ArtReview May 2014 by ArtReview

Despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man

uk £5.95

9 770004 409093

May 2014

05>

LA New York

vol 66 no 4

16/04/2014 10:45

AR-May-2014-cover_AFpcp.indd 1

Ragnar Kjartansson

002_AR.indd 2 UK_ART REVIEW 470x300_CHER DIOR-MAI_SSCALL.indd 1

16/04/2014 10:49 04/04/14 16:20

UK_ART

4/14 16:20

www.dior.com

CHER DIOR COLLECTION Yellow gold, white gold, pink gold, diamonds, garnets, rubies, tanzanite, sapphires and Paraiba tourmalines.

002_AR.indd 3 UK_ART REVIEW 470x300_CHER DIOR-MAI_SSCALL.indd 2

16/04/2014 10:49 04/04/14 16:21

HA U S E R & W IR T H

RICHARD JACKSON

NEW PAINTINGS 23 MAY – 26 JULY 2014 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

S CLOWN, 2013 – 2014 WOOD, STEEL, CLOTH, AQUARESIN, PAINT, PAINT BALL GUN, ELECTRONICS 335.3 × 91.4 × 91.4 CM / 132 × 36 × 36 IN PHOTO: FREDRIK NILSEN

004_AR.indd 4 2014_0893_HWLO_230x300_Jackson_Artreview.indd 1

16/04/2014 10:50 10.04.14 14:52

2014_089

4.14 14:52

STERLING RUBY

SUNRISE

SUNSET

SUNRISE

SUNSET

SUNRISE

SUNSET HAUSER & WIRTH

18 TH STREET NYC MAY 9 – JULY 25 2014

004_AR.indd 5 2014_0893_HWNY_230x300_Ruby_Artreview_rechts.indd 1

16/04/2014 10:50 11.04.14 10:34

Ai Weiwei

23 May — 12 July 2014 27 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com 006_AR.indd 6

16/04/2014 10:51

Richard Long

23 May — 12 July 2014 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com 006_AR.indd 7

16/04/2014 10:51

Ragnar Kjartansson The Explosive Sonics of Divinity Borgarleikhúsið, Reykjavík 28 - 30 May 2014

The Palace of the Summerland TBA21, Vienna 3 April - 8 June 2014

Me, My Mother, My Father, and I New Museum, New York 7 May - 22 June 2014

A Lot of Sorrow

Luhring Augustine Bushwick, New York Opening 13 September 2014

Luhring Augustine 531 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 www.luhringaugustine.com

008_AR.indd 8

i8 Gallery

Tryggvagata 16 Reykjavík, 101 www.i8.is

16/04/2014 10:52

No Problem Cologne/New York 1984-1989 May 1 - June 14, 2014

Werner Büttner George Condo Walter Dahn Jiri Georg Dokoupil Peter Fischli / David Weiss Günther Förg Robert Gober Georg Herold Jenny Holzer Mike Kelley Martin Kippenberger Jeff Koons Barbara Kruger Sherrie Levine Albert Oehlen Raymond Pettibon Richard Prince Cindy Sherman Rosemarie Trockel Franz West Christopher Wool

David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 Martin Kippenberger, 1985 Photo by Bernhard Schaub/Cologne

David Zwirner.indd 9 1052679A7_9.252x11.811_80s_ArtReview_FA.indd 1

212 517 8677 davidzwirner.com

16/04/2014 10:52 4/3/14 4:20 PM

Galerie Hubert Winter

NIL YALTER May 8 - June 21, 2014

Breite Gasse 17 1070 Vienna Austria ph +43 1 5240976 (fax +9) office@galeriewinter.at www.galeriewinter.at

winter_placed.indd 10

16/04/2014 10:53

NOTVITAL HEaDS 22 MaY – 21 JunE 2014

PARIS

011_AR.indd 11

FRANCE

7 RUE DEBELLEYME

T 331 4272 9900

ROPAC.NET

16/04/2014 10:53

The Distant Sound Susan Philipsz

SSB 4.25 KHz SSB 4.27 KHz SSB 4.34 KHz 24 May – 21 September 2014 Norway Sweden Denmark

THE EUROPEAN UNION The European Regional Development Fund

012_AR.indd 12

www.thedistantsound.eu

16/04/2014 10:54

Simply the best ‘With real taste and belief in art, this dealer champions (and of course sells) the best.’ Jonathan Jones, theguardian.co.uk Last month ArtReview went to Colombia to conduct some research into the country’s contemporary art scene. But it’s not going to show you the fruits of any of that now. This issue isn’t even about Colombia! Ha ha ha! You’ll have to wait until January 2015 for that. There aren’t even any amusing phone pictures – ArtReview’s handheld device exploded just after that trip (that’s how much fun ArtReview’s been having). As the naked bearded gentleman in the local swimming pool changing rooms keeps telling it every time it wraps a towel around its waist to shimmy its Speedos down to its ankles: ArtReview is such a tease. Rather, the reason ArtReview mentions its South American adventure (it was really like in a Willard Price novel) is that it couldn’t help noticing, as it travelled from gallery to gallery, the large number of artworks (mainly from the early 1990s onwards) that took Pablo Escobar and the era of extreme narcoterrorism as their subject matter. Even Fernando Botero was at it. When he was in his seventies. And that left ArtReview wondering how much context informs or even dictates the content and nature of artworks. Could you make a work of art in Colombia 10 or 20 years ago that ignored all that (say, expressing your passion for pure geometric abstraction) without looking like a blinkered fool who was utterly removed from the real world (a bit like The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones who, in a recent blogpost that took the form of a shameless suck-up to art dealer Larry Gagosian, essentially ‘argued’ that the dealer is the best so his artists must be the best)? On the evidence of the artwork ArtReview saw from the 1990s and early 2000s, the answer is: probably not. Even if you did try to ignore this part of the country’s history, did your ignoring it merely highlight it because of its absence? ‘He is the one who pushes the best stuff – it does not get better than Serra or Twombly. And who has the first show at both his new Manhattan spaces? The brilliant Urs Fischer.’ Jonathan Jones, theguardian.co.uk

The context of Jonathan Jones

AR-May -Editorial-resupply.indd 13

16/04/2014 10:55

Of course on one level this is a ridiculous notion: art doesn’t have to reflect its surroundings. We all know that. Artists have been demonstrating this since at least the late nineteenth century (if not before, but ArtReview doesn’t want to get all jingoistic about Constable and Turner – that’s 1950s ArtReview, and it’s grown up now), thinkers have been demonstrating this since at least Kant. (And while we’re at it, there’s also no way that you could characterise recent Colombian art as being the product of a collective one-track mind.) But nevertheless, ArtReview’s interest in art has always been tied to its (art’s, not ArtReview’s, although ArtReview hopes that the first leads to the second) potential relevance to and effectiveness in the context of the world around it. So all this is a long-winded way of saying that this issue is largely about context. Most obviously, for those of you who’ve read the coverlines, the context of the art scenes on the East and West coasts of the US – from how art speculation is linked to property speculation, to what to make of LA’s current art boom (the usual West Coast boosterism or the real thing?). But we also examine whether or not the emergence of Dubai as a hub for the commercial art market is, or is not, reflecting the issues of the Emirate in terms of day-to-day living (even though everyone knows the answer to that one!). We also reflect on the struggles faced by those who feel that, in the current global marketplace, art should reflect an antiestablishment (or more specifically anticapitalist) position (as well as dipping our oar into current debates about the influence of the market). And on a more general level… ‘Walking into a Gagosian gallery almost always makes me optimistic about the future of art. Keep ’em coming, I say.’ Jonathan Jones, theguardian.co.uk …whether or not an audience’s preconceptions or definitions of a discipline such as art or architecture set out the limits of what practitioners of that discipline can achieve. (ArtReview can’t help thinking of Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, compiled during the 1870s, published 1911–3: ‘Artists – All triflers. Praise their financial disinterest (archaic). Be surprised to find them dressed like everyone else (archaic). Earn insane fortunes but throw them out the window. Often invited to dine in town. A female artist can be nothing but a strumpet. What they do can hardly be called work. Architecture – There are only four kinds of architecture. Naturally one does not count Egyptian, Cyclopean, Assyrian, Indian, Chinese, Gothic, Romanesque, etc.’) And consequently, whether or not the real work of art and architecture lies in exploring the context of its own definitions. As Jonathan Jones has it, context is everything. ArtReview

The context of ArtReview’s party in Cologne

AR-May -Editorial-resupply.indd 14

16/04/2014 10:55

Tara Donovan 534 West 25th Street New York May 10 – June 28, 2014

pacegallery.com

015_AR.indd 15 TD_ArtReview_0404.indd 1

16/04/2014 10:55 4/4/14 4:58 PM

cristina iglesias tres aguas A project for Toledo

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS ASÍN

Opens April 2014, Toledo, Spain www.artangel.org.uk/tresaguas Commissioned by Artangel and El Greco 2014 Sponsored by Acciona and Liberbank Commissioned with the support of Artangel International Circle and Tres Aguas Patrons Group

Artangel.indd 16 Artangel-CI-ArtReview-3.indd 1

16/04/2014 26/02/2014 10:56 16:54

ArtReview vol 66 no 4 May 2014

Art Previewed 23

Previews by Martin Herbert 25

Guillaume Apollinaire on Hito Steyerl Interview by Matthew Collings 50

Points of View by Jonathan T.D. Neil, J.J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind, Mike Watson, Sam Jacob, Hettie Judah, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Oliver Basciano 35

The Law and Its Ideas by Daniel McClean 54

page 28 Wu Tsang, A Day in the Life of Bliss (still), 2014, three-channel video with sound. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

May 2014

AR-May-Contents.indd 17

16/04/2014 11:04

Art Featured 61

Ragnar Kjartansson by Oliver Basciano 62

After School I Art Professional, Art Market, Artworld by Christopher Mooney 84

New York Juggernaut by Jonathan T.D. Neil 70

After School II Los Angeles by Andrew Berardini 88

LA’s Art Wave by Jonathan Griffin 74

After School III New York by Jonathan T.D. Neil 90

The Expanded Photograph by David Everitt Howe 78

page 78 Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Ryan, February 16. 2011 (2011), c-print, 46 × 61 cm, edition of 3. Courtesy the artist

AR-May-Contents.indd 18

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:04

9.03 – 28.09.2014 Cose in corso Mark Manders

6.10.2013 – 31.07.2014 9’/ Unlimited Beatrice Pediconi

12.10.2014 – April 2015 Ritratto di donne Alessandra Ariatti / Chantal Joffe

4.05 – 31.07.2014 Scene Jeannette Montgomery Barron

12.10.2014 – 31.01.2015 Il corpo figurato Artworks from the Collection (1966-2005) group exhibition

permanent collection international art 1950–today thursday–sunday reservations ph. +39 0522 382484 info@collezionemaramotti.org www.collezionemaramotti.org via fratelli cervi 66 – reggio emilia – italy

PP_Costella_MARAMOTTI_Artreview.indd 1 Maramotti.indd 19

4/8/14 5:14 PM 16/04/2014 11:05

Art Reviewed 93

Tobias Rehberger, by Mark Rappolt The Night of the Great Season, by Barbara Piwowarska Ruth Proctor, by Barbara Casavecchia Anastasia Ax, by Jacquelyn Davis The Crime Was Almost Perfect, by Sam Steverlynck Francesca Woodman, by Martin Herbert Kilian Rüthemann, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Félix Luna, by Gabriela Jauregui Daniel Arsham, by Claire Rigby n12, by Iona Whittaker

Exhibitions 94 Martin Creed, by Helen Sumpter Nina Canell, by Martin Herbert Akomfrah, Boswell, Newsome, by J.J. Charlesworth Ruin Lust, by Sean Ashton A K Dolven, by Eddy Frankel Tameka Norris, by Dea Vanagan Carolee Schneemann, by Robert Barry John Skoog, by John Quin Spencer Sweeney, by Susannah Thompson Ken Okiishi, by Brienne Walsh Michel Majerus, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Sarah Szczesny, by David Everitt Howe Raster Raster, by Jonathan Griffin Mai-Thu Perret, by Ed Schad Guy Ben-Ner, by Orit Gat Scott Reeder, by Andrew Berardini Nancy Burson, by Siona Wilson Bill Viola, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Teresa Margolles, by Sara Arrhenius Ed Atkins, Frances Stark, by Kimberly Bradley

books 124 The Duchamp Dictionary, by Thomas Girst Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1946–1968, by Gregor Muir and Anne Massey The Blazing World, by Siri Hustvedt The Supermodel and the Brillo Box, by Don Thompson thE stRiP 130 oFF thE RECoRD 134

page 119 Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 1972–5/1999, b/w gelatin silver print on barite paper, 10 × 15 cm (paper 20 × 25 cm). © and courtesy George and Betty Woodman, New York/Sammlung Verbund, Vienna

AR-May-Contents.indd 20

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:04

Camilo RestRepo EL SUEÑO DE LA RAZÓN PRODUCE MONSTRUOS M Ay 2014 S

6 0 2 6 W i l S h i r e B l v d . l o S a n g e l e S , c a 9 0 0 3 6 | 3 2 3 9 3 1- 3 7 2 1 | W W W . S t e v e t u r n e r c o n t e m p o r a r y . c o m

Camilo_Restrepo_ad.indd 1 021_AR.indd 21

4/11/14 6:18 PM 16/04/2014 11:06

FutureGreats 2014

ArtReview and EFG International are proud to present the second in a series of six specially commissioned poster projects featuring unique artworks created by artists following their selection as 2014 FutureGreats. Each artwork is reproduced in ArtReview and is available as a full-size limited-edition poster in subscriber copies of the magazine.

AR-May-EFG ad.indd 22

Rebecca Birch

Rebecca Birch is a good filmmaker. She knows when to make an edit, when to take a conventional shot and when to allow the action to take place offscreen. Birch also knows how to play with light and shadow, and she knows the merits of a good song to ratchet up the emotive resonance of a situation. But what makes her a great artist isn’t any of this formal stuff; it’s the interaction she builds up with her subjects, and in the relationships she creates as part of the subtly performative process of her practice. Oliver Basciano

16/04/2014 11:07

Art Previewed

He began to wonder if he himself didn’t suffer from the ingrained, morbid apathy he liked to draw in others 23

AR-May-Dividers.indd 23

16/04/2014 11:10

26 April to 27 July 2014 An exhibition curated and designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado

10am – 6pm, daily National Museum of Singapore Free admission www.nationalmuseum.sg Showcasing 245 black and white images of our planet by world renowned photographer, Sebastião Salgado, Genesis is a culmination of Salgado’s photographic works taken at over 30 different destinations from 2004 to 2011. Presenter

In collaboration with

Supported by

Dramatic, moving and grand, Salgado’s photographs present the powerful images of our fragile planet and the intricate association between Man, animal and the environment that we all have a duty to protect.

Official Magazine Supporters UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre Christensen Fund Marin Community Foundation Wallace Global Fund Tubarao Arcelor Mittal

The National Museum of Singapore is an institution of

Image: Brazil. 2005. © Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas images

Genesis-ArtReviewAdFPFC.indd 1 genesis_placed.indd 24

4/15/14 10:0511:11 AM 16/04/2014

Previewed Vivian Suter Kunsthalle Basel through 1 June

Maria Eichhorn Kunsthaus Bregenz 10 May – 6 July

Yann Sérandour GB Agency, Paris through 31 May

Rina Banerjee LA Louver, Los Angeles 9 May – 28 June

Rebecca Horn Sean Kelly, New York 10 May – 21 June

Go-Betweens: The World Seen Through Children Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 31 May – 31 August

Navid Nuur Dundee Contemporary Arts through 15 June

Wu Tsang Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin 2 May – 31 July

Prix Pictet V&A, London 22 May – 14 June

Allen Ruppersberg Wiels, Brussels 16 May – 17 August

3 Navid Nuur, When Doubt Turns into Destiny, 1993–2011. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Previewed.indd 25

16/04/2014 11:13

of religious dogmatism as a matter of course. In 1982, in her early thirties, the Buenos Airesand one which seems to provoke that laconic 1 born, formerly Basel-based Vivian Suter arrived And while her work’s variety outwardly serves remark at the end of a song by Vivian Suter: in Panajachel, Guatemala, while travelling aesthetics, you’re invited to think past that “good grief, this is me”’. Showing in a classy towards the process as allegorical of the global through North and Central America, set up corner of former home turf, with her aesthetic home in a former coffee plantation surrounded social, of issues of identity and ecology: as current again, this could be Suter’s moment. by grevillea, avocado and mango trees, and Banjeree said in a 2012 interview, ‘when the Make a colourful segue to Rina Banerjee: 2 powerful world presses hard, people get more established two studios. In one she painted the New York-based, Indian-born painter oily, inventive and what was a terrible itch the village, its lake and nearby volcanoes: and sculptor (who lived in the UK in between) can become a triumphant molting’. in the other, closeups of encroaching banana leverages a fundamental restlessness that maniplants. At least that’s a partial, benign-sounding Now is when ArtReview leaps catlike into fests diversely, from iconography partaking of summary: Suter, about whom information is both Indian miniature painting and Victoriana 3 the big time. In Navid Nuur’s exhibition scant and who doesn’t seem to have had a solo at Dundee Contemporary Arts, writing about to canvases strung with disruptive objects, from show in a decade, appears to be a painter of inner taxidermy alligators to amber vials and icons of the exhibition, ‘no matter what opinion is included’, is to be included in the show itself, multiple faiths. As her first LA show ought to volcanoes as well as real ones; twisty, dexterous landscapes, labyrinthine abstractions and hybrids demonstrate via new paintings, drawings and ‘as an artwork’, provided the following phrase is included: ‘When you end and I begin. of the two in a blazing palette and self-possessed sculpture, Banerjee’s rootless cosmopolitanism, 2008–2014’. Presto: this is art. We’re now modernist style. Here, Bice Curiger once wrote, her fruitful scorning of geographical and hisintimidated to go on, naturally, but feel duty‘“painting” ultimately becomes the building torical dividing lines, inevitably has sociopolitbound to mention that Nuur’s biggest UK block, the matter of a new, living organism, ical undercurrents: it refuses the limitations

1 Vivian Suter, Untitled, undated, acrylic on canvas, 204 × 170 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist, Stampa, Basel, and Gaga Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City 2 Rina Banerjee, Her captivity was once someone’s treasure and even pleasure but she blew and flew away took root which grew, we knew this was like no other feather, a third kind of bird that perched on vine intertwined was neither native nor her queens daughters, a peculiar other (detail), 2011. © the artist. Courtesy LA Louver, Los Angeles

AR-May-Previewed.indd 26

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:13

5 Rebecca Horn, Der Untertan, 2013, acrylic on paper, 207 × 168 × 5 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York

4 Maria Eichhorn, Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices, 1999/2005/2008, 11 16mm films (colour, silent, each 2 min 38 sec), performance. Film strip © Bildrecht, Vienna, 2014. Courtesy the artist

show to date also includes the equally reflexive City Soil (2009–14), a 1,100-litre bin filled with incinerated rubbish generated during the show’s making, and When Doubt Turns into Destiny (1993–2011), a surveillance video in which Nuur dodges the security lights in Berlin’s alleys and courtyards – two examples of what the DutchIranian artist calls ‘interimodules’, evocations of the in-between, the transient. Invited to participate in Documenta 11, 4 in 2002, Maria Eichhorn used her fee to found The Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company, a corporation complete with real shares. Producing standalone artworks is not the German artist’s thing: the economic context of art is. (See her raffle, during a 1995 show at Leipzig train station, for roundtrip tickets to nearby destinations; purchase of a plot of land for 1997’s 5 Skulptur Projekte Münster; and 1998 video

The Social-Historical Background to the Artist’s Contract from Her Project The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement by Robert Projansky and Seth Siegelaub). This time, the Fluxus- and Conceptualism-inspired, serially collaborating Eichhorn is producing works specific to the host institution, as well as documents relating to her Documenta work and its continuation. Additionally, in a related questioning of the social and behavioural normative and what is appropriate material to show in a gallery, she’s presenting short 16mm-films from her series Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices (1999/2005/2008). Expect this mix of erotics and bureaucracy to be the rare show that bridges nipple-licking and stamp-licking. Eichhorn, Einhorn, Horn: never let it be said we don’t apply some stringent criteria to our selection of shows here. In 1968 Rebecca Horn

May 2014

AR-May-Previewed- resupply -p27&30.indd 27

produced her first body-related sculptures following an earlier yearlong spell in a sanatorium – recovering from lung poisoning after sculpting using glass fibre without a mask – during which time her parents died. The relationship between the fragile body and the environment became her theme, via her well known ‘body sculptures’ featuring prosthetic extensions (most famously Einhorn, 1971, featuring the artist with an enormous unicornlike horn jutting from her head). And bodies, their vitality and their imperfections, have been central to her diversifying œuvre (installations, sculptures, performative works, paintings and films) ever since. In her last solo show at Sean Kelly, in 2011, Horn showed skittering abstract paintings and sculpture using auxiliaries for the body, including an arcing riding crop and copper piping;

16/04/2014 11:15

6 Wu Tsang, A Day in the Life of Bliss (still), 2014, three-channel video with sound. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin

7 Allen Ruppersberg, No Time Left to Start Again/ The B and D of R’n’R #2a, 2010, silkscreen print on perforated board, silkscreen print on two cardboard boxes, laminated colour photocopies, metal hooks, dimensions variable. Photo: © Sébastien Agnetti. Courtesy Air de Paris 8 Yann Sérandour, Cactus Cuttings (detail), 2014, plant stands, books about cactus culture, fluorescent Perspex sheets, dimensions variable. Courtesy GB Agency, Paris

‘a consequence of social media avatars and No Time Left to Start Again/The B and D of R’n’R here, in the wake of Horn’s seventieth birthday, online personas developing their own conscious- (2010), is an epic archive-dive, filleting we’re promised ‘a very significant exhibition ness’, society is regulated and monitored Ruppersberg’s collection of 4,000 78rpm records of new work’, albeit with no clues at press time – somehow – by invisible bass frequencies, and into an extensive soundtrack and arranging aside from ‘The Vertebrae Oracle’, a tantalising Blis’s surveilling conflates fandom and external amateur snapshots, obituaries and images poem by Horn that we were sent, dedicated to control. Anterooms feature a sculptural collabof old records on 20 big colourful pegboards. Méret Oppenheim and speaking of the Pleiades, turquoise liver spots, an uncle’s goatee and Corfu. oration with Parisian hacker Freeka and an The result ought to be, as per for Ruppersberg, 6 Wu Tsang has, since his starmaking filminstallation involving light, crystals and mirrors. coolheaded, visually warm and marbled with and-installation turn in the 2012 Whitney If Tsang’s art veers closer to the identity melancholy – and a quicker tour of the rock-andBiennial, made vexing searches for personal politics-driven, sci-fi concept albums of Janelle roll past than sitting through Tony Palmer’s identity his thematic domain. Premiered in Monáe than to most contemporary art, we’re 1,000-minute-long documentary All You Need Is Berlin is the Massachusetts-born, transgender not complaining. Love: The Story of Popular Music (1976–80), though artist’s 40-minute, two-channel A Day in the Life A more direct relationship between art and you might want to do that after. 8 7 popular music powers Allen Ruppersberg’s of Bliss (2014), filmed in Mexico City, Houston Yann Sérandour offers a less libidinal take and Berlin. It’s 2017: the celebrity figure Blis show at Wiels, where the droll California on Conceptualism. The Brittany-born artist (played by performance artist Boychild) conceptualist goes systematic on ‘American is comparably engaged with the legacies of 1960s is oppressed by, and fighting back against, vernacular recorded music, from folk to rock, and 70s art and the possibility of reflecting an ominous group called the Looks, passing through gospel and blues’. The result, on them: literally, in Yucatan Mirror Displacements

AR-May-Previewed.indd 28

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:14

029_AR.indd 29

16/04/2014 11:16

9 something more grown up, endlessly caught in Go-Betweens: The World Seen Through (1–9), a 2008 series that inserted real mirrors the infinity loop that the figure eight represents. Children takes its title from photographer Jacob into Artforum reproductions of Robert Dijkstra returns, meanwhile, as one of Riis’s characterisation of the children of poor Smithson’s 1969 Mirror Displacement works in the 11 shortlisted photographers in this year’s immigrants in New York as intermediaries, the Mexican desert; if these are returned to the 10 Prix Pictet, held for the first time at London’s helping their parents who couldn’t speak the present by effectively inserting the living viewer V&A, which showcases some 70 works in the language, bridging the Old World and the New. into them, a later series from 2011 presents finalists’ exhibition. The prize was founded That idea of bridging worlds – a fresh curatorial photographic reproductions of antique mirrors by a Geneva private bank in 2008: the jury is modality, as handled here – is explored through with their reflective surfaces made opaque: put independent, the slant is ecological and socially artists including, alongside Riis, Christian the consecutive works together and you might minded, the entrants are typically top-tier, Boltanski, Rineke Dijkstra (of course!), Chiharu think that when you look into the past, the most and the resulting show travels the world for Shiota and Teresa Hubbard and Alexander you’ll see is your own reflection. Those projects, a year. This time around, the Prix follows up Birchler. The latter’s film Eight (2001) might be though far from an adequate guide to its previous themes – ‘Water’, ‘Earth’, ‘Growth’ exemplary: here, as a young girl tries to get Sérandour’s plays with the past – which have and ‘Power’ – with ‘Consumption’: the artists ahold of a birthday cake and eat it, she moves also involved copies of ancient sculptures and (or in one case, their estates) in the running around what seems to be a room but that then publication-based responses to Ed Ruscha books for a CHF 100,000 payday also include Boris reveals itself as a suburban backyard, only to flip and Lawrence Weiner catalogues – come, Mikhailov, Michael Schmidt, Laurie Simmons once again and be exposed as a film set. As the respectively, from Sérandour’s last two shows and the late Allan Sekula. Eyes down for film loops, the girl, whose eighth birthday it is, at GB Agency: the third arrives, with fitting a winner on 21 May. Martin Herbert hangs suspended between childishness and neatness, after another three-year interval.

9 Rineke Dijkstra, I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) (detail), 2009–10, video, 12 min (loop). Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris & New York

10 Michael Schmidt, Lebensmittel (detail), 2006–10, baryt print, 56 × 82 cm. © and courtesy the artist

AR-May-Previewed- resupply -p27&30.indd 30

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:15

doosan.indd 31

16/04/2014 11:16

El AnAtsui (GhAnAiAn, born 1944) ‘Sacred secrets unfolding’ 2006 £40,000 - 60,000 US$67,0000 - 100,000

AfricA now New Bond Street Wednesday 21 May 2014 at 2pm

bonhams.com/africanow

032_AR.indd 32

16/04/2014 11:17

contAct +44 (0)20 7468 8355 africanow@bonhams.com

032_AR.indd 33

16/04/2014 11:17

034_AR.indd 34

16/04/2014 11:18

Points of View Jonathan T.D. Neil An empassioned debate takes a turn for the worse J.J. Charlesworth A trip to Dubai reveals the ways in which contemporary art is now a driver for the globalised economic system

Maria Lind The performance of bureaucracy

Hettie Judah Fashion in a museum! Art on the catwalk!?

Mike Watson Why art and politics?

Jonathan Grossmalerman It’s not me, it’s you

Sam Jacob To what extent do our preconceptions about individual disciplines shape what those disciplines produce?

Oliver Basciano Off-space No 20: Project LALO, London & Los Angeles

Jonathan T.D. Neil An empassioned debate takes a turn for the worse The flap that erupted after the collector and entrepreneur Stefan Simchowitz was identified as Public Enemy No 1 in Katya Kazakina’s article about ‘art flippers’ (that species of collector who buys and sells quickly in search of profits) on Bloomberg.com this past February took a dark turn at the beginning of April, and it should make us pause a moment and rethink the stakes involved in our arguments about art, money, markets and value. But first, the turn itself: On 3 April, Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor published a short roundup of recent commentary by Andrew Goldstein, whose interview with Simchowitz on Artspace.com is what originally goaded critic Jerry Saltz to pen a takedown of Simchowitz over at New York Magazine’s Vulture blog, and Kenny Schachter to defend Simchowitz in the New York Observer’s Gallerist blog by showing how his speculativedealing strategies are just the latest in a long line of such activities that reaches back to Duchamp. In this regard the content of Maneker’s post was benign enough – it merely pointed to some choice quotes from Schachter and Goldstein – but it ran under the title of ‘L’Affaire Simchowitz’, which one must assume was meant to raise the spectre of the Dreyfus affair and anti-Semitism, though whose anti-Semitism exactly it would be hard to say. Then a day later Simchowitz himself posted to his Facebook page a quote that linked to the Wikipedia entry for Werner Sombart, a German

economist who, in 1911, published a book titled The Jews and Modern Capitalism. The quote itself didn’t come from that entry, but from the one for ‘Economic Antisemitism’, where it is written that ‘Werner Sombart concluded that the perceptions of cheating or dishonesty were simply a manifestation of Christian frustration at innovative commercial practices of Jews, which were contrary to custom and tradition of the Christian merchants, but were otherwise ethical.’ Simchowitz writes that the quote and link were sent to him by a friend who wished to remain anonymous, but he nevertheless felt compelled to post it under his own name and so to spread the insinuation that other forces, anti-Semitic ones, are in play. Never mind that Sombart is speaking of Christian merchants’ attitudes in the early modern era, or that what he actually concludes is that if you look ‘through the catalogue of “sins” laid at the door of the Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries, you will find nothing in it that the trader of today does not regard as right and proper, nothing that is not taken as a matter of course in every business’. Sombart’s work, it’s worth pointing out, was in large part a response to Max Weber’s better-known The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), and it sought to position Judaism as a positive guiding force in the development of modern economic liberalism. ‘Throughout the centuries,’ Sombart writes, ‘the Jews championed the cause of

May 2014

AR-May-PoV.indd 35

individual liberty in economic activities against the dominating views of the time.’ Now, the implications are clear: the slights that Simchowitz suffered after espousing his ‘disruptive’ views on the art marketplace (galleries are monopolies that are dragging artists down, money is the best publicity and so on) are driven by an unspoken antiSemitism that pervades critics’ opposition to that marketplace in their orthodox commitment to art’s pursuit of the good and the true and the beautiful. And if Sombart’s work is meant to license an expansion of this logic, then any moves to hamper (neo)liberal economic activity may themselves be viewed as having antiSemitism – however unconscious, however unspoken – as their animating force. The insinuations are gross, and the implications contradictory, when not outright stupid (Communism was a Jewish conspiracy too, after all). Simchowitz may have been inelegant in the way he promoted his interests and enthusiasms for profiting off the work of up-and-coming artists, and he is too confident in his own success (as many newly minted millionaires often are), but he’s an advocate of art and artists in his own way, and there must be a place for him and his ideas in the discussion of art’s value both in and out of the marketplace. Trot out hackneyed and false paranoias, however, and you trivialise and cheapen that discussion before it can truly begin.

16/04/2014 11:19

J.J. Charlesworth A trip to Dubai reveals the ways in which contemporary art is now a driver for the globalised economic system Driving at 120kph on the six-lane Sheikh Zayed freeway through Dubai, calmly tailgating, my taxi driver, a Bangladeshi, tells me he’s been in Dubai for seven years. He has family back at home, a wife, two kids. He makes decent money driving a taxi, by Bangladeshi standards. I explain that I’m here once more for the Art Dubai art fair; yes, he says, it’s getting busier this time of year, business is good, but things are getting more expensive. Rents are going up, he complains, particularly since the UAE won the bidding to host Expo 2020 in Dubai, last November. ‘World Expo’, burbles the Expo 2020 website, ‘is a catalyst for economic, cultural and social transformation and generates important legacies for the host city and nation.’ Here in Dubai, I’m wondering what kind of catalyst art might be for this dusty, busy Emirate city-state. Without a doubt there’s a sort of art scene growing up here. Commercial galleries are developing, and there are one or two nonprofit initiatives. Art Dubai is growing in confidence, along with its sister fair Design Days Dubai and the city-sponsored Sikka emerging-art fair. Effectively, though, these developments of the cultural scene are a government-sanctioned project, part of a systematic attempt by Dubai to transform itself into a hub for finance, trade and expatriate high-living. Art Dubai and its other initiatives are co-owned by the DIFC, DIFC = Dubai Dubai’s financial free zone. International ‘DIFC has been designed Finance Centre, whose ‘vision’ to live up to the expectais ‘to be a global tions of the elite, and financial hub’ strikes the perfect balance between retail, commercial and residential space. Work and play, day and night, the district enhances people’s lifestyles,’ declares the DIFC’s mission statement. Building-

site hoardings advertise endless vistas of luxury villa living… Contemporary art, then, is part of the ‘offer’, and it’s striking how readily art is generated to fill such a context. What’s remarkable – and unnerving – about the invention of an art scene, almost from scratch, in a place like Dubai, is how it bears witness to the expansion of the idea of the ‘contemporary’ as a globally transplantable cultural form, virally reduplicated as a functional part of any self-respecting, modernising, social elite’s image of itself, of how it behaves and how it wants to spend its leisure time and wealth. There may be good art, bad art and indifferent art on show and on sale at Art Dubai, and it is of course interesting to discover artists and works that haven’t yet established their reputations further west. The visual ‘language’ and conventions of contemporary art are present and operating Emiratis smoothly. But this very seammake up lessness and smoothness brings only 15–20 me to consider how contempopercent of the UAE rary art now relates to its population ‘outside’ – to the society in which it operates. ‘Outside’, in a place like Dubai, is a strange place. It’s a place where few have the right to remain, other than the Emiratis themselves, and where everyone else comes and goes, stays for a few years, works, makes money, leaves. If you don’t have a job, if you’re not sponsored, you don’t stay, whether you’re the white Western expat or the taxi driver from Bangladesh. There are strange exceptions, like the young artist I talk to on the drinks terrace who is the fourth generation of his family to live in Dubai without proper citizenship, caught in the various paradoxes of exile and emigration – where others can’t stay in Dubai, he can’t leave, as he’d never be let back in to the country he grew up in.

If contemporary art is Western in origin, then its cultures, discourses and institutions evolved spontaneously, organically, in the historical emergence of the public sphere, in the battles for democracy and free expression, for what it meant to be part of a public and what it meant, as an artist, to address a public, all the while deliberating what art’s role in a society was meant to be. In the world after globalisation, though, it’s as if this Western phenomenon has been carefully emptied of that history, surgically Art has disconnected from its ties to a living, become conflicted social reality, to become a tool an infinitely reduplicable module that can be plugged into the topdown development of the new ‘global city’, where art is no more than a form of lifestyle choice, and in which it is largely indifferent – necessarily so – to the society it inhabits. As the US-based Global Cultural Districts Network argues, the arts have ‘played a major role in defining the identity of established global capitals like London, New York, Berlin, and Paris, but many of the entertainment and arts districts in which they are located have developed organically, often over the course of several centuries, and without formal investment strategies. Today, cultural infrastructure is increasingly planned large-scale and top down.’ And why is that? Because ‘globalization has led to competition between cities and regions for inward investment, knowledge workers, and tourists. Large-scale cultural projects are now an increasingly important driver of competitiveness and are key in branding and differentiating regions and cities.’ Once modern art was hated by the system it challenged from outside. Contemporary art, it seems, is now both the system’s driver, and its brand.

Antonia Carver, HH Sheikh Mohammed at Art Dubai 2014. Courtesy Art Dubai

AR-May-PoV.indd 36

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:19

Maria Lind The performance of bureaucracy Where do revolutions happen nowadays? In the streets, is the most immediate answer; on Tahrir Square, in Zuccotti Park and most recently in Maidan Square too. But just as often they happen behind closed doors, far away from the visibility of outdoor public space and the supposed transparency of democratic decisionmaking. In fact, some of the most profound revolutions take place in locations where iPhones are switched off and TV cameras are absent: at board meetings and on the desks of bureaucrats. A revolutionary plan, which changed the course of both economics and politics in Sweden, was shaped on 21 November 1985 in a villa in the countryside near Stockholm. The board of the Central Bank of Sweden met there to come to terms with the weakening economy, decreasing profits for industry and increasing unemployment. Their solution was to make the banking sector autonomous by deregulating the credit market, an initiative endorsed by Olof Palme’s Social Democratic government at the time. This unspectacular, and largely unknown – albeit certainly revolutionary – event is the object of artist Andjeas Ejiksson’s work 1985 (2011). The work takes the form of a play featuring the characters who attended the board meeting, conceived for the villa itself and its surrounding picturesque landscape. It was commissioned by Lisa Rosendahl, director of the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (Iaspis), itself part of the state authority Arts Grants Committee, which answers directly to the Ministry of Culture. That the influence of bureaucracies has been growing rapidly since the advent of ‘new public management’ in Western Europe is palpable in most sectors of society, whether the influence is revolutionary or not. Power has moved from the representatives of parliamentary democracy

to public and private bureaucrats. A prominent feature in this process is the ubiquity and impressive volume of assessments and controls of different kinds. We count, weigh and measure more or less everything, and evaluate the results. The protocols for doing so go by various names: reviewing, inspection, certification, revision and quality control are some of them. The field of contemporary art is as affected by this as much as anything else; it is palpable in both artworks and their subjects, and how organisations operate. But in contrast to Benjamin Buchloh’s, ‘aesthetics of administration’, it has more to do with methodology, protocols and rituals than visual aesthetics – it has to do with the performance of bureaucracy. But why do we review and assess so much? And what are the consequences? One explanation is that the public sector over the last 20 years has gone through a process of ‘organisation making’ – ie, agencies and other entities have striven to become ‘proper’ organisations. For this to work effectively, they need – understandably – to be definable, measurable and manageable, characteristics derived from steering mechanisms used in business management. In addition to this there has been a tendency to decentralise, which has led to responsibility moving downwards in the hierarchies. In order to make sure that this freedom is not used in the wrong way and that disorder does not occur, reviews and assessments are useful. But this is a prescriptive use: the assumption is that without the inspections and assessments, problems might occur, so one needs to perform the inspecting and assessing as a core activity. And as we know, reviews and assessments often lead to a demand for more – and presumably Andjeas Ejiksson, 1985 – Outline for a Revolutionary Drama, 2011, poster. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-PoV.indd 37

better – reviews and assessments. Ultimately they are used as an instrument of control – to make people do what you want them to do. When this logic of assessment starts to dominate other logics (for example, professional logics specific to each field of activity), an ‘imaginary rationality’ comes about. Especially when the reviewers and assessors can implement sanctions. Furthermore, as these figures rarely delve into the activities they are examining themselves, they have to rely on reports, which in turn makes the bureaucracy grow, stimulating rituals of control. However, reviews and assessments are often made too narrowly and any new knowledge they might produce doesn’t enter the relevant arenas – at the end of the day, change in organisations happens through established power relations and ideology, not through reviews and assessments. Whereas politicians hang on to the idea that reviews and assessments signal action and engagement, they are in reality replacing political responsibility. For Ejiksson, this – how bureaucracies become sites of condensed influence and executive power, a force to be reckoned with – is fertile ground. However, 1985 still waits to be staged. The Arts Grants Committee, through a high-ranking bureaucrat, in 2013 suddenly erased the play from the agenda of art projects by Iaspis that had to be approved by the board. This makes the context of the commissioning of the play, via a state agency that has gone from being, during the 1990s, one of the most vivid and artist-centric platforms in Europe to now being ruled by the bureaucracy, even more interesting. In all its banality. Iaspis also happens to be the place where, during my tenure there, the word ‘bureaucracy’ was banned from official use – as Foucault already taught us: real power always tries to conceal itself.

16/04/2014 11:19

Mike Watson Why art and politics? In the realm of cultural theory, both Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek have recently observed that we live in a world that is perhaps capitalist beyond any possibility of a political or cultural conversion. Such an observation – more a call to action for the left than an admission of its defeat – underpins the commitment of some artists, such as Tania Bruguera, Chto Delat?, Oliver Ressler and Voina, to name but a few, to politically oriented art, although Žižek himself warns of the dangers of politics influenced by art. The philosopher points in Living in the End Times (2010) to the justification that the poet has historically provided for the dictator. Yet while it could be argued that behind every dictator there is a poet or philosopher (one could think of Nero’s use of Seneca, the abuse of Neitzsche’s philosophy by the Nazi party or the closeness of Mussolini to Gabriele D’Annunzio), it could also be argued that behind every dictator there is equally a military machine, a judiciary, a political system, a belief system, a network of allies, an energy source and a food and amenities supply – and therefore a butcher, a baker and, dare we say, a proverbial candlestick maker. In short, the poet is no more responsible for the actions of the dictator, monarch or democratically elected leader than everyone else in the vast network – ie, ‘society’ – that supports them. This is very true of state-backed capitalism – the curious compromise between statism and the free-market mentality that has predominated in the West since the global economic crisis began – with which even the most ardent leftists are complicit, given their participation in the system of exchange and taxation that supports the aforesaid compromise. This is not only due to the fact that we must all purchase items that feed back into the chain of exchange,

but also because absolutely every action we undertake – for or against capital – enters into that same exchange system. If capitalism is the world and everything in it, then the brick through the window of the chief superintendent’s car, however potent a symbol, is merely another gesture played out within that selfsame whole, feeding into its mechanisms, of insurance, judicial process, trade, etc. Ultimately, it arguably stops making sense even to talk of capitalism, for if everything is capitalist – even those few who exclude themselves from the system exist in it – there can be no capitalism, as an aberration, to speak of. Indeed, it is perhaps a fallacy to speak

It is perhaps a fallacy to speak of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as if the left were beautiful souls made to suffer a bad world of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as if the left were beautiful souls made to suffer a bad world. No one is outside what is a social whole, and an ‘outsider mentality’ arguably serves to fence in various opposition groups and either alienate them from that social whole or make them isolated and more easily observable by a hostile media and legal system responsible for maintaining the legitimacy of the state and its relationship with ‘capital’. One may be forgiven for thinking at this point that we are doomed to slavery at the hands of an uncaring system that is fast developing an ever more advanced system of surveillance. As true as this may be, there is something deeply unfulfilling in just sitting back and accepting a steady slide into worldwide slavery. As Theodor

W. Adorno argues in his 1961 essay ‘On Commitment’, art must continue to exist in order to avoid a total ‘surrender to cynicism’. Indeed, there is something in the abstraction of poetry, or of art in general, that can arguably resist the dry rationalist auspices of finance capital. This is not because art stands outside society, or because it has some intrinsic properties that might prove exemplary of a better way of life. Art is as complicit with capital as any other realm of society, perhaps more so given that an artwork’s only strictly utilitarian – as opposed to aesthetic – value is its resale value, whereas most other manmade objects have some useful property aside from their investment potential. Add to this the fact that the great majority of artworks made don’t have any investment value at all, and one can see just quite how useless art is. The art academies of the world are in effect adept factories for the production of landfill. Yet it is precisely in this uselessness that art’s political calling resides. In a senseless world led by a runaway financial machine in which political and intellectual opposition is so far embedded as to make critique impossible, the uselessness of art offers a refuge. If nothing else works, at least art might, and when it invariably doesn’t, we can at least take comfort in the fact that we never really expected it to, and then try again. Many will find this hypothesis unconvincing, but for now this ‘trying’ is the best antidote some have found to the madness of an increasingly controlled world. Any more lofty assertions as to arts political capacity risk giving a false hope. Though it is in the serious, diligent and continued application of art to political ends, such as with the work of Bruguera and Ressler, that breakthroughs may be made.

Slavoj Žižek

AR-May-PoV.indd 38

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:19

YOUR OWN PIECE OF SPRING. STRICTLY LIMITED AT LUMAS. Hand signed, limited editions. From over 160 artists. At affordable prices.

CHRISTINE JASCHEK

£ 430

limited & hand signed

Cherry Blossom

90 x 120 cm

36 / 100

AMSTERDAM . BERLIN . BRUSSELS . DUBAI . LONDON . MOSCOW . NEW YORK . PARIS . VIENNA . ZURICH

LUMAS.COM LUMAS_.indd 39

16/04/2014 11:22

Sam Jacob To what extent do our preconceptions about individual disciplines shape what those disciplines produce? I’m in the middle of a pitch – the awful inspection parade that designers undergo to get a job. But this time it’s different. I’m working with an artist [name redacted due to contractual reasons]. I’ve always argued that working across the seemingly arbitrary boundaries of creative disciplines is In which exciting, inspiring and, it has the author has a few to be said, challenging. complaints Perhaps that’s because about the ‘disciplines’ are like a costume way his day department that outfits us such job works that our roles and responsibilities in the grand narrative are clearly defined. These tell us where the limits are and how we as practitioners should act. Of course, there are many exceptions – a whole host of creative types who rage against the limits of their particular ways. Think of the antiart of Dada, for example, or of Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964). But often their rage – because it’s directed at the heart of a particular discipline – is entirely consumed by its own world. A collaboration is not (necessarily) instigated to pull down the walls between one world and another. But it is different from working alone. And in the manner of British comedian Les Dawson’s gossiping housewives, it can offer the opportunity for a cross-cultural chat across the garden fence or at the kitchen table. It’s in this that surprising, exciting and depressing things come to light. Some of the things that in your own world are completely natural suddenly seem, when reflected back at you, entirely arbitrary. When we’re told that we need everything

AR-May-PoV.indd 40

costed and rectified by a structural engineer, Artists, on the other hand, he explains, I just nod. But my companion’s eyebrows rise have their path strewn with laurels, are cajoled and his eyes roll at the thought that it’s us, and pampered into a commission rather than for a tiny fee, expected to resolve all this threatened with legal and contractual issues at pragmatic detail. To see your own discipline the first turn. The artist is there to do his or her filtered through another is like shining light thing, and these days the client is there to help through a prism. The everyday foundation bring that into the world. of your own practice is split into a spectrum Do we choose our disciplines, or do our of previously invisible components. disciplines shape us? Is it the x number of years A conversation is one thing. But the real of academic indoctrination and cultural boundaries of a discipline come down with assimilation that shape our relationship to force when its rules and regulations – insurance making work? Or is it our inherent tendencies policies, health-and-safety procedures and that draw us towards different centres of professional liabilities – are put in front of you, gravity? Or are we simply forced to comply with demanding a signature. It’s among these the terms of engagement set out before us? legal clauses defining roles and responsibilities Working across disciplinary boundaries that you’ll find what they inevitably challenges the preconcepreally think you’re there for. tions of the parties involved – whether A passionate argument These are nonnegotiable these preconceptions are thrust upon against overregulation, health-and-safety – not a conversation, but us or are internal ones we think tell procedures and other a demand. us who we are. Even having the rules rules that suppress We go down to the site of the game set out in starker contrast the limitless possibilities only demonstrates that our work to meet the client, and engendered by total are told everything we can’t isn’t natural or normal but a potlatch artistic freedom do and everything we have of conventions. to. The look on [artist’s And what of the idea of creativity name redacted] is quite something. ‘It’s like itself? Far before a project comes into view, long you’re a plumber!’ he says. And it’s true before a brief is written, the ambition and reach in a way. As an architect the client assumes of a project are already limited by the way a that you’re there to provide him with a service, discipline frames the world. Possibilities are to give him a solution to his or her problem. ruled in and out, included or excluded by Even, as in this case, when his or her ‘problem’ default based on custom and tradition. Perhaps is to make something interesting with very the only way to open up these possibilities is little functionality. for all of us – in our assumed roles as architects, designers, artists or whatever – to lean over Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough, the fences between our respective patches and The Les Dawson Show. start talking to one another. Photo: ITV/REX. Courtesy ITV Archive

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:19

Hettie Judah Fashion in a museum!? Art on the catwalk!? The tired debate over whether or not fashion has a place in ‘the art museum’ tends to ignore the fact that ‘fashion’ is as promiscuous a term as ‘art’. Just as there is much art unlikely to be granted space in that monolith of current conceptual mores ‘the museum’, so there is fashion that seems tailormade for curatorial titillation. With her affection for extreme exoskeletal structures, curious embrace of the modern world and the latest manufacturing technology, and meticulous couture-level handwork, Amsterdam-based fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s is a natural fit; currently her work features in museum exhibitions in Calais, New York, Missouri and Miami. Each of van Herpen’s collections is created through collaboration: variously with architects, scientists, engineers, dancers, composers and artists. Previous seasons have included acrylic garments that reproduce the furl of water cresting mid-splash across the body, jagged crystal structures jutting like giant sea urchin prickles from a dress, clouds of smoke, headpieces intended as physical evocations of synaesthesia and a leatherIt’s wrong! worked bodice of gothic complexity inspired by the facade of Chartres Cathedral. Her most recent collection was ostensibly a rare step into the world of prêt-à-porter, though with couture pieces thrown in, including dresses studded liberally with artificially produced fire-opals and a state-of-the-art flexible 3D printed dress with the texture and milky whiteness of raw squid. Six years into her career, van Herpen’s work is far more often seen in display cabinets than

on the red carpet. Despite protesting that her physical perfection as a commodity, and designs are absolutely intended to be worn, and homogeneous off-the-peg beauty. only come alive on a moving human body, the Shrink has been widely exhibited since 1995 niche of women who have both the flair and (including, recently, at Eyebeam in New York the financial wherewithal to wear van Herpen’s and as part of the File festival in São Paulo), but creations is a pretty tight one, populated, at Malstaf intended it initially as an experiential a guess, by Daphne Guinness, Lady Gaga installation, an invitation to test how and Björk. Put baldly, without their easily humans can adapt to a new environSo wrong! inclusion in museum displays, very few ment. While rather taken aback by the people would ever have the chance to see casual lack of attribution that has dogged these pieces, in all their compelling, advenimages of the installation since the show, turous materiality, at close range. Malstaf’s respect for van Herpen as a creative force has made him philosophical about Next to van Herpen’s how the work has been skewed by its context. fashion collection, Shrink “If I had a perfectly clear message to say to the audience, why make an elaborate installabecame a statement on physical tion? I think it’s interesting that the work perfection as a commodity, can evolve.” A few years back, van Herpen’s beautiful, and homogeneous alien creations seemed far removed from off-the-peg beauty any kind of commodifiable application and The flipside of the question of fashion’s her investigations into physics and emerging place in ‘the museum’ is whether art has a place technologies motivated more by creative on the catwalk. This last season, van Herpen’s indulgence than commerce. “In my work the designs risked being upstaged by the ‘set’ – a process and the developing stage of a collection version of Lawrence Malstaf’s artwork Shrink are as important as the end result. Maybe in this (1995) in which three models were suspended stage it becomes even more important to me,” vacuum-wrapped between layers of plastic in she admits. “I want to enrich myself and bring the centre of the runway, fed air through my work into an non-safety-zone every time umbilically-corded tubes. Populated by ‘perfect’ I create.” As wearable tech and intelligent bodies – including the Belgian supermodel garments suddenly become the stuff of the Hannelore Knuts – and watched by the editors present, however, van Herpen’s engagement of the world’s most powerful fashion magazines, with science and engineering seems startlingly the context of the runway had a definite impact relevant and to offer a future in which Google on Shrink. Next to van Herpen’s ‘Bio Piracy’ Glass might make one look numinous rather collection, Shrink became a statement on than slappable.

Lawrence Malstaf, Shrink (installation view at Iris van Herpen fashion show 2014), 1995, vacuum installation. Courtesy Galerie Fortlaan, Ghent

May 2014

AR-May-PoV.indd 41

16/04/2014 11:19

Jonathan Grossmalerman It’s not me, it’s you Phew! It sure is wonderful to be out of my ugly funk! Who would believe that, emerging from my depressed torpor, I’d so easily transition from outrageously scaled paintings of beautiful vaginas and penises, sometimes together but just as often apart, to a series of much more modestly scaled, intimate portraits of my very close friends. Portraits of their faces, mind you! And I’m just tickled pink at the response being so positive! Sales-wise, I mean. While I’ve sold each and every one of the portraits (thank you very much!), the critics have, of course, been somewhat less kind. That’s not to suggest that I haven’t appreciated some of their insights. You know… the one or two that came after all the name-calling. It’s funny – when you get as immersed in a project as I do, it’s sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. And it can, frankly, be illuminating to read the responses of people who see the work with clear eyes and no vested interest. For instance, until I read about it in The New York Times, it never, ever… at all… not once… ever occurred to me that each one of the friends I chose to paint, by pure happenstance also proved to be a ‘murderous’ tyrant, warlord, kleptocrat or oligarch. On reflection, I admit, that is pretty crazy! I mean, there I was, so involved with the paintings’ beauty, subtle composition and complexity of emotional interplay that it never dawned on me how absolutely and without a doubt all of the

faces I was committing to canvas were owned by power-hungry dictators and their henchmen, who also happened to be, by a series of coincidences so random that they really could only be called super-coincidences, my close friends and confidantes. I really wonder if it says more about art, though, and less about the nature of… my friends or… their particular crimes. (Because – let’s face it! – however well-meaning their intentions and generally positive their results,

Until I read about it, it never ever occurred to me that each one of the friends I chose to paint, by pure happenstance also proved to be a ‘murderous’ tyrant, warlord, kleptocrat or oligarch we should call their actions for what they are!) As viewers, I think we all agree that ultimately despots are a great deal more interesting to look at than… mmmm… someone like you. I’ve been thinking about this a while, so forgive me if I go on. What is it about them? Is it because they simply feel bigger? I don’t mean like they ‘feel’ bigger to us but that they themselves feel feelings on a bigger or on a larger scale. Do you get my meaning? Why is it that the eyes of Bashar convey deeper sentiments than – let’s say – Fernando, who sells

me my morning bacon, egg and cheese on a kaiser roll at the corner deli. You know, sometimes I wonder, when Fernando is busy making my delicious breakfast sandwich… if I were to… I don’t know… let’s say out of nowhere just burn him with my cigarette or cut him with the kitchen knife that he keeps on the counter close enough to me that I could grab it and slice his arms to ribbons before he could do anything about it… would he feel pain like I do? No doubt he would not. But the likelihood that he would scream and carry on as though he did feel pain like me is one of the reasons I never follow through on these kinds of thoughts. These really are the big questions. I mean, why is it that when I look into the eyes of Viktor Yanukovych I see an infinite universe of desire and passion and conquest, and when I look into Fernando’s eyes I only see weariness and anxiety and glints of the small pleasures in life, like, for instance, the joy of hearing your children laugh or the refreshing act of sipping a cold beer. God, I hate Fernando! If only his bacon, egg and cheese on kaiser rolls weren’t so remarkably delicious. Come to think of it, I could certainly use a cold beer right about now… perhaps I’ll go by the deli as soon as I finish this… because the thing about bacon, egg and cheese on a kaiser roll is that it’s really not just for breakfast, even though it’s commonly misunderstood to be. But that’s not my point. My point is… Good God I’m hungry!

My close friend and confidante Bashar – beautiful eyes

AR-May-PoV.indd 42

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:22

yarat_placed.indd 43

16/04/2014 11:23

Oliver Basciano Off-space No 20: Project LALO, London & Los Angeles There are certain cities that have established artistic links, even at a grassroots level – for example, the EasyJet route between Berlin and London is one well travelled by emerging artists, and group shows in the one city pepper the CVs of residents of the other. It’s therefore relatively easy to keep abreast of what’s going on, of artistic themes emerging, of artists on their way up. Much of this has to do with the relative affordability of the travel, of course. The art scenes of places further away from each other – even cities long established as art meccas – must, for most of us, be investigated from afar, through art magazine reviews, e-flux mailouts, Contemporary Art Daily-style blogs, museum shows and the booths of visiting galleries at local art fairs. The problem is that the distant audience only gets the art establishment’s mediation of a particular scene, either critically (those galleries that attract the attention of review commissioners) or economically (those that can afford the e-flux fees or are approved by an art-fair committee), and this will, more often than not, be at the expense of artist-run spaces. It’s in the face of all this that artists Neil Taylor and Harriet Murray, who run North London nonprofit gallery Campbell Works, together with their American counterpart, painter Max Presneill, who runs Los Angeles-based nonprofit curatorial venture ARTRA, came up with Project LALO, an exhibition exchange between ten spaces across the two cities, which runs over the course of three months up to this May.

Ironically, the project has its roots in an art fair. Taylor and Murray had travelled to LA in 2012, alongside neighbouring London gallery the Institute of Jamais Vu (see Off-space No 11) to take part in the Co/Lab initiative for nonprofit spaces at Art Platform. Though they thought an art fair an odd context, and not something they might have sought out independently, the consequences were positive. There they became friends with Presneill, and a few other artists who were running similar projects in old industrial spaces or unused retail units

Each were then paired, according to their curatorial interests and the physical size of their spaces, with a transatlantic counterpart as a ‘blind date’ with very little in the way of budgets. Together they cooked up a plan to develop this new friendship into something bigger. Taylor and Murray set about approaching like-minded UK spaces, and Presneill did the same on the West Coast. Each was then paired – according to a rough approximation of curatorial interests and the physical size of spaces – with a transatlantic counterpart as a ‘blind date’. With the introductions made, the gallery pairs were then at liberty to take their projects in whatever direction they wished,

albeit with the stipulation that each show mixed artists from home and abroad. In March, for example, Londoners Marie D’Elbée and Jonny J.J. Winter were paired up with Angelenos Courtney Arwin, Kio Griffith, Roni Feldman and Presneill himself at Project/ Number in North London. Simultaneously D’Elbée and Winter also had works in Mind the Gap at Mid-City LA space Autonomie, alongside a plethora of expat Brits living Stateside. Meanwhile London stalwart and champion of the city’s painters, Transition, worked with Weekend, the Hollywood gallery that is also quite partial to the medium, and Jaus in West Los Angeles is currently hooked up with Campbell Works itself, hosting an exhibition that centres on the contemporary legacy of the landscape as a motif in art. At its heart the project is about creating a complementary network to the one that operates in the wider – and that is largely to say commercial – artworld, in which there is a free and very necessary flow of art and artists around the globe, where localism is something to be exported. The network that Project LALO is instigating is one that is harder to keep on the road, of course; it hasn’t got the cash to maintain it, but the organisers have replaced dollars with collective energy and labour. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Campbell Works has been spurred to think about expanding the model. Trip to Japan for Project TOLO, anyone?

Land Skipe, 2014, (installation view). Courtesy Jaus, Los Angeles, and Campbell Works, London

AR-May-PoV.indd 44

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:20

ERIK DEN BREEJEN There’s a Riot Goin’ On

Liza Minelli in Caberet, 2014, acrylic on linen, 72 x 84 inches

May 1 - June 7, 2014

frieght and volume placed.indd 45

530 West 24th Street New York, NY 212 691 7700 freightandvolume.com

16/04/2014 11:24

L Y A Y M RO ADE LS AC HOO SC OW SH 14 20

Admission Free Open: Oct-Mar Apr-Sept August

Tues – Sun 10am-4pm 10am-5pm 10am-6pm

Collective Gallery City Observatory & City Dome 38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh, EH7 5AA + 44 (0)131 556 1264 mail@collectivegallery.net www.collectivegallery.net

Image credit: Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013, video (colour, sound), 13 mins. Courtesy the artist, Silex Films and kamel mennour, Paris.

Camille Henrot Grosse Fatigue 10.05.14 – 16.06.14

Julie Born Schwartz Alex Chase White Alex Clarke Coco Crampton Natalie Dray Paul Eastwood Marisa J. Futernick Daniel Lipp Ellen Macdonald Murray O’Grady Aimée Parrott Hannah Perry Ariane Schick Paul Schneider Gabriel Stones Alice Theobald 13 – 29 June 2014 Admission free royalacademy.org.uk/ raschools

Funded by:

Exhibition

Melanie Smith Melanie Smith

Melanie Smith free 2014 11 April –Admission 15 June

11 April - 15 June 2014

Born in the UK, Melanie Smith moved to Mexico 25 years ago and has becomeAdmission one of their most free celebrated 11 contemporary April - 15 June 2014 artists.

RA Schools sponsored by

Born in the UK, Melanie Smith moved to Mexico 25 years ago and has Art Review.indd 1 most become one of their celebrated contemporary artists.

Exhibition

14/04/2014 14:21

Her first UK survey exhibition includes film, photography, painting and sculpture.

Melanie Smith’s first survey exhibition in the UK focuses on work made since the early 1990s that relate to the artist’s own experience of migration from the UK to Mexico 25 years ago. Includes a new film, Fordlandia (2014), shot in the Amazon amidst the remains of an abandoned city and rubber plantation built in the 1920s by Henry Ford.

Admission free Includes the prėmiere of a new film, Fordlandia (2014), shot in an abandoned city and rubber plantation built in the Amazon in the 1920s by Henry Ford.

Melanie Smith, film stills from Fordlandia, 2014.

Includes the prėmiere of a new film, Fordlandia (2014), shot in an abandoned city and rubber plantation built in the Amazon in the 1920s by Henry Ford.

Film stills from Fordlandia, 2014

Melanie Smith, film stills from Fordlandia, 2014.

Exhibition presented with: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

MK Gallery is supported by

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

MK Gallery 900 Midsummer Blvd Milton Keynes MK9 3QA www.mkgallery.org

Exhibition supporters:

Exhibition presented with: Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

~ Kilchmann, Zurich, Zurich, Galeria Galeria Nara Nara Roesler, Sao Paulo; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Roesler, São Paulo; Regina Pinho dewho Almeida Regina Pinho de Almeida and those wish to remain anonymous. and those who wish to remain anonymous.

MK Gallery is supported by

MK Gallery 900 Midsummer Blvd Milton Keynes MK9 3QA www.mkgallery.org

Exhibition supporters:

Melanie_Smith_A1_Poster_Mar14_v11.indd 1

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo; Regina Pinho de Almeida and those who wish to remain anonymous.

Melanie_Smith_A1_Poster_Mar14_v11.indd 1

046_AR.indd 46

MK Gallery 900 Midsummer Blvd Milton Keynes MK9 3QA www.mkgallery.org

4/2/2014 4:33:50 PM

16/04/2014 11:25

PIMLICO TATEGALLERY @TATE

Until 19 October FREE ADMISSION

Supported by

TATE BRITAIN COMMISSION 2014

Victor Man Zephir

“Artist of the Year” 2014 March 21– June 22 Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin Daily 10 am – 8 pm Mondays admission free deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com

047_AR.indd 47

Phyllida Barlow untitled: dock; stockadecrates (detail), 2014 © Phyllida Barlow Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

16/04/2014 11:27

Half of What You See, 2010, Fayçal Baghriche, photograph Celementine Crochet

Intervening Space: From the Intimate to the World 16/05/14—28/06/14 Group show of contemporary Algerian artists The Mosaic Rooms 226 Cromwell Road London SW5 0SW Tues–Sat 11am–6pm, Free www.mosaicrooms.org

Comar Ilana Halperin: Learning To Read Rocks Thurs 29 May – Sat 26 July Opening night Thurs 29 May 6pm – 8pm Gallery, An Tobar comar.co.uk 01688 302211

AR-48.indd 48

16/04/2014 11:28

Aijing Studio.indd 49

16/04/2014 11:28

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 29

Guillaume Apollinaire on Hito Steyerl Interview by Matthew Collings

Guillaume Apollinaire (born 1880) was an avant-garde poet and inventor of a peculiar new ideogrammatic writing style. A close friend of Picasso, he acted as apologist and explainer for many new forms of visual art in the period just before and including the First World War. He died in 1918 from shrapnel wounds received two years earlier.

AR-May-Great Minds-Collings.indd 50

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:29

Artreview I suppose many people associate your name with a list. Telephones, the theory of relativity, high-speed travel, the invention of the aeroplane and the arrival of Cubism – can you explain how this rhetoric of the new got established?

and our free time is really controlled time, we occupy ourselves going to museums as a free activity, looking at culture, but when we’re doing that we’re occupied ourselves by capital. Is that an updated version of enigmas in de Chirico?

GuillAume ApollinAire Between the publication of my book of poems, titled Alcools, in 1913 and the outbreak of the First World War, I came up with a good number of literary novelties. Visual arrangements on the page, an imagery of surprising new juxtapositions, it was Surrealism before the event. Surrealism, or ‘superior realism’, was actually a term coined by me. I don’t know now where my ideas came from, which is often so when one analyses aesthetic invention retrospectively, but they reached a peak at that particular moment. And in my journalism of that time you can see me turning them over with an intense curiosity but at a slight remove, since these are mostly reviews and articles about art. The answer to your question, then, is that this written material forms the basis for a lot of the literature on Modernism. I examine the concept of imagination itself. And I ask, what is modernity? So we hear a lot in my reflections on Duchamp, de Chirico, Picasso or Marie Laurencin about new things in everyday life: the telephone, the cinema and so on, as well as automobiles, aeroplanes, ocean liners and whatnot. They are symbolic manifestations of the zeitgeist. Of course German concepts were somewhat anathema at the time, so one wouldn’t use this Hegelian term. One would say rather something like, ‘It is the genius of the French to adore the intertwining of the new with the audacious.’ Certain words like ‘audacious’ return again and again in my critical writings. Along with ‘energy’, ‘unforeseen’, ‘impact’, ‘force’ – plus, of course, ‘surprise’. Science advances and so too does art – the future is all. Invention is all. What is de Chirico up to with his plastic inventions whose strangeness is so often overlooked? In order to depict the fatal character of modern things, this painter utilises the most modern motive force of all – surprise. It’s not apparent at once to everyone, of course. We need poets who are inventors themselves to see that invention has occurred. This is what it means to have a progressive cultural elite.

GA Capitalism controlling our free thoughts, giving them to us, as it were, rather than us freely having them on our own, is already an established idea in academia, for which she finds a journalistic correlate on the one hand and a filmic one on the other. She brings to both modes an element of whimsicality. And this is really the only factor of originality, since academia was already there first with the other stuff. But kookiness isn’t what I was talking about a hundred years ago.

Ar Is it the same as Hito Steyerl at the ICA? I mean, is she the new audacious? She tells us we’re all controlled

Ar What about 12 Years a Slave? You can’t be blasé about that, surely? GA The YBA core of this artist’s imagination is very evident in this movie, since it’s a film based almost entirely on visceral revolting horror, with elements of sentimentality. The same is so for his other attempts in this medium, always critically loved, and in each case gruesomely body-oriented with risibly hollow gestures towards social and political significance. He is on the solemn side of YBA, not the humorous side. We see a sort of nastiness pomp. Sarah Lucas, for example, is the opposite, morbid but light-footed. Ar What do you want from art? GA I like it when there are tangible factual physical materials worked so there’s a sensual appeal, and there are also atmospheres or ideas that seem to surround or emanate from the tangible factor, a duality, so you get the mystery of Cubism but also its visual and tactile exquisiteness, or the enigma of horror scenes by Goya, which at the same time are inescapably replete with high aesthetic refinement. I expect to find this equality of tangible/ intangible in art, but that expectation dies away by the time the YBAs pop up.

Ar Everyone likes her. GA It’s true the work is warmly received in every quarter, and there simply is no negative criticism of it in existence. And yet the question remains, do insights about politics, which are not insights but repetitions, become freshened up because they’re couched in a visual form that teenagers are at home with? I like the one with the museum guards telling their stories about their former lives in the police and the military. But while sympathising with their subjectivity above Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File (stills), 2013, HD video file, single screen, 14 min. Courtesy the artist facing page Guillaume Apollinaire

May 2014

AR-May-Great Minds-Collings.indd 51

I nevertheless felt it was being used for purposes of which they remained unaware, which is a bit much if the film’s message is that in museums, when we’re being sensitive to culture, we’re really being the inadvertent dupes of aggressive capitalism. Didn’t she make the guards acting out their inner traumas the inadvertent dupes of her social-theory message?

Ar You mean it’s all the wrong balance? GA You often find more on the side of vagueness and only a little on the side of sensual appeal. The imbalance is played out in different ways, of course. And the same play-out applies beyond the YBAs, as we saw with Hito Steyerl. You’re looking at a sort of trash but being asked to think about something important. The trash isn’t transcended, but importance is merely somehow forced into the frame. Ar Surely 12 Years a Slave is beyond that kind of criticism? GA McQueen talks in interviews about being ‘steeped in Western art’. When we see the work, it doesn’t speak of art’s range, whether Modern

16/04/2014 11:29

or pre-Modern, but a certain thing: confident slowness, inertia even, and a feel for the grain of the material, the grain of film. This turns glutinous in a Hollywood movie where the emotional register is above all titillating and sadistic. AR It’s a total hit, what’s the matter with you! GA In 1914 I wrote about Modernism’s renewal of art’s means and aim. This film a century later describes sadism and the victims of it, but the means are as transparent as the aim. You see through a close-up description of suffering slaves to the romantic suffering of the artist genius who must confront the world’s hostility. That long baleful look of despair of the lead character, returned to so often in the film, is interpretable as the artist aghast at the greatness of his task and the indifference of the public. Except that both are now well in control because of some present-day miracle of social and cultural circumstances. That Oscar simply will not be lost. A single relief element in the film, if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by current Hollywood clichés about intensity, is the texture of spoken language, but as it comes from the book, it cannot be chalked up to directorial invention. And in any case the same trick, to talk like people really talked in the Victorian era, has been tested already by Deadwood and found to be a draw for those who subscribe to pay TV. The movie, by contrast to the book, and indeed the HBO offering, delivers waves of luscious filmic high-production values on an epic scale but to no particular artistic purpose. They speak instead of the film industry’s self-regard so an artist can be apotheosised by Hollywood.

I coined that term as well as Surrealism, you know. I was also interested in a guy who had the pseudonym of ‘Survage’. He was a Cubist in Paris, from Finland originally. I wrote a lot of calligrammatic material about him. ‘Calligramme’ means the words of a poem are presented in a chopped-up form so they make visual signs. My interest was partly because of the accident of his made-up name

Imperatives of invention and originality are reduced to mere vagueness. In the mist, all you find is more mist. Hito is right that we’re being used, but a) we know, and b) it doesn’t mean we should let her use us, too combining sauvage or ‘savage’ with the prefix sur, meaning something like ‘superior savage’, which I thought really was the spirit of the age, the ultimate in antibourgeois aesthetics. Ah, but Orphism, that was fantastic. The message of the new, in this case that colour is light and light is colour, and light reveals all, really made an impact. I’m not blind to the new new:

AR So is only Cubism good? GA Well, now you’re just being provocative. Orphism is great, too.

the new of 2014. But it is sad that now we’re often asked to celebrate to the rafters cultural content that is not new but outrageously stale and from the bottom of the wastebasket of the would-be-new. Imperatives of invention and originality are reduced to mere vagueness, it turns out. In the mist, all you find is more mist. Hito is right that we’re being used, but a) we know, and b) it doesn’t mean we should let her use us, too. AR How does she do that? GA She makes us go along with her artist-pet international specialness, I guess, the same with all the earnestly careerist political-art collectives pretending to be theoretically original that exist at the moment, all arrested at an early-twenties age-point in their narcissism, and their demand that everyone believe only they have ever noticed anything, and all in reality aged the same as her – about forty-seven. AR You’re a rough guy! What happened to your poetic side? GA What do you mean? This is the language of poetry. I used to go on about classic modernist similes and juxtapositions: ‘Sun neck cut’ – ‘Shepherd Oh Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning.’ I’ll have to look it up. I can’t remember the poems all that clearly any more. Anyway, now I go on about what I consider the genuine new modernity, which is inventively to juxtapose ordinary critical observations that tell it like it is with forms of present-day entertainment art that masquerade pitiably as profundity. I declaim the sovereignty of colours and textures that actually do something, and ideas that don’t just come from theory books. So back off, junior. NexT mONTH Virginia Woolf on Georg Baselitz’s upside-down paintings

Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc. (stills), 2014. Courtesy the artist

AR-May-Great Minds-Collings-p52-resupply.indd 52

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:30

CMY

CASS ART.indd 53

16/04/2014 11:33

Ai Weiwei and the destruction of art

top Mobile phone footage of Maximo Caminero dropping one of Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases (2007–10) at the Pérez Art Museum Miami above Jake & Dinos Chapman, Insult to Injury, 2003, Francisco de Goya, The Disasters of War, 1810–20, portfolio of 80 etchings reworked and improved, 28 × 38 cm. Photo: Stephen White. © the artists. Courtesy White Cube, London, Hong Kong & São Paulo

AR-May-McClean.indd 54

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:34

The Law and Its Ideas No 6 by Daniel McClean

Background The recent destruction of a green handpainted Han-dynasty-era vase forming part of an installation by Ai Weiwei is a crude attack both on the artistic expression of the artist and on art itself. Ai’s installation, Colored Vases (2007–10), included in his travelling retrospective when it reached the Pérez Art Museum Miami, consisted of numerous Han vases overpainted in different bright colours to resemble modern vases. Next to the installation, a series of blackand-white photographs depicted Ai Weiwei smashing what appears to be a Ming dynasty urn. Ironically, this art crime (which has also been captured on video) was committed by another artist, Maximo Caminero, and not on this occasion by the Chinese authorities – Ai’s usual adversary. The act (allegedly inspired by Ai’s photographs next to the installation) was misguidedly intended by Caminero as a protest against the museum’s alleged failure to exhibit the work of local artists. Caminero has since apologised for his actions. Aside from the potential loss of an important artwork, the monetary value of the damage caused to Ai’s installation has been widely and spectacularly reported to be $1 million, though it is not clear on what basis this valuation has been reached and seems exaggerated at best (even as the cost of replacing the installation as a whole). The destruction of art has a long history, one that is coextensive with the history of art itself. Iconoclastic attacks in the name of religion on religious imagery that depicts the likeness of God or Christ have been an endemic feature of Christianity. More recently, attacks on art have been motivated by political ideology (for example, the Suffragettes’ slashing of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, 1647–51), as well as the desire for notoriety (as seen in the repeated assaults on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, c. 1503–5). Tate Britain explored the theme last year in a memorable exhibition, Art Under Attack: Iconoclasm in British Art. Artists have also appropriated the language of iconoclasm (as reflected in Ai’s photographs here) to give symbolic force to their work. Usually, however, this language is not applied literally to the desecrated image or object but rather to its reproduction: as seen, for example, in Duchamp’s mischievous addition of a moustache and goatee to the face of the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q (1919). However, in rare instances and in order to enhance the provocation, artists have resorted to defacing the original itself. This is reflected in Jake & Dinos Chapman’s controversial ‘rectification’ of rare ‘original’ etchings (Insult to Injury, 2003) from Goya’s iconic series The Disasters of War (1810–20). Legal protection What can be done to protect artworks and punish those who wilfully vandalise them? The law provides a number of offences to prevent and punish attacks on art, and with them different legal sanctions. On the one hand, there are criminal offences. Most notably, vandals

can be punished for criminal damage to property: in this case, Caminero is likely to be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned for his action. On the other hand, there are civil remedies. A person who destroys an artwork can be liable to its owner in damages for wrongful interference with property (known as conversion) and, if he or she has assumed custody over the property, for breach of his or her duties as a bailee. The owner may be expected to be compensated for the damage caused to the property, generally at its current market value. Some countries provide, as a part of the law of moral rights, injunctive relief to artists to prevent the destruction of their artworks and also damages if their artworks are destroyed (including by their owners). The US Visual Artists Rights Act (1990), for example, expressly protects artworks of ‘recognized stature’ (which applies to artworks that are well known, not simply to artworks that are by artists who are well known) from being destroyed. This applies also, in principle, to the removal of ‘site-specific’ artworks from their sites. The act was passed following the national and international outcry caused when Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) was removed from New York’s Federal Plaza by US government authorities in 1989. Serra failed in his legal attempt to prevent the US General Services Administration from removing the work in the New York courts. Though the moral right to prevent the destruction of an artist’s work is clearly inscribed in US law, it is not clear how far this right is protected in other countries with ‘moral rights’ legislation. It is unclear, for example, whether the right exists in the United Kingdom, for example, as a part of an artist’s general right to prevent the ‘derogatory treatment’ of his or her work. A society’s right? Despite the variety of legal sanctions available to prevent the destruction of artworks, loopholes exist. The main loophole appears to concern owners of artworks. The owner (save where the artist has a right to prevent the artwork’s destruction) can, generally speaking, destroy the artwork, as in the famous case of the Japanese collector Ryoei Saito, who reportedly announced that he wished to be cremated with his $82.5m Van Gogh Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890) – the assumption being that owners of artworks will not wish to destroy their own property, particularly if this is of financial value. The destruction of Ai Weiwei’s vase raises important legal and cultural questions about why we value the preservation of artworks. Shouldn’t society have a general overriding right to protect its cultural artefacts in addition to the rights of owners and artists? Just as there are heritage laws designed to protect monuments and buildings from interference and destruction, shouldn’t these also be applied to artworks? Of course, how these might be framed is another story and might involve the courts in the troublesome business of judging: ‘What is art?’

May 2014

AR-May-McClean.indd 55

16/04/2014 11:34

BAMBI the “female Banksy” Walton Fine Arts 152-154 Walton Street Knightsbridge London SW3 2JJ UK +44 (0) 207 581 2332 art@waltonfinearts.com www.waltonfinearts.com

Julian Opie Collected Works —

21.05.14 to 14.09.14

The Holburne Museum Great Pulteney Street Bath BA2 4DB

056_AR.indd 56

www.holburne.org

16/04/2014 11:35

23-26 octobER 2014

grand palais et hors les murs, paris Organised by

Ofﬁcial sponsor

057_AR.indd 57 ART REVIEW 235x300 FIAC2014 GB.indd 1

16/04/2014 11:36 14/04/14 17:22

The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else 22 May — 17 August 2014

Image courtesy of Anne Schwalbe

Featured Artists: Nadim Abbas, Allora & Calzadilla, Iván Argote, Bik Van der Pol, Pierre Bismuth, John Cage, Chen Zhen, Ceal Floyer, Aurélien Froment, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Sharon Hayes, Tim Etchells & Vlatka Horvat, On Kawara, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lee Kit, Gabriel Lester, Marysia Lewandowska, MAP Office, Ahmet Öğüt & Cevdet Erek, Willem de Rooij, Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi, Koki Tanaka, Narcisse Tordoir, Freek Wambacq, Haegue Yang, and others.

058_AR.indd 58

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Witte de Withstraat 50 3012 BR Rotterdam www.wdw.nl

16/04/2014 11:37

Studio: Jim Lutes / #6

Art_Review_Layout 1 4/7/14 11:34 AM Page 2

THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART

18–21 SEPTEMBER 2014 NAVY PIER expochicago.com

Presenting Sponsor

ExpoChicago.indd 59

16/04/2014 11:38

prepare for the best…

VERNISSAGE Wednesday 13 August 6pm - 10pm For tickets and further information visit: www.melbourneartfair.com.au Melbourne Art Fair is presented by the Melbourne Art Foundation, a not for profit organisation benefiting living artists.

Venue Partner

MAF_art_review_ad_001.indd 1 Melbourne Art Fai.indd 60

Government Partners

Major Partners

Hotel Partner

04/04/2014 11:40 10:05 16/04/2014

Art Featured

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous 61

AR-May-Dividers.indd 61

16/04/2014 11:11

Ragnar Kjartansson

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 62

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:43

Relative Matters In recent years, the Icelandic artist’s truly epic performance works and videos have toyed with our emotions – sorrow, joy, boredom, exhilaration – to highlight social formation and construction. And this month he’s bringing it all to New York by Oliver Basciano

May 2014

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 63

16/04/2014 11:43

I have a really fond memory from early 2013: it’s of a group of us, becomes overfamiliarity, the hours rolling over and the tune never sitting in a Reykjavík-based curator’s kitchen in the early hours of changing. It’s fatigue on the part of both audience and the performers the morning, the aftermath of a party settling around us, drunk- that runs the (intentional) risk of rendering the song banal, stripping enly singing Halo. It probably helped that it’s one of Beyoncé’s more it of the magic – the magic that will forever associate Beyoncé’s Halo introspective numbers; it fitted the mood. Ragnar Kjartansson was with that night in an Icelandic kitchen – that a great song holds over leading this impromptu, hammed-up rendition, belting it out with its listener. After a while however the juxtaposition of the anguished a mixture of mirth and sincerity. Halo (2008) is a song programmed sincerity of the lyrics – “Sorrow found me when I was young/Sorrow for what might be termed ‘instant nostalgia’. It has an inbuilt sense of waited, sorrow won” – with the predictability of their continuous time passing and revels in its changes of tense, causing an enjoyably repetition to the point where those words start to empty of meaning becomes enjoyably absurd. It is notable that of all the shaky phonesentimental feeling of melancholia. Later on that morning, Kjartansson played Sorrow (2010) by Amer- camera footage shot by the audience and posted online afterwards, ican indie band the National and told me about a particularly well-documented point is when a plan to get the group to play that song live, In many works the individual the band’s drummer leaves his kit to eat some over and over, for six hours. He realised that acts of portraiture accumulate ribs Kjartansson has brought onstage for sustenance, and Sorrow is performed bereft of project, titled A Lot of Sorrow, in May last year at to become a performed MoMA PS1, and it has many of the key ingrediits usual foreboding drum rhythm. The sense ents of Kjartansson’s video and performance of hearing the song change in some way rejuself-portrait of their author works: music, repetition and endurance. venated it for the audience. Born and still based in Reykjavík, Kjartansson, now in his late thirKjartansson, and his girlfriend, are genuine fans of the National. ties, has been involved in various bands since his teenage years. While Indeed, Kjartansson’s work is intensely personal, even when it comes none achieved the success of contemporaries like Sigur Rós and Múm, in its more theatrical guises, whether it involves him dressed as a one electroclash outfit, Trabant, toured widely and produced four crooner in front of a purple silk-laden background singing “Sorrow albums during the early 2000s. The experience of live gigs directly conquers happiness” over and over again for an hourlong videowork informs his performance work (which takes the form of both live (God, 2007, the lyric referencing the National’s song, but not taken events and videoworks), though his musical influences have spread from it), or every five years filming his mother spitting in his face (Me beyond indie pop to include country, classical and opera. A Lot of Sorrow and My Mother – 2015 will see the work’s fourth iteration), or when the put a magnifying glass up to the setup of audience and spectacle: initial artist painted a young man’s portrait every day for five months in the delighted anticipation, followed by excitement as the familiar and Icelandic Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, canvases, beer bottles much-loved song starts (many of the audience were longtime fans of the and empty packets of Benson & Hedges piling up, the individual acts of band); before a weariness begins to drift over the viewer, as familiarity portraiture accumulating to become a performed self-portrait of their

preceding pages Photo: Ari Magg, March 2014 above Me and My Mother 2010, 2010. HD video, colour, sound, 20 min (loop)

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 64

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:43

author. Repeat visitors to the latter work were able to observe the artist Múm – the filming taking place at sunset; Kjartansson himself also getting tired of his daily task, the strain of production and boredom features, climbing out of a bath at the start of the film and spending becoming visible, and the act of visual art’s creation being made as the work’s 60-minute duration in less than a dressing gown. Together repetitive and mechanical as the performing of pop music was in A Lot they perform a swooping refrain of “Once again I fall into my femiof Sorrow. The works are autobiographical on both a micro and macro nine ways”, a line from a poem by Kjartansson’s ex-wife. For me, it’s a level. They literally measure a period in time of the artist’s life – be it devastating work. The line feels self-critical, even if the payoff, ‘femione night, several months or, in the case of Me and My Mother, the best nine ways’, an allusion perhaps to an unbridgeable gender gap in any heterosexual relationship, is not. ‘Once again’ suggests eternal return, part of a lifetime – but also his relationships, his family, his life so far. More recently, I’m chatting with Kjartansson over Skype. He’s in an inescapable fate, a despondent inevitability to life and the sad repeReykjavík and wearing a dressing gown. We’re discussing his nine- tition of a mistake. It’s a first-person, self-analytical confession. We all screen installation work, The Visitors (2012), and how it relates to his fuck up, and it’s our own fault, the work cries out. The Visitors is also about friendship, though. At the end, the ex-wife and the pain of their separation. In musicians join up, a bottle of champagne is The Visitors Kjartansson and a motley crew of It’s a first-person, popped and they wander out onto the expaneight friends are shown in an upstate New self-analytical confession. York mansion, each person appearing on a sive lawn. There is a comforting feeling evoked separate screen singing or playing an instru- We all fuck up, and it’s our own by seeing all these old friends together. We all ment. Among the group are regular collabfuck up, but we get through it together. fault, the work cries out orators composer Davíð Þór Jónsson (who Given the subject matter and frequent composed the film’s music, a job he’s undertaken for Kjartansson on return to melancholic musical compositions, I ask Kjartansson previous occasions, including for God, as well as conducting various of whether he ever thinks of his work as depressing. On my computer the artist’s orchestral works, such as the 12-hour rendition of the final screen he’s shaking his head, and then dives out of view, coming aria from Mozart´s Marriage of Figaro, 1786, produced for Performa in back with a copy of the Cure’s 1992 album, Wish, on CD. He flips out 2011) and ex-Sigur Rós keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson’s, whose previous the sleeve notes and reads the quote the band used from Shelley’s To composing credits with the artist include S.S. Hangover, Kjartansson’s a Skylark (1820). ‘We look before and after, and pine for what is not, 2013 work for Massimilano Gioni’s Venice Biennale exhibition, in our sincerest laughter, with some pain is fraught, our sweetest songs which an old Icelandic fishing boat repeatedly set sail from the historic are those that tell of saddest thoughts.’ There’s beauty in sadness, he harbourside with a brass sextet aboard, only to return shortly there- tells me, and beauty is never depressing. I also get the feeling that the after, stuck in a circle of launching and docking. There is facial hair for works are in some way cathartic for the artist; a way of navigating the the men, floaty summer dresses for the women – among them Kristín various trials life might throw at one. If that sounds self-indulgent, Anna Valtýsdóttir and Gyða Valtýsdóttir, both formerly of the band then Kjartansson’s work is delivered with such joie de vivre that it does

The Visitors, 2012 (still), nine-channel HD video, colour, sound, 64 min (loop). Photo: Elisabet Davidsdottir

May 2014

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 65

16/04/2014 11:43

S.S. Hangover, 2013, performance, boat, captain, brass instruments, musicians. Photo: Lilja Birgisdóttir

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 66

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:43

The End, 2009, performance. Commissioned by the Center for Icelandic Art for the Pavilion of Iceland at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Photo: Rafael Pinho

May 2014

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 67

16/04/2014 11:43

not come across that way. This isn’t just about Kjartansson and his artist’s film version of the book; but, he tells me, he is under no illurelationships: but the ones we all enact and the roles we play in them. sion, given the epic nature of Laxness’s tale, that he has enough time A day or so after our conversation, Kjartansson is going to Vienna or budget to do their craft justice. This is not a case of wilfully placing for an exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. He will constraints on the work; instead, the action of attempting the film travel to New York for his first major solo exhibition there, at the New becomes the artwork itself, with all the crew and technicians, as well Museum, opening in early May and then on to Saint Petersburg for as the actors, becoming performers for the museum’s visitors. It’s also Manifesta 10. However, before that he’ll be in Vienna for more than about giving the audience access to the process of production, levelling the hierarchy between artist and viewer, three weeks, again surrounding himself with a which again suggests Kjartansson is not group of friends. Like The Visitors, a certain balI also get the feeling that simply enjoying hanging out with his mates ance between failure and contentment will be the works are in some way but producing a more universal portrait of present in this new project. Together they will cathartic for the artist; a way friendship and camaraderie, and engaging in attempt to live in the gallery and in front of the public, to make a film of Icelandic Nobel lauof navigating the various trials questions about the roles we play within social reate Halldór Laxness’s World Light (1937–40), groups and even, perhaps, in society at large. If life might throw at one. If that the crew – eating together, working together, a seminal work of literature that follows the sounds self-indulgent, then travails of Ólafur Kárason, a poet, from childpartying – can be thought of as a cipher of the hood to dispiriting, unfulfilled adulthood. It’s Kjartansson’s work is delivered family unit, then this is no coincidence: family, a book that the artist describes as being like a and relationships, are the recurring subject of with such joie de vivre that it Bible to his family, read and reread, and which the artist’s work. does not come across that way his father – the actor and director Kjartan In a period in which material formalism, digital space and the artist as archivist have Ragnarsson – has previously produced in three theatrical adaptations. In February, in Berlin, Kjartansson premiered been the dominant tropes in contemporary art, from the shiny empty a theatre production based on the same text titled The Explosive Sonics Minimalism of Jacob Kassay or Jordan Wolfson’s miserable stripper of Divinity (2014), which will be restaged back home in Iceland in late robot, to Camille Henrot’s hyper-decontextualisation of historic arteMay over three nights. That adaptation used a long-defunct theat- facts, then Kjartansson’s interest in real-world interaction has given rical format in which the stage remains devoid of actors. The narrative his work a dedicated following (and a Performa award to boot). His instead is played out through a series of stage paintings by Kjartansson, invoking of personal relationships, and his work’s warm emotiveness, together with an accompanying choir conducted by Þór Jónsson, with is about as far from the cold theory of something like object-oriented a Romantic score by Sveinsson. In Vienna there will be actors for the ontology as you can get.

Scenes from The Palace of the Summerland, 2014, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 68

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:44

Kjartansson’s blood relatives have an explicit role to play in the Doors and the music of other similarly iconic bands playing in the New Museum exhibition, titled Me, My Mother, My Father, and I. The background. Acconci coquettishly addresses the viewer directly, central work will be Take Me Here by the Dishwasher – Memorial for a his come-on half-baked but seductive nonetheless. “Come in close Marriage (2011/2014) and involves a projected loop of a scene from to me,” he whispers at one point. I think about how weird the directMorðsaga (1977), Iceland’s first feature film, which featured both his ness of Acconci’s address is and how awkward that makes me feel. father and his actress-mother, Guðrún Asmundsdottir, at that point I think about how it’s that connection, or rather that relationship, married, but who have since separated. In this endlessly repeated between the audience and performer – a definite, but hard-to-define excerpt, Asmundsdottir is having that most 1970s of fantasies: sex emotional resonance that coerces the viewer into particular moods, with the plumber (played by Ragnarsson). and then plays with them – that defines Kjartansson is not simply Her fantasy plays out on screen as the lonely Kjartansson’s work too. The hypnotic quahousewife and her tradesman-lover engage enjoying hanging out with his lity of a work such as God or the party atmosin energetic liaisons against the kitchen phere of the Venice pavilion (at least in the mates but producing a more sideboard. If that isn’t an odd enough arteopening days) establish a carefully crafted fact of one’s parents’ history, then the fam- universal portrait of friendship effect on, and rapport with, his audience. ily legend goes further: Ragnarsson and and camaraderie, and engaging I think about the waves of orchestrated Asmundsdottir claim Ragnar was conceived in questions about the roles we changes that occur in the viewer’s state of mind as one watches Kjartansson’s works the very next night. As the parent’s cineplay within social groups and matic foreplay loops on the projection, a full – excitement, sadness, boredom, happiness, brass band will perform in the gallery space even, perhaps, in society at large sadness, excitement – microcosmic of the ups throughout the show, creating a climatic and downs of any relationship, perhaps, and piece of multimedia theatre. Again, relationships define the process I realise the specific appeal of the artist’s work. It makes us think of the work’s production, while the work itself suggests that it is rela- about our own humanity. ar tionships that define who we are. If Kjartansson’s practice is happily out of sync with what is in Ragnar Kjartansson and Friends: The Palace of the Summerland vogue now, it nonetheless finds precedent in art history, with figures is at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, through 8 June; Me, My Mother, My Father, and I is at the New Museum, New York, such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden being particularly impor7 May – 29 June; The Explosive Sonics of Divinity is staged at tant for the artist. After my second conversation with Kjartansson, Borgarleikhúsið, Reykjavík, 28–30 May; and Kjartansson is part of I remember an Acconci work, Theme Song (1973), in which the artist Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, 28 June – 31 October lies on his front, his face uncomfortably close to the camera, the

Morðsaga, 1977 (still), dir Reynir Oddsson, 35mm film, colour, stereo, 93 min. All images courtesy the artist, i8 Gallery, Reykjavík and Luhring Augustine, New York

May 2014

AR-May-Ragnar.indd 69

16/04/2014 11:44

New York Juggernaut As ‘the Great Gentrification’ rumbles on, artists, galleries and institutions are feeling the heat. Will the artworld come through it stronger, or be a victim of its own success? by Jonathan T.D. Neil

Whitney Museum of American Art’s new main building, under construction in New York’s Meatpacking District, September 2013. Photo: Timothy Schenck

AR-May-NYoverview.indd 70

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:46

New York is on the verge. It’s calamitous. Culture. Economy. Society. The old triumvirate isn’t getting along. They’re faking it, retreating to the corners of a too small apartment of a too-new condo building in an area of the city that didn’t know it had been signed up for the neoliberal remodel. There is anger, and resentment. There have been betrayals, born of disrespect. Just listen to Spike Lee at Pratt Institute this past February, speaking here of the historically black neighborhoods of New York City:

29 percent who aren’t. But when asked if their lives over the next four years will be better, worse or unchanged under the de Blasio administration, the greatest number, 38 percent, believe it will be business as usual. And so the Great Gentrification rolls on, a juggernaut on a doublediamond slope. Apartments in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, once one of New York’s ‘toughest’ neighborhoods, now go for north of $1 million. Art people I know – critics, teachers, dealers, artists, all white – are moving to Harlem. ‘Great bones’ is how the real estate crowd unironYou can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and ically describes what these neighborhoods offer, as if the flesh and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African blood should be overlooked. Bushwick is now East Williamsburg. drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t Williamsburg, one stop out of Manhattan along the L train, is now do it any more because the new inhabitants said the drums are just an extension of Manhattan’s East Side. As is Long Island City. loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in A couple I know are selling their apartment near Columbia University nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ and beating it out of the city… for Singapore. people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. The visual arts have long been at the tip of the gentrifying He’s not – he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We plough. Newly minted MFAs and aspiring outcasts often look to such bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motheroutlands for inexpensive studio and living spaces. But the speed of fuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck the speculators has picked up, and the established communities are outta here!… You have to come with respect. There’s a code. pushing from the other direction. At a recent panel on the ‘Studio in There’s people. Crisis’, Brooklyn deputy borough president Diana Reyna noted that Is there hope? After 12 years of Bloomberg, and eight years of Giuliani ‘once speculators see an artist, they think: there goes the neighborbefore that, it’s the age of Mayor Bill de Blasio. A Democrat. A liberal. hood. [Artists are] seen as the enemy in our neighborhoods, and that A man of and for the people, who comes to office armed with a mixed- has to change.’ Greater community engagement might be the solurace family. Not a billionaire. Not a Republican. Someone who has tion. Reyna offered the example of NURTUREArt, a Bushwick-based stacked his administration with organisers and activists rather than nonprofit that has engaged the local schools. But for individual MBA technocrats. According to a Quinnipiac poll from March of this artists, New York’s economic imperatives seem to leave less and less time for anything other than wage earning and year, 65 percent of New Yorkers are optimistic about the future with de Blasio as opposed to the rest. Meanwhile, the speculators lie in wait. Do the Right Thing, 1989, dir Spike Lee

May 2014

AR-May-NYoverview.indd 71

16/04/2014 11:46

top Tony Tasset, Artists Monument, 2014 (installation view, 2014 Whitney Biennial), mixed media, 244 × 2438 × 244 cm. Photo: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago

AR-May-NYoverview.indd 72

above left Dora Budor, Action Paintings, 2014. Courtesy the artist and 247365, New York

above right David La Spina, Fantasy Baseball, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Primetime, New York

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:47

The Great Gentrification isn’t only centrifugal – that is, it reaches inward too, into even the most hallowed of cultural precincts.

$10m, contribute their share too. According to Knight Frank’s Global Cities Survey, which ranks the world’s cities according to how hospitable they are to the global rich, New York, right now second place to ‘Once upon a time the Museum of Modern Art was a home London in the overall rankings (but first for ‘economic activity’), will away from home for anybody who cared about modern art. gain the overall top spot by 2024, increasing its numbers of UHNWIs, Now it’s a fucking department store.’ currently about 3,000, by about 30 percent. ‘This bland and banal scheme possesses all the presence That’s $114b in wealth in ten years’ time calling New York City and panache of a commercial parking garage entry.’ home. Add to that the HNWI’s roughly $12 billion on the next rung ‘Somewhere inside me, I heard myself saying my gooddown the ladder and you have the makings of a trickle-down city byes to MoMA. I thought, I have seen the best modern museum of where money flows easily at the very top but largely evaporates by my generation destroyed by madness.’ the time it reaches anything below the second or third percentile That’s Jed Perl (New Republic), Martin Filler (The New York Review of of earners. In the artworld, this translates into big dollars spent at Books) and Jerry Saltz (New York magazine) on Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s the big November and May auctions, and at the top galleries, espedesign for MoMA’s expansion into the lot currently occupied by Tod cially those that don’t feel the need to vie for the top spot in this magaWilliams and Billie Tsien’s 2001 building for the American Folk Art zine’s yearly rankings – that is, the Goodmans, the Gladstones, the Museum, which is getting the wrecking ball. Never before in my Coopers, the Marks – because they’re confident the money will be recollection has a single proposal for a cultural product, in this case there when all is said and done. It’s the structural causality behind a design for a museum extension that puts an emphasis on public- Christopher D’Amelio closing his gallery and partnering with facing – aka visible to the street – performance and contemporary art David Zwirner, and behind Jessie Washburne-Harris and Michael Lieberman closing their gallery (which respaces, elicited such a ferocious and, more Once upon a time it was regular presented Karl Haendel and Matt Saunders) importantly, unified chorus of histrionic and joining, respectively, Metro Pictures and opprobrium. ‘Department store!’ ‘Parking custom for New York parents to garage!’ ‘Madness!’ To the barricades. Yes, Mr give their children an extra wad of Marianne Boesky. ‘Patrimonial capitalism’ is what the economist Thomas Piketty calls it. Lee, ‘You have to come with respect. There’s small bills to carry in their pockIn New York City, it’s the wellspring of the a code.’ If you are middle-aged and white, ets when they went off to school. Great Gentrification. there’s art. And artists. Currently sitting on a bank of Against this backdrop, gallery movements It was called mugger money, the the Hudson River in Chelsea lies Tony Tasset’s (Gagosian to the Lower East Side!), new profesinformal fee one paid to walk the Artists Monument (2014), an offsite project of sional affiliations (former Christie’s Contemthe 2014 Whitney Biennial (and not far from streets between ‘nineteen-mother- porary Art honcho Amy Cappellazzo to partthe construction site of the Whitney’s new fuckin’-sixty-eight’ and sometime ner with uber adviser Allan Schwartzman!) Renzo Piano building – a different kind of and academic migrations (David Joselit soon after the end of the David ‘there goes the neighborhood’ event). Etched ditches Yale for the Graduate Center at City Dinkins administration (1993). with 392,486 names of modern and contemUniversity!) are just the rosy epiphenomena porary artists, from the established to the The Great Gentrification has done (can you hear Frank Sinatra? “New York, emerging to the middling, all arrayed on Neew Yooooork!”) of a wave – fast, hard, high away with such quaint scenes technicolour panels (no black, no white, no – on which we are all being driven towards brown), Tasset’s shipping container of pseudo-recognition gestures an unknown shore. Will New York’s artworld shatter against the at equality, even collectivity. Congratulations, artists, you have made gilded rocks of speculation and status? Or will its formidable ranks of it to New York, at least in name. artists, dealers, directors and thinkers manage to surf this inevitable Collectivity is not what Tasset’s Monument is to, however. It’s to swell in a demonstration of fitness, talent and guts that is worthy of individualism. I suspect artists will arrive like pilgrims to Mecca, and this most improbable of places? will begin their circumnavigations, but always alone, or perhaps in Once upon a time it was regular custom for New York parents pairs, searching for their names, for that mark of recognition that to give their children an extra wad of small bills to carry in their establishes them as what they have chosen to be. Those who can’t pockets when they went off to school. It was called mugger money, make the journey will ask for pictures. “Look! Here you are, on the the informal fee one paid to walk the streets between ‘nineteensame panel as ________!” There is no class called ‘artist’ though. motherfuckin’-sixty-eight’ and sometime soon after the end of the There is no shared project, no modernist utopia nor fidelity to some David Dinkins administration (1993). Kids in those days were adults, ‘evental’ eruption of the new in the offing. Which is why just as many worldly in ways that only ten frightening blocks could test. will likely avoid the Monument, repulsed by their shared polarities. The Great Gentrification has done away with such quaint scenes, It is an interesting number nevertheless: 392,486. According to for which leisurely art walks on the avenue were backdrops. Everyone the 2014 European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Art Market Report, it’s almost has gone to their corners, including Culture, Economy and Society. the exact midpoint between the world’s population of high-net- One almost wants to look to the western horizon, to whisper the worth (roughly 600,000) and ultra-high-net-worth (roughly 200,000) words attributed to the great educator and publisher Horace Greeley: individuals. It’s the latter, those with more than $30 million in ‘liquid’ ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.’ And yet… assets, who buy the most expensive art and account for the greatest Excuse me, how does it go, Mr Lee? Oh, that’s right: ‘Get the fuck share of the estimated $60 billion market, but the HNWIs, those with outta here!’ ar

May 2014

AR-May-NYoverview.indd 73

16/04/2014 11:47

LA’s Art Wave New projects, museum appointments and gallery openings point to a cresting of interest in Los Angeles-based contemporary art that is as powerful as any the city has seen by Jonathan Griffin

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy, Rebel Dabble Babble (detail), 2012. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy the artists and the Box, Los Angeles

AR-May-LAview-resupply.indd 74

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:48

Things move fast in Los Angeles. Enterprises bloom, seemingly overDrivers are still confused by signs around Downtown pointing to night, and then wither without warning. Careers too. The city is in a the Temporary Contemporary – the huge warehouse space adopted perpetual state of emergence and disintegration; a young settlement by MOCA in 1983 and renamed the Geffen Contemporary in 1996, after that is already older than people imagined it would ever be when they it proved too popular among artists and visitors to relinquish. Hopes perched their stilted wooden homes on dusty hillsides in the early are high – though cautious – that Vergne will shore up the museum’s decades of the twentieth century. Someone recently told me that the financial and scholarly foundations after they eroded under previous hundreds of towering Washingtonia palm trees that were planted directors Jeremy Strick and Jeffrey Deitch. Both discovered, to their to prettify the city for the 1932 Olympics are now at the end of their grave cost, that LA’s philanthropic class is not easy to mobilise in the natural lifespans, and will start keeling over any minute. A compel- service of high culture. At the lowest point of Deitch’s leadership, ling image; also totally untrue, it turns out. LA was built on imagina- commentators looked on in anguish as even the museum’s own board tive fictions, and they continue to be the city’s major export. hesitated to part with the necessary funds to save the institution. Los Angeles’s art community is eyeing the eastern horizon with a Following desperate discussions about the possibility of subsuming mixture of anticipation and scepticism. We are witnessing an influx MOCA within another, more solvent institution, the endowment of commercial galleries and midcareer artists, many arriving from soared, passing $100 million in January this year. New York. Two significant new institutional hires – Connie Butler, Noncollecting, kunsthalle-style nonprofits have traditionally chief curator at the Hammer Museum, and Philippe Vergne, director been LA’s weakness. In January of this year, attempting to redress this of the Museum of Contemporary Art – relocated from the East Coast. deficit, curator Cesar Garcia opened the Mistake Room, an exhibi(Butler has ties to the city, having served as curator at MOCA from tion space in a warehouse south of Downtown that pledges to focus on underexposed artists working outside 1996 to 2006.) The idea that LA’s artworld LA’s art community is eyeing the United States. Hearts sank when Oscar needs fixing from outside is not a popular Murillo was announced as the first artist to one, although most would concede that in the eastern horizon with order to resist stagnation and complacency, a get a show. Such slavish adherence to current a mixture of anticipation and continuous supply of fresh personnel is vital. market trends has been the failure of other scepticism. We are witnessing nonprofits, such as LAXART (where Garcia Plenty is happening from within, too. an influx of commercial used to work). The Santa Monica Museum Three of LA’s prominent galleries – David of Art, the region’s foremost kunsthalle, will Kordansky Gallery, Michael Kohn and galleries and midcareer artists, move into a new and expanded building Various Small Fires – have chosen 2014 as the many arriving from New York, when a light-rail station, connecting the year to upgrade to bigger – and/or betterand two significant new east and west sides of the city, opens at the placed – buildings, adding to the gallery district that has emerged in Mid-City around institutional hires have relocated redeveloping Bergamot Station Arts Center Highland and La Brea Avenues. Across Grand in 2016. from the East Coast. The idea Avenue from MOCA, in Downtown, the Despite this instability, there are votes of that LA’s artworld needs fixing distinctive latticed ‘veil’ designed by Diller confidence in LA’s institutions from the art from outside is not a popular one, market.A host of new commercial galleries are Scofidio + Renfro for philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad’s museum is now mostly in coming to the city, many of them secondary although most would concede spaces for galleries established elsewhere. place; the porous structure will provide a foil that in order to resist stagnation Sprüth Magers, of Berlin and London, will to its brash and shiny neighbour, the Frank and complacency, a continuous Gehry-designed 2003 Walt Disney Concert open an LA gallery helmed by Sarah Watson – Hall, when the Broad opens in 2015. Fans of supply of fresh personnel is vital formerly director of the defunct L&M gallery the city’s irreverent new art fair, Paramount that opened in Venice, California, in 2010 – Ranch, organised by newbie gallerists Alex Freedman and Robbie towards the end of this year. Alongside local hero John Baldessari, Fitzpatrick with artists Liz Craft and Pentti Monkkonen, are waiting who is unrepresented in his hometown, the gallery already boasts a to see whether it will become a regular fixture in the art calendar. range of West Coast artists, including Thomas Demand, who recently To equate Los Angeles’s short-term, mercurial dynamic with the relocated here from Berlin. This spring, Martos Gallery will compleabundance of chutzpah among its creative and entrepreneurial classes ment their current New York programme by opening a gallery on LA’s would be to see only half the picture. Rarely has a city developed with Washington Boulevard, next to Michael Thibault Gallery – where such scant regard for its own future. The institutions that flourish Jose Martos’s project Shoot the Lobster presented monochromes by here – and I include certain successful commercial galleries alongside the fictional artist Henry Codax in January. art schools and major museums such as LACMA and the Hammer – do Gavlak Gallery, which has operated from Palm Beach, Florida, so because of their farsighted commitment to the ongoing cultural since 2005, will move in June to a building on Highland Avenue, life of their community. It was not always thus. LACMA’s atrocious directly between Regen Projects, Redling Fine Art and Hannah Art of the Americas building was completed in 1986 in a half-baked Hoffman Gallery. Founder Sarah Gavlak will return to her Palm Beach attempt to augment its existing galleries; it is already in a state of space during the busy Florida winters, but will benefit, for the rest of dilapidation. The museum recently unveiled a proposal by Swiss the year, from being nearer to the numerous Angeleno artists on her architect Peter Zumthor to bulldoze most of its campus and replace roster, Lisa Anne Auerbach and Mungo Thomson among them. it with an elevated black building whose liquiform footprint rhymes Construction is already under way on Michele Maccarone’s LA outpost, a large warehouse next to 356 S. Mission Rd, the gallery with the site’s prehistoric tar pits.

May 2014

AR-May-LAview-resupply.indd 75

16/04/2014 11:48

opened by Gavin Brown specially for Laura Owens’s blockbuster solo LA outpost, partnered with local gallerist Niels Kantor. Last summer, show in January 2013, now operated jointly by Brown and Owens. L&M closed its Venice space after just three years in the city. Most (Maccarone’s choice of location echoes her decision, in 2007, to move recently Perry Rubenstein, who moved his entire New York gallery next door to Brown in the West Village.) She is following two of her to a large, handsomely renovated space on Highland Avenue in 2011, artists, Oscar Tuazon and Alex Hubbard, who recently moved to filed for bankruptcy in March this year. These enterprises all failed California, and aims to open in spring 2015. Team, also from New for subtly different reasons, but the moral remains: LA’s promise of York, plans to open an LA space in September 2015 with shows by Cory boundless opportunity may simply be another one of those fictions Arcangel, Ryan McGinley and Gert & Uwe Tobias. that it is so successful at exporting. None of the gallerists I spoke to claimed to be moving for commerThe really big news, of course, is that the widely respected Paul Schimmel – chief curator at MOCA until he was unceremoniously cial reasons; although there are serious collectors in California, there ousted by Deitch and Broad in 2012 – will himself be partnering with are not enough to support even a fraction of the businesses located here. Galleries sell their wares far and wide Zürich-based gallery Hauser & Wirth in 2015. in order to maintain bricks-and-mortar Although details have yet to be announced, None of the gallerists programmes under the SoCal sunshine. Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel is expected to set I spoke to claimed to be moving Meanwhile, their clients also travel far and up shop in the district of Downtown close to for commercial reasons; wide in order to build international-quality the Box, the gallery owned by Paul McCarthy although there are serious collections. There is nothing chic about and run by his daughter, Mara. McCarthy is thought to be a major reason for Hauser provincialism. collectors in California, & Wirth’s expansion westwards, alongside Rather, galleries want to be close to their there are not enough to support other locally unrepresented gallery artists artists. Inexpensive real estate, skilled fabrieven a fraction of the businesses Thomas Houseago, Rachel Khedoori and cators and a low-key (though intellectually serious) social scene provide near-perfect Sterling Ruby (the last of whom also happens located here conditions for artistic production. Not to to be affiliated with Sprüth Magers). Before we get carried away with hyperbolic proclamations about mention the magnificent landscape and great food. Those artists LA’s cultural efflorescence, it may be worth remembering that the who move here – whether to study or teach, to step into the limelight city’s history is littered with futures that failed to materialise. One or out of it – rarely seem to leave. Made in LA 2014, the second of the could even cast as far back as 1948, when artist William Copley and Hammer’s biennial exhibitions, this time curated by Michael Ned his brother-in-law opened a gallery in Beverly Hills showing surre- Holte and Connie Butler, will open in June. It promises to reveal what alist art by Man Ray, Max Ernst and René Magritte. Due to the indif- Dave Hickey, reflecting on the California Minimalism of the 1960s ference of the local customer base, it closed the following year, as did and 70s, describes as ‘a flowing stream of interests, passions, proclivithe nearby Modern Institute of Art – an underresourced, proto-MOCA ties, and occasions – a fluid micro-chronicle of the artist-as-citizen, that lasted only two years and makes the latter-day museum look coping with paradise [… with] a sequence of tactile, visual solutions like a financial triumph. During the late 1980s, Luhring Augustine to specific visible occasions that take place at the blurred interface had a short-lived foothold in Los Angeles, in partnership with Max of the artist and the world.’ That flowing stream, today, seems more Hetzler. Between 2005 and 2007, New York dealer Zach Feuer ran an like a river delta. ar

Mike Kelley, Switching Marys, 2004–5, mixed media with video projections, 188 × 422 × 102 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles

MOCA board cochairs Maurice Marciano and Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, MOCA curator Bennett Simpson and MOCA director Philippe Vergne (left to right). Photo: Rachel Murray/WireImage

AR-May-LAview-resupply.indd 76

ArtReview

16/04/2014 11:48

top Laura Owens, 12 Paintings by Laura Owens and Ooga Booga #2, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York above Henry Codax at Michael Thibault, Los Angeles, 2014, curated by Shoot the Lobster. Photo: Laura Schawelka. Courtesy Michael Thibault, Los Angeles.

May 2014

AR-May-LAview-resupply.indd 77

16/04/2014 11:48

The Expanded Photograph The work of three American artists shows how photography is breaking the limits of the frame and the constraints of the medium to become an artform that is site-specific, as concerned with overall context and the space of its own existence as any other. Is this another instance of the ‘postmedium’ age we’ve all been promised, or merely a recognition that the specifics of the medium are more wide-ranging than we previously thought? by David Everitt Howe

In one of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s black-and-white c-print diptychs, Jake studio desk. Originally shot for editing purposes, it became a work (A Reproduction) (2010), a hot, well-built and, incidentally, well-hung in and of itself only years later, when the artist was in residence at young man reclines on a bed, naked except for a leather harness the Studio Museum in Harlem. In lieu of the studio operating as a wrapped around his chest. Comfortably outstretched, he looks at the theatrical space for traditional, head-on studio portraits – his tradelens casually, as if he were a BDSM subject in Robert Mapplethorpe’s mark approach for several years – Sepuya trained the camera, literX Portfolio (1978), taking a break but perhaps feeling a little horny. It’s ally, on the studio itself. It was a noticeable shift in his practice, such a pretty casual setup, though still a posed portrait. In another image, that throwaway photographs, orange peels, paper towels and other Jake (2009), the same man, wearing the same harness in the same bed assorted items left around became of formal interest, in and of them(though now in a leather jockstrap), pays no attention to the camera. selves. A portrait of a man seated on the floor is featured prominently Rather, he’s looking at himself in a Polaroid, in Darren, September 8. 2011 (2011), propped Homosexuality is more which he holds up in the air. The Polaroid, as up on a tabletop surrounded by orange opposed to the person, becomes the subject peels, a book and several stacks of ephemera. footnote than focus; the artists of the photograph, and it’s perhaps indicaThese items were not posed just so, but are more notable for turning rather left that way by chance. In Studio, tive of the way that Sepuya, David Gilbert photography increasingly and Jonathan VanDyke have ‘expanded’ the February 8. 2011 (2011), an orange rests on a table. site-specific, subjecting it medium, to borrow a term from Rosalind A chair is pulled out and draped messily with Krauss. She used it to describe postmodclothing. Tossed on the floor around a roll of to other forms of artistic ernism’s break with Modernism, in which paper towels and beat-up black boots, other production artists became less concerned with an object garments make notable appearance in Studio, of sculpture than its space of existence, its overall context (she called March 2. 2011 (2011), while a c-print, likely fallen from the wall, slumps this ‘marking sites’). Synonymising what’s within the frame with on the floor in the upper-right-hand corner of the shot, partially cut what’s outside it, what’s posed with what’s not, Sepuya, Gilbert and off. It becomes the focus of another work, Ryan, February 16. 2011 (2011), VanDyke make the studio itself their subject. While they each iden- where it’s still half on the floor, half on the wall, the model’s body tify as queer, homosexuality is more footnote than focus; the artists marred by glare where the two meet. are more notable for turning photography increasingly site-specific, Notable in this body of work is the architecture of the studio, its white walls and polished floor becoming something of a stillsubjecting it to other forms of artistic production. Take Sepuya’s Desktop, April 23, 2010 (2010), a photograph featuring life landscape, much like the empty beds Sepuya has had a habit of several other photographs scattered randomly across the artist’s photographing over the years, such as Bed, November 29. 2010 (2010),

AR-May-ExpandedPhotoRESUPPLY.indd 78

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:00

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darren, September 8. 2011, 2011, c-print, 61 × 46 cm, edition of 3. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-ExpandedPhotoRESUPPLY.indd 79

16/04/2014 12:00

David Gilbert, Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013, archival ink jet print, 20 × 14 cm, edition of 5. Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York

AR-May-ExpandedPhotoRESUPPLY.indd 80

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:00

Jonathan VanDyke, Eddie Saint Mondrian, 2013, archival pigment print, 93 × 140 cm, edition of 3. Courtesy the artist and Scaramouche, New York

May 2014

AR-May-ExpandedPhotoRESUPPLY.indd 81

16/04/2014 12:00

little more than a black pillow propped upright on a rumpled surface surfaces, photography has taken a more leading role in his pracof sheets. These were done almost as an afterthought. Since Sepuya tice, which employs his studio as a performative framework. For had no proper studio, he used his bedroom, and specifically his own The Painter of the Hole, his last solo exhibition at Long Island City’s bed, to shoot the many people he considered friends and lovers – most Scaramouche, VanDyke laid canvas on his studio floor and invited of them gay – after he graduated from school. These bedroom scenes two dancers, Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana, who are thus reference, intentionally or not, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s iconic a couple, to work with him on a series of choreographed movebillboards of empty beds, Untitled (1991), which served as dramatic ments in private at his studio, based on their relationship. With memorial to Gonzalez-Torres’s lover, who died of AIDS complica- paint inserted into their costumes, over time the canvases became streaked with paint as they performed. tions that same year. Thus there’s something faintly elegiac about Sepuya’s work In the absence of bodies, Sepuya’s The fabric later became both colourful backdrops for a series of photographs and when it’s devoid of people. In the absence of photographs of empty beds and paintings; cut and stitched together into a bodies, his photographs of empty beds and studios become like indexes Harlequin-inspired diamond pattern, they studios become like indexes of past lives, or were stretched around painting frames. The more probably, future deaths, something of past lives, or more probably, akin to what Roland Barthes would call the photographs were inspired by Bauhaus fibre future deaths, something akin photograph’s punctum, the ‘this-has-been’ or artist Gertrud Arndt and the private, clan‘this-will-die’ of the human subject – here to what Roland Barthes would call destine photography of George Platt Lynes, the photograph’s punctum supplanted by space itself, filled with the who became well known for his melodramatic, homoerotic nude photography durinanimate traces of many. In David Gilbert’s work too, the empty studio setup takes centre ing the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The stills feature VanDyke’s friends and stage. Unlike Sepuya’s, though, which is almost elegantly sparse – like colleagues hyperstyled and dressed. In Eddie Saint Mondrian (2013), a West Elm catalogue – Gilbert’s is manically stuffed with things, a a man is clothed only in white boxer briefs, his body marked with pack rat sent to task, so to speak: scraps of paper, yarn, ripped fabric, graffitilike scribbles. Wearing what looks like a small, square version leftover canvases and drips of paint, among other things, are turned of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1943) around his neck, he into dramatic sculptural tableaux, photographed, then blown up leans back on a backdrop reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock splatter large and in full colour, as was the case with his 2013 solo exhibi- painting. Pollock makes another appearance as a pair of jeans worn tion Coming of Age at Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York. It would by a seated man in Cumberland Valley Portrait Studio 1979 (2013). The take almost a whole paragraph to detail everything Gilbert captures man is surrounded on all sides by the disorienting folds of Ellis and in one shot; with Girlfriend! (2013), two layers of fabric are pinned Botana’s paint-smeared canvases. to the wall – one torn and gauzy – while a red bucket on the floor is Hung together back-to-back, such that VanDyke’s photographs nearly impaled by a long, wooden rod covered in string. On the wall, were often placed directly onto the paintings’ reverse, the pairseveral paintings rest against each other, as if left there in storage. In ings foregrounded just how recurrent a motif the dancers’ canvases Drama at Sunset (Summer) (2013), the studio window is lit a brilliant red were, functioning as both utilitarian, behind-the-scenes flooring and from outside by a Los Angeles sunset. It looks almost artificial, though formal aesthetic device – studio space, photograph and painting all in it’s not, while a clamp lamp, illuminating a far studio wall layered one. What’s notable is that while VanDyke increasingly abstracts his with paper, thread, planks of wood, paintings and other innumer- studio’s site-specificity through various processes and mediums, it able things, lends dramatic emphasis. pops up again and again, hardly able to be ignored. Everything stems Unlike Sepuya’s studio shots, for which the artist left objects from it, including the photographs. untouched, here the studio is both formally arranged and left as This is hardly relegation. Rather, it just proves that mediumis, such that the two are nearly one-andspecificity has little place in a contemporary the-same. As Emily Hall recently wrote in Medium-specificity has little place artworld that’s ‘postmedium’, even though Artforum, ‘Discerning where Gilbert’s delibthat’s a little bit of a lie. Mediums aren’t going in a contemporary artworld erately arranged assemblages end and their anywhere. The conventions of painting and that’s ‘postmedium’, even though photography will always be around, waiting environs begin can be difficult – indeed, the that’s a little bit of a lie. Mediums to be renovated, redone, readdressed, over boundary between the two is so fluid that the act of distinguishing becomes nearly pointand over. Sepuya, Gilbert and VanDyke do aren’t going anywhere less.’ In Gilbert’s free-for-all studio – which is this handily vis-à-vis an emphasis on the often compared to the way Brancusi kept his, a place with ‘nothing studio. It’s an open-ended, experimental space, where if you didn’t fixed, nothing rigid’ – media is so mixed, it’s illegible. As Gilbert quite catch the ‘here and now’ of it – the building up or the breaking noted in an email exchange, “While the materials remain readable as down, the choreographed or unchoreographed thing that happened fabric, paper, plaster and paint, exactly what they ‘are’ is much harder – it exists in relic form as photographs, which speak to a certain time to pin down.” and a certain place, always contingent. ar Similarly, it’s the overlapping and sometimes complex intertwining of studio setup, painting and photography that makes Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Studio Work is on view at Platform Centre Jonathan VanDyke’s work so similarly hard to pin down. Known for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg, from 31 May to 11 July. Jonathan VanDyke: Video and Performance opens at Four Boxes mostly for his paintings, which slowly drip paint onto the floor with Gallery, Krabbesholm Højskole, Skive, Denmark, on 17 May a series of tubes hidden behind elaborately woven or constructed

AR-May-ExpandedPhotoRESUPPLY.indd 82

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:00

Moyra Davey Phillip Lai 11 April — 29 June 2014

Free Entry

Phillip Lai for ArtReview May 14.indd 1 083_AR.indd 83

Supported by

Camden Arts Centre Arkwright Road London NW3 6DG

Image: Phillip Lai, Untitled (detail), 2011

camdenartscentre.org camdenartscentre @ Camdenartsctr

14/04/2014 16:31:08 16/04/2014 12:01

After School I Art Professional, Art Market, Artworld by Christopher Mooney

‘He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and “keep churning out papers… After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough”’ Interview with Higgs-Boson theoriser Peter Higgs in The Guardian, 6 December 2013

AR-May-After School.indd 84

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:02

‘Look at that subtle off-white colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark!’ Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)

Tasteful business cards: like it or not, in art and its academies, as in make any difference, or, as in psychoanalysis, are the fees, whether commerce and science and pretty much everything else, the paper paid directly by the student or granted in the form of scholarships, matters, and its most beguiling form is of the economic brand. Money an essential part of the developmental process? Are art schools, theretalks. So let’s see if you’ll buy this: can the artworld, spearheaded by fore, cognitive behaviour clinics, and crit sessions a form of normative its best art faculties, students and independent researchers, foster a therapy? Or is, as the American critic Dave Hickey once said, the MFA’s collaborative project as sizeable and significant as the Large Hadron only and ‘evaporating’ raison d’être ‘training sissies for teaching jobs’? Collider? What the blazes for, you ask? Answer this first: are today’s Or from a more recent and even more phlegmatic Hickey rant, should art schools – especially the big, famous ones – experimental labs, fine arts departments be pushed wholesale into athletics, and should end-oriented research centres, reeducation camps, de-skilling tanks, students attend for the same sole reason basketball players go to NCAA seed-stage equity venture farms or the most important relational art schools: not to get a piece of paper but to ‘make it to the pros’? Or works of our age? Did the artworld engender the art school, or vice should art instead follow the football-club model, with youth acadversa? Were both created by the art market, or are all three – art school, emies and farm teams feeding new talent directly into the big-league art market, artworld – so far up each other’s arses that you can’t tell maws of Team Gagosian, Team Zwirner and Team Qatar? them apart? You there, art school students, what’s the most imporFinally, is it just me, fusty, snooty, dulled around the edges romantant thing you learned at school today? Did you learn it from your tic that I am, or does the word ‘professional’, when sided up against professors, your peers, or yourself? Why does so much contemporary the designation ‘art’ or ‘artist’ and used to describe a person working art look like homework? Is it time for degree-granting art schools, in a field of contemporary art, make the whole enterprise sound as the American art critic Jerry Saltz wrote recently, ‘to stress courses inherently sad? Like those old Art Instruction, Inc. ads on matchin craft and various skills – from blacksmithing to animal tracking?’ books and the back pages of comic books: ‘Become a Professional And, really, are institutions of higher learning the best environments Artist in Your Free Time’; ‘Make $75 to $100 a Week in Art’. If the artist for art instruction, or is the increasing professionalisation of art, by in question is not of the ‘fine’ variety, fine. If he or she is of the pay-thewhich I mean the almost universal obligation for academic certi- bills freelance or cubicle-bound ‘applied’ genus, by all means, slap fication, with its attendant conformist tendencies and standard- on ‘professional’. ‘Successful’ sounds better for both camps, though, ising effects, 100 percent depressing and awful and evil? Is the MFA right? More positive, less insecure. Whoever heard of a ‘professional lawyer’ or a ‘professional doctor’? Unprofessional, sure. But really, a ‘terminal’ degree, in every sense of the word? Tangentially related: should art schools be democratic, meri- isn’t all of this beside the point? Should someone in as reputable a tocratic or plutocratic? Must aspiring artists shell out scandalous forum as ArtReview be allowed to indulge in such a knuckleheaded amounts of cash to become ‘future greats’ or, failing that, certified quasi-rhetorical pile-on, and not provide a single straight answer? ‘professional artists’ or, failing that, certified ‘art professionals’? Is Richard Prince right, is even a fruit cocktail beyond me? Is the third calling lower than the second? Full disclosure: I am not an artist, never Calling: are vocation and profession the went to art school and have declined every above American Psycho, 2000, dir Mary Harron same thing? Are professional and sucoffer to teach, speak or in any way directly facing page Peter Higgs onsite with the Compact Muon cessful the same thing? If admission to communicate with art-school students. Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN. these institutions were free, would it I can’t even look them in the eye. Photo: Maximilien Brice. Courtesy CERN, Meyrin

May 2014

AR-May-After School.indd 85

16/04/2014 12:02

Now your turn, you there, the art-aspiring types clutching this digest of good report between your art-aspiring fingers (the rest of you can move along). Are you at a crossroads? Are you trying to decide whether to: A B C D

major in fine arts apply for an MFA programme attend an alternative, artist-run school Net-surf and museum/gallery-hop yourself into an educated state of art-making preparedness E intern your body and soul to an artist whose work you admire F retreat your quiescent pupa-self to a hidey-hole until, through hard work and/or divine intervention, you emerge a fully formed art moth, perpetually hovering near the dangerous flame of artistic genius and all-consuming creativity?

If any of the above, read on, for I will show you the path on which there is no coming and no going. If, however, you are enrolled in one of the finer fine-arts programmes already, and can afford the subsequent debt load, go back to whatever institutional structure has been set aside for you to do what you do – studio, study carrel, the confines of your mind – and do what you do. If, like Baudelaire, you believe that art is a cancer that eats up everything else, and you’re not OK with this, turn the page. If you dream of fame and sex and fortune, dream on, but somewhere else. If your hand and eye take a backseat to your mouth, move along. If you network or think you should learn to network, stop where you are. If, for you, the aesthetic has been eclipsed by other values – political, social, moral, relational, dialogical, environmental, conceptual, whatever – hover near the back with a mocking sneer on your face, looking up from time to time but not deigning to participate. If the phrase ‘distribution of the sensible’ makes your skin tingle, or crawl, put this down and take a bath. If you seek approval and guidance from a community of like-minded peers, beat it. I mean it. You there, DIY guy in the white overalls, move a little closer. You with the Lacan book, try the door down the hall. Spiky-haired thing, a urinal, really? I see that it’s fully functioning

and not upside down and made in China. Yes, yes, I watched the video and read the Walter Benjamin quote. The uniqueness of urination as a work of art in the age of postmechanical reproduction, I get it, big deal. Piss off. The rest of you? It is time to get off the pot. Aesthete, philistine and everyone else in between, what we talk about when we talk about art, the big questions, the whats and the whys – especially ‘what is art?’ and ‘why is this art?’ – are tiresome but unavoidable. And essential. The laziest way to describe a work of art is to talk about what someone is willing to pay for it. The same is true of an art education. The whole student-debt thing, which the American critic Ben Davis calls the ‘juicy black carbuncle of a political issue that is going to explode’, is easily and safely lanced. Just don’t get too close. Yes, money talks, but do you have to listen all the time? And if not, to what should you be listening? Your heart? Your mind? Your mother? The full, great, caterwauling arc of everything? Not a certifiable, noncredentialised knucklehead like me, that’s for damn sure. Artists make art. Artists, make art. Business cards, too, if you want, with your artwork images on them. And a watermark. Finally, to conclude (Mrs Wilson taught me this, Mr Prince, in the fifth fucking grade), the Large Hadron Collider, which is a pleasant two-hour drive from Art Basel, cost €5.5 billion to build. Christie’s and Sotheby’s Contemporary Art sales alone could pay that off in three years, max. Last year’s whole Higgs-Boson hoopla was deservedly a big deal – it closed the last gap in the Standard Model theory of fundamental particles – but it didn’t bring us a fraction of an inch closer to answering the most nagging questions in fundamental science – or fundamental anything. If the constants of nature were different, would atoms still form? Would there still be art? Would we still need art schools? Would Jerry Saltz, Dave Hickey and Ben Davis still exist? Would I? Would you? Would Richard Prince? Would Lori McNee? This is huge, the stakes are enormous. I suggest we put aside our differences, pool our resources and pay Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell and Anish Kapoor to build us a really big shiny ring in the Alps, where we can watch what happens when we Three Stooge our domes into each other at three metres per second slower than the speed of light. Then maybe we’ll actually learn something. ar

‘What I have that makes me feel professional right now is a well-organised studio, business cards with my artwork images on them, memberships in arts professional organisations, acceptance into juried shows, postcards mailed to a growing mailing list, subscriptions to arts magazines, a growing body of work and people who purchase my artwork’ One of the winners’ testimonies in the ‘When Are You Ready to Call Yourself a Professional Artist?’ contest on the ‘Fine Art Tips with Lori McNee’ website

‘ArtReview… you couldn’t judge a fruit cocktail. I hate your power lists. Ranking? What are you, in the fifth fucking grade? Luckily your [sic] in London or I’d come over there and Three Stooge your knuckle-headed domes together’ Artist Richard Prince on his blog, 8 November 2013

AR-May-After School.indd 86

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:02

E N JU

NG OPENPI TION RECEDAY, MON 16 JUNE.M. 5–9 P

2 2 17 4 1 20 AY TO D S E U T DAY, SATU.RM. ick, itzpatr man F 1– 9 P AY, *Freedngeles urich Los A ond-Guth, Zer, d m SUND.M. n y e re F Friedla Cinzia rlin 1– 6 P Berlin rich, Be

rk ew Yo ides, nal, N v * 47 Ca Livia Bena * 8 0 M2 Lima n Siegel, Altma ncisco odern, San Fra nt & M Ancie n n, Londo an Anderse Christihagen , n Cope a / Meguro Aoyam aris Tokyo Hertling, P BaliceProjects, *BlankTown Cape urich don n ang, Z BolteL li Presti, Lo o p m awa, Ca ik h Is / Carlosn Londo Berlin Chert, , Berlin Circus ielsen, Croy N Berlin e Bruijne, Ellen drdam sels Amste dance, Brus Dépen ent-Art, m *Docuos Aires w York Buen Street, Ne x *Esse , Milan FluxiaNaples Fonti,

y Fried *Lars , Mexico Cita, Paris Gaga l de Stamp York w e e d Gau Gitlen, N i Laurel oise, Duba Grey Nunn, Berlin , *Dan Gine Hofland Jean rdam Amste

rdens, ush Ga Hollybn an, Londo son Mossm Hopkin nd Aucklaas Huber, Andre ue Viennaastner, Prag, Hunt Kto de Visión * Institutá al, Bogo Internation Karma t s h e c p Zuri m, Buda Kisterell Koppe, Kenda w na Glasgoel Layr, Vien Emanu

n Londoa, cello, Limon rravalbuen Maisted ris Madri lle Alix, Pa , Marceline Martins e *Jaqu aulo ow São PMary, Glasg Mary w, Berlin i, e *Math esca Minin Franc Milanor, Rome Paris Monit harpentier, on, Mor C r’s Tankstati Mothe Dublin

rücke, Alte B Neue rt o.t.M. rd, FrankfurasBlanchaa Nogued, Barcelon Madri tanbul Non, IsBaroque, Officeels Bruss uin & Co., Overd geles Los An, Berlin j Peres , Berlin, Clu ijing Plan Brm China, Beleta, Platfoctos Ultravio *Proye mala City ski, Guate Radziszew *Dawidaw Wars Warsaw Raster,

BURG15 WEG L BASE . WWW.CH LISTE AR-87.indd 87

rts, Fine A *Real klyn a o Bro Cluj-Napoc in Sabot, Brown, Berl, e y *Sand icher / Lang Schle erlin Berlin Schubert, Bin Micky uppe, Berl Silberker & Kohl, Somm rich Berlinr Staiger, Zu Grego , Warsaw urg, Stereor Van Doesb Stigte rdam Amstee Subal, Simon ork New Y thens, eder, A The BreCarlo Monte nd eneva a * Truthequences, Gren, Cons van Zome Martinrdam Amste, Oslo n VI, VII Gold, Londo ndon Vilma an Viner, Loork Jonathpace, New Y Walls

ILLER W Z T E. GU N I MA SOR & CIEQUIERS BAN L SPONE C N BASE SI 7 19 9

16/04/2014 12:36

After School II Los Angeles by Andrew Berardini

LA art school is hot. Or cool. Or at least it was. Just read Ralph Rugoff’s 1989 article ‘Liberal Arts’ in Vogue about CalArts. Or Dennis Cooper’s 1997 ‘Too Cool for School’ in Spin about UCLA. Or Andrew Hultkrans’s ‘Surf and Turf’ in Artforum, Summer 1998. Or Deborah Solomon’s ‘How to Succeed in Art’ in The New York Times Magazine in June 1999. In a city run by boosters of one kind or another, thrustered by a weird need to be loved, or to make money trying, such buzz is met by locals with a certain healthy scepticism. But it’s true, the schools and, perhaps more importantly, their teachers turned attention to LA, and with ups and downs, tragedies and triumphs, dropouts, blowouts and sellouts, kept it. By most accounts, an MFA from an LA art school in 2014 is a very good token to show the gatekeepers to a career in art. Lari Pittman, quoted in Hultkrans’s article, calls the magic ingredient for school in Los Angeles ‘sweet neglect’. I once asked CalArts dean Tom Lawson if he could predict by looking at students’ work if they would

AR-May-After School.indd 88

be successful. He said, “If they are still making work ten years out of school, I would say they’re successful.” LA art schools became hot/cool mostly because of the simultaneous and often sudden success of the teachers. UCLA became ‘Too Cool for School’ via Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari. At Art Center College of Design, they had Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams. USC has had Frances Stark, Andrea Zittel, Charlie White and Sharon Lockhart. The relationship between school and artmaking isn’t strained in Los Angeles. It’s no dig to be a teacher, being one indicates nothing about commercial success or a lack of it. Students, after they graduate, advocate for their teachers. The position even adds heft and force to one’s influence in the community rather than detracting from it. Among artists in LA, nobody says, “Those who can’t do, teach”. Being a teacher is a part of the identity of success here.

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:02

Without a strong market and with a dearth of institutional art spaces, Southern California’s scene began during the 1970s to coalesce around schools. Populated by people grossed out by New York (Mike Kelley) or attracted by the possibility of a new educational experiment (Allan Kaprow), CalArts became the first model for a conceptually rigorous, morally decadent, sunstroked art school with a dollop of artworld savviness, one that went on to be mimicked by all its successor institutions around Los Angeles. CalArts sputtered on and off in the 1980s. After the recessions and riots of the 1990s, UCLA and Art Center emerged with force and publicity. USC has quietly dominated the last decade. Catherine Opie came out of CalArts about the same time that Rugoff published ‘Liberal Arts’. With aesthetic clarity, Opie’s photographic work captures communities, most famously the queer one she herself emerged from. Charlie White was one of the student artists originally featured in Hultkrans’s ‘Surf and Turf’. His photos and animations trawl the weird and often uncomfortable territory between aspiration and desire. And Piero Golia arrived in LA 12 years ago without an art degree. His work deals primarily with legend, attempting to embody Alighiero Boetti’s idea that an artist is somewhere between a shaman and a showman. Now Opie is tenured at UCLA and White at USC (where he chaired the graduate programme for four years), and Golia is the chief proprietor of the most successful and longest-running artist-led school in the city, the Mountain School of Arts. “When I graduated from CalArts in 1988,” said Opie to me, “it was kind of a hot moment for the school. But I didn’t have any expectation of having a career or getting a gallery. Being in a group show at an alternative space looked like success. Students are now very aware, having an idea of a certain type of career in the artworld and they’re choosing different programmes in relationship to that.” One of the real problems is always money. “We all have a problem with the cost of an art education in the US,” said Opie. “It’s horrific.” The current sticker price of tuition for an MFA at CalArts: $83,400. UCLA seems like a steal at around $30,500 (double that to $61,000 if you’re not a California resident). These numbers don’t include accumulating loan interest, materials or living expenses. One reason USC has been the most competitive

these last years is that full funding is common though not guaranteed. Careerism, opportunism and hustling are dirty words in some circles of art, ‘ambition’ being the more polite stand-in. But every artist-professor I talked to about art school in LA lamented the cost, the corporate structures threatening their success and the freedom (once protected by art schools) shifting away, along with the influence, elsewhere. As Charlie White wrote to me, ‘I do not think it is alarmist to say that schools are rapidly becoming too costly, too professionalised and too concerned with exterior issues instead of the interior realities of their pedagogical and communal impact.’ But money isn’t an issue for all schools. Lasting for one semester every spring, the artist-founded Mountain School of Arts pays nothing to its faculty and requires no monetary payments from its students. Piero Golia told me that, when he first arrived in town, he quickly realised that without a school a young artist in LA was without a community. So he founded a school with fellow artist Eric Wesley. The classes have ranged from life drawing with Vanessa Beecroft, collaborative music performances from Mike Watt (Minutemen, Dos, Firehose, Stooges) and Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), and a moving autobiographical monologue from feared Vogue editor Lisa Love. All speakers, including myself at times, volunteer to speak for free. “When we started the school,” explains Golia, “we never had the concern if people should pay. How can you charge if you don’t consider education a commodity? We also thought nobody would ever pay us. We do education, we let other people deal with money.” Researching this piece, I started to get lost in all those old articles filled with breathy buzz and the new catastrophic tidings of debt and corporate takeovers, all the conditions that made art school important in LA and what makes it still important. Writing to me, Charlie White summed it up best: “The condition of the artist in Los Angeles is to be at once aware of the falseness of the city while also falling victim to the aspirational desires that feed it. We have no choice but to plan, like Tod Hackett in The Day of the Locust [1939], ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’ in our work.” Terribly false and fantastically real, the quickest way to debt and, for some, success, chockful of weirdos with room for one more, LA art schools are still hot. Or at least will be when the artists set them on fire. ar

above Artist Catherine Opie. Photo: Scott Groller. Courtesy CalArts, Los Angeles facing page Artist Richard Jackson. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles

May 2014

AR-May-After School.indd 89

16/04/2014 12:02

After School III New York by Jonathan T.D. Neil

If there is one thing that Sanford Biggers would change about visual-art MFA programmes, including the ones that he has taught in – currently Columbia University’s; Harvard’s and Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) before that – it would be to ‘make them free’. This is a widely shared sentiment, and it motivates many debates and projects in New York City, from Cooper Union’s controversial decision to begin charging tuition next year (Cooper grants BFAs only) to the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), the group’s ongoing free ‘learning experiment’, to the free Friday art classes that Thomas Hirschhorn conducted as part of his Gramsci Monument (2013) at the Forest Houses housing project in the Bronx last summer. Over the past 20 years, the MFA industry has had a large hand in supporting New York-area artists via its vast network of visitingcritic and adjunct-instructor positions. The rail networks (still laughable by European standards) and the close proximity of a number of schools to the US art-market’s biggest commercial hub have made it possible for artists to cobble together teaching ‘gigs’ of one kind or another at Yale, Columbia, Bard, NYU, Pratt, Parsons, Hunter, Cooper and others in order to get some of the bills paid. It’s economic pragmatism, if not desperation, that drives many artists’ decisions to return to the crit rooms and studio outbuildings. But Biggers told me he had always wanted to teach. He was influenced by the ‘Black Romanticism’ of figures such as Ernie Barnes and Romare Bearden, whose work was often dismissed as ‘didactic’, a term that has been sloppily applied at times to Biggers’s own practice,

AR-May-After School.indd 90

which, as with his recent Quilt Drawings (2012), often takes race and African-American history as its animating force. Biggers counters by understanding ‘didacticism’ as a kind of “defence mechanism”, both for artists who aren’t accepted immediately by the mainstream and by audiences and critics who are resistant to work that doesn’t accord with how they think art should look and behave. If one has to educate one’s audience, however, it’s a small step from there to wanting to educate future artists, “to teach people how to think and how to see”, as Biggers puts it. Since 2009 he has been doing this at Columbia, widely considered one of the top, if not the top school on the East Coast. Not surprisingly, at VCU Biggers found the atmosphere relatively “easy and laidback”, while at Columbia he recognises that there’s “more at stake”. Only a very small cohort of students are selected from a big pool of applicants, and those students are anxious about money, which feeds their ambitions to get out into the New York artworld, set up their studios and seek recognition. “Not a week goes by”, says Biggers, “without a Columbia alum showing in the city”, which is presumably one of the reasons so many young artists want to get their training there. If Biggers’s presence is any indication, Columbia has become more amenable to interdisciplinary, performance and social practices, which were not always at home within the academy. “When I was at Columbia,” Coco Fusco told me, “the problem was that there were these extreme formalists who hated that I wanted the kids to read and write and who didn’t want there to be any study of performance, thought it was terrible that people wanted to do video and not

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:02

paint, or that anybody would be concerned with any kind of sociological material or phenomenon in an artwork.” Fusco isn’t describing the 1990s. She taught at Columbia from 2001 to 2006, hardly the Stone Age for advanced art practices in the academy, though it does date the very recent institutional enshrining that such practices have enjoyed. It’s a fight that Fusco has had to wage in the schools – after her tour at Columbia she was named chair of the visual arts department at Parsons, The New School for Design, and is now Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, in São Paulo – because her own work has been pioneering when it comes to sociologically informed performance and video. For example, The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–4), perhaps one of the most memorable works of the historic 1993 Whitney Biennial, had Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña performing in a cage as the two ‘undiscovered Amerindians’ of the work’s title in order to provoke a rethinking of the New World’s foundation myths. Bare Life Study #1 (2005) and A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006–8) addressed the larger role that women played in the US military adventurism of the last decade. And more recently, Fusco has been giving performance lectures for which she assumes the role of the veterinarian and psychologist Dr Zira from Planet of the Apes (1968) (Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr Zira, Animal Psychologist, 2013). Teaching has allowed Fusco to work out some of these ideas in the classroom. The work she produced in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was informed by a seminar she conducted on how artists have responded to war in the past. But as much as the seminar room can be a place of productive dialogue, Fusco told me that students at top schools such as Columbia, students who she declares are often “very good”, can arrive with a sense of entitlement and will push back against faculty who may be seen, in their eyes and those of other faculty, as demanding too much on the intellectual front. “Because it’s so expensive to attend,” Fusco says, “and you have so many volatile egos, and spoiled kids, and the school wants to keep the clients

happy, you basically have to tiptoe delicately and figure out how much a student can listen to and also how much you can say in that discursive environment.” Heather Rowe, who was in Columbia’s MFA programme just prior to Fusco’s arrival, confirmed that the formalist/conceptualist split was indeed in full force while she was there, and there are iterations of it in one programme or another throughout the New York and East Coast network. Though Rowe has never sought out teaching jobs, she has held many. Currently teaching in the foundation curriculum at Cooper Union, Rowe has also taught at Columbia (drawing), Parsons (critical reading & writing), RISD (senior painting thesis), Yale (visiting critic) and Harvard (sculpture), always at the request or invitation of a fellow artist. Though “teaching is always hard and incredibly draining,” Rowe admits, “it’s good to check in with people at different moments of development”. There’s some irony to the fact that Rowe finally taught a sculpture class only last year, after having taught off and on for more than a decade. Important too, given that Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies is housed in the Carpenter Center – Le Corbusier’s only built work in North America – because Rowe’s sculpture is nothing if not architectural, and many works, such as On Returning (2007), explicitly contend with modernist architecture’s ambivalent history. More recent work, such as Paneled Insomnia (2011), mines what Anthony Vidler defined some time ago as architecture’s ‘uncanny’, that is, the darker psychological dimensions that go along with the forceful shaping of space. Rowe’s students at Cooper are very aware of what’s happening in the New York artworld, and the Internet and social media have made it increasingly easy for young artists to find their peer groups, to make connections and to begin to ‘show’ their work, which often means distributing it through unconventional channels. The networks and access once promised by MFA programmes have been overtaken by more informal affinity groups, by artists gathering together to forge their own practices out of the raw materials of the urban centre, and there is no urban centre for art in the United States – not Los Angeles, not Detroit, not Chicago – quite like New York City. ar

above Coco Fusco, Bare Life Study #1, 2005. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York facing page Thomas Hirschhorn, Art School: Energy =Yes! Quality =No!, from Gramsci Monument, 2013, Forest Houses, Bronx. Photo: Romain Lopez. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

May 2014

AR-May-After School.indd 91

16/04/2014 12:03

artbasel.com | facebook.com /artbasel | twitter.com /artbasel

ArtBasel FP.indd 92 ABB14_Ad_235x300_ArtReview.indd 1

16/04/2014 12:42 19.03.14 13:20

Art Reviewed

This was the final dumping ground… A Sargasso of the imagination! 93

AR-May-Dividers.indd 93

16/04/2014 11:11

Martin Creed What’s the Point of It? Hayward Gallery, London 29 January – 5 May I’m writing this two days before UK Mother’s Day, but it’s just coincidence that the piece that stands out most in this 30-year survey of work by Martin Creed (for more than just its physicality) is the enormous, 12.5m-wide spinning sculpture that spells out, in 2m-high white neon letters, the word ‘mothers’: Work No. 1092 (2011). It may be big and blunt, but without getting too Freudian about it, the work also highlights the more subtle and contradictory facets of the maternal parent/child relationship. When that heavy steel arm swooshes over your head, for example, the instinct is to duck, as you might from the threat of an admonishing ‘clip round the ear’; even though you know that, unless you’re 198cm tall or over, it’s not going to hurt you. The work is a celebration, but at the same time isn’t it also slightly embarrassing – a bit too big and brash, a bit too interfering? Work No. 1092 also stands out as one of the few elements in this exhibition that makes its focus a person (or generic group of people) other than the artist. Indeed, the more of Creed’s work one sees in one place, the more it becomes obvious that it’s the artist’s feelings about making sense

of being in the world that are his subject, whether that’s by lining and stacking up objects in order of size – potted cacti, cardboard boxes, rusty I-beams – or trying to connect things, such as producing 1,000 prints using different heads of broccoli on square pieces of paper measuring 18cm on a side, after realising that a head of broccoli, Creed’s favourite vegetable, was on average the same size (18cm) as a seveninch single. In a hang that opens up and makes full use of all the Hayward spaces, from toilets and balconies to stairs, lifts and doors, these repeated attempts to make sense of the chaos of life become more heightened – at one extreme by containing and ordering the chaos, and at the other by splurging it all out, as in the ‘Shit’ and ‘Vomit’ films (Work No. 660, 2007, and Work No. 610, 2008), in which volunteers are seen against a stark white background, respectively shitting or vomiting. Then there’s Creed’s music, which sits somewhere in between. What also becomes apparent is the awareness that, as an audience, what we get caught up in is not only the recognition of those feelings in ourselves,

but also Creed’s mostly playful, sometimes uncomfortable but always deeply felt desire to express them. In that sense perhaps every work here is a form of self-portrait – although there are also three traditional self-portraits that punctuate the show, and which also stand out for being as different in style as the artist’s own appearance has been over the years – in terms of changes in hair, facial hair and glasses. The earliest portrait is an accomplished acrylic on board, in a Paul Nash palette, from 1984; the second a photograph of Creed with a Cheshire Cat grin from 2003; and the third a more melancholy face, from 2013, rendered in coloured pencil and acrylic, that stares out from a circular black ground, as if looking out from a porthole. Creed playfully titled his show What’s the Point of It? As a question, it isn’t that dissimilar to asking: what’s the point of life? Thinking again about ducking under Work No. 1092’s spinning arm, I’m reminded that the most pressing point for me right now is to get that Mother’s Day card in the post. Helen Sumpter

Work No. 1092, 2011 (installation view), white neon, steel, 500 × 1250 × 20 cm. Photo: Linda Nylind. © the artist. Courtesy Hayward Gallery, London

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 94

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:04

Nina Canell Near Here Camden Arts Centre, London 17 January – 30 March How deeply should we analyse a sculpture? Materiality, after all, extends to the subatomic level, where particles act tirelessly and weirdly, and invisible forces can sometimes be as decisive as visible ones. Such forces, Nina Canell’s work asserts, can even compose for us. Near Here (1 Microsecond) (2014, made with her frequent collaborator Robin Watkins) is a thick sheet of plastic coated with photocopying toner and, for one microsecond, zapped with a million volts. Now sitting in a Perspex vitrine on a rectangle of carpet, it suggests lightning cutting whitely through murky blackness; the massive electrocuting power that created this aleatory composition on the plastic’s surface, now just a memory, feels inextricable from it. In this sense, the Swedish artist shares territory with boffinlike practitioners such as Raphael Hefti; but, as per her previous shows, this selection of works from 2012 to 2014 finds Canell primarily interested in extending sculpture’s vocabulary to unseen things made flashingly visible, or out of sight yet framed as present. So the off-white chunks sitting in a glass on a square of carpet in Interiors (Condensed) (2013) turn out to be coagulated air, a favourite material of Canell’s, and in a series of thick

offcuts from electricity cables – several suspended in vitrines full of water – the artist speaks of natural forces stymied, a galvanic flow suspended. These works, their crosssectioned ends revealing jostling clusters of wires, each wrapped in colourful insulation (the whole thing encased in thick rubber, like a giant liquorice allsort) operate strangely. They’re all about absent forces, cancelled events. We know what electricity does in water: it conducts, potentially fatally. But we’re simply reminded that it would happen, were circumstances different. Blue (Diffused) (2014), meanwhile, features a ‘shredded sock’ whose tiny azure fragments hang, as if magnetised by static electricity, in a slim vertical vitrine. Without specific crib notes (which aren’t freely available), you know only that something is happening here. Canell’s ‘seemingly unorthodox use of objects and materials’, according to the institution’s website, ‘attempts to transfer, exchange and share forms of intuitive knowledge’. This is an interpretative stumbling block of sorts in works that appear to require some sort of explicatory supplement. What’s apprehensible without one is a sense of being perched on the

lip of understanding – or left with one’s subjectivity – which might be analogous to intuiting that existence is ghosted by all kinds of vigorous invisibilities that we don’t really understand, shifting all the time. Read Canell’s work thus and it converts into something like science’s inverse: a relativist poetics, suggesting both anxiety and excitability at everything being in flux, at the air and what’s built into our architecture (eg, electricity cables) quietly effervescing, and – as per the title – at the constant, easily ignored proximity of all of this. Even so, to ride the critical upbeat in this way is also to dance around the fact that this display doesn’t engage as previous Canell shows have. You might will it to be both literal and metaphor (for the creative spirit, for the freedoms of interpretation), but there are more of the cable works than seem necessary, odd curatorial decisions such as stranding one work outside the entrance, a faint air of exclusion. Canell remains an intriguing, individualistic figure, and one doesn’t want her to sit still as a sculptor; but for an exhibition plugged into power sources and in clandestine perpetual motion, this one feels mysteriously static. Martin Herbert

Near Here, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy Camden Arts Centre, London

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 95

16/04/2014 12:04

John Akomfrah, Phoebe Boswell, Rashaad Newsome Carroll / Fletcher, London 7 March – 10 April If this three-person show asks us to consider artists who deal in the ‘cultural frameworks and politics of identity’, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that any political charge is subdued or latent, more reflective than confrontational. The identity in question might start out with that of being black, and yet what it means to ‘deal with identity’ here ranges further than the immediate experiences of the artists. Biography isn’t absent, but in 2014, identity is complicated by generations of hybridisation, displacement and expatriation. Phoebe Boswell was born in 1982 to Kenyan and white-settler parents, but grew up in the Gulf States before coming to London. Her moody, claustrophobic installation of works, titled collectively The Matter of Memory (2013–4) – a mix of sculptures, wall drawing and video-projected hand-drawn animations – folds over her frayed, complicated relationship to biography and rootedness in a rumination on land and its possession. The Matter of Memory assembles vignettes that evoke everyday servitude and constraint, alongside familial recollections, in a landscape of postindependence Kenya where white wealth and privilege endured: a wall drawing of a dead elephant, animated flies buzzing around its vacant eye; a loop of a man whipping another under a tree, projected onto the pot of an elegant tea service; finely drawn portraits of the artist’s elderly father. Boswell’s visual style might owe

something to William Kentridge, but her distanced yet compulsive pursuit of a receding past and its iniquities conveys a hazier, more intimate melancholia. By contrast, New Orleans-born-and-raised Rashaad Newsome tries to put some distance between himself and the stereotyped and mass-marketed black American culture that surrounds him. An ornate gilt-framed video depicts Newsome ceremonially crowned with a baseball-cap-cum-crown before a cathedral assembly of homies, then shifts into an animated tumult of rope gold and other status-symbol merchandise; nearby, opulent collages combine fashion magazine reproductions of handbags, jewellery, disembodied women’s high-heeled legs and twerking asses. Maybe as an antidote to these nervy complicities (they’re both seductive and disdainful), Newsome’s deft performance video Shade Compositions (2012) takes the clichés of cultural identity as raw material: a chorus of black and non-Caucasian women and a few drag queen-ish men perform a concerto of vocal mannerisms, gestures and slang words that have become markers of street ‘attitude’ – kissing-teeth, ‘say what?’ melanges of club diva and ghetto posturing. That performing the rituals of identity puts you above their power is a familiar trope – but what marks out Shade Compositions is the sheer aural weirdness of the result.

If Newsome and Boswell have a love-hate commitment to particular ethnocultural identities, John Akomfrah’s two-screen film Transfigured Night (2013) shatters any easy continuity between past and present. A sweeping, elegiac journey through postwar history since decolonisation, Akomfrah’s work is a moving, troubling question mark over the ideal of democracy and the continued reality of iniquity and oppression. Mixing archive footage with contemporary sequences, the film’s key images are of an official visit to the USA by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana – seen welcomed by President Kennedy in 1961 – contrasted with images of violence from wars and revolutions of the same period. Nkrumah’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial is echoed later, as Akomfrah’s camera tracks contemporary visitors to this shrine to democracy – a giant white man enthroned. Transfigured Night betrays a sense of stasis and hesitancy about how democratic progress might ever be possible, while its grand scale is nevertheless encrypted with the personal: Akomfrah was born in 1957 – the year of Ghana’s independence. Nkrumah’s Ghana, increasingly authoritarian, forced Akomfrah’s family to flee a decade later, to Britain. ‘Identity’ – to remain oneself – cannot, among these shifting generations of artists, be comfortably inhabited. But what to become, and how to become it, is a prospect still shrouded in uncertainty. J.J. Charlesworth

Phoebe Boswell, This Vast Mammouth Animal Opened Up, 2014, charcoal and carbon on MDF, looped projection, speakers. Courtesy the artist and Carroll/Fletcher, London

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 96

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:04

Ruin Lust Tate Britain, London 4 March – 18 May Ruins are created suddenly or gradually – an eruption of magma or a growth of lichen. This is demonstrated in the first room of Ruin Lust, where John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822) meets Jane and Louise Wilson’s Azeville (2006), a huge monochrome photograph of a military bunker in Normandy. These kind of structures influenced modernist architecture, whose style struck J.G. Ballard as anticipating its own demise, perhaps because of the resemblance of the shuttered concrete to the layers of sedimentary rock that might, in some distant geological future, subsume it. The curators make us wait for the inevitable. I counted ten dilapidated abbeys in the second room, their serial presentation underlining the eighteenth-century craze for picturesque decay in Europe. In Turner’s Tintern Abbey: The Crossing and Chancel, Looking Towards the East Window (1794), two sightseers are dwarfed by crumbling columns, reminding us that these artists didn’t just inaugurate a genre, they started a tourist industry. But ruins aren’t just retrospective, ie, decay ‘interpreted’; they can be premonitory too, as with Joseph Gandy’s drawing Bird’s Eye View of the Bank of England (1830). It was John Soane himself who instructed Gandy to depict parts of his under-construction building as

a future ruin, the natty facade concealing an interior that resembles an archaeological dig. Film offers the opportunity to show ruin in the making. The inclusion of Tacita Dean’s Kodak (2006) is a bonus. The work stakes everything on a tautology: the celluloid moving through the projector shows celluloid moving through the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, scarcely visible in the gloom as it speeds through the rollers. Some see the results as a requiem to a dead medium, but it’s better than that: it’s a comprehensive embalming, the full Avalon treatment. Either side of this centrepiece, Ruin Lust features nice matches of method to subject matter. Laura Oldfield Ford’s ballpoint pen feels perfect for municipal Modernism in her drawing Ferrier Estate (2010): an expedient instrument for an expedient architecture, with no moralistic upbraiding of its ‘failed utopia’ or false celebration either. James Boswell’s tiny lithographs of the Blitz show London’s masonry turning against its citizens. You peer into their smutty blackness, unable to discern looters from patrolmen, museums from bridges – war’s reduction of the particular to the general. Despite its British bias, Ruin Lust doesn’t stray into ‘edgelands’ territory. A precedent for psychogeography emerges, however, in Paul Nash,

whose essay ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’ (1936) uncovers a vernacular Surrealism in Dorset. The accompanying photographs – especially Steps in a Field near Swanage (c. 1935) – show the painter’s fixation with isolated anomalies. John Latham’s 1976 proposal (for the Artist Placement Group) to designate as art five West Lothian shale heaps is here too, setting an elegiac tone that is amplified in the last room. Keith Coventry’s bronze casts of broken saplings bear plaques giving the time of their planting and destruction, hence: Burgess Park SE5, Planted 1983, Destroyed 1988 (1994); while artist collective Inventory’s Estate Map (1999), a peeling metal sign taken from the Marquess Road Estate in the London borough of Islington, serves as a canvas for a bilious rant. The words markerpenned across its surface stress the absence of such social housing projects from urban maps, and the consequent relegation of their thoroughfares to something ‘less’ than streets. It’s the perfect Russian ending to a terrific show, though Inventory’s contribution is best seen alongside founding member Adam Scrivener’s essay from the same year, ‘Open Yet Excluded’, which charts the transition of the Marquess Estate ‘from pseudo-rural idyll to prison camp’. Sean Ashton

Jane and Louise Wilson, Azeville, 2006. © and courtesy the artists

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 97

16/04/2014 12:04

A K Dolven Teenagers Lifting the Sky Wilkinson Gallery, London 27 February – 6 April As spring begins to stretch its weary muscles after months of endlessly drab English darkness, entering Wilkinson Gallery’s first show of A K Dolven’s work since 2010 feels like stumbling back into the depths of some sunless winter. The Norwegian artist’s latest works create a dark, nasty world that leaves you desperate for the warmth outside. The show opens with a work composed of repeated single red fingerprints on white aluminium, like bloodied scrawls on a prison wall, marking the passing of days. The wall next to it is daubed with a near illegible story recounting some disaster that left the author in a confined space with a group of abandoned others. Written apparently years after the supposed event, this tale of ‘hell’ and survival sets a disturbing stage for Dolven’s impossibly subtle works. Small, pitch-black oils on aluminium dot the space. Shadowy, imperceptibly dark shapes peer out of the gloom like barely visible faces in some claustrophobic cave. The works are small, drawing you closer in, forcing you to face these ghosts head on.

The show’s title work, Teenagers Lifting the Sky (2014), is the most evocative piece here. Two large rectangles of bare aluminium hang on the wall, smudged by dozens of black handprints. The marks drag out across the surface, smeared thoughtlessly down the metal. There’s something prehistoric about them, as though they were created by naked Neanderthals in the process of lifting the piece into place. Are these the abandoned humans of the story on the wall, leaving marks in the darkness of a lightless cave? It’s a quiet, impulsive work, primal and minimal. But realistically, it’s just a finger painting – how willing you are to let yourself be swayed by something so bereft of effort and aesthetic quality is down to you and your patience for the world Dolven is creating. Upstairs, a record player spins a soundwork created in collaboration with the American poet and performance artist John Giorno. Two voices, one male, one female, endlessly chant “ya”. The man is monotone, Gregorian in his bored repetition, while the female voice progresses from

confused and inquisitive to orgasmic arousal. Whatever hell is described in that story on the wall seems to have turned these victims into monosyllabic, primal beings – reverted them to a primordial state where communication is feverish, simple and sexualised. Aesthetically the works on show here are so slight and minimal that they come off as a bit dull, and that’s a disappointment from an artist who has delivered so much in the past. Her last show at Wilkinson, featuring videos of people climbing a glacier and a spinning woman, was frostily beautiful – a quality that’s sadly lacking here. But you can almost disregard the shows visual misgivings, because it’s in the viewer’s mind that Dolven forces the works to take shape. All they do is imply: they’re signifiers of some trauma that can’t be forgotten. If you choose to lose yourself in that trauma, to be led through the nightmarish world she makes bloom through all her implications, you’ll be absorbed, and left totally shaken. Eddy Frankel

This Is a Political Painting, 2013, oil on aluminium, 125 × 250 cm. Photo: Peter White. Courtesy the artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 98

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:04

Tameka Norris Almost Acquaintances Ronchini Gallery, London 14 February – 29 March When do you know an artwork is finished? According to multidisciplinary artist Tameka Norris, the answer is this: when you want to throw up. This unapologetic attitude bestows upon her work – be it performance, video, photography, painting or music – a certain confidence. As alter ego Meka-Jean or Mynameisnotshorty, she raps about being the resurrection of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the black Cindy Sherman, and her conviction leaves us wondering if Norris will live up to that hype. She spent most her life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast – infamously torn apart in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Residing in LA when the storm hit, Norris developed a disjointed relationship to her birthplace, and ‘post-Katrina’ became the central narrative in her practice. Almost Acquaintances, her debut UK solo show, continues this investigation into the decay and fragility of modern life, mediated through her remote experience of Katrina. It features her latest body of work – a series of sculptural paintings made of torn bedsheets, painted

and printed fabrics, embroidery and tampered representations of the American flag. Despite visual references to Tracey Emin and Yinka Shonibare, Norris succeeds in creating a convincing artistic voice of her own. It’s hard to deny a sense of political injustice here, but the works speak quietly and tenderly in contrast to the artist’s often-heated polemic. The paintings are carefully dressed and draped with discarded fragments, and the titles pay homage to the lives and homes that once stood, while the exposed stretcher bars echo the notion of structures stripped of their flesh. The strength of her work is in its tension. Norris is attempting to expose the reality of New Orleans as a victim of failed gentrification post-Katrina, and fittingly the show opens with Empty Lot, Comes Predator (2014). Here, four painted pink diamonds are configured to resemble an ‘X’ that is reminiscent of the search-and-rescue X-coding that was used to record the number of dead bodies found on a particular site following the disaster. Many

of the homes that remained standing after Katrina still bear these codes, the residents lacking the funds for their expensive removal, as a constant reminder of the devastation that makes it challenging for the community to be optimistic about the future. This rather grim reminder is counterbalanced by Norris’s subtle and sometimes playful execution of these paintings – braided rags, personal anecdotes, warm colours and soft textures. Tucked away on a small screen at the back are two earlier videoworks. In both films the artist casts herself as a Black Venus in response to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags (1967/74). They endeavour to illustrate her wider practice and exploration of what it means to be a black artist in the canon of art history, and I can’t help but think that if similar works had been given more prominence, it would have allowed for a deeper dialogue with the current work and greater dimension to the exhibition; but ultimately, this is a strong display by a promising young provocateur. Dea Vanagan

Josephine, 2014, oil and acrylic on fabric, 102 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery, London

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 99

16/04/2014 12:04

Carolee Schneemann Water Light / Water Needle Hales Gallery, London 28 February – 12 April Visiting Venice for the biennale in 1964, Carolee Schneemann felt herself floating, suspended. The city’s network of canals engendered ‘a sense of “rising out of,” rather than “being upon” a fixed plane… The city as a model of fixed transience.’ Germinating from this peculiar sensation in Italy’s floating city, Water Light / Water Needle (1966) was conceived originally as an aerial work to be performed upon a web of taut ropes strung across the Piazza San Marco. After two years of being told that her dream was impossible, Schneemann finally managed to rig it up among the eaves of San Marco’s New York namesake: Saint Mark’s Church, in the Bowery. But as she would later write (in More Than Meat Joy, 1979), ‘The transparencies of Venice still motivated the actual aerial arrangement of ropes which enclosed or surrounded the audience seated below.’ This exhibition revisits Schneemann’s pioneer happening in a single-room exhibition containing six works on paper (mostly

watercolour with occasional ink and crayon, created as preparatory sketches before the first performance), six photographs from the performances at Saint Mark’s and a subsequent performance at Lake MahWah, New Jersey, an 11-minute 16mm film (transferred to video) of the Lake MahWah performance, along with five new prints of black-and-white photographs of the original performances overlaid with splashes of colour in acrylic paint. Water Light / Water Needle enacts, in a strange kind of way, a model of utopian society. In the video we see eight performers (including Schneemann’s Judson Dance Theater colleague Phoebe Neville as well as the composers James Tenney and Meredith Monk) navigating routes across the strung ropes – a little like the old children’s game of Hot Lava. Given the variable tensions and vicissitudes of the ropes in question, however, clambering from A to B requires unique forms of collaboration and sensitivity. A foot placed here or a tug there may cause

wild fluctuations down the line where somebody else is trying to balance. The ropes become an occasion for play – in the video we see them twisted into swing chairs – but also cooperative action, with bodies entwining as they pass each other, legs wrapping around torsos to become newly evolved bipedal, four-armed creatures. With no predefined score for their movements, just a system of rules and loose performance indications, the poetry of the work becomes an emergent property. Schneemann had specified that movement across the ropes should not be ‘acrobatic’ or ‘balletic’ but ‘always functional’, but dancelike figures transpire as a consequence of this deference to function, like a Bauhaus table. The acrylic swirls in blues and yellows added to the more recent works bring out the abstract forms of the figures in the photographs, making each swinging performer into a sinuous Schiele-esque dancer. Robert Barry

Water Light/Water Needle (St. Mark’s Church) I, 1966, gelatin silver print, 25 × 16 cm. Photo: Terry Schutte. © the artist. Courtesy Hales Gallery, London

100

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 100

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:04

John Skoog Redoubt Towner Gallery, Eastbourne 25 January – 6 April Your attention please: Cold War paranoia is back. And so with tensions currently high over Ukraine, what better time for John Skoog to present his new film, Värn (Redoubt) (2014), about the heightened Swedish bunker-mentality of the mid1960s. Fear of Russian invasion was a real concern for the locals back then. As recently as last year the Swedish Armed Forces chief, General Sverker Göranson, said his country wouldn’t last two days against Russia. So perhaps it is no surprise that some Swedes have taken drastic measures – throwing up their own crazed fortifications – to protect themselves. Skoog’s researches have found one such construction and the strange story of its existence. Imagine what might have happened if the outsider artist Ferdinand ‘le Facteur’ Cheval had been born in twentieth-century Sweden instead of nineteenth-century France. What if the ideal palace he built had been inspired not by beauty but by fear? And what would the architectural result have looked like if, instead of using natural forms of found stone and pebble, his Northern doppelgänger had taken found industrial materials from the mid-twentieth century? This is the subject of Skoog’s film.

The builder was Karl Goran Persson, a rye farmer, left alone and lonely after the deaths of his parents in the 1940s. He took a government pamphlet warning of the risks of Russian invasion very seriously and, like some Nordic Noah, decided to save his people from the imminent deluge. And so he built his landlocked ark to resist atomic blasts and radiation. Persson used what he could find, and Skoog’s camera lingers lovingly over the details of the detritusturned-building materials. Old farming tools, railway sleepers, rusted spring mattresses, used tires, bits of bikes. And concrete, loads of it. We are presented with an encrusted walk-in Anselm Kiefer that Skoog has revealed in slow tracking shots and pans. Skoog’s vision tarries over areas of erosion – we are in the Entropy art zone again. Persson built something ludicrously permanent and grand and ghastly that recalls the Flakturm of Berlin, or Vienna. Persson’s shelter would thrill cultural theorist Paul Virilio of course with his thinking on bunker archaeology (and, one suspects, ArtReview contributor Brian Dillon too, with his love of what the urban design academic Alan Berger calls ‘drossscapes’). The quiet voices of

local women narrate Persson’s obsession. Some of them were scared of him when they were kids. No wonder. But his desire to keep his neighbours safe seemed genuine enough. He was no Scandinavian-noir nutter. Just as André Breton and Picasso sang the praises of Postman Cheval, now Skoog pays homage to a more modern, more angst-ridden naïf. Skoog’s film captures the ambiguity of the architectural gesture, protective in principle but perhaps more likely to have been a funeral monument in reality if invasion had happened. The squat shape of the construction, its monumentality and mystery, recall too the remains of Mayan temples. Or indeed Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic (1967) – all those highway concrete abutments and inutile pipes that Smithson describes as ‘a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur’. There is bleak poetry in Skoog’s video and in Ita Zbroniec-Zajt’s beautifully stark cinematography. Bare trees are filmed in winter, and it is difficult not to dismiss clichéd images of our mad past of Mutually Assured Destruction. War – it’s just a shot away. Now go quickly to your shelters. John Quin

Redoubt, 2013, film still. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 101

101

16/04/2014 12:05

Spencer Sweeney Monads and Party Paintings The Modern Institute, Glasgow 1–26 March Spencer Sweeney has been partying. He’s also been painting. Possibly – even probably – he’s been doing both at the same time. In fact, one wall of this show is made up entirely of Party Paintings, oil-on-linen works intended, the press release tells us, to ‘let people know about different shows and parties that happen at Santos Party House’, Sweeney’s New York nightclub. OMG! Could this be any cooler? It certainly ticks all the boxes of what many contemporary artists need to cover: nostalgia, counterculture and music (guess what – Sweeney is also a DJ!). The paintings refer to all of the above plus clubbing, the blurring of art and life, drag queens, ‘shared social involvement’ and much more. These features apparently combine to show (press release again) ‘a disregard for boundaries of genre’, which in turn ‘allows creativity to flow through many channels’. So, we have a wall of Party Paintings, paintings as – or of – album covers and club posters

featuring 1970s and 80s groups like Dead Kennedys and Crass, and a long wall of Monads, semiabstract portraits of Sweeney’s friends executed in very thickly daubed, gestural strokes, including one of Chez Deep (Chez Deep, 2014), the ‘drag sisterhood’ who performed at the afterparty for the opening of this show (held at the club of another Modern Institute artist who is also a DJ and makes works that are frequently titled after music of the 70s and 80s). The Monads are brash. They look very fauxnaive and ‘authentic’, painted with a modish devil-may-care attitude to skill and technique – straight outta (Hans) Prinzhorn. The problem for this party pooper is that the apparent strengths of this exhibition are also its biggest flaws. It’s assumed that qualities such as ‘plurality’, ‘a coming together of individual components’ or the ‘reactive convergence between the influences within Sweeney’s art and his life’ are, per se, ‘good’. Critical content

is also often considered ‘good’, but it’s nowhere in evidence here, unless this is a cunningly disguised critique of the vapidity of the artworld (let’s all paint our friends!). Many of the cultural references Sweeney points to are fascinating, but it does not follow that because the (very literal) subject matter is interesting, the artworks themselves will absorb some of this reflected glory (just because I love EPMD does not mean I will love EPMD Party Painting, 2011). The feverish excitement and hedonism these works attempt to evoke are completely lost in the stark, sober space of the gallery in the daytime – perhaps Monads and Party Paintings might perform more effectively in the environments that inspired them. Sweeney may be a shit-hot DJ and clubber extraordinaire, but this is Bad Painting – Bad Painting both stripped of historical context of the term and of the ironic, inverted meaning of the first word. Susannah Thompson

Monads and Party Paintings, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Ruth Clark. Courtesy the artist and the Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

102

AR-May-Reviewed RESUPPLY P102 + P119.indd 102

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:09

Ken Okiishi Reena Spaulings, New York 16 February – 23 March Without knowing that Reena Spaulings is a gallery, visitors to Ken Okiishi’s solo exhibition might think they’ve stumbled upon an electronics store that’s been vandalised by fingerpaint-wielding children. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong, except that there’s an artist behind the scribbling. The ten works within are made up of flatscreen televisions (all entitled Gesture/Data, 2014) that play mashed-up loops of television programmes that Okiishi recorded with a VHS player during the 1990s and 2000s. Their screens are covered in loose, gestural brushstrokes that Okiishi made while the composite loops were running. The press release says that these brushstrokes recall ‘Joan Mitchell or even late Monet’, but the lines could just as easily be attributed to a trained elephant. In other words, they seem less deliberate or laden with purpose than merely unskilled and random. Television junkies will immediately feel anchored by the references in Okiishi’s works. One loop includes a few minutes of 2004’s second presidential debate between President

George W. Bush and then Senator John Kerry, in which Kerry drones on about opposing the Iraq War. Another loop shows a C-SPAN segment featuring a speech by Muhammad Yunus, the microfinance economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. An incessant stream of infomercials, advertisements and reality television programmes is spliced with political commentary and dramas such as Touched by an Angel, a series that ran from 1994 to 2003. The programming itself forms a picture, not of a specific time or place, but rather a dreadful feeling of interminability, such as one feels when sitting in a DMV office waiting to renew a driving permit, or when stuck in an elevator. The works themselves complicate this temporality. The brushstrokes obscure the screen, which makes watching difficult. This forces the viewer into a state of distraction, and so we go bouncing from work to work like a kid who forgot to take his Adderall. Does this say something with regard to the way we interact with the world in the Internet age – ie, our constant switching between different

streams of information? It’s a stretch to believe something so profound (and exhausted) could come from a cluster of television screens covered in paint. Another reading, perhaps, is that by painting on a moving image, Okiishi is opening a new frontier for the medium, but if the poor aesthetic quality of these attempts is any indication, that frontier remains a Siberia. Like so much contemporary art that’s neither absurdly beautiful nor immediately political, one can’t help wonder what’s at stake. The artist and the gallery’s reputation, of course: but also, one would think, a need for some sort of critical dialogue. In this case, that dialogue seems irrelevant. We all know we’re distracted; we don’t need art to mirror the obvious. Rather, contemporary art with a theoretical bent should open a dialogue around what hasn’t, or can’t, or shouldn’t be said otherwise. In doing so, it would activate the possibility of a different future than the one we’ve come to accept as inexorable. Brienne Walsh

Gesture/Data, 2014, flat-screen television, oil paint and VHS transferred to .mp4 (colour, sound), 92 × 54 × 12 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 103

103

16/04/2014 12:05

Michel Majerus Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 8 February – 19 April Anxiety is the emotion one might most associate with Michel Majerus’s work, both when thinking about the artist’s too-short career and when confronted with the array of works that Matthew Marks has mounted across three spaces, the largest-ever showing of Majerus’s art in the US. Majerus, Luxembourg-born and Berlinbased, died in a plane crash in 2002 at the age of thirty-five. According to his biggest supporter, the Moderna Museet’s Daniel Birnbaum, by the mid-1990s Majerus was the most ‘contemporary’ artist he knew. That assessment comes in part from a familiarity with Majerus’s omnivorous approach to imagery and the apparent ease with which he was able to discard debates over painting that had consumed the previous decade and generation. Mournful or melancholic? Critical or complicit? Once the stuff of shouting matches in museum lecture halls, such questions about painting’s remit must have been hard to hear under the thump of techno beats in Berlin after 1989, when the Wall fell, history ended and we all became contemporary.

Whether you take your end-times thinking in the original Hegelian or prefer the lighter, more easily readable neoliberal version that Francis Fukuyama began to peddle at the dawn of the 1990s, the period between 1989 and 1995 was indeed anxiety-ridden. The only two works in the Matthew Marks show that date from this period, Somebody Wants to Buy All Your Paintings! (1994) and o.T. (69) (1994) betray a cheeky paranoia, not just about the market (‘Who wants to buy my paintings?’) but about art history: both works appropriate pieces that Warhol made between 1985 and 1986 – end-time works in themselves (Warhol died in 1987) – and o.T. (69) includes nods to Anselm Kiefer and ‘The World-Ash’; so, back to Hegel and the ‘end of history’ via Wagner. Is it any wonder that we needed raves during the early 1990s? But then it is easy to get stuck in the web of Majerus’s links: ‘Is that from Super Mario Bros.?’ ‘Is that late De Kooning or camouflage?’ ‘That looks like Ruscha’s OOF but in inverted colours and crappily done.’ ‘Whose face is that next to Tron?’ By the time of the browser

wars of the mid-1990s, the tech business and the economy were beginning their boom, so no one was thinking too hard about the answers. Given all the cribbing and quotation, and the speed with which it all appeared (Majerus produced something like 1,500 works during his short career), what’s obvious to note, at least, as many have, in retrospect, is that Majerus brought the promiscuity of the Internet’s image culture to bear on his artistic work in a manner that few artists have. What’s also important to note, as few have, is that Majerus relied heavily on scale – going big, very big – to give his work weight. Many works’ dimensions go over two metres, the effect of which is to inflate their contents to foreign proportions. It’s a quintessential pop manoeuvre. Warhol introduced it. Rosenquist probably perfected it. In Majerus’s hands it’s symptomatic of a tenuous touch, a need to get across to and, perhaps, connect with, or touch, an audience that is being blown ever further away from painting, and itself. Jonathan T.D. Neil

o.T. (69), 1994, acrylic on cotton, two panels, each 303 × 237 cm (474 × 606 cm overall). Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

104

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 104

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Sarah Szczesny Who Framed Sarah Szczesny? Ludlow 38, New York 16 February – 30 March Donald Duck makes a rare artworld appearance, dancing on the grave of painting, in Sarah Szczesny’s Who Framed Sarah Szczesny? It’s as if once the medium became so self-reflexively flat as to become totally boring, it turned to masturbation and comic books instead. Taking a playful look at Disney, and specifically Carl Barks’s invented Donald Duck-land of Duckburg, Szczesny proposes Barks’s comic-book playland as symbolic of postwar industrial reproduction by taking bits and pieces from Duckburg – like duck beaks and ‘Do not feed the animals’ road signs – and breaking them down into inchoate elements before collaging them directly onto paper, for example, or etching them into metal. In the process, Szczesny twins the endgame of painting with a gleefully capitalist success story, leaving both barely recognisable. Thus the cartoon elements in Do Not Feed Animals (all works 2014) are hardly identifiable as such. Taking the right-hand side of several drawn duck beaks, or the top parts of walking

sticks (among other visual cues broken down to near-illegibility), Szczesny turns Duckburg into a hieroglyphics, a ruin of visual language collaged tidily in rows on large swaths of green paper. The same garbled bits of animation are recycled in many of the other works, such as Yeah Old Wishing Well, where they are given a bit more space and blown up large, though the new scale doesn’t assist anyone trying to suss out what exactly they are looking at. That curving blue thing might be part of a scarf, or part of an axe. About the only thing left intact is a floating ‘Don’t litter’ sign. Szczesny seems particularly keen on undoing Disney, which she does with aplomb. Undoing painting, though, is much harder, and the Disney bit doesn’t really do the trick, not even in the Taler works, in which two competing canvases – one gouached with yellow loopy circles, the other with broadly stroked black washes – bring painting up and out of the wall. Technically the works are made of paper,

though folded and glued into shape they resemble stretched canvases. At times Szczesny layers the two ‘canvases’ one atop the other, such that they overlap in various directions. In other instances the yellow canvas juts out from its flat black partner like a shelf coming out of the wall, or the two are both jutting out the same way, as if the wall had been turned like a page. These works don’t deconstruct the medium of painting so much as perpetuate it in strange ways – although, to be honest, they’re really not so strange. Artists such as Ellsworth Kelly have been playing with the literal shape of painting for more than 50 years. If anything, Szczesny is simply showing the extent to which painting has been chipped away at by popular culture. Disney just happens to be a very good and apropos scapegoat for the ways in which anything visual is levelled into just another image to be circulated. Whether it’s painting or not hardly matters. David Everitt Howe

Delivery E, 2014, foam, metal, 18 × 33 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 105

105

16/04/2014 12:05

Raster Raster Aran Cravey, Los Angeles 22 February – 12 April Any post-postmodernists who dared hope that contemporary art had become ‘post-movement’ must have been dispirited, in recent years, to see the tag ‘post-Internet’ growing in ubiquity. Art magazines have done their best to nail down a definition of this vague field, in some cases recruiting the same curators who are bold enough to try to identify its principal characteristics and exponents through group exhibitions. The artist and scholar Marisa Olson, curator of Raster Raster at Aran Cravey, claims to have coined the term ‘post-Internet’ in 2006. She wisely stops short of positing Raster Raster as a survey of the movement, leaving that unenviable task to Karen Archey and Robin Peckham, whose exhibition Art Post-Internet at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, opened in March. Olson’s art was in the UCCA show alongside that of Petra Cortright, Bunny Rogers and Artie Vierkant, who also feature in Raster Raster. Meanwhile, an improbable trifecta of concurrent group shows across town – at Honor Fraser, Perry Rubenstein and Anat Ebgi – includes work by Cortright; Marc Horowitz, also in Raster Raster, features in two, and Travess Smalley in another. The exhibition at Perry Rubenstein is titled, appropriately, Too Soon. Much of the art in these

exhibitions, though spirited, seems jejune. Most of the artists in Raster Raster were born during the 1980s, and two – Rogers and Jasper Spicero – in 1990. Not all of us can claim to be true ‘digital natives’, but if you were born in 1990, you would barely remember a world without the Internet. The fact that, in the developed world at least, connectivity is so ingrained into daily life raises the question: what part of contemporary cultural production does it not affect? Raster Raster convenes a pool of artists who, by and large, are not making ‘Net art’ (as we once called it) but who draw from the proliferation of images and signs online, who shuffle fact and fiction, who translate between media and who seem to relish the losses in quality (image- and otherwise) that take place during those processes of translation and transference. Rasterisation is the technique by which digital images are prepared for pixelated output, but it also involves scanning. Smalley’s prints (described in the checklist as ‘digital paintings on vinyl’) depict sculptures by Alexander Calder, scanned from a book and then exported with added overlays and tonal modifications. More sophisticated is Loops (2014) by Alexandra Gorczynski, which

combines a low-resolution photograph of a fabric floral wreath with a video image of the same. The screen, embedded in the photograph, shows a projectile smashing the video image before dissolving into static. The disparity between styles in this show makes the grouping seem almost meaningless. For example, Vierkant’s dourly cerebral monochrome painting, based on a patent for an air conditioner screen, is a world away from Mehreen Murtaza’s grotesquely overwrought Triptych (2009), a digital collage depicting a sci-fi dystopia of global exploitation. Christine Sun Kim’s large, quiet drawings – apparently relating to her deafness – are ill-contextualised here. And despite the buzz that currently surrounds her, Cortright’s contribution, a composite image of a figure printed on fabric, is underwhelming. It may be the case that these busy artists were unable to supply their best work. We must leave it to Hennessy Youngman, aka artist Jayson Musson, to illuminate the zeitgeist with his video Art Thoughtz: How to Make an Art (2011), in which he haplessly guides us through “this age of Internet-based artistic-type productions and shit”. Jonathan Griffin

Alexandra Gorczynski, Loops, 2014, archival pigment print with embedded screen, 86 × 86 cm. Courtesy Aran Cravey, Los Angeles

106

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 106

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Mai-Thu Perret Astral Plane David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 25 January – 22 March The most consistent take on Mai-Thu Perret’s work is that it uses fiction as a vehicle for politics. Her longest-running project, The Crystal Frontier (1999–), imagines a feminist utopia in the desert of New Mexico, from which pour forth arts and crafts for sale or barter. These objects, made by Perret or others hired to make them, are authored (according to the artist) by the women in the community. Thus authorship (a concept that has been beaten to death by critics for half a century at least) becomes, again, an opportunity to meditate on labour and the hierarchies of power that regulate it. Perret stands at a distance from the narrative, orchestrating the story and the outcome of its production, but avoids (somehow) being the ego of the art object. This backstory is not really apparent in a Perret exhibition. Instead, viewers get an assortment of objects, notes and diary entries, meant to accrue over time as clues to the existence of the commune. Until one

knows the story, a Perret exhibition looks like a scattered series of loosely connected objects (it also looks like a group show). At their most ambitious, her installations have the flavour of nostalgic science fiction, imagining the residents of the commune as well versed in Constructivism and Marxism while leaving room for mysticism and other strange religious impulses. When isolated from her story, the objects can be outright confusing: it takes a lot of rhetorical legwork to get to know Perret. The new works at David Kordansky Gallery – ceramics, tapestries and one black-donkey sculpture made from rattan – aim to exist outside the narrative of The Crystal Frontier. They reach for a universal meditation on what exists and what may exist beyond us. Perret builds a cosmos, complete with an afterlife. Morning comes, everywhere’s the same, rain on a thousand houses (2014), a series of five ceramic panels, is glazed in such a way as to denote different

galaxies in miniature. The tapestries carry runes and symbols lacking a key. A number of thick, cauldronlike bowls, primal and rough, dripping glaze and containing pools of colour within, anchor the middle of the space. The astral plane is a place of spirits and heavenly bodies, a place through which the soul passes after death. We, along with the donkey, Black Balthazar (2013; an echo of Robert Bresson here too), make the journey as we pass along and between the artworks, which can only be read as sites of spiritual resonance. Perhaps Perret is looking to generate the ‘aura’ of traditional art-making, where objects were linked to spiritual transport and served as windows into other worlds. Thus she taps again Constructivism and, in the tapestry Untitled, IV (2014), the animistic symbols of Paul Klee. Whether or not Perret is serious about this endeavour, however, or is merely wrapping New Age beliefs in oldart discourse remains unclear. Ed Schad

Black Balthazar, 2013, birch plywood, rattan core and water-based paint, 123 × 115 × 30 cm. Photo: Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 107

107

16/04/2014 12:05

Guy Ben-Ner Soundtrack Postmasters, New York 25 January – 8 March Guy Ben-Ner is a master of one-liners. Case in point: in his new work Soundtrack (2013) he superimposes the soundtrack of minutes 22:00–33:00 of Steven Spielberg’s movie War of the Worlds (2005) onto a family drama that takes place in his Tel Aviv kitchen. It’s a simple premise developed into an 11-minute video. Already a loose adaptation of the famous H.G. Wells novel, Spielberg’s film follows Tom Cruise as he attempts to protect his children when aliens attack the planet. Ben-Ner’s film also includes a couple of familiar actors – two of his own children, who have starred in many of his previous works, such as the memorable Stealing Beauty (2007), which was shot in various IKEA branches and analyses the family as an economic unit, and Moby Dick (2000), an unhinged reenactment of the great American novel using Ben-Ner’s kitchen as a set and himself as a clumsy combination of Ishmael and Captain Ahab. In Soundtrack, the artist and his three children (Ben-Ner’s newest progeny makes her first appearance here) perform the movie

in a way that is reminiscent of scenes that expose how Foley artists created sound effects in old radio plays and so highlight the gap between the family’s domestic activities and the dramatic soundtrack: the sound of an aeroplane taking off is coupled with footage of a blender used to make a breakfast shake, a series of explosions with plates falling off a shelf. The pathos of this kitchen-sink drama is charming and amusing. Ben-Ner’s hallmark reflection on the structure of family and a man’s role therein is always nuanced, but in this particular work, when in the midst of the mayhem he shouts to the kids, “Get out! We’re under attack!” there are images from Palestine and Lebanon streaming on the laptop placed on the kitchen table. It’s a weak allusion to the world beyond the artist’s personal uppermiddle-class woes. An emphasis on speech is the link to the other work on view, Foreign Names (2012). Shot in different branches of Aroma, the ‘Israeli Starbucks’, it weaves together candid shots

of the café workers speaking into the store’s point-of-sale microphone in order to generate a new text. Presumably the workers are calling out the names of clients whose orders are ready (the names are actually inventions of the artist). In Ben-Ner’s hands, their words morph into a Mad Libs-style ode to their own social and economic situation. “Jobs please for our comrade waiters”, say the employees of a self-service style café, the kind that put waiters out of work. This co-optation gives the disenfranchised workers a voice, physically and metaphorically, in the face of an exploitative service economy. It’s clear that Soundtrack is the centrepiece of the show, but it’s Foreign Names that serves as a reminder that our lives are political. While Ben-Ner’s incessant examination of the family structure is always delightful (even if a bit repetitive and self-indulgent), the inclusion of a work that goes beyond the domestic proves that Ben-Ner is at his best when what’s at stake for him is more than his personal situation. Orit Gat

Soundtrack, 2013, single-channel video, 11 min, edition of 6 + 1AP. Courtesy Postmasters, New York

108

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 108

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Scott Reeder 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles 26 January – 16 March A mellow yellow laboratory. A haze-grey zoo sans animals, stacked cages in a corner. A bedded boudoir beckons, with walls striped pale turquoise and grey. Across from the orange bar with orange stools, a looping orange booth curves to a keyboard set up for a house band performance – no suggestion of Billy Joel covers or astrosounds from the beyond. The orangey shades range from frozen OJ to smog-tinted highway cone, with an electric tease of Atomic Tangerine thrown in. Three-letter-word band names carved near the bar read like threats of future performances. Linger long enough and maybe ‘Ape Tux’, ‘Hot Phd’, and ‘Zen Sax’ might wander in dragging battered instruments and moondusted hair to lip-sync a tune or two. Freak out in a Moonage Daydream, oh yeah. Scott Reeder’s spacey monochromatic rooms, all part of the artist’s eight-years-in-the-making movie, Moon Dust, are a bit tired, a bit cheap and

pushing on. It’s all like a themed hotel for a moon colony never realised, a decorating scheme too boldly kaleidoscopic for a space age where a broke NASA now hitches rides with subcontractors. The abandoned sets warehoused amid anonymous industrial swathes of city, train-tracked and desolate after dark, surrounded by shady companies with meaningless acronymic names. Surely not far from the soundstage where the faked moon landing went down. Scattershot through the rooms hang smeary abstractions and paintings of lists: Book Titles (Fiction and Non Fiction), Band Names, More Alternative Names for Exhibitions I’ve Seen and Ideas for a TV Show Episode or a Painting (all works 2014). The lists are like brainstorms for a creative professional still working out amazing discoveries to come, all utterly ridiculous and acutely possible: naming the next big thing, how to quietly take down the competition, how

to imagine what doesn’t exist and name it into existence. The abstractions jangle with colour, entire swathes wrought with only a paint roller. But the jokiness of the whole affair infects them. They can’t help but get a contact high from Two Fat Cops Realize They Are Clones. I think it was Borges who remarked that his short stories were sketches for novels he was too lazy or too busy to write. (Or, as Nabokov mocked, Borges wrote beautiful balconies for houses that didn’t exist.) Here, the lists themselves almost make up for the unwritten novels, the neverformed bands, the moon colonies of one’s dreams: Codependent Computers and Unrealistic Furniture, Trends in Tombstones and Boat Names for Babies. Pointless Apex and Labrador Dali. French Chimpanzee Emails God One Too Many Times. Or the last of a list, a subtle poem that substrates the whole: Just Subtly Shifting Colors. Andrew Berardini

Ideas for a TV Show Episode or a Painting, 2014, oil pastel on gesso on canvas, 213 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 109

109

16/04/2014 12:05

Nancy Burson Composites Clampart, New York 20 February – 29 March Nancy Burson, as every recent photography textbook tells us, is a pioneer in the development of digital imaging. Continuing in ‘history of photography’ mode, Clampart’s selection of key works of the 1980s and early 90s could indeed serve as a minicourse on the topic. Although I fear it would be a rather dull one. Seen from the limited perspective of new photographic technologies, Burson’s work has always seemed like a lesson in how science kills art. Nevertheless, she does banality well. Lion/ Lamb (1983) and Cog and Dat (1983) – a verbal/ visual composite of ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ – are perhaps the simplest images in technical terms. These mythical enemy pairings of the animal kingdom, the former bearing biblical weight, the latter Disney lightness, are each rendered in the same full-face portrait format of all the composites. Comparisons are thus implicit. The alphabetical mashup of ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ in the latter’s title offers a neat linguistic parallel for the computer-generated negative that is the basis of her technique. The visual randomness and dry humour of these images-as-information

is most evident here. But when this work is counterposed with the more obviously politically charged composites, such as Warhead I (Reagan 55%, Brezhnev 45%, Thatcher less than 1%, Mitterand less than 1%, Deng less than 1%) (1982), the Manichaean extremities of the Cold War-era take on a bathetic chill. Brezhnev’s huge eyebrows and plump face are distorted to sinister effect by the chiselled good looks of America’s Hollywood President. With their combined gaze sliding suspiciously off to the right, Burson’s depiction is more film noir than the statistical measurements might suggest. At the other end of the spectrum is Businessman (10 Businessmen from Goldman Sachs) (1982). This bland embodiment of the corporate world – blank expression, standard haircut, homogeneous European features – is as affectively empty as Warhead I is full. Putting a face to capital, as Businessman does, turns out to be just as unsettling for its visual banality as Warhead I is for its open menace. The generic faces of Mankind (An Oriental, a Caucasian, and a Black Weighted According to

Current Population Statistics) (1983–5) and Androgyny (6 Men + 6 Women) (1982) have a different kind of emptiness. These are purely informational games, in which Burson’s conceptual method is laid bare. While these images always seemed banal in the worst sense when encountered individually, within this larger body of work they find their place. Aged Barbie (1994) is more image manipulation than composite. It’s one of a group of four digital distortions in the exhibition where we seem to have swerved into a Twilight Zone of eugenics gone wrong. All too visually dramatic, the effect has more to do with (simulating) a traditional use of directional lighting and focus than the informational approach of the work from the 1980s. With science turned into science fiction, the work has lost much of its critical edge. While Burson’s composites work best when the information goes beyond zeros and ones, the use of empty visual data is the necessary conceptual structure that makes this significant work. Siona Wilson

110

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 110

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Bill Viola Grand Palais, Paris 5 March – 21 July The first presentation of video art at the Grand Palais and Bill Viola’s first retrospective in France, this exhibition is also the American artist’s largest so far, involving 20 installations and almost 50 screens. From his video baptism (so to speak), The Reflecting Pool (1977–9) – one of his earliest videotapes and first uses of chromakey special effects, in which Viola’s suspended body above water slowly disintegrates while a theatre of shadows on the pool’s surface diverts our attention – to the new multiscreen installation The Dreamers (2013), which portrays seven sleeping performers submerged in water, Viola manages, once again, to plunge his viewers/ flaneurs into a state of rapt contemplation. If the artist has been so successful over the past four decades in immersing his audience in his art, it is not just because of the breathtaking complexion of his moving images. It is first and foremost because his field, which goes beyond video towards what he calls the ‘universal language of mankind’, reflects questions that are profoundly humane. During the opening, Viola described his practice as ‘a journey through life with the knowledge that we will not live forever’, while ‘humanity really consists of three conditions: the unborn and the dead, which are both eternal, and in-between the living, which is temporary – all of us at this moment in time, which is the thing that we work with’. And that

is exactly what video, the medium of instant feedback, has allowed him to ‘sculpt’ (he says) or make manifest since the beginning of his career. Of course, the spectator hasn’t always the time to decipher every single frame. In The Sleep of Reason (1988), one has to face the unpredictable attacks of nightmarish images on the walls of a room intermittently plunged into darkness (among others, the flashing wings of an owl, after Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, in his etching series Los Caprichos, 1797–8), while The Quintet of the Astonished (2000) contrarily demands an exemplary concentration to sense the changes of expression portrayed by five actors, the extreme slow motion applied to Viola’s video footage bringing it close to the stasis of painting. That said, Viola’s archetypal fictions (drowning, sleeping, crossing paths or simply beingin-the-world, being born and passing) always happen to a body, whether it his own (as in most of his early pieces) or that of a family member (in Heaven and Earth, 1992, on two monitors facing each other at the midpoint of a vertical wooden beam, the impossible dialogue between the artist’s newborn and his grandmother, who had passed at the time, is made perceptible through their reflections onto each other’s screens) or a performer’s (as in all Viola’s productions since the late 1990s). And so deep identification and

empathy operate even though sometimes the human figure can barely be seen: in the videotapes Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) (1979) and, to a lesser extent, Walking on the Edge and The Encounter (both 2012), people filmed across a great distance in the desert are so distorted by the heat that they appear like mirages, or the hallucinations of the landscape itself. Finally, the bodies that penetrate Viola’s pictorial world are almost systematically subjected to the transformative qualities of natural elements – primarily water, as in the diptych Surrender (2001), which portrays the reflections of two actors tearing up, plunging and dissolving onto the liquid surface – and the video devices or montages the artist has thoughtfully set up: the split screen of The Voyage, for example, one of five panels in the multiprojection installation Going Forth by Day (2002), in which an old man on his deathbed gains the power of ubiquity as he suddenly appears, while taking his last breath, both in and outside his house, joining his already deceased wife for their final journey on a boat. Though most viewers at this very instant are distracted by the disastrous flood occurring on another panel, The Deluge, leaving them completely oblivious of the miraculous split, there my heart melts, discreetly, for this is simply beautiful. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Going Forth by Day (detail), First Light (Panel 5), 2002, video/sound installation, five-part projected image cycle, 36 min. Performers: Weba Garretson, John Hay. Pinault Collection. Photo: Kira Perov. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 111

111

16/04/2014 12:05

Teresa Margolles The Witness CA2M, Madrid 18 February – 25 May The large colour photograph depicts a tree by the roadside somewhere in the Mexican border town of Juárez. The bark on its trunk is wounded and scarred: not, as we would expect, by the forces of nature, but brutally perforated by bullets. Standing in our way, erect and silent, the tree is a mute witness to the violence of the drug cartels and the social erosion of a suffering city. The Witness, from 2013, is also the telling title of Teresa Margolles’s poignant exhibition at CA2M. Its simplicity and rigour allow the viewer enough space and time to experience how the radical indignation in Margolles’s work speaks through the physical presence of fragments of reality, such as human voices, broken-down buildings and collections of newspapers. Trust in the evidence, faith that objects and matter can bear witness when no one is there to speak, is a theme that runs through this powerful selection of works. They all address the precarious situation of the border city, where illegal trafficking, corruption and unbridled exploitation of human labour are tearing apart the

vulnerable fabric of communal life. The large wall work PM 2010 (2012) shows all the front pages of the city’s tabloid newspaper in 2010, the most violent year in the recent history of Juárez. Every paper shows the body of a murder victim, alongside the mandatory front-page girl. Violent death and the sexualised female body play set roles in the same commodified spectacle. Taken together, the works in the exhibition create a space for writing the history of events that otherwise would remain in shadow. The proximity of the Mexico-born artist to the place and the people of Juárez is an essential part of Margolles’s artistic method, which verges on the anthropological. With persistence she stitches together an extensive patchwork of microhistories that resist and contradict the official history that has the power to transform human suffering into mute statistics. When walking through the show, one is also reminded of how emblematic the city is of a more general global condition, predicated on the impoverishment of sustainable local structures in exchange for the mobility of labour and capital.

The house and the home become a crucial, recurring trope in Margolles’s work, depicting connection with and belonging to a place, as well as the ultimate shelter and protection for human life. Esta Finca No Será Demolida (This Property Won’t Be Demolished) (2011) is a series of photographs showing abandoned and destroyed houses, which speak silently of the life that once went on there. The pivotal piece in the exhibition, La Promesa (The Promise) (2012), is, or rather was, also a house. The artist acquired one of the abandoned houses in Juárez, demolished it and crushed the mortar into fragments. The material was then reused to build a sculpture in the exhibition space. This is a long, horizontal structure, which could be read as a barrier, a wall or even a tomb. During the exhibition, the piece is continually altered by volunteers, who gradually destroy its shape by spreading the fragments out into the space. This performance becomes an act of memory, in which the hidden history of the house is brought back into the present by the touch of hands. Sara Arrhenius

La Promesa (The Promise) (detail), 2012, colour photograph. Courtesy the artist

112

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 112

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Number Seven: Ed Atkins/Frances Stark Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf 7 September – 22 February “It’s an amazing show, but you have to spend time with the works,” said a friend, describing Number Seven, the seventh exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Collection. Spot on. I spent the better part of a workday willingly being pulled ever more deeply into the digitally generated landscapes and psychological worlds of two artists of different generations, genders and countries. Number Seven begins on the ground floor of Stoschek’s vast, three-storey space with a few of Stark’s non-videoworks, including The Inchoate Incarnate: After a Drawing, Toward an Opera, But Before a Libretto Even Exists (2009), a fabulous oversize rotary telephone-as-costume (which Stark wore in a performance in 2010). Then the screen marathon began, with Nothing Is Enough (2012), the first of a series of word-based videoworks drawing on Stark’s experiences with young Italian men in online sex chatrooms. Snippets of text appear on the wall – italics for Stark, roman for the men – discussing life, sex, the Internet, slow routers. A piano soundtrack adds delicacy; it was composed by another chat partner from the video in the next room, Osservate, leggete con me (2012). Osservate… (‘Observe, read along with me’ – a line from a Don Giovanni aria in which Don Giovanni lists his lovers; its soundtrack plays here) condenses nine chats into a three-channel video; the texttalk turns from apologetic flirting (‘sorry I’m getting confused, I’m high’) to geopolitics and

even Stark’s career. At one point, a paramour asks Stark if she’d like to see his ‘best thing’ (one can guess, and we find out later). These random encounters become real relationships and, on several levels, artistic collaborations. Next spaces, next artist: the sharp shift in aesthetics and subject matter of Ed Atkins’s earlier works, like A Primer for Cadavers and Delivery to the Following Recipient Failed Permanently (both 2011), here shown alternately in one room, at first jars and confuses; with jump cuts, loud noises, kaleidoscopic high-definition film effects and a distorted off-camera narration. In both films, Atkins clearly addresses death. It’s only after seeing his more recent works that the relationships between the two artists become clearer. In the two-channel video Us Talk Dead Love (2012), Atkins creates a bald CGI avatar with his own captured features. The disembodied head, this time with an undistorted voice, emits a torrent of musings – stream-of-consciousness poetry, really (“at night I dream of Pluto, the dejected ex-planet”) – arising from the narrator discovering an eyelash under his foreskin. Abstract images appear and disappear; like a grey block where subtitles should be, or a close-up eye. In Warm Warm Warm Spring Mouths (2013) we see a similarly hi-def CGI figure; this time underwater with a head of lushly floating hair (hair and liquid are both notoriously difficult to digitally render). In both rooms, large-scale collage/drawings based on the

films’ imagery lean against walls, glowing with the light of the screens. Upstairs are Atkins’s earlier works – 2010’s simpler Death Mask pieces offer insights into the artist’s development – while Stark’s My Best Thing (2011) plays in full. The feature-length animation follows her ongoing conversations with two Italian chatroom lovers, one at a time, with all characters rendered as Playmobil-esque figures. Here we finally witness Stark’s conversations in spoken form; the initial comedy of watching action figures boogie to dancehall music, talk about sex and politics, and pause lengthily morphs into a voyeuristic look at the utter simplicity of intimacy. The contrasts between the artists are many: female vs. male, Los Angeles vs. London, Gen-X irony and humour vs. Millennial ennui; opensource lo-fi vs. high-definition code-based work. But Atkins and Stark have a rather dramatic and unusual commonality – the willingness to take immense emotional risks. Both dive straight into taboo issues like death and the (im)possibility of love – utterly exposing themselves in pictures and poetic words to a general audience that increasingly hides behind technology, and an artworld currently obsessed with distanced observation and artistic research. Putting these two artists together was a brilliant move. And for me, time well spent. Two weeks after my visit, the dialogues, imagery and possible meanings of this exhibition still echo through. Kimberly Bradley

Ed Atkins, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, 2013, single-channel HD video installation, colour, sound, 12 min 50 sec. Photo: Simon Vogel. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 113

113

16/04/2014 12:05

Tobias Rehberger Home and Away and Outside Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt 21 February – 11 May This is an exhibition that demands close inspection. Even though the first thing Tobias Rehberger does is fuck up your eyes. Inspired by the dazzle painting that adorned Allied naval ships during the First World War, and that aimed to make it difficult for enemy vessels to calculate distance and movement when attempting to fire, the German artist – who studied and lives here in Frankfurt – has decorated the entire first room (walls and floor) with black-and-white geometrical patterns, and then placed within this hectic space a number of sculptures, some of which are similarly adorned. Mirrors, some cracked, complete the look. The blinding effects of all this razzledazzle presently become even more problematic for the unwary visitor, as the works in the rooms that follow have been installed within a series of ramps, steps and troughs – it’s as if the artist wants to trip you up. Just in case you don’t get the message from the works themselves, you’ll know by now that Rehberger is a master manipulator. Take the collection of vases he’s selected, to which various of his artist friends – among them Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jorge Pardo and Sharon Lockhart – have been invited to add flowers, albeit without any knowledge of the receptacle into which they are to be placed. (Rehberger contributes blooms too.) These are presented as portraits, titled simply with the ‘sitter’s’ name. The implication, presumably, is that the flowers tell us something about the character of the ‘sitters’ and that the vases tell us something about how Rehberger views his subjects.

You presume that there is some truth in these portraits, but what do a collection of white and dark violet lupins tell us about Olafur Eliasson? Other than his preferred colours, forms and scents? And yet people constantly communicate in this way. Someone who buys a Philippe Starck gnome stool wants to tell us that they have a fantastic (albeit childlike) sense of humour. Whether they have one or not. On the one hand we learn that objects tell a story; on the other how that story can be screwed around with, how an object can become something that it is not. See also the cacophony of metal tubing of more-or-less-functioning neon elements, suspended in the museum’s entry rotunda and casting a shadow (sometimes, depending on the light and your positioning) that spells out the work’s title, Regret (2014), on the white plinth below it. There’s an implication that people project themselves similarly. Some sense of ‘personality’ is inescapably present in many of the objects in this show. There are sculptures that smoke, drip (water) or feature flickering neon tubes, and one equipped with empty speech bubbles (are we supposed to fill them in? you wonder) and a giant cartoon fist. Others seem simply to have wandered away from their obvious supports. Rehberger calls these ‘handicapped sculptures’, and an interest in the prosthetic, or how a form might be extended, transformed or improved, also runs through the show. Literally in the Prosthese series (2000), in which the artist has created prosthetic arms, legs, knees, fingers, etc (using his own bodily measurements), with each

plastic extremity adapted to give it an alternative function – the right arm ends in a ring (for lifting weights?), the right middle-finger in a bulbous growth (for pushing buttons?). Or in the atomised aspects of Michael Jackson throughout the show: a cuckoo clock that emits one of Jackson’s trademark screams every 15 minutes (Cuckoo M.J. IV, 2012) and a timer in which measurements of minutes and hours are indicated by illuminated photographs of Jackson featuring the various looks he offered up during his career (M.J. Timer, 2010). All this is a perfect reflection of the real world, in that it is geared to offer up an aesthetics and prosthetics for personality (the right clothes, the right phone; you could extend this to the projected personalities on Facebook and dating sites too). Not least in the final work of the exhibition, Gu Mo Ni Ma Da (2006), in which the artist Danh Vō (who studied under Rehberger) adapted sketches of the 11-metre-long yacht that his father built in order to enable his family to flee Vietnam in 1980, to provide the blueprints for a sculpture in the style of Rehberger. The boat, an angular mass that looks like it might manifest some kind of stealth technology, was built, but here it is presented as a photograph on the back wall. This is an essay in how objects express relationships – here that of father and son, student and teacher – but it’s a twisted reflection of those relationships, like in a funfair’s hall of mirrors, in which even the artist himself is in danger of being reduced to little more than a look. And it’s this sense of daring that makes Rehberger’s work stand out. Mark Rappolt

114

AR-May-Reviewed-Rehberger-p114.indd 114

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:10

The Night of the Great Season Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Centre d’Art Contemporain 19 February – 11 May For a Polish art historian, seeing Polish Surrealism and neo-Surrealism at a Kunsthalle located in a former foundry in postindustrial Mulhouse, Alsace, might be compared to an exotic accident while on the Grand Tour: a surreal chance encounter of sorts. The Night of the Great Season is a bold show, juxtaposing a limited selection of well-known Polish avantgarde and neo-avant-garde artists (Tadeusz Kantor, Erna Rosenstein, Bruno Schulz, Alina Szapocznikow) with three artists of the current generation (Tomasz Kowalski, Agnieszka Polska, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski). The most interesting aspect of the exhibition is that it presents them together for the first time in the context of Surrealism. The title comes from a short story by one of the most famous Polish-Jewish pre-war writers and artists, Bruno Schulz, part of his masterpiece The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe, 1933–4), a strange modern ‘degenerate’ text exploring time and the perception of Jewish life in the small town of Drohobycz. Schulz is represented here by drawings related to his prose, though they are closer to Neue Sachlichkeit than to Surrealism. Echoes of Schulz were strongly present in Kantor’s self-founded theatre, Cricot 2, particularly in his ‘Informel Theatre’ and later ‘Theatre of Death’ approaches, represented here by The Dead Class (1975), a great documentary showing Kantor’s performance by Andrzej Wajda. Interestingly, it was Erna Rosenstein’s husband, Artur Sandauer, who rediscovered and reinterpreted Schulz in his

literary essays of the 1970s. Kantor, Rosenstein and Sandauer were all members and cofounders of the second Kraków Group in 1957, which also represented surrealist tendencies in Polish art. That Rosenstein’s works are being exhibited in this part of Europe for the first time since the 1980s deserves special attention. This PolishJewish artist, one of the most original among her peers, combined surrealistic automatic drawing with a focus on the female body, the feminine and the fetish. She was one of the first to do so in Poland, tackling alienation, abjection and difference. A great example of her painting here, Become! (Stan sie,1988), is a fantasy about insemination, mysterious sperm levitating in abstract oceanic space cutting the canvas. In interesting relation to her works are small-scale sculptures by Alina Szapocznikow and large c-prints by Agnieszka Polska. Rosenstein and Szapocznikow shared not only the traumatic past of the Holocaust experience, but also both made fetish and assemblage structures from refuse and remnants. In her collages, Polska makes direct reference to Włodzimierz Borowski’s Artony series of ‘assemblages-beings’, translating them into an organic ‘fairytale’ made of mud and branches (Arton series, 2010). On the other hand, other younger artists, the aforementioned Ziółkowski and Kowalski, take formal inspiration from surrealist imagery, creating their own ahistorical language in spectacular paintings and drawings. The curatorial strategy here was inspired by Jakub Banasiak’s book Tired of Reality (2009),

and his argument that in turning away from the Polish ‘critical art’ generation of the 1990s, the younger generation is now evidently ‘tired of reality’ and embracing alternative approaches – surrealist, among others. The clear minimalist display is in some respects misleading, though. One might think that what is on show constitutes the very few embodiments of surrealist art in Poland, and echoes Kantor’s famous statement that ‘we didn’t have Surrealism in Poland because we had Catholicism’ (a stance reflected in Banasiak’s book). But Polish Surrealism did exist, albeit marginally, in several artistic and clearly communistic formations in Lvov and Kraków: the pre-war Artes group, the first pre-war Kraków Group, and the second Kraków Group including (among many others) Kantor and Rosenstein. Poland didn’t have a figure like André Breton. It had neither the strong circle that he consolidated nor a tradition of surrealist exhibitions. Nevertheless, many artists of different generations did become ‘surrealists’ and ‘neo-surrealists’, such as Edward Krasiski, Kazimierz Mikulski, Jerzy Kujawski and Janina KraupeSwiderska. Surrealistic tendencies appeared also in Polish film and in experimental cinema – we could mention here early films by Roman Polanski, the filmic oeuvre of Wojciech Jerzy Has or the experimentation of Walerian Borowczyk. This show, then might serve as evidence that research into this broad topic has just begun. Barbara Piwowarska

Alina Szapocznikow, Autoportrait II, 1966, bronze, 21 × 26 × 11 cm, edition 3 of 7. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Piotr Stanislawski and Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 115

115

16/04/2014 12:05

Ruth Proctor I Was There Norma Mangione, Turin 30 January – 8 March ‘I am here but I am also there’ proclaims Ruth Proctor’s writing on the wall (I am here but I am also there (Varsity Black), 2014). It’s a soft statement, made of chenille varsity letters – like those stitched onto college jackets as proof of the wearer’s belonging to some sort of group. Maybe this is a self-portrait, maybe a global anthem for so much of our present ‘social’ life, lost in the serial heterotopias of the Net, with polished profiles, strategic displays of ‘likes’ and identities in drag. Right beside this work stands another sculpture: the alluring I see you liking everything (I was there) (2013/14), a giant multicoloured mask in forecourt bunting originally created by the artist for the panoramic rooftop of a Peckham car park, one that is periodically turned into the exhibition setting for the summertime project Bold Tendencies. In London, the rustling mask felt like a quixotic attempt to frame the landscape (or direct the gaze) through its apertures, almost too small an object for the scale of the building and its urban views. In Turin – where a small fan theatrically plays the role of the wind – it fills and blocks the

entire space, from wall to wall, as oversize as a (somehow shy) elephant in the room. Peekaboo, if I don’t see you, you don’t see me: infant experiential logic negates the possibility of two things happening at the same time. Only trial-and-error method and cognitive development will teach us about the permanence of objects. ‘I am here but I am also there’ seems to voice the artwork’s multiple personalities, as material evidence of something existing in manifold contexts, times and spaces, to be seen, experienced, remembered (and eventually liked) in very different moments. The Faraway Nearby, as Rebecca Solnit titled her 2013 book on memory. In the adjoining, smaller room, a slideshow (Syncro skating drawing (Team Torino), 2014) records further experiments with movement and impermanence: a group of skaters engraves a ring on the ice by turning round and round. Again, this work echoes another performance and ensuing installation that Proctor orchestrated in London, a Car Drawing (2013) created by the tyre marks of a car revolving in circles. In Turin, the images are accompanied by a sheet

of A4 paper where Proctor provides instructions on how to draw the circle, indicating different handholds (‘Basket, Elbow to elbow, Hand to hand, Arms down’): a frustratingly simple task for the professional skaters involved in the project. Proctor trained as a skater too: in previous works (like the short video Falling or Jumping, 2011) she films herself while trying to execute a complex jump on ice, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. Trial and error, over and over again. It makes for an ironic self-portrait of the artist as performer, wishful stuntwoman and ‘professional faller’ (I’m quoting from Proctor, who recently held a talk in Coventry titled ‘Professional Falling’), who serially attempts to create beauty and formal perfection, though well aware that none of them will last long. The last work on show says it all: Smoke Drawing #1 (2014) retraces on three sheets of paper a series of previous performances by Proctor in London and Turin, where the artist walked with a small smoke flare in hand, leaving behind a cloud of Yves Klein-blue smoke. Now you see it, now you don’t. Barbara Casavecchia

I see you liking everything (I was there) (installation vew), 2013/14. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion Di Persano. Courtesy Norma Mangione, Turin

116

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 116

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Anastasia Ax Swallowed Fear Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm 21 February – 21 March Anastasia Ax does not shy away from the visceral, using her hands and body to construct raw images, sculptures, sound and performative works. The Stockholm-based artist primarily uses ink and paper, but she provokes one to rethink how they can serve as charged mediums, and she has a history of collaborating with experimental artists such as Lars Siltberg (in the case of this exhibition, Siltberg and Ax opened it with a performance) and MarjaLeena Sillanpää. She often adopts the role of detective or archaeologist, searching or hunting for that which does not obviously reveal itself. Ax’s work possesses an archival quality; she catalogues, collects and sifts through debris, the remnants and remainders of her creative journey. The works that make up her exhibitions are like relics from a broken era. In this exhibition, Ax appears interested in the delicate boundary between nature and society, the works on show suggesting that these spheres aren’t in accord – that chaos and ferality inevitably reign despite attempts to rein them in. The show consists of posters and brittle, paper-based sculptures that

insinuate both the constructive energy and dark side of change since the artist fixates on transformations that are simultaneously progressive and destructive; these works ask one to contemplate how mankind’s narrative has been documented for centuries using similar fibres and to reconsider the direction we are going, together and individually. In the press release, Ax highlights the fact that these same fibres are derived from plants; our history has often been inscribed using such natural materials. Society, plants and paper likewise deteriorate and decompose, leaving room for new constructions inspired and fuelled by recycled energies. Additionally, the halfcentury-old paper Ax chooses to use is symbolic of humanity’s intellectual culture – fragile, deteriorating, layered. On the gallery floor sit two sculptures emphasising the violent, unpredictable quality of existence. Curled paper bubbles up – charred, crumpled and sitting atop piles of creamy paper, as if tainted by a now-silenced war zone or catastrophe. The unsaid, muted and masked motivate Ax’s feverish spectacles, which tend to be wordless and cryptic.

The poetic images in the posters portray moments during which culture moves towards and merges with nature. Each of them seems to be a window into what went awry at a given point in history (eg, images focus on apocalyptic, shock-and-awe moments: blackened cityscapes, intricate vortices), yet it is difficult to decipher what particular points in history the works refer to. It is this ambiguity that makes Ax’s work alluring: as if presenting once-buried hieroglyphics intended to represent the downfall of any culture from any era, she creates a constrained language. She forces an alternative communication, provoking the imagination with a unique array of codes, symbols and scenarios that can be widely interpreted. Like filmic stills that relay neither the climax nor denouement, these illustrations nevertheless convey Ax’s fragmented narrative of unexpected pivotal moments. Images of hands, eyes and off-kilter visages exist alongside circular objects and words (eg, ‘void’) engulfed in black ink. The power of each displayed image is magnified by the choice to minimise language, constraining any message via the use of ink and paper. Jacquelyn Davis

Swallowed Fear, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Maja Flink. Courtesy Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 117

117

16/04/2014 12:05

The Crime Was Almost Perfect Witte de With, Rotterdam 24 January – 27 April The relationship between art and crime has always been an intriguing one. A crime can be planned and executed so precisely that it almost becomes a work of art, at least according to the executor. Thomas De Quincey’s famous essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827) has served as an often-solicited source of inspiration for reflections upon the relationship between both; the subject is also brilliantly addressed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), in which two bored students flirting with Nietzsche’s theory of the übermensch kill a classmate as an ‘artistic act’ to see if they can get away with it. A reference to Hitchcock’s classic could not be missing in The Crime Was Almost Perfect, for which curator Cristina Ricupero united more than 100 works by 40 artists – an ambitious endeavour for sure. In his installation Technicolor Proof (R_O_P_E) (2013), Mike Cooter evokes elements from the interior where the entire action of Rope takes place. Besides ethnographic sculptures similar to those in the film, the artist also shows a flickering neon light of the apartment opposite – one of few glimpses, in the film’s narrow universe, of the outside world. While the protagonists in Hitchcock’s film might have plotted a perfect crime as art, some

artists are not afraid of criminal activities, either: the Dutchman Han van Meegeren, for example, a frustrated artist who became notorious for forging paintings like the ‘Vermeer’ here. The term ‘con artist’ has the word ‘artist’ in it for a reason. Hence, Claire Fontaine shows various manipulated objects that can be used to break into houses, and Gardar Eide Einarsson also finds ways to outsmart the system. Throughout the exhibition, he presents pictures of places in the urban realm where contraband objects can be hidden, from the metal cap of a public urinal to an open space next to a letterbox. The show addresses crime in all its aspects, from vandalism (Matias Faldbakken’s spraying a line across a wall in the 2013 work Spray Measurement), theft (Pierre Huyghe’s absurd video Dévoler (Unstealing, 1994), in which he leaves objects in shops), greed (a display of broker Bernard Madoff’s books in Julien Prévieux’s 2011 installation Forget the Money), violence (Monica Bonvicini’s That Hangs, 2005) and horror (Richard Hawkins’s images of decapitated heads, Jim Shaw’s zombie businessmen in his Zombie Painting from 2004). And maybe that is a bit too much. If Ricupero had restricted her theme to art and criminality, it would have been a fascinating subject that

already has more than enough meat on its bones. By expanding so much, the show almost becomes a display of all possible evils. Take Kader Attia’s installation The Construction of Evil (2014), for example – shelves with archival material of racial images depicting non-Westerners as savages: while works by Attia connected to this one have been shown in contexts relating to postcolonialism (eg, Documenta), the installation seems somewhat out of place here. Or what about Saâdane Afif, whose L’Humour Noir (2010), a scale model of the Centre Pompidou as a coffin made in Ghana, is meant to be an example of black humour: not, to my knowledge, a criminal offence. Ulla von Brandenburg often works around staging and theatricality and shows a constellation of empty theatre costumes forming a circle (Quilt I, 2008), in which the curator detects an act of violence. Evil is apparently also in the eye of the beholder. And so although this exhibition has an original theme and includes plenty of good artists, unfortunately it isn’t so convincing as a whole. Perhaps the show is a victim of its own ambitions, showcasing too many works to fit a theme that is interpreted too broadly – and often too didactically. The crime might have been almost perfect, but the exhibition isn’t. Sam Steverlynck

The Crime Was Almost Perfect, 2014 (installation view, with two works by Mike Cooter). Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn. Courtesy Witte de With, Rotterdam

118

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 118

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Francesca Woodman Sammlung Verbund, Vienna 30 January – 21 May In 1972 Francesca Woodman took an extraordinary black-and-white photograph, among the first of many. She’s sat on a church pew, wearing a pale cable-knit sweater, light bursting behind her and hair ominously curtaining her face. A dark fuzzy beam emanates from her hand. As it expands to fill the lower right corner, the image succumbs to abstraction. The ‘beam’ is the shutter-release cable, repurposed into mystic strangeness; the photograph is entitled Self-portrait at Thirteen, Boulder, Colorado . Nine years later Woodman would be dead. As is widely known, in those intervening years she created a now-celebrated photographic oeuvre that elides oblique confessional, flickering feminist concerns, art-history-infused aesthetic intelligence, plus something harder to grasp and borderline occult. To see that work summarised in some 80 photographs and several short films, as here, is to be startled once again by her clock-racing precocity. The daughter of artists, Woodman was named for Piero della Francesca and was no naïf. Untitled, Boulder, Colorado (1972–5/1999) finds her half-submerged in a river, clinging to the phallic root of a big, spreading tree, her hair floating out across the water, dodged-and-burned light glowing behind the trunk. The image has a romantic cast: it specifically recalls John

William Waterhouse’s water nymphs and the skewed arcadias of Samuel Palmer, but also has the manipulated oddity of Victorian spirit photography. At Rhode Island School of Design, Woodman’s performative leanings blossomed, as she repeatedly photographed herself in a derelict house, endlessly experimenting with the affective power of angles. In House #4 (1975–8), her body appears trapped behind a freestanding, leaning fireplace: Woodman slants her camera so that this object’s tilt is the vertical and everything else is at a crazed lean, while the moving figure is wraithlike. What one might glean from such works is that Woodman inhabited a universe that felt off-balance and spirit-haunted, but constantly enacted strategies of formal control. The mood shifts, though. A series made in Rome in 1977–8, where she turns repeatedly to iconography of angels – wings made from fluttering sheets, while she and her boyfriend’s naked bodies flit in and out of view – is warm and giddy; Eel Series, Roma, May 1977 – August 1978 (1977–8), in which the creature curls in a bowl while Woodman’s arm curls around it as her out-of-focus body follows the shape of a mosaic floor, has Eve-andthe-serpent overtones and effervescing mixed textures, while insinuating that what’s happening here only exists because the shapes matched.

The last works, in the year or so before she jumped from a Manhattan window in January 1981, are hard not to read through the biography. In the blurry Untitled (1979–80), made after Woodman had moved to New York and was trying to position herself as a surreal fashion photographer, she again leverages her surroundings: she appears, head hung, at one end of a long, cloudlike patch of paint on a rough interior wall, as if it were a mood coursing out of her. The very last work is a sphinxlike self-portrait, a nude Woodman staring flatly out of a ghostly white face, arms akimbo, no longer refusing to meet the male gaze but challenging it, her ‘certificate of live birth’ pinned up on the left. It’s an outwardly sad photograph but not a didactic one; Woodman was never that. In Untitled (1975–8), she photographed the wooden folding panels of a Dutch door. At the centre of this, Woodman appears. Her body cuts off, dropshadowed, at the waist, floating and twodimensional; her left hand doesn’t connect with it, and, beyond the assumption of double exposure, one can’t see how the photograph’s shifty spatiality was achieved. A humming little marvel that resists full understanding, it’s a synecdoche of Woodman’s career. Martin Herbert

Untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 1972–5/1999, b/w gelatin silver print on barite paper, 10 × 15 cm (paper 20 × 25 cm). © and courtesy George and Betty Woodman, New York/Sammlung Verbund, Vienna

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed RESUPPLY P102 + P119.indd 119

119

16/04/2014 12:09

Kilian Rüthemann Hatch Up Your Troubles Raeber von Stenglin, Zürich 31 January – 8 March The seventh dictum of writer Mark O’Donnell’s article ‘Laws of Cartoon Motion’ (Esquire, 1980) states, ‘Certain bodies can pass through a solid wall painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot.’ Witness Wile E. Coyote’s intricate photorealist paintings through which the Roadrunner passes without problem; but in attempting to follow, Wile only crashes into the very stone surface he himself had adorned. ‘This’, O’Donnell concludes, ‘is ultimately a problem of art, not science.’ Walking into Kilian Rüthemann’s show, there at first appears to be a small hemispherical mirror propped up on the concrete floor against the far wall. It’s only when we get closer that it becomes apparent that it is actually a fairly large hole – not big enough for us to crawl through, but evidently big enough for a fairly large mouse. The piece, Hatch Up Your Troubles (all works 2014), gives the show its title, taken from a 1949 episode of Tom and Jerry in which a young woodpecker disintegrates any bit of wood within its reach. In the cartoon, it’s unclear whether the woodpecker chick is devouring or just atomising

the materials it drills through, and that sense of ambiguous transformation, misdirected DIY and the rule of the cartoon tunnel’s inconsistent denials guide Rüthemann’s concise exhibition. There are only three works in Hatch Up Your Troubles, which feels something like the sparse storeroom for a wayward interior decorator. In the front room is an uneven, 4m-high pile of what must be at least a hundred circular Ikea doormats, coconut fibre bristles stuck into pliant grey silicone bases. One for Every Moment (Stack) looks sturdy enough, despite the odd mat hanging out like a dog’s tongue as the towering arrangement works its way to just a few inches shy of the ceiling. In the back room is Untitled, a pile of wood that behaves more like a giant slug, with dozens of thin layers of black oak slumping lazily over a thick, pale beam of untreated pine. The oak, made from a rare and pricey trunk of wood preserved in a bog, is finely cut for use as veneer and is here bundled in ready-to-buy sheets, barcodes still attached. Despite his predilection for stacking things, I think Rüthemann is interested in more than

just saggy gravity. In both works, it feels like their respective materials are attempting to return from their newfound home-decor existences to their ‘original’ states – a palm tree and a whole oak trunk – but the mask doesn’t quite fit, the lipstick on the fixed smile is messily smudged. It’s a perverse reconstitution of ‘natural’ materials that have already been transformed into processed surfaces that project naturalness; the point isn’t the distinction between natural or not, but the reflection of the desires that shape those materials. Through those desires, as in O’Donnell’s law, things can simultaneously be and not be not exactly what they are. Which is where the tunnel comes back in. Rüthemann’s work is blunt and direct, but in that insistence seems to be working through materials to get to the unlikely, unstable cartoon reality where things shift: the space inside the tunnel. Like Wile, that’s a place we can’t go. The problem of art, for Rüthemann, is to figure out how it can be accessed indirectly. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Hatch Up Your Troubles, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy Raeber von Stenglin, Zürich

120

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 120

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

Félix Luna Efemérides Habitables Galería Luis Adelantado, Mexico City 7 February – 16 April Taking as its pretext an exhibition about the history of photography in Mexico that was staged last year at MUNAL (Museo Nacional de Arte), Mexico City, Félix Luna’s work Espejos Opacos (Opaque Mirrors, all works 2014) elegantly interrogates the very essence of the medium. Making his own selection with the help of his friend historian-turned-curator Andrés Aguilera Patiño and distorting the images manually through mechanical modifications, Luna reveals a parallel narrative that questions official history. The images he has rephotographed and distorted create phantasmagoria, mirages. It is no coincidence that the artist highlights and problematises the fact that the daguerreotype is a sort of mirror, as the MUNAL exhibition was intended to be a mirror of history through its photos. Luna shows us that, more often than not, the mirror is opaque. His selection begins with the first daguerreotype ever taken in Mexico. It’s a choice that immediately brings into question the construction of so-called national history: while the image was shot here, it had to be taken to Europe to be developed (using silver imported from the New World), only to be sent back to Mexico again. Here is global capital and postcolonial schadenfreude revealed in one click. The selection then moves on in groups of blackand-white photographs spanning 1839 to 1940, their continuity traced or drawn by the artist in squiggles and lines in CMYK – the subtractive colours that are precisely absent from these

prints. A quick visit to the artist’s studio downstairs reveals that for him, magenta stands for ‘keep’, black, or key, for ‘archive’, cyan for ‘discard’ and yellow for ‘forget’, and it would seem that this sort of arbitrary mechanism is the mechanism of history-making itself. It’s also interesting to note that the blue (hi)story line is the one that was used ‘officially’ at the MUNAL exhibition. Placed on a long shelf, Luna’s narrative selection spans the four walls of the gallery, and in it he has chosen to turn progress on its head, literally: any image having to do with factories, mining, labour, etc, is upside-down. The rest of the photos are all placed ‘normally’ in groups that tell stories (or not) and some have been removed, leaving a blank space: a marked emptiness. These removed images are all to be found on the floor in small piles located at the four cardinal points. The artist has chosen to remove any clichés (again literally) and portraits of famous ‘heroes and villains’, leaving us, in a way, with a more unofficial and unglorified, often ‘truer’ version of history, where Durango becomes Durangogo (due to manipulation of the image scan), or where the railroad under a group of lynched Catholics seems to become a river, surely the Styx. All the images are lying on a bed of quicklime, or calcium oxide, which is the material used by miners who extract silver – the same silver used to make daguerreotypes and, of course, most of analogue photography up until relatively recently – to neutralise

the toxic chemicals used in its separation from other minerals. This becomes a double neutralisation – not just the symbolic one of the cyanide and other toxic chemicals, but the neutralisation of the images themselves through their placement on this white dust: nothing makes ‘sense’ in the traditional way any more. As a sort of prelude, Hay Ausencias Que Representan un Verdadero Triunfo (There Are Absences That Represent a Real Triumph) is another, more literal extraction: that of a brick, taken by the artist from Lecumberri, an infamous former prison in Mexico City, which now holds the national archives. This action is documented in silkscreens, exhibited as such and is therefore as hard to read as truth itself. And finally, as counterpoint to these two extractions, the show also has an inclusion: in the centre of a huge darkened room, a single light illuminates a small golden disc: the base of an inserted upside-down bronze sculpture cast from the hole that the artist made in the floor and into which he has reinserted the sculpture to almost perfectly fill the gap. The sculpture is invisible, and one can only see it online, in a YouTube video documenting the process – elsewhere, not here. Absence and presence – the question of photography – and inclusion and exclusion – the question of history – converge in these habitable events or ephemerides, if only for the brief moment of the exhibition. Gabriela Jauregui

Espejos Opacos (detail), 2014 (installation view). Courtesy Galería Luis Adelantado, Mexico City

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 121

121

16/04/2014 12:05

Daniel Arsham Volcanic Ash, Rusted Steel Baró Galeria, São Paulo 15 February – 22 March It’s no simple matter to fill the cavernous Baró Galeria, a slick, 1,500sqm space on the fringe of São Paulo’s gritty Centro. In the previous exhibition held there, Argentinian artist Pablo Siquier occupied it stunningly without placing a single thing on the gallery’s expansive floor: his show consisted of three immense murals in which complex, hyperprecise computergenerated drawings were executed in charcoal by an all-too-human hand, their labyrinthine systems facing each other across the massive empty space, forcing the viewer into the role of pivot or link between them. In his first Latin American exhibition, New York artist Daniel Arsham begins with a bang: a visual pileup in the form of the site-specific Crystal Car (2014). In it, a ruined 1976 Chevrolet Opala has been dumped on the floor – or in the concept of Arsham’s show, ‘unearthed’ by a future archaeologist. Battered, bruised and with its original colour oddly indistinguishable, as if you’d gone suddenly colour-blind, the hull of the still elegant Chevy is filled to the brim and half-buried under eight tons of bluish glass pellets, of the kind used to make asphalt glint in the headlights.

Pieces of glass come together more compactly in a nearby sculpture, Focus (2013), a full-size cast of a standing Arsham in a pose somewhere between praying and intently reading his own upturned palms. The piece, rendered in bits of broken glass and resin, was apparently inspired by a hurricane Arsham experienced as a child and the memory of the smashing, falling glass; and it’s a theme of destruction, loss and catastrophe, and of the persistence of the objects around us, albeit in altered forms, that pervades this exhibition. In a set of four gouache paintings, odd architectural objects protrude from swampy, overgrown glades; and in the short film Future Relic 01 (2013), a white-robed seeker from the future traverses a series of sand dunes, unearthing artefacts from the present day. He turns a dollar coin, white and brittle like a sand dollar, in his hand; and a cellular phone of the early-1990s variety, hefty as a milk carton and white as milk, turns and falls in the air, shedding grains of glassy sand in vivid, beautifully coloured images. This foreshadows the most compelling part of the show: a set of sculptures representing

fossils found by future archaeologists. There are payphones and heavy, boxy TV sets; Polaroid cameras and radios; and, already obsolescent at less than 20 years old, a set of weighty early laptops, all rendered in a rock-hard compound of volcanic ash, glacial rock dust and HydroStone gypsum cement. With a technical brilliance that Arsham also puts into practice as one half of the avant-design duo Snarkitecture, where he and Alex Mustonen create similarly moulded and eroded tables, shelves and benches, the ‘fossils’ appear to have crumbled away in patches, revealing tiny grottoes like rock formations, minutely studded with quartz crystal, fragments of obsidian, crushed glass and sand. Like fossils, which are negative images of the original object rotted down and rendered solid again by the passing of time, these are objects that embody the present absence of the original object – the instant obsolescence of a Polaroid camera measured in geological time, for example; and the work of the artist in representing them, using matter to fill in the blanks, endlessly manifesting what has once been real. Claire Rigby

Ash, Glacial Rock, Obsidian, Rose Quartz and Steel Eroded Laptops, 2013, volcanic ash, glacial rock dust, obsidian fragments, rose quartz fragments, steel fragments, pulverised glass, sand, crushed marble, Hydro-Stone, each 24 × 28 × 33 cm. Courtesy Filipe Berndt / Baró Galeria, São Paulo

122

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 122

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:05

N12 – No. 5 Beijing Commune 16 January – 15 March For what purpose, an artist group? If this exhibition feels a bit like an art school show, it’s because it is, in a way. The N12 artist collective was founded by 12 graduates of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and first showed their work – then only paintings – in 2003; in the press materials at the time, they professed having discovered ‘the possibility of painting to the nth dimension’. Their aim was and is to exhibit together as a group, without a theme. They were born within a year of each other, and all live and work in Beijing. A number of them are now recognisable names in the Chinese scene: Wang Guangle, Liang Yuanwei, Qiu Xiaofei and Hu Xiaoyuan are counted in Beijing Commune’s stable of commercially successful young artists. This is a variable and slightly jarring display including painting, ink drawing, sculpture, installation and – in what comes as a shock in the last room – conjoined stuffed animals. The lack of a deliberately cohesive theme is palpable. The first room includes the most recognisable names and works. There is a trilogy of large canvases by Song Kun (instigator of N12),

juxtaposed with three concrete sculptures by Wang Guangle and a silk-on-wood piece by Hu Xiaoyuan. The paintings by Song are technically strong, with a translucent quality and grisaille and pink palette that lends them a statuesque aura. On the floor in the foreground are the concrete lumps by Wang – conceptually considered, but lumps nonetheless. Hu’s wood piece, for which the grain is redrawn meticulously in Chinese ink on silk, hangs somewhat neutrally to the left. As the show continues, the more notable works are a large painting (of a recumbent Hu) by Ma Yanhong that is striking at first for the skills of its execution; Qiu Xiaofei, too, in his Light of Shadow of Light (2012) has produced an engaging play with illumination on and outside the canvas. Liang’s florid, textured paintings are attractive, if unsurprising. The final room of the exhibition contains a pair of acrylic panels suspended in midair and painted with red clothes, as if the figures inside had vanished. Next to them are the stuffed domestic animals – conjoined cats and rabbits and a dog – that are the unexplained creations of Yang Jing.

But it is not in the works themselves that the real interest of this show lies. More compelling are the conditions under which the N12 group started and continues to plan exhibitions. Art students in China are noticeably inclined towards forming groups, not least because of the relative lack of leadership and institutional structure in the art scene in which they find themselves, and the unifying force of a traditional art education that many wish to break from. A highly commercial environment in Beijing may be what spurred N12 to show together in the first place, as it were, as a pack, at noncommercial venues. Now their presence as a group and the relative success of their individual careers provide a different kind of security, and their reasons for showing at this prominent gallery are open to speculation. In short, N12 – No. 5 (which comes eight years after No. 4) provokes worthwhile wondering about the value of this mode of communication and display for these artists, its effect on them and the dynamics of the wider scene, and the direction they want it to take. Iona Whittaker

Yang Jing, Black Wolf and Anonymous, 2014, stuffed animals (dog and bird), 244 × 122 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR-May-Reviewed.indd 123

123

16/04/2014 12:06

Books

124

AR-May-Books.indd 124

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:12

The Duchamp Dictionary by Thomas Girst Did you know that the young man who stole Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) from MoMA in 1995 returned it, the following day, by tossing it over the wall of the museum’s sculpture garden? That there are several nodes of connection, via Philadelphia, between Duchamp and Sylvester Stallone? That The Large Glass (1915–23) makes a cameo appearance in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), that Duchamp liked American women best, once took LSD by accident, was a ‘visionary of car-sharing initiatives’ and, as Thomas Girst reminds us twice, said, ‘I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina’? If not, but you wished you did, then The Duchamp Dictionary is for you. There are a few accessible inroads to Duchamp, mostly written by Calvin Tomkins (the essential 1996 biography, the Duchamp chapter in 1967’s The Bride and the Bachelors and most recently the slim, jewellike interlocutions in The Afternoon Interviews, published last year). There is also a lot of turgid scholarship and wildcat theorisation. Girst, founding editor of the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, author of The Indefinite Duchamp (2013) and a curator of the artist’s work, could easily have geeked out and written something equally

Thames & Hudson, £16.95/£29.95 (hardcover)

gnomic and petty – he has after all, so he tells us, corresponded with Duchamp scholars for nearly two decades. Instead, he swipes magisterially at slack scholarship – ‘the idea that Duchamp’s work is a riddle, rebus or secret in need of monocausal decoding is a dead end’, he writes in the entry on ‘Alchemy’, saying later that contradiction is key to Duchamp’s art – and has written the book that he thinks was missing: a ‘concise and entertaining’ entrée that makes ‘[Duchamp] and his work as accessible as they deserve to be’. If The Duchamp Dictionary, which packs plenty into a couple of hundred pages, flatters the short attention span of many modern readers, with Marcel’s own quotes highlighted as if the whole thing were a word-processing document (better than it sounds), then the thing takes the dictionary format partly, so Girst tells us a little tenuously, because Duchamp and the surrealists liked dictionaries and talked about them a few times. But as you read, the format comes to fit the artist’s rulebook-ripping mien. We get Duchamp’s life as a teasing jigsaw puzzle: the selection kicks off with ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and Duchamp’s quitting of painting in 1918, and one of the last entries is for Young Man and Girl in Spring, a painting he made in 1911.

In between, the entries vary playfully. One, entitled ‘Influence’ (his on others), is mostly just a juggernaut list of famous names. The entry for ‘Laziness’ reads, merely, ‘See “Work”’. Elsewhere, as in the entry on the Étant Donnés, for example, detail rightly blooms. Once you get into the broken rhythm of the book, then – assuming you can ignore the one big flaw, an interlaced sequence of terrible, crass, collaged illustrations – it’s surprisingly absorbing; technically a dictionary, but limited enough in subjects that it doesn’t feel like the sort of thing you’re going to look up a particular word in. Rather, you dive in at random or read chronologically (which feels the same), and Girst refreshes and augments the known facts. I did flip to the ‘Chess’ entry to settle, perhaps, conflicting reports I’d read about how good Duchamp’s game was, and soon lost interest in that question thanks to a fascinating little melange of anecdote and quotation, and the summary that Duchamp’s admiration for chess master Aron Nimzowitsch is ‘probably as good as it gets when it comes to adoration by an agnostic’. It’s that kind of book; you go in for a minute and come out an hour later. ‘Anything systemized becomes sterile very soon,’ Duchamp once said. Not always, apparently. Martin Herbert

Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1946–1968 by Gregor Muir and Anne Massey Published to coincide with a retrospective of work by Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern and a smaller display at the ICA (as well as an archival show at the Institute’s former premises on Dover Street), this is a book that tries to do a number of things at the same time. On the one hand it’s a history of the ICA’s founding and evolution up to its move to its current premises, at Nash House on the Mall, an archive of installation shots, invitations and exhibition history. On the other it’s a history of a how a relatively small group of people set out to promote the international modern art they loved in the context of ‘gloomy’ and inhospitable postwar Britain. And along the way it sets out to chronicle the ICA as the seedbed and incubator of Pop and Op art (Lawrence Alloway, assistant director of the ICA

between 1955 and 1960, is generally credited with originating the term Pop art), of the Independent Group (formed at the ICA, and including Alloway and Hamilton among its members), of architectural Brutalism (whose chief proponents were Independent Group members Alison and Peter Smithson); and as the site (in 1955) of Francis Bacon’s first institutional show. There is naturally a sense that the ICA, which in the recent past has struggled to assert its identity within and relevance to London’s current art scene, is attempting to address that now, as Muir openly admits in his introduction (he admits the need to root the ICA in its past; not the ICA’s previous failings). And there’s a consequent degree of self-congratulation throughout the text: phrases such as ‘It is to

May 2014

AR-May-Books.indd 125

ICA, £20 (hardcover) the ICA’s credit…’ (in respect of the Bacon show being put on over a decade before homosexual acts were decriminalised in Britain) or similar pop up with slightly off-putting frequency. Yet the book remains fascinating in its description of early attempts to establish what ICA cofounder Herbert Read proudly described as an ‘adult playcentre’ (after its opening exhibition) as a serious institution for the promotion of contemporary art that was both a private members club and an ‘educational’ institution with a public mission, and that desired to be independent of patrons (and their funds) and yet experimental in nature. These issues remain at the core of debates about the ICA and similar organisations today (as the list of sponsors at the back of the book demonstrates). Mark Rappolt

125

16/04/2014 12:12

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt When her powerful art-dealer husband dies suddenly, Harriet Burden – or ‘Harry’ to her friends – an artist who feels her career has been overlooked because of her sex and her intellect, becomes obsessed with revenge. Siri Hustvedt’s sixth work of fiction takes the form of an archive of documents gathered after Burden’s death by the scholar I.V. Hess, who is researching the mysteries surrounding the artist and her ‘Maskings’ project, which had involved exhibiting her own work as if it were that of three complicit established male artists, in a plot to expose ‘them’: the ignorant dealers, artists, spectators and critics. Burden designs her project to expose what she sees as the heinous phallocentricity of the artworld, which she blames for stunting her career. She is also consumed by ideas about ‘how we see’, and it is her intellectual and emotive wrangling with this issue that constitutes the wider interest of the novel beyond artworld mechanisms. The first of these motives is undermined and the second activated by the fact that Hustvedt’s character adapts her work for each surrogate artist, thus at least partially becoming them rather than, as Burden describes it, ‘wearing’ them. Burden’s affected artworks often come across as literal-minded and adolescent: for example, one work involves an effigy of her husband behind misty glass, made shortly after his death.

Sceptre, £18.99/$26 (hardcover)

This has the effect of making the real art that pops up in the text, such as in Hess’s innocent footnote briefly describing the Guerilla Girls’ interventions, also seem madeup. The installation Burden devises for one of her artist guises, Anton Tish, is an outrageous stew of references, made via quotations written all over the gallery walls and an accompanying sculpture of a woman. This leads Hustvedt’s reader to wonder whether Burden is unsuccessful not because of any malign prejudice, but because her art is just not very good. In Hustvedt’s New York artworld, fame is the only expertise, and this is withheld from Burden except in vicarious forms. Burden makes her best works for her Maskings and successfully vacates herself from their meaning. Under the guise of the handsome, young, unknown ‘Anton Tish’, her work is read by critics as exploring art history; through the black and gay ‘Phineas Q. Eldridge’ her work explores identity; and through the celebrity artist ‘Rune’ her work explores seduction and masculinity. Hustvedt surrounds the reader with multiple unreliable narrators and all are implicated as misrememberers, all telling the wrong stories about ourselves, warped and blinded as we are by perspective, memory and desire. Rune is the master trickster of the novel and its most uncanny creation, whose self

is consciously re-represented and reimagined from one moment to the next by his relentlessly mythomaniac interaction with family, friends and critics alike. Rune’s truth is deception, and his art consists of bland manifestations of this. Faced with this fey and weightless creature, Burden – heavy in the centre of multiple orbits and desperate to be the hero of her own book – loses control of her experiment. Longing to know herself as Odysseus rather than Penelope, she is drawn to Rune for his masculinity and chimeric audacity. In a glowing review of Burden-as-Rune, an exhibition is described as ‘muscular, vigorous and cerebral’, and she is ecstatic. Her anger finally stems not only from her sense of feminist injustice but also from an understanding that her consciousness is ambient in the gendered environment and that she cannot bodily access any objective platform upon which to metamorphose. There can only be perception and memory. As an experiment in contingency The Blazing World is perfectly contained and made possible by the novel form. Burden sits in the middle of it all unmoving, steeped in the marinade of the ingredients Hustvedt tosses in, stopping only when she gets the right particular complex flavour on her wooden spoon, not unlike the making of the multireferential The History of Art installation Hustvedt invents for Anton Tish. Ian Whitfield

The Supermodel and the Brillo Box by Don Thompson Last year the critic Ed Schad wryly tweeted, ‘Every time an article is written on an auction, an artwork, somewhere, dies.’ Well, Ed, brace yourself: Don Thompson’s follow-up to his 2008 art-market introduction, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, will have killed more work than could be stashed in all the world’s tax-free storage zones. I say follow-up, but at times it feels like the same text – certainly the same unremarkable prose, but also many familiar sentences. Take Thompson in 2008: ‘There are approximately 40,000 artists resident in London, and about the same in New York. Of the total 80,000, seventy-five are superstar artists’; and compare

126

AR-May-Books.indd 126

Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99 (hardcover)

it with Thompson in 2014: ‘Of the 80,000 [artists] in London and New York, 75 might eventually become mature artists with seven-figure incomes.’ No source is cited for these surprisingly stable figures, by the way. Some of Thompson’s language (he’s an economist by trade) gives the impression that he doesn’t really like art – despite the fact that he has dedicated a great percentage of his life to writing about the commerce surrounding it. Of Takashi Murakami, for instance, he writes that the artist ‘claims’ intentionally to avoid any illusion of depth and perspective as if Murakami might oddly be fibbing about this. Thompson obsessively details how many assistants an artist

might have and overuses the word ‘backstory’ when discussing the ideas behind a work. At one point he weakly criticises Galerie Urs Meile for changing the ‘backstory’ of Ai Weiwei’s Tree #11 (2009–10), as if an artwork can’t have more than one meaning. Thompson’s book is more depressing for being aimed for mass appeal – its tone is accessible, there are no footnotes because it’s ‘not intended as an academic reference’, the publishing blurb boasts a marketing plan with ‘national print and broadcast publicity, national advertising’. As such it’s just another example of the mainstream media’s preoccupation with art as commodity. Oliver Basciano

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:12

June 18 – 21, 2014

ineverread.com 127_AR.indd 127

Mainsponsor Ricola 16/04/2014 12:13

AR-May-Subs ad.indd 128

16/04/2014 12:14

artreview.com/subscribe AR-May-Subs ad.indd 129

16/04/2014 12:14

130

AR-May-The Strip_AK.indd 130

16/04/2014 12:15

For more on artist Francisco Sousa Lobo, see overleaf

131

AR-May-The Strip_AK.indd 131

16/04/2014 12:15

Contributors

Matthew Collings is an artist and writer. His abstract paintings done in collaboration with Emma Biggs have been exhibited worldwide and are in many collections. Collings’s TV series This Is Modern Art (1999) won a Bafta, among several other awards. His documentary on abstract art will be shown on BBC4 this autumn. For further reading relating to his interview with the poet Apollinaire, Collings recommends On Art (Documents of Twentieth Century Art): Guillaume Apollinaire (1972) and Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen (2012).

Andrew Berardini is a writer in Los Angeles. Last year he won the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Grant for Art Writers and was a finalist for the Premio Bonaldi. He has just finished a book on Danh Vō, to be published by Mousse. For further reading, Dennis Cooper’s ‘Too Cool for School’, from 1997, collected in Smothered in Hugs (2010), is in his view the pivotal essay on art schools in LA, but adds that all of Howard Singerman’s work about art schools is brilliant, from Art Subjects (1999) to the LA focus in ‘Excellence and Pluralism’, published in 2011 in East of Borneo.

Contributing Writers Sarah Arrhenius, Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Jacquelyn Davis, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Eddy Frankel, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Maria Lind, Daniel McClean, Barbara Piwowarska, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Ed Schad, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Dea Vanagan, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Ian Whitfield, Iona Whittaker, Siona Wilson

Jonathan Griffin Claire Rigby is a freelance critic and curator who has lived in Los Angeles since 2010. He is a contributing editor for Frieze magazine and part-time faculty at Otis College of Art. His exhibition Cogwheels Carved in Wood, currently at Night Gallery, LA, features recent and historical work by British and American artists including Derek Boshier. For a wider perspective on the future of the Los Angeles artworld, he recommends studying its beginnings, and the futures that failed to materialise, in books such as LA’s Early Moderns, by Victoria Dailey, Natalie Shivers, Michael Dawson (2002), and On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900–1950 (1996), edited by Paul J. Karlstrom.

is editor-in-chief at Time Out São Paulo and a regular contributor to ArtReview. She writes about Brazilian current affairs for the English-language blog at the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, and contributes to publications including the New Statesman, the South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Mark and Frame. For further reading on some of the themes in Daniel Arsham’s exhibition, she recommends The World Without Us (2007), in which author Alan Weisman investigates the way the planet would evolve if it were left instantly, inexplicably bereft of the human race, from the built environment to rural farmland, and from the rusting nails on the roof of a house to the fate of the world’s artworks (bronze statues prevail).

Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Ari Magg, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Francisco Sousa Lobo

Francisco Sousa Lobo (preceding pages)

Everything around Francisco Koppens seems to be dying: his marriage, his drawing skills, his job prospects, his body, his faith. For him God has changed into a bristly clownface, grinning from the moon or a pitch-black painting. With Portuguese fatalism, Koppens seems ready to end it all, but holds back because he can’t find the style or method to ‘write that goodbye note’. His solitary, secret compulsion is to draw comics telling ‘stories of sex and violence, where the hero undergoes a dreadful tribulation, at the mercy of strong perverse women’. But these instill such shame in him that he draws over them, obscuring and censoring them until they become almost solid black, like a dark monochrome painting. Some of these strips he posts to the Pope, most he tears to pieces. The scraps where the corners of four panels meet form crucifixes, echoing the cross looming over the couple’s loveless double bed. Like a Kafkaesque ‘K’, Koppens is the metafictional persona of the London-based Portuguese artist and writer Francisco Sousa Lobo. It seems that comics finally provide Sousa Lobo, and Koppens, with the

132

AR-May-Contributors.indd 132

style and method to write that postponed suicide note, as the remarkable graphic novel The Dying Draughtsman (2013). Sousa Lobo based his multilayered, self-reflective construction on events and feelings he lived through. He draws every area of black in it not quite solid but built up from repeated lines, all-obscuring, as if they cover up some shameful other comic, hidden beneath. As a widely exhibited artist, Sousa Lobo sees comics as increasingly central to his expression. From the outset he intended The Dying Draughtsman to be launched in an art gallery, as reflected in ‘Private View’, his new Strip for ArtReview, which offers two self-contained snapshots of the artworld and artistic life. Sousa Lobo explains, “The first page features the uncomfortable status of comics in the midst of fine art. The foreignness of comics is still felt in commercial galleries, and their untapped potential is mostly ignored. The private view here is the humble launch of The Dying Draughtsman, where its unstated autobiographical threshold is the main cause of anxiety.”

The second page features snippets from a large interview Sousa Lobo made with his friend and fellow Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas at a nonpublic exhibition in the Workplace Gallery, London. “The private nature of this show allows for the comic to be that window into a larger audience,” he says, “and for Canoilas’s ideas and works to be open and read in the comic itself. Once again, those black expanses recur on these pages. For Sousa Lobo, “the sign of the monochrome appears both as something that deals with silence, the extinction of images, as well as something to do with renewal”. Sousa Lobo has two further graphic novels out this year. A Desert God records the week he spent in a remote Carthusian monastery, and The Care of Birds is a fiction about an Irish birdwatcher who reflects on how the fear of paedophilia has made it impossible to tell the story of a friendship between an adult and a child. Sousa Lobo’s own artistic renewal through comics continues. Paul Gravett

ArtReview

16/04/2014 12:16

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Production

ArtReview Ltd

Editors Mark Rappolt David Terrien

Publisher Patrick Kelly patrickkelly@artreview.com

Production Director Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Art Direction John Morgan studio

Galleries

Design Pedro Cid ProenÇa Maël Fournier-Comte

Operations Executive Letizia Resta letiziaresta@artreview.com

ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH T 44 (0)20 7490 8138

UK and Australasia Jenny Rushton jennyrushton@artreview.com

Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Jonathan T.D. Neil

Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com

Senior Editor, Web Editor Helen Sumpter

Northern Europe Indra Moroder indramoroder@artreview.com

Managing Editor Oliver Basciano Editorial Director (Asia) Aimee Lin Copy Editor Hettie Judah Trainee Louise Darblay

North America and South Africa Debbie Shorten debbieshorten@artreview.com

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com

Managing Director Debbie Shorten

Finance

Personal Assistant Lulu Nunn

Finance Director Lynn Woodward lynnwoodward@artreview.com Financial Controller Errol Kennedy Smith errolkennedysmith@artreview.com Trainee Georgie Brinkman

Asia, Middle East and Russia Florence Dinar florencedinar@artreview.com

Chairman Dennis Hotz

Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions 3rd Floor North Chancery Exchange 10 Furnival Street London EC4A 1YH T 44 (0)20 8955 7069 E artreview@abacusemedia.com

Lifestyle

office@artreview.com

Stacey Langham staceylangham@artreview.com Charlotte Regan charlotteregan@artreview.com

Photo credits on the cover and on pages 62–3 and 128–9 Ragnar Kjartansson (on the cover: with his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, and mother, Guðrún Asmundsdottir), photographed by Ari Magg on pages 124 and 142 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (ISSN No: 1745-9303, USPS No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months July, August and February by ArtReview Ltd and is distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe Nj 08831 and additional mailing offices. Periodicals postage paid at New Brunswick Nj. POSTMASTER: send address changes to ArtReview, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe Nj 08831

Text credits Quotations on the spine and on pages 23, 61 and 93 are from the novel The Day of the Locust, written by Nathanael West and published in 1939

May 2014

AR-May-ContributorsRESUPPLYp133.indd 133

133

16/04/2014 12:17

Off the Record May 2014 “My God, you smell good. Damn good.” I’m sitting at the bar in the Menlo Grill Bistro & Bar, a tastefully appointed restaurant in South Bay, Menlo Park. I spin round to see where this compliment comes from and spot a large handsome middle-aged guy with tinted glasses, a trimmed beard flecked with grey and swept-back hair. “Thank you,” I reply, casually putting down my piece of HomeStyle Roast Chicken. “It’s actually a perfume that smells of one of London’s major parks with the best fresh and tender green notes from Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Now, what do you want?” “I just wanted to know what a sophisticated lady was doing here in a small town bordered by Palo Alto and Stanford, albeit one that was deemed by CNN to be one of the best places on earth for the rich and single.” He places his hand on my knee, which I ignore. “I’m freelancing for an art dealer. A famous New York- and London-based German émigré whose name I can’t mention. One of his rivals has opened here. I’m scoping it out.” “I know this rival you’re talking about. That gallery, Pace? They’re way ahead of the curve out here.” The man removes his hand from my knee, gets off his stool, curves the tips of his fingers inwards while keeping his hand arched backward before striking downwards into the middle of his plate of Miso Glazed Chilean Sea Bass. “Christ almighty, not more martial arts! You don’t happen to know Marc Spiegler, do you?” “I won’t lie. I know who you are, Gallery Girl. My assistant told me you were trying to learn about America and its art scene. I tracked you down. Or rather, Larry’s gallery assistants did.” He points at a gaggle of nervous-looking blonde women peeking over menus at a corner table. “There’s nothing to learn here. You want to learn about American art, come to my exhibition now! It’s in Bloomsbury, one of Larry’s private jets is waiting at Moffett Federal Airfield.” “Why do we want to go to fucking Bloomsbury to learn about American art?”

AR-May-GG.indd 134

“Because I am American art! I am Julian Schnabel!” The guy gets up and draws himself to his not inconsiderable full height. He pauses for a moment. “Do I scent grass leaves, pollen, oxygen, asphalt, labdanum and smoked cedar in whatever perfume you’re wearing? That’s got to be the new perfume, Serpentine. Goddamn, my nuts are on fire!” I turn around and the linen around a bowl of nuts is indeed on fire. I’m determined not to get drawn into another private jet-Rohypnol scenario after the editor’s complaint about plot repetition, so I take advantage of the conflagration to make a speedy exit via the windows of the ground-floor toilets. All I know is that I desperately need my freelance fee after a mistaken punt on an Indonesian art fund, and that fee depends on taking covert pictures of Pace’s new space in this unlikely new location. A quick cab ride later and I’m creeping round the Calder show at Pace, trying to get closer to an earnest-looking stubbled dealer who is sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by tech entrepreneurs. “I’m like you guys,” he says. “I might be an art dealer now, but I’m about innovation. Pace was a Beijing early-adopter! Now we’re here! You might not want to buy Calder, but let me tell you about our strategy and what we’re doing out here.” This is it, the moment where I can earn my £175 freelance fee. I’m trying to get my purple Polaroid IS529 compact digital camera out of its case when he turns and looks straight at me. “What is that?” he yells. I shrug, helpless in his powerful gaze. Then he looks upwards; his eyes go dreamy. “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” His eyes have closed. The tech entrepreneurs are whooping. “Proust?” I reply. He opens his eyes and stares at me. “The unbearably heavenly smell of Hans Ulrich Obrist on a lady who also carries a camera that’s available for £39.97 from Curry’s electrical store? The great man would never use that kit! The incongruity! Disgrace!” One of the tech entrepreneurs grabs my camera and hurls it against a Calder mobile. Another tries squashing it with his New Balance ML72S. We all wait patiently. Forty minutes later he hands it back unharmed and points at the door. Outside, it’s America. It’s still a beautiful evening in Menlo Park. I pull the bottle of Serpentine from my backpack and read its embossed Tracey Emin design that poetically states, “The Grass, The Trees, The Lake, And You”. I kiss it gently, hurl it into the middle of the highway and start walking. Gallery Girl

16/04/2014 12:18

SAVE THE DATE THE DATE SAVE DATE THE SAVE AUGUST 29TH - AUGUST 31ST 2014

A N D E R SEN ’S CO N T E MP O R A RY ( D K ) GA L E R I E A N D E R S O N / S A N D ST RÖ M ( S E ) GAL ER IE ANHAVA (FI) A N N A E L L EG A L L E RY ( S E ) G A L L E R I B O B J E R G G A A R D ( D K ) C H R I ST I A N A N D E R S E N ( D K ) C H R IST I A N L A R S E N ( S E ) D AV I D R I S L E Y G A L L E RY ( D K ) G A L E R I E F O R S B L O M ( F I ) G A L L E R I N I C O L A I WA L L N E R ( D K ) N I E L S B O R C H J E N S E N G A L L E RY A N D E D I T I O N ( D K ) N I L S STÆ R K ( D K ) G A L E R I E N O R D E N H A K E ( S E ) i 8 G A L L E RY ( I S ) G A L L E R I M AG N US K A R L S S O N ( S E ) M A RT I N A S B Æ K G A L L E RY ( D K ) O S L C O N T E M P O R A RY ( N O ) P E D E R LU N D ( N O ) P E T E R L AV G A L L E RY ( D K ) G A L L E R I R I I S ( N O ) G A L L E R I S P EC TA ( D K ) G A L L E R I S U S A N N E O T T E S E N ( D K ) V 1 G A L L E RY ( D K )

MEDIA PARTNER

CHART | ART FAIR KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG IN COPENHAGEN www.chartartfair.com

CHART_ARTREVIEW_ADD.indd 3 135_AR.indd 135

15/04/14 08:52 16/04/2014 12:19

136_AR.indd 136

16/04/2014 12:19