ArtReview May 2015 by ArtReview

Heimo Zobernig

Venice Biennale

www.dior.com

ROSE DIOR BAGATELLE COLLECTION White gold, diamonds, fancy pink diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, Paraiba tourmalines and tsavorite garnets.

CAFÉ SOCIETY COLLECTION RING IN WHITE GOLD, ONYX AND DIAMONDS

www.chanel.com

margarethowell.co.uk

22 May — 4 July 2015 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com

Shirazeh Houshiary Smell of First Snow

Sergio Camargo Mármore

22 May — 4 July 2015 27 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com

HA U S E R & W IR T H

RONI HORN BUTTERFLY DOUBT 5 JUNE – 25 JULY 2015 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

HACK WIT – WATER STAR, 2014 WATERCOLOUR, PEN AND INK, GUM ARABIC ON WATERCOLOUR PAPER, CELLOPHANE TAPE 69.5 × 41.9 CM / 27 3/8 × 16 1/2 IN

HAUSER & WIRTH

LEE LOZANO DRAWINGS & PAINTINGS 14 MAY – 31 JULY 2015 511 WEST 18TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10011 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

NO TITLE, C. 1964 – 1965 GRAPHITE ON PAPER 24 × 23 CM / 9 1/2 × 9 IN

Yayoi Kusama Give Me Love May 9 - June 13, 2015

David Zwirner New York

Lisa Yuskavage April 23 - June 13, 2015

David Zwirner New York

Selections from The Kramarsky Collection May 5 - June 20, 2015

Carl Andre Mel Bochner John Cage Bruce Conner Dan Flavin Suzan Frecon Eva Hesse Jasper Johns Donald Judd Ellsworth Kelly Barry Le Va Sol LeWitt Robert Mangold Agnes Martin Brice Marden Robert Morris Bruce Nauman Ed Ruscha Robert Ryman Fred Sandback Richard Serra Robert Smithson Richard Tuttle Cy Twombly Lawrence Weiner and others

David Zwirner New York

Wynn Kramarsky, 2005

RICHARD SERRA EQUAL

May 1 – July 24, 2015

David Zwirner New York

HEIMO ZOBERNIG Represented by

Image: Untitled, 2014, 200x200 cm (detail)

Foto: Archiv HZ

GALERIE MEYER KAINER

E L L S W O R T H K E L LY M A T T H E W M A R K S N E W Y O R K

56th Venice Biennale

Eduardo T. Basualdo Antonio Manuel May 09 - November 22, 2015

Upcoming Shows

Federico Herrero June 06 - July 25, 2015

Laura Lima

August 08 - September 19, 2015

T O N Y

O U R S L E R

April 29–June 14, 2015 201 Chrystie Street New York, NY 10002 lehmannmaupin.com

Mendes Wood DM congratulates Sonia Gomes Runo Lagomarsino Paulo Nazareth on their participation in the 56 Biennale di Venezia 09/05 – 22/11/2015

Mend e s Wood DM Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm R. Marco Aurélio, 311 Vila Romana São Paulo SP 05048 – 000 Brazil

ALEXANDER CALDER MULTUM IN PARVO EXHIBITION DESIGN SANTIAGO CALATRAVA

APRIL 22 – JUNE 13, 2015

»NOMOS is among the best luxury watches out there.« N E W YO R K TI M E S

Find Ahoi and all other NOMOS models at nomos-glashuette.com and nomos-store.com

ArtReview vol 67 no 4 May 2015

Editorial Erfrischment At its age (sixty-six, don’t you know), ArtReview doesn’t remember many things, but it does remember the momentous day last December when it sat its operatives down in a circle on the floor and climbed into its leather chair and barked at them about how there was no need to pay any attention to the Venice Biennale next summer [now this month], because the ‘real’ art wasn’t going to be in some swampy-yetpicturesque tourist themepark, but rather in the places no one really goes. ‘The real art is where the people are!’ it screamed. ‘The people don’t have to come to the art: the best art is always happening around them,’ it bellowed, pressing play on a video of Indonesian collective Taring Padi in action in a fishing village, and tearing up its writers’ Easyjet tickets. ArtReview can’t remember when exactly it realised it might have got all that a bit wrong. Perhaps it was five seconds after the rally, when its operatives downloaded their tickets onto their phones. Perhaps it was after it poked itself in the eye with some spectacles it had bought from a shop that promised to give it ‘Scandinavian personality’ through the magic of optometry. Perhaps it was shortly after that, when it was forced to break out a precious bottle of China-Gold (for ocular erfrisch-ment purposes) and began to feel that its life was becoming a series of encounters with more-or-less crude national stereotypes – dreamed up by marketing departments that had never really been to the nation in question. Or perhaps it was when Robert Barry delivered his analysis of the pros and cons of the Venice Biennale’s favouring of a national pavilion system, which to most art whingers seems to be the biggest sign of its outdatedness. By now, manufactured nationalism had begun to constitute the fabric of ArtReview’s daily life.

Personality

But it was really when it read an article by artist Michael Soi about the trials and tribulations of a ‘hijacked’ Kenyan Pavilion at Venice that it began to feel that there may be something to the Biennale’s way of forcing countries to define themselves. You can read why in Soi’s own words later in the magazine. ArtReview’s not going to steal his thunder here, but suffice to say, it has realised that the Venice Biennale has different resonances in different places, and hopefully you’ll realise that once you’ve read this issue. Of course, ArtReview hasn’t given up on its commitment to art that deals with the everyday and the immediate (both as context and as subject) – go read Laura OldfieldFord’s ongoing column for persuasive reasons as to why that’s important. Or check out the features on Heimo Zobernig, Tobias Zeilony or Sean Lynch – all of whom are showing in national pavilions at the Biennale – for a range of different takes on the same. But as it put this issue together, ArtReview became increasingly fascinated by the similarities and contrasts between these diverse bodies of works, and the ways in which, at any of these big art jamborees, its exposure to a range of different or alternative perspectives on life is actually as much a pleasure as it is a pain. Perhaps what worried ArtReview most, back in December, was the extent to which the Venice Biennale often feels like a jumble of art with no context other than the fact that it’s in Venice, or the art Olympics, or whatever other hyperbolic description is currently being used by various art marketing departments. As one of the artists (and there are a few) who had bought himself a space in a national pavilion at Venice once told ArtReview, ‘It doesn’t matter where you are in Venice, or what you show, you just need to have shown there.’ All of which only served to reinforce the sense of a festival whose scale and glamour had overtaken any sense of purpose that it might once have had. But often ‘purpose’ when viewing art is not something that you are given; it’s something you create. ArtReview

Original

Lee Ufan 534 WEST 25TH ST NEW YORK MAY 15 – JUNE 27, 2015

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 37

Kenneth Clark reflecting elegantly on art and television Interview by Matthew Collings 68

Points of View by Sam Jacob, Michael Soi, Lucas Ospina, Laura Oldfield Ford, Maria Lind, Laura McLean-Ferris & Jonathan Grossmalerman 55

Christian Jankowski Interview by Tom Eccles 72

page 56 Michael Soi, China Loves Africa 20, 2012–13, mixed media on canvas. Courtesy the artist

May 2015

Art Featured

Heimo Zobernig by Joshua Decter 92

Eclectic Straw Totem by Haegue Yang 116

Tobias Zielony by Kimberly Bradley 100

Michaël Borremans by Martin Herbert 122

Artists with Borders by Robert Barry 104

Lynn Hershman Leeson by Karen Archey 126

bgl by Craig Burnett 108

Andrea Zittel by Gesine Borcherdt 130

Sean Lynch by Chris Fite-Wassilak 112

page 112 Sean Lynch, DeLorean Progress Report, 2009–11, colour photographs. Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery, London

ArtReview

March 14 › June 21, 2015 261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris / fondation.cartier.com / Please follow us BRUCE NAUMAN, PENCIL LIFT/MR. ROGERS (DETAIL), 2013. COURTESY SPERONE WESTWATER, NEW YORK. © BRUCE NAUMAN / ADAGP, PARIS 2015

Art Reviewed

Alejandro Cesarco, by Laura McLean-Ferris Sebastian Lloyd Rees, by Orit Gat sogtfo, by Andrew Berardini Mernet Larsen, by Jonathan Griffin Monique van Genderen, by Ed Schad Lulennial, by Gabriela Jauregui Simon Linington, by Claire Rigby Penny Siopis, by Matthew Blackman Sharjah Biennial 12, by Joshua Mack

exhibitions 140 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, by Siona Wilson Hassan Khan, by Olga Stefan Bruce Nauman, by Christopher Mooney James Benning, by Raimar Stange Rare Earth, by Kimberly Bradley Neïl Beloufa, by Barbara Casavecchia Nadine Byrne, by Jacquelyn Davis Peter Buggenhout, by Sam Steverlynck Gonzalo Lebrija, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Maria Georgoula, by Michelangelo Corsaro Alex Katz, by J.J. Charlesworth Johanna Billing, by Louise Darblay Iman Issa, by Rebecca Heald Mark Barker, by Sean Ashton Lina Selander, by Helen Sumpter Uriel Orlow, by John Quin Hugo Canoilas, by Susannah Thompson Martín Soto Climent, by Brienne Walsh Alex Da Corte, by David Everitt Howe

books 170 Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts, by Mel Evans Pablo, by Julie Birmant and Clémant Oubrerie A Geology of Media, by Jussi Parikka The Container Principle, by Alexander Klose the strip 174 off the record 178

page 163 Mernet Larsen, Chainsawer and Bicyclist, 2014, mixed media on canvas, 126 × 124 cm. Courtesy Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

ArtReview

Works from the Collection of Ileana Sonnabend and the Estate of Nina Castelli Sundell Post-War and Contemporary Art

Auctions Evening Sale 13 May Day Sale, Session I 12 May Viewing Opens 2 May 20 Rockefeller Plaza New York, NY 10020 Contact Laura Paulson pwcart@christies.com +1 212 636 2100

JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930) Target graphite with paint brush and dry watercolor cakes in wood frame 7 3/4 x 5 1/2 in. (19.7 x 13.9 cm.) Executed in 1960. $2,000,000–3,000,000 © 2015 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The Art People christies.com/contemporaryart

Lara Favaretto Good Luck

MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO

April 30 – September 20, 2015

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts | via Guido Reni 4 A, Rome Tuesday - Sunday: 11:00/07:00 p.m. | Saturday: 11:00/10:00 p. m. | closed Monday www.fondazionemaxxi.it T

supported by

Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo

Art Previewed

This traditionally Dutch, but nevertheless explosive dish provides fun and food for all the family (except vegetarians) 35

Previewed 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 9 May – 22 November various venues throughout Venice Joan Jonas us Pavilion Codice Italia Italian Pavilion

Sarah Lucas British Pavilion

ic-98 Finnish Pavilion

Paz Errázuriz and Lotty Rosenfeld Chilean Pavilion

Camille Norment Nordic Pavilion

Photo London Somerset House, London 21–24 May

Simon Denny New Zealand Pavilion

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair Pioneer Works, New York 15–17 May

On Ways of Travelling Angola Pavilion

1 Annotated copy of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume I, 1867, a work at the centre of the 56th International Art Exhibition’s All the World’s Futures, where all three volumes will be read live, under the direction of artist Isaac Julien, for the duration of the Venice Biennale. © International Institute of Social History (iish), Amsterdam

May 2015

There are 90 participating countries in this At the us Pavilion, perhaps buoyed by 2 1 year’s Venice Biennale, the 56th edition of the the popular sprawl of Sarah Sze’s installation now 120-year-old event, and this column is not last time, the commissioners have booked in going to attempt the fool’s errand of discussing another unruly figure, Joan Jonas. This is bold, them all. Or even, like, one-tenth of them. nevertheless, since the nearly octogenarian Nor are we going to dwell on curator Okwui artist’s latter-day installations, rich melees of Enwezor’s centre-stage project of a durational myth, performance, video, sculpture and drawrecital of Marx’s Capital (1867–94) or his unflinch- ing, take the kind of time to parse that one ing decision to invoke, in an advance statement, would think inimical to the restless pace Walter Benjamin’s commentary in his essay of Biennale visitors. That said, we’re told that ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) Jonas’s show, They Come to Us Without a Word, on Paul Klee and the angel of history, as if that focuses on ‘landscape and natural phenomena’ were not the most overdeployed text in contemand ‘the ocean as a poetic, totemic, and natural porary art (albeit one that, admittedly, remains entity, as a life source and home to a universe perpetually relevant). We will, however, pull of beings’. Oh, and the pavilion’s website comes out a few pavilion shows, with the aim of giving with a donations section, because it’s 2015 and a scintilla of a sense of the scope. why pay for it yourself if you can crowdfund it?

The Italian Pavilion, which has apparently already come under fire for featuring only two women among its 15 artists, meanwhile gets on with the otherwise uncontroversial business of celebrating the host country. Codice Italia, according to curator Vincenzo Trione, will investigate ‘the identity of Italian art – described as the duality between our origins and the continuous transformation of our lives’. One great, if rarefied, pleasure of the Venice Biennale is the tactical vagueness of the explicatory language around it, but what this seems to mean is a balance between the way that world events impact on artists – tying into Enwezor’s general theme – and the counterbalancing effects of memory and heritage. Either way, the artists include Vanessa Beecroft, Mimmo Paladino,

2 Joan Jonas, Reanimation, 2014, performance, HangarBicocca, Milan. Courtesy the artist

3 Paolo Gioli, Sebastiano, 2011, Polaroid, 50 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

6 Tamas Dezso, The Flooded Village of Geamana (Geamana, Central Romania), 2011, from the series Notes for an Epilogue (2011–). © the artist. Courtesy the Photographers’ Gallery, London

4 Sarah Lucas, situation Absolute Beach Man Rubble (installation view,Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2013). © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

5 Paz Errázuriz, Manzana de Adán, 1983/2010, b / w photograph, 50 × 60 cm, edition of 3 + 1ap, from the series Manzana de Adán, 1982–7. Courtesy the artist

at Berlin’s cfa, it’ll engage them in a maximalist Jannis Kounellis (Greek, but based in Rome) Rosenfeld, in her 1979 work A Mile of Crosses on the manner, though we’ll have to wait and see if Asphalt, made the simple but devastating intervenand Aldo Tambellini (American of Italian extraction), which is not a bad core lineup at all. tion of gluing strips of fabric across the dividers its opening’s coinciding with the uk’s general4 The commissioners of the British Pavilion, on a major road in Santiago, setting up an ersatz election results impacts on Lucas’s expected cemetery, an unavoidable memorial. In Venice, ie, the selection committee that advises the cavalcade of arses (and other body parts). British Council, are continuing the slow-motion Politics certainly won’t be avoided at the in a show titled Poéticas de la Disidencia / Poetics coronation of Sarah Lucas, who, through a 5 Chilean Pavilion, which pairs photographer Paz of Dissent, the artists focus on Chile’s transition Errázuriz and video and performance artist Lotty back from a dictatorship to a democracy. combination of energy, persistence and small but substantial-feeling shifts to her practice over Rosenfeld. Both were formed during General But wait. For a moment, let’s say you’re not the last decade or so – not least an increasingly Augusto Pinochet’s 1970s, and have concerned going to Venice, or are going later; that meanexplicit dialogue with modernist sculpture – themselves in various powerful ways with that while you’re staying in London, or New York, traumatic subject. Errázuriz might be best known and you want to go to an art fair. Well, let’s see. is now situated as one of the uk’s most signififor her embedded work with the transvestite cant artists. ‘Sex, death, abjectness and the If you want more photography than you can community in Santiago; because of political slippery notion of Englishness’ are the themes shake a light meter at, the British capital finally restrictions, the images were not published 6 has its own dedicated fair, Photo London, that the committee identifies as germane to until 1990 (and supposedly every bookshop Lucas’s work. If her show is anything like her which features some 70 international photog2013 Whitechapel retrospective or her last show in Santiago refused to stock the artist’s book). raphy galleries and galleries representing

May 2015

9 Camille Norment, Triplight,2008, light sculpture. Photo: David Olivera. Courtesy the artist

7 Vincent Michéa, Bintou #2, Or series, 2013, collage, 21 × 21 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan

8 ic-98, Arkhipelagos (Navigating the Tides of Time), 2013, 3-channel hd animation, 20 min, silent. Animation by Markus Lepistö. Courtesy the artists

photographers (to be precise about it), the former include Yossi Milo, London’s own Photographers’ Gallery, HackelBury, Timothy Taylor Gallery and Paul Kasmin Gallery, plus lectures, symposia, tours, etc. Meanwhile, New York has Frieze New York, about which plenty of ink will be spilled elsewhere, though 7 perhaps not enough on one ancillary fair, 1:54, which focuses on African contemporary art. (The ‘54’ refers to the number of countries that make up Africa.) The last edition, at Somerset House in London, featured 100-plus artists, 27 galleries and an informative bequest of lectures and screenings; this year’s is likely to feature all of that, plus – yes – ArtReview as media partner. 8 And now back to Venice. The Finnish Pavilion stars ic-98, aka Visa Suonpää and

Patrik Söderlund, whose slow-burning videos become of us. (Nothing good, clearly, but that’s perhaps not such a bad thing.) over much of the last decade have figured Over in the Nordic Pavilion, Camille – mostly in intricate black-and-white pencil9 Norment’s project Rapture will use sound and drawn animation, with ghostly cgi aspects – light as means of reactivating viewers’ bodies postapocalyptic landscapes in which nature – specifically, we’re told, to ‘explore the socioprogressively takes over. In their extraordinary, political encoding of sound historically and in feature-length A View from the Other Side (2011), the present from a critical perspective as well as a single view of a pavilion by a river mutates reflect upon dissonance as a space for the creation over thousands of years; in the various films of new and affirmative thinking’. Historically, that comprise Abendland (2013–14), with their the Maryland-born, Oslo-based artist and focus on ‘a twilight world after the age of man’, musician has suggested, sound has been both which feels a little further down the darkened a release and a trap, used to reaffirm and transroad, nature restores itself, warped and glowing. ic-98 may appear to have viewers’ attention gress cultural norms and as a tool for the control spans against them, yet their work tends of bodies. She’ll explore this complex of ideas to hook one with technique and mood and via a three-part display, including a sculptural compel one to stay and see what’s likely to and sonic installation, performances (involving

ArtReview

an eighteenth-century glass armonica, invented by Benjamin Franklin) and three publications. The society of control, implicit in Norment’s work, also backdrops Simon Denny’s exhibit for 10 the New Zealand Pavilion, which, in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks concerning the extent of spying practices on the part of international intelligence agencies, explores shifting notions of knowledge and geographical divides. Focused specifically, we’re told, on ‘the roles played by technology and design’, Secret Power is partly set in something like international space, 11 ie, Venice’s Marco Polo airport (so don’t fly into Treviso, Denny admirers), with the other half in the library of a piazza, an architectural allegory for the acquiring of knowledge that, tidily, also contains historical maps and globes.

Considered prior to its opening, the main innovation of the first Venice Biennale to be overseen by an African director (and entitled All the World’s Futures) looks, perhaps not surprisingly, to be its broadened participation. A quarter of the exhibited artists are black, and even more countries than the last edition’s 88 are involved, some after years of absence and others for the first time, including Grenada, Mauritius, Mongolia, the Seychelles and Mozambique. Some of this, currently, can only be tagged ‘wait and see’. We do know that the Angolan Pavilion, featuring a cross-generational group exhibition entitled On Ways of Travelling, is likely to be visceral in places – it includes Francisco Vidal’s installations made from machetes – and will also encompass Délio Jasse’s photographic

meditations on the sedimentation of memory, Nelo Teixera’s admixtures of wood and found objects, and research-driven video and installation by Binelde Hyrcan (admittedly these are pretty loose descriptors, but that’s what we’re working with). Meanwhile, selecting your artists from the country in question hasn’t appeared a priority for the Kenyan Pavilion, which, with great resultant controversy, has been stuffed with Chinese and Italians. In general, though, one looks forward to new discoveries, à la the Iraq Pavilion of 2011, and to seeing how these artists will be enlisted in Enwezor’s overarching inquiry: how creative figures can work to make sense of ‘the current upheaval’ – which is, as Benjamin had it, only our part of ‘one single catastrophe’. Avanti! Martin Herbert

10 Simon Denny, The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom, 2014 (installation view, Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, 2014). Photo: Shaun Waugh. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Binelde Hyrcan, L’Orgie (detail), 2015, video and installation. © and courtesy the artist

Athi-Patra Ruga, Dancing Figure, hand-woven tapestry, 122 by 88cm Estimate: R50 000 – 80 000 (£2 800 – 4 400)

Important South African & International Art AUCTION IN JOHANNESBURG, MONDAY 1 JUNE 2015 Preview: 29 - 31 May, 10am to 5pm Strauss & Co is the global leader in the South African art market

+27 11 728 8246 | +27 79 367 0637 | www.straussart.co.za

Pavilion of Angola Official Representation of Angola at the 56th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia 9th of May – 22th of November 2015 Exhibition On Ways of Travelling Artists António Ole Binelde Hyrcan Délio Jasse Francisco Vidal Nelo Teixeira Curator António Ole Deputy Curator Antonia Gaeta Comissioners Angola Ministry of Culture / Rita GT Palazzo Pisani Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello Piazza Santo Stefano San Marco 2810

www.cortesigallery.com info@cortesigallery.com

Via Frasca, 5 Lugano, 6900 - CH

41, 43 Maddox Street W1S 2PD London

Heinz Mack, Dynamische Struktur schwarz-weiß, 1957-58

Cortesi Gallery

Atmosfera ZERO Great Expectations #2 curated by Marco Meneguzzo 16 May - 18 July 2015 Vernissage: Friday 15 May 6 pm - 8 pm 41 & 43 Maddox St. London, W1S 2PD - UK +44 20 74 93 6009

Bernard Aubertin, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Hermann Goepfert, herman de vries, Walter Leblanc, Adolf Luther, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Christian Megert, Gruppo MID, Francois Morellet, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Tomas Rajlich, Paolo Scheggi, Jan Schoonhoven, Gunther Uecker, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Grazia Varisco, Nanda Vigo.

SUSPENDED BALANCE CIRIACA+ERRE

@con-temporay art | 13.04 – 31.05.2015 | via verri 1 milan | italy

ibrahim el-salahi vigo

haraza @ jerwood gallery . hastings 28.04 > 31.05.2015

vigogallery.com #vigogallery

flamenco @ vigo . london 29.05 > 31.07.2015

frieze nyc . stand b48 . spotlight 14 > 17.05.2015

Ed Atkins Laura Buckley, Haroon Mirza & Dave Maclean Martin Creed Alexandre da Cunha Dexter Dalwood Tracey Emin

Isa Genzken Samara Golden Guyton\Walker Rachel Harrison Damien Hirst Andy Holden Jim Lambie Michael Landy

Maria Lassnig Mark Leckey Sarah Lucas Josephine Meckseper Albert Oehlen Heather Phillipson Sigmar Polke Elizabeth Price

ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION 20 YEARS 30 APRIL–16 AUGUST

zabludowiczcollection.com 176 Prince of Wales Road, London NW5 3PT FREE ENTRY

Pamela Rosenkranz Wolfgang Tillmans Keith Tyson Julia Wachtel Gillian Wearing Rachel Whiteread Christopher Wool

to be

• 9 may — 22 november dutch pavilion, Biennale arte 2015 venicebiennale.nl

all ways to be hermaN DE VRIES

commissioned by

MEUNS

1967 - 1968

Meun, 1968, oil on canvas, 222 x 185 cm. © Photo Lara Seguin Lutz

SIMON HANTAÏ

13 MAY - 11 JULY 2015 1 2 R U E D E S E I N E P A R I S 6

WWW.GUTTKLEIN FINE ART.COM INFO@GUTTKLEIN FINE ART.COM

Schools

Open 10am

SHOW 12–28 Royal Academy

daily –

6pm

Schools

Admission

FREE

JUNE Burlington House

Piccadilly

2015 London

royalacademy.org.uk/raschools

w1j 0bd

Points of View

As you stare out of the floor-to-ceiling window, the city lies before you. The soft lights of your hotel room are reflected in the glazing – looking like the traces of ufos in the darkening sky. All the while, your own reflection floats like a ghost amid the cityscape. With its huge plate window, the room is both an auditorium from which to view the city and a stage upon which your own intimacy is performed before the city as a witness. Behind you is your room – a bed, a bath, a glass screen still dripping from the shower you just took. All handled with that monastic-luxury palette of blond wood, grey carpet and slate tile. It’s not any traditional room-type: not quite bathroom, bedroom or office. These usually distinct zones have been smeared together to create a space defined not by walls but by punctuations of sanitaryware, Egyptian cotton and recessed technology. This kind of luxury prioritises individuality, authenticity and personality but it is not simple surface flattery. Those things are present in its spatial conception too. It places a focus on you, your own body as a thing treated and serviced, nurtured by experience. And nowhere more than in the ever more complex arrangements of what one might – just – call a bathroom. Here the idea of the body, of privacy, of traditions of hygiene and self-image, is staged. Glass walls that dissolve traditional boundaries, bathtubs that have migrated into living areas, basins that have become complex water features – all dotted with vials of gels and crèmes, scented and branded with messages. Shallow as they may seem, the lineage of these kinds of space is deep, leading all the way to the filthy, sewerless streets of the industrial city. It was out of the need for sanitation that a new idea of architecture and the city emerged during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. This was an idea of cities and buildings that could be planned, of places filled with light and air, of hygiene. Advances in engineering and infrastructure, the desire for social reform and the development of medical science began to transform the relationship of the city to the body. For architecture, these tendencies catalysed as the thing that became known as Modernism. And the bathroom was the real battleground for these new ideologies, sensibilities and technologies.

plumbing the depths or

Some ideas from the bathroom, wherever that is, in which is mentioned

measures of hipness, traditions of hygiene, the obsessions of modernist architects and new opportunities for public or semipublic nudity Sam Jacob looks out of a window and sees himself

Le Corbusier’s bathroom for Villa Savoye, Poissy. Photo: Adaptor-Plug. Licensed under Creative Commons

May 2015

Washing, hygiene, the cult of health and outdoorsiness, the heliotherapy that the medical profession advised to cure rickets and tuberculosis, merged with the aesthetic and cultural project of modernist art. Think of the bathroom of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye – with its tiled chaise-longue next to the sunken bath, daylight and openness to the rest of the house. It suggests a very new way for the body to occupy space – exploding the usual domestic privacy with an image of bright exposed nakedness. Hygiene here is far more than practical, it’s also moral, channelling a secular version of John Wesley’s ‘Cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness’ and revelling in a declaration often attributed to John Ruskin: ‘A good sewer was a far nobler and a far holier thing… than the most admired Madonna ever printed’. For all its ideological moralism, it was plumbing that fascinated the modernists. By the end of the nineteenth century, Adolf Loos, in an essay titled ‘Plumbers’ (1898), waxed lyrical about English waste management: ‘The plumber is the pioneer of cleanliness. He’s the State’s top tradesman, the quartermaster of civilization, the civilization that counts today.’ And in the foundation text of architectural Modernism, Le Corbusier wrote, ‘We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.’ Sigfried Giedion argued that the American bathroom was the only room in the house whose history was not tied to feudal times. ‘This room is modern,’ he said. ‘It is American.’ At the same time, though, we should also remember that other modernist ideas were folded into the mix, of psychoanalysis, for example, where Freud told us, ‘The impulse towards cleanliness originates in the striving to get rid of excretions which have become unpleasant to the sense-perceptions.’ These narratives continue to be staged with the bathroom as its theatre. And in no more extreme form than with the luxury hotel bathroom, a type of space bequeathed to us by psycho-aesthetic-medico-engineering, where the pleasures and perversities of the idea of cleanliness can be acted out.

Much has already been said about the Kenyan Pavilion at Venice in 2013, about the role of the Italians curating it and the Chinese artists showing in it, all flying the Kenyan flag. The Venice Biennale is arguably the grandest podium for any artist. But it is one an artist cannot simply barge onto, no matter how prolific or successful he or she is. The structures dictate that artists are invited to take part via

will someone allow the real kenyan art scene to stand up? Fact:

No one likes the global postnational world more than art does But:

intermediaries – curators, dealers/agents or their national pavilions. Curators will work with cool artists. Dealers mainly go for those who guarantee commercial success. That leaves most artists hoping to make it to these ‘Art Olympics’ through their national pavilions. It’s a system that, in the main, seems to have worked for all other countries through the other 55 editions. Except Kenya! In 2013, when Kenya hosted its first national pavilion at the Biennale, we were disappointed at the presence of so many non-Kenyan artists within it. Indeed, we were so hurt that we weren’t sure what to do, and when our government appeared to play dumb about it, we believed them. We let our emotions make decisions and gave everyone the benefit of doubt. We were naive. Then this year, slowly countries started unveiling their pavilions for the 56th Biennale and the artists representing them. Zimbabwe was among the first. They must be the model pavilion: they are ‘Zim’ through and through. Curator – Raphael Chikukwa; assistant curator – Tafadzwa Gwetai; commissioner – Doreen Sibanda; artists – Chiko Chazunguza, Masimba Hwati and Gareth Nyandoro. The Kenyan Pavilion had no pomp and circumstance for its launch. It just crept onto the Biennale website. And it turned out to be a repeat of 2013. It was commissioned by Paola Poponi (Italian) and curated by Sandro Orlandi Stagl (Italian), just as it had been for the last Biennale. These individuals have again selected mostly artists who are non-Kenyan – Qin Feng,

A Kenyan pavilion in Venice featuring a group show of more Chinese artists than Kenyan ones? or

give us a break by

Michael Soi, (Kenyan) artist

Michael Soi, Shame in Venice 2, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 100 × 100 cm

ArtReview

Shi Jinsong, Li Zhanyang, Lan Zheng Hui, Li Gang and Double Fly Art Center (all Chinese) – and presented them as Kenyans. This has angered us because we have numerous artists who have recently gained prominence internationally, and we feel we’d be better represented by them – reputable artists such as Beatrice Njoroge, Anthony Okello, Sam Hopkins and Peterson Kamwathi, to name but a few. Kamwathi, currently one of Kenya’s most prolific artists, should probably be the face of the Kenyan Pavilion at the Biennale. Our (2013) disappointment has turned to anger. Anger not because we personally didn’t make it to Venice, but because – again – we have impostors there. People purporting to be us. Masquerading as Kenyan artists. Claiming to be telling our story. The Kenyan Pavilion has again been awarded to individuals who have no relationship to the Kenyan art community. How did we get here? How do non-Kenyans walk in and claim our right? How do they appropriate our identity? In an attempt to get to the root of this, Kenyan artists sought an audience with the relevant government agents, who initially were not available. No one in (a position of) authority – from the Kenyan Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts, or Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Brand Kenya Board, the Export Promotion Council, our equivalent of the National Gallery or the Kenya Cultural Centre, not even government-consulted outfits like the Creative Economy Working Group or the Kenya Copyright Board – was even willing to participate in a conversation to try and figure out what was going on. They seemed clueless. Or rather, they (up to now) have pretended to be, probably waiting for it all to go away. None has issued a statement. None of them seems to have an opinion, except to not to want to disturb the status quo. Artists gathered and decided it was better to have no (Kenyan) pavilion at all than one full of impostors, and when no help was forthcoming from Kenyan authorities, social media campaigns started. Eventually the culture cabinet secretary, through emissaries, agreed to a meeting at his office. This turned out to be a farce. At the meeting we felt like we were the ones being interrogated, rather than the other way round, about whether we were in a position to cause any trouble in regard to the misrepresentation that the mess was creating. From this and subsequent conversations, coupled with how the government agents have behaved, we smelled a rat. The process of acquiring a national pavilion in Venice has given us reason to believe that those who have been given the responsibility of ‘representing’ Kenya must have ‘full government’ support. Someone high up must have signed away our birthright.

The common consensus among us artists is that they can have their pavilion, but that they leave our name, identity and flag out of it. Our resolve is to achieve this before the launch of the Biennale. This we intend to do through our modest networks of friends (locally and internationally), through social-media activism and local creative networks of artists, reputable writers, thespians and friends of (genuine) Kenyan art. It is also time for Kenyan artists to realise that their practice goes beyond their studios and that they have a responsibility to claim what belongs to them. Days of heckling and picketing are long gone, and we should now be able to engage on more sophisticated platforms. While some of us are engaging in informed verbal discourse, others are involved in critical writing. Personally, I am using my following/ popularity to make work about this and other social and political situations that the average Kenyan often has to face – issues revolving around political impunity, corruption, interracial relationships, the growing sex industry in Kenya and of late, the emergence of China in the lives of Kenyans. I try to make my work as simple as possible. What you see most of the time is what you get. Many art institutions locally are very passive in this endeavour. But there are some, such as

the GoDown Arts Centre and Kuona Trust, that also feel the need to be part of it. Kuona Trust, formed in 1995, is a not-forprofit outfit that aims to raise the profile of the arts locally by creating opportunities for artists through providing affordable studio spaces, training, exhibitions and international residencies. Though things have changed a lot in the (almost) 20 years of its existence, they still remain relevant in contemporary Nairobi. They currently host about 30 artists, most of whom are active locally. They also have a small temporary exhibition space that’s quite reputable in conceptual exhibition circles and probably has the most modern art library in the region. For most of the resident artists it’s the only space that is not only centrally located, but is also an information hub, with professional studios and regular contact with both local and visiting artists. It is also the only local outfit that funds artists’ conceptual projects. Artists also have regular opportunities to participate in artist residencies with partner institutions (Triangle Arts Trust partners) regionally. The GoDown (set up in 2003), which is modelled around the same principle as Kuona but with more bias towards performing arts, has visual art studios and a gallery, hosts regular residencies and holds the only annual visual arts competition in Kenya.

Other art outfits, like Banana Hill Art Gallery, Maasai Mbili studio, Ngecha Artist Association and the Kenya Visual Artist Network, may not be so activist but in other ways are also attempting to better the general contemporary Kenyan scene. But at the time of writing there does seem to be a little light at the end of the tunnel. On 12 April, the Kenyan government, through the cabinet secretary of Sports, Culture and the Arts, Hassan Wario, issued a signed ministerial statement denouncing 1) the pavilion; 2) the misrepresentation; and 3) the use of the Kenyan flag and name on said pavilion, and promised to formulate ways in which Kenya would be represented in the 2017 Biennale by a credible Kenyan Pavilion. The Kenyan arts community is grateful to the artists and friends of Kenyan art, both in Kenya and abroad, for their support. In conclusion, I want to admit that I am circumspect, and as much as we are now celebrating, let us bear in mind that this was just a small fistfight and we must now prepare for the greater battle to realise a proper Kenyan Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. I hope that next time any of us writes an article in any international magazine or online publication, it will be informing the international arts community of the great pavilion we will be presenting to the world in 2017.

Michael Soi, The Shame in Venice 1, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 300 × 100 cm both images Courtesy the artist

May 2015

This little tale of commerce begins with an interview with the most expensive artist on the planet, who one day this spring declared helplessly: “You cannot escape the market.” Of course, it could also start in a more romantic fashion, with the same artist – an octogenarian – in his studio, almost alone, somewhat uncomfortable before the camera, but ready to begin painting a series of works, without mystery, almost as if conducting a tutorial. The artist takes a brush as thick as a small broom, traces here and there, then loads two or three colours and goes from canvas to canvas. The first scene comes from an interview Gerhard Richter gave to Die Zeit in March, in which he revealed himself to be solemnly scandalised by the prices his works are achieving: “The records keep being broken and every time my initial reaction is one of horror even if it’s actually welcome news. But there is something really shocking about the amount.” The second scene comes from the 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, by Corinna Belz, which returns continually to the artist’s studio to track the development of a series of his paintings. At first the strokes are cheerful, in a narrow spectrum of bright colours, expressive patches showing the virtuoso hand in direct communion with the gesture. But then his assistants prepare gallons of paint for him – ochres and greys for this session – and when the paintings are almost dry, he changes style and covers them, although not with a brush but with a giant squeegee, which the painter drags with both arms across the painting, spreading a layer of semi-uniform colour and obliterating the previous work. The process is repeated, but something always survives from the preceding stages, small flickers and geological layerings that block the naive conceptualism of monochrome from calmly setting up its negation. In the Die Zeit interview, Richter’s horror is prompted by the price achieved at a recent auction by one of his works, Abstraktes Bild (1986). Sold for $46.5 million to an anonymous buyer, this is a near 6,000-fold increase in 30 years, given that the artist originally sold it for about $8,000 to a collector from Cologne. Richter remembers his happiness, then, at being included in this collection. Now, faced with the speculative spiral, the happy memory remains trapped between what was going to be, and that which now is not. All that survives is the economic balance: “We artists get next to nothing from such an auction. Except for a small morsel, all the profit goes to the seller.” In another scene from the documentary, Richter is besieged by photographers at the press conference for one of his many retrospectives. We’ve previously seen him visit this same gallery

take courage, great leader! or

Beware the ides of March or

The Market! It’s bad! Whatever shall we do? Quit your whining and do something! advises artist Lucas Ospina. And by the way, it’s artists at the top of the money ladder who should take a lead

Gerhard Richter Painting (still), 2011, dir Corinna Belz, 97 min. Courtesy Kino Lorber, New York

ArtReview

when it was empty and insist that the room’s lighting be left basic and thin, a hostile atmosphere for appreciating his works, “so that people are happy to get out”. Now the focus of attention and pestered by journalists and admirers, Richter says to one of his companions as he leaves the opening, “I’m not at all radical.” “Luckily I can… shut my studio door on most of the discussion about the market and prices. I’m good at suppressing it,” he says to Die Zeit. Yes, he is very lucky, but Richter doesn’t want to throw in the towel without giving evidence of three failed attempts to change the commercial game. Recently he put a sale price of $2,000 on one of his photographs, but the owner of the gallery told him: “You can’t sell that for $2,000, it needs to be more like $10,000 or $20,000.” On another occasion Richter recounts that he made “100 small original paintings and sold them very cheaply. They sold immediately and promptly ended up being sold at auction.” And in a third round, he assumed the role of his alter ego, the critic, comparing two of his own works and saying that the one that reached a price at auction of more than $30m is quite inferior to a much cheaper one – but who cares about the critic? Now it is only collectors and prs who write the history of art. The artist has faith in a time to come “when the art market corrects itself” and says that he understands its workings as well as he understands “Chinese or physics”. Richter gives the impression of being beaten, but just as he did with his paintings and photographs, and their thousand-and-one variations, why not insist on the game of transubstantiation from money-value to art-value? To raise the stakes a bit, if the art market is like an atomic bomb, then artists are the ones who candidly and eagerly started to split the atom. But should artists allow money, as a language, to be so far removed from their work? Marcel Broodthaers proposed selling, at the 1971 Cologne art fair, a gold ingot under a financial contract that fixed the price at double the value on that day and required payment in cash. Hans Haacke sells some of his works under a contract that guarantees him 15 percent of future sales and includes the power to advise on and prohibit proposed displays of the work (a ‘Projansky’ contract). Why does Richter try to play with the art market but flaunt such a lack of imagination? Why not gamble and devise contracts that set out levels of depreciation each time a work is sold? Why not include in these contracts clauses along the lines of Haacke’s that correct or limit a work’s commercial escalation at auction? Come on, Richter, you are more than the most expensive artist in the world. If you don’t do it, who else will? Don’t give up. Yes, Gerhard, you can! Translated from the Spanish by David Terrien

AFRICA NOW CONTEMPORARY AFRICA Thursday 15 October 2015 at 2pm New Bond Street, London

CHÉRI SAMBA (DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, BORN 1956) ‘J’aime la couleur’ £25,000 - 35,000

bonhams.com/africanow

ENQUIRIES +44 207 468 8355 africanow@bonhams.com closing date for entries Friday 14 August 2015

east ham high street – amusements, bookies, pound shops. Boxes spilling onto the pavement. Washing machines, fridges, stacks of nomadic architecture. England’s colonial past erupts in a ruckus of phone cards and flashing leds, attentionseeking boys, tattoos like blades – a dinting and melding of dialect, East End filtered through Lithuanian, Ghanaian, Tamil, Urdu. Behind a row of pawnbrokers, the market hall, walls the colour of orange sorbet. Poster shreds and chalk graffiti, Tamil lettering like neat mathematical compounds. There are moments when the city becomes elevated, ungovernable, interiors that have held you captive are suddenly perforated. Warnings smoulder in snugs and saloon bars, in the derelict arcades and ad hoc masjids. You hear the frustrations and resentments, heaped up for so long like drifts of junk in a charity shop, start to crackle and burn. Narrow plywood corridors, partition walls summoning the colours of Colombo, lime-green, saffron, duck-egg blue, pastel sweet like sugared almonds. Fluorescent grottoes crammed with Tamil dvds, Ghanaian religious tracts and pirate copies of Nigerian horror – flying stars, shrieking commands, lurid graphics. Place becomes kaleidoscopic, allusions to mythical states, utopian worlds splintering and reconfiguring.

dark energy From East Ham High Street to Bethnal Green housing estates (and back again), via Colombo, Miami and an autonomous alcohol-free zone in Finsbury Square Featuring a man called Simon and his hatred for ‘modern society’, ‘rip-off’ electronic music and being called ‘Simon’ or

the art of not being who or where you were before by

Laura Oldfield Ford, artist

ArtReview

Scent of mango, crushes on the street, in and out of South Indian restaurants, queuing in bright canteens – mirrored walls, trays of dosas, doors opening onto Goa, Kerala, Colombo. Rumours pulsing, e3, e15, e10, groups assembling on corners, on forecourts, spilling onto the streets – diaphanous threads spanning Green Street, Romford Road, a shimmering sequence of forecasts. Flats raided. Armed police. Underground, Sellafield, Westfield. An intense heat activating scents, unlocking memories. lime, tamarind, ginger candy floss and cinder toffee coconut and rose water cigarette smoke and jasmine hot ketchup on thin chips incense burning in shop doorways. The night is violet like a postcard from Miami. Black flag, Shahada, white Arabic lettering – a little stall with the scent of frankincense, books, dvds, scholarly texts. Mohammad al-Britani – Simon. Standing behind a stall, fleeting glance in my direction. I recognise him instantly, a face from the old days. I first met him, must have been 2001, 2002. I was living on an estate in Bethnal Green. Simon was in a band with one of my flatmates, Jay. I remember they all used to come round and sit in his room, drinking cans of Pilsner. They entombed themselves there, curtains drawn, slabs of cigarette smoke, listening to black metal at window-rattling volume. Slayer, Bal-Sagoth, Akercocke. They would talk for hours about sleeve notes, back catalogues, encrypted meanings in songs. Nightmarish posters sellotaped to woodchip walls, Salvador Dalí, H.R. Giger, Odd Nerdrum. I remember Simon’s strange demeanour, intense but somehow detached. Even then he thought it was his job to educate. He was one of those awkward blokes, found it difficult to talk to women, cagey and defensive. There

was something about him, maybe Asperger’s – vulnerability always there like a film of dust. I remember most Saturday nights there’d be me and my mate Ayesha sitting in the lounge drinking vodka and cokes before going to some party in Tottenham or Hackney. After a few cans in Jay’s room, that lot would venture out in their black T-shirts, combat trousers and heavy black boots. Simon would become bold and expansive, overspilling with emotion, as if he was too big for himself, tipping ashtrays, kicking cans – alcohol unlocking a cascade of diatribes. He said he was committed to black metal because it imagined something real, authentic, an ethnic paganism. He despised what he called modern society, said it was insincere, emotionally vacuous; went on about the corrupt, decadent nature of it. He talked about the conjuring of an ancient past, how the world would be better without humans. We infuriated him because we wouldn’t accept his views; he said we were unenlightened. We used to play stuff like early jungle tracks to antagonise him, or insane rave classics like Bam Bam’s Where’s Your Child? It sent him a bit mad. He hated all the music we were into. I remember him going on about sampling, about electronic music, saying it was all a rip-off. That crew forged an elaborate collective image, immersed themselves in a totally new ideology. It was as if they were undergoing a process of reinvention, uncovering facets of a new identity. It seemed to me that in a sense they’d all rejected their past, and that to broach it, even to each other, might be regarded as an act of treachery. Simon never really talked much about his background, except to say that the family was religious, the evangelical type, his dad had been involved in setting up the Alpha Course at a church in Woking, a stockbroker on permanent leave. There were four kids and Simon was the youngest. Religion had crept into the house as a frame of discipline. Since he’d started his archaeology degree at ucl he’d completely distanced himself from his family; he didn’t even like being called Simon any more and had adopted a raft of pseudonyms. I was evicted from that flat in 2002 and temporarily rehoused in the opposite block. I didn’t really think about Simon at all after that. And then there was an episode almost a decade later, one of those strange loops in time:

2011, that intense and vivid autumn when the Occupy movement had transformed St Paul’s into a bubbling mass of tents and sound systems. I was at the Finsbury Square site looking for my mate LV. I remember the night, sharp and still with the scents of November – woodsmoke, fireworks, onions and ketchup. I’d been drifting round trying to find her. The moment I walked into the encampment I sensed a cloying atmosphere, the black energy of the comedown. I stepped past the circles of dim, shuffling sleeping bags and felt a scuttling sensation on my skin, the damp filters of regret. I came to the middle of the square, where there was some sort of gathering, an assembly being addressed by a bloke who looked like a Grant Wood painting, American Gothic, face utterly devoid of compassion. I was encircled by conspiracy theorists who’d burrowed in through a David Icke message board. When I found my mate, she was sitting next to a fire with a skinhead bloke in a camouflage jacket. I registered the arrogant expression as he sat there telling some journalist about the Zeitgeist Movement, about the psychic bombardment of the city – terrorism, Jew, Judaism, kabbalah, Illuminati, occult, evil, New World Order, tyranny … They had declared this area autonomous, they were deflecting rays coming from the City of London, they would summon currents and energies and rechannel them, they were going to rig antennae on top of council blocks in Shadwell, Hoxton and Bethnal Green. She’d been sending texts asking me to come and get her out. When I found her, she looked up at me with a look of delight and incredulity, kind of saying how the hell did I get myself mixed up in this? There were blokes hanging round watching, a brooding circle of ex-ravers, ex-military, ex-travellers. They’d decided the site had to be completely teetotal, even though it was Friday night and the rest of the city was basking in a glow of warm intoxication. I remember feeling really charged up, standing my ground against this contingent. One of the blokes stepped up and bashed the beer bottle out of my hand. I grabbed LV by the arm. I remember both of us laughing, giddy with adrenaline as we stumbled through dark rows of tents. I remember them jeering, hounding us out. I heard that strident voice leading the chorus, a voice barbed with hostility, declaring that our presence was altering the energies, that

May 2015

we were polluting the zone – I knew the voice without even needing to turn round… Simon. And now, in the eye of a heatwave, I stand at a stall in East Ham market watching him with the other blokes, noting his ease and composure. He glances over and says, “Hello, sister”, in a spirit of benign camaraderie. He acts like he doesn’t remember me, but I understand the importance of his role. It’s about dawah, about drawing people into conversation – whether he remembers me or not isn’t important now, this is a clean slate, he’s not who he was before. I watch as he engages a woman in fierce conversation. The confidence he used to get from the drink is being channelled now through his faith, his absolute moral certainty. I have watched him on those YouTube documentaries, hanging round Waltham Forest, putting stickers on lampposts, proselytising his new faith – Sharia4uk, Al Muhajiroun, Saved Sect. I buy some incense. There are three of them on the stall, an exuberant Welsh bloke called Hamza with the same skinhead, same straggling red beard as Simon, and a goodlooking Asian bloke who steps up to serve me, “Better than Febreze, them, sister,” he says in a Bradford accent. I recognise him as well, always next to Choudhury on demos.

If it is not a gesamtkunstwerk, then it is at least an artwork applying the ‘overall’ principle threedimensionally: the floor and the ceiling are host to metal lamps with spindly legs and long cables, round tables made of concrete with brass legs, black-and-beige circular linoleum mats, wooden screens with biomorphic holes in them, suspended webs made of brass, handwoven nets and halterlike details made of leather, as well as long ropes connecting the many wooden beams in the ceiling. The old plastered walls are in use too, but by implication rather than directly. Leonor Antunes’s work The Unpredictability of Possible Future Uses (2015), made specially for this year’s Sharjah Biennial, is everywhere in the corridor and the five rooms it occupies, although minimally so. There is no abundance of objects; instead a smallish number of things furnish, or rather populate, the former hospital in Old Sharjah, right by the corniche, which in recent years has been cleared of dhows, the old wooden cargo boats that for centuries have transported goods across the Persian Gulf. Antunes’s objects are carefully crafted, several of the same kind creating a sense of repetition throughout the spaces, which were supremely quiet when I went there two days after the biennial opening. The possible future uses of both the exhibition space and the different components are indeed unpredictable, from the point of view of their previous functions in relation to today, as well as their uses in a future to come. The old medical facility, refurbished and now housing this year’s biennial, as part of an endeavour that plays into a number of more or less problematic processes, such as gentrification and political whitewashing, has taken on a new function. Antunes’s tables and mats hark back to mudbrick tombs in Mellieha (in the northwest part of Malta) dating from 150 bc and palm-leaf mats for eating on the ground used by local nomads. Like indigenous Amazonian techniques for hammocks, the suspended nets lack knots, making them more stretchable than other nets.

in defence of the biennial or

In tune with Antunes The Sharjah Biennial – it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but a new commission offers a good example of why such events and the work they engender remain important

The appropriation of local materials and techniques by Antunes is of course unpredictable in relation to their original function and location. Equally so with the shapes and functions borrowed from the designer and architect Greta Magnusson-Grossman (1906-99). Born and educated in Sweden, she set up a successful design studio in Stockholm during the 1930s before emigrating to Los Angeles, where she continued to make furniture and started designing houses. In addition to the 20-odd single-family houses, most of which were made for professional women and couples without children and located on ‘difficult plots’, she created entire interiors for Southern California’s local jetsetters, among others Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard. It is Grossman’s tactile and soft-edged functionalism that recurs in Antunes’s work, particularly in her use of Grossman’s Grasshopper lamp (1948), which in Antunes’s hands is the only source of light in the dark rooms of the former hospital in Sharjah. But it is also there in the mats and the low tables with folded metal legs, and the inclination to treat the interior as a whole. Not only was Grossman a rare case of a woman who saw her ideas being realised both in design and architecture, but she also took particular care with the whole experience of the building. Similarly, Antunes’s ‘overall’ is restrained – not exactly overall but nevertheless no horror vacui. A sort of modest overall with personality. As one of many commissions for Sharjah Biennial 12, this particular artwork points both backwards and forwards in time, at the unpredictability of uses for an object in the past and towards those undefined uses still to come. Yet it pertains to something predictable: the remaining importance

Maria Lind, who’s cocurating a biennial

both images Leonor Antunes, The Unpredictability of Possible Future Uses (details), 2015, leather, hemp, brass, steel, electrical cables, lamps, concrete and teak. Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

ArtReview

of biennials and other institutions to support new work. Together with commissions by Michael Joo, Haegue Yang, Iman Issa, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri and Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Antunes’s The Unpredictability of Possible Future Uses is worth the trip to the Gulf.

The conversations that happen at the periphery of art shows are important, yet difficult to record. Changes in mood are rarely noted in official documentation, nor are the informal conversations that happen away from panel discussions and interviews. Yet this is how we change our minds about art, and how thinking develops. Not that we should be in the business of recording everything – the nsa does that for us – but with regard to performance, artists’ historical struggles with the deadening aspects of documentation have often hinged on problems with capturing vitality. Excluded elements might include some of the following: the weather, emotional atmosphere, smell, taste, the day’s events, coughs, stumbles, late arrivals or mistakes. Putting these issues centre-stage, several recent performances have sought to document informal movements, memories and chatter of audiences and performers by describing them with language in real time. “An event took place here [X] days ago. This is what happened…” said dancer and artist Lauren Bakst repeatedly in Reverberations, a work that she performed in New York, in the New Museum’s lobby gallery, over the course of several weeks this past January and February, as part of Gerard & Kelly’s (duo Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) exhibition P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange). Each time I saw her perform, she was wearing a fluffy pale-pink sweater and patterned pink jeans with trainers, and described different micro-events that had occurred in the space over the course of Gerard & Kelly’s research residency at the museum. For example: 21 days ago a man had tried to take a picture of her performance with his iPhone and failed to do it properly; 20 seconds ago she brushed against a child’s foot by accident; 12 days ago, while she was trying to take a picture of a fellow dancer, she received a notification from an app she had downloaded earlier that, as she said during the performance I watched, was “keeping me updated on the progress of the protests that were happening outside, organised by Black Lives Matter. This was a day after the announcement of the nonindictment of Darren Wilson.”

edge funds or

Each of Bakst’s stories was accompanied by a repeated movement extracted from the story and transformed into choreography – a raised hand in front of the face with a final jerk of a thumb to signify a phone photograph, a gesticulation as someone struggled to articulate a point. Bakst also referred to Gerard & Kelly’s other programming in the space, which included an exploration of pole dancing on two poles with various dancers and teachers, including the Chosen Ones – a group that usually performs on the poles in subway cars – as well as a series of conversations with activists, writers and artists including Chris Kraus, Andrea Fraser and Heather McGhee, who they invite to talk to them on a bed that they dragged into the gallery space. I’ve seen several performances that use performers’ bodies as vehicles for memory. Siobhan Davies Dance’s Table of Contents at the ica in London in January 2014 was a live archive of the company’s choreography performed and reconfigured by the dancers as they described their memories of performing these works over time. Tino Sehgal’s participants in works such as These associations (2012) routinely describe their own memories to members of the public as a conversation starter. What was striking and exciting about Gerard & Kelly’s P.O.L.E., and Reverberations, is the way that they summoned the museum as an active space for drawing in conversations that occur at the margins, which then unfolded over the course of weeks. In Reverberations we heard about moments of conflict and confusion with speakers such as Fraser and Kraus, or among audiences, as well as performance memories. It felt as though the peripheral conversations in the gallery, and input from streets, subway cars, marches, nightclubs and beds, were drawn into the space and suggested as places or moments of significant exchange. It was a form of live research that seemed tangibly to grow over time and reach a high number of people in an intimate manner, so that audiences could take part – in moments that we would have otherwise missed – as we were channelled through the memories of a living being.

How to exploit the untapped potential of those incidents and accidents on the periphery of the art experience you know

gossip, half-remembered magazine articles, the bad moods provoked by inconsiderate lovers if not

Laura McLean-Ferris will tell you

Reverberations, featuring Lauren Bakst, as part of Gerard & Kelly, P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange), 2015. Photo: Jesse Untracht-Oakner. Courtesy New Museum, New York

May 2015

“Quiet, you blabbering dunderhead of death! Away with you, Thanatos! You insipid bureaucrat of mortality! And you, Abaddon, you bumbling ass! You, who cannot create, contrive only to destroy! No! Your meagre spittle shall not yet douse the blazing inferno in my loins. And your stench must content itself with loitering outside among the rabble, for my parlour is still pleasant with contemporary pop music and the perfume of youthful vaginas!” I struggle with the heaving, grotesque spectre, his bony fingers clawing my shoulders as I tear at the heavy bone-black cloak that threatens to envelop me! But what is this?? I hold no cloak! It is but a sweat-soaked sheet that entangles me. And what talons are these that dig into my soft white shoulders but the simple fingers of my dull-witted studio assistant Neal! That idiot!!! Why is he screaming in that awful southern vernacular!? I can’t make head or tail of it! And why does he shake me so? “Mr Grossmalerman! Wake up! Are you ok? I was just finishing these canvases when I heard the most harrowing cry from your room! I came in to find you struggling with your sheets in the grip of some sort of terrible dream!” “I’m fine, Neal. Now go away! “Good God, Mr Grossmalerman… how long have you been in here and why are you surrounded by all this drug paraphernalia??” “Goddamn it, Neal! I said go away.” He stands up, walks towards the door, stops and turns around. “Well fuck you, too, Mr Grossmalerman!” The door slams and once again I am alone with my thoughts, which I must admit have been wandering ever more towards contemplations of death. Ever since my ex-wife Sylvie exploded (ArtReview vol 64 no 6, September 2013), it has lurked. To have one’s life cut so short, so suddenly and with such hilarious consequences is just… well, it’s just too much for me to bear. Perhaps it is time I stopped painting vaginas, faced this fear head-on and wrestled with the emperor of all subject matter. ‘But how?’ you ask… By painting a painting about death. That’s how. That’s impossible, you say? Well, perhaps it won’t be easy, but goddamn it! What worthwhile endeavour is ever easy!? I ask you!

Let’s see… a painting about death… a painting about death… there must be some agreed-upon visual language for this sort of thing… Has no one ever painted a painting about death before? Good lord, am I once again at the forefront of some hideous new vanguard!? Well, then I accept the challenge! I suppose I could simply paint a dead person… although, I mean, it might be hard to tell whether they’re dead or not, you know… visually speaking. A dead person can often be mistaken for someone who’s simply sleeping. Well, for a little while at least. No. This will only lead to frustration. Hmmmm… how about painting a skull? Yes! A skull is pretty direct and clear. I mean, I can’t think of anything else a skull might bring to mind than death. Besides, of course, pirates. Uh-oh! That could be a problem. This painting is really and absolutely not going to be about pirates. Pirates are exciting and adventurous, whereas this painting will be about pretty much the most solemn and depressing thing a painting could possibly be about. But I’m not giving up without a fight. How about an image of a recently snuffed-out candle? You know, to symbolise life’s brief and fragile nature! There could even be a little windy vapour of smoke rising from it! Oh, who am I kidding! No one will get that. They’ll just think it’s a boring old painting of a stupid candle. Rotting fruit? Flies? A clock? All too vague. Goddamn it to hell! This is turning out to be harder than I thought. Wait a second! I know! What if I turn it around completely and paint something so much the opposite of death that all anyone can think of when they see it is… death? You know, like how when you see a toddler walking down the street and all you can think about is tripping it? Yes… I might be on to something. But what is the opposite of death? Birth? Flowers? Life? Flesh? Beating hearts? Fucking… titties and pink vaginas? Pink vaginas!? Oh, my God!!… Does that mean that… this whole time… I’ve been painting about… death!!!??? All I’ve ever painted about is death? I’m already a death painter!? That’s terrible… Fuck it, I give up. I’m going with the skull thing.

son of nyx, brother of hypnos, nemesis, eris, keres and oneiro or

How to identify death as your theme in a painting while dodging the obvious danger of your thanatos being mistaken for a pirate. by

Jonathan Grossmalerman, avant-gardist; lately a painter of vaginas, now a peddler of skulls

Jonathan Grosmalerman, Fastidious, 2015, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

WILLIAM GEAR, COMPOSITION BLUE CENTRE, 1949

William Gear 1915-1997 The painter that Britain forgot 18 July - 27 Sept 2015

towner

townereastbourne.org.uk

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 38

Sir Kenneth Clark reflects elegantly on art and television Interview by

Matthew Collings In which we welcome the gentleman art-historian who also invented civilisation and art on television before asking him

what went wrong in the years since then? why do we have art bubbles and flipping? how do you use an autocue? &

can you be critical without being labelled a h8-ter and defriended?

The art historian, author and popular television broadcaster Sir Kenneth Clark, was born in 1903. He was the youngest-ever director of London’s National Gallery, taking up the position in 1933 at the age of thirty. In 1969 he wrote and presented the tv series Civilisation, which described the history of Western civilisation through its surviving monuments of art. He received many decorations, including a life peerage. He died in 1983.

ArtReview

artreview tv’s very different since you made Civilisation. In fact anyone can make films now and they don’t even have to be on tv. Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is considered a great inspiration to the YouTube generation. sir kenneth clark Compared to today’s typical documentary films on mainstream tv about art and culture, that video is a relief. No motiveless laughter merely to put the audience at ease or presenters repeatedly exclaiming the word ‘extraordinary’ in front of an artwork instead of working out a point to make about it. ar What did you like positively about Leckey’s film, though, on its own terms? skc Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Anyone who’s been in a tv edit suite knows that if you put images with sounds that don’t fit, it can create an eerie effect. I think his film is beneficial for artworld professionals. They like to feel there’s something important that they’ve discovered. We’ve all got to feel good about ourselves, however fatuous the reasons we come up with. Leckey provides a service, supplying delusional importance to a system that needs to keep pumping out exactly that product to a public happy to swallow it. ar Was it hard work making Civilisation? skc Not really. I thought out the themes and then we went and did the work. I read my material from an autocue. When I was first making notes for the series, I assumed it would be lectures from a studio with slides. But the director gradually got the idea we should go round the world for two years and film things for real. Between us we invented by accident the authored tv documentary. It was enjoyable to make, and then it was surprisingly successful. It kept being shown at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, dc, at lunchtime screenings for 300 people; on the first day 24,000 showed up, including Jackie Onassis and half of President Nixon’s cabinet. I went to an event to honour me there, and the mass hysteria was disturbing. I had to go in the toilet and have a weep at one point. I was primitively howling for 15 minutes. ar Why? skc Confusion at the adulation: it was like there was a plague and they thought I was the doctor. I suppose the success of the series in the States was due to the reassurance it gave to bourgeois values. On the other hand it was just as successful in Poland and Romania, which in those days were socialist countries. ar You were in your late sixties by then. Did you think the world was about to be overrun by socialism and it was important to round up all the beautiful

cultural treasures for one last sigh of reverence before they were swept away by barbarians? skc Yes, something like that. I was always worried about things breaking down. ar What’s the best fun you ever had at an art exhibition? skc Oh without doubt soaking up the Bellini show in Venice in 1949. I really thought I was in the company of a dear friend. I went again and again, day after day for three weeks. At every point he restored my faith in mankind. Almost alone among the greats he is optimistic. He knew tragedy in his youth, of course. But in middle age he came to look for those things in life that are calm and life-giving. Men, landscapes, buildings, all take on this feeling of natural goodness. When I was coming from the hotel one day on the way to visit the Bellini

I sat in a café every evening starting at 4.30pm, overlooking the bustling Piazza di S Francesco, and wrote my notes. On other days I was in the café on the square in Sansepolcro, which was much quieter, because no one ever visited that town then. I stayed at Bernard Berenson’s place. The Phaidon boss had never heard of him show, I could see through the doors of a private gallery, on the corner of the piazza where I was staying, and I made out large canvases in there covered in scrawls of paint. No greater contrast to the comfort of Bellini could be imagined. They screamed from the back of a banal modern interior. But in the end I went in, and recognised it as the work of a genuine artist. The rhythms, the control, the surprise and the unity – it was overwhelming. At first I’d been horrified; now I felt a genuine connection to the experience I’d been having every day with Bellini, and was about to have again in a minute. It was the first European exhibition of Jackson Pollock. ar What happens with an autocue? skc You write something and the words get transferred onto a contraption by a technician, and then you read them as you’re being filmed, in a location. facing page Sir Kenneth Clark in a still from bbc television series Civilisation, 1969

May 2015

ar How do you get it to sound like you’re not reading? skc Well, it’s a knack: you just have it. I’d been lecturing for 40 years. You usually have to repeat it a few times, so the crew and the director can arrange the camera moves. You rediscover the spontaneity that was there when you wrote the material in the first place, which, again, is a matter of rhythm. You’ve done it yourself, haven’t you? ar Very little, and not at all on any of my own programmes; occasionally if I presented live from a tv studio. I found it constraining. When you wrote a book about Piero della Francesca in 1951 was it hard to think of things to say? skc No, there wasn’t anything else on him at the time except a brilliant but in some ways obscure work by Roberto Longhi from 1927. For me it’s Piero’s quietness that compels. In the hands of one who uses it creatively, the word ‘colour’ means almost the reverse of its connotation in popular speech. There it means number, variety and contrast. But colour used to reshape the world as part of a consistent philosophy must be restricted to those colours that are on easy terms with one another. Shouting will get them nowhere. It is only in quiet discourse together that a new truth may emerge. La vérité est dans une nuance. The relationship of colours in Piero corresponds to a similar relationship of forms. The impact on one another of his slatey blue and ochre, or porphyry and serpentine, has the same degree of resonance as the impact of the arcs, spheres and cylinders that constitute his form world. Both are muted without being deadened. Anyway, to get the work done I drove around in Florence to the Piero sites, which I’d known intimately for years. The boss of Phaidon had some scaffolding put up in the cathedral at Arezzo, so photos could be taken of the frescoes. I sat in a café every evening starting at 4.30pm, overlooking the bustling Piazza di S Francesco, and wrote my notes. On other days I was in the café on the square in Sansepolcro, which was much quieter, because no one ever visited that town then. I stayed at Bernard Berenson’s place. The Phaidon boss had never heard of him. In fact he hadn’t heard of Piero when I initially proposed writing the book. I introduced him to Berenson. I told him Berenson’s best works were the collected four prefaces to his lists of authentic paintings. It turned out this had only sold a few copies, as it looked a bit boring the way it was designed and laid out. So the Phaidon boss made an agreement with Berenson and reissued it with an attractive redesign and it immediately sold 60,000 copies. You had a bit of success like that with This Is Modern Art, didn’t you, Matthew?

ar Yes. But I don’t think the reason was the layout. Rather, it was assumed to be a book that forgave ordinary people for being naive. As art was just beginning to become a consumer product during the 1990s, something to be enjoyed as entertainment, readers were grateful for what they thought of as a guide to how to do it. When you watch tv documentaries on art today, what do you get from them? skc Generalised enthusiasm with a few historical markers of a very simplified kind. ar Do you think art is explained helpfully to a wide audience on these programmes? skc It depends what you mean by helpful. The audience has been conditioned by the cultural dumbing-down process, which was itself the result of marketing requirements, to think of art as a certain thing. Civilisation was frequently marred by windbaggery. Nevertheless I occasionally gave the impression during the series that I thought of paintings and sculptures as having been consciously structured, the result of a series of conceptual and visual decisions. This is now unknown on tv. You’re supposed to talk about art as if it’s a branch of fantasy, not a class of objects. I’m planning not to be in the vicinity of a tv during the run of the planned remake of Civilisation. Communicating to a mass

audience about culture no longer involves getting ideas across that you’ve had yourself about a particular subject. A massive machine of producer interference ensures that all ideas that eventually make it into the programme support a primary and overriding single corporate aim of unctuously sucking up to an imagined audience that furiously rejects all knowledge unless it already more or less possesses it. That’s why tv programmes about art are a form now pervaded almost entirely by clichés. There are exceptions: Jonathan Meades’s reflections on architecture, for example. But if you get involved in mass-audience communication about culture, and you have anything peculiar to say – peculiar in the new mass-audience placatory terms I just outlined – it’s a very neurotic and awkward struggle. And the presenters on these programmes at the moment rarely show any evidence of wanting to engage in it. ar In the artworld in the States now, everyone’s going on about the art market bubble and flipping. What do you think of all that? skc Marketing in itself is not necessarily a problem. But it can get out of hand. One disturbing result when commercialism overwhelms all other considerations has already been mentioned, the crushing of intellectual

Gentile Bellini, Procession in St Mark’s Square, 1496, tempera and oil on canvas, 367 × 745 cm

ArtReview

content on tv. Another one, not unrelated, is that the utterances of art advisers and dealers – who, after all, are only snake-oil salesmen – enjoy the status, on social media and in online art publications, of actual thought. There are many different levels of criticism and analysis today, and much genuinely insightful work by experts goes on with some of it making its way into art books for the general public and articles in art magazines, but still that is for a relative minority. It’s unfortunate that the stuff that is most widely consumed is by depraved sickos calling themselves advisers, and so on, whose only motivation is profit. These conmen paint a distorted picture of those who hire their services as healthily adjusted types: they say their clients’ motivation in art speculation is never profit alone. Rather, there is the faint and barely consciously registered awareness of a future possible profit, but this is far outweighed by a sheer love and passion for art. Now, if you gently mention there might be something self-serving about this characterisation both of the client and by inference the noble adviser, they reply that you are a kneejerk whiner and a h8-er and de-friend you. next month Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, on the Dubai art fair

HALL2.0 J3

Liu Wei 刘炜

Aye Gallery room 601,unit 3,yong he garden,yard 3,dong bin he

T:86 10 8422 1726 / 8422 1030

E:aye@ayegallery.com

road,an ding men,dongcheng district,beijing 100013

F:86 10 8422 1728

www.ayegallery.com

Other People and Their Ideas No 22

Christian Jankowski has been appointed chief curator of manifesta 11, which will take place in the city of Zürich in 2016. The Berlin-based artist’s recent solo exhibitions include heavy weight history at cca Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, in 2013 and casting jesus at macro, Rome, in 2012 Interview by

Tom Eccles Manifesta, Europe’s nomadic biennial, was launched in 1996 with the aim of examining contemporary art and its context in Europe beyond the familiar centres of artistic production. Recent editions of Manifesta have focused on geographical borders and margins, both within Europe and – as with Manifesta 8 in Murcia and North Africa – at its outer edges. Characterised by a strong sense of place, an engagement with the cultural and political present, and a commitment to innovative curatorial practice, the tenor of each edition is distinct to its time and place. The last edition, Manifesta 10, took place in 2014 in St Petersburg under the curatorial direction of Kasper König. Manifesta 11 is scheduled to open in Zürich on 9 June 2016.

ArtReview

artreview In her announcement of your appointment as the curator of the next Manifesta, the biennial’s director, Hedwig Fijen, said: ‘Jankowski will investigate the whole array of art’s authorship, its production and its reflection on Zürich’s professional landscape. In doing so, Manifesta 11’s chief curator approaches the complex identities of the city in an unexpected way, reaching out to audiences beyond the inner circle of contemporary art biennials.’ This hints at a classic strategy of yours as an artist, which is to engage very specific groups of people we don’t normally expect to be art producers per se – a church group, or a heavy weight lifting team, for example – to participate in the making of an artwork (a film, a performance). Is this what we should expect from your Manifesta? christian jankowski Yes. ar Why do you think you were chosen as the curator of Manifesta? cj I think they needed a wild card, because art is already so well established in Zürich. There are so many good institutions and curators, and everybody is very well educated. So they thought to go with a project where the outcome wouldn’t be predictable, where there would be some risk involved. ar What was your pitch? cj My pitch is that I’m sticking with my old ideas. My pitch is to do what I always do, which is to work within the framework of collaboration. I’ll be working with people who are not already involved in the artworld and looking to link artists with representatives of different vocations. Through this, we’ll produce a bunch of new works. I mean, there will be an introductory show consisting of existing works, but for me that will be more like an introduction to the theme of Manifesta 11. It’ll also provide information about all of the satellite spaces, where we’ll present the new commissions. I’m compiling a list of all the professions in Zürich, from which the invited artists will each choose one profession. Then I’ll find an interesting character or personality who practises that profession, who would be willing to collaborate with an artist, who would also be willing to host the artist and help find a non-art venue where the finished work will be presented. In this way, there will be many different kinds of venues for the exhibition. While it’s a bit like art in corporate spaces – art in businesses or business-related places – I’m not asking artists to work with a company, but rather with individuals who work at that company. It’s really about one-to-one encounters between the hosts and the artists. Each project starts with a budget of €8,000, and then we can develop projects from there that will grow financially or materially depending on the context.

ar Zürich being Zürich, I hope you will be collaborating with the banking community? cj I trust the artists to pick interesting professions from the list we give them. But if we get to the last artist participating and no one’s chosen to work with a banker, I’ll make sure to let them know that. Still, maybe it would say something if no one were to pick ‘banker’ from the list. Of course, the banking community is a topic for Manifesta 11 – even if none of the artists choose to work with a banker. ar Do you have a working title? cj Manifesta 11 will be called What People Do for Money. I think it resonates well with Zürich. ar What do you think the projects will reveal about Zürich? cj You know, there’s no predetermined outcome. In the end, it will all come down to the interactions between the hosts, the artists

I’m compiling a list of all the professions in Zürich, from which the invited artists will each choose one profession. Then I’ll find an interesting character or personality who practises that profession, who would be willing to collaborate with an artist, who would also be willing to host the artist and help find a non-art venue where the finished work will be presented and the spaces they move through. There will be dozens of hosts, and they will each have a different effect on the work produced. But all together, they will reveal something about what use the hosts think art has – and also what people from Zürich are willing to put into art. The hosts will have to participate out of honest interest. I kind of like those moments when you say (or a host might say), ‘ok, I can do that. But what’s in it for me?’ If you think about Sigmar Polke’s church windows in Zürich, of course they needed windows for their church. So Polke’s work was the perfect fit. He could use resources from the church. I hope some of the Manifesta projects also find niches like that, where they follow the interests of their collaborators facing page Christian Jankowski. Courtesy Manifesta 11

May 2015

to make something that might be permanent, or that can use the energy that’s already there, or recycle stuff. ar There is always the tendency among artists and curators to work with groups who sit at the margins of political and economic power and to use these kinds of exhibitions as ‘platforms’ for giving voice to groups and issues that often remain unheard. That’s not really been your approach. How do you select who you want to work with both as an artist and now as a curator? cj That’s true. My approach tends to be different. I often distrust the black-and-white views of people who believe they’re on the right side. I find it interesting to go to the centre of the system. My work is perhaps affirmative in that way, but it also has the potential to destabilise. It can be read in two ways. Manifesta 11 will be about personal relationships. If an artist chooses to work with a banker, the artist will be working with a person, not an institution. He or she might be a higher-up, or might come from the mailroom. We will send artists into every corner of society and ask them to make work in relation to the information they find – whether it’s powerful or not, critical or not, intelligent or not. ar Why work with businesses rather than, say, community groups? cj I’m concerned that community groups might use up too much energy by talking too much. I thought about community groups, but I don’t want a conference where everybody talks, where everybody has an opinion. Where talking might even be an endpoint. Instead, I’m interested in activating. I also think that the resources you have are much clearer in a business. When you talk to somebody who owns a bakery, you can expect to find certain material. I think if you look at my past works, you’ll see that I was always more interested in professions. ar I always thought you worked primarily with social groups, church groups, a hula-hoop club or a heavy-weight lifting club. Somehow, these kinds of self-identification groups have always been places where you’ve been able to infiltrate as an artist. cj The members of the heavy weight lifting club consider themselves service professionals, sportsmen. The hula-hoop teachers also do this professionally. They have customers that form a group, the same as a yoga teacher. Professions bring a certain vocabulary, they bring a certain viewpoint on the world, and they have a very specific look. They also bring something unexpected and new into the artwork through a kind of shared authorship. ar Have you specified to your artists the minimum amount of time they commit to the project?

cj No, because I trust that the artists will commit themselves to the project. If they agree to participate, then they’ll want to make good work. It doesn’t matter whether an artist spends a few days or a few months on a project – it doesn’t guarantee a good artwork. ar Humour is always present in your work. It’s a way to get to something quite profound. Do you think humour will play a large part in Manifesta? cj People will likely find humour in it. But humour isn’t driving the project. If I were to imagine being invited as an artist to Manifesta, I’d like the idea of being picked up by my host, that somebody would feel responsible for me other than the curatorial assistant who says, ‘Oh, here, read the concept of this biennial. And oh, yes, you should know this and that.’ Instead, you get a personalised tour through Zürich. As the curator, I won’t be providing the information. I’ll work in the background with my team. I want the artist and the host to get together and really feel like they can do stuff without me, not knowing what the result will be. Humour might come into play at some point. But I trust the artists and the hosts, and I don’t want to control how the artworks will be made. ar With many of these more public projects recently there has been an interest in activism. Do you think we’ll see some political actions that come out of this Manifesta? The artist Artur Zmijewski’s 2012 Berlin Biennale for example focused solely upon activism. cj You know what, I found Zmijewski’s Berlin Biennale frustrating. I thought it was quite sad to see how the activists were presented. I like Artur as an artist, and I think as an artist, he’s done many great projects. But I found the exhibition to be a bit disrespectful to the topic and to the activists. Instead of working in a way that made the artworks or the statements look stronger, he forced nonartworks into an art context, and they suffered from that. The curators that I’ve liked have always stepped in and helped make the artists and the artworks look good in the end. They found a good place for my work between the interests of different artists. It’s not enough to throw people in a room and say, ‘Here’s the room, get in, everybody, find something.’ That was my feeling about Berlin. He threw people together,

but they looked absurd in that context, because the white cube is not a real context for activism. This won’t be my focus, because I think that activist groups are often in a rather weak position, criticising something from outside the system. Rather than protesting outside buildings, which I fully respect, for this Manifesta and for the topic of my Manifesta, I would like to see who owns the building and to bring the artists into contact with those people. We will try to find representatives of people from different walks of life and then work in dialogue with them and see where the dialogue ends. ar Manifesta is also seen as a kind of touchstone of the European project. Whether it’s the fall of the Berlin Wall, whether it’s the expansion of the European Union, or the unification of Eastern Europe with Western Europe. It’s had its moments of crisis, in Cyprus, for example, when the exhibition was cancelled in 2006. Right now you have this incredible moment in Europe of xenophobia, Islamophobia and rising nationalism, and in Switzerland of course, no minarets. Will you touch down on some of this? cj Of course, I hope Manifesta 11 will do just that, but I won’t do so as a curator who says, ‘You should work with minarets in Switzerland.’ ar As an artist, you have always had an intense interest in and a great facility for thinking about communication strategies. How are you thinking of marketing for Manifesta?

If I were to imagine being invited as an artist to Manifesta, I’d like the idea of being picked up by my host, that somebody would feel responsible for me other than the curatorial assistant who says, ‘Oh, here, read the concept of this biennial. And oh, yes, you should know this and that.’ Instead, you get a personalised tour through Zürich. As the curator, I won’t be providing the information. I’ll work in the background with my team. I want the artist and the host to get together and really feel like they can do stuff without me, not knowing what the result will be

ArtReview

cj The results of these collaborations are by their very nature unpredictable. So I felt that with this Manifesta, there’s a need for reflection. We will document the different steps of the project as well as the different obstacles during production in a series of collaborations between students and professional filmmakers. The films they will produce will follow a series of guidelines that I’ve developed. These films will be presented at the ‘Pavillion of Reflections’, a venue floating on Lake Zürich that’s being designed by the architect Tom Emerson and his students from eth Zürich. So, you’re there in the beautiful Swiss landscape on the lake, and then you see on the projection what actually took place. The Pavillion of Reflections will function on many different levels. For the people in charge in Zürich, they’ll be on camera saying, ‘No, our bank will not do this, for this and this and this reason’ – you know, just to take the bank as the first example that comes into everyone’s head, but it’ll be the same with the other professions. Two weeks prior to the opening of Manifesta 11, the artists will present their projects at private receptions for the professional groups they collaborated with. So there will be openings solely for policemen or only for – I don’t know who – for the hair salons or for the customs officers. These openings will be documented and presented at the Pavillion of Reflections, so we can see how different businesses or these different professions or individuals interact with art. Whether they’re proud of it, how they identify with it, what they think of their colleagues. Then you can compare the way each project was received at the Pavillion of Reflections, because you’ll be on the lake, with a certain distance to Zürich. ar You must have seen Kasper König’s St Petersburg Manifesta. What did you think? cj Good question. You know, there aren’t many people who could have done that Manifesta under those conditions. I think Kasper did the right thing in deciding not to stop the dialogue. It was actually the first Manifesta I saw, so I can’t compare it with any others. But I liked it. It was old school, but I like old school. After seeing it, though, one thing I decided is that I want to put more emphasis on new productions.

Ji Dachun Liu Wei Mu Boyan

Opening

Exhibition

14 June , 2015

14 June , 2015 – 16 August , 2015

Ludwig Museum

Curator

Danziger Freiheit 1

Prof Dr. Beate Reifenscheid ( Director of Ludwig Museum)

(am „Deutschen Eck") 56068 Koblenz T:0261-30 40 412 F:0261 30 40 413

In cooperation with Aye Gallery Beijing

E:info@ludwigmuseum.org www.ludwigmuseum.org

2015

Galerie Rudolfinum 28. 5.—9. 8. 2015 Roger Hiorns

Feb—May

AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE

XANTI SCHAWINSKY

TOYS REDUX —ON PLAY AND CRITIQUE

Alsovo nabrezi 12, 110 01 Prague 1 www.galerierudolfinum.cz

May—Aug

21.02.–17.05.

29.08.–08.11.

Nov—Feb

migrosmuseum.ch migros-culture-percentage.ch

RESISTANCE PERFORMED

21.11.–07.02.2016 Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zürich

Roger Hiorns, Untitled, 2013. Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London. Installation at De Hallen Haarlem © Photo Gert Jan van Rooij Media partners

MOON KYUNGWON & JEON JOONHO

General partner of the gallery

Aug—Nov

30.05.–16.08.

Bin Afif

Mercy - Steel Sheets - 360 X 180 cm.

profiled as one of the main pillars of contemporary art in

Less Yellow - Mixed media - 90X120 CM.

Reductase - Print on fineart museum etching textured 350 gms - 100X150 CM.

Bankruptcy - Mixed media - 188x87 CM

Saudi Arabia

haled Bin Afif is a very talented contemporary artist, with patents in high speed captures, and is very precise regarding details of his work like a mechanical geneticist. For example, in his opinion, the slightest difference in his work is like the distance between Earth and Mars. Khaled believes that everything speaks and breathes, which is why he takes his time making conversation with his materials and spends time analyzing his decisions to perfect his artwork. “I left my country running from the war and came here to start my life” is the story Khaled’s father used to tell when Khaled was young. Khaled did not understand it, he thought of it as only a story that his father would tell his friends about. Sometimes he said it again to himself to combine the story with the kind of things he witnessed on a daily basis. Khaled Bin Afif was born in Makkah. Its mountains embraced him; its sky provided him with shade and shining stars, helping him to draw in his dreams and visions. He was quite rebellious at school because it restrained his freedom and didn’t give him the space he needed to allow his imagination to grow. As a result of this he turned to books, and developed an addiction to reading since books were the only things to provide answers to his deep rooted curiosity. Khaled then began searching inside himself with the hope of finding direction towards his passion. He started off with poetry and then moved

into music, for which he played instruments professionally. On top of this, he also manufactured mechanical devices and engineered their programs. He remembered his first camera, when he took a picture of anything his eyes could see. Khaled mastered photography and was a guest on many TV shows. He worked hard in this field and invested everything he had in order to become a professional, and find a way to address society problems. His artwork is very unique, with an objective behind every piece. When he begins a new project he devotes a lot of time in a bid to give his work an artistic touch with novel impressions to direct a creative task. Khaled is now one of “TheGallery” represented Artists. “TheGallery” property of Arabian Wings, is one of the most important contemporary art gallery in Saudi Arabia in terms of capacity to house a large number of artworks and visitors. It is situated on an area of 1500 square meters with an 8-meter height, based in Jeddah city located at Al Tahlia Street, El Khayyat Center. “TheGallery” strategy is to support Visual Arts and to become a reference for those who search for it and for hosting exhibitions for the various artworks of its artists. It will be landmark to which purchasers will come to find visual arts masterpieces they are looking for. “TheGallery” has been profiled as the gateway for Arab artists to local and international recognition. www.arabian-wings.com

be s t

"th e ur s e o c f l o g m in i " in Ve nic e

s ' e n o b h s i F Do u g

d n a L e r u s Lei

f l Go

Featuring : John Akom frah, Yara El-Sherbini, Doug Fishbone, Ellie Harrison, Candice Jacobs, Hetain Patel, Yinka Shonibare mbe, Lindsay Seers and Eyal Weizman Saturday 9 May - Sunday 26 July 2015 Tuesday - Sunday, 10am - 6pm Arsenale Docks, San Pietro di Castello 40 , 30122 Venice em 15 venice.co.uk Plus online project sun-screen.uk is a partnership between

8 TT HH N O R D I C BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPOR ARY ART M O S S / N O R W AY

Palexpo Geneva / 28-31.01.2016 / artgeneve.ch Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 30.04-02.05.2016 / artmontecarlo.ch

S A L O N S

’ART

THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART

17–20 SEPTEMBER 2015 CHICAGO NAVY PIER

Studio view: LAURA LETINSKY Design: JNL

expochicago.com

Presenting Sponsor

SC E N E RY Torgny Wilcke EXHIBITION Saturday 25th April to Saturday 30th May 2015

158 New Cavendish St London W1W 6YW foldgallery.com

Notation_website_vART.indd 1

21/04/2015 11:36 Art Review ad.indd 1

Jason File: An Ornament and a Safeguard

10/04/2015 13:36

Supported by:

29 April - 6 June 2015

19a Herald St, London E2 6JT

Project Space

Wed - Sat, 12 - 6pm WWW.THERYDERPROJECTS.COM

PHOTO LONDON Somerset House, London 21–24 May 2015 Preview day 20 May

Over 70 galleries have decided it’s one of the cultural events of the year. Amana (amanasalto / IMA) Tokyo Atlas Gallery London Ayyam Gallery Beirut, Dubai, London Ben Brown Fine Arts London Bernard Quaritch Ltd London Bernheimer Lucerne, Munich Blanca Berlín Galería Madrid Camera Work Berlin Caroline Smulders Paris Christophe Guye Galerie Zurich Crane Kalman Brighton Danziger Gallery New York Edwynn Houk Gallery New York, Zurich Eleven Fine Art London Eric Franck Fine Art London Flowers Gallery London, New York Galerie Ernst Hilger Vienna Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire Paris Galerie Lumière des Roses Paris Galerie Pavlova Berlin Galerie Polaris Paris Galerie Thomas Zander Cologne GALLERY FIFTY ONE Antwerp Gazelli Art House Baku, London Grimaldi Gavin London HackelBury Fine Art London HADA Contemporary London

Howard Greenberg Gallery New York in camera Paris Ingleby Gallery Edinburgh James Hyman Gallery London Kahmann Gallery Amsterdam Kasher|Potamkin New York La Galerie Particulière Paris LAMB Arts London, Sao Paulo Les Douches La Galerie Paris Michael Hoppen Gallery London Michael Reid Sydney Nailya Alexander Gallery New York Paul Kasmin Gallery New York Peter Fetterman Gallery Santa Monica Photo Gallery International Toyko Pi Artworks Istanbul, London Polka Galerie Paris Purdy Hicks Gallery London Riflemaker London Robert Hershkowitz Lindfield, London Robert Klein Gallery Boston Robert Morat Berlin, Hamburg Roland Belgrave Vintage Photography Brighton

In association with

Partners

ROSEGALLERY Santa Monica SCHEUBLEIN + BAK Zurich School Gallery / Olivier Castaing Paris Steven Kasher Gallery New York Sundaram Tagore Gallery New York, Hong Kong, Singapore Taka Ishii Gallery Paris, Tokyo Tasveer Gallery Bangalore The Little Black Gallery London The Photographers’ Gallery London The Ravestijn Gallery Amsterdam The Wapping Project Bankside London Timothy Taylor Gallery London Tristan Hoare Gallery London Yossi Milo Gallery New York Discovery Section A.I. London Edel Assanti London G/P Gallery Tokyo Galerie Vanessa Quang Paris IBASHO Antwerp PUG Oslo Roman Road London Tiwani Contemporary London

Publishers Autograph ABP Dewi Lewis Hatje Cantz HOTSHOE Kehrer Verlag MACK Books Phaidon Thames and Hudson Lounges and Special Exhibitors Aperture Rankin LensCulture Royal College of Art Tickets now available ticketmaster.co.uk/photolondon

photolondon.org #PhotoLondon15

Exhibitors list as of 15/04/2015

WINCHESTER SCHOOL OF ART

MA CONTEMPORARY CURATION The MA Contemporary Curation is designed to provide education, research training, “behind the scenes” industry insight, and practical experience across disciplines within the expanded field of curation today. Based at The Winchester Gallery, with links to the 3 nationally renowned art centres at the main campus, MA Contemporary Curation benefits from the world-leading academics at Winchester School of Art. Our professional networks help students put innovative curatorial theory into practice.

www.soton.ac.uk/contemporarycuration

THE ROCK & ROLL

ARTiculation C U R AT E D BY M I C K J O N E S , J A M E S P U T N A M A N D A LT E R I A A R T

An international public speaking competition on art and architecture for young people

7th May 22nd November 2015 T U E S D AY - S U N D AY 10:00 - 18:00

ARTiculation Italy to be launched at the Venice Biennale 2015 in partnership with the British Council

Courtyard of the Istituto Santa Maria della P ieta E N T R A N C E O N C A L L E D E L L A P I E TA V E N E Z I A 30122 N E A R E S T VA P O R E T T O : ARSENALE / SAN ZACCARIA

ARTiculation 2015 events include ARTiculation England ARTiculation Scotland ARTiculation Ireland www.rochecourteducationaltrust.co.uk ARTiculation@sculpture.uk.com

therockandrollpubliclibrary.com facebook.com/rocknrollpl @rocknrollpl @rocknrollpl

Supported by:

Additional backing from:

Exhibition production:

Media Partner:

Richard Long, Tame Buzzard Line, 2001and David Nash, Black Butt, 2011 © the artists and New Art Centre

09/05 - 22/11 SANTA M. AUSILIATRICE 09/05 - 22/11 CASTELLO 450 WWW.WALESINVENICE.ORG.UK SANTA M. AUSILIATRICE CASTELLO 450

WiV_adverts.indd 1

WWW.WALESINVENICE.ORG.UK

ffotogallery ffotogallery

19/3/15 16:35:02

150 Galleries. 40 Countries. Over 500 Artists. 3 Punts Galeria / Spain / Germany 10 Chancery Lane / Hong Kong Aicon Gallery / USA AKI Gallery / Taiwan Albareh Contemporary / Bahrain Albemarle Gallery / UK Arndt / Germany / Singapore Art on 56th / Lebanon Arusha Gallery / UK Asia Art Center / Taiwan Ayyam Gallery / UK / UAE / Lebanon Beers London / UK Boesso Art Gallery / Italy Alessandro Casciaro / Italy The Cat Street Gallery / Hong Kong CCA Galleries and Coriander Studio London / UK Circle Culture Gallery / Germany Coates & Scarry / UK COB Gallery / UK Corridor Contemporary / Israel Cortesi Gallery / Switzerland / UK Cynthia-Reeves / USA DAM Gallery / Germany Da Xiang Art Space / Taiwan Delhi Art Gallery / India / USA Dillon Gallery / USA East Gallery / Taiwan Faur Zsófi Galéria / Hungary Fehily Contemporary / Australia Wadi Finan Gallery / Jordan The Fine Art Society / UK The Fine Art Society Contemporary / UK Flowers Gallery / UK / USA Frameless Gallery / UK Galerie du Monde / Hong Kong Gazelli Art House / UK / Azerbaijan Galerie Grand Siècle / Taiwan

Michael Goedhuis / UK Grosvenor Gallery / UK Galleria H. / Taiwan Mark Hachem / France / USA Hafez Gallery / Saudi Arabia Gallery H.A.N. / South Korea Kashya Hildebrand / UK Ifa Gallery / Belgium / China Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery / Japan Galerie Pascal Janssens / Belgium Jealous / UK Jenkins Johnson Gallery / USA Kanalidarte / Italy Khaas Art / Pakistan Kobayashi Gallery / Japan Galerie Kornfeld / Germany Pearl Lam Galleries / China / Hong Kong / Singapore Amy Li Gallery / China Liang Gallery / Taiwan Lin & Lin Gallery / Taiwan Louise Alexander Gallery / Italy Diana Lowenstein Gallery / USA Galerie Maria Lund / France Maddox Arts / UK Maerzgalerie / Germany Kalman Maklary Fine Arts / Hungary Anna Marra Contemporanea / Italy Mead Carney Fine Art / UK Meno Parkas / Lithuania Dominik Mersch / Australia Millennium / UK October Gallery / UK Olsen Irwin / Australia Omenka Gallery / Nigeria One East Asia / Singapore Galerie Ora-Ora / Hong Kong Paci Contemporary / Italy Galerie Frank Pages / Switzerland /

Germany Galerie Paris Beijing / France / Belgium / China The Park Gallery / UK Photo&Contemporary / Italy Piano Nobile / UK PIFO Gallery / China Praxis / USA / Argentina Priveekollektie Contemporary Art | Design / Netherlands Galeria Quadro / Romania Riflemaker / UK Rossi & Rossi / UK / Hong Kong Galleria Russo / Italy / Turkey Galerie RX / France Sanchit Art / India Sardac / France Karsten Schubert / UK Schütz Fine Art / Austria Alon Segev Gallery / Israel Shine Artists / UK Skipwiths / UK Gallery SoSo / South Korea Space Station / China Gallery Sumukha / India Sundaram Tagore Gallery / USA / Hong Kong / Singapore Tang Contemporary / Thailand / China / Hong Kong Tezukayama Gallery / Japan OTCA: Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art / UK Unix Gallery / USA Vanguard Gallery / China Mercedes Viegas Arte Contemporânea / Brazil Galerie Olivier Waltman / France / USA Yiri Arts / Taiwan Zemack Contemporary Art / Israel

Sabrina Amrani Gallery / Spain Artistique Design Gallery / Qatar Bosse & Baum / UK Hanmi Gallery / UK / South Korea IAGA / Romania Kevin Kavanagh / Ireland Galerie Koo / Hong Kong La New Gallery / Spain Mao Space / China Ohshima Fine Art / Japan Megan Piper / UK Son Espace / Norway / Spain Gallery Yang / China Zipper Galeria / Brazil

AnnArt Gallery / Romania Art On Istanbul / Turkey William Benington Gallery / UK Blau Projects / Brazil Circle Art Agency / Kenya Marian Cramer Projects / Netherlands Lychee One / UK Galerie Laurent Mueller / France Christine Park Gallery / UK Q0DE / Jordan Sulger-Buel Lovell / UK / South Africa Upfor Gallery / USA White Rainbow / UK

House of St Barnabas / UK Camden Arts Centre / UK Dundee Contemporary Arts / UK IADA / Kazakhstan Ikon Gallery / UK INIVA / UK Maraya Art Centre / UAE Modern Art Oxford / UK Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art / UK Postmodernism Museum / Romania Society of Nigerian Artists / Nigeria UAL: NOW / UK Whitechapel Art Gallery / UK Gallery list correct at time of print

artfairslondon.com

Art Featured

Boil the pasta letters in salted water until half-cooked 91

This is (not) Heimo Zobernig’s project for the Austrian Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale by Joshua Decter

ArtReview

May 2015

Heimo Zobernig will represent Austria at the 56th Venice Biennale. this language not to destabilise the social space of art presentation, At the initial time and place of this writing – Thursday, 12 March or to perform an orthodox form of institutional critique of the muse2015, in Mexico City – I have no idea what Zobernig is planning for um’s power, but rather to underscore how exhibitions are always the Austrian Pavilion. And it is better not to know in advance. Why in some way constructed, even theatricalised situations. Zobernig give it away before it needs to be given away? Several days later, as synthesises supposedly opposed characteristics: a rigorous analysis this writing continues in New York City, I remain in the dark. There’s of the spaces of art as a way to rethink interconnections between really no doubt that Zobernig is an excellent choice: he’s arguably painting, sculpture, architecture, design, place and utilitarian things Austria’s most significant living contemporary artist, having received (ie, appurtenances and furnishings) on the one hand, and an irreva survey show in 2013 co-organised by the Reina Sofía, Madrid, and erence regarding his own mastery, on the other. It’s the contradicthe Kunsthaus Graz. For his 2011 non-retrospective show at the tions simmering just beneath the surface that make Zobernig’s work Kunsthalle Zürich, the artist bathed the entire exhibition in red crackle and pop. I identify something of Michael Asher’s contextlight, thereby playfully recoding the works and suggesting a kind driven dialectical spirit in him: the reality that art frames the instiof new-millennium gesamtkunstwerk. These recent shows, by the tutional spaces it appears in and that those spaces in turn reframe the way, should be a cue for us institutions: art (the architectural frame occasionally I’d prefer to add something more it’s about time for Zobernig to have becoming the art, per se). a survey there too. Zobernig seems intuitively to grasp than just another hagiographic essay spatial design both as a discipline with Still, I’d prefer to add something about this artist, so instead more than just another hagiographic its own set of aesthetic principles, as I will speculate on what essay to the already voluminous amount well as an instrument for reengineering of writing (including my own) produced how publics encounter the places of Zobernig might do in Venice about this artist over the past few decades. contact between art and its frames. In his And so it occurred to me that to spice things up a bit, another path oeuvre, exhibition design can become ‘the art’, and art can become could be taken: speculate about what Zobernig might do in Venice. Of the ‘exhibition design’. Zobernig allows space to perform itself course, writing is not a crystal ball, and this text is not predictive engi- back to us, as a platform for art – even if the art, itself, becomes the neering, yet it’s possible to offer clues regarding what he might have platform, stage, podium, chair or other seemingly innocuous element in store for us at the Biennale. Or, rather, what will just have opened to navigate built space. And though his work exudes the confident by the time this text goes public. At least one thing seems certain, even intelligence of a well-engineered grammar – a grammar developed if this is more projection than speculation: Zobernig will engage with through recursive, tautological reworkings of the language itself – Josef Hoffmann’s original design of the 1934 pavilion building. Given there is also something that suggests it is not completely comfortthe artist’s history of cannily rethinking art’s interdependence with able in its own skin. Or maybe I’m just thinking about Zobernig’s design and architecture, Hoffmann’s early-modernist building would videos, such as Nr. 12 (1996) and Nr. 24 (2007), wherein he appears, a bit awkwardly, only in his own skin, stripped naked to the seem to be an ideal site for surgical tweaking. Since the 1980s, often in dryly humorous, occasionally self- world – the artist’s body as an almost accidental vehicle for the perfomance of intersections of televisual mocking neovaudevillian ways, Zobernig has Ohne Titel (in red), 2011 (installation view, media, painting, sculpture, theatre, comedy deftly manipulated the modernist codes that Kunsthalle Zürich at Museum Bärengasse, 2011). and other phenomena. The body as the first underpin geometric abstraction in visual art, © Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich. design, display and architecture. He amplifies and last architecture. Courtesy Kunsthalle Zürich

ArtReview

opening pages, left Untitled, 2009, mixed media, 244 × 148 × 50 cm.Photo: Archive hz. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

above Documentation of the making of a video installation included in Heimo Zobernig, 1996, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Courtesy Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago

opening pages, right Weißer Kubus (White Cube), 2002. Photo: Mumok, Vienna. © the artist. Courtesy Mumok, Vienna

May 2015

In 1995, I authored an essay titled ‘Unmistakably Art, Anything But Art: Zobernig’s Subversive Doubt’, which originally appeared in the catalogue of the artist’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession that year. What follows is a reassembling of fragments from the text, serving as a preamble to my speculations about what might happen in Venice: – Art, for Zobernig, has at the very least a double life. – Is Zobernig a conceptual artist? And what does it mean to be named a conceptual artist today? Is he producing meta-statements, or something akin to meta-art? Does anyone really know the difference between art and metaart, anyway? And what do we make of Zobernig’s smooth integration of painting into architecture – or is it the other way around? For his 1994 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, Zobernig deftly set into motion a number of conceptual and material conversions: painting into place, place into painting, painting into object, architecture into painting, painting into object, and architecture into object. – Is this thing what it appears to be, or is it something else? Is it a painting? Architecture? A sculptural object? None of the above? – Take away the apparent order established through systems of cultural distinction, and things begin to fall apart in the loveliest way imaginable. – When is architecture both architecture and not architecture? When it is the product of an art activity that creates the similitude of architecture. – And when is sculpture at once sculpture and not sculpture? When it is the product of an art activity that creates the similitude of sculpture.

– For instance, when is a café at once a café and not a café? When it is the product of an art activity that creates the similitude of a café. – Zobernig produced the similitude of a café, and yet this similitude was also a real, functional, café. – As a complex object/art object located within an architectural field of visible and invisible structural relations, a Zobernig painting becomes a material signifier for an intervention – a sign that becomes the index for site. – For Zobernig, painting is camouflage for an art activity or an art condition. Painting is a mask that makes art look more like art. – A Zobernig painting is certainly an actual painting, but it is also quite possibly something other than a painting. – When is a painting at once a painting and not a painting? When it is the product of an art activity that creates the similitude of a painting. – And when is an art object or art activity at once an art object / art activity and not an art object/art activity? When allegory takes over. – The allegorical function of an art object or an art activity brings it into a narrative (or meta-narrative) relation with both everyday life and art. Art cannot be taken for granted. Why? Because it no longer takes itself for granted – if it ever did. – As art begins to distance itself from itself in order to become more like an everyday thing, it moves closer to what it is already. – In other words: an extraordinary-everyday thing.

Heimo Zobernig, 2012 (installation view, Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid, 2012). Photo: Joaquín Cortés / Georg Petermichl. Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

ArtReview

top Untitled, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 100 × 100 cm. Photo: Todd White Art Photography, London. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong bottom Untitled, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 100 × 100 cm. Photo: Todd White Art Photography, London. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

May 2015

And to conclude: my speculations, educated guesses and questions regarding what Zobernig might do in Venice: – A performance of the production of the exhibition; the exhibition conceived as a performance. ––Reenactments of early theatrical pieces in which elements of conceptual art and performance art converge. ––A selection of early geometric abstract paintings. ––Sculptures that play with minimalist tropes wherein painting and object merge. ––Shall we play tennis on a concrete slab conceived by Zobernig? ––The exhibition space as discursive and social space, as an exhibition. ––The White Cube Is Always a Temporary Construct Until It Is Not. ––Monochromes. Stripes. A grammar of geometric abstraction in painting. ––Are these tables, sculptures, both, or something else? ––The use-value of art determined by the public within the frame of a social contact zone engineered by the artist. ––A room within a room: the museum-as-architecture composing rooms for art inside other rooms. ––Documenta 9 restaged within the Venice Biennale: the public’s access to the artworks is blocked. ––Backstage as frontstage as backstage: all the world’s a stage, including the pavilion. ––Reconfiguring the extant walls of the pavilion to resemble the artist’s initials: hz. ––A video of the artist walking naked through Venice projected onto the exterior and interior walls of the pavilion. ––Event-space pavilion: a podium, seating, Internet café and other functional appurtenances doubling as art objects assembled for a series of readings, discussions, talks and other social gatherings during the Biennale. ––The exhibition as the grammar of the exhibition. ––The pavilion is furnished with chairs. The chairs may be repurposed from other places within the Biennale ecosystem, or from elsewhere in Venice. The chairs may be custom-made according to the artist’s specifications, or designed in collaboration with another artist. ––A tribute to the late Franz West, with whom the artist collaborated, most notably for Documenta X. ––Chairs are artworks too. And not. And.

top Untitled, 1999, Parsol blue glass, glass overlay, angle steel, lacquer, 74 × 74 × 74 cm. Photo: Archive hz. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

––Multiple projection screens placed in relation to one another to suggest a constellation of projection screens. The exhibition is always a screen for something else.

bottom Heimo Zobernig, 2014 (installation view, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, 2014). Courtesy Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover

––A monochromatic painting is always just a painting and also a screen for something else.

ArtReview

––Visitors to the pavilion are invited to design a Zobernig poster for the exhibition; the designs are displayed throughout the duration of the Biennale. ––Zobernig places reflective materials on the walls of the pavilion, mirroring the space. The space is doubled, and publics are doubled. ––A video showing the artist, naked, wrestling a malleable object; the video is accompanied by a presentation of the object itself, a kind of artwork-prop-artwork. ––Halfway through the run of the Biennale, Zobernig deinstalls the exhibition, and reengages the space with a different set of actions, gestures, works or things. The process is documented, and the video screened for the remainder of the Biennale. ––An immense white cube is built into the space, connecting two extant walls. It becomes a permanent feature of the pavilion. ––Mannequins are distributed throughout the space; some are displayed within structures, some clothed in T-shirts, while others are partially painted. The mannequins are stand-ins for the artist, or a surrogate public welcoming the public. ––Zobernig restages – in compressed and respatialised form – his entire 2003 Mumok survey in the pavilion. ––The pavilion becomes a black-box theatre for a series of theatrical productions and screenings. ––Zobernig redisplays replicas of three cabinets originally made for the 2003 exhibition at Kunsthaus Zug, Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstatte; the cabinets were designed and produced in a prison workshop in Switzerland by the artist, a master carpenter and two inmates of the prison. The pavilion as prison? ––Red curtains (theatrically lit) are draped over the extant walls of the pavilion, suggesting a stage set for an exhibition about to take place. Videos are presented behind certain curtains, and the artist’s publication designs are archived in glass cases. The exhibition is a layering of facades. ––A bluescreen video features Zobernig, naked, accosted by three anonymous figures in chroma-key jumpsuits; they tape over his mouth and genitals, erasing body parts. The three tormentors heap art magazines and catalogues onto him, and wrestle him down, enacting a symbolic obliteration of the artist. ––Various grid paintings are installed on a large gridlike armature. Grids over grids. Additional paintings are displayed within cagelike structures that connote art storage systems; each day, a new work is taken out of ‘storage’ and displayed on the structure’s exterior. ––The artist introduces a new wall into the Hoffmann building that exists, almost invisibly, as both sculptural object and architectural element, altering the public’s experience of the liminal qualities of the pavilion space. ––Zobernig delegates all curatorial decisions to the commissioner of the pavilion, as an artistic-curatorial gesture. – The commissioner decides to delegate back all curatorial responsibilities to the artist. ar

top Heimo Zobernig, 2009 (installation view, capc Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 2009). Photo: F. Deval, Mairie de Bordeaux. Courtesy capc Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux bottom Untitled, 1993, synthetic resin lacquer on particle board, 202 × 102 × 35 cm. Photo: Archive hz. Courtesy the artist

May 2015

100

ArtReview

Tobias Zielony The German photographer, one of five artists representing that country at the Venice Biennale, depicts people living on the margins in a way that is itself ambiguously positioned – between documentary photography, photojournalism and art by Kimberly Bradley

“How is boredom interesting, or important?” Berlin-based artist says the artist. He succeeds in pinning us to the images themselves, Tobias Zielony asks me this question in a café near Checkpoint even if they do often obscure the boundaries between documentary Charlie, surrounded by other customers neurotically checking their photography, photojournalism and fine art. Several times in our conversation, in fact, Zielony speaks slightly disparagingly of joursmartphones or rushing out with coffees to go. I reflect on Zielony’s question, and think of the subjects of his nalism and journalists – citing unprepared interviewers, misquotes photographs and films from the early part of his career – usually or, more importantly, that it’s difficult to photograph or film subjects listless, seemingly purposeless young people living at the fringes of who have been previously disappointed by a prior photojournalist’s society. Then I think of boredom itself, and realise that in a produc- lack of engagement or time. At times, however, I wonder whether the tivity-hacking, network-cultured era, it has become increasingly rare, artist perhaps also harbours a certain tense ambivalence towards a even suspicious, to do nothing. Boredom is feared. It’s a state of being trade and visual culture that lies so close and yet so far from his own. or not-being largely relegated to have-nots; those without access to His subjects remain anonymous, ‘stories’ appear as fragments; socially loaded situations are aestheticised. We never learn the identhe infinite distractions of Western society. Along with social marginalisation and an exploration of docu- tities of the people in Zielony’s Trona series, shot in the meth-addled mentary photography’s ideologies, boredom is an important, if ‘armpit of America’ in the California desert in 2008. Nor the First perhaps invisible, theme running through Zielony’s oeuvre. He Nations people – mostly men, but also families – from in and around shoots the disenfranchised and the places they live and work – derelict the Canadian prairie city of Winnipeg in his Manitoba series (2009–11). housing projects, desert slums, bus stops, Jenny Jenny (2011–13), a haunting ensemble gas stations – in limbo, loitering, posing, of photographs and a film depicting Zielony says he gains his subjects’ being bored. “It’s very difficult to depict trust by not judging or moralising, several Berlin-based prostitutes and their milieus, offers only hints of where, when, boredom,” says Zielony, who was born in by taking time and by not trying how and who. Instead we see representaWuppertal, Germany, in 1973 and is one of five artists representing that nation tions of a woman in her underwear with to ‘save’ anyone a jaggedly scarred belly, a concrete stairat this year’s Venice Biennale. (He is, by the way, clearly not bored – approachable and friendly, with almost case leading into a desolate housing project by night and a young Nordic looks and an occasional deep chuckle, he exudes a combi- woman we assume, from the title, is named Steffi. Other series show nation of calm and hyperalertness, as if he’s continually processing peripheries and their people in Poland, the outskirts of Rome or contextual information but never getting ruffled.) “I even thought Naples, Marseilles, Dortmund and other places. Some images seem boredom was an act of refusal or rebellion, but I’m not so sure about candid, others feel posed, as if the subjects were jumping at the chance that any more.” to be granted a voice, a place in modern image culture, perhaps for Zielony’s fascination with the edges began during two courses the first time. Zielony says he gains his subjects’ trust by not judging of study – the first in Newport, Wales, during the late 1990s study- or moralising, by taking time (for Jenny Jenny, 18 months) and by not ing documentary photography and the second a degree in fine-art trying to ‘save’ anyone, even if he’s twice been asked to be a youth photography at the Leipzig Art Academy. It was at the former, an leader through his photographic work. His motivation? “With the institution geared towards editorial reportage in a working-class young people in Wales or Manitoba, it was more that these people city, that Zielony “noticed that the way I photograph and the stuff are as important as anybody else. They form daily life and society, too, that interests me doesn’t have so much news value”, leading him so why not talk about them?” intentionally to place his ambiguous, ambivalent works into an art Here arise the perennial issues of photography’s ability or inability to depict ‘truth’ or act as a window on or mirror to reality – as context and head to Leipzig and the international artworld. Ambivalence and ambiguity are, of course, the opposite of the clear well as ethical questions of the author’s infiltration of a situation, the narratives and digestible stories that photojoursubjects’ complicity and thus coauthorship, the facing page Light Box, 2013, viewer’s interpretation. Some series (especially nalism demands: “I’m trying to create a nonlinear from the series Jenny Jenny, 2011–13, narrative outside the time- or story-based one,” Jenny Jenny, one could argue) can be seen as purely c-print, 88 × 59 cm

May 2015

101

voyeuristic; others come uncomfortably close to poverty porn, even if the subjects are granted a certain grace and dignity. Zielony, who considers his work not documentary photography but an exploration of its history and ideas, is well aware of these problems, bringing up names like Marxist artist and art theorist Victor Burgin, who at first saw fine art and documentary photography as mutually antagonistic. Back to the notion of boredom – is it indeed rebellion, or simply an inevitable byproduct of marginalisation and poverty? Does depicting that boredom reveal a social problem to be solved, or condemn the subjects to remain forever in their disenfranchised states? Does it simply make viewers into apathetic recipients of yet another anaesthetising wave of images? Zielony’s pictures are haunting, his nocturnal overexposures of people and places eerily beautiful, but they don’t solve photography’s perennial dilemmas. They push our image-weary buttons and, as the artist says, “ask what photography can do”. Lately Zielony seems to be going beyond boredom – filming and photographing far less lassitude and more proactivity, as well as playing with new aesthetic approaches. In a recent exhibition featuring his films at Berlin’s kow gallery, the newest works represented a break in subject matter and style. A film shot in Ramallah under the auspices of a Goethe-Institut scholarship is a loose remake of Kenneth Anger’s 1965 Kustom Kar Kommandos. Zielony’s slick Kalandia Kustom Kar Kommandos (2014) sees two Palestinian men gently polish, then drive, a vintage Volkswagen to a soundtrack of the Paris Sisters’ version of Dream Lover (1964); the result is a vaguely homoerotic, fetishistic homage. It was the first time Zielony had worked on a storyboarded production, and the first time he lent his ‘eye’ to a camera operator.

When I ask about his upcoming appearance in the German Pavilion – curated by Florian Ebner, with artists assembled to explore the concepts of contemporary image culture and distribution – Zielony says “he can’t say much” (discretion is another reason we’re meeting in a cafe, and not in his studio nearby, which apparently contains a model of the pavilion. He also only moved in a couple of weeks before). But he can reveal that what will be on view in Venice will primarily be photographs featuring refugee activists currently living in Germany. “They’ve illegally left the camps in German cities and formed a protest movement. They use media to have a bigger impact. In a sense it’s a collaboration, really,” he says. ‘Collaboration’ is a loaded, interesting word in this context. Zielony may be heading into what is for him new territory, illuminating more overtly political issues occurring in more familiar locations, and most importantly (and problematically) taking more agency. His voice becomes more passionate. “At the end of the 1990s we had [Fukuyama’s] The End of History, but now history is coming back with a bang. Look at the Arab Spring. You can’t just sit and think about simulacra – even the war in Bosnia was a challenge to theory at the time. Some political issues are political issues for a reason.” His words again raise old questions of what realities photography is capable of not only depicting but also shifting (at the very least in public consciousness); what art may or may not be capable of in terms of “real” politics, especially in the delineated space of a biennial. Hito Steyerl, one of Zielony’s coconspirators in the German Pavilion, has interestingly written that ‘the only real documentary image is the one that shows something that does not yet exist and maybe come[s] one day’. Something to consider as we await an exhibition that will likely be far from boring. ar

above The opening, 2004, from the series Tankstelle, 2004, c-print, 48 × 72 cm facing page 13 Ball, 2008, from the series Trona – Armpit of America, 2008, c-print, 84 × 56 cm all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and kow, Berlin

102

ArtReview

May 2015

103

Artists with Borders by Robert Barry

104

ArtReview

Transnationalism seems to be one of the essential qualities of whatever it is we mean by ‘contemporary art’. Why then does one of its biggest showcases insist on national entries? Is it just to entice artists to screw such notions up?

above Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), 2011, digital still from five-hour performance on Tijuana/San Diego border, performance documentation. Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco facing page Hans Haacke, germania (installation view), German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1993. Photo: Roman Mensing. © the artist / vg Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

May 2015

105

On 14 June 2011 Ana Teresa Fernández walked up to the us-Mexico staged the first international exhibition of painting, but it did so in border at Playas de Tijuana and began painting its imposing struts a manner little different to the way Britain’s Great Exhibition four in a wan sky-blue. After a few hours, at least when seen from a certain years earlier had presented industrial gadgets and gizmos. Here was angle and in a certain light, a considerable swathe of the fron- the world under one roof, precursor to our own dear shopping malls, tier seemed to have vanished, as its new coat of paint matched the wherein European nations no longer at war (at least for a little while) receding sea, shore and sky behind. Fernández’s Borrando la Frontera advertised their wares for the facilitation of international trade. (Erasing the Border, 2011) makes conspicuously manifest one of the more In the words of Anthony D. Smith’s The Nation Made Real: Art and glibly utopian powers commonly attributed to art in the twenty-first National Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (2013), art in this period century: that of being able to make national borders and the strictures had ‘helped to make the abstract notions of “nation” and “national of political geography seem to vanish, rendering the world at once identity” palpable and accessible to the educated classes’. So John Constable’s Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’) (1816–7), with its vaster and more intimate. On course to becoming something of a cliché, this ideal makes the well-groomed meadows and earthy rural types, had conjured up a Venice Biennale, with its quasi-colonial division by national pavil- mythical ‘British Arcadia’, the very image of Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’. J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting ions, seem all the more anachronistic in Hans Haacke’s famous assault Temeraire (1839), depicting a boat used in an age of seemingly unstoppable highspeed global information flows. Two the Battle of Trafalgar, offered up a nostalon the floor of the German Pavilion years ago, when I interviewed Anri Sala, gic evocation of past military triumphs. seemed to symbolise the wrecking of an Albanian artist living in Berlin who Through such emotive images, in that year was in Venice representing more than just a particular building painting made the sense of a national France but doing so (due to a mutually British culture feel more palpable to a agreed swap) in the German Pavilion, he and his curator, Christine class then engaged in exporting that culture – by force, if necessary – to Macel, agreed that the question of nationality and national repre- colonies in Asia and beyond. But at the end of the century, for nations sentation was essentially irrelevant. “We are in a postnational time seeking independence – like Norway and Hungary – or newly united in the artworld,” Macel told me, in a manner suggesting this was so nations – like Italy and Germany – art acted as a powerful beacon obvious as to barely require comment. So why, when other biennials capable of rallying popular energies to a common cause and common identity. In the case of Hungary, the building of a national pavilion at have dropped it, does Venice persist with the national model? The origins of the Venice Biennale go back to the late nineteenth Venice in 1909 actually preceded the birth of an independent Hungary. century. Founded in 1895 and initially planned as a showcase for A hundred years later, however, the national model was increasItalian art, the exhibition soon broadened its attentions to the rest of ingly coming in for a kicking. Hans Haacke’s famous assault on the the world. The first national pavilions were built from 1907, starting floor of the German Pavilion in 1993 seemed to symbolise the wrecking with Belgium, followed by Hungary, Germany, Britain, France and of more than just a particular building. In the same year, Biennale director Achille Bonito Oliva initiated a trend Sweden. The model for such a system came direct John Constable, Flatford Mill of encouraging national participants to select a from the World Expos of the preceding decades. (‘Scene on a Navigable River’), 1816–7, oil combination of homegrown and foreign talent. In 1855, the French Exposition Universelle had on canvas, 102 × 127 cm. © Tate, London 2015

106

ArtReview

Numbers of competing biennials and art fairs were growing exponentially across the globe, few of which followed the national model (the last to do so, the Bienal de São Paulo, gave up on its countryspecific representation in 2006). In a climate of intellectual postmodernism and general post-Cold War global togetherness, thinking about artworks in terms of the arbitrary lines on a map that happened to encircle the particular place and time of an artist’s birth suddenly seemed altogether unbefitting. But as Vittorio Urbani pointed out to me, these criticisms – coinciding with the opening up of the Biennale to greater participation from non-Western nations – tended to come, for the most part, from “smarter Northern European countries”. Urbani manages a nonprofit association called Nuova Icona. Based in Venice, since 1993 Nuova Icona has collaborated in producing the national participation at the Biennale of several smaller, more marginalised nations, from Finland and Wales to Azerbaijan and the Lebanese Republic. In 2009 it played a critical role in the inclusion of Palestine in the 53rd Biennale. This was a project fraught with difficulties, not least the refusal of the Biennale’s directors to bestow the exhibition with the title of ‘pavilion’, as this would imply diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state on the part of the Italian government. In the end Palestine c/o Venice was called a ‘collateral event’, a title with some unfortunate military resonances for a nation under a permanent state of siege. Then a project by Emily Jacir to append Arabic transliterations to each stop on the local water-bus routes was cancelled at the last minute by the mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari. “I don’t want to talk about a plot against it,” Urbani told me, “but there were problems.” Chatting with Urbani via Skype, I started to get a sense of the different meanings taking part in something like the Venice Biennale could hold for countries outside the mainstream of artistic production and exchange. This year Nuova Icona is working on the Iraq Pavilion. Urbani recalled a conversation with his cocommissioner, the Iraqi historian Tamara Chalabi, in which she explained how depressing it

is for ordinary Iraqis that the only images of their country in the international media tend to be marching soldiers, grief-stricken women and bullet-ridden cars. “We may not have a country called Iraq next year,” she said to him when they first spoke about organising the pavilion last year. For Urbani, this is a truly political act: “to make a pavilion on the edge of a disaster”. I got a similar sense from talking to other representatives of marginalised nations. For Wu Tien-chang, whose solo exhibition will make up the Taiwanese participation this year, the importance of such an event lies in the debate it generates within the country on the changing status of Taiwanese identity. Charles Lim, whose Sea State project (2005–15) occupies the Singaporean Pavilion, told me that “when there is an exhibition of Southeast Asian art in Europe or North America, it is often in a group-show format. Very rarely does one hear about a Southeast Asian artist having a major solo exhibition in Europe. The national pavilions in Venice, for better or for worse, provide that platform.” A similar attitude was expressed by Chus Martínez, curator to a Catalonian national collateral event. The best way to break the sclerotic national tradition is by expanding it: only through “the proliferation of other pavilions” do you gradually “break that idea of a nation”. But at the end of the day, the situation in Iraq remains precarious and Palestine seems further than ever from statehood. Under such circumstances, the simple act of getting artists out of their countries to come to Venice can be, as Urbani told me, “a nightmare”. Mongolia, hosting its own national pavilion for the first time this year, had to resort to an Indiegogo campaign to finance travel and materials (when it closed on 8 March, Mongolia had reached less than 2 percent of its $50,000 goal). If art can sometimes seem as transnational as the financial system from which it is increasingly inextricable, actual flesh-and-blood people continue to present a limiting factor. No matter how well Ana Teresa Fernández painted that Mexican border, it remained just as impassable for anyone stuck on the wrong side. ar

Enkhbold Togmidshiirev, performance, Time and Space Festival, Jeju Island, South Korea, 2010. Photo: Enkhjargal Ganbat. Courtesy the artist

May 2015

107

108

bgl – Canadassimo The Québécois collective brings its trademark mix of pranks and tomfoolery – risky materials in artmaking – to the Venice Biennale by Craig Burnett

109

The Giardini during the Biennale – so often hot, crowded and grim – Laverdière’s English, we’d barely understand each other.) This dépancould use a dépanneur and a place that’s a little less serious. Enter bgl, neur has a twist: many of the product labels are blurry. It’s not all the a three-part collective from Québec City, bringing a bit of their local prosecco you’ve been drinking. bgl scanned, blurred and reprinted the culture and a few laughs to Venice. bgl formed in 1996, when Jasmin labels. “When you enter, everything is normal,” explains Laverdière. Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière, preparing for an “But if you’re curious, you’ll notice that something is wrong. It’s physexhibition, gathered the work they’d made in pairs or on their own ically annoying. When you discover it, we hope it provokes pleasure.” and threw it into a kind of see-through garden shed. Combined effort, Annoying pleasure. Maybe you’ll need a rest, duly offered in the playful process, single result: the bgl template was set with their very next space, the second of three. But let’s step outside for a second. first work. The Canada Pavilion has an almost domestic scale and atmosphere, If you’re Canadian, you might know what a dépanneur – or ‘dep’ – is. and because our pranksters wanted to make it look like it was underIf you’re a Quebecker, you know them intimately. A dep is the province’s going renovations, they covered it in scaffolding, built a kind of ‘patio’ answer to that mainstay of any street corner worldwide: a small shop above the whole structure – and added a layer of fake windows. From where you might grab a bag of crisps, some window cleaner or a soda. the ‘patio’, visitors are encouraged to throw their money away (not And that’s stage one of the three-part experience that bgl will build usually a problem in Venice), tossing coins into precipitous channels in the Canada Pavilion: a downmarket dep, replete with tinned goods, that shoot for five or six metres before falling into a space between foodstuffs, Québécois beer, plumbing problems and even a few things windows, where the coins will drop, dart and ding off bolts between two panes of glass as if the facade were a giant you might need in Venice (umbrella, anyone?), above Taxi Chicha Muffler, 2013, performance, pachinko machine. Inside, to help you watch and all in near-perfect verisimilitude. London taxi. Photo: Natalie Jean listen to this spectacle of money falling from the “A lot of our work functions on that ambiguity preceding pages Canadassimo, 2015, of knowing whether it’s true or not,” explains Venetian skies, bgl has laid on a giant sofa. work in progress for the Canada Pavilion, Laverdière, spokesperson for the group because The pavilion culminates in the next space, an Venice Biennale. Photo: Ivan Binet his English is the best. (I spent a summer studartist’s lair festooned with strange terracotta figuboth images Courtesy the artists; rines and countless cans for mixing paint. Some ying French at Laval in Québec, the same univerParisian Laundry, Montreal; character seems to inhabit the pavilion, running sity where bgl went to art school. Yet without and Diaz Contemporary, Toronto

110

ArtReview

a dépanneur by day, painting in the backroom in off hours. His studio, crises. “Personally,” he says, “I felt my engagement was about keeping offers Laverdière, is “a total mess”, and the artist is “hypnotised by the craziness and liberty alive.” The more he tries to explain this posipleasure of mixing paints in the cans. They are in the centre of the tion, the more tongue-tied he becomes. Eventually, he says, “When I room, on the comptoir – these cans are everywhere and full of colours.” try to explain in English, je suis melangé.” But this isn’t a problem with The figurines – “gods, animals, a lot of little personnages” – look like fluency. We all get mixed up trying to articulate how humour operates they were made from warm clay, but this is another trick. A bin sits in art, how it can have such a liberating effect on the viewer. in a corner of the studio, oozing terracotta goo. The plan was to make According to Kant, Voltaire said that heaven offered two things to all these mass-produced idols look raw and artisanal, so they dipped counterbalance life’s hardships: hope and sleep. ‘He might have added them all in brownish paint. A wash of rainbow waits. laughter,’ intoned Kant, except for the fact that the ability to arouse bgl trade in tomfoolery. For Rapides et dangereux (2005), they donned laughter was a scarcer talent than writing books that break your black and yellow tights and rollerbladed through Québec City, push- head, neck or heart. Humour, in other words, is more difficult than ing a modified (four extra wheels at the front) but idle motorbike dreaming, thinking or sentimentalising. It’s even tougher in visual through the streets like space-age jackasses. In 2013, they tipped a Lon- art. Make a joke and you risk bathos or banality. Laughter demands don taxi on its side and attached a shisha pipe to its muffler, inviting a communal spirit, a bit of faith from your public and fellow artists. passersby to take a puff. On a Montréal roundabout this year the col- When I asked how bgl became a collective, Laverdière described how lective will see the installation of La Vélocité des Lieux, a massive sculp- they decided two days before the opening of their first show to gather ture of a Ferris wheel that looks like it was made from bus carriages. All all the objects they’d made as individual artists and throw them into of these works have something in common with Canadassimo, the title what he called a cabanon, Québécois for a wooden shed. With the shed for their pavilion: they emphasise communal experience, absurdity, covered in transparent plastic, the individual pieces were faintly risk, humiliation and goofiness. When I ask Laverdière about humour discernible, but the work was now a composite structure, a Déchets in their work, he replies immediately, “I think it’s d’œuvres. The title is a pun, untranslatable, but I’d above Rapides et dangereux, 2005, offer something like Trash Masterpieces. Born an our job.” He then mentions that a few years ago there performance, motorcycles. oxymoron, bgl are still willing to risk throwing it was a lot of talk about l’art engagé: art that is quantifiPhoto: Jean-Michel Ross. ably useful, responsive to social and environmental all away to make us laugh. ar Courtesy the artists

May 2015

111

Sean Lynch by Chris Fite-Wassilak

By mixing anecdotal history with ‘official’ art history, everyday experience with museum-style preciousness and learned with unlearned opinion, Ireland’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale offers viewers a practical insight into the point of standing around and looking at art 112

ArtReview

The neighbourhood wasn’t happy: infuriated mothers united to paintings, improvised amateur sculpture, funding bylaws or a joke protest the unnamed ‘ugly old thing’ that had apparently become told down at the pub – with equal heft. a ‘nuisance’ and a site for teenage ‘cider parties’. As an August 1988 Lynch takes for granted a postmodern approach to history as somenewspaper article reports, ‘[Mrs Breda White’s] son had to get a stitch thing spiralled, overlapping, potted. Accordingly, his work is filled when he banged into it as he was playing with his friends. Mrs White with forgotten histories and overlooked objects: DeLorean Progress perhaps summed up the feelings of most of the mothers when she Report (2009–11) used photography and sculpture to trace the castsaid: “All right it was the child’s own fault. But if the sculpture wasn’t iron tooling used to fabricate the body panels and infamous doors of there, it wouldn’t have happened.”’ Ultimately, 62 signatures backed the DeLorean dmc-12 automobile (which was originally produced in a a petition to remove the red steel sculpture that occupied the Cork suburb of Belfast, Northern Ireland) – from various scrap-yard advenhousing estate’s green. tures to the current use of 12 of the pieces as weights for fish cages for Mrs White’s faultless logic, lumping social issues on unwanted salmon farming off the coast of County Galway, Ireland. His booklet monumental modern art, seems as good a place as any to start trying Views of Dublin (2008), meanwhile, follows via newspaper clippings to describe the work of Sean Lynch. The neighbourhood’s petition remnants of the replica Berlin Wall built in Dublin for the filming features in Lynch’s publication project Yesterday’s Papers (2008), which of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) through to their later use in collects ‘an overview of newspaper coverage of art and artists in rebuilding Dublin’s first school for traveller children. The wall replica Ireland in the past fifty years’. As it turns out, the sculpture, an angular, and the failed car are quite specific, unusual objects, it’s true. But at Calder-like example of classic modernist public sculpture titled their heart, the projects seem to want to hold us to account for the Uniflow (1985), by John Burke, was removed from the estate as a result way we treat the things that we make, to chronicle the microhistories of the complaint, and to this day remains abandoned, half-buried in of the stuff we surround ourselves with, inherit, lose. Lynch’s way of an outdoor storage yard on the outskirts of Cork. But it has resur- working is to release multitudes of these animated footnotes, tuning faced as a character in Lynch’s Adventure: Capital (2014–15), the project us into the seams of history he’s pushing at. with which he will represent Ireland at this year’s Venice Biennale. His exhibition For the Birds at the Visual Centre for Contemporary The Uniflow incident brings together many of Lynch’s recurrent inter- Art in Carlow last year picked up on the Irish medieval myth of mad ests: anecdotal history, mundane experiences of political and artistic king Sweeney. In the tale, the cursed king becomes half man, half currents, and an almost existential concern for the civic life of an bird, living in trees, reciting intricate verses and eating moss until a artwork. What these interests lead to are playful, sprawling instal- maid takes pity on him, serving him milk in an improvised vessel of lations that might each be termed a museum to the upturned stone, hollowed-out cow dung. Lynch took the chance to bring the story to careful constellations of posters, slides, clippings and trinkets that life, ushering a cow in to do its business in the gallery and surrounding suggest alternative understandings of ‘the object’ and ‘the artwork’ the result with large-scale sculptures, by the artist Tom Fitzgerald, based on Sweeney’s life. Sweeney has been a that we’ve inherited from dominant narratives like, say, the museum and Modernism. There’s above and facing page DeLorean Progress Report (details), popular literary trope, invoked by Seamus 2009–11, colour photographs, essay, handmade an egalitarian slant to his revisionism, treating stainless steel bodypanels of a DeLorean dmc-12 car. Heaney and T.S. Eliot, and here he was called upon as part of a musing on the disappearance all cultural artefacts – whether films, novels, Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery, London

May 2015

113

above and facing page A Blow by Blow Account of Stonecarving in Oxford (details), 2013–14, slide projector with voiceover, stonecarving, rubble, photographs, museum artefacts, printed matter. Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice 2015

114

ArtReview

of the Irish farming industry, the stereotype of the Irish wandering alongside a block of sandstone carved into a small monkey-shaped spirit and also what, if anything, we make of things when we look at caryatid (made by contemporary carver Stephen Burke, the chunks them as art. In Lynch’s vision, it’s not so much that everything is art, and rubble from the process piled nearby), next to objects borrowed but that the renegotiation of meanings is an artistic act. For him, it from various ethnography collections and pictures of the cheery seems that art can be not only a space where reality and fiction merge, ‘Chuckie the chicken’ icon, all quietly intermingle. A narrated slideshow stirs these elements into a potent mix, suggesting connections but also a space were shit actually happens. Sweeney had risen before, in parodic form, in the pages of Flann between emigration, evolutionary theory and the ideological frameO’Brien’s madcap book-within-a-book-within-a-book At Swim-Two- works of museums. Birds (1939). There’s a passage embedded late in the tale where the It’s this swirling mass that might be the best indication of Lynch’s characters revolt, subjecting their author to countless degrading inju- forthcoming Venice project, Adventure: Capital. Starting similarly ries before holding him to trial for his literary crimes. O’Brien corrals with stone, this work is about – if it’s ‘about’ anything – solidificaelements of Irish sagas, romance novels and cowboy westerns into an tion, accumulation and building: of wealth, of cities, of stories, of unruly procession to impress upon us a moral: stories are alive, semi- meaning. Centring on a meandering narrated projection of stills, the conscious creations that continue working on us long after we think project takes us from the edifices of finance in London, to the statue of we’re done with them. The most we can John Lennon at his eponymous airport do is attempt to herd them in rough in Liverpool, via Belfast to Burke’s abanAll the physical objects and artefacts directions that might eventually create doned steel sculpture in Cork, back Lynch brings together are characters to a quarry in Cornwall and towards a a more or less meaningful trajectory. that inform the loose, unfinished proposal for a new public sculpture. Lynch similarly seems fully to grasp This projection is accompanied by a set this; all of the physical objects and artenarratives of his work facts he brings together are characters of stone carvings of Greek river gods – a that inform and wander through the loose, unfinished narratives symbol of trade, a representation of which appeared on Irish bankof his work, each patiently but insistently asking us to provide the notes from the 1920s until the 60s, and a version of which we might be familiar with from when it hit the front pages as one of the first answers as to why they’re there in the first place. His recent project A Blow by Blow Account of Stonecarving in Oxford Elgin marbles to travel, the headless statue of the river god Ilissos, (2013–14) was a multifaceted installation, incorporating information heading on loan to Russia. Through Lynch’s meticulous research on the O’Shea brothers, Irish stonemasons who operated during the and his studious, unravelling practice, it seems a spiral of cultural mid-nineteenth century and who had carved the ornamental details and political circulation and representation is set to be unleashed, on the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Lynch, natu- with Lynch the enthusiastic and goading shepherd of these stories. rally, sets this in motion in a widening gyre, connecting their work The redefined public sculpture, which is perhaps what he could be with the Ark at Vauxhall, Britain’s first public museum – which, said to be proposing in all of his projects, is storied, unending and according to Lynch, through drunken, shady dealings became the perhaps doesn’t even need us anyway: at one point in the journey, in foundation of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, and whose site is now an animated segment of the video, Burke’s Uniflow gets up from the a branch of Favorite Chicken & Ribs. Photographs of their carvings, hole it’s been sitting in for over two decades and walks away. ar

May 2015

115

116

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2015

117

118

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2015

119

120

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2015

121

Michaël Borremans by Martin Herbert

One of Europe’s most technically accomplished painters, the Belgian artist’s enigmatic work is full of contradiction, humour, horror, beauty and a cautious approach to truth 122

ArtReview

On the eastern outskirts of Ghent, in a far-from-glitzy residential can only say what you can’t – you’re not wrong. Borremans’s practice, street, there’s a narrow terraced house with a battered wooden service as he unfurls it in conversation, amalgamates reaching in the dark and door. The doorbell reads ‘Borremans’, and the first-time visitor might getting the job done; characterises, indeed, reaching in the dark as the accordingly do a double take, wondering how one of the leading fig- job. And if you have to wear a bunny suit to paint, you wear the bunny urative painters of his generation can operate from here. Then the art- suit. Sitting beside us as we talk is a recent canvas, a big work that packs ist, a dapper figure in his early fifties, unlocks the door, we edge around a group-figure composition’s worth of complexity into a single chara Porsche, and the courtyard opens up in front of the concealed studio acter wearing an ominous, pointy, glossy black hood, isolated, as with complex – one of two, alongside a remodelled nineteenth-century most of Borremans’s work, on a voidlike ground. “There are always chapel elsewhere in the city – that Michaël Borremans converted a lot of allusions in my work: here, the Catholic church, the Ku Klux Klan, isis, nuns, whatever. It’s not explicit, but it’s all there. But, you by hand a couple of decades ago, before he became successful. It’s nearly twilight, the close of the artist’s working day. Before know, I cannot explain all this. In a very intuitive way, I reflect on these big windows lose the light, we visit a sequence of voluminous, what’s in our collective consciousness, and also art history. I find it a well-organised rooms, neat warrens of worktables and shelves and very interesting way of communicating – extremely loose, but still tasteful raw-brick walls, including a ground-floor winter studio and, emotionally very efficient. I’m always thinking of the psychological on the first floor, a double-height summer one. We cross the nook, impact of an image that I’m creating when I’ll show it, because you complete with canvas backdrop and, right now, a querulous little make a painting in the studio, but the act of painting is showing it – stuffed animal, where Borremans takes the photographs that serve as I’m aware, or I’m thinking about, the effect on a possible viewer. It’ll the basis for his paintings. In another space, using packing materials be different for everyone, but I want to decide on the direction it has.” and card, he builds the sculptural sets from which he makes his tight, Rewind through Borremans’s practice since the late 1990s – after dreamlike drawings, characterised by impossible incongruities of he took a sabbatical from teaching and embarked on a make-or-break scale. One room, opening onto the courtyard, is dominated by a mint- move towards being a serious artist – and you’ll find certain constants condition vintage Mercedes S-Class, gleaming black. Somewhere in that ‘direction’. Depictions of enigmatic pursuits bordering on along the way we pass the adult-size rabbit suit that Borremans claims Surrealism, for one thing: in The Pupils (2001), painted in the brownish sometimes to wear while painting. austerity colours of Borremans’s early phase – a degree of colour has The archetypal Borremans paintOne room, opening onto the courtyard, bloomed in his art since – three men ing is a seductive enigma, a bouilis dominated by a mint-condition vintage each disaffectedly probe decapitated labaisse of specificity, obscurity, Mercedes S-Class, gleaming black. heads. A dozen years later, in The anxiety, humour and great techFalse Head (2013), a lifelike portrait nique. In The Devil’s Dress (2011), a Somewhere along the way we pass the of a blonde woman, eyes closed, falls woman – assumedly, as one can’t adult-size rabbit suit that Borremans claims see the face or body very well – lies apart at the neck as it appears, imposon the ground, torso and thighs sibly, that she’s wearing a headsometimes to wear while painting covered in what is less a dress than covering rubber mask. In Eating the a polygonal piece of cardboard, painted red. While the title unnerves, Beard (2010), a woman appears to chew or spew a mass of brown, dribwhat the sumptuous brushiness of the painting gives one to grip bling paint that we read, as per the title, as facial hair. In The Angel onto is at least partly art-historical – a conscious conversation with (2013), a tall woman (modelled by Belgian supermodel and actress Manet in general and also Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Hannelore Knuts) stands in a pale pink formal dress or a nightdress, Tulp (1631). The painting somehow manages simultaneously to speak looking expressionlessly down, her blonde hair pulled back, her face clearly and to stutter. It ties itself to a pedigree while registering slathered – voluntarily or not – in black paint. (One sees, notably, the a break; it conveys, with certitude, a problem about conveyance itself. edges of the studio backdrop: this is a setup, in more ways than one.) Sitting by a log fire, flanked by his guitars – inexpensive copies of a In The Son (2013), a boy, too, looks down, fibrous beams of white light National Steel and a hollow-bodied jazzer’s instrument – Borremans shooting from his eyes – although those beams are, of course, just paint is explaining how he first came to work in this structurally abstruse strokes; Borremans never lets you forget you’re looking at a painting. way. “It’s really a philosophical question about what truth can be. You’ll be drawn into the outright strangeness of what he’s done, then And truth is just as much in the lie as in something straightfor- reminded that the interpretative rigmarole you’ve gone through is in ward or honest. All of this came very organically for me from the way the service of something that, objectively, has no meaning. I perceived the world since I was a child: that there’s a variety of interI mention to Borremans one interpretation of his work, by The pretations of something called ‘truth’. And I was always cautious Observer’s Laura Cumming: that its primary subject must be painting about it. As an adolescent, that’s where my fascination for cinema itself, because it sets up a situation that appears to have a before-andcame in. They build decors; they fake everything to make it seem real. after, and yet there can be none, because it’s a painting. He assents. And if they do it with that,” he continues, warming to his mistrust, “That was always the magic of painting for me. It’s a window to “they do it with everything. To have it is to use it. Landing on the moon, a space you cannot enter, and that’s partly what mystifies a painting. wars – you never know. So therefore in my work I want to give infor- I was trained as an etcher – I’m starting to do it again, I was good at mation in a way that’s clearly incorrect, not fitting, out of place. it when I was young – so I’m in the tradition of Rembrandt, Manet, Picasso. It’s a very old-fashioned idea, the artist-etcher, but I like I think that’s more honest.” it a lot. But I’m also an artist of my time,” If you hear a strong note of pragmatism in facing page – meaning, he says, postmodern relativism – this – if you can’t say what you can know, you The Angel, 2013, oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm

May 2015

123

“I lived through this period, I experienced it, took some luggage from funny. In fact, my work has become more humorous in general lately, it. My work would never be possible in preconceptual times.” because I’m more aware of the necessity of it. We tend to take art seriIndeed, a good deal of the pleasure of Borremans’s work is pre- ously and it’s a very serious business, but humour is a crucial element. cisely that it maintains a foot in two camps. While a superb technician, Then again, I see humour in a lot of works. I see it in Vermeer,” – balancing buttery handling with a chilly palette shot through with Borremans’s voice gains the venerating breathiness it has when he bursts of red and glowing with earth colours, he’s a figurative painter talks of classic painting – “though much more in Chardin.” (Compare who does not, in the end, paint living figures. None of his people feel the latter’s Child with a Top, circa 1738, with the quiet bizarreness of like people, they feel rather like proxies for a complicated emotional Borremans’s Man Looking Down at His Hand, 2007.) state or, again, for positions concerning truth and its discontents. What fascinates me, as with any artistic practice that depends And so his work typically feels on edge, rarely conservative. Indeed, it on a psychological delving that can lead to greater and greater selfrarely feels fully anything, preferring restive hybridising. The ominous understanding, is how the artist continues – how it doesn’t all become is leavened with absurd or black comedy – sometimes explicitly, as in rote illustration, how one moves on, sharklike, in order not to sink. the self-explanatory Man Wearing a Bonnet (2005), where the humour Borremans, it’s clear, has gone through a few phases already and comes not only from the floppy-eared baby-blue hat this adult is dropped them: phases of style, phases of elucidation. At the outset wearing but from his deeply pensive expresof our conversation, I mention that some of his above The Devil’s Dress (ii), 2011, sion, and at other times subtly. work – a body of paintings in which a figure oil on canvas, 75 × 124 cm is seemingly cut off at the waist (and, in the When we meet, Borremans has just finished facing page As yet untitled, from the upcoming bizarre 2005 film Weight, rotates implausibly a rare commission, a painting of someone’s exhibition Michaël Borremans: Black Mould, on a table) – resonates with statements he has horse – done, inevitably, from a photograph. at David Zwirner, London made to the effect that he feels humans aren’t “The horse is looking at us,” he points out. all images Photos: Peter Cox. free, and that this might constitute a reading. “The only work I’ve done that looks at you, Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London, “That was a long time ago,” says Borremans and it’s a horse, but it’s like a human. I find that and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

124

ArtReview

flatly. Last year, he told Art + Auction that “I have a statement to make. It’s been finding its way all these years.” What one finds, visiting him currently, is a strange balance, lacking a neat tagline, exerting discipline to set an image loose, what it might add up to – beyond questions of truth – perhaps held in abeyance. In his case, as a modern painter, the route into this unknown is to use nonpainterly media. “My basic material is a photograph, or a film still, which I make myself. I film or photograph the model or situation, the props and the background, and then I’m painting them already. The lights, the composition, the way the subject is placed and the frame, it’s for a painting already. A lot of contemporary painting looks like photography, whereas my photographs look like paintings – the camera serves to make a painterly composition. And then also my paintings refer to statues. Someone said to me once, when I showed him my early drawings, you’re a sculptor, and for the last ten years – secretly, I mean, because nobody is waiting for it – I’ve done experiments with sculpture, though most of them fail. When I made Weight, I originally wanted to have a sculpture made, turning around like a doll. But it wasn’t good enough, so we used a very disciplined twelve-year-old girl, a ballerina, cut a hole in the table and used a motor. If you make a film that shows the sculpture, you can direct exactly how the viewer sees it. It’s a form of control. That’s why

most of my paintings are very simple, too – when a painting becomes complex, for me it’s very hard to maintain control over it.” For Borremans, the system is working. He’s genuinely excited when he leads me over to a table covered in a series of new, small, disturbing paintings of dancing figures in, unusually, a kind of landscape, albeit one that looks like a tabletop tableau featuring model trees. “These are going to get much worse. More flesh, the dress is going to go up. The second series”, he says, “will be really gross.” You sense that he does and doesn’t know where it’s going, that this might constitute a professional ideal. We go back to the fireside and talk about whether filmmaking – he has some “nice ideas in the drawers, but I have to get in touch with the Hollywood people” – is a release for him, as it is for, say, Wilhelm Sasnal. He says no, that music used to be his release. “Fifteen, 20 years ago, when I was playing in bands, I needed the music to work better in my studio. After that, you’re reset. I play guitar, but I think singing is the best thing – it lets the devil out.” The light has fully gone now. Out of the darkness, the horse gazes down at us. ar

May 2015

Michaël Borremans: As Sweet As It Gets, a 15-year survey of drawings, paintings and films, is at the Dallas Museum of Art through 5 July; Michaël Borremans: Black Mould is on view at David Zwirner, London, from 13 June through 14 August

125

Lynn Hershman Leeson by Karen Archey

Spanning everything from comics and cyborgs to full-length feature films, the American artist’s 40-year output has pioneered investigations into the relationship between technology and the body, and now its time has come 126

ArtReview

One of the most successful tools deployed by second-wave feminist shown at zkm, were giant renditions of cyborgs. At Bridget Donahue, artists was mathematical calculation. By calculating female represen- Hershman Leeson’s early work includes hand-painted female bodies tation in gallery and museum exhibitions – which often amounted on canvas from 1965 that are deceptively haptic in contrast to the rest to none – second-wave feminist artists were able clearly, factually of her oeuvre. Her Breathing Machines of the late 1960s are an early to express the egregious gender imbalance that plagued twentieth- example of work that employs sensor technology. Breathing Machine ii century culture and which continues today. This is all explicated in (1968) comprises a wax face covered with a wig, paint, butterflies and !Women Art Revolution (2010), a 40-years-in-the-making documentary feathers entombed in a wood–and-Plexi vitrine that, when you come film by artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, who has seen her own fair share near it, begins audibly breathing. These materially revelational works of elision from the art-historical record. tap into an aesthetic depicting the hybrid state of subjectivities; one Hershman Leeson has been active as an artist since the 1960s, both stereotypically feminine (the fragile butterfly), and morbid (the focusing on issues relating to technology (specifically biotechnology) disembodied, rotting face). This depiction of a woman as alive but and the body, and although the influence of her work can be seen entombed, rather than ebullient and brimming with vim, represents in that of artists of younger generations – such as Cory Arcangel, the female body in a realistic way that’s still severely underrepreCécile B. Evans or Ann Hirsch – and has won innumerable honours, sented in both art and popular culture. The female bodies most visible including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for in contemporary art today are so often cisgendered, conventionally the Arts grant, she is just now seeing attractive and at least partially nude, and widespread recognition. Her first maattempt to cater to, and perhaps overpower the male gaze in a battle of erotic jor institutional solo show was mountforces. Hershman Leeson acknowledged ed this past winter, at Zentrum für Medienkunst in Karlsruhe, and in as early as the 1960s that one cannot fight New York the artist was recently the false idealisation of women by creating another false idealisation of herself, but subject of a daylong celebration and rather focused on revealing abject femipanel series at moma ps1, as well as a solo show at the new gallery Bridget ninity to collapse those ideals. A woman in 1968 could be many things, but not Donahue on the Lower East Side. As simultaneously feminine and funny, or we all know, artworld taste and time simultaneously sexy and intelligent – work cyclically, and for the first time it seems as if the two have paired for and certainly not feminine and morbid. Hershman Leeson. Her work appears While leading feminist thinker to be a decades-preceding preamble Donna Haraway saw the cyborg as a utoto much of what is being produced in pian vision of freedom from our genderNew York, Berlin and London today. ed bodies, Hershman Leeson goes further For example, if you were to take a and seemingly uses the motif to suggest look at the New Museum Triennial, an escape from the self. In her landcurated by tech-savvy artist Ryan mark 1975 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Trecartin and curator Lauren Cornell, Haraway writes that ‘a Cyborg is a cyberyou’d see a concerted interest in reimnetic organism, a hybrid of machine agining the body in light of advances and organism, a creature of social reality in biotechnology and mass communication. So, too, is this interest as well as a creature of fiction. Liberation rests on the construction expressed in contemporary art discourse in Europe, as, for example, of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression in the group exhibition Inhuman at the Fridericianum in Kassel, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived expewhich offers ‘visions of the human being as a socially trained yet rience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late resistant body, transcending biologically or socially determined twentieth century.’ gender classifications, as a digitally immortal entity, or as a constantly Hershman Leeson’s performance Roberta Breitmore (1973–9) saw evolving self’. In other words, we’re thinking about the cyborg again. the artist living a double life as a self-loathing blonde with a personIn a recent phone interview, Hershman Leeson told me she has been ality disorder. She had an apartment across the street from the hiding her work under her bed for all of these years waiting – hoping – artist’s own, as well as a part-time job, a shrink and a driver’s license. for the artworld to catch up. Looking back at Hershman Leeson’s Breitmore cruised around the city, meeting people through classificareer now, the pieces to the puzzle easily fall into place – the artist eds, but she served no grand, dramatic purpose in Hershman Leeson’s was on the vanguard of both burgeoning feminist and new-media art life. “Nothing she did was really remarkable,” said the artist to me in movements during the 1960s and 70s, with a concerted interest in a recent phone interview. “Roberta was activated by me putting on the outfit, getting into character and really becoming her. She had the cyborg that unites these fronts. her own handwriting, her own gestures, her Hershman Leeson, originally from Cleveabove Self Portrait As Another Person, 1966, own manner of speaking and voice.” Perhaps land, moved to Berkeley in 1963, longing to take wax, wig, sound, makeup, sensor, tape recorder the most interesting aspect of Roberta is that part in the activist scene there. From her early facing page !Women Art Revolution, 2010, she is not terribly dissimilar to Hershman days as an artist during the 1960s, her work drawing by Spain Rodriguez Leeson herself. Roberta isn’t the (supremely was political in tone. Her first major drawings, for graphic novel and film

May 2015

127

misguided) social-justice fantasy experiment that Donelle Woolford artist, who knows that Swinton’s presence will help popularise her is for Joe Scanlan, but an investigation into the often unstable bound- filmwork and disseminate her message. “When I was making video aries of the self. Breitmore continued to be a motif in her practice, as or new-media art, it was so often shown in the corner of a gallery and she resurfaced in 1996 as CybeRoberta, a telerobotic made-to-order doll never seen,” says Hershman Leeson. “So I decided I wanted to expand with webcam eyes. Even though desktop computers weren’t popu- the format, to make feature-length films, in an attempt to expand my larised until the mid-1990s and the iPhone didn’t debut until 2007, audience. I also needed the expanded amount of time to really develop a story.” She has been working on a sci-fi trilogy for decades. Conceiving Hershman Leeson was already thinking about digital surveillance. Especially in her work of the 1980s and beyond, Hershman Leeson Ada (1997), her first in the series, features a young female computer tends to deal in the machine-made, mass-produced and mediated programmer obsessed with Ada Lovelace (the nineteenth-century image. Past the 1960s, her work has few moments of haptic touch or mathematician and computer-programming pioneer) and a knack for aesthetic delight, as in the case of her Breathing Machines or painterly manipulating the time–space continuum. Teknolust (2002), her next, collages, but rather focuses on the brutality of the image, specifically features Swinton as Rosetta Stone, a scientist specialising in biogeof the female body and the scientific infonetics who creates a part-human, part“When I was making video machine organism. The last in the series graphic. Take for example her Construction Chart Drawing (1973), a photograph scribwill come out in the near future, and will or new-media art, it was so often bled upon in pen with markings appearing further deal with genetic manipulation. shown in the corner of a gallery similar to plastic surgery directions, such as Hershman Leeson has also directed the and never seen… So I decided ‘lighten eyebrows’. Or, at zkm, her installadocumentaries Strange Culture (2007), on tion The Infinity Engine featured wallpaper, biogenetic artist Steve Kurtz’s run-in with I wanted to expand the format” titled gmo Animals, Crops, Labs (The Infinity the fbi, and !Women Art Revolution, which Engine) (2014), comprising images and brief descriptions of endless historicised the second-wave feminist art movement, with much of genetically manipulated organisms. The Infinity Engine also features Hershman Leeson’s original footage spanning four decades. genetically modified glow-in-the-dark fish that one can easily buy in Having been making both films and artwork for nearly 40 years, a New York City pet shop, but are considered illegal in Germany due Hershman Leeson’s work now vacillates between long editing to their genetically modified status. periods, and then building up the desire to make something. “A lot of Since the late 1980s, Hershman Leeson has also worked as a suc- the work is hybrid, because the ideas are always intertwined, but I do cessful filmmaker and documentarian, her films exploiting the pop- alternate,” she says to me. Whatever her next wave brings, we should ular fascination with sci-fi to address polemical topics such as gender all be along for the ride. ar inequity and the precariousness of bioengineering. Actress Tilda Swinton has starred in nearly all of Hershman Leeson’s movies (which Lynn Hershman Leeson: Origins of the Species (Part 2) have had modest budgets), seemingly in political solidarity with the is on view at Modern Art Oxford from 30 May through 9 August

hybrid room with gmo fish, 2014 (installation view), from The Infinity Engine series, 2013–. Photo: Tobias Wootton. Courtesy Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe

128

ArtReview

Roberta’s Construction Chart 2, from the subseries External Transformations, 1975, c-print, 58 × 76 cm. Courtesy moma, New York all images © the artist

May 2015

129

Andrea Zittel “Anyone can learn something here, entirely on their own. Oftentimes people learn to protect something that they previously didn’t care for at all. We live in an unconstrained community” by Gesine Borcherdt

130

131

above Aggregated Stacks, A–Z West, 2010.Photo: Giovanni Jance preceding pages A–Z Wagon Station, 2003–15

132

ArtReview

The desert is alive. Especially the region between Death Valley and with an interior of artificial rocks or wraparound padding. Zittel Palm Springs, where, not three hours from Los Angeles, lies Joshua was famous for these during the 1990s. It was the time when Tobias Tree. This is actually just a typical one-street town from the 1930s, with Rehberger, Jorge Pardo and Carsten Höller began producing interacgas stations, coffee shops and supermarkets. What gives the place its tive art at the margins of design, to which the curator and theorist name, however, rises up behind it, on rounded hills: a futuristic sand- Nicolas Bourriaud ascribed the term ‘relational aesthetics’. In his scape, with nodular bushes and trees that look otherworldly against book, which was translated into English in 2002, he attested to such the violet tones of the late-afternoon sky. Without a doubt, this is not art’s potential to create ‘micro-utopian situations’ and promote ‘social the centre of the artworld. But at the edge of the park, behind the first interaction’ in which people grow closer to one another and reevaluate of the larger hills, lives an artist: Andrea Zittel. their everyday lives; Zittel was mentioned as one of the artists who Fifteen years ago Zittel, who was born in Southern California in was proposing new situations for living. Looking back at these works 1965, moved here from New York and established herself in a small today, one thing stands out above all: many of these artists – mostly settler house – a flat, functional style of architecture that is fairly male, by the way – operate their very large studios with the help typical for this area. Before long a glass of innumerable employees, producing spatially expansive art to be shown in container construction was installed Out here in the vast countryside, huge museums. Something begun as next door, with space for an office, a everything has the dimensions ‘micro-utopian’ and ‘interactive’ has carpentry workshop and looms. Then of a garage, container or chicken coop. diffused – seamlessly – into the power came a chicken coop, a guest cabin, a small warehouse and a camping area. Zittel’s employees are more like friends gestures and small-talk credo of global Zittel has since expanded her property art gigantomania. from the town. Hardly any of them to cover 14 hectares: quite a big patch Not so with Andrea Zittel. Out here have connections to the artworld of land for someone whose work is in the vast countryside, everything has the dimensions of a garage, container about modesty and small-scale living. A short stroll around the hill ultimately gives you the feeling of having or chicken coop. Her employees are more like friends from the town. landed on a space station, with its glistening silver ‘Wagon Stations’ Hardly any of them have connections to the artworld; many are musi(in Zittel’s terminology) perched here in the dust: ten human-size, cians. A while back there were a few that came straight from prison. semicircular metal capsules, each with a mattress and minimal shelf Right now, two hardy young men are plastering cardboard boxes that space, just large enough for sleeping, reading or simply gazing at will later be plugged into shelving systems. The next room across has the sky. For someone who migrated from the Big Apple because she walls hung with abstract wool tapestries woven here on the premises; couldn’t see the horizon, it’s as simple as that. while these serve no direct purpose, others are used for designing “My work is about escaping the institutions,” says Zittel, whis- Zittel’s carpets and clothes. If you didn’t know better, you might think tling her wandering dog – the type that looks like a coyote – back to the whole place was a craft workshop producing items destined for her side. “The Wagon Stations are not conceived as exhibition spaces, organic markets. they’re meant to stand under the open sky. I’d like it if people lived “When Hal Foster wrote his 2003 essay ‘Design and Crime’, I with my works.” Those interested can make a reservation to stay in one thought: Oh no! That’s aimed at the generation I grew up with,” says Zittel, laughing. Redirecting the criticism for a night, or even for a few weeks. The ‘Escape Parallel Planar Panel (black, rust, off-white), 2014, that architect Adolf Loos had levied almost a Vehicles’ are also meant for living, not for woven wool tectile mounted hundred years earlier – in his essay ‘Ornament museums: individually designed live-in trailers on enamel coated plywood, 56 × 99 cm

May 2015

133

and Crime’ (written 1908, published 1913) – against the indiscriminate the Mojave for real-estate investment and build artificial villas for adornment of everything and everyone, Foster attacked the design exhausted people from the city. atrocity of our time: the conflation of art with commerce, marketing Zittel’s work touches on all of these contexts. But despite the lessand the culture of spectacle. What was once considered a total work is-more mission, an undogmatic, experimental lightness persists, of art, the critic suggested, is now becoming a commercial product. which is rarely a matter of course in large-scale artistic-production And, for sure, Zittel’s approach of designing every detail of life, and locations. “Anyone can learn something here, entirely on their own. thus serving the rhetoric of product design – she does, in fact, conduct Oftentimes people learn to protect something that they previously her work under the brand name ‘A–Z, an Institute of Investigative didn’t care for at all. We live in an unconstrained community with Living’ – can easily tangle in the web of such criticism. people from the village or friends from la,” explains Zittel, while the In actuality, Zittel’s understanding of her work is more humble sun sinks behind a hill and the air turns abruptly cold. than that of many of her colleagues, who illustrate Foster’s theories A life apart from the art metropolises and institutions is hardly perfectly. Her approach resembles the elementary pragmatism of something new. In the 1960s above all, artists fled the institutions the Bauhaus. Her clothing, sofas and shelves are made from simple and galleries for open terrain, and in the us this usually meant one materials – felt, foam, wool, cardthing: the desert. Yet, while Michael board. The shapes and colours are Heizer and Robert Smithson carved sober, without seeming cold or techtheir rugged monuments directly noid. On the contrary: the synthetic into the ‘expanded field’ of raw landlounge art of the 1990s, which today scape and Donald Judd deployed his cubes in Texan no-man’s-land, looks soulless and oddly sophoZittel’s approach harks back to moric, is alien to her. For Zittel it all comes down to basic human needs. something that could not be further The central question is how one can removed from such grand gestures: live well with as little as possible. camper-van holidays, the endless In an age in which not only art roadtrips with her parents when it but also the daily routines of latewas of utmost importance to consider what was essential to bring capitalist society are defined by profusion and consumerism, hers is an along, and what was not. approach that could hardly be more Some obvious catchwords come apt – and an interesting proposal to mind: escapism, reclusion. Indeed, one could argue that a person especially since, following the bankwho chooses to live at a remove ing crisis that began in 2008, many from the centres of urban or social people are forced to live with less. life should not be making art about Nevertheless, Zittel does not claim it. But long ago Joshua Tree and any moral high ground. For somethe Mojave developed into an oasis one who lived in Brooklyn in an that – after the hippy years – has 19sqm storage space, slept there, attracted artists, intellectuals and built furniture there, sewed and aficionados who conceive of the raised chickens there, such that the desert as a giant laboratory. Every street often became part of her workyear Zittel invites them to present space, modesty is simply an obsession. This was already the case when their projects at her art festival, High Zittel, upon finishing her studies Desert Test Sites, a nonprofit organA–Z Wagon Station, 2003–15 at Rhode Island School of Design, isation she founded with a few other moved to New York in 1990; when people from the artworld that offers all images © the artist. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, London & Berlin workshops, excursions and residenshe got a job at the Pat Hearn Gallery, she chose not to buy a trendy gallerina wardrobe, opting instead to sew cies for artists, critics and the public. All of these are invited to come her own clothes – one outfit for summer and one for winter. to the desert and propose new ideas beyond the commercial artworld, However, this all sounds more spartan than it feels when you’re thinking about alternative ways of life. The general idea behind this, in Joshua Tree National Park. A–Z West is a dream factory some- as Zittel puts it, is “learning from what we are not”: a fine motto for art where between a minimalist microcosm and a hippy utopia. Of as well as life – particularly if you aren’t quite part of either. ar course Zittel is not the first person to do this. Since the 1960s there have been esoteric experiments such as ‘sound baths’ – round archiTranslated from the German by Jonathan Lutes tectures that capture the sounds of the Mojave Desert that borders Joshua Tree. The area was a famous hippy destination, attracting Eye on Design: Andrea Zittel’s Aggregated Stacks and the Collecpeople seeking a chilled-out natural lifestyle; Antonioni shot his tion of the Palm Springs Art Museum is on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum through 12 July; Andrea Zittel: The Flat Field Works can be legendary movie Zabriskie Point (1970), in which Death Valley becomes the land of free expression, nearby; today, la businessmen use seen at Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, from 13 June through 27 September

134

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Parsnips are often maltreated or ignored 139

2015 Triennial: Surround Audience New Museum, New York 25 February – 24 May Everything is new. Marketing is art. Comedy is art. The artist has a new role in the world. She provides new visual metaphors for our new subjectivities in this new digital age. All this promise of newness makes me feel too old to write this review. Thankfully, the New Museum’s third triennial survey of early-career artists, Surround Audience, does not quite deliver on its advertising. There remains a distinct mismatch between this oh-so-old (modernist) rhetoric of ‘the new’ and what we experience in the abrupt shifts between different modes of attention, media and tone as we walk through this exhibition’s cluttered rooms. The entry-level galleries offer the most immediately apparent reference to the rhetoric of newness promised in the exhibition. Casey Jane Ellison’s Touching the Art (2014–), an apparently parodic but desperately real artworld chat show aired on Ovation tv, is well-placed, mediating the space between the ticket booth and café. That the series is also available on YouTube is further indication of its introductory role in an exhibition that stages the linkage between

art practice, commerce and entertainment. The resounding echo of high-pitched irony in Ellison’s bitchy docent-cum-talk-show-host voice, evident in soundbites like “I don’t do soundbites” and “My final word is everyone needs therapy and you all agree I’m pretty, right?”, undergoes a sharp tonal shift as we move to the adjacent gallery space. Here, amid Renaud Jerez’s awkward assemblage sculptures and Lisa Holzer’s strangely appealing nail polish paintings, are two contrasting commodity displays as sites for performance. Li Liao’s Consumption (2012) presents stained worker overalls, the identity card of the artistas-factory-worker and the timesheets from the 12-hour shifts he ‘performed’ in Foxconn’s notorious Shenzhen complex. Liao’s work of labour-as-performance was used to purchase the very product he helped to produce in the factory: an iPad Mini. This slightly scuffed object stands mutely attached to a plinth, unresponsive to the prods of gallery viewers hoping for some kind of related moving-image document of the action. Disappointment is exactly the point. Next to this self-consciously dull display of a widely desired contemporary commodity is the dis artist collective’s luxury Dornbracht-brand

2015 Triennial: Surround Audience (installation view). Photo: Benoit Pailley. Courtesy New Museum, New York

140

ArtReview

combination kitchen-bathroom installation, The Island (ken) (2015). This is a purpose-built, fully functioning stage set and prop for a series of lecture-performances presented weekly over the course of the exhibition. (The one I attended, by curator Chus Martínez, was on the topic of artists’ research as a form of procrastination delivered while simultaneously using The Island (ken) to make a cup of tea.) If Liao offers the traces and the product of voraciously exploitative labour and a banal everyday digital device, dis operates in another class register. The juxtaposition of the two works animates global inequities: on one side is the New York collective’s collaboration (and complicity) with corporate sponsorship; on the other is the fact that Foxconn likely manufactured much of the technological infrastructure of Surround Audience. We know about Foxconn and still use our iPads. We know that art is a luxury commodity bought by the rich even as it might suggest a critique of social inequities. We know that the global biennial circuits are implicated with global capital. But staging political contradiction is not political insight, and there is little of the latter on offer in Surround Audience. So, on we go.

With the aftertaste of Ellison’s bitter irony I begin to feel a creeping ambivalence about the social address of contemporary art flaring up in the space between these works. It’s hard to tell if this is generated by a curatorial logic of disjunction or my own critical despair. Lauren Cornell of the New Museum collaborated on the curating with artist Ryan Trecartin, who is known for his low-tech, high-energy immersive videoworks featuring hordes of contemporary teenlike characters in frenzied performances. While the tone of hysteria that distinguishes Trecartin’s video installations is largely absent from the works selected for Surround Audience, something akin to this level of affective dissonance is nonetheless generated in the seams between certain works. There are moments of thematic synthesis around, for example, the retro-cyborg representation of the body. A segment of Juliana Huxtable’s series universal crop tops for all the self canonized saints of becoming (2015) is adjacent to Frank Benson’s lifesize sculpture Juliana (2015), showing Huxtable’s trans body with breasts and penis as a shimmering green mannequin. The Huxtable figure faces the cockless cyber-dummy of Ed Atkins’s large-scale black-and-white hd video projection Happy Birthday!! (2014), and Juliana seems to gesture with manicured acrylic nails towards Firenze Lai’s modest paintings of featureless figures with enlarged feet suggestive of various

alienated emotional states. Critical dissonance has disappeared, making me wonder if perhaps I had imagined it all along. Elsewhere the body is largely absent but for the proliferation of metonymic or prosthetic suggestions, such as Aleksandra Domanović’s soho (Substances of Human Origin) (2015), a series of artificial arms attached to the wall that were based upon a model of a prosthetic hand designed by a Hungarian-born scientist in 1963. A series of erotic devices are presented in a curio cabinet display of drawings and prototypes in Shreyas Karle’s series Museum Shop of Fetish Objects (2012). More reminiscent of surrealist objects, Karle’s work suggests the contradictions between personal modesty and religious erotic symbolism in Hindu traditions. Karle’s Cleavage Plates for Idol Worship (2012) are small plaques of beaten metal showing the varying amounts of décolletage revealed on sacred statues and presented here as eroticised fragments. This paradox is more than retroSurrealism, since it has a charged political relevance in India’s current climate of virulent Hindu nationalism. We encounter a more bombastic political tone with Josh Kline’s spectacularly didactic installation Freedom (2015). The hypocrisies of the Obama administration are revealed through Teletubby figures dressed as members of a swat team. Another kind of political linkage is explored in Onejoon Che’s installation featuring

enlarged photographic documents and facsimile models of North Korean aesthetic influence on socialist-style public monuments in Namibia, Senegal and Botswana. One of only two or three documentary-type projects in Surround Audience, Che’s installation stands out in contrast to the phantasmal spaces suggested in many of the other works. Che’s project finds its match in Antoine Catala’s Distant Feel (2015), a contemporary reimagining of a propaganda sculpture for the present. The ideological message is empathy, or as the wall text puts it, ‘a message with no product except feeling’. To develop this Internet-age work, Catala collaborated with the highly successful Manhattan-based global advertising firm Droga5. They came up with a meme for empathy, e3, and fashioned this shape as a living sculpture constructed out of coral and housed in a fish tank. It’s not for nothing that this monstrous staging of the corporatisation of affect, with pulsating sea urchins and anemones living on the coral e3 symbol, turns out to be the most visually powerful piece in the exhibition. The spectacle of nature put to work in the service of the commercial branding of human feeling generates an aesthetics of bathos. While Distant Feeling might provide the closest fulfilment of the New Museum’s marketing for the triennial, this is a rather depressing imagining of the shape of the new in our times. Siona Wilson

Antoine Catala, Distant Feel, 2015, mixed media. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

May 2015

141

Hassan Khan Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 30 January – 12 April The title of Egyptian artist, writer and musician Hassan Khan’s first institutional solo show in Germany is borrowed from that of Philip K. Dick’s 1974 dystopic novel, which describes the United States of America of the then near-future, in 1988. A police state where black people are eliminated or sterilised, the population is kept compliant through mind-numbing entertainment, drugs and material rewards, and surveillance systems monitor citizens’ every action and gesture, this futuristic society no longer seems so implausible. Khan’s exhibition features six works, four commissioned especially for the show, while an earlier video, Studies for Structuralist Film no. 2 (2013, all other works 2015), is conceptually integrated. The multimedia works also reflect the artist’s own preoccupations: sound, text and visual forms. Much like in Dick’s novel, whose chapters are connected with a lyrical transition – stanzas from the sorrowful sixteenth-century lute song Flow My Tears, by John Dowland, from which the book’s title derives – the objects in the show are also connected by poetic and obscure relations hinting at grief and dissatisfaction. In the lobby, there are two works: a window drawing shows two colourful, rather gesturally rendered forlorn male faces looking in opposite directions, while the title of the show (also that of the work) is handwritten across the top; and in Live Ammunition! a polyrhythmic clapping emanates from four loudspeakers. The faces allude to Dick’s main characters, the policeman

Buckman and the pop singer Taverner, a celebrity who one day wakes up a complete unknown, thus losing his identity, and embarks on a soul-searching journey to rediscover himself literally and symbolically. Metaphors for two pillars of power in society, these opposing and mirroring individuals are like the double-faced Janus. This work can also be read, thanks to the interpretation offered in a poetic accompanying text by the artist (which can be considered the seventh work in the show), as a comment on the social situation in Egypt, where the police and the people are in conflict and yet suffer the same pains, while Live Ammunition!’s tempo evokes hope and its demise, and also alludes to those brief moments of triumph experienced during the democratic protests in Tahrir Square. In the main hall, a large cube-shaped, brick-lined space accessible via stairs, physically transitioning us from one state to another, we find three additional works, while LightShift, changing coloured light on the stairs, underlines this transition but also creates an autonomous environment. A folding screen, on the left, meaningfully titled The Double Face of Power and neither hiding nor dividing the space, shows on its three differently coloured surfaces various geometric designs that, through the magic of lighting, create subtle shadows on the floor. In the middle of the space, on a large wooden platform, are carefully arranged globular ‘stacked glass forms’ (to quote Khan’s text)

of various heights. Titled Abstract Music, this mysterious landscape might allude, the artist writes, to the ‘logic of systems’, but as with the screen, nothing is very clear. Behind this work is the 2013 video, projected on a rectangular piece of frosted glass suspended between two metal lines attached to the columns enclosing Abstract Music. While the other works lack aesthetic and formal force, fail to engage and are cryptic in their connection to each other and to the theme of the show, instead taking refuge in veiled meanings revealed only through the artist’s own written guide, the film establishes itself as the show’s cornerstone and clearly relates to the theme of power and oppression. In one of the several similarly shot segments of different individuals, a woman sits on a centrally placed chair in an empty white room. The camera circles her repeatedly, her eyes in turn following its movement – a dance of perspectives. Moreover, given the pervasiveness of surveillance, abusive police tactics and increasing oppression in both the democratic world and that considered to be in transition, the video’s dance between watcher and watched creates new levels of meaning and association and also alludes to the duality portrayed in the window drawing. Dick might have envisioned a future America, but our contemporary reality shows that there are no longer clear distinctions between worlds and that we all live in a dystopic dream from which there is no real exit. Olga Stefan

Working sketch for detail from Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 2015, cut and printed light filters, vinyl lettering directly applied to the window. Courtesy the artist

142

ArtReview

Bruce Nauman Fondation Cartier, Paris 14 March – 21 June If you are Bruce Nauman, and you’ve been asked to fill the Fondation Cartier with your artworks, which would you choose? You’ve been producing art for 50 years, most of it provocative, some of it darkly humorous and disturbing, quite a bit truly excruciating. “Art that knocks you down,” you’ve called it, “like getting hit in the face with baseball bat.” There is, however, not a lot of bat in your newer work, most of which focuses, very simply, on your hands: how they respond to instructions, what they do and make, and the sausage-esque parallax effect produced when you point your forefingers at each other and stare at them for a really, really long time. It is neither aggressive nor transgressive. If I had to say something about it (which I am loathe to do – contemporary art criticism rarely sounds more cack-handed than when analysing your work), I’d call it calmly contemplative. There’s no ‘pay attention mother fuckers’ (Pay Attention, 1973) type stuff. No antiart. No politics. No sex. No scary clowns. No torture. No complicity, no guilt. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying. Now, you haven’t had a solo show in France since 1998, so people will want to see a range of work, but there’s not much exhibition space at the Fondation – windowless basement, glassed-in main floor with high glass walls, and garden – so only a small selection will fit. How about one work from each decade? A sculpted

or photographed pun, or a bat-in-the-face audio work from the 1960s. A videotaped studio performance, neon sign, lithograph or claustrophobic corridor installation from the 70s. An angry, politicised sculpture or loud harrowing video from the 80s. Maybe a dismembered taxidermy sculpture from the 90s. And one of the gentler hand-based works – drawing, video, sound piece, bronze sculpture – from this century. No? Then let’s do looping and/or spinning works. Start with the text-on-paper For Children / For Beginners (2010), with its scrawled-out loops like this: ‘Teaching children / Children teaching’ – which we first saw at Sperone Westwater in New York, a year after you won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. This links to your hand instruction pieces, specifically those fuelled by Bartók’s For Children compositions for piano, written for children-size hands. Combine this paper work, on a wall on one side of the main floor, with the sound piece For Children / Pour les enfants (2015) – based on the 2010 edition of this work, in which your voice repeats the words “for children”, to which, now, the repeated French phrase “pour les enfants” is added. In the garden, add a tuneless ‘musical’ echo of this, the sound piece For Beginners (Instructed Piano) (2010), in which the thumb and finger positions (of the child-size hand) are transposed into struck keys near middle C on the piano.

Now, place the giant Pencil Lift / Mr Rogers (2013) video installation of your hands, shot in your studio, in which you converse with the cameraman while trying to balance a pencil nub, sharpened on both ends to look like a sausageesque parallax illusion, between two sharpened pencils – while your cat, Mr Rogers, wanders past in the background. (People can’t seem to get enough cat videos, and Mr Rogers is a splendid cat.) Downstairs, Carousel (Stainless steel version) (1988), one of the readymade taxidermy-form pieces, this one spinning, scraping the floor. Opposite, the famous Anthro / Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) (1991) – six monitors, three screens, one bald head – singsonging three series of words: “Feed me / Eat me / Anthropology”, “Help me / Hurt me / Sociology” and “Feed me / Help me / Eat me / Hurt me”. In between, Untitled (1970– 2009), a protocol work staged as a performance in 1970, restaged in 2009 as a film – unassisted by you in both cases, but based on your written instructions. Two dancers seen from above lie on a sort of square dial on the floor, feet extended, hands over head and entwined at the centre, and spin, or roll, like the hands of a clock. The camera also spins from time to time, at the same speed as the dancers. It’s all very mesmerising. A profound meditation on the passing of time. That’ll do it. Christopher Mooney

Carousel (Stainless steel version), 1988, stainless steel, cast aluminium, polyurethane foam, electric motor. Photo: Glenstone. © the artist / adagp, Paris 2015

May 2015

143

James Benning Decoding Fear Kunstverein Hamburg 14 February – 10 May Decoding Fear addresses the theme of civilisation critique, an exceedingly important issue in the face of the ongoing destruction of our habitat through manmade climate change. James Benning, who began his career as an experimental filmmaker during the 1970s and ever since has been a significant contributor to cultural history, here presents not only films, but also paintings, sculptures, texts and installations that, above all, focus on two ‘outlaws’, Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber. Thoreau, in his 1849 essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ and other philosophical tracts, formulated his critique of civilisation, which would later influence Martin Luther King, Jr. The mathematician Kaczynski’s manifesto, ‘Industrial Society and its Future’, was published in 1995 by various media outlets, including The New York Times, and attacked the technologisation of society; from 1978 to 95 Kaczynski terrorised us citizens with a letterbombing campaign that wounded and killed several people. Both men lived in the American wilderness, secluded in small, self-built cabins. Benning reconstructed each of these on his own property in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and

through their windows filmed the surrounding nature. The two-channel video installation Two Cabins (2011) shows these unedited video recordings overlaid with sound captured at the original locations of Thoreau’s and Kaczynski’s cabins. Acoustic authenticity and sculptural reenactment merge seamlessly while providing a distillation of the life of Benning, who by all indications identifies artistically with the mindset of the two thinkers. The installation’s precise reconstruction of Thoreau’s desk and an equally meticulous replica of Kaczynski’s typewriter bring to mind the literary production of the two outlaws. Visitors can hear Kaczynski’s diary entries featured in Benning’s film Stemple Pass (2012), which also shows static shots of the Sierra Nevada landscape. The beauty of nature, which Benning’s chosen home reflects, is rendered with the same focus as Kaczynski’s fundamental critique of its destruction. Benning’s exhibition includes reconstructions of the models, lifesize but minimal, shorn of details and texture and painted in monochrome white. These unmistakably recall the work of the late Israeli installation artist Absalon and function here, above all, as ascetic blanks that can serve as projection spaces for one’s

Stemple Pass (still), 2012, hd video, 121 min. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

144

ArtReview

own fears and as a symbolic safe area for a resistive withdrawal into the white cube. The almost retrospectively arranged exhibition, first seen last year at Kunsthaus Graz, also features more-or-less amateurish works by outsider artists such as Henry Darger, Black Hawk and Jesse Howard. Naive animal representations are on display along with nudes of pubescent girls and a minstrel dancer in blackface with pipe in mouth. These artefacts, however, are not originals, but replicas painted by Benning himself. This renewed act of identification, further accentuated by the fact that these copies had earlier hung in Benning’s cabin, creates subtle allusions between outsider art – much of it still outside of the art market – and the outlaws Thoreau and Kaczynski, the latter in prison for the rest of his life. These forgeries of a kind also work to scrutinise the ostensibly legitimate claims of ‘noble’ art, such as artistic originality, authentic individuality and exacting craftsmanship. Accordingly, Benning’s civilisation critique runs consistently parallel with a critique of our professional practice of art – a not insignificant factor in making this exhibition so important. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

Rare Earth Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (tba21–Augarten), Vienna 19 February – 31 May A young naked man sits atop an unidentifiable vehicle’s flaming motor, a sculpture spouts fire; there’s a reptile living in a vitrine and… Ai Weiwei. At first blush, Rare Earth has all the ingredients of spectacle. But dig a little deeper and it also has lofty aspirations, intriguing art and important underpinnings. The group show’s 17 so-called positions (via an equivalent number of artists) are meant to represent the periodic table’s 17 rare-earth elements and the issues and controversies surrounding their current extraction and use – a structure via which curators Nadim Samman and Boris Ondreička broadly explore human agency and the role of technological advances throughout history. The exhibition’s point of departure is Danish antiquarian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s nineteenth-century attempts at exhibiting prehistory and categorising time through man’s use of materials for tools and weapons – his Stone, Bronze and Iron Age classifications have certainly stuck with us. Following this (and the europium and cerium mined in places like California or China to construct the iPhones we look at a thousand times per day), Samman and Ondreička dub our time the age of Rare Earth, and support their thesis with artists whose practices are largely based on artistic-scientific research and sociopolitical work.

Much of the art brings up issues of humanity’s fraught relationship to progress and technology: British artist Roger Hiorns’s Untitled (2012) sees the aforementioned young man sitting pensively on what turns out to be a military helicopter motor alight with a single flame; his Thinker-like pose and the contrast between flesh and war machine manage narrowly to evade kitsch and make a strong opening statement. Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s Voyant (2015) – a handmade robot – alludes to Third World exploitation. Other works address the effects of man on earth or its creatures, like Marguerite Humeau’s Réquiem for Harley Warren (‘Screams from Hell’) (2015), a network of connected white sculptures that (again) intermittently shoot flames, as if from the underworld. Or British artist Iain Ball’s Neodymium (Energy Pangea) (2011), which sets a Maitreya solar cross (symbolic of the sun’s power) in a terrarium with a bearded dragon basking in its warmth. Still others wax philosophical with objects, like Oliver Laric’s Sun Tzu Janus (2013), a two-faced multihued polyurethane bust of the Chinese military general/philosopher; or essayistic filmmaking like Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2012), her fantastic, widely shown, 2013 Silver Bear-winning meditation on creation myths and knowledge as archived and presented via technology.

The show does feel vaguely forced – its high number of commissions (ten out of 17 pieces) seem to thrust interpretation into a predefined and thus restrictive place, for both artists and viewers (as the latter, I ask: would Suzanne Treister have made a rare-earth mandala of her own accord?). Discussions of rare-earth materials stay entirely on the meta level: it’s a bit surprising that no works deal directly with the elements’ geopolitical influence in mediums like documentary film or photography or leanings toward Land art; Guan Xiao’s The Core Sample (2012) – cylindrical sculptures that evoke geological samples but are in fact made of petroleum byproducts and metal – comes closest. The curatorial statement that these works ground our ‘immaterial cultural moment’ therefore doesn’t feel quite accurate. The usual questions of curatorial authorship arise, and art meets science to varying degrees of success. For example, Ai Weiwei’s set of rolled white towels, stacked spa-style, are gratuitously embroidered with the cursive words ‘Rare Earth’ in europiumlaced thread that apparently glows in the dark. At the same time, however, Rare Earth is ambitious and gorgeously installed, and its focus on technology thankfully manages to avoid yet another discussion of network culture. Some viewers will be drawn to Rare Earth’s bling, others less so, but it offers relevant food for thought for both camps. Kimberly Bradley

Roger Hiorns, Untitled, 2012, Nimbus military helicopter engine, fire, youth, 190 × 98 × 80 cm. Courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna

May 2015

145

Neïl Beloufa We are safe now Zero, Milan 26 February – 3 April The world isn’t a gentle, lucid, organised and comforting place, Neïl Beloufa reminds us with We are safe now. To put it another way, life’s a mess. The video-based installation Moving Wall: La domination du monde (World Domination) (2015) greets the viewer, with bureaucrats and politicians from different nationalities (played by nonprofessional actors) advocating, in turn, the need to invade Asia, Europe or Africa to solve their countries’ problems, on the basis of improvised and delirious economic speculations. It’s a work designed to make one uncomfortable, even physically so. For the video component (from 2012, produced on the occasion of Beloufa’s solo show Les Inoubliables prises d’autonomie at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris) is now projected on an epoxy resin screen that is bumpy – the protrusions caused by a metal structure on rails behind it, like a dolly. The latter’s slow movements back and forth distort the frame and literalise the meaning of ‘cinematic’ (from the Greek kinema, movement), but the association of immaterial images with such an uber-material support undoes the magic lantern’s illusionistic comforts. It looks unmistakably artificial; yet the more the video’s dialogues, corporate suits and institutional furniture descend into Dr Strangelove-style oddity, the more I want

to delve deep with them, first amused, then surprised, irritated and unsure, while gloomy associations with current geopolitical madness creep in. Pushing emotional buttons, one recalls, is the basic rule of communication, especially in an era when news is circulated by social media. We know this, yet we click and like and ‘je suis…’ in our millions. On the other side of the room, Beloufa has installed Souvenir (2013), a freestanding portion of wall in plaster, wood and steel on wheels – a self-contained system to archive and materialise memories of the recent past. Souvenir includes a small video projection, shot backstage at a fashion shoot at, again, the Palais de Tokyo, where art is merely the nondescript hip background for a model’s poses. Pretty hilarious. Maybe Souvenir is so large in order to minimise the artist’s frustration; maybe it’s a big noteto-self to remain sceptical of celebrity, now that Beloufa too has acquired young-star status. A parade of icons of quick obsolescence hangs on the wall: in the Vintage series (2014), bottles, cameras, laptops and pencils emerge, like finds from an archaeological excavation, from mdf surfaces roughly sculpted with a hand grinder, like low-definition reliefs. Beloufa has inserted into each tableau also one or more electrical sockets: a symbol of universal anxiety now that the possibility of being disconnected and ‘dead’

We are safe now, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy the artist and Zero, Milan

146

ArtReview

is so upsetting that we carry around extra supplies of energy, as hunters and gatherers used to do with water and food. If the first room is plunged into darkness, the second is full of bright light. Another large Souvenir stands next to new works from the Secured Wall series (2014–15), in cast polyurethane foam, pigmented in blue, grey, purple and black, and framed in industrial metal. A few are wall-mounted, while a freestanding semicircular construction takes centre stage on the floor. The surface of each ‘wall’ is modular, as if in ashlar masonry, recalling the rusticated palazzi of the Renaissance, but it clearly reproduces the airbags for packaging used by shipping processors. They look both fragile and secure, like an air mattress or a waterbed, providing the illusion of being lulled by waves without ever risking capsizing or drowning. In her text for the exhibition, Myriam Ben Salah writes: ‘The space is baby proofed: you can walk safely among the colourful and soft foam walls, it won’t hurt if you stumble (don’t rub your face on it though, it’s chemical). You can relax… Everything is going to be ok. In case drinks are served at the opening, be sure to sip responsibly. And you will be fine. But don’t let Beloufa control your temper.’ Good advice, I think. For a second, I was tempted to bang my head against the wall, as if in a rubber room. Barbara Casavecchia

Nadine Byrne A Wave Rose Toward You Elastic Gallery, Stockholm 5 March – 18 April In Nadine Byrne’s first exhibition at the formerly Malmö-based Elastic Gallery, the Swedish interdisciplinary artist moves gracefully between mediums – from painting to artist books, from sound to sculpture, and more. She impresses with her ability to incorporate wide-ranging materials such as ceramics and embroidery into an artistic practice that reflects the feminist-leaning, craft-driven trend that is ascendant among many contemporary Swedish artists today (for example Linnéa Sjöberg, Iris Smeds and Anna Nordström), and she continues to present her work in whatever format time and space demand. In short, she appears to be a malleable creator with unpredictable, whimsical tools within her grasp. More specifically, in A Wave Rose Toward You, Byrne emphatically unfurls her interiority for public consumption. The exhibition’s title refers to the first of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923). Thanks to the Internet, almost everyone now has access to such poetics, but nobody can claim to understand how such words affect specific individuals – Byrne, in this case. Indeed, it is seemingly often of no concern to artists whether the viewer understands their objectives; rather this responsibility, in many cases, belongs to the observer, and that is true of the Duino

Elegies, a collection that attempts to unpack a general human condition in ten elegies that build upon one another, the whole complex and highly layered. In parallel, Byrne mirrors Rilke’s desire to pinpoint an intimate and shared humanity, but does so by incorporating a range of visual modes and methods that reflect her creative path. In Point, Breaking (Hjorthagen) (2015), in the opening room, the artist presents a delicate sculptural installation that consists of two dark-green cylindrical ceramic towers, strung between which is a sprayed mesh fabric upon which is mounted a Polaroid of a blurred visage – perhaps from Byrne’s past – the whole arrangement pulled taut. If it is often puzzling as to how to interpret Byrne’s works, then, similar to poetry that transcends any given time and place, the viewer’s ability to translate and personalise is a prerequisite. Both Rilke’s words and Byrne’s artistry highlight the importance of introspection and solitude: the former wrote his elegies while staying at a castle (the eponymous Duino) on the sea near Trieste, and the latter produces work that delves inward, anchoring herself in recollections both close and distant. Specifically, the artist’s abstract works link her emotional world to the various rooms of her childhood

apartment. The sculpture Commune Pieces (Libre) (2015), for example, resembles a rectangular coffee table; its glass covered with embroidered linen on which is set a lone green ceramic cylinder. Byrne aims at connecting the realms of the real and the imaginary, formulating it as the dichotomy of the present versus the past. Her blurred photos, abstract lines and forms, and sculptural curiosities cajole one to consider how the objects and visual references that make up one’s own life are archived and retrieved. In the embroidered series Echoes (2014), she frames geometric lines and fragmented, angular shapes that leave one feeling light and ephemeral in the face of intense existential inquiries – displayed lines are not figurative, thereby relieving one from viewing a specific scene, event or portrait. Akin to a Rorschach test, the Echoes series neither offers nor asks for a single interpretation; its focus is the very process of articulation. In the first elegy of his Duino Elegies, Rilke writes: ‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?’ (‘If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?’). Faith in oneself, and in memory, remain paramount to anyone who has the ambition of being heard. Jacquelyn Davis

Commune Pieces (Libre), 2015, embroidered linen, grout-sprayed mesh fabric, ceramic object, 56 × 120 × 17 cm (without podium). Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg. Courtesy the artist and Elastic Gallery, Stockholm

May 2015

147

Peter Buggenhout Museum Leuven 12 March – 31 May For one reason or another, it seems that some artists only receive recognition at home once they make it abroad. The singer-songwriter Jacques Brel, for example, first had to be accepted in Paris before being celebrated in his native Belgium. Another example would be Peter Buggenhout, whose sculptures have been exhibited in prestigious venues like New York’s moma ps1, Paris’s Palais de Tokyo and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, but who has never had a solo show in a public institution in his home country. Until now, that is, and this retrospective bringing together sculptures from various series, dating from the late 1990s until the present day. In doing so, the exhibition tracks his ongoing quest to liberate sculpture from representation, without falling in the trap of an all-too-didactic chronology. Like abstract and concrete art before him, Buggenhout aims to make autonomous objects that only refer to themselves and are devoid of meaning or symbolism. The quest might be similar, but the response is different thanks to his use of what he calls ‘abject materials’, defined by Georges Bataille as escaping any form of categorisation. The artist works, for example, with stuff like dried horse stomachs and pig intestines, which are unusual and yet, due to their elasticity, very sculptural. For

his Mont Ventoux series (1997–), Buggenhout stretches these stomachs over sculptures assembled from, among other things, parts of car bumpers and streetlights. The result is an uncanny, organic constellation of blobs and volumes, expressing vulnerability through its bloodshot parts, festering wounds and various tonalities of flesh colours; it’s repulsive, yet mesmerising. Though alluding to butchered raw meat, the sculptures are a world unto their own. As with every piece he makes, the artist tries to squeeze the entire universe into one work through the variety of materials, assembled without any logic or hierarchy. These objects don’t ‘mean’ or ‘refer to’ something, they just ‘are’. This is even more the case with the series The Blind Leading The Blind (2000–), consisting of huge piles of junk – including, among other things, twisted iron bars, parts of a trailer and couches – covered with a thick layer of dust. At first glance, these sculptures, with their strong physical presence, might remind one of a scrapheap or long-ago crashed aeroplane. Yet quickly that comparison turns out to be too restricting, as the works remain resolutely indefinable. The raw energy of the creation process underlying the works is best captured in the Gorgo series (2005–). Here blood and horsehair hold the sculptures together,

Gorgo #26, 2012. Photo: Dirk Pauwels. Courtesy Museum Leuven

148

ArtReview

creating a frightening, voodoolike atmosphere that seems the result of some obscure ritual. A separate room unites smaller works from various series made for display in glass cases. This section breaks the rhythm and scale of the overwhelming installations, offering an opportunity to study the work in detail and illustrating how the various series mutually influence and enrich each other. In some of the intestinal works, one also finds coloured plastic, as in the newest series, On Hold (2014–), in which, for the first time, Buggenhout uses colour, integrating parts of old bouncy castles alongside building materials and a variety of other things, as if to counter the otherwise pervasive darkness of his oeuvre. Buggenhout sees his work as a response to what he considers the dead end of minimal art due to its simplification by a limited, geometrical vocabulary. Through a varied selection of organic and industrial materials, he brings an interesting contribution to the medium of sculpture and manages to liberate it from any possible narrative reduction. Not the random piles of materials that they may initially resemble, these are carefully composed works, existing somewhere between form and formlessness yet expressing a strong sense of materiality. The result, as Buggenhout clearly desires, is sculpture purified of content. Sam Steverlynck

Gonzalo Lebrija Unfolded Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris 4 March – 16 May Starting from the innocent, yet also nihilist, pastime of making and unmaking paper planes, Gonzalo Lebrija’s fourth show at Laurent Godin has leisure, power and postmodern spleen at its core. Unfolded presents us with a minimalist ensemble of four paper works, six wooden panels covered with gold leaf, a silver sculpture and an 18-minute video loop, Éxodo (Aeroplane Competition) (2001; all other works 2015). As is often the case with the Mexican artist, the gesture prevails and gives all the works, even the static ones, a performative dimension. In fact, the origin of Unfolded is a paperplane contest: specifically, the happening documented in Éxodo, which Lebrija organised in March 2001. At the time, he was working in a studio on the top floor of the Condominio Guadalajara, a 26-storey building that was then the highest in the Mexican city. He had a habit of throwing paper planes through the window and watching them land 105 metres below. Small law firms occupied the majority of the edifice, giving the Condominio “a sort of bureaucratic vibe” that, Lebrija told me, he “could sense every day by using the same elevator that stopped at every floor”. So he decided to skyjack the building, if you will, and to do so he invited all the lawyers to join him on the top floor and play with paper planes instead of the law.

The video presented in the exhibition, a shortened version of the performance, documents it from street level: paper planes are thrown from the top of the Condominio and fly down to the ground. Frankly, given the camera position and scenery, the first thought I had while watching Éxodo was of the news footage of victims jumping from the World Trade Center. Considering 9/11 happened later that year, the rather disturbing spectacle offered in this video is just coincidence; or twisted fate. In other circumstances, or from another camera angle, it could just as well have reminded me of King Kong. In any case, Lebrija’s intent was to mock the absurdity of bureaucracies and corporate power. The existential diversion continues in the gallery with four large unfolded cotton paper planes (Unfolded, Octagon, Atlas, Starker) displayed in glass frames hanging on the walls, and six maple-wood assemblages covered in gold leaf, which reproduce in three dimensions the flattened depressions of the former or similar (Unfolded gold; Unfolded gold: Riff; Unfolded gold: Concord peak; Unfolded gold: Black eye; Unfolded gold: Polar ring; Unfolded gold: Atlas). While formally the entire ensemble recalls Sol LeWitt’s folded and torn papers from the 1970s, the pieces are named after stars, constellations and

galaxies, which “in a way adds a certain mystery to them”, Lebrija says. Indeed, once you’re done playfully trying to figure out the different shapes of the erstwhile paper planes, you may observe that the intricate lines and angles of the folds render geometric compositions resembling the pyramidal structures of organisation charts; whereas the gold leaf applied to the wooden panels, like Christian icons, leads the imagination straight to the realm of the sacred. This is how, in Lebrija’s show, the notions of power and cult mingle to suggest mysterious hierarchies, the referent of which symbolically hides in the futility of the paper plane, and which brings us to the last piece on display. Installed at the entrance of the gallery, Silver Lamento is a small sculpture of a standing man wearing a suit, right arm and head leaning against the wall, as if frozen in a state of deep melancholy. Lebrija has produced many variations of this figurine since 2008, this one melted out of silver objects gleaned from flea markets. According to him, it represents the lamentation of the postmodern man left with no God to worship and no other choice than to turn his back to the world. This is the embodiment of Lebrija’s postmodern spleen. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

May 2015

149

Maria Georgoula Pom pom expedition Circuits and Currents, Athens 1 – 18 April A pair of pristine slippers, a trio of cheap gazebos and a quick reference to Eugène Ionesco’s 1950 play The Bald Soprano: you don’t need a lot more to frame up the aesthetic inclinations of the suburban middle-class. Guest-curated by the collective Radical Reading, Maria Georgoula’s Pom pom expedition is a take on the notion of softness: that of a blob, of an uncooked cake and of lethargic petty-bourgeois thought. Surrealism and absurdism are references for Georgoula’s work, although thinned down to a certain formalism that speaks and produces meanings mostly by ways of visual and tactile vocabularies – call it subtle anti-intellectualism, or just contemporary art. In other words, the ferocious class-related critique once fervently practised by Ionesco, André Breton et al here seems to give way to a polite display of fluffy objects and plaster globs, distilling the banality of everyday life in a few gracious works, thoughtfully installed. What do the surreal and the absurd have to tell about the psyche of the middle class of the twenty-first century? On the ground floor, the aforementioned white gazebos (Βατία / Vatía, 2015) take up most

of the space, sitting one next to the other in the soothing creamy light that illuminates the room. On the wall, a couple of tableaux covered in amorphous plaster forms (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 2014, the title of which directly references the Ionesco play) hang next to a tall bannerlike sculpture topped by an avocado (Φλάμπουρο / Banner, 2015), which refers to the wedding customs of some traditional Greek cultures. The basement space, featuring a built-in cage and two noisy fans embedded in the walls, feels in itself more underground. A long pole covered in furry fibreglass rests on the metal bars, soft and cuddly as the mascot of a fabric softener, protruding inside the gated space. In the cage, a box covered in plaster rests on the floor next to a pair of slippers, a symbolic presence indeed reminiscent of apathetic moments spent in front of hotel room televisions (Pad, 2015). On the other side of the room are two rumpled sculptures (Pom pom, 2015) made of those beaded covers that taxi drivers use for added comfort in their cars, but only on the driver’s seat, because they spend hours and hours sitting there and their customers do not.

Βατία / Vatía, 2015, gazebos. Courtesy the artist

150

ArtReview

Georgoula’s undecided forms, their morphological anarchism and their unengaged attention to the banal might well reflect a part of the collective and unconscious craving for comfort and apathy. There is an enigmatic approach to self-spectacularisation – a blessing and a curse – of the petty bourgeoisie, an approach that always stands between parody and detached participation. Is softness, the term itself, charged here with layers of latent meanings? For in relation to the present-day middle class it can suggest more than a couple of tempting associations: the property of giving little resistance to pressure; poor physical condition; a disposition to yield to the wishes of someone; the quality of being indistinct and without sharp outlines; acting in a manner that is gentle and mild and even-tempered. With regard to the representation of mental / emotional spaces here, a critical reading might embrace these clusters of attributes or dismiss class discourse altogether, as in that joke where one fish asks another, ‘So, how’s the water?’ and the other fish replies, ‘Water? What’s water?’ Michelangelo Corsaro

Alex Katz Black Paintings Timothy Taylor Gallery, London 28 February – 2 April ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté / Luxe, calme et volupté.’ Whatever world ‘Là’ is, it’s probably the kind of world Alex Katz depicts, the world he somehow inhabits and the world he offers his viewer, in warm tones made bright by the light of a leisured sun, falling on the bodies and faces of people happy not to do much, nor needing to. The Black Paintings are not those paintings, though – not the scenes of bathers in swimsuits or people in beachside groupings or genteel social gatherings or daylight playing on flowers and woodland foliage that tend to attract the greatest attention to Katz’s work. The Black Paintings are figure portraits, all painted in 2014, with the scenery ditched in favour of a grand background of uniform black, against which his subjects stand, mostly looking to us, sometimes at each other, or into the middle distance. There’s little for us to look at, then, apart from their expressions, their demeanour, their clothes – and Katz’s laconic, winning, assured sense of line, contour and flat colour. And that is already plenty, even though that plenty is a kind of emptiness. Three rows of three paintings fill one gallery wall to ceiling height, all of a sort

of ‘widescreen’ format, and all a uniform, 122 × 274 cm. Against these landscapes of nothing, there are Katz’s models; styled, elegant, urbane, relaxed, some of them regular sitters for Katz – wife Ada, grey-haired, regal; the younger Vivien, looking back at her with that mix of familiarity and respect that marks out a good daughter-in-law (Ada and Vivien); Katz’s son Vincent, one of two paintings (the other being Don) in which the male figure turns his back on us, face obscured, looking into the depths of the blackness, in well-pressed shirts. Given the cue that Katz paints people he knows, we can fantasise about relationships and emotions – what are they thinking, what histories do these people share with each other and the artist? – and in their unstressed poise they advertise familiarity and intimacy. And yet, simultaneously, if that falls away, they become something else: a type of person, or a person who inhabits a particular group, and carries the subtle signs of their belonging. On an adjacent wall we find Thor and Elizabeth, in their minimal blacks and greys, subtly chic light coats, close together and face-to-face, looking into each other’s eyes with wry amusement. Whoever they are, they’re a couple, a suggestion

cutely slipped into Elizabeth, where she is reproduced almost identically but he is absent, while a grey band added to her ring finger points to his absence, and their relationship. How could we not like these confident yet unostentatious residents of a happy life, with their flowing hair and designer outerwear? Smiling, dark-haired Eve in her vest top, no doubt on her way to yoga class, or blonde Nicole, steadfast and serious in her bright red storm jacket – a garment either exquisitely on-trend, or worn because she’s really going yachting? All this, given shape in Katz’s optimistic, high–low cultural fusion of line and colour, somewhere between Matisse and Hergé, but without the latter’s black outlines, which made everyone the master of ligne claire drew contained and dynamic and ready for action; here, everyone radiates actionless energy, which pushes the blackness into the background. Even in his portraits, even suppressing all context, Katz can’t help but conjure a utopian world of universal privilege – an aspiration for most, a reality for some – of happy, convivial people living in a fulfilled society. (T)here, everything is order and beauty; luxury, calm and sensuality. J.J. Charlesworth

May 2015

151

Johanna Billing Pulheim Jam Session Hollybush Gardens, London 13 March – 25 April In the opening static shot we see a narrow country road surrounded by fields of wheat, undulating beneath the wind. In the background, two wind turbines and the greyish, almost indiscernible apparition of an industrial power station blowing dense steam out of its cooling tower. Cars slow progressively, until they grind to a halt. Then begins the wait, the frustrating, uncertain – and so-familiar – wait of the traffic jam. In this case, it’s one set up by Swedish artist Johanna Billing on one of the roads linking two towns in the proximity of Cologne for the purpose of this new film, Pulheim Jam Session (2015). Projected on a large screen in the gallery’s main room, the film alternates between the observation of this fictional traffic jam and the behaviours of the volunteers participating in it, and a loosely improvised performance by Swedish pianist Edda Magnason in a barn nearby, which insufflates a palpitating rhythm into an otherwise uneventful narrative. With both the original performance and the resulting film, Billing’s work turns the incidental and frustrating traffic jam into a moment of poetic contemplation and sociological reflection.

What is striking in this traffic-jam scene is the resignation and patience with which the characters seem to accept their powerlessness over the situation, eventually transforming this frustrating moment into a positive and qualitative social experience: a father starts to read to his children, kids run around in the fields, some people play with their dogs, while others engage in discussion with their car neighbours. There is something quite utopian about this spontaneous social gathering, where time and progress have stopped, and in this manner the work reminds me of Julio Cortázar’s short story ‘La Autopista del Sur’ (‘The Southern Thruway’, 1966). As the duration of a gridlock on a highway in the South of France stretches indefinitely, Cortázar’s characters start to evolve into a self-organised community, a little society where situational car neighbours become friends or lovers. Time as measured by their watches loses all relevance, and becomes indefinite, gauged only through the meteorological changes indicating the passing of seasons. Although of less fantastic proportions, what resonates in Billing’s film is this depiction of the traffic jam as a social journey, evolving into circumstantial camaraderie and positive interaction.

Pulheim Jam Session (still), 2015, hd video, 22 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London

152

ArtReview

Billing’s protagonists are not professional actors following a script; they are inhabitants of the Pulheim region who responded to an open call in the local newspaper and on radio to participate in a staged traffic jam. The performed nature of the film, accentuated by the film poster and a few photographs taken during the shoot, shown in a room adjacent to the gallery, is counterbalanced by a certain contingency and open-endedness in the performance, which relied a lot on the improvisation of its participants. This element of spontaneity finds an echo in Magnason’s improvised piano jazz session, the unpredictable composition describing an irregular rhythmic crescendo, from quiet and melodic modal themes, to folksy, rapid and joyful excerpts. Yet this session is filmed by the artist in a way that makes apparent the staging of the scene – the film crew and equipment are occasionally caught in the frame – deliberately altering the impromptu character of the event. Playfully intertwining improvisation and staging, Billing creates a self-reflexive film with hints of a social utopia, leaving one hankering for an escape from the daily grind. Perhaps stuck in a jam is the way to get there. Louise Darblay

Iman Issa Lexicon Rodeo, London 14 March – 16 May I had a distinct recollection of some Iman Issa works I saw in Turin in 2010. There were shelves. A table. Bright colours. Some pictures of fruit maybe? A Sony Walkman. And an old-fashioned telephone. Thanks to the Internet, I find that I have misremembered some of the above. Most of the items included were muted in tone, and there was no phone, but there was a typewriter – a similar kind of shape perhaps? Those works were from Issa’s series Triptych (2009). Now, at Rodeo in London, she is showing refined diptychs. Lexicon comprises sculptural forms paired with short text panels under glass. Each ‘display’ is billed in the press release as ‘a proposal for a contemporary remake of an existing artwork’. From their descriptions, none of the ‘original’ artworks are immediately recognisable. Materials detailed in the text panels veer towards the traditional: lithographs, ink and pencil drawings, oil and gouache. Materials used in the sculptures presented are lavish, with human hand indiscernible: highly polished hardwoods, anodized aluminium and lenticular prints. In the displayed texts both the ‘lexicon’ and grammar are formulaic, with words, phrases and imagery recurring: ‘childlike’, ‘deep reds’, ‘half-human half-animal figures’. A large

number of the figures mentioned in the text panels (but who remain absent from the paired sculptures) are described as wearing cloaks. Arms and hands are often raised. Hair partings are mentioned with disproportionate frequency. And although it is claimed the described works are from various geographical regions, the subject matter – predominantly religious and mystical with titles that reference ‘harvest’ and ‘laboring’ (nb us spelling) – feels curiously mid-twentieth-century middleof-America. There is a sense of the ‘original’ artworks having been found in a dusty attic rather than a canonical museum, even if some of the companion sculptures are clearly reminiscent of established visual vocabularies. For example, though dramatically different in scale and material, when looking at Issa’s Colonial House (study for 2014) with its four dark grey sheets leaning against each other to make an open-topped cube, it is impossible not to think of Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969/81). That each work is a ‘study for’ a designated year suggests an attempt to capture something specific to the moment, and some of the works feel as though they can be crudely decoded: Monologist (study for 2014) comprises a cone mounted sideways on a tripod while the text describes a spotlight; Fortune Teller (study for 2013)

includes a cosmologically evocative c-print with a bright circular form set against a black background. In some works it seems technique is being brought to the fore, as in Harvest (study for 2014), in which a monitor showing hazy pastel shades is seemingly a result of the accompanying panel text, which states, ‘It has barely any discernible paint marks or brushstrokes.’ Other compositions remain opaque, meaning the viewer seeking definition quickly gets lost in subjective projection, a realisation that these works are not about definitive equivalences or interpretations but the strength of possibilities. Not only this, but the two parts of the work are inseparable; within the lexicon, one or either component might be considered a ‘bound morpheme’. Beyond Issa’s performative linguistic intentions, Lexicon’s distillations lend themselves to the realm of abstraction, although, as with my Turin experience, the quirks of memory also loom large. Likewise context: in early March 2015, when ancient artefacts are under attack in the Middle East, the Cairo-born artist’s works venture visions of what might remain and what might be brought into being once artworks cease to exist. They speak to the power and potential of memory, as well as the responsibility to imagine and reimagine. Rebecca Heald

Lexicon, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Robert Glowacki. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London & Istanbul

May 2015

153

Mark Barker Southard Reid, London 12 March – 11 April Mark Barker is a protean artist, straddling the disciplines of sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, photography and video. This show offers five works in four different mediums, all taking the male figure as their subject. Two gessoed clay sculptures depict figures arching backwards over their plinths, offering dried flowers from slender fingers, their bodies tapering into flat, bladelike heads whose Grecian curls, long noses and drooping eyelids recall the late-nineteenth-century trappings of the aesthetic movement. All but one of the works here depict the figure in profile. The left side of the face in Untitled (Yarrow) (all works 2015) is virtually devoid of features, giving it the feel of a relief (there is no front as such, just a wedge where both sides meet), but the torsos of both works, particularly Untitled (Hydrangea), with its tensed midriff and dilated bellybutton, set up a deliberate contradiction between two- and three-dimensional form. Stylistically, the rest of the show is less quotational. Christopher, a drawing in graphite, gouache, chalk and charcoal, shows a young man with arms folded, shivering in black

underpants and ladies’ slingbacks, his feet drawn on a separate piece of paper abutted to the first, giving the impression of two different figures collaged together. In Bedsitter, a projected digital animation, a rocking chair moves gently to and fro, a sleeping boy dangling from the back by the nape of his neck and a cat snoozing on the seat, the boy’s limbs resembling – thanks to the side-on view – those of a puppet. The more you watch, looking in vain for minimal variation of movement during the 1:58-minute loop, the more plausible this balancing act seems, as though the two protagonists are perfect counterweights to sustain the perpetual motion here portrayed. And is this not how everyone feels about their cat: that life without it would destroy all equilibrium? Perhaps this is Barker’s subject: the nailing of common sentiment with uncommon tableaux. Some tableaux are more contrived than others. General Malaise is a small colour photograph of a handsome bearded man in a knitted scarf and shawl, again in profile, being offered water from a cup by someone just out of shot. Photography introduces a somewhat theatrical

Mark Barker, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy Southard Reid, London

154

ArtReview

dimension to the show, the staged nature of Barker’s general approach being more blatant in this set-up image. The male figure recurs throughout, a vehicle for anchoring sentiment with tender details: the stretched bellybutton in Untitled (Hydrangea); the folded arms in Christopher; the fetchingly emaciated ribcage in Bedsitter; the sick man’s knitted scarf in General Malaise – all of which hint at an unseen milieu that is at once decadent, convalescent, morosely erotic, and peopled by the awkward and vulnerable. The ‘accessory’ is assigned a metonymic role, like a cravat or a lily in a scene by Wilde, adumbrating a more complex social backdrop rather than fully fleshing it out. Barker is an eloquent stylist, allowing the idea to dictate form, one senses, in the same way that a poet chases thoughts into a suitable verse structure. Although the drawback of this approach is that one can fail to master any one form technically (and it is true that some of the modelling of the sculptures looks hurried), his handling is convincing enough for each work to evoke a wider imaginary universe. Sean Ashton

Lina Selander Open System – Silphium and Other Works Iniva, London 14 January – 21 March Thinking of an analogy to describe this small selection of Lina Selander’s short films, photographs and installations brought to my mind a hand of cards. Each individual work (card) has its own significance, but can appear more than once within the exhibition (card game). And how these same works are reedited (how cards are added, taken away and shuffled) affects the overall impression (the meaning of that hand). Alright: it’s a bit of a clumsy parallel. Nevertheless, these notions of repetition, shuffling and reediting are key to the nuanced excavations of film and the photographic image as the recording devices of history that Selander (Sweden’s representative in Venice) undertakes. A rhythmic montage of still and moving, existing and original images, sounds and silence, the 22-minute film Silphium (2014), made with Oscar Mangione, takes its title from a medicinal plant, native to the ancient Greek settlement of Cyrene in North Africa. Exploited to extinction, the plant only survives as an image on coins. As Selander’s camera pans across

photographs of these coins in a book, there is an awareness of embossed impressions of something once alive long ago, captured in a photograph in a different time, which has in turn been animated at a still later date, on film. These opposing motifs of visible and invisible, alive and dead, and of a general collapsing of time, also repeat – in blurry action glimpsed through spyholes, reflections of leaves on a pond, a bare and abandoned Christmas tree. Chris Marker’s seminal time-travelling tale La Jetée (1962) is more than an acknowledged influence, with whispered snippets from its soundtrack included in Silphium’s audio, as if bits of La Jetée itself had travelled through time. There are more wormhole effects in the film Model of Continuation (2013). With the viewpoint from a camera set up in a photographic studio, pointing at an infinity curve, onto which is projected an edit of another of Selander’s short films, To the Vision Machine (2013), the viewer is presented with a film within a film on a screen within a screen. The montage of footage in

To the Vision Machine focuses on imagery documenting the aftermath of Hiroshima, and the effect of the bomb’s nuclear explosion as a giant camera flash, recording an imprint of the city as it destroys it. Flora is a strong presence here too, with plants taking on a poignant role as history’s silent witnesses. In the one new work here, To the Vision Machine appears again, playing on an iPad, in Open System – Working Archive (2015), a vitrine containing, among other things, a silphiumdepicting coin and a stack of photographs that appear in yet another of Selander’s previous films, Anteroom of the Real, (2011). Silphium and Model of Continuation were first reviewed in these pages when they were shown at Kunsthall Trondheim last year, but another context adds a new work and another layer. These repetitions and reworkings remind how we access history by repeatedly tunnelling into and representing records of the past, and bring to mind another analogy, not so much wormhole as down the rabbit hole. Helen Sumpter

Silphium (still), 2014, hd video, b / w, 22 min. Courtesy the artist

May 2015

155

Uriel Orlow Unmade Film John Hansard Gallery, Southampton 3 March – 25 April The reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel, a depressing event that emphasised his rejection of a Palestinian state, made it a timely moment to see Uriel Orlow’s installation, which focuses on the historically contested site that is Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. His Unmade Film is exactly that – a sequence of rooms that contain what might be construed as the basic materials for a movie: so we are presented with a storyboard, a script, some stills, a voiceover, the staging, the closing credits and so on. Deir Yassin is the site of dual trauma – firstly the massacre of its Palestinian inhabitants by Zionist paramilitary forces in 1948 and then, shortly after this, the establishment of Kfar Sha’ul, a psychiatric institution that cared for Holocaust victims, including Orlow’s great-aunt, who had survived Auschwitz. Orlow considers these two events as instances of wilful ignorance, where one horrific event conceals another. Unmade Film notes the lack of any commemorative plaque on the site regarding the Palestinian victims of the Nakba, while concurrently Orlow recalls the desolate atmosphere he encountered when visiting the forgotten mentally ill from the East European camps. We witness stills of empty seats where patients once sat, their presence mute, a reminder of the unconsoled. In another room we can listen through headphones to a sad

soundtrack of Arabic music. But where does this take us, the witnesses here of the unwitnessed? The impossibility of comparison, of doing justice to the two histories, is Orlow’s subject and hence his reasoning behind the blasted, fragmentary form of his project. We might paraphrase Brad Prager, from his excellent After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty First Century Documentary Film (2015), in order to sum up Orlow’s dilemma: ‘picturing the Holocaust’s [or Deir Yassin’s] horrors diminishes them, turns them into kitsch, and prolongs the treacherous illusion that it is possible, from our standpoint, to comprehend what took place’. Orlow’s dismantling of the filmic apparatus into its elements is properly Brechtian, and one imagines he shares Brecht’s concern to, in some way, politicise his audience. What has happened, he implies, is wrong, is beyond irony and requires correction. The artistic method Orlow uses here is montage and recalls the great modernist literary experimentations of Joyce and Döblin. And yet there is, as with the strictures of Claude Lanzmann, director of the magisterial documentary Shoah (1985), around Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), a rejection of reconstruction, of the risks of fictive manoeuvring. But there remains the risk to the status of Unmade Film as a work itself with such disruption, that we end up with eroded

Unmade Film, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Steve Shrimpton. Courtesy the artist

156

ArtReview

fragments that fail to gel into any coherent sense of impact as art. The unmade film project as an object in itself has antecedents, as with the volume of notes relating to Stanley Kubrick’s life of Napoleon, or, and of more relevance to Orlow’s work given its subject matter, Jane and Louise Wilson’s art about unfinished art videowork Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009), which speculated on another of Kubrick’s plans, his unrealised take on the Holocaust. And yet while accusations of kitsch for a realised film are nigh on unavoidable when discussing the unimaginable horrors of the period, performances can still be powerful, can still qualify as art, even if the totality of the project remains something of a failure. Consider Paul Schrader’s movie Adam Resurrected (2008), based on Yoram Kaniuk’s book and set in a fictional Israeli psychiatric hospital for survivors not dissimilar to Kfar Sha’ul. Despite the scepticism of many, actors and actresses remain key to the success of cinema as art. While Orlow’s work has some staged choreography, it has no thespian performances to speak of as striking as Jeff Goldblum in the titular role of Schrader’s movie. Orlow’s acute sensitivities unsurprisingly avoid the chance of imaginative, fictive failure, but isn’t that what art must risk? John Quin

Hugo Canoilas Someone a long time ago, now Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee 6 March – 10 April A performance, project space, staircase, upper-foyer gallery, main gallery, comic book exhibition-within-an-exhibition and reading list. In a preview of the exhibition in Dundee’s local newspaper The Courier, Hugo Canoilas announced that he wanted visitors to ‘feel and experience everything… because I’m giving everything I have’. He wasn’t wrong. The Portuguese artist’s first solo exhibition in Scotland feels like an ambitious, almost exhaustive attempt to cram every permutation of the artist’s practice into Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art’s Cooper Gallery and its adjacent spaces. In places, the exhibition is just too sprawling. The five projected works in the ‘project space’, for example, are situated in a room that isn’t gallerylike enough to announce its presence as the beginning of a larger exhibition. Rather, it functions as one of the entrances to the building, a walk-through area in which the overhead projectors on the floor seem somewhat lost, as though left there to be lifted and moved elsewhere. It’s an unfortunate curatorial decision that threatens to undermine Canoilas’s critical

intentions by making the work appear flimsy or slight through the manner of its presentation. In fact, taken together, Canoilas’s works are frequently intriguing and complex in both the theoretical and political concerns they seek to examine and the sheer range of forms employed to make these manifest. The reading list, intended to expand upon ideas related to the work, highlights that Canoilas is an eminently bookish artist, and allusions to literature and theory abound throughout the exhibition, including a sizable interest in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and philosophy, particularly that evincing a symbolist or existential leaning (Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard, Malcolm Lowry and Arthur Rimbaud, among others). Fernando Pessoa’s work in particular seems to act as a conceptual framework for Canoilas. In the opening-night performance, Pessoa’s use of heteronyms as a way of exploring the fluidity and shifting nature of identity was reflected in Canoilas’s own adoption of an alter ego, in this case the ageing American hippy Jeremy

Babcock, a kind of lay preacher espousing epigrammatic philosophical ‘truths’ both comedic and foreboding. In the main gallery space, the collision between the absurd and profound continues in large-scale paintings of dinosaurs, mammoths and other prehistorical creatures rendered in the illustrative style and saturated, heightened colour of 1970s children’s book illustration. Unlike those depicted in the Ladybird book Dinosaurs, though, these animals cheerily recite passages from Pessoa, Derrida and Heidegger as they emerge from their primordial soup. To add to the apparent incongruity, their pronouncements are shown within comic-book speech bubbles. In the upper-foyer gallery, a commission, collaboration and sublet by the artist Francisco Sousa Lobo acts as a response to Canoilas’s work in the form of an adventure comic-book and letter to the artist entitled I Like Your Art Much. With more careful curatorial decisions, I’m sure many visitors to this exhibition would reiterate Sousa Lobo’s response. Susannah Thompson

Jeffrey goes to Dundee, 2015, performance. Photo: Ross Fraser McLean. Courtesy the artist, Cooper Gallery djca, Dundee; and Workplace Gallery, Gateshead & London

May 2015

157

Martín Soto Climent The Contemporary Comedy: Glossy Mist Clifton Benevento, New York 20 February – 25 April Today every artist becomes a brand once he or she capitulates to capitalism’s hegemony over the artworld system. The only way to shed this brand is to disappear entirely from the marketplace – or, as Martín Soto Climent attempts to do in The Contemporary Comedy: Glossy Mist, acquire an entirely new set of personalities. Consisting of 24 works made by eight ‘different’ artists, seven of whom are personas created by Soto Climent – one is his alter ego, Martín Soto – the exhibition was inspired, according to the press release, by a text by the fourth-century Chinese anarchist philosopher Bao Jingyan about the existential crisis of a warrior facing death. In his dreams, the warrior kills a man who wears his own face, a metaphor, no doubt, for what Soto Climent attempts to do in this exhibition. The problem is that The Contemporary Comedy: Glossy Mist reads less like a pivotal confrontation with oneself and more like a Gabriel García Márquez novel, or like the private ramblings of a schizophrenic person with an international coterie of friends, which might be saying the same thing. Known best for creating sublime objects out of trash, stockings, shoes and beer cans, here Soto Climent assumes the characters of Lola Lago, a Tierra del Fuego-born choreographer and

dancer who committed suicide during the 1970s; John Brown, an artist with ‘very little means’ who creates Plasticine faces in crumpled beer cans; Felix Manz, a Swiss depressive who defaces newspaper advertisements; and João Carvalho, a composite of a group of men imprisoned by a military dictatorship in Brazil during the 70s, to name just a few examples of the avatars. Each of these personas deals more overtly than obliquely with death. Animal skulls, skeletons and death masks abound. Rather than a group show of artists dealing with the same theme, it’s readily apparent that this one belongs to a single artist experimenting with different mediums – drawing, painting, collage, photography and sculpture. Tashiro Tsuramoto: Hagakure (all works 2015) is a three-sided structure in the centre of the gallery consisting of a wood frame wallpapered with loosely brushed ink drawings of howling skeletons on white sheets of paper. According to the press release, Tashiro Tsuramoto is a ninetyone-year-old calligraphy master who lost most of his family in a concentration camp in Mexico during the Second World War – one can’t help but imagine Soto Climent himself hunched over in a silk kimono with an ink-stained brush,

affecting Tsuramoto’s personality as much as he does Tsuramoto’s ‘hand’ on paper. Iris Shady: Desnuda is a ladder constructed from cement, plaster, plastic bags and wire, which are moulded to resemble the pelvis and various leg bones of a human skeleton. Shady is a New Zealand sculptor attempting to create/anticipate the fossilised remains left behind after the extinction of the human race. The hanging installation is meant to symbolise the work’s suspension between time and space, but without the context provided by the checklist, it just looks a prop from the serial-killer drama Hannibal (2013–). In the bathroom of the gallery hangs Felix Manz: Untitled (Obama), a minor work that speaks volumes about the exhibition. It consists of a photograph of President Obama over whose face Manz has sketched a skull. Even defaced, Obama is still immediately recognisable thanks to his signature gesture of leaning slightly forward, with his right hand pinching his chin. In other words, everyone has a tell. Soto Climent’s might be flamboyance. Inside of him there’s a manic character actor attempting to break free – either that, or an ingenious artist who needs to figure out what he wants to be doing. Brienne Walsh

Felix Manz: Untitled (Obama), 2015, newspaper, black pencil, 43 × 33 cm. Courtesy the artist and Clifton Benevento, New York

158

ArtReview

Alex Da Corte Die Hexe Luxembourg & Dayan, New York 26 February – 11 April Alex Da Corte’s Die Hexe is nothing if not discombobulating. Firstly, it’s located on the Upper East Side, which is like another planet. Disoriented by so many rich peoples’ townhouses, I walked by the gallery’s nondescript entrance twice. Secondly, upon entering, I thought I’d stumbled into a psychic’s storefront. It was in fact the gallery belonging to Luxembourg & Dayan, with its friendly, conventional gallery staff popping suddenly out of unseen doors. Perhaps the gallery’s assistants and directors are the real frights of Da Corte’s kinky Halloween freakshow – situated, as they seemed to be, in a parallel, opaque universe of ordinariness. Staged as a somewhat loose narrative set entirely in domestic spaces, complete with a hammy script of Da Corte’s own creation, Die Hexe begins when viewers stumble into the dark reception area decorated with candy apples and flickering fake candlesticks. There one is faced with three identical doors. The rightmost leads upstairs, while the left portal leads to offices; the door in the middle offers only a peephole view of a Robert Gober drain, glimmering in bright light (the view’s disorienting play with light, mirrors and perspective made it sorta resemble a small Yayoi Kusama, though I don’t think that was intentional). Moving upstairs to a room papered with pumpkin-coloured gingham wallpaper and

illuminated entirely in orange, one finds a chair rocking on its own, powered by a rickety flywheel, and a stuffed cloth leopard straddling a carpet in the centre of the floor. The latter is actually a work by Mike Kelley, though you’d never know it unless told so. There’s a Bjarne Melgaard work too, in the adjoining room: a naked woman on all fours forming the base of a glass table covered in kitschy bric-a-brac bongs. With colourful floor-to-floor carpeting and a stripper pole, onto which an outmoded flip-cover cell-phone had been affixed, the room looks like a strip-club-cum-drug-den lifted straight out of a Tarantino period movie, though Da Corte’s reference, as told to me by a gallery director, is actually Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The louche 1970s details are all there, replete with a reproduction of Poussin’s Midas and Bacchus (1630), which forms the stylised backdrop of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Here the Poussin sprouts neon from its central figure’s penis. Trailing along the wall, the neon draws the logo for Black Cat fireworks – after all, the artist notes, Bacchus always appears with a cat. Ostensibly the whole thing culminates in death, the final room of the exhibition, which is just past a gallery of fake (and one real) Haim Steinbachs propping up kitschy kitchen items. Three of its walls are covered in plush

green fabric, and the fourth wall is mirrored, disguising three morgue drawers, one of which, opened, contains pooled Listerine and another Gober drain. This drain, however, is just a white marble reproduction of the other. I would hire Da Corte in a heartbeat to decorate my grungy apartment with limecoloured wall covers, electronic candelabras and delicate still lifes composed of Friday the 13th hockey masks (the pièce de résistance of Da Corte’s morgue); the young Philadelphiabased artist is known, after all, for these kinds of over-the-top, super-gay immersive installations. But Die Hexe seems to be little more than kitsch for kitsch’s sake, inflected with a variety of pop-cultural, camp and art-historical references adding up to little more than sheer spectacle – even though it gestures to greater things. Maybe that’s what is disappointing about Die Hexe: there are so many interesting references squandered. Together, they lead nowhere. For some, Da Corte’s glossy sensory overload might be enough. Though I could jerk off to this kind of Liberace Halloween special all day long, the sense of missed opportunity leaves me a little cold. For all its pleasures, the exhibition seems merely to window-dress – elaborately – domesticity gone awry. David Everitt Howe

Die Hexe, 2015 (installation view). Photo: John Bernardo. Courtesy Luxembourg & Dayan, New York

May 2015

159

Alejandro Cesarco Loyalties and Betrayals Murray Guy, New York 28 February – 4 April There’s a pastel drawing by Ed Ruscha, in which a blue smudgy background leaves the words ‘Some pretty eyes and some electric bills’ standing out in white block caps. To my mind the prettiest words in that sentence are ‘electric bills’. Any fool can tell you about pretty eyes, but during this period (the work is from 1976) Ruscha was subtly retooling associations with beauty and glamour by placing it within banal situations, and pragmatic tedium, using language referring to traffic jams and ‘pay nothing till April’. I sense that Alejandro Cesarco, who opens his exhibition Loyalties and Betrayals with Words with Ruscha (2014), has a different idea of Ruscha’s use of banality. Two photographs of a gallery wall text introducing a fictional Ruscha retrospective, this work emphasises banality and boredom as possible avant-garde strategies: ‘The metaphysical of his work, always hovering like tomorrow’s flowers just beyond perception, resists the interpretative skills one cannot help exercising.’ (Pretty Eyes, Electric Bills is one of the Ruscha titles Cesarco mentions in this text.)

Each photograph pictures this wall text from a slightly different angle, I suppose to introduce issues relating to unseen gaps, interstices, lost spaces and so on. Such themes are taken up in a silent 16mm film, Mirrored Portrait (2015), transferred to video, which shows Cesarco’s first photography teacher, Panta Astiazarán, whom the former had not seen in 16 years, taking a portrait of Cesarco in a café. The unseen years between them, which is the real subject of the film, are a gulf, and the emphasis here is on fathoming this great gap in time, rather than any resultant photographic portrait (which is not shown). Several images of Cesarco’s studio floor are entitled A Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (I–III) (2013), and show grey-scaled pockmarks, dents and clean floors that have been worn, scuffed and dirtied – an apparent metaphor for the ageing artist. Emphasising an exhibition that is already blanched of colour, the two long walls at Murray Guy are painted with long panoramic rectangles of different shades of grey – one putty, one columbine.

Mirrored Portrait, 2015, 16mm film transferred to digital, colour, silent, 3 min 50 sec. Courtesy Murray Guy, New York

160

ArtReview

Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense (2015) is the artist’s newest videowork, and it is composed of contemplative footage of pale-hued roses, rainy streets, paper blowing in the wind and a pretty woman looking pained and thoughtful as she flicks through a series of books and plays with her hair. She notably studies catalogue reproductions of On Kawara’s Date Paintings (from 1965 on) and Roni Horn’s photographic portrait series You are the Weather (1994–5) and is seen reading Alberto Moravia’s Contempt (1954). Such shots are punctuated by intertitles of infuriating pretention that don’t speak to the everyday as such, but rather to a contemplative, philosophical language of the poetic: ‘Beauty as the promise of happiness’, or ‘To see into is to think back’. In the intertitles of the videos, Cesarco describes quotations as ‘fresh wounds’. Really? Where’s the blood? The banality here is not of a transformative kind, but just plain boring: a poetic world that’s all pretty eyes, and no electric bills. Laura McLean-Ferris

Sebastian Lloyd Rees Vendor Room East, New York 22 February – 29 March The objects hanging in this gallery travelled all over the world to be here. In fact, a number of them are accompanied by a FedEx slip or envelope bearing Room East’s Lower East Side address and various locations for the artist. Rees sent the baskets, cardboard boxes, newspapers and other ephemera on show from India; here they are arranged in the space, either hanging as two-dimensional work or reconfigured to make sculptures. Rees’s recent visit to Mumbai included daily trips to a variety of markets and ‘sites throughout the slums of the city’ (so states the press release) in order to gather material. One wall is painted a mustardy ‘Indian Yellow’ (according to the checklist), and atop it is green plywood used by builders to fence off a construction site, which Rees found in New York and repurposes here as a large abstract painting folded across the corner of the gallery (both are part of Hoarding 2015 (Varick Ave by Meadow St 24 January 13:56), 2015). The poor materials are not transformed by being placed in the gallery space. They resist

the aura that the white cube so often imparts. But the fact that the works don’t quite fit the gallery does not mean that they do what Rees thinks they do, which is to give a voice or a presence to those people who used or made these things. This is most obvious in an installation titled Ragpickers’ Court (2015), in which nine wooden hands emerge from sleeves made of cheap fabrics and connect to broken pieces of timber. It’s jarring because its politics are off: the hands do not assert any kind of voice or presence. Divorced from their local context, these objects read like a detached statement: someone else’s call, or capitulation. This is not the first exhibition in which Rees, who also makes work collaboratively with Ali Eisa under the name Lloyd Corporation, has exhibited barely treated found matter. Historically it’s been a strong tool to treat objects as a kind of archaeology, to channel sociopolitical situations by shifting them from the street into the gallery. In the case of his 2014 solo show at Duve gallery in Berlin, for example, objects

found in different industrial sites in the German capital invoked the state of dying industries in Western cities and the rise of the service economy. In this show, however, the result is exoticism. The ideas Rees points to here – hoarding, debris, repurposing, urban space – are relevant in any contemporary society, Global North and South alike, but they’re not addressed critically in this body of work. Rees’s focus on poor materials like cardboard, wire and baskets that he collects and brings over to the West from the ‘slums’ of India (so it says in the press release) does not flag the global nature of these environmental issues but rather highlights their foreignness to a Western audience. The promise of Rees’s work at the moment is not its content but its methodology. He updates the relationship between found material and the gallery as a charged site. This has been a rich field of discussion for a long time, and Rees could have a strong voice in it if he decides to be less of a tourist and more of a thinker. Orit Gat

Followers (detail), 2015, paint, mask, cardboard, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Room East, New York

May 2015

161

sogtfo (Sculpture or Get the Fuck Out) François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles 28 February – 11 April Tits or Get the Fuck Out. In the darker, scuzzier and more diabolically playful corners of the Internet, where identity is at best fluid and undefined, togtfo is, according to writer Quinn Norton, ‘a transgression to test a new person’s ability to participate within an in-group’. Though directed at women or users perceived to be women, you’re not supposed to show your tits. That’s maybe the worst possible response. Or the worst outside of taking it as a literal request and getting upset. Better is, maybe, ‘All I have are your mom’s and nobody wants those’, or just ignore the fuckers. The question presumes that the majority of /b/tards, anons, trolls, hackers and lurkers are dudes, which most of them are, and the Internet’s language, culture and criteria have been largely set by men. Artist and exhibition curator Charlie White asserts that sculpture has had the same history, but that it shouldn’t have had to, thus the show’s title. Of all the different media, sculpture has a particularly cock-dragging history and is dude-dominated in general, in la in particular, and the gang of artists in this show engages with that history, collectively pushing the medium into new places. Of the six artists, all ladies, two midcareer and a trio

of emergers, none are flashing their tits or buckling under the offence of patriarchy. With humour, panache, skill and style that matches and surpasses their male peers, the work of these artists supersedes any bullshit gendering. Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Sculpture (once u go black) (2015) quietly engages with la sculpture icon Charles Ray’s subtle and significant rescalings. Here the upsized bottom hips of a mannequin sport a fade-to-black of panties stacked atop panties creeping down its legs – an American Apparel model tweaked for surreal effect. The sculpture doesn’t read here as an objectified body but rather as a bit of amusing motherfuckery (to use the Anonymous term) with display, bodies and commerce. Kathleen Ryan beautifully engages with display and material in Bacchante (2015), which has concrete balloons tumbling down a granite plinth, a bulbous match for Nevine Mahmoud’s ceramic balls in Basketball (2014) and Beachball (2015). Rounding onward, Mahmoud’s gnarly, heavy metal spiked rings, plunked on and off pristine coloured platforms with one particularly sizeable vagina dentata calling itself O (2015), matches in shape and title Kelly Akashi’s surreal free-floating wall, dubbed Figure oO

(2015). Standing with two circles cleanly chopped out, the wall displays the artist’s disembodied hand cast in wax. Rather than assertive phallic obelisks, we have assertive holes all the more badass for their yonic vacancies. Andrea Zittel’s Flat Field Work #1 (2015) reads in this context as a bridge. Zittel takes issues of domesticity to a level of autarchic seriousness. Her perspicacity and facility with materials make craft, previously considered ‘women’s work’, simply art. Given the male-dominated history of sculpture, the ladies here offer neither a junior alternative nor a reactionary riposte, but a sophisticated set of objects working with essential issues of sculpture in ways that the gentlemen just couldn’t. White locates with these artists an important shift in our understanding of art (especially the history of it in Los Angeles) and its relationship to gender, flowing out of feminist and trans advances but also the postgender continuum offered by online avatars. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer sums up the possibilities beautifully in the final line of her essay that accompanies the exhibition: ‘an all-female sculpture show is pretty cool, but an all-female Senate would be so much cooler’. Andrew Berardini

Nevine Mahmoud, Tunnel chunk with color plane (detail), 2015, aluminium, laminate, wood, 125 × 31 × 274 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

162

ArtReview

Mernet Larsen Chainsawer, Bicyclist and Reading in Bed Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, 28 February – 11 April What’s the most grindingly dull subject you can think of for a painting? How about a college faculty meeting? Seventy-five-year-old Mernet Larsen, of Tampa, Florida, has made a whole series of paintings depicting meetings at the art school in which she still teaches. Two of them are included in this exhibition, and boring they are not. Larsen, who until recently had showed very little outside the East Coast, has devised a parallel semiotic universe in which the ordinary becomes janglingly peculiar. Lines of perspective are inverted or rendered dead parallel, and humans are plotted as amalgams of sharp-edged polyhedrons. In some paintings, figures have close-to-natural proportions, but in others, such as Sit-ups, Leg-lifts (2012), the body is drawn as a plank with feet. Larsen’s paintings frequently look as if they were programmed by an equation with one or two wayward variables.

What hauls the works back from the brink of unrelatable oddness is Larsen’s eye for textured surfaces, and the effects of light upon them. She has developed a technique of painting on panels of tracing paper that she sticks to the canvas, compartmentalising sharp-edged fields of colour. In Explanation (2007), one of the meeting pictures, Larsen captures the streaky pattern of institutional linoleum under fluorescent light so accurately that you feel like you’re in the room – which makes the painting all the more discombobulating because the perspective is flipped inside out, the biggest floor tiles appearing to be on the ceiling. For Greek and Russian icon painters, reverse perspective had a specific theological purpose: to project the sacred image into the spatial realm of the human. For Larsen, it is more of a perceptual puzzle, an order of representation

that allows us – compels us, in fact – to climb around inside the picture rather than to stand outside it and peer in. She does this not in order to be clever, or even to make us conscious of our own processes of apperception. Larsen wants us to look as if for the first time at social behaviours that would normally not warrant a second thought. In Handshake (2001), a man and a woman dressed in business casual evoke two colossi performing a magnificent slow dance. Salad (2013) shows an unremarkable meal being shared by three people and includes an empty chair that suggests you can join them. Boredom and blandness in Larsen’s world are nonissues. The world is what you make it, she seems to tell us. Despite Larsen’s cool palette and deadened affect, these are not pictures of alienation, but humanist studies for a posthuman age. Jonathan Griffin

Explanation, 2007, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 104 × 132 cm. Courtesy Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

May 2015

163

Monique van Genderen Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 21 February – 4 April It is worth pausing, at least for a moment, to think of the differences between Monique van Genderen’s four super-large paintings in the opening gallery of Susanne Vielmetter and the paintings of the era about which van Genderen is pointedly thinking: the broad and massively scaled canvases of Abstract Expressionism. Notably, the limitations of the studio set the parameters of van Genderen’s paintings. The canvases are so large that she was forced to work on them both on the floor and on the wall, not knowing what they would look like when stretched and extended at Vielmetter. No doubt this happened often in the cramped urban environment that housed painters such as Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler and a painter whom van Genderen specifically refers to in her press release, Morris Louis, who perhaps sacrificed his kitchen table to the service of painting in a way that no painter had before nor has since.

None of these older painters would have been too precious about discussing the studio as a constraint. We do witness such preciousness today, when the entire lifecycle of the painting itself – from conception, to execution, to sale, to postgallery life – becomes something on which artists must actively dwell. Which leads to a conundrum, of sorts, in van Genderen’s work. For instance, Untitled (2015), a painting so large that two more centimetres would cause it to exceed the gallery wall, is one of van Genderen’s self-described Manufactured Paintings. Yes, it’s manufactured by an artist, but knowing van Genderen likes to think about the chain of creation of a painting, it is difficult to know what to do with the final product, which has all the flavours of a Gottlieb, with its divided surface seeming to call for primal dualities between heaven and earth, sky and water, black holes and caves. The final painting wants to be existential, to capture the

Untitled, 2015, oil on linen, 419 × 198 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

164

ArtReview

viewer in the immensity of large thoughts about the size of a human in relation to an immensity. Simply put, the conundrum is that the experience of the painting has outgrown the small discourse of the studio. Other paintings, on a smaller scale, call forth a similar reaction. A smaller Untitled (2015) measures in at only 97 × 89 cm, yet it is a painting that seems to suggest liminal states of being that recall early Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko. If the painting were called ‘break’ or ‘dawn’ or ‘onement’ or any other word that smacks of 1950s-style Expressionism, the title would fit. It is a tremendous painting, full of mystery and suspense and cosy colours sliding into intrigue, making it worthy of many viewings. The painting seems to want to believe in something old, but it hedges its bets with a language of modesty, the language of most painting in our age of doubt about painting. And, to be honest, van Genderen’s work is too good for such things. Ed Schad

The Lulennial: A Slight Gestuary Lulu, Mexico City 17 February – 8 March, 14 March – 14 April, 18 April – 17 May The three-part Lulennial: A Slight Gestuary is one of the most ambitious projects I have seen in Mexico City. And that’s despite, or because of (depending on how you look at it), the fact that it takes place in one of the city’s smallest exhibition spaces. The first part mind-blowingly packs an entire conceptual art-history course into 9sqm. Nor does the second part disappoint, despite the bar having been set so high. (The third and final part has yet to take place at the time of writing.) The premise behind the 28-artist exhibition, cocurated by Chris Sharp (an ArtReview contributing editor) and Fabiola Iza (Sophie Goltz has curated a historical performance component live and online, accessible for the duration at aslightgestuary.tumblr.com), is that small gestures can have a great impact, and here conceptually based work of the type that is conventionally grouped with a geographic focus is grouped not by nationality or even by generation, but rather in terms of an affinity in their economy of means and gesture, all of which allows young artists to be placed alongside historical figures, and art created in response to a variety of contexts to be shown side by side. Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inframince (an imperceptible difference between two things that cannot be defined, only illustrated with examples, such as ‘the heat emanating from a just-vacated seat’ or the ‘fog of breath on a polished surface’) is cleverly explored through many of the works, as for example in Karin Sander’s monochromatic painting in the negative: a white rectangle contained in the wall proper created by a process of sanding and polishing that reveals the history of the space

itself. In stark physical and material contrast, next to it, Goran Trbuljak’s Jazz Brush (1991), a textured canvas transformed into a tambourine, begs people to play it. Jiří Kovanda is one of the exhibition’s central artists. For this first part, the shoelaces of his desert boots, replaced with spaghetti, incarnate an antimonumental gesture (Untitled, 2004). In an interesting reversal of synaesthesia, one sees the opposite of Trbuljak’s piece in Zarouhie Abdalian’s silenced whistle, her delicate Buoy (2014). Another departure point for the show, and the perfect literal and figurative condensation of the inframince, is Gabriel Orozco’s iconic Breath on Piano (1993), next to which Jenine Marsh’s clay ‘ears’ on a found metal armature, in themselves a compact compendium of discreet gestures (Talk Closely, 2014), seem to listen attentively. Fernanda Gomes’s monochromatic sculpture Untitled (2015), a homemade rough wooden cover for electrical wires taken from a neighbour’s house and placed in the gallery, has a narrative component to it and includes the ‘poor’ aspects of Kovanda’s materials while at the same time representing a different sort of monochrome to Sander’s. Just as this work was taken from the street, one noticed a coin on the gallery floor that begged to be picked up: Tania Pérez Córdova’s Holy Drunk… (2014), specifically conceived for The Lulennial, is an astute commentary on the economy of art, but also on the economy of gestures in the show. Consisting of three ten-peso coin replicas formed from alloys of beer can and bronze, the first is on the gallery floor, the second in Sharp’s pocket throughout the show’s duration and the third in the care of Lulu,

a juice stand a short walk from the gallery (and from which the gallery takes its name). Full of paradoxes, this work questions nobility and value in a succinct way. Atrapar la mosca, a 2014 video by Chantal Peñalosa, comments on a local tourist economy bled dry and devastated by the trade in illegal drugs, but also on idleness and wasting time, as the artist follows a fly buzzing through the restaurant where she works (or rather doesn’t work, due to a lack of clients). Despite its banal, almost ridiculous action, the video captures light reflecting off the restaurant’s floor that is revealed as almost identical to the gallery’s own floor – a more formal type of bleeding out. If the first part of The Lulennial had a sonic quality to it, the second part presented an organic feel: Kovanda’s Necklace (2007), a piece encountered on the first day of the show (it was destroyed during the opening), was a line of green peas on the gallery floor, right in front of where Peñalosa’s video had previously made a seamless connection between the gallery and the works. The peas were soon displaced and smashed, but in perfect colourful resonance with the green of the work in front: Francis Alÿs’s Untitled, Study for a Story of Deception (2004), a painting sawed through onsite, depicting a lush green jungle. This was just the beginning of part two, which also included documentation of beautiful performances by Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci, a humorous tortilla-andinstruction-based piece by Darren Bader and Wilfredo Prieto’s Look at the size of this mango (2011), to mention only a few. I cannot wait to see part three. Gabriela Jauregui

Tania Pérez Córdova, Holy drunk 1. este país 2. esta gente 3. este gobierno (installation view, Lulu juice stand, Mexico City), 2014, bronze mixed with melted beer cans. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

May 2015

165

Simon Linington Dirty Matters Galeria Emma Thomas, São Paulo 19 February – 28 March Like a battered patchwork flag defiantly flown, the beautifully grubby rags stitched together to make Raise (2014), gracing one wall of the main gallery space, are stiff with clay, acrylic paint and ink – the day-to-day ephemera of this artist’s life. Part of a body of work by the British artist Simon Linington that is all about capturing the poetics in the detritus that surrounds us, this exhibition isn’t necessarily about São Paulo – the works made here, like the older pieces, were developments of projects already underway – but it fits the city like a glove, peering into its grubby, disregarded corners and mobilising some of its considerable dust and grime to become part of Linington’s exercises in mindfulness and matter. The result of a residency at Pivô, the not-forprofit gallery inside Oscar Niemeyer’s immense Copan building, Dirty Matters brought vestiges of downtown dust from São Paulo’s gritty heart to Emma Thomas, a gorgeous young gallery in the leafy neighbourhood of Jardins. Well Well Well 1, 2 and 3 (all 2015), a set of test-tube-like collections of materials gathered from the ground, is reminiscent of the decorative bottles of sculpted sand touted to tourists in parts

of the Middle East, North Brazil and on the Isle of Wight, where London-based Linington grew up. In these São Paulo versions, sand is layered with dust, red earth and fine white scrapings from the wall at Pivô to form carefully constituted strata – at once empirical samples and mystical talismans related to place, like a handful of sand brought home from a day at the beach; or a stone from a grave, pocketed and slipped, once home, into a jewellery box. The tubes are, like all of Linington’s work, the result of a process that is as focused on close contemplation and study – seeking heaven in a grain of sand, then crossing the street to inspect the grit on the other side – as it is on not looking and seeing, and on detaching himself from conscious thought. In a 2013 conversation with the curator Natasha Hoare regarding another work, 8 Hours (2013), Linington explained the importance of the involuntary nature of the etchings caused on the aluminium sheeting by his staying on top of it for eight hours, in a purposefully unintentional mark-making process that is equally responsible for the random stains and smears made on the clothes he wears as he works, and on the rags he uses

Edifício Copan, Av. Ipiranga 11/12 and 12/12, 2015, dust, binder and varnish on paper, each 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy Galeria Emma Thomas, São Paulo

166

ArtReview

in his studio, some of which are exhibited here (Rags, 2014–15), complete with their patina of paint and clay. Most compelling of all, the diptych Edificio Copan, Av. Ipiranga 11/12 and 12/12 (2015) has the look of a canvas washed with fine gold dust – a cosmos of particles, or of undulating sands. This work, albeit made at Pivô, revisits a similar London work, 56 Dace Road: Studio 21 2/9 (2013), and is the result of an identical process. Linington gathers up and sifts dust from the studio floor before mixing it with binder and water, then pours it onto paper laid on the studio floor to achieve a facsimile of the surface – a precise, deliberate process resulting in images that could just as easily be of anything other than what they are: the surface of an unknown planet, a closeup of a speck of dust seen under an electron microscope. The effect is to produce a mute pause in the viewer, hypnotised by the surface’s resemblance to anything and nothing, so that, just as in Linington’s process, conscious thought makes way for a deeper, wordless response that gathers in the solar plexus, enveloping the heart like a nebula. Claire Rigby

Penny Siopis Time and Again Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town 17 December – 23 March One rarely hears the word ‘narrative’ spoken when people talk about contemporary painting. Certainly in South Africa such discussion seems largely stuck on modernist ideas of painting’s two-dimensionality and its representational failure. However, in a recent talk given by Penny Siopis, this is the word that she most often resorted to when addressing her work. By her own admission, she was taught by two very different schools of thought – one almost might say in two different eras. The first was informed by the Premodernism taught at Rhodes University in South Africa during the 1970s, the second by the Postmodernism taught at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the uk in the same decade. This is perhaps one of the reasons that she and her friend William Kentridge are unique and fascinating artists – they can code-switch with alacrity, at once talking of ‘narrative’ and ‘expression’, and addressing Poststructuralism. Certainly Time and Again, Siopis’s excellent retrospective, evokes perfectly this codeswitching. For it is not only an exhibition that recounts the movement in Siopis’s thinking

about feminist and postcolonial theory but also exemplifies how narrative has functioned in this exploration. Without narrative her work here would be difficult to address. From her early Cake series depicting food painted in orange, turquoise and pink impasto that was worked onto the canvases with icing syringes, to her later glue and ink paintings, it is impossible to read her work without constructing narratives. In a Cake painting such as Embellishments (1982), for example, one is bound to engage with the narrative of a young female finding her sexuality while at the same time playing out her gendered role. The mythological underpinnings of the work Three Trees (2009) – where the sensuality of colour and the handling of the medium subvert the violence of the depiction of the sexual exploitation by one or several ambiguously gendered figures of a central female figure, whose splayed legs are tied to tree trunks – creates an ethically confusing narrative, both traumatic and epicurean. This desire to reveal through narrative is again at play in Siopis’s most politically motivated works. In Patience on a Monument

– ‘A History Painting’ (1988), as in the many other paintings of this period, photocopies of figures and events from South African history are pasted in a collage, and overpainted to form a background to the main figure, in this painting a black female sitting atop a pile of debris, as if on a throne. However, the narrative quality of her work is most overt in her videos of spliced found footage and pieced-together histories. The Master Is Drowning (2012), about David Pratt, the man who attempted to assassinate Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, and Communion (2011), the story of the brutal 1952 murder of nun Sister Quinlan by an angry mob, are impressively constructed narrative feats. These videos, installations and paintings reveal what is perhaps the master narrative in Siopis’s work: the consequences of intervention, both political and personal. But what Time and Again really expresses is what the writer Philip Hallie said about theories – that they are meaningless when there are ‘no stories to illuminate their principles’. Matthew Blackman

Cake Box, 1981, oil and found objects on wood base. Photo: Mario Todeschini. Courtesy Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town

May 2015

167

Sharjah Biennial 12 Various venues, Sharjah 5 March – 5 June In its twelfth iteration, the Sharjah Biennial – an exhibition that in the past distinguished itself for ambitious projects developed in situ, a focus on art and performance in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and inclusions that incisively explored migration, secularism and radical faith, among other dynamics critical in the region and the greater ‘international’ beyond it – eschews critique and politically trenchant content to consider how art might signal what is ‘possible’ in today’s world. Inherently pragmatic, though not devoid of idealism, the concept seems to complement an idea the show’s curator, Eungie Joo, first mooted in The Ungovernables, the 2012 triennial she organised at the New Museum in New York: that in art, as in nonviolent political resistance, disobedience and withdrawal can both circumvent existing power and engender new artistic and social structures. What these ‘possibles’ might be remains unclear. Rather Joo’s concern here is with how artists look at the past and present in ways that might allow us to imagine the future afresh. Experience is the unifying thread. Sensation and physicality, interpretation and emotion, are its constituents and are also the raison d’être of much that’s on view. Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings (2001–), an ongoing series depicting the sky on which Kim inscribes various musings, construct an intimacy of specific detail and, in their combination of random reflections and references to current events, suggest ways in which the private and the public intersect. A selection of work from the 1980s by the Emirati conceptualist Hassan Sharif, including a table with a wool-covered bottom that visitors are invited to feel, proposes individual investigation and

scepticism as requisites of engaged viewing and, by extension, living. They also signal that Modernism is more than a phenomenon of the Atlantic world, and that Conceptualism can be sensuous and multivalent, not just heady, though neither point counts as news. Sharif’s pieces anchor a long sequence of galleries in the Sharjah Art Museum, one of the few venues in which work by more than two or three artists is installed together. This includes a small survey of the Lebanese master Saloua Raouda Choucair, born 1916, whose abstract sculpture incorporates elements of Arabic calligraphy and reflects an interest in Sufism. The display ends with a selection of plaster reliefs from the 1970s and 80s by Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara. Painted in garish colours, they alternately depict scenes from Palestinian life, weddings, Iftar feasts and suchlike, and Surrealist amalgams of martyrs and monsters, including a golemlike figure inscribed ‘Pinochet’. Together they assert that for Palestinians daily existence itself constitutes resistance. If Joo intended these juxtapositions as a statement about the complex links between the personal, the political and the social, the inclusion here of Byron Kim’s work – which is more introspective than visionary – or Beom Kim’s neo-Dada plays on canvas as surface (a painting cut to resemble bricks, for example) reduces the mix to a superficial, muddled exploration of how experience is represented in art. An introductory wall text nearby refers to the need ‘for wonder, mindfulness and query at this particularly disharmonious and decadent moment in history’. Past biennials have deftly explored such implied urgencies

facing page, top Byron Kim, work from the series Sunday Paintings, 2001–, acrylic and ink on canvas, mounted on panel, 36 × 36 cm. Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

168

ArtReview

and their immediate effects as, for example, the years-long engagement between the Indian collective camp and the crews on the dhows that dock in Sharjah and trade between Gujarat, the Emirates and Somalia. This collaboration resulted in a ship-based pirate radio station that broadcast during the 2009 exhibition and a film with content generated by sailors screened during the 2013 version. Both projects pioneered new dynamics of artistic inclusion while parsing economies of trade, movement and political isolation. This time, much on view seems comparatively anodyne and superficial. Haegue Yang’s An Opaque Wind (2015), an installation of metal partitions, spinning chimney caps that apparently cite Islamic wind towers and local newspapers published for foreign labourers, attempts to gin up references to migration and traditional regional architecture into a poetic play on the titular suggestion of wind. In paintings from her recent Invisible Sun series (2012–15), Julie Mehretu lays skeins of lyrically abstract marks over networks of rectangles in ways that recall Twombly, though her canvases lack his feverdream passion and depth of cultural reference. They are far too large and elegant to convey the ‘emergent potentiality’ or ‘the resistance to participate – [as] a revolutionary act’ the Biennial guide attributes to them. Rather, as grandiosity yields to solipsism, such work encapsulates – although I doubt intentionally – the pitfalls we all face in inscribing ourselves in a broader polity and underscores how this exhibition fails to cohere into little more than disparate introspections and superficialities. Joshua Mack

facing page, bottom Various works by Saloua Raouda Choucair in an installation view of Sharjah Biennial 12. Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

May 2015

169

Books

170

ArtReview

Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts by Mel Evans Pluto Press, £12.99 (softcover)

Few artists are so well represented in British institutions as the one born the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1908, known today as bp. Yet the Tate and National Portrait Gallery alike exhibit just a single work (in multiple reproductions) by this towering figure: a yellow and lime-green sunburst (Helios, 2000) indebted to the abstraction of Kenneth Noland and the geometric modulations of Julio Le Parc. Such institutions ignore bp’s arguably more significant site-specific works, eg at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (2006) and Macondo Prospect, Gulf of Mexico (Deepwater Horizon, 2010). These epic time-based works, involving several million barrels of oil mottling thousands of miles, expected to affect habitats and livelihoods for years to come, declaim man’s destructive potential and the dark underside of the Enlightenment fascination with nature’s domination. With this latter work ongoing, Mel Evans performed a kind of tribute at Tate’s June 2010 party celebrating its two-decade-long association with bp. Retooling 1960s interventions by the Guerrilla Art Action Group, Evans and fellow activist Anna Feigenbaum (both of the group Liberate Tate) entered around 7.15pm wearing large bouffant gowns, only to release upon the gallery floor a ten-litre slick of molasses. No mere stunt, Evans and Feigenbaum’s action brought out the truth of this event as a

marketing exercise designed to wash away that other stain off the coast of Louisiana. Evans’s analysis of oil’s apparent reliance on art to paint over its environmental misdemeanours with a varnish of public service, is engaging, often witty, and to the point. She lambasts Tate and other recipients of bp money (principally the Royal Opera House, British Museum, and National Portrait Gallery) for affording the oil company’s logos a prominence in excess of the venues’ need for their sponsor. But sometimes I wished for greater depth and context. The polemic style feels sometimes more like a pamphlet than a book. The focus on bp risks missing the bigger picture about corporate sponsorship. Evans claims that such concentration on the oil industry is ‘both necessary and urgent’ but as her own research reveals that bp’s sponsorship of the National Portrait Gallery followed successful campaigns against tobacco sponsorship, the question remains where the arts should turn having shunned the petroleum giants. With dwindling state funding, who has wealth to meet the vast financial demands of such institutions while remaining morally pure – and by whose standards of judgement? But Artwash has more immediate aims than the disentangling of such knots. The book seeks less to make the reader think than to make them act. Another new book from Pluto, Curationism by David Balzer (reviewed in the December 2014

issue of ArtReview), provocatively traces the art world’s reliance on corporate finance to the 1960s turn from saleable objects towards immaterial concepts and performance (in particular to Harald Szeemann’s Philip Morris-sponsored 1969 exhibition in Bern, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form). Art that cannot sell itself sells its audience instead. Today corporate sponsorship of live arts is almost inescapable. But it risks sealing what Susannah Butter in the New Statesman has called ‘a Faustian pact’ – as the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (which includes members of Liberate Tate) discovered. Invited to host a workshop on art and activism at the Tate Modern, they found themselves barred from mentioning the Tate itself as a site of activism. The activist performance art of Liberate Tate ends up implicated in the very processes it seeks to overturn. None of which should take away from the imperativeness of Evans’s critique. Oil companies exercise unaccountable influences on the arts in Britain that risk neutering their radical potential, occasionally entering into outright censorship. This needs to be addressed and Evans’s book brings to bear a formidable discursive arsenal with which to do so. As a specific intervention in an ongoing campaign, Artwash is sharp, pointed and persuasive. Robert Barry

Pablo by Julie Birmant and Clémant Oubrerie SelfMadeHero, £16.99/$27.50 (softcover)

In a panel on one of the introductory pages of Birmant (words) and Oubrerie (artwork)’s fat graphic novel about Picasso’s early career years in Paris at the beginning of last century, two modern-day Parisian kids (Pablo and Fernande) are told to ‘hurry up!’ by their mother. As she admonishes them, their father is seen in the foreground waiting in a car and looking somewhat irritated; the car’s ‘signature’ logo spells Picasso. Highlighting the ongoing celebrity of the novel’s central character a hundred years on in this way (the book’s narrative begins properly in 1900, the first Citroën Picasso was launched in 1999), the image is just a small example of how the artwork of a graphic novel can say in pictures what would be far more difficult to put across in words.

Picasso may be the novel’s subject, but it’s told from the viewpoint of Fernande Olivier (1881–1966), Picasso’s early lover and muse. It’s primarily her autobiography that Birmant has drawn on to write the down-to-earth script (translated from the French by Edward Gauvin), a script that Oubrerie fleshes out just as vividly in images to depict the turbulent triumphs, losses, loves, friendships and feuds of the artists, poets and writers – Picasso and Fernande among them – who lived, worked and partied in the ramshackle and rundown Montmartre building known as Le Bateau-Lavoir. Part of the pleasure of Pablo, as a fictionalised novel based in fact, is that no character gets hagiographic treatment, with everyone refreshingly portrayed with human weaknesses, passions and

May 2015

vulnerabilities. Thus Matisse (in a cameo role) is a puffed-up rival; Gertrude Stein emotionally generous, flirty and devilish in equal measure; and Picasso, at the beginning, a somewhat gauche and goofy figure, whom Fernande, practical, adaptable and certainly no pushover, initially isn’t certain she wants to be with at all (even after sex, which there’s plenty of in the novel, too). Pablo is the third in SelfMadeHero’s ‘Art Masters’ series – Van Gogh and Rembrandt already having been given the graphic novel treatment to equal acclaim. Hopefully there are more in the pipeline. With her equally deep passions and vulnerabilities, Louise Bourgeois’s career, in particular the lesser-documented decades of the 1940s and 50s, is a subject I’d like to nominate. Helen Sumpter

171

A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka University of Minnesota Press, $24.95 (softcover)

In the past five years, rocks and minerals have increasingly appeared in art exhibitions. A few examples: the rare stones collection of the surrealist writer Roger Callois, exhibited in Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale; Katie Paterson’s reforged meteorite, Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky (2012), which was returned to space by the European Space Agency; Jason Loebs’s chunks of precious mineral ores dusted with Optical Variable Security Ink (the glittery type used on banknotes), Untitled (2014); Wu Chuan-Lun’s Coast Mining (2014), petrochemical objects found at the beach; Shimabuku’s Exchange a mobile phone for a stone tool project (2015). This uptick in geologic focus is specific, and reflects a substantial shakeup of the humanities over the last decade. In short, the humanities have been asking themselves whether humans should actually be the things that are of first and foremost importance and interest (thus arriving at a posited ‘posthumanities’), and whether the limits of human thought should limit the ways we consider other species or objects, or weigh their importance. Take Quentin Meillassoux’s use of the ‘arche-fossil’ as evidence of life that predates human thought, therefore providing an example of ‘an ancestral reality or event, one that is anterior to terrestrial life’. Chiefly in philosophy, such conversations have coalesced under terms such as object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, new materialism, posthuman studies, the proposed geological

period of the Anthropocene and more, and have drawn on the work of such wide-ranging figures as Meillassoux, Rosi Braidotti and Paul Crutzen. Though various debates and splinter groups abound, it’s fair to say that such lines of thinking have found significant traction among artists and curators, given art’s long attachment to speculation and material transformation. Jussi Parikka, professor of technological culture and aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, has added a tight, timely study to this field, which engages with the work of the aforementioned writers and philosophers to combine geological thinking with a material approach to media, but also speaks through the work of artists such as Robert Smithson, Trevor Paglen and Raqs Media Collective. Parikka points to the ways in which the use of media such as silver or silicon used-film, video or animation can be seen via a geological lens (issues such as pollution, labour, mining or a consideration of their ‘deep time’ on the earth in relation to human time). Or how coltan, mercury, germanium, tantalum, indium and their placement across the earth affects global geopolitics: conglomerates of such minerals in iPhones and laptops are shipped to China to be dumped due to a combination of tech’s reliance on economies of planned obsolescence and the lack of certain minerals in China’s landmasses. In a counterpoint to Western discussions of immaterial labour and the exhaustion

of human souls, Parikka points to the international mining industries that employ labour to extract such materials from the earth, and details the harmful effects of these on the workers who mine or assemble them (largely in China and various African countries). But A Geology of Media also points to the double bind of looking at media minerally: it is precisely through the technologies afforded by mineral excavation, technological development and the exploitation of outsourced labour practices that the earth is revealed to us differently, through techniques of ‘visualisation, sonification, calculation, mapping, prediction, simulation’, and so forth. Parikka’s best example from art is Paglen, whose The Last Pictures (2012) project – in which the artist sent 100 photographs etched on a silicon wafer with a ‘lifespan’ of billions of years into orbit on a satellite – the author writes about as a drawing of attention to a slow-moving atmospheric junk layer of orbiting material that is not seen, yet remains part of the earth’s geology. As the book pertains to art more broadly, it can be read as a call to move away from art ‘about the Internet’, networks and immateriality, and the aesthetics of liquid crystal displays, towards work that emphasises the physical materials that construct such tools, and are subsequently affected by them, in a form of ecological and political thinking. Laura McLean-Ferris

The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think by Alexander Klose mit Press, $29.95/£20.95 (hardcover) ‘I don’t have vessels, I have seagoing trucks!’ So proclaimed Malcom McLean, the American small-time trucking company director who, in the 1950s, as the (albeit often contradicted) story goes, hit the big time with the invention of the intermodal shipping container: a metal vessel in a standard size that could be lifted straight from truck to ship without the load ever being disturbed. Shipping became not about delivering individual products but about those products being subsumed within a global continuous chain. ‘The principle of container transport and the reason for its sweeping success lie in conceptualizing the container as a metacontainer whose cargo is not of concern,’ Klose writes. ‘As long as you do not find yourself at the beginning or the end of the transport chain.’ The German researcher’s book, originally

172

published in 2009, but now available in English, traces the economic, political, cultural and social impact of the shipping container in great detail. The tangents Klose is led down by the last two treatments are perhaps not so interesting – to be honest, I learned little hearing about Darren Almond’s 2000 project Meantime, in which the artist fitted a container with an oversize digital clock and shipped it from the uk to his exhibition that year at Matthew Marks in New York. Klose’s attempt to draw comparisons between the container and time capsules seem tenuous too. The story doesn’t need these threads – when related as a history of this sea change in global commerce, it is fascinating enough. With reference to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882) and Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man (1857), Klose writes persuasively – and poetically –

ArtReview

that McLean’s aim was to ‘reduce the oceans to a system of highways – to dry up the seas, in essence – he also contributed considerably to the liquefaction of land’. Klose goes on, by way of activist Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999), journalist Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005) and artist Allan Sekula’s photo and text work Fish Story (1989–95), to posit the container, parallel to the Internet, as one of the main pillars supporting globalisation; a physical network that ‘combines the linear, one-dimensional logic of the digital with the two-dimensional logic of the chart and spatial logic of packing and stacking’. Klose’s tone remains quietly impressed by the level of global cooperation at play in the logistics business, yet he doesn’t ignore that it was only economic interests that ushered in this modern-day Pangaea. Oliver Basciano

Heimo Zobernig, Vienna, April 2015. Photo: Till Janz

artreview.com/subscribe Also online at artreview.com and through the iTunes Store

174

For more on Hervé Di Rosa, see overleaf

175

Contributors

Joshua Decter

Haegue Yang

Contributing Writers

is a New York-based writer, curator, art historian and theorist. He has curated exhibitions at institutions such as ps1 (now moma ps1), ccs Bard, Apex Art, the mca Chicago, Kunsthalle Vienna and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. He is author of Art Is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986–2012) (2012), published by jrp/Ringier; and coauthor of Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993 (2014) published by Afterall. He is a faculty member on the ma curatorial practice programme at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and also teaches at Cooper Union, New York. This month he profiles the work of Heimo Zobernig. He just finished reading Benjamin Noys’s Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014) in record time.

is an artist who lives in Berlin and Seoul. Currently her solo exhibition Shooting the Elephant 象 Thinking the Elephant is taking place at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul. This year her work is included in Sharjah Biennial 12, Vienna Biennale 2015, the 13th Biennale de Lyon and group shows at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; moma, New York; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others. This month she produces an artist project, Eclectic Straw Totem, for ArtReview. She is listening to Isang Yun, the Korean-born composer whose work was affected by his kidnapping in 1967 by South Korean secret police following accusations of spying activity. She is also contemplating elephants and reading the extraordinary 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, by George Orwell, and The Roots of the Heaven (1956), by Romain Gary. She has enjoyed witnessing the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra playing at Berliner Philharmonie.

Karen Archey, Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Matthew Blackman, Gesine Borcherdt, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Craig Burnett, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Michelangelo Corsaro, Jacquelyn Davis, Joshua Decter, Tom Eccles, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Orit Gat, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Rebecca Heald, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Kevin Jones, Maria Lind, Laura Oldfield Ford, Lucas Ospina, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Ed Schad, Michael Soi, Raimar Stange, Olga Stefan, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Brienne Walsh, Siona Wilson

Karen Archey is an art critic and curator based in New York and Berlin. She is editor of e-flux conversations and the founder of Women Inc., a new feminist working group. In 2014 she cocurated the exhibition Art PostInternet at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. This month she profiles the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. Archey is currently reading Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the memoir of Cookie Mueller, whom she describes as, psychically, the best blend of Chris Kraus and Miley Cyrus. She says the autobiography is both poetic and funny while imparting painfully wrought wisdom.

Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is currently coorganising ‘hmn’ with Anne Tallentire, a regular series of events in which artists, researchers and workers have seven minutes to present new work. This month he profiles Sean Lynch. He is currently reading Richard McGuire’s Here (2014), a graphic novel which never goes anywhere, set in the same corner of a sitting room, spanning millions of years and hundreds of micronarratives.

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 Hervé Di Rosa, Mikael Gregorsky, Till Janz, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Haegue Yang

Hervé Di Rosa (preceding pages)

“The great names in comics have affected me every bit as much as the great painters I love.” Growing up in the 1960s, relatively isolated in Sète, on the French Mediterranean coast, Hervé Di Rosa got his culture fix from reproductions of fine art in books and from comics. “I saw no difference between them in scale or validity.” Starting to exhibit his art in 1980, Di Rosa with his brother Richard and Robert Combas drew on their passions for both art and pop culture to pioneer the radical French ‘Figuration Libre’ movement in the 1980s. Unlike most earlier Pop artists, who were not necessarily raised on comics, Di Rosa explains, “I don’t cite comics in a superficial way, I incorporate their techniques into my work.” Interviewed in April at the second Pulp festival just outside Paris, Di Rosa enthused to Frédéric Bosser from dbd magazine about comics’ lasting influence on him, not only through its ‘aristocracy’, from Winsor McCay to Hergé, but equally for “so-called ‘minor’ artisans”, whom Di Rosa admires for their “modesty, honesty and reserve, which comes out of necessity”. He picked out Luciano Bottaro, a prolific Italian cartoonist on Disney comics, and his boisterous boy-pirate Pepito, and the artists in the weekly Pif Gadget (1969–93,

176

then monthly 2004–08), published by the French Communist Party, “a symbol of the liaison between populist lower-class comics and more bourgeois titles like Tintin and Spirou.” Di Rosa had his first four-page comic published in 1978 in Charlie Mensuel, the monthly spinoff from Charlie Hebdo, but he produced no more. Raised on print, Di Rosa recalls, “I felt frustrated not to have my work printed, so in 1985 I created four issues of my own magazine.” In an oversize format, initially in silkscreen, Dirosa Magazine featured in the first three issues the stories ‘La fin d’un monde’ (16 pages), ‘Renaissance’ (28 pages) and ‘La Transmutation’ (20 pages). Appropriately, in 1989–1990 he created about 30 strips for his childhood favourite Pif Gadget. He went on to animate his characters in a series of cartoons, Les Renés, broadcast by Canal Plus in 2000. “Les Renés are happy cyclopes living in Bonheur-lesBains who have to fend off attacks by the International Villains who try to disturb their tranquillity.” His one-eyed wanderer René returns in his new Strip for ArtReview, his first in 25 years and his first experiment incorporating digital images and colours. “You see René’s opinion of contemporary art after he has travelled through all the multiverses

ArtReview

and arrives on earth, where all the places are represented in which I have worked since 1989 during the 19 stages of my global project Autour du monde.” Currently, Di Rosa is preparing a personal exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris for October 2016, while continuing to codirect the Musée International des Arts Modestes (miam) in Sète. Di Rosa recalls, “I found contemporary art too narrow, caught between elitism and the marketplace. I was raised on the history of art but also by illustration, popular imagery, toys, all ‘the modest arts’, and believed they needed more recognition.” Based on their success and their principles, in 2000 the Di Rosa brothers, Combas and colleagues cofounded miam to conserve, present and promote marginalised arts and artists on the peripheries of art brut, outsider art and mass-market culture. miam has thrived, showing its large permanent collection alongside two wide-ranging exhibitions each year, with plans to relocate to substantially larger premises. Tirelessly curious and committed, Di Rosa sees that “there is some progress, as art historians pay closer attention. The frontiers of the modest arts are always shifting.” Paul Gravett

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Production

ArtReview Ltd

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Publisher Patrick Kelly patrickkelly@artreview.com

Production Director Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Galleries

Operations Executive Letizia Resta letiziaresta@artreview.com

ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y oth t 44 (0)20 7490 8138

Editor David Terrien Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Jonathan T.D. Neil Senior Editor, Web Editor Helen Sumpter Deputy Editor Oliver Basciano Editor, ArtReview Asia Aimee Lin Copy Editor Hettie Judah Editorial Assistant Louise Darblay

uk and Australasia Alison Reisner alisonreisner@artreview.com Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com Northern and Eastern Europe Indra Moroder indramoroder@artreview.com North America and Africa Debbie Shorten debbieshorten@artreview.com

Art Direction John Morgan studio

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

Designers Julien Savioz Pedro Cid Proença

Lifestyle

office@artreview.com

Stacey Langham staceylangham@artreview.com

Chairman Dennis Hotz

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com

Managing Director Debbie Shorten

Finance

Subscriptions

Finance Director Lynn Woodward lynnwoodward@artreview.com

To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe

Financial Controller Errol Kennedy-Smith errolkennedysmith@artreview.com

ArtReview Subscriptions 3rd Floor North Chancery Exchange 10 Furnival Street London ec4a 1yh t 44 (0)20 8955 7069 e artreview@abacusemedia.com

Charlotte Regan charlotteregan@artreview.com

Text credits Reprographics by phmedia. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (issn No: 1745-9303, usps No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. The us annual subscription price is $64. Airfreight and mailing in the usa by agent named Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa. Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica ny 11431. us postmaster: Send address changes to ArtReview, Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa

Photo credits on the cover and page 173 photography by Till Janz on page 170 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 178 photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

May 2015

Phrases on the spine (Dominic de Grunne’s Wood Pigeon with Grapes) and on pages 37 (Floris van den Broecke’s Hachée), 91 (Michael Rothenstein’s Exotic Salads) and 139 (Henry Moore’s Lamb Stew) are taken from The Artists’ Cookbook: Colourful Recipes from the Studios of the Royal College of Art in Its 150th Anniversary Year, with an introduction by Henry Moore and published in 1987 by Macdonald & Co Publishers, London and Sydney

177

Off the Record May 2015 I smile as the water taxi does its now familiar curve and the skyline of Venice slides into view through my Victoria Beckham aviator-style gold-tone mirrored sunglasses. The wind blows the collar detail of my Chloé grosgrain-trimmed ruffled cady minidress in a pleasing manner. I start pondering the serious matter of the involvement of a scion of the Chalabi family in the Iraqi Pavilion. After all, the paterfamilias of the Chalabi family was involved in providing dodgy information about weapons of mass destruction to the Bush administration. I’m just about to get out my Smythson Panama Luck Be A Lady textured leather notebook to write, ‘Iraq? Good thing or bad thing? Not sure ;)’ when the boat grinds to a halt. A small flotilla of fishing boats has stopped ahead of us and onboard a baying mob is yelling at me. I lean forward and tap the boat driver on the shoulder. “What’s going on, padre? And what’s with the haircut? You look like B.A. Baracus out of The A-Team. Am I allowed to say that?” He sighs. “My name is Mario. Unfortunately you’ve chosen Venice’s only water-taxi driver of colour. Although on the upside, I do speak English after my unsuccessful spells spearheading the attacks at Manchester City and Liverpool. I’m not even on the bench any more, so I thought I’d do some moonlighting.” “Mario! It’s my pleasure! I didn’t recognise you out of your shorts and torso-hugging football top. Well look, it’s not always about the goals, it’s also work-rate and your movement off the ball…” Mario ignores my attempts to stay 110 percent positive. “Look, lady, this is the same lot who recently tried to lock a bunch of Syrian refugees up in Veneto,” he continues. “Didn’t you read about it in The Times? A local councillor suggested residents of the Lido be given guns. This lot assumes that if you’re travelling with me, you’re some sort of illegal.” “This is ridiculous! I’m here to visit Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale…” “Okwui? Don’t tell them you’re here to visit an African. We’ll never get through!” Mario’s voice is rising. The people on the boats seem to be getting some sort of heavy metal chain ready for use – presumably not for fishing. “Calm down, Mario! Okwui is a world-famous curator. And this is a world-famous exhibition. I’m here because I’m particularly interested in the young Tunisian Nidhal Chamekh and the Nigerian Karo Akpokiere, as well as…” But I don’t have time to finish. Mario’s look of worry has turned to blind panic and he starts reversing the boat madly. “Hush, lady! Have you lost your mind?” he yells. “Don’t you know we’re in the country where crowds recently racially abused young black kids playing for Milan’s under-10 team?” “… and also Ibrahim Mahama from Ghana is going to make a giant tapestry outside the Arsenale from kookily-coloured fabrics and burlap sacks that are used to transport Ghana’s vital commodities,” I continue. “… where the country’s first black government minister was two years ago compared to an orangutan by a fellow politician who remained in post,” Mario attempts to interrupt.

I don’t hear him. “And I can’t wait to see the works of self-styled Afrofuturist Wangechi Mutu and Mozambique’s Gonçalo Mabunda’s use of decommissioned weapons…” “… where the former football manager of Italy, Arrigo Sacchi, said earlier this year that he wasn’t racist but there were too many young black players,” he shouts. I’m barely distracted. “Not to mention Glenn Ligon, Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen. And I’m looking forward to rediscovering Sonia Boyce as well…” “… and you’ve got to remember that this is the country recently ruled by a prime minister who thought it was funny to make jokes about Barack Obama’s tan,” he shouts forcefully. “… no wonder Okwui’s exhibition is called All the World’s Futures…,” I yell. “… are frankly anywhere else but Italy,” he finishes. “Fair point,” I concede. We both fall silent, with only the sounds of the boat screaming in reverse filling the void. I chuck my bundle of press releases over the side and watch them dissipate in the waters, the diligent work of so many arts pr agencies around the world lost to me forever. Mario does a three-point turn and puts the boat into forward again, the engine returning to its normal thrum. “Well where now, Mario? You’re right. This whole country is a disgrace. I would say it’s like England in the 1970s, but that’s probably some sort of insult to the National Front. Sod it. Let’s get to the airport. Liverpool has got Chelsea away on Sunday, and it’s time for you to stop moping around driving a water taxi and start scoring some goals. Let’s stay 120 percent positive, my friend!” Gallery Girl

22-25 octobER 2015 grand palais et hors les murs, paris Ofﬁcial sponsor