionless faces, punctuated with stitched eyes and mouths, bore a near-human countenance. Automatonophobia – the fear of representations of living beings – perhaps comes about, such works remind us, in part as mannequins, puppets, statues, etc point to our own base materiality. While the smaller, more intimate scale of the figures in I Piccoli Puppazzi Sporchi di Pruppà makes the new cast no less unsettling than their predecessors, their arrangement across the four walls of the chapel evokes a sense of individual cellular beings relating to a wider community. Placed individually or in pairs or trios on small wooden shelves, the figures, in their differences from one another, conjure

up the notion that it ‘takes all kinds to make up a world’. While all formally more or less the same, the ﬁgures each bear slightly different countenances due to slight variations in posture. These individual ‘puppets’ give both the sensation of there being the possibility of individuals existing among a mass but also of a community of individuals being conceivable. While the public is left to make up their mind about what the ﬁgures represent individually and collectively, it is difficult not to discern the village drunk, the madman, the preacher, the widow, the swinger, the hooligan and the prostitute among this rabble of cloth and sack. It is a tribute, perhaps, to the simplicity of the execution of the work that so much can be inferred without being said directly. Above all, I came away thinking that so long as so many perverse individuals exist, in the real world of which this is a microcosm, then there is the possibility of unity of individuals: a unity of fools, perverts and lunatics, but a unity all the same. Mike Watson

I Piccoli Puppazzi Sporchi di Pruppà, 2016 (installation view, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome). Courtesy the artists and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

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Darren Bader rocks and mirrors Galleria Franco Noero, Turin 3 November – 23 December Darren Bader’s rocks and mirrors got me from the minute I opened the gallery’s door and found a big rock looming behind a corner, as if ready to jump onto an accompanying mirror and, as might happen in a Looney Tunes cartoon, crush it. Imagination and amusement can be easy to trigger. The show offers exactly what its title declares: a huge selection of paired rocks and mirrors (or mirroring surfaces), elegantly arranged around the three vast spaces of the gallery. The mirrors are mostly hung at eye level, like paintings; the rocks positioned all over the floor, like sculptures. A huge boulder occupies the backyard, like a meteorite dropped from the sky, in the droll company of a rounded inox steel jug. While rocks embody the beauty of boundless mineral colours, mirrors provide a wide array of stylistic options, since Bader includes in his collection of reflective surfaces not only looking glasses from all ages, ordinary and precious (Ettore Sottsass’s iconic 1970 Ultrafragola being the easiest to spot), auratic and tacky, but also objects with different functions: an iPad, a steel knife, a lady’s purse covered in glass splinters, a door, a moon-shaped silver balloon, a chimney pipe and so on. Sizes vary from inches to metres, weights from grams to tons: it’s a taxonomist’s paradise – or a tautologist’s, a geologist’s, a design aficionado’s, you name it.

Bader is a consummate master of deadpan readymades and a serial practitioner of juxtaposition – his recent book 77 and/or 58 and/with 19 (2015) reproduces the certificates he provided for 77 artworks, including ‘my grandfather’s bathing suit’, ‘a pretty face’ and the trio ‘Persian rug and/with tripod and/with sous chef’. In Turin, one thing is evident right from the first object the exhibition introduces, a full-length swivel mirror installed frontally at the entrance: rocks and mirrors does its best to put the viewer centre stage. Or, at least, make her aware of the situation. Reflection upon reflection, it’s all about You, You, You, as in museum selfies and interest lists. It’s always up to the subjectivity of each spectator to give meaning to the arbitrary ‘chance meeting’ between a rock and a mirror, as the surrealists knew well and Bader surely doesn’t forget to allude to and/or mock. Free associations are encouraged: a fun game to play. Think of abstraction and figuration (your face, here, is all over the place, pretty or not); reality and artifice; rawness and refinement; solidity and fragility; perpetuity and contingency; conservation and transformation; pre/post mirror phase (otherwise: on the joys and discomforts of growing up); Minimalism and Pop; primitiveness and civilisation. The list could go

on forever, in accordance with individual subconscious, cultural background, speculations and fantasy. But please don’t let your inspired feelings become overblown. In Life As a Readymade (2012), his ‘open letter to the art world’, Bader clarifies his point of view: ‘I see many people young and aging (myself included) who believe that it’s their station to promote the word art. The tradition of the Romantic has 200+ years later become the pragmatic of or oblivion of identity. Let’s call it, “identitude” (like the pseudoGWBushism, “dignitude”), or me-ism, in the vestments of creative liberalism.’ Rocks and mirrors also provoked another association: I don’t know how intentional. On the same day, I visited another patently rock-related exhibition in Turin: Rinascimento (Renaissance) by Adrián Villar Rojas, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The Argentinean artist filled the space with a titanic sequence of boulders and slabs, brought from Istanbul, covered in elegant still lifes of rotting fruit, fish and decomposing matter. A colossal memento mori as well as a monument to the gloom and doom of the Anthropocene – surely no laughing matter, but against it, Bader’s satire and deflation of epic artmaking seemed sager than ever. Barbara Casavecchia

rocks and mirrors, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

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How Did We Get Here salt Beyoğlu and salt Galata, Istanbul 3 September – 29 November Coming at the end of a year of political uncertainty, two general elections and escalating regional conflicts, this exhibition could hardly have had a more freighted title. Part of a fiveyear programme, The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989, put together by L’Internationale, a confederation of institutions exploring, debating and researching art’s role in democratic emergence, it is an artistic exploration of the decade beginning with the 12 September 1980 military coup in Turkey, which suppressed social and political dissent against the preceding years’ economic transitioning from domestic production to a free-market model. Consolidated through rising state violence, the 1982 Constitution outlawed all trade unions, political parties and political organisations. Many forms of civil opposition emerged throughout the 80s nonetheless: intellectuals, environmentalists, feminists, lgbt-rights activists, socialists and citizens opposed to martial law and conservative nationalism. Across salt’s two spaces, through photojournalism and print publications, books, movies, video recordings, commercials, etc, as well as work by contemporary Turkish artists, this highly charged period is brought to life. Here, for example, is a video of the first organised protest in Istanbul to have openly defined itself as feminist (Feminist Steps, Füsun Ertuğ archive, 1987), along with spreads from the popular magazine Sokak (Street), which often spoke out about hate-violence against the lgbt community. There are video diaries from Serdar Ateser, a musician-cum-activist who captured the environmental cost of construction projects

on Western Turkey’s Aegean shores (The way to and back from the Aliağa Thermal Power Plant protest, 1989). Running in tandem with these are artworks touching both the broad social and political issues of past decades and a more harrowing, closer moment. Bringing to mind the plight of Argentina’s ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’, Halil Altındere’s Welcome to the Land of the Lost (1998) is an in memoriam collage of postage stamps featuring the faces of people believed missing in Turkey since the 1980s. On another floor, Hale Tenger’s installation The Closet (1997–2015), made in San Antonio and displayed ‘at home’ in Istanbul for the first time, occupies the entire ground floor of salt Galata in a striking reconstruction of three rooms from Tenger’s childhood home: starting from the living room where tv football coverage is punctuated by breaking news on arrests and state violence, we finish in a musty closet full of memorabilia. Tenger’s domestic spaces and the loaded objects occupying them – school textbooks recounting a selective national history, an austere table set for the family dinner – become claustrophobic, emotionally charged phenomena. Home is transformed into a place where outside violence can manifest within, and where the persistence of such manifestations renders them dangerously close to mundane. In its introductory statement, the duallocation exhibition professes its aims to help trace continuities between the socioeconomic effects of the 1982 constitution and that of state–civilian relations in Turkey today, but this sounds too cursory a way to describe the

rich individual works that here form a clear, affecting historical narrative. Some Turkish press criticisms of the exhibition have pointed out that, for all its focus on a period of political turmoil and human rights violations, the exhibition left questions as to the accountability of the state unaddressed. However, rather than survey these troubled times only to pronounce on what is now widely known (the generals who instigated the coup were tried in 2012), salt has skilfully blended contemporary artistic practice with a visually led social-research impulse. Through a young new generation of artists, ﬁlmmakers and writers, Turkey is only now tentatively delving into its recent political history. As a result, though the aim sounds modest, the undertaking itself is not; the greater task here may indeed be to uncover continuities – or undo decades of collective forgetting – so as to better understand today’s polarised political situation through historical context. Indeed, in a recent turn of events that only adds to the urgency of continuing such creative critique, salt Beyoğlu has since closed indeﬁnitely. Speculation remains as to whether their official reason – that renovations await approval from the city’s building authority – is putting the pressure they may be facing rather mildly. How Did We Get Here has, however, since opened at salt Ulus in Ankara, continuing to trace the trajectories of social dissent, collective action and state response. It is a strong addition to both L’Internationale’s project and to Turkey’s own context of enquiry, urging us to understand the past in our present before we try to move forward. Sarah Jilani

Serdar Ateser, The way to and back from the Aliağa Thermal Power Plant protest, 1989 (video still). Courtesy the artist

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Gerard Byrne 1/125 of a Second Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry 16 January – 12 March Upon entering the Mead’s angular confines, I found myself called immediately to its furthest reaches by the squawking of geese and the shrill tweet of gulls. Jielemeguvvie guvvie sjisjnjeli (2015–16), a deliberately unpronounceable title (at least for anyone who doesn’t speak the Nordic language of Southern Sami) that roughly translates into something approximating ‘film inside an image’, offers a panoramic Steadicam tour of the flora and fauna of northern Sweden, as represented within the Stockholm Biologiska Museet. In this single-screen projection, we swoop past taxidermy terns, elks and owls in what seems like a continuous loop (but which is actually composited from five different shots). This is a real nature morte – most of these beasts were probably shot by the museum’s founder, and keen hunter, Gustaf Kolthoff – rendered all the more uncanny by its eight-channel ambisonic surround soundtrack. The Biologiska Museet itself is a rather quaint sort of place, strangely out of place in a world where National Geographic has its own tv channel, but for Gerard Byrne this museum is retro hi-tech, a quasi-photographic apparatus in itself. When Kolthoff first opened the institution in 1893, he was able to offer up a representation

of the natural world still unavailable to any camera then existing. The devices were too bulky to navigate Arctic clifftops, their exposure times too long to capture any but the most docile of creatures. But he presented his diorama as a frozen instant – birds are caught in flight or seemingly mid-conversation in a highly photographic manner. The display is also unusual in that it is lit entirely by natural light through a skylight roof. Hence the title of the work, with its suggestion of the mise en abyme. Jielemeguvvie guvvie sjisjnjeli is only superficially a departure from Byrne’s characteristic practice of restaging history in order to disturb the present, through the shock of anachronism and the memory of old vanguards. This work is just as keen to highlight its own contradictions and disturb its own narrative smoothness (the disjuncture between the stillness of the creatures and the fluidity of camera movements, between the dust-caked animal corpses and the lively, immersive soundtrack being just a few examples). If it is the only ‘new’ work here, the show rearranges several old works in such a way as to reinvent them as a single new installation. Three videoworks – New Sexual Lifestyles (2002), Subject (2009) and He searches for the contrary of saved (2014) – are split among six video

1/125 of a Second, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry

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monitors and a carousel of projected slides, dotted about the space. The works occupy sometimes three, sometimes none, sometimes all of these screens, alternating and interrupting each other according to a bewildering choreography programmed in advance and set down in minute detail on a schedule handwritten on the wall. Finally, the light in the room changes throughout the day, from blue to green to deep red, making the ﬁnal work in the show – a set of seven photographs detailing the historical development of Kodak’s Wrattan ﬁlter system (1912–2012) (2013) – almost impossible fully to make out. A beguiling complex in all, the various parts resonate peculiarly with a quote from E.P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working Class projected on the wall (as part of Subject, a study of Leeds University during the 1960s). Were we to freeze the show at a given point, then, like Thompson’s formulation of ‘class’, there would be no exhibition, ‘but simply a multitude of individuals [or individual works]’ But if we watch these works over an adequate period, ‘we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions’. This is a tangled, occasionally frustrating web, but there’s rich sustenance in the unknotting. Robert Barry

Ellen Hyllemose Landscape Reconfigured Fold, London 21 November – 16 January Upon entering Ellen Hyllemose’s exhibition, we are met by a bulky load formed of three large bundles of fabric stuffed with ordinary diy materials (Reconfiguring Landscape ( floor piece), 2015). Fragments of cardboard or bubble wrap are discernible under the soft Lycra, and their shapes and surfaces poke out gently to reveal different textures and forms that seem at once chaotic and carefully modelled. Inserted between the bundles, small layers of dyed concrete and string stick out, creating a small yet potent focus of colour within the predominantly white surface of the fabric. This large sculptural work doesn’t exactly obstruct the passage into the main space, although its sheer physical presence – it almost touches the ceiling – makes us instinctively divert our route a little too close to the gallery walls. Another large-scale work dominates Fold’s long and somewhat narrow gallery. Running parallel to the full length of the wall, a ‘hanging painting’ is formed by roughly cut mdf panels partly covered with pale yellow fabric,

suspended from the ceiling by forest-green ropes (Reconfiguring Landscape (double hanging piece), 2015). These panels come in slightly variable sizes and shapes and hang layered over each other at different heights, but always very close to the floor. The entire room is taken over by the sequence of vertical green lines combined with the horizontal rhythm of the superimposed brown boards traversed by yellow swathes of stretched fabric. Using only ordinary materials in a very direct way, Hyllemose manages to create a sense of expansiveness in a space that, it seems to me, would normally feel quite confined. Instead of attempting to disguise the architectural limitations of the gallery, she has opted to underscore them with this bold yet elegant installation that requires us to move along its length in order to fully apprehend it. Landscape Reconfigured also features a series of more modest wall pieces in which the artist continues to explore the inherent qualities of materials (Glue Between Landscapes, 2014–15).

One small work consists of a board covered with several layers of stretched Lycra that have been imprecisely cut to reveal sections of contrasting colour around the exposed surface of the background. As in her fabric bundles, the materiality of what is hidden behind other layers remains visible, even if subtly. In other cases, Hyllemose applies the paint directly on unprimed mdf, creating bright colourfields that only partially cover the raw wood. Finally, there is a group of works made of clusters of cut-up strings of painted paper that hang from a nail inside frames (Reconfiguring Landscape ( framed), 2015). This is perhaps a necessary conservation compromise, but when contained within boxes her work seems to lack the straightforwardness that characterises the other works in the show. In her best pieces, Hyllemose’s everyday materials are reconfigured into compositions that deftly emphasise not only their textures and colours, but also the space that surrounds them. Kiki Mazzucchelli

Reconﬁguring Landscape (Double Hanging Piece), 2015, mdf, Lycra, rope, stainless steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Fold, London

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This is Today Gazelli Art House, London 22 January – 6 March This is Tomorrow, the seminal 1956 Whitechapel exhibition, had pretty clear aims: to present a new model of collaborative practice, one that brought together 38 artists, architects and designers; and to showcase a new visual aesthetic, one that the British public came to know as Pop art. By contrast, This is Today is both a smaller and far less coherent creation. Partly it’s intended as a look back at the emergence of Pop and proto-Pop artists – even though only one of its eight exhibitors, Eduardo Paolozzi, actually participated in the 1956 show. Yet it also offers a broader perspective, by including pieces that don’t easily fit within a Pop sensibility – specifically, the expressive, vaguely corporeal-looking painting and prints by the late Magda Cordell McHale, a Hungarian-born artist who, despite being a member of the Independent Group along with the likes of Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, was omitted from the Whitechapel display. Finally, the phrase itself, ‘This is Today’, suggests a kind of historical reckoning: an implication that our current age is some sort of fulfilling of this past era of British art. Alternatively, of course, it could just be a case of a commercial gallery inventing a snappy title

in the hope of linking disparate works. Yet the surprising thing is how genuinely fascinating much of the show is – particularly those paintings that, in different ways, do indeed seem to capture the ﬂavour of today’s artistic culture. In White Painting (1959), Bernard Cohen places a pair of linear circles symmetrically within an oblong, only to upset this schematic purity with a quizzical scribble of yellow off in one corner – a sort of wistful nod to a dissenting style, a gesture of jokey sabotage. And there’s a similar playfulness to John Plumb’s resplendent Jaffa (1965), where an orange colour-ﬁeld curls away from the canvas edge to reveal slivers of clashing hues. In both cases, the works’ formalism is undercut by a tone of whimsical self-regard, a sense of irony and distance that chimes with certain contemporary approaches to abstraction. If other works feel quainter, it’s perhaps because their focus on incorporating massproduced, everyday objects has become so accepted within contemporary practice. Which isn’t to say that Ian Stephenson’s small Protopalette collages (1961–2) aren’t hugely compelling, featuring paint-dappled paper palettes placed atop spattered backgrounds

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to create scintillating, camouflage effects. And as for Richard Smith’s string-tethered, kitelike canvases, you get the sense they were probably always meant to have an endearingly oldfashioned, ramshackle quality to begin with. Inevitably, the exhibition includes overtly Pop-orientated pieces, works exploring ideas of mass media or technological change – from Paolozzi’s mechanically themed collages of the late 1940s to Derek Boshier’s films combining new and found footage from the mid-70s. But the gap between those dates also points to the show’s main weakness, which is that its historical scope sometimes feels too generous, its focus slightly muddled. It’s a problem that’s most acute with the works by architectural collective Archigram – not so much their colourful, almost abstract elevations from the mid-60s, printed here as enormous digital transfers covering the gallery windows, but rather the 1990s maquettes built from these same designs. The geodesic domes and floating walkways, for all their fanciful appeal, feel like the most narrowly programmatic things in the show, and serve as an unwelcome reminder that nothing dates faster than a particular vision of the future. Gabriel Coxhead

Andrew Norman Wilson Artiﬁcial Selection Rowing, London 12 December – 16 January A Reason to Get Up in the Evening (all works 2015), the video displayed at the entrance to Andrew Norman Wilson’s solo show, is pointedly hung slightly too low. In front of it is a plaster wall (Sexy, Expensive Wall) built for the exhibition with an opening about 120cm high that leads to a second videowork in a room painted glossy black. Installing this exhibition, titled Artiﬁcial Selection, Wilson did not only have human viewers in mind: before the opening, the artist brought a pig to wander the gallery space. Documentation shots of the massive hog circulated on social media; the brown, spotted animal intently watching a video, then walking through the size-appropriate doorway to look at the rest. The pig spent two hours in the space. Without speculating on what contemporary art means to the farm animal, the gesture winks at a current direction in contemporary art production and presentation, one marked by an attempt to address the connection between humans and nonhuman animals, plants and minerals. Pierre Huyghe’s dog with a pink leg, Human, wandered through Documenta 13 in 2012 as well as the artist’s shows at Centre Pompidou and lacma in 2013 and 2014. Anicka Yi grew the bacteria taken from 100 women in the artworld for her show at The Kitchen, in New York, in 2015. And curatorial projects such as the Anthropocene Project curated by Anselm Franke

at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2013–14 and Nicolas Bourriaud’s 2014 Taipei Biennial were explicitly concerned with the Anthropocene, the geological age through which we are apparently living, and that is marked by human beings’ accelerated effect on the natural world. Wilson may join in all too comfortably. That’s the thing with trendy work: it’s hard not to be read as a follower. The materials list for the wall drawing Supercontinent Forecast, an indecipherable map made of cake frosting, includes ‘bacteria’: the artist intended that the sweet icing should be home to microorganisms that would swarm and ﬁll the map. But in December the gallery space was too cold and so we’re left with the absence of life rather than its proliferation. Similarly, while the pig could be a genuine viewer of the art, in a space intended and designed for it, its presence might be read as a shtick. So while there’s no overlooking the trendiness of this exhibition, it’s hard to ignore how effective it is, hard to tune out the narrative Wilson builds throughout the space. Wilson’s nonanthropocentric vision is uncomfortable, keeping the viewer alert and curious about the place he or she – as a human – might have in this space. Creeping into a dark screening room by way of a too-small door is awkward and sets the tone for the

two-minute-20-second-long video The Unthinkable Bygone, in which an animation of the baby dinosaur from the American puppet sitcom Dinosaurs (1991–94) appears, in a shiny black cube, the creature’s body split into two. There’s chirpy music and the sound of birds, there’s a ﬁvesecond phase in which the scene cuts to a green landscape, then back to the baby dinosaur looking down at his missing lower half, as the subtitles read ‘now I have two problems, where previously I only had one’. A pop-culture dinosaur repeats in an ominous reference: the one-second video loop at the entrance is an animation of a mosquito feeding on broken, calloused skin. It’s so close up that the skin looks like a desert, the bug a monster. It is a reference to Jurassic Park (1993), its backstory about dinosaurs created from dna found in a mosquito. What is the baby dinosaur’s problem? It’s not really clear (except being chopped in half for an inexplicable reason). The exhibition is opaque and ominous, and even while it echoes works and ideas developed by others, it’s still effective. The sound of the mosquito feeding haunts the space and an alienating feeling looms large in the sense that perhaps we – as humans – are not the intended audience: it’s a space in which you are forced to reassess your place, constantly hovering between the very foreign and very familiar. Orit Gat

Artiﬁcial Selection, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Plastiques Photography. Courtesy the artist

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Simon Denny Products for Organising Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London 25 November – 14 February The time spent walking round Simon Denny’s solo exhibition is undoubtedly an informative hour or so. Packed with annotated installations of ephemera, the show pursues the artist’s ongoing fascination with technological bandits and hacking culture, with this new body of work adding a supplementary dimension through a series of sculptures that demonstrate the not-unrecognised link between meddling with software systems, and the ‘hacking’ carried out by management consultants into corporate organisational systems. Upon arriving the visitor is invited to mount a raised scaffold platform, a path of steel sheeting along which a series of upright vitrines stand, about two metres in height. The exact purpose of the platform is unclear except, perhaps, insofar as it adds a bit of superﬁcial excitement to the viewing of the museological displays. The vitrines introduce the viewer to the fascinating early days of hacking. One of them contains the exposed innards of an old public telephone, next to which is displayed a cheap plastic whistle still in its packaging. Writing in marker on the vitrine glass, Denny notes that such whistles at one point came free with boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Hackers worked out

that the whistle’s frequency of 2,600hz was the exact pitch needed to reset phone box systems, a trick that presumably aided free calls. It’s a cool story. Another cool story: there was a hacking subculture referred to as the ‘artscene’, attracting those with more aesthetic sensibilities. Denny offers the example of a couple of bods who were able to break into dot-matrix display screens, reprogramming them to show rudimentary images. Another cool story: the supposed founding fathers of hacking are often credited as the Tech Model Railroad Club, formed in the 1940s at mit. They would appropriate telephone exchange switches to use in complex model railway layouts. (In moments between reading Denny’s scrawled-on-glass paragraphs of history, the visitor is able to glance at some model trains). Another cool story: hackers are ﬁercely loyal to their preferred operating system. A tradition has grown up in which cuddly toy animals have become mascots for each system. Linux fanboys will often seek comfort in a penguin toy. Here’s the problem with Products for Organising though: as interesting as this history mostly is, Denny has forgotten to make any art out of it. We just get a bit of blurb and some

Modded Server Rack Display with Hacking the Commons (detail), 2015, mixed media, 100 × 245 × 100 cm. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne

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accompanying artefacts each time, so much so that up to this point – and call me naive or a traditionalist or whatever – I’ve been loath to label what I’ve described as ‘sculptures’. It is largely the same case with the section of the exhibition that looks at those pseudoutopic, soul-sapping, organisational management systems with corporate wank titles like ‘Holacracy’ and ‘Agile’. While Denny has concocted some large, doughnut-shaped display stands in reference to the shape of the current or soon-to-be headquarters of three case-study organisations (Google, Zappos and the British intelligence agency gchq ), it’s just more demonstrative ephemera displayed: bestseller management bibles, Edward Snowden’s leaked office plans, infantilised motivational signs. It’s not that the research-based, museological methodology is without merit of course; it is, rather, that there is zero interaction between Denny and the research narratives. As with much of his previous work, there is no sense of whether he is lauding or mocking any of this stuff, no political standpoint, no authorial subjectivity. Which leaves it as, ultimately, a pale aestheticisation of a radical history that he has shown no evidence being a part of. Oliver Basciano

Rose English A Premonition of the Act Camden Arts Centre, London 12 December – 6 March “Fil – a – ment, fil – a – ment,” rings out Sarah Leonard’s pure, cut-glass soprano, one of ten recorded voices performing Lost in Music (2015), Rose English’s new choral work, sung to a tinkling percussive score by Luke Stoneham and listened to in a nearly pitch-black, soft-carpeted gallery, where the only illumination comes from a series of spotlit yellowing pages of images and text pinned along the walls: photocopies of Chinese acrobats, images of glass and glassblowing, fizzing lightning bolts and manmade electrical flashes, all overlaid by phrases handwritten by English – ‘wrought iron writing, highly wrought, over-wrought language… let its ecstatic (glass) heart sing’. Whether one moves around the space reading the pages, or sits on one of the chairs dotted throughout, the experience is a sensory, almost synaesthetic one that amplifies the relationships between text, image, sound, movement and materiality, while at the same time combining the interconnected themes in all five works in this exhibition – the voice, breath and fire in the creation of blown glass, and

balance, fragility, weight and trust in the highly disciplined and skilled combination of gymnastics and juggling practised by Chinese acrobats. A pioneer of British performance art, English has been working with this combination of subjects for the last ten years. The exhibition’s title work, a three-channel video from 2015, combines ﬁlm of glassblowing and acrobats in rehearsal with footage from Flagrant Wisdom (2009), a virtuoso performance by Chinese acrobats from Shanghai at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, in which they impossibly balance multiple tiers of drinking glasses on various parts of their bodies. A tabletop installation, Prototypes of Practice (2011), displays examples of glass and ceramic objects, some of which have been made for and used by the acrobats. The video vignette Ornamental Happiness (2006) is an excerpt from a performance for the Liverpool Biennial of glass-balancing by acrobats. It’s the ﬁfth work, the wall-pinned pages Storyboard (2011), that ties them all together. A working draft for the libretto of Lost in Music,

it also functions as a working sketchbook for future works in the series, envisioned as a potentially much larger performance project. Its next development, an actual live performance of Lost in Music, will be taking place at Camden Arts Centre as part of a four-day programme of events in March. English may have been working on these particular themes for a decade but she has been working in a cross-artform and collaborative way – using elements of performance, dance, theatricality and text – for more than 40 years. What it means in terms of context and criticality when visual artists create work in other disciplines, be they dance, music, poetry, architecture or acrobatics, is an area of discussion that crops up regularly at ArtReview. English may not have all the answers, but what she demonstrates is that when the artist’s creative input is not only integral to the outcome of the work but is the transformative element without which that work, in that form, would never exist, there is far less to debate. Helen Sumpter

Ornamental Happiness, 2006, performance. Photo: Alastair Muir. Courtesy Camden Arts Centre, London

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Rafaël Rozendaal Abstract Browsing Steve Turner, Los Angeles 9 January – 6 February Oddly, it’s easier to play ‘guess the website’ when the weavings are reproduced small as jpegs on the gallery checklist. At lifesize, Rafaël Rozendaal’s Jacquard tapestries – each of which takes the layout of a well-known web page and transforms it, by removing all text and image content, into a geometric abstraction over two-and-a-half-metres wide – are gorgeous and overwhelming in their vivid, raucous colour schemes. The interlocking rectangles of blended pink and yellow or mauve and magenta threads create a pleasurable, tingling optical sensation. Referring to the checklist, however, returns us to consideration of these tapestries’ sources. 15 05 11 Pinterest and 15 05 08 Instagram (all works 2015) are perhaps the ones in which the unusual architecture of those websites is most readily identiﬁable; 15 05 10 imdb took me longer, being more generic, and 15 05 05 Twitter, though obvious in retrospect, did not occur to me because I am so used to reading Tweets on my phone. (Maybe that could be Rozendaal’s next series: vertically scaled rugs woven according to the design of smartphone apps.)

The medium of tapestry is in vogue among contemporary artists, especially since Jacquard looms conveniently became digitally programmable and capable of replicating complex photographic or painted images at scale. Pae White, Chuck Close, Gabriel Kuri and Gerhard Richter, to name a few, have all recently produced Jacquard weavings. For Rozendaal, however, the process probably has an added conceptual attraction: the punch-card technology of Jacquard looms inspired the earliest computer engineers, including Charles Babbage, inventor in 1837 of the Analytical Engine. Beyond that relatively superﬁcial hook, however, what does it mean to purge these websites of content and transform them into monumental, unique and expensive artworks? The web is (putatively) free and democratic; there is something utopian about a site like Wikipedia, running on goodwill and mass collaboration (at least in principle). Rozendaal’s translation (not included in this exhibition) of that aesthetically uninspiring site is arbitrarily ﬂooded with fuchsia pink, turquoise and other acid hues. When Peter Halley abstracts

prison architecture, his aestheticisation and capitalisation of his source material is part of his provocation. In Rozendaal’s case, it is unclear if a comparable motivation exists. That the palettes of these tapestries also brought to my mind traditional African fabrics adds a further layer of unaddressed unease. More problematic, however, are the opposing, dystopian implications of web architecture, which is not just about design but also monetisation. Rozendaal’s tapestries effectively make you realise what is missing: the distinction between different kinds of information – personal, editorial, informational and advertising – that rub discomfortingly up against each other. This is exactly the intention of the designers. Not to mention that the information itself is often generated by code that tracks your browsing history and analyses your demographic proﬁle, tastes and current interests. Rozendaal’s work does not reveal whether it is this insidious aspect of the Internet, or its utopian dimension, that makes his gorgeous tapestries worth thinking about as well as looking at. Jonathan Griffin

15 05 02 Gmail, 2015, Jacquard weaving, 144 × 266 cm. Photo: Don Lewis. Courtesy the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles

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Michael Henry Hayden Knock Knock acme, Los Angeles 9 January – 6 February A play of shadows. Stay in bed past the clanging of your alarm and watch the light shift across the walls of your bedroom. The clean sun-bright morning light hardens into the stare of noon before melting into the ice-creaming hues of afternoon, darkening past evening’s sunset and at last into the sharp neon glares of night. Over the course of a day the simple room gathers the emotional force of an opera, but slowly, slowly. Cut by the blinds, dappled by trees, the light waltzes across the wall as you stay still under your thickening sheets. A door, its uniform panels and frame, a chain lock, a double rocker switch (both turned down) and wall. A simple set for a moody theatre of time. In his gallery debut, Michael Henry Hayden has composed 15 works, mostly paintings on relief sculpture of a cross-section of these quotidian architectural elements (all paintings Untitled, 2014–15). Excepting a couple of doubled-up doorframes, locks and light switches, the armature remains the same.

All that changes is paint made light across these surfaces. The expressionist use of light in the cinematography of ﬁlm noir is an easy reference, but the drama here isn’t driven by tawdry schemes of illicit love affairs or a detective’s moral conundrums but by the softer stuff of time and memory. Or maybe not even these. The works are only paint on wood after all. But it’s hard not to see these chopped doorways as anything else. I remember the noonday demons of a hundred illnesses and depressions, bed-nesting with fever dreams, watching the shadows grow electric with delirium and sadness. Trapped by a broken body, a fractured mind, I could do nothing but watch the passing day, a speechless Proust. There are other moments caught by these paintings. A dusk from a day almost beyond recollection, a tired boy’s body tucked into a sofa, reluctant to commit to bed but ready for a soft respite from the chase of games, dirty

basketballs bounced over crumbling asphalt. The gooey orange light too strange and otherworldly to ignore. It lasts only a long moment as the streetlights ﬂicker on and you know the day is done. While Hayden’s work doesn’t suggest such a story, you can’t help but tip into such memories as you look at the powerful beauty of light caught in paint across his shut doors. These works evoke the same profound emotion of Robert Gober’s waterless sinks and cut houses, as well as an urban loneliness seen by one of Edward Hopper’s singular citizens. Both have a quiet, underlying menace, as do Hayden’s paintings, which are freighted with story and emotion, but there’s something about the colour, a California light, that makes their recollections a gentler dream. Through Hayden’s paintings, I can imagine myself lying in bed, but not alone, as I watch the light change through my bedroom window. Andrew Berardini

Untitled, 2015, oil on wood, acrylic and brass, 102 × 81 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and acme, Los Angeles

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Sam Pulitzer Now Time for the Ins: A Fool’s Guide to Commuting Real Fine Arts, New York 9 January – 13 February Considering that Sam Pulitzer is notorious for hating on the artworld – note his blog ‘Art Observations’, published under the pseudonym Jerry Magoo, which takes aim at artworld denizens – his latest outing at Real Fine Arts is surprisingly subdued. Now Time for the Ins: A Fool’s Guide to Commuting consists mostly of drawings inspired by New York subway and commuter rail lines, and an architectural intervention of two walls, out of which small rectangles have been cut at eye-level (these are meant to be reminiscent of subway car windows, though the effect is lost on me). The whole thing seems rather quaint, even simple, in light of Pulitzer’s mammoth 2014 Artists Space exhibition A Colony for ‘Them’, a heady clusterfuck of art historical, institutional and cultural references. There he pulled a pseudo Michael Asher by partly reinstating the venue’s former warren of gallery spaces (Asher rebuilt ten years’ worth of temporary exhibition walls at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in

2008); creating a bohemian, still-life, old-timey tableau of jugs, antique wood things, a dirty mattress and a body-modifying one-inch earlobe gauge – pointed to by a ceiling-mounted laser – for just a hint of subculture; and enlisting a cohort of cool artist friends to contribute oversize images forming a confounding network of movable walls and partitions. The fussiest thing in Now Time for the Ins: A Fool’s Guide to Commuting may be the introductory map, titled Fool’s Guide (all works 2016), which introduces visitors to the small space and is actually seven prints on adhesive paper slapped on the wall in a vague pyramid shape. Each print looks like bright, geometrically blocky and garbled subway signage crossed with a nonsensical diagram of sorts. And each corresponds to a drawing in the show, four of which are noticeable rehashes of the Oscar health insurance ads that recently blanketed the New York subway system. Neurotypical Earner features a middle-aged man swinging

Neurotypical Earner, 2016, coloured pencil, ink on paper, collage element, acrylic frame, hardware, 69 × 59 cm. Courtesy the artist and Real Fine Arts, New York

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off a streetlight pole like Gene Kelly singing in the rain (or like a pole dancer ), while Absorptive Ensemble sports a burly meathead eating a hot dog and wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Everything sucks’ (a riff on New Yorkers’ jaded attitude; New Yorkers hate everything, but they love Oscar!). In each, the ﬁgures appear as thin white outlines against a black background, almost like architectural drawings, or – again – diagrams; and in their titling, they hint at undertones of labour and class, commuting and work. A large drawing of a digital clock, Idle Timepiece, hovers over all like the omniscient clock of capital. According to Oscar’s Yelp ratings, it likely spent as much time raising money and designing ads as delivering customer healthcare. Now Time for the Ins: A Fool’s Guide to Commuting may be, on the whole, rather underwhelming, but perhaps it’ll prod New Yorkers to think twice, or at least think, about the corporations tasked to help them. David Everitt Howe

A Scratching Not a Biting Bureau, New York 10 January – 14 February The words A Scratching Not a Biting evoke wilful action and physical sensation. Picture a dog scratching purposefully at the ground, creating both a performance and a visible mark. ‘Not a biting’ suggests an avoidance of direct aggression, however; despite their expressive or sensual tenor, the works in this exhibition – which encompass performance (captured on video), painting, sculpture and photography – don’t force their presence or stray far from a sense of humour or self-effacement. Like that scratching dog, the motivation behind Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s movements in the video Kitchen (2011) remains unclear. Nonetheless, the fervent gestures he performs in a nondescript kitchen are highly compelling. He homes in on the bare countertop, slapping it with his palms, plotting swiftly with his fingertips and bouncing his hands as if following an invisible plan, almost as if the surface were hot to the touch. In this wordless demonstration one senses that the strength and determination of his actions, which flow without pause, are born not of forethought but of an obsessive compulsion he has come to accept and to use. These movements appear refined by the force of habit and repetition; the sound of his gasps and short breaths adds to this atmosphere of urgency and dynamism. Garber-Maikovska’s performance is echoed nicely in three of his ink-and-pastel compositions (all 2015), whose coloured patches and black swipes testify to the energy that drives his artistic

output. Two oil paintings by Charlie Billingham, Strike 1 and Strike 2 (both 2015), express a similar expressive force, though this time it is contained within the subject matter and its implicit narrative: in each painting a figure in profile, the head and legs of which have been strangely cropped, hugs its torso tightly, giving off an air of stubborn anticipation; the paintings are hung next to each other so that the figures appear to be standing back-to-back. What looks like a truncheon is thrust beneath their arms, and the unruly, outdated clothing combined with a certain cartoonish handling implies that these are characters culled from nineteenth-century satirical drawings. The paintings are compelling not least for this unusual air of anachronism and the swapping of colours between them: denied any background context, one figure wears a blue shirt and is placed against an emerald green field; the other sports a shirt of the same green against a background of the matching blue. The work of the other three artists in the show is loosely conversant in a different way. Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel work together, often learning a new craft technique for the purpose of making something as a combined effort. Their humbly titled Stoneware Mural with Pipes No. 2 (2015) is an uncanny piece. From a roughly two-metre-wide landscape panel composed of fired ceramic tiles in varying shades of yellow and light brown protrude ten curved or comically straight-stemmed pipes attached to the tiles by their bowls. Their placement is odd,

and without apparent reason, reminding one perhaps of crustaceans that have affixed themselves to a sea wall. They point across the room towards two sculptures, demurely titled Stoneware Vessels (2013), also by Dewar and Gicquel, which are modelled on a toilet bowl and bidet. The wall flanking the Stoneware Vessels displays two untitled photographs by Carina Brandes, in each of which two naked figures recline and slide over a bronze bear statue. Slightly blurred, the people strive to cling to the polished, rounded body of the animal (a form slightly echoing the Vessels), while each person’s gender is kept hidden. We see only their forms in profile, torsos curled over with their behinds facing each other (echoing Billingham’s figures), or holding on by the hips, legs bent with hair falling over their faces. One detects a deliberate play by the exhibition’s organisers here between phallic pipes, bathroom-related sculptures and these slippery, noir-ish bodies. In tune with its title, which conveys expressive curiosity over conclusive action, A Scratching Not a Biting assembles a group of works that might at first seem ambiguous in their intentions. As one explores the show, however, subtle connections – between figures who don't face each other, for example, the shapes of bathroom ware and bodies, or movements exacted on a kitchen surface or canvas – reveal simultaneously the strength of each artist’s work and an intriguing cadence of sensations among them. Iona Whittaker

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, Stoneware Mural with Pipes No. 2, 2015, high-ﬁred stoneware, 224 × 85 × 19 cm. Courtesy the artists and Bureau, New York

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Martin Wong Human Instamatic Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York 4 November – 14 February Martin Wong, who died in 1999, moved from San Francisco to New York in 1978, when the city was on the skids. He settled in a seedy hotel at the South Street Seaport and began to teach himself to paint. He’d studied ceramics out West and had worked as an itinerant street portraitist calling himself the Human Instamatic, a moniker that, when used as the title of this 94-work survey – it begins with juvenile self-portraits and ends with images of cacti painted as Wong was dying – implies he realistically recorded the city before him. This is not so. His ﬁrst New York works were of eight balls (Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball (Eureka), 1978–80); the drag queen Divine (Divine, 1979); and tabloid headlines based on the rantings of David Berkowitz (a serial killer who claimed to be possessed by a dog) spelled out in American Sign Language by fat hands emerging from angular cuffs (Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder, 1980). They have a quirky charm. By 1982 Wong was living in Alphabet City, then a Hispanic ghetto on the Lower East Side,

where his repertoire expanded. He was obsessed with firemen; the Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero, with whom he lived for a year and half during the early 1980s; and a local crew of hustlers and drug abusers. He painted them – an image of two firefighters kissing (Big Heat, 1988), a dealer with a wad of cash (In the Money, 1986) – usually against streetscapes of carefully articulated brick walls rendered in a sere impasto and crusty earth tones, or in prison scenes based on Piñero’s writing. Many of the paintings include texts, often spelled out in American Sign Language, or charts of constellations in mixes that are both symbolic and homoerotic. His sensual surfaces and attention to details of buildings and bricks suggest that he was after the touch, the experience of being in the city and alive on the fringe. What he sought through that presence was something transcendent for which the temporal was a gate. For example, The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Paco) (1984) presents a prison liaison as holy, like the star charts and sign language, a symbol of something universal and timeless.

Gemini, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 81 cm diameter. Collection Papo Colo

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It makes sense, then, that he was an inveterate collector, amassing the work of graffiti artists (since donated to New York University), Chinese vessels, dice and hamburger-themed trinkets, among other objects. Like the paintings, this stuff is an autobiography born of the desire to engage. By the late 1980s aids and gentriﬁcation had transformed his once seedy neighbourhood. Wong began painting facades from Chinatown. He claimed it had taken him 20 years to accumulate the requisite material and skills to make these works. Flat, cartoony and too reliant on gaudy blues, they lack the obsessive vigour of the earlier pieces. In a 1996 interview, Wong, who was by then suffering from aids, said he’d painted everything he’d wanted to and that the Lower East Side had changed too much for him to depict further anyway. Beyond the passage of time, Wong’s sentiments reﬂect a limited, if intense, vision that energises the paintings but also renders them more interesting as a time capsule for a vanished moment. Joshua Mack

Saloua Raouda Choucair crg Gallery, New York 4 November – 20 December It is tempting to look at Saloua Raouda Choucair’s work as a demonstration of how the modernist ‘language’ of abstraction crossed ethnic and national boundaries in its bid to become a universal mode of communication, one stripped of the proclivities of local linguistic and graphic inheritances in order to tap pure affect and sensation. Choucair is Lebanese. Born in 1916, she travelled to France during the late 1940s, where she encountered Le Corbusier’s architecture and studied with Fernand Léger – what better duo to unlock the secrets of form? When she returned to Beirut, she brought those secrets with her and whispered them within the precincts of her homeland’s Islamic art and architecture, creating a body of work that is at once grounded by those regional artistic legacies and set in ﬂight by the formal experiments and liberations licensed by Modernism. We now know that, though modern art began in the crucible of colonialism, by the 1930s and 40s it had gained refugee status, its practitioners and proponents escaping from Europe to North and South America, the Middle East and as far as Asia. In Choucair it found asylum.

Lifting off the ground as it did, though, modern art had always risked losing touch with its audience. Even when aiming at the demotic it was elitist (read bourgeois). Riven internally, modern art struggled formally, adopting new techniques and materials and practices in order to find acceptance. Choucair never shied away from such ventures – see her small plinthmounted clay and metal, clay and plastic Water Projects from the 1970s and 80s – but her work is at its best in wood and stone, ceramic and tapestry, and at modest scale, even though she always wanted to realise big projects, like Corb. Her Project for Public Housing (1973), a small double-stack of terracotta A-frames, surely works better as a tabletop sculptural folly than as an architectural model. Though her Infinite Module and Infinite Structure (both 1974–2014) gesture towards skyscraping, their stacked stone units appear more like fastidious cairns, heavily weighted and speaking to their maker’s hand and efforts. Worth special recognition is Choucair’s facility with wood. Secret of a Cube (1960–62), a small, roughly 12 × 15 × 12 cm block of what

looks like walnut, holds lovely biomorphic folds within its otherwise rational coordinates. Moving Dual (1983–5) splits the cube in half and then extrudes, twists and ripples it upwards, its two halves filling in for one another down the work’s wobbly cleave. This quality of being separate-but-joined is present in many of Choucair’s pieces here – eg Bench (1969), Poem Box (1972–4), Dual (1975–7), Sliding Dual (1975–7) – but gives way to works that only gesture at separation without enacting it physically, as in her small terracotta The Rhyme Series (1994–6) and Quantum Leap (1985–2011). Brancusi looms large here. Not just the Brancusi of the Endless Column, to which Choucair’s Infinite Module and Infinite Structure as well as her Movement of the Angle (1983–5) pay dues, but the Brancusi of The Kiss (1916), which thematises separate-but-joined as a condition of desire, if not love. It would be too much to say that love is what many of Choucair’s works are after, unless we are to understand it as a love of form, and so of the abstract language of modern art, to which Choucair was joined. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Moving Dual, 1983–5, wood, 42 × 27 × 27 cm. Photo: David B. Smith. Courtesy the artist and crg Gallery, New York

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Pacifico Silano Tear Sheets Baxter St Camera Club of New York 10 December – 16 January Although I am not a gay man myself, I am very turned on by man-on-man pornography. I discovered this while watching the 2013 French film Stranger by the Lake, which is about a serial murderer seeking sexual encounters – and victims – at a gay cruising spot at Lake of Sainte-Croix in Provence. The fantasies I have had about anal sex in the bushes with men sporting moustaches have lingered ever since; therefore, I was excited to see Tear Sheets, Pacifico Silano’s exhibition of composite photographic images whose raw material is culled from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s such as Honcho, Blueboy and Torso. What I hoped for from the show was something seedy. A darkened gallery with strobe lights perhaps. Or plywood viewing boxes. Maybe even a glory hole along a back wall. Evocations of a lost past, and hopefully some fodder for masturbation. What I found instead was a typical white-box space, brightly lit and filled with 15 neatly framed and hung images, the salacious impact of which was roughly the equivalent of a fashion spread about summertime fun in Love magazine. Images that would have been considered perverse upon their first showing were neutered

by the sterile environment and, moreover, the present time. For example, Glory Hole (all works 2015) is an image split into two parts: on the left, a blonde piece of plywood with a perfect hole, on the right, the left thigh of a man who has pulled down his jeans to reveal a bikini-brief tan line. During the 1970s, this would have been a portrait of forbidden desire; in 2015, because this gay aesthetic was long ago coopted by the fashion and design worlds, it may as well be a magazine spread for an up-and-coming Brooklyn furniture maker. Bette layers a black-and-white photograph of contestants at a gay beauty pageant over a glam shot of a beautiful transvestite in a yellow dress. Again, in the 1980s, this could have been viewed as a collection of outcasts; today, in the age of Caitlyn Jenner, it’s just a bunch of queens doing their thang, and openly. The only image that still carried any charge was the single one that did not feature a white male. Penthouse View shows a ripped, naked black male looking out over a view of the Empire State Building. Superimposed at top left there is a photo-booth strip depicting a handsome black man in a white Henley shirt. Here what resonates is not sex but the fragility

Penthouse View, 2015, archival pigment print, 61 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist

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and exploitation of the black male body in American society. According to the press release, Silano’s intention is to mine the origins of gay socialisation and identity formation, as well as to ‘reconcile the loss and longing that permeates those affected by the aids crisis’. The pretty boys are here. But missing is the fear, the pleasure, the shame, the heartbreak, and especially the pride in claiming one’s own identity, which other photographers and artists, such as Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, successfully captured in their time. Silano, who is in his early thirties, did not live through the crisis himself. Why he is trying to speak in the voice of a lost generation is not clear in the imagery. Perhaps the thesis of the show is an attempt to appeal to an artworld audience that once prided itself on tolerating imagery that the rest of society would not. The difficulty is that, in 2015, this audience no longer exists. What is valuable now is authenticity, speaking from personal experience, and with honesty, all of which seems lacking in this show. Brienne Walsh

Coco Fusco Alexander Gray Associates, New York 9 January – 6 February In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida describes how archival objects exist ‘under house arrest’. His words are apt for Coco Fusco’s exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, in which she mines a range of archives – government records, oral histories, film databases – to document the Cuban regime’s brutal suppression of political dissent. Fusco has maintained a steady focus on Cuba throughout her long-running career; in both her artistic practice and numerous publications she has often returned to the politics and people of this island nation, most recently with Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). Yet this show is not simply another contribution to an ever-expanding corpus. Rather, it takes the display of a new installation, Confidencial, Autores Firmantes (Confidential, Signatory Authors, 2015), as an occasion for revisiting many of the artist’s earlier videos, and positions her latest offering as an elucidation of themes manifest throughout her work. On the ground floor of the two-storey gallery a selection of typewritten documents are held in Perspex cases. Although written in Spanish, it becomes clear that these papers contain a confidential exchange among Cuban authorities from 1971. Translations by Fusco reveal plans for

the censorship of intellectuals supporting the detained ‘anti-revolutionary’ poet Heberto Padilla, and original copies of the texts in question are displayed nearby. The letters, however, are not what they seem; they are, in fact, painstakingly reproduced facsimiles, and were made in collaboration with historian Lillian Guerra after her accidental discovery of the original documents in the archives of the Cuban Ministry of Culture. Guerra smuggled out copies of the papers by taking pictures of them with the camera on her mobile phone, then Fusco set to work recreating each one using a period letterpress, typewriter and paper-ageing techniques. Her ﬁnal installation marks a subtle creative intervention in the act of historical research and echoes the formal strategies of videos on display upstairs. A rotating programme of works from 1993 to the present includes two recent works that cover similar thematic ground: La confesión (The Confession, 2015), previously displayed at the 56th Venice Biennale, explores Padilla’s public confession after his ﬁve-week imprisonment; and the 44-minute La botella al mar de María Elena (The Message in a Bottle from María Elena, 2015), created for the 2015 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, focuses upon

the poet María Elena Cruz Varela, exiled after her 1991 campaign for political reforms. As the central features in the video programme, La confesión and La botella exemplify the artist’s broader working methods vis-à-vis art and politics. Although they adopt elements of political documentary such as talking head interviews, Fusco also incorporates lengthy still shots and extracts of narrated poetry to remind us that these videos are resolutely creative projects. What results is a captivating meditation on creativity itself, yet also a sombre exploration of its volatile consequences under autocratic rule. At a q&a event to launch the exhibition, Fusco explained that she distinguishes her artistic practice from her activism, and does not expect her art to elicit political change. Indeed, she regards the term “activist art” as “dangerous” and “unclear”, and is wary of its limitations. How, then, might one assess what is so evidently political in content, yet nonpolitical in aims? Fusco doesn’t provide clear answers, but perhaps such indeterminacy is part of the point. Instead of making grand claims for her work, she presents an art inﬂected, but not dictated, by politics. Whether it inspires political action is entirely up to us. Dan Udy

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Totemonumento Galeria Leme, São Paulo 19 January – 27 February Cildo Meireles’s art action Tiradentes: totemmonumento ao preso político (Tiradentes: TotemMonument to the Political Prisoner) was executed in 1970 during Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship (1964–85). In it, the artist tied ten live chickens to a stake, set ﬁre to them, then stood and watched them burn. A photo taken the following day shows blackened ground, charred remains and a scorched wooden pole. Completing the action just as Meireles had hoped, soon afterwards, a member of Congress gave a speech at a formal lunch expressing his distaste for the brutal artwork; he then turned his attention to a serendipitous main course of frango ao molho pardo: chicken in blood sauce. Meireles’s piece furnishes the name and the inspiration for this group show, featuring works by eight artists who deal with traces, remembrance and the way versions of history are served up in the public sphere. Facing Meireles’s photograph at the far end of Leme’s monolithic exhibition space, Erica Ferrari’s Sobre nossas cabeças (Over Our Heads, 2015–16) is one of a series of new works in which Ferrari salvages and repurposes demolition rubble – in this case, in a metre-wide form that looks, from a distance, like an immense gnarled oyster. Mounted on the wall and apparently sustained there by

a frail wooden post, the melange of concrete, plaster and assorted debris, dotted with flecks of gold leaf, is trimmed in dusty red velvet. At its centre, the sharply defined impression of a horse’s foreleg is taken from a bronze statue of the Duke of Caxias, which stands high on a plinth, proud and incongruous, over a downtown São Paulo square haunted by crack addicts. What can its military triumphalism possibly mean to the lost souls of cracolândia? Ferrari’s wreckage, held together somehow and precariously propped aloft, is more fitting by far. At the other end of the scale, the smallest work in the show is a miniature replica of São Paulo’s grandest statue, the Monumento às Bandeiras (Monument to the Settlers), an immense stone sculpture by Victor Brecheret depicting yet more proud horsemen: Brazil’s conquistadores, off to penetrate the wilderness in what became the ‘founding ethnocide’ of the modern Brazilian state, as an accompanying text by the exhibition’s curator, Isabella Rjeille, puts it. Jaime Lauriano’s eponymous copy (2015–16), cast in metal from spent cartridges used by Brazil’s murderous military police, distils violence, past and present, into one tiny model placed on a single red brick that rests on the gallery floor.

Jaime Lauriano, Monumento às Bandeiras, 2015–16, red brick, molten brass and ammunition cartridges, 18 × 9 × 7 cm. Photo: Filipe Berndt. Courtesy Galeria Leme, São Paulo

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Alongside, a set of tracings by Clara Ianni recreates vestiges of history in the form of lesions on bone (Reparação (Reparations), 2015–16). Fractures, cracks, scratches and bullet holes are traced from a manual used by forensic anthropologists working on unearthed remains from Brazil’s dictatorship years. ‘Possible weapon: a hammer’, reads one caption, on a half-punched circular hole. ‘Passage of a blade during a chest stabbing’, reads another. Blood takes flight within you as you absorb the blows: empathetic animals, we conduct the pain felt by others reflexively; but it doesn’t seem to matter and the violence boils on. The cumulative result is a weight on the chest, a sense of the scars and smashed bones that are the true cost of history. José Carlos Martinat’s Contextualizable (2015–16), a block of cool, fragrant clay set on a wooden plinth, gives some relief. Beautiful in its malleability, Martinat’s soft monument invites visitors to trace their own memorials in a fingerprint, a flower, a slogan; or to extinguish someone else’s, using nothing more than fingertips to rub an angry ‘Fora Dilma!’ (‘Out with Dilma’, referring to Brazil’s besieged president) into the cool, dark clay of oblivion. Claire Rigby

Carlos Bunga Desplazamientos síquicos (Psychic Displacements) Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 23 September – 28 February Carlos Bunga took this exhibition as an occasion to rethink the host institution’s architecture. His temporary walls and pillars, made from cardboard and packing tape, challenge the existing distribution of the space and suggest a plan for an alternative building. The unconventional exhibition is fittingly titled Desplazamientos síquicos (Psychic Displacements), referring to mental – and, in this case, architectural – shifts, and to the transference of concepts from one object – or spatial layout – to another. At the centre of the museum’s main space, Bunga has poured out a huge pool of yellow paint, now dried, whose colour is intensified by tinted spotlights. The area defining Superficie cutánea (Skin Surface, 2015) is framed by wooden steps and, due to its craquelurelike structure, reminiscent of the rough textures in Antoni Tàpies’s painterly compositions. (In fact, Portugal-born Bunga started off as a painter and is today based near Barcelona, the city that was home to Tàpies.) Next to this area, separated by the temporary architecture and at head level, is a square painted with the same yellow hue as the pool below, upon and framed with the cardboard that’s ubiquitous in this show. The impetus behind Ocupación (Occupation, 2015) is reminiscent of Malevich’s black square hung under the ceiling of the Last Futurist Exhibition

of Paintings 0.10 in 1915; it also calls to mind Donald Judd’s minimalist Menziken wall sculptures from the 1980s, aluminium boxes with coloured Plexiglas at the bottom. Like them, Bunga’s works emphasise presence and the relation of the viewer’s body to the pieces. Besides these references, the intervention in the entrance patio of the museum – from which Bunga removed a number of concrete floor slabs at regular intervals, and piled them up in an orderly stack next to the site – nods to Land art. Similarly, a square piece of lawn has been removed in the adjacent patio leading up to the second wing of the museum and, here too, is exhibited in the site. In the neighbouring inside space, five rows of truncated pillarlike cardboard containers have been placed on the floor and mirror the ceiling structure in the passage outside: the work is fittingly titled Reflejo (Reflection, 2015). Lastly, in the museum’s darkened third wing, five videos between one and four minutes in length are shown on cubelike monitors positioned on the floor. The videos depict actions such as a hand erasing an architectural floorplan with a rubber, titled Más espacio para otras construcciones (More Space for Other Constructions, 2007–8); or, in Lamp (2002), two hands putting a smashed lightbulb back together using transparent tape, only to break it with a hammer

and start over. Both pieces set up a Sisyphean process referenced in the exhibition text, in relation to Bunga’s work in general, via combined antonyms such as ‘construct/destroy’, ‘add/remove’ or ‘perfect/imperfect’. The exhibition succeeds in questioning the perception of our built environments as given imperatives, without alternatives, and lays bare their fragility – while alluding to an array of widespread art historical references. By considering the viewer’s bodily presence à la Minimalism, using the customisable materials of Arte Povera and making reference to incisive architectural interventions and Land art, Bunga updates the age-old question of how we construct the world that we inhabit, and how it in turn inﬂuences movement and thought. In a place such as Bogotá, where the built environment is growing at a rapid rate, examining how things were, are and could be is more topical than it might be in other cities. Then again, the precarious architectural cardboard skeletons seem to preempt the eschatological caesuras that precisely these human-driven changes impose on our environment, such as climate change, and that are already now perceptibly altering it in ways that will impact our lives profoundly and irreversibly, and call for radical architectural alternatives. Stefanie Hessler

Desplazamientos síquicos, 2015 (installation view, Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá). Courtesy the artist; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; and Galería Elba Benitez, Madrid

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Books

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My Dear bb: The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959 edited by Robert Cumming Yale, £25/$45 (hardcover)

In a book full of revelations, perhaps the most discomﬁting is the suggestion, at the conclusion of some 34 years of letters, that the correspondents did not much like one another. Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark had much to bind them – common passions, linked arenas of research, social and professional ambition – but friendship? Not always. In his afterword, Robert Cumming cites a friend of Clark’s who, upon reading Berenson’s postwar diaries Sunset and Twilight (1963), exclaims, ‘Heavens! How Mr Berenson disliked you!’ When Berenson and Clark ﬁrst met, the former, at sixty, was considered a peerless authority on the art of the Italian Renaissance and enjoyed popular renown; the latter was twentytwo, an ambitious and self-possessed graduate. During a trip to Florence, Clark paid homage to Berenson as he held court at his elegant Villa I Tatti, home to a vast working library and archive. Clark’s earliest letters – pompous, with collegiate overformality – were written to Berenson’s wife, Mary, who proposed that Clark return to I Tatti as a research assistant to help her husband update his monumental 1903 tome, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters. Unvoiced in the polite correspondence that follows is Clark’s struggle between the urge to please his Oxford mentor (Charles Bell, keeper at the

Ashmolean), to fulﬁl his own ambitions and to enter the coruscating intellectual orbit of I Tatti. Three years later, in 1929, Clark stepped away from the Florentine Drawings research. That his and Berenson’s relationship endured this disappointment was due in no small measure to the older man’s insatiable appetite for documentary photographs to add to the I Tatti archive. Clark’s ability to supply images of artworks and antiquities forms the backbone and premise of much subsequent correspondence. The rejection did, however, represent a tipping point in their relationship, from student and master to a less sharply drawn hierarchy. Over the next three decades, their correspondence follows arcs and troughs as each endures the blossoming and loss of power and reputation. Clark ascends swiftly – aided by his association with Berenson – through an advisory role at the Royal Academy and positions in the Royal Collections and the Ashmolean, to become, aged thirty, director of the National Gallery. Such swings of fortune provoke a pivotal exchange between the two. In 1937 Berenson, then in his seventies, feeling the ebb of energy, mourning for his friend Edith Wharton and held back by a sickly wife, appeals to Clark for ‘brotherly comradeship’: ‘If there is anything

I now crave for it is your affection,’ he writes. It is an appeal that Clark – now the darling of London society, on intimate terms with the highest in the land – awkwardly rejects: ‘I come of an undemonstrative family and my feelings are as stiff as an unused limb.’ It is the Second World War, and Berenson’s refusal to leave Italy (and abandon Nicky Mariano, the third party in his I Tatti ménage à trois), that restore equilibrium between the two. Berenson’s endurance raises him to quasimythic status, aided by bestselling runs of his diaries and essays. Clark, meanwhile, is shaken by opposition at the National Gallery. A portrait of youth and age, My Dear bb plays out against the formative years of our current art landscape with a cast of supporting characters – Duveen, Noailles, Gulbenkian, Courtauld – now synonymous with institutions they helped form. Cumming’s extensive supporting essays and notes betray formidable research, but, like his subjects, he carries his knowledge lightly, and deploys it to inspire rather than bludgeon. Much here is humbling – not least the profound engagement and sense of carpe diem that drive Berenson and Clark to spend days on end at each exhibition, and the exotic notion that an art critic might be a household name. Hettie Judah

Berlin Artists by Till Cremer Kerber Verlag, €34.90/chf42.60 (hardcover)

Berlin Artists contains 300 of the 500 portraits of contemporary artists working in the German capital that Cremer shot between 2009 and 2014. Each portrait is accompanied by the artist’s date and place of birth and the location of the shoot (either the artist’s workplace or ‘a place consistent with their work’), and aims at cataloguing the diversity of practices in the city and the networks that exist within its artistic community: apparently the artists were selected by referral from other artists who had previously been photographed. The selection moves alphabetically, beginning with Saâdane Aﬁf sitting at a desk, his face in complete shadow thanks to the light ﬁltered through the window behind him, and

ending with Ralf Ziervogel, sporting a severe bowl-cut and standing, ﬁsts semiclenched like a boxer’s, in a cemetery. Of course, ordering by name rather than social connection undermines the sense of a network and replaces it with a linear catalogue of a type: artists. So what can a portrait tell us about the people catalogued – who has nice hair (Anselm Reyle), who likes to listen to cds (Eberhard Havekost), who likes pot plants (Susan Philipsz), who is highly organised (Antonia Low) and who has the best beard (aa Bronson)? In a collection like this, one is reduced to looking out for what the artists have in common (most artists dress casually, only a few extrovertly; beards are in)

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and what distinguishes each from the next (who sits, who stands, who incorporates an example of their work most deliberately or artiﬁcially into the portrait). In this way, one is reduced to drawing out the kind of simple-minded clichés that Gustave Flaubert might have included in the satirical Dictionary of Received Ideas he compiled during the 1870s. Despite the photographer’s claim that each portrait is the result of interviews and conversations with his subjects, everything about being an artist is here reduced to a look: the effect is like scrolling through an Internet dating site or a model agency’s look books. Perhaps books like this are a sign of our times; I hope not. Mark Rappolt

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Ellsworth Kelly Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One

Ellsworth Kelly

edited by Yve-Alain Bois Cahiers d’Art, £275 (hardcover)

by Tricia Y. Paik Phaidon, £60 (hardcover)

In Yve-Alain Bois’s first volume of his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, the late Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is too early for his own good. Bois’s book, spanning 1940 to 1953 (roughly, Kelly’s early education in Brooklyn and Boston, and years living in Paris) is as gripping a read as a catalogue raisonné gets. During Kelly’s Parisian golden streak (1948–54), the artist anticipated, almost casually, a variety of later artists’ styles, from Richter’s grids of primary colours to Palermo’s wrapped monochromes to Nauman’s (and, later, Whiteread’s) ossified negative spaces. Browsing a copy of ARTnews in a bookshop in 1954, Kelly saw reproductions of Ad Reinhardt’s work, and moved back to the States, assuming kinship with artists there; he was right, just a bit preemptive. In both Bois’s book and Tricia Y. Paik’s monograph, the Paris period acquires a legendary sheen, and both books’ texts resound with the mild indignation of the true believer: ‘now do you see?’ Modernist historians love to crow that theirs got there first, but it’s hard not to double-take at works like White Relief, a quiet, Ryman-esque grid

of wooden lozenges painted white on a white field, made in the same year (1950) of Abstract Expressionism’s most theatrical pomp. Kelly just wasn’t made for his times. Kelly’s importance, both books suggest, is in his determined rejection of the original gesture. ‘I’m not an inventor,’ he claimed, by implication damning Picasso, against whom many Western artists measured their worth at the time. Kelly’s strategy was, in a sense, to admit defeat. The fruits of this rejection of artist as innovator emerged in works like Window, Museum of Modern Art (1949), a ‘transfer’ (in Bois’s neat definition) of an existing object without expressive distortion – here, a window in Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne, recreated as two paired canvases painted grey and white, one flipped to reveal its black-painted stretcher. Bois’s entry gently dismantles previous readings of the work, especially its spurious relationship with Duchamp. What Kelly called ‘alreadymade’ imagery (almost certainly a nod to the old man) referred to things seen (shadows on a staircase, light on water) and reenacted

as painting, all trace of manufacture concealed. What this wilful impersonality and aversion to uniqueness means today is, retrospectively, Minimalism and its offshoots; what it meant in 1949 was perversion. Even more so was Kelly’s practice of keeping old motifs in play, in unedited form, right up to his death last year at ninety two. In this sense, there’s no ‘late period’ Kelly: everything is always present. Paik calls him ‘our Old Master making art in the present tense’. But Kelly is too interesting for such a title. The apotheosis of male artists of his and later generations into latter-day old masters (especially Twombly, Freud, Johns and Kiefer) suits Kelly least well, in part for his reluctance to sink into lovely autumnal melancholy in his dotage. For Gavin Delahunty, in his essay for the Phaidon book, Kelly’s ‘retroactive movement’ has kept him on the periphery of modernist art history. There are worse places to be. Bois’s sequence of catalogues – there are four more to come – will, then, be cyclical, not linear; always contemporary, and always alive. Ben Street

Please Send This Book to My Mother by Sarah Entwistle Sternberg Press, €22 (hardcover)

This unusually entertaining presentation of a life combines fragments of text, architectural plans, drawings of counterpoise lamps, photographs of exceptionally beautiful women and other personal leavings discovered in the New York storage space of English architect Clive Entwistle 35 years after his death. They have been assembled here, without regard to chronology or apparent theme, by his granddaughter, artist Sarah Entwistle. The older Entwistle was unsuccessful by many measures: he died before turning sixty, broke, in exile, possibly alone, his extravagantly ambitious projects (among them the Liverpool Cathedral, a utopian city for America called the Holopolis, various skyscrapers) unrealised. Crucially, he seemed impervious to the evidence of his failures, as seen in his knack for creative self-presentation to lovers, politicians, estranged children and journalists. ‘It made me happy

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to hear you say you thought my project was deﬁnitely the best… I couldn’t arrive at any other conclusion but yours,’ he writes to the editor of Architectural Design, possibly putting words in her mouth. ‘When do we start?’ he asks the organisers in a note laying out his ‘most tremendously exciting overall idea for your World Fair project’. Not one to take responsibility or let the consequences of this shortcoming get him down, Entwistle woos ‘af’, a woman 25 or so years his junior and the daughter of the West German consul general. They marry (his second marriage); he takes many photos of her (and she of him); he tells her he will whip her if he ever catches her in a lie; and he writes a frankly moving poem about their sex lives and ‘her strange demand’, which, like much of what is here, would be hard to corroborate, given that it is only the Entwistles who have a voice – Clive in the text fragments, and Sarah in her selection of them.

ArtReview

The architect’s self-regard and ability to mythologise his life as it was happening should have served him well in New York, which is where he spent most of his final 15 years, but begging letters and justifications to family and strangers alike tell a story of professional setbacks and financial troubles. They are painful to read, all the more so for their absence of shame or insight. Key characters and themes sit dryly in the book’s 300 annotations, not necessarily in biographically useful fashion (I cannot say, for example, which of Clive’s children fathered Sarah, nor who her grandmother was). The title Please Send This Book to My Mother is drawn from a handwritten note found at the back of an Entwistle family history, written by Bannister Grimshaw and published in the 1920s. This work must surely be seen as its dissipated and paradoxically fuller follow-up. David Terrien

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For more on Igort, see overleaf

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Contributors

Max Crosbie-Jones is managing editor of the arts, fashion and lifestyle magazine Bangkok Post The Magazine and was previously the Thailand correspondent for Artinfo. He collects retro Thai print ephemera, especially movie posters, and has just ordered Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam over Forty Years, a 2014 collection of essays by the late Benedict Anderson. This month he writes on how rare it is to ﬁnd today’s social and political conditions reﬂected in contemporary art from Thailand. Joshua Mack is an art critic and independent curator based in New York. He has a longstanding interest in postwar Japanese art and has recently organised several exhibitions of Tetsumi Kudo’s work in collaboration with Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Other recent exhibitions he has worked on include Albert York, held in autumn 2014 at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Time Out New York, Aperture and Modern Painters among other publications. This month he interviews artist Cai Guo-Qiang about the Chinese art scene.

Ben Street is a freelance art historian, writer and educator based in London. He lectures for the National Gallery, Tate, Christie’s Education and Sotheby’s Institute of Art and has written for museum and gallery publications worldwide. This month he reviews two books on the art of Ellsworth Kelly. Doretta Lau is an editor at visual culture museum M+ in Hong Kong. A collection of her short stories was published in 2012 with the title How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? It was selected as one of the best books of the year by The Atlantic. This month she writes on the work of Cao Fei. Gallery Girl has been ArtReview’s back-page columnist for around ﬁve years. Despite well-documented problems with legal highs, which thankfully will be banned in the uk under forthcoming legislation, she ﬁled columns on artworld issues and the hot topics of the day. This month it all comes to an end. Her spirit, like her Rick Owens wool-and-silk lace-up coat, will live on, however.

Contributing Writers Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Barbara Casavecchia, Adeline Chia, Matthew Collings, Michelangelo Corsaro, Gabriel Coxhead, Max Crosbie-Jones, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Sam Jacob, Sarah Jilani, Hettie Judah, Doretta Lau, Maria Lind, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Erik Morse, Brad Phillips, Mark Prince, Claire Rigby, Sherman Sam, Raimar Stange, Ben Street, Kate Sutton, Dominic van den Boogerd, Dan Udy, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Iona Whittaker Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mathilde Agius, Mikael Gregorsky, Igort

Igort (preceding pages)

Igor Tuveri, who publishes under the name Igort, was born in 1958 in Cagliari, Sardinia, yet grew up surrounded by Russian culture. His father was a classical composer inspired by Russian music and his grandmother would tell him the stories of the great Russian novels before he could read. “Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy were like imaginary uncles to me. I used to speak with them at home as if they were real.” In Igort’s ﬁrst major work to be translated into English, Dulled Feelings (1990), one tale, set in Russia, paid homage to Batman by imagining a musclebound teenager being adopted and trained by the American Caped Crusader to take over as a Soviet Dark Knight. The other story explored Igort’s deepening fascination with Japan – a country he would visit later to work in the manga tradition – incorporating references to ‘shunga’, or Japanese erotic prints, into a Cold War intrigue about a Japanese man torn between two lovers, a male secret agent and a female spy.

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A planned biography of Chekhov took Igort to Kiev, but he put the project aside in favour of more pressing tales. “I started stopping people in the middle of the street, to ask them, with an interpreter, if they would tell me how life in the Soviet Union used to be. They were very full of sorrows and hopes.” Less a journalist or biographer, more a literary observer and conduit, Igort, who would spend two years living between Ukraine and Russia, including Siberia, made sense of their stories and histories by turning them into what he calls ‘graphic testimony’. “If you write and draw, you just need a pen and a notebook. And ‘a good pair of shoes’, as Chekhov used to say.” The results are The Ukrainian Notebooks (2010) and The Russian Notebooks (2011), newly published in English as one exceptional, harrowing 352-page volume. The ﬁrst part unlocks the darkest of memories from ﬁrsthand witnesses and survivors of Stalin’s government-sanctioned famine of 1932–33, estimated to have killed between 2.4

ArtReview

and 7.5 million ethnic Ukrainians – a buried holocaust that the artist does not want to see forgotten. In The Russian Notebooks Igort deals with the life and death in 2006 of the journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya. “I am trying to convey this terrifying presence of silence which envelops present-day Russia.” For ‘Haiku’, his new comic in watercolour and ink for ArtReview, Igort returns to his love of Japan and his readings of the seventeenth-century poet Matsuo Bashō. “In his aesthetic vision, nature was just to be observed, no action was needed,” the artist says. “So I’ve tried to realise a visual haiku about Bashō on his trips, looking for something very simple, catching the moment.” Igort proves that the comics need not always be about progressing through panels. Here, the reader is invited to join the poet, to observe and contemplate. It is another example of Igort’s search to apply the visions of artistic avant-gardes past and present to the language of comics, “to not be caged in – and to try to capture life”. Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 136 photography by Mathilde Agius

Phrases on the spine and pages 33, 67 and 99 are from the Wikipedia page for White Rabbit candy

on pages 130, 142 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

March 2016

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Off the Record March 2016 I push open the door and hurry into the restaurant. Why we’re meeting in New Jersey is beyond me. I check my trusty Bulgari Diagono, take a printout of a grainy photo and scan the room. Sure enough, there at a table near the wall is the elderly Dutchman I am looking for. “I thought you were dead,” I say as I sit down. He smiles and turns his attention to the mini jukebox on our table. He flicks through some songs before choosing one. “Why would you write to me if I was dead?” “There was no one else. I’m an outcast in the artworld,” I reply flatly. “I didn’t really think posting a letter to ‘Bas Jan Ader, The Ocean Wave’ would get to anyone. To be honest I was blasted on Hawaiian baby woodrose when I did it.” The restaurant door swings open and a group of distinguished gentlemen with baseball caps pulled down tightly come in. I’m sure I recognise a flash of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s spectacles and the unmistakable stride of Sir Nicholas Serota, but there’s no way they could know I’m here. “What happened, Gallery Girl?” Bas asks. He presses a tune on the jukebox, Don’t Stop Believin’, by Journey. “Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world, she took the midnight train goin’ anywhere…” Bas hums along tunelessly with the opening of the song. “Didn’t this song appear at the end of that television series…?” I ask. “You spent years insulting artworld grandees from the back page of ArtReview. Did you think they would thank you for it?” A middle-aged waitress goes by. She has pale skin, small dark eyes and her black hair is done in one single plait over her left shoulder. “Weird, huh?” I say. “Having a waitress here in the middle of New Jersey who looks like Marina…” “…Do have an onion ring,” interjects Bas. “Look,” I say, pushing the onion rings away, “surely they knew it was all in jest? I was never really abducted on the orders of Matthew Slotover wearing an African tribal Tabwa mask. Him with the mask on, not me, that is. Beatrix Ruf doesn’t send notes saying, ‘Power is rough’ just before we announce the Power 100. I’m sorry for insulting Brazil. I didn’t mean all that stuff about Okwui. Or Gioni. Look, Mr Softy Top in Victoria Park doesn’t even rent out porn from his ice cream van.” Bas looks puzzled. “I must have missed that last column. It’s not easy when people think you drowned at sea.” “That’s exactly why I wanted to see you, Bas. I need to disappear. I think this time it really is the end… I mean, that couple over there with that party of Boy Scouts – that’s not Don and Mera staring aggressively at me, is it?”

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“I think I can help you disappear, Gallery Girl, don’t worry. By the way, you’ve apologised to a lot of people in your nice speech but at least one figure seems missing. Viel Glück!” “Hold on, isn’t that Swiss German?” “You know there are ten questions every gallerist should be asking themselves right now,” Bas shouts at me. As he yells, Bas’s long hair moves violently and not in a natural way. He adjusts it. Bits of makeup are running from under his eyes. He looks strangely younger than he did a few moments ago. I can’t remember him ever wearing a silk pocket handkerchief in the documentation of his performances. “I’m too sad to tell you, Bas!” I reply with one last throw of the dice. Ignoring me, Bas gets up and heads towards the bathroom. Before he gets there he drops briefly into a Shotokan karate crane leg stance. I realise that he’s not Bas Jan Ader. Bas is dead. I notice my Rick Owens wool and silk lace-up coat is starting to fray. I take it off and place it carefully next to my Proenza Schouler frosted pvc clutch bag. I remember where the song comes from. “Season 6, episode 21, The Sopranos. The last episode,” says someone from the table behind me. I turn around. It’s a large party. From their ill-fitting Zara clothes I realise that they are all curators. My time is up. “So this is it, I guess,” I say to them. “After all the fake comedy endings when I can’t work out how to finish a column, this is how it actually ends?” They nod enthusiastically. I am filled with a state of perfect outward calm. “Don’t stop believin’, hold onto that feelin’…” “Focus on the good times,” I say to no one in particular. The bathroom door opens. A figure emerges. I look up. “Don’t stop believin’…” And then, like Malevich’s cracked masterpiece, it all goes black. Gallery Girl

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