ArtReview May 2016 by ArtReview

Wayne Thiebaud

David Hammons John Berger Girolamo Savonarola

dior.com

Archi Dior collection

White gold, pink gold and diamonds.

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION BROOCH IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

www.chanel.com

Costa del Sol, 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 106.7 x 183 cm (42 x 72 in) © Carmen Herrera; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

Lisson Gallery New York opening Tuesday 3 May 2016 Inaugural exhibition Carmen Herrera: Recent Works 504 West 24th Street New York

New York

Cory Arcangel currentmood

Stanley Whitney Radical Times London

Eva Hesse Diaries

These fascinating journals from 1955 to 1970 document Hesse’s experiences of the world and her evolution as an artist UK release date 4 May 2016 US release date 24 May 2016 Reserve your advance copy at www.hauserwirth.com/publications

Hauser & Wirth Publishers www.hauserwirth.com/publications

Yale University Press yalebooks.com yalebooks.co.uk

HA U S E R & W I R T H S O M E R S E T

MARTIN CREED WHAT YOU FIND

22 MAY – 11 SEPTEMBER 2016 DURSLADE FARM, DROPPING LANE BRUTON, SOMERSET BA10 0NL WWW.HAUSERWIRTHSOMERSET.COM

PHOTO: HUGO GLENDINNING

MARTIN HONERT APRIL 26 – MAY 28, 2016 — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10, D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE

Martin Honert, Ziegelei, 2015/16, photo in light box, wood, Installation: 368 x 233 x 167 cm, (Scale model)

FRIEZE NEW YORK MAY 5 – 8, 2016

TOMÁS SARACENO AEROCENE APRIL 26 – MAY 28, 2016 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

FRIEZE NEW YORK MAY 5 – 8, 2016 ARTEBA MAY 19 – 22, 2016

Solitary semi-social mapping of PKS 1101+384 by one Nephila clavipes - one week and three Cyrtophora citricola - three weeks, 2016 (Detail) Spidersilk, paper, glue, ink.

IN 2004

BUILDING WORKS ON THE BURJ KHALIFA START IN DUBAI. THE SKYSCRAPER WILL BE FINISHED IN 2009 TO BECOME THE TALLEST BUILDING ON EARTH.

PIOTR UKLANSKI, UNTITLED (BLUE SK Y ), 2004, C-PRINT ON ALUMINIUM, 185 X 236 CM

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

MARVIN GAYE CHETWYND, CORINE’S PUPPET THEATRE, 2014, MIXED MEDIA, 290 X 380 X 22 CM

@MDCGALLERY

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CARSTEN HÖLLER RECONSTRUCTS DAVID N. LEE’S SWINGING ROOM IN THE SOLO SHOW ‘CARSTEN K. HÖLLER, GEORGI I. KRUTIKOW, DAVID N. LEE’ AT MASSIMO DE CARLO IN MILAN.

CARSTEN HÖLLER, DISTORTED SWINGING ROOM, 2004, POLYSTYRENE, GALVANIZED IRON, 350 X 1450 X 400 CM

AFTER 3 YEARS OF RENOVATIONS, THE TEATRO ALLA SCALA IN MILAN REOPENS WITH AN OPERA BY ANTONIO SALIERI, TITLED L’EUROPA RICONOSCIUTA.

LIZA LoU The WAveS SALZBURG MAy – JUNe 2016 RoPAc.NeT

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

Merlin James Kerlin Gallery 13 May –25 June 2016 Frieze New York Booth D8 4 –8 May 2016

www.kerlingallery.com

Sigmar Polke Eine Winterreise

May 7 - June 25, 2016

The Estate of Sigmar Polke is represented by David Zwirner Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982. Acrylic and iron mica on fabric, 117

/ x 115 ¾ inches (299 x 294 cm). Private Collection

11 16

David Zwirner New York

09/04 - 21/05/2016 Sonia Gomes James Lee Byars

Haroon Gunn Salie

28/05 - 06/08/2016 Prediction Curated by Milovan Farronato

Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Julie Béna, Adriano Costa, Raúl De Nieves, Patrizio Di Massimo, f.marquespenteado Celia Hampton, George Henry Longly, Christian Holstad Runa Islam, Zhana Ivanova, Goshka Macuga, Liliana Moro Christodoulos Panayiotou, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Prem Sahib Mathilde Rosier, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Santo Tolone Erika Verzutti, Philip Wiegard, Trevor Yeung

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos West Room

Frieze, New York 05 - 08/05

ArtReview vol 68 no 4 May 2016

Sail on Silver Girl California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers Jon Baker and Frank ‘Ponch’ Poncherello cruise the freeways of Los Angeles, solve crimes and help people in trouble in this cop show. The stakes usually weren’t very high – the better to highlight the personal lives of Ponch and Jon… Argh… sorry. Let’s try again. Laura Holt gets no respect as a private investigator, so she makes up a fictitious boss named Remington Steele – and business starts flowing in. Damn! Sorry… again… Self-made millionaire Jonathan and freelance writer Jennifer are the Harts – a globetrotting married couple with a talent for finding mysteries wherever they go. And even when they’re uncovering thefts, espionage and assorted skulduggery, they still find time for romance. Grrr… damn you, Pierce Brosnan, wrong American Dream again… Right. Dreams – and not the one in which ArtReview is commissioned to write all the descriptions of 1980s American detective shows for IMDb. Although maybe all this does highlight that no one dream is necessarily better than another… Even if most of those detective shows are pretty much the same… A friend of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and one of the more significant painters of the postwar American Dream (often in its most saccharine incarnations), this month’s cover artist, Wayne Thiebaud, leads the way in an issue that explores the ways in which art and artists seek to challenge reality by augmenting it. In Thiebaud’s paintings this takes the form of his colourful landscapes or super-sweet confectionery; elsewhere, Oliver Basciano investigates the ways in which sexuality and gender stereotyping (and ultimately political status quos) have been highlighted and enhanced

in the works of three Latin American photographers: Paz Errázuriz, Graciela Iturbide and Sergio Zevallos; while in the work of David Hammons such enhancements appear in the way he modifies relatively ordinary objects by minimal embellishment or by interrupting the conventionally close connection of the person of the artist to his or her work. From the absent presence of the artist in the work of Hammons, to the altogether different absent presence of Gulf labourers highlighted in Guy Mannes-Abbott’s argument about the importance of considering the practice of making and displaying art in terms of the broadest social and economic perspectives. If an artist such as Hammons chooses to assert or deny (normally a bit of both) his presence in the systems and customs of the artworld, then Mannes-Abbott, a member of the Gulf Labor group, argues that the system must also look out for those who lack those options. What the last three articles also share is an acceptance that art is no longer able to divorce itself from the systems that surround and control it – whether that be an economic market, or a political or social system. Which is one of the reasons why ArtReview decided to invite writer and critic John Berger to republish his text ‘A Moral’. Written during the 1950s, the text both mourns the fact that artworks at the time were increasingly becoming commodities or investments at the expense of being objects for contemplation. Clearly, the issues – in an essential manner, concerning what art is for – that he was considering then are no less valid and urgent today. Streetwise detective David Starsky partners up with a more intellectual partner, Kenneth ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, to protect citizens and patrol the streets of Bay City. They get their inside information from flamboyant bad-boy Huggy Bear and spar with their no-nonsense boss, Capt Harold Dobey. Ah… American Dreams… ArtReview

Richard Tuttle 26

510 WesT 25Th sT NeW YoRk MaY 6 – JuNe 11, 2016

BEN SLEDSENS

Pulling Ropes and Ringing Bells 5 May - 18 June 2016

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY

Art Previewed

Girolamo Savonarola on intensity Interview by Matthew Collings 54

Previews by Martin Herbert 33 Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Maria Lind, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Sam Jacob 43

page 37 Peter Galison & Robb Moss, Containment (still), 2015, film, 80 min. Courtesy the artists. Exhibited in Riddle of the Burial Grounds at Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp

May 2016

Art Featured

Wayne Thiebaud by Ed Schad 62

Anarcho-otherness in 1980s Latin America: Paz Errázuriz, Graciela Iturbide and Sergio Zevallos by Oliver Basciano 80

A Moral by John Berger 70

On Activating the Politics of Art in an Age of Globalised Systems by Guy Mannes-Abbott 86

David Hammons by Gabriel Coxhead 72

page 72 David Hammons, Untitled, 2013, glass mirror with wood and plaster frame, fabric, 192 × 97 × 29 cm. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

ArtReview

C NG G -- II K K CH HO O Y YO ON M AA YY -- 11 88 JJ UU N N EE 11 22 M 11 22 M M AA YY -- 11 88 JJ UU N N EE

Edouard Malingue Gallery Edouard Malingue Gallery

馬凌凌畫畫廊廊馬

edouardmalingue.com edouardmalingue.com

Sixth Floor 3333 Des Voeux Sixth Floor Des Voeux Road Central Kong Road CentralHong Hong Kong

Art Reviewed

Intimate Wine Reception, by Dean Kissick Michael Genovese, by Larry Wilcox Hilton Als, by David Everitt Howe Sarah Braman, by Brienne Walsh Justin Berry, by Iona Whittaker Anna Ostoya, by Wendy Vogel Chantal Peñalosa, by Kimberlee Córdova Henrique Oliveira, by Thais Gouveia Michael Lin, by Aimee Lin Liang Shuo, by Edward Sanderson

Exhibitions 94 Goshka Macuga, by John Quin Jiří Černický, by Mark Rappolt Jani Ruscica, by Stefanie Hessler Lydia Gifford, by Louise Darblay Karl Holmqvist, by Raimar Stange Stephen Shore, by Mark Prince Paul Geelen, by Dominic van den Boogerd Jesse Jones, by Luke Clancy Annina Matter & Urs Zahn, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Bahar Yürükoğlu, Murat Akagündüz & Şener Özmen, by Sarah Jilani John Latham, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Michael Dean, by Laura Smith Ariana Reines & Oscar Tuazon, by Brian Dillon Becky Beasley, by Sean Ashton Elizabeth Price, by Helen Sumpter Rose Wylie, by David Trigg Ali Prosch, by Andrew Berardini Elaine Cameron-Weir, by Jonathan Griffin Martine Syms, byDarius Sabbaghzadeh

Books 124 The Perpetual Guest, by Barry Schwabsky Munch, by Steffen Kverneland Strike Art, by Yates McKee Last Futures, by Douglas Murphy THE STRIP 130 A CURATOR WRITES 134

page 118 Justin Berry, Perch, 2016, archival inkjet on Baryta paper, 57 × 57 cm. Courtesy Essex Flowers, New York

ArtReview

Cortesi Gallery

Heinz Mack. The Visible Reminder of Invisible Light

Curated by Mario Codognato 11 May — 22 July 2016 Lugano

The Concrete Utopia. Ivan Picelj and New Tendencies 1961 — 1973

Curated by Ilaria Bignotti 26 May — 22 July 2016 London Under the patronage of Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art

Via Frasca 5 6900 Lugano, Switzerland +41 91 92 14 000

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

info@cortesigallery.com www.cortesigallery.com

Ivan Picelj, CTS-I (detail), 1966, black, red and blue painted metal on white painted wooden panel, 90×90×7.5cm. Photo: Damir Fabijanić. Courtesy: Anja Picelj-Kosak.

Art Previewed

These events manifest an increase in the dimension of terrorist action 31

AUCTION

Daan Van Golden b. 1936

J U N E 12

Study A.G.

info@arteuropeauctions.com

Oil on Canvas

+31 (0) 85 876 9977

AMSTERDAM

190 x 95 cm

€ 280.000 - 350.000

www.arteuropeauctions.com

Previewed Ulay MOT International, Brussels 13 May – 16 July

EVA International Limerick through 17 July

The Poet and The Critic, and the missing Public Fiction at MOCA, Los Angeles through 19 June

Nicole Eisenman Anton Kern Gallery, New York 19 May – 25 June

Martin Honert Johnen Galerie, Berlin through 28 May

Shahryar Nashat Portikus, Frankfurt through 19 June

Maria Lassnig Tate Liverpool 18 May – 18 September

Riddle of the Burial Grounds Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp through 17 July

Duke Riley Brooklyn Navy Yard 7 May – 12 June

Folkert de Jong Brand New Gallery, Milan 18 May – 22 June

9 Shahryar Nashat, Present Sore (still), 2016, video, 9 min 20 sec. Courtesy Rodeo, London and Silberkuppe, Berlin

May 2016

A couple of years ago the American band with Jürgen Klauke from the early 1970s, Vampire Weekend were interviewed, and is Ulay’s photography-driven Conceptualism when talk got around to footwear, as it will, – particularly in his Auto-Polaroids, self-portraits one of them noted he’d seen “that guy [Marina with an explicitly existential bent; various Abramović] went out with” wearing Crocs, explorations of split-personality drag and and admired him for being “an old European self-mutilation; and his Anagrammatic Body Series 1 artist who doesn’t give a fuck”. Ulay deserves (2015). The body here feels perpetually at risk, better, and is finally receiving it. This careerpatched together, double-sided, a vessel for bold spanning show at MOT is underpinned by his adventure. Seen after Ulay’s, much other art globetrotting, since the man born Frank Uwe looks timid, low-stakes. The Crocs? Forgiven. Laysiepen in a German bomb shelter some Let’s now rewind – or fast-forward? – 72 years ago was not only a pioneer of body to the 2012 Whitney Biennial, which featured art but was also among the first post-studio 2 45 monotypes conveying 45 moods by Nicole artists, operating nomadically from New York Eisenman, positioning her as an elder statesto Ljubljana, Amsterdam to Australia. (The experson and signal inspiration to emerging hibition’s centrepiece, a pair of 7m scrolls artists. The French-born American artist and, featuring drawings and paintings, relates to lately, MacArthur ‘genius grant’ awardee Chinese travels during 1982–7.) Also emphasised, is indeed a lynchpin for today’s figurative alongside duelling performative collaborations painting, and particularly for its insouciant

freedoms. The most recent show of hers that ArtReview saw, last year at Barbara Weiss in Berlin, set up dynamic interplays between butch female swimmers, sombre bears and politicos tussling over flags. This, though, may be no guide for her solo show at Anton Kern, since Eisenman – a painter and sometime sculptor who can echo George Grosz, Edward Hopper, Paul Cézanne or George Herriman (among others) when she wants – shuffles her emphases regularly between the cartoonish, the neomodernistic, the erotic, the melancholic, the queer-political, the absurd, the enflamed and the abstract. And given the current prevalence of artists who paint but are not really painters, those who do and are matter very much. Turning to an influence on this particular influence, not to mention painters from Martin Kippenberger to Dana Schutz: ArtReview tends to

2 Nicole Eisenman, Laurie on the Train, 2015, oil on canvas, 208 × 165 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

1 Ulay, Nina (Anagrammatic Body Series), 2015, photographic collage, 214 × 152 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and MOT International, London & Brussels

ArtReview

CH RIS HO O D 19/05/2016 - 16/07/2016

GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON GENEVA www.bernardceysson.com

3 Maria Lassnig, Self-portrait with Stick, 1971, oil paint and charcoal on canvas, 193 × 129 cm. © Maria Lassnig Foundation

4 Alice Maher, Chaplet, 2003. Photo: Kate Horgan. Courtesy the artist and EVA International, Limerick City

focus on living artists, but we’re making an It’s hard to imagine a curator who, tasked and Tracey Rose, and are divided across nine with organising a biennale in Ireland in 2016, venues, including the sonorously titled Cleeve’s 3 exception for Maria Lassnig (1919–2014), whose work is deathless and who, at Tate Liverpool, would ignore the centenary of the Easter Rising. Condensed Milk Factory. We would say somereceives an unmissable first UK retrospective. thing here about the cream of recent art but 4 And yet, for Limerick’s EVA International, The Austrian painter and sometime filmmaker Koyo Kouoh… no, we jest, of course the connecwe’ve already done our allotted fooling for called her approach, which she initiated in 1948, tion is made, with a smart widening of the lens. one preview, so that’s that. ‘body-awareness painting’. She embodied it in ‘Ireland, which I consider the first and foremost 5 Memory is Martin Honert’s abiding theme. portraits conveying bodily sensations: a fusion laboratory of the British colonial enterprise, The German artist’s sculptures, exploring his of rainbow palette, gestural expressivity, unhas always been a fixture in my thinking on own childhood – and thus, given that he was flinching focus on physicality and weakness, the psychological and political effects a system born in 1953, his country’s postwar period – and and consoling absurd humour that, even when designed to humiliate and alienate can have notable for unpredictable shifts of scale, have she was painting in her late years, looks like the on peoples’ souls,’ the Cameroonian-born, repeatedly concerned themselves with the snares work of a brilliant young artist. (Lassnig lived, Dakar-based Kouoh says of her show Still (the) and distortions of remembrance, whether he’s taught and exhibited until she was ninety-four.) Barbarians, an exploration of the continuing visualising a former teacher coloured to look The 40 paintings here span the 1940s to the aftereffects of colonialism that places Ireland like an old, shadowy photograph or building twenty-first century, synthesise a variety of at its centre. The 50 artists selected, who are an atmosphere-laden if perhaps not entirely modernist movements into originality and, delivering both a variety of new commissions trustworthy tableau of his childhood schoolif you are the type who messes around with and performances, include Kader Attia, Mary dormitory after dark. Ironic, then, that Honert brushes and canvas, will inevitably school you. Evans, Liam Gillick, Alfredo Jaar, Uriel Orlow himself faded from view somewhat for several

ArtReview

years, though in recent times – thanks to smartly dour condition in diverse ways. They’ve acquired – at great effort – the private ownership of installed shows like his miniretrospective at mineral rights and photographed what lies the Hamburger Bahnhof in 2012 – he’s been ascendant again. Here Honert is Johnen Galerie’s beneath the ground; made parquet out of lead acquired from decommissioned power plants; showcase artist for Gallery Weekend Berlin. composed choral works dedicated to ruins; Tie a knot in your handkerchief or something. filmed one of the world’s largest stalactites; Something we might prefer to forget and, of course, more, putting a homonymic – something we are literally burying – is ‘seen’ in ‘Anthropocene’. 6 espoused by Riddle of the Burial Grounds at Extra 7 Folkert de Jong is no doubt best-known City Kunsthal: the fact that, as a species, we’ve for his melancholy theatrical tableaux featurbeen shoving radioactive matter into the ground ing ghostly militaristic and fairytale figures, on a daily basis since the close of the Cold War, characterised by lavish use of polyurethane as if sweeping dust under the rug, albeit fatal dust that will sit there for millennia. (Plutonium, foam and explorations of the themes of power, for example, is thought to have a hazardous capitalism and war. But the Dutch artist has lifespan of at least 240,000 years, with some switched up his aesthetic a few times in recent of its isotopes far hardier than that.) Here, years, moving into bronze in 2012 and, more 20 artists, including Dorothy Cross, Mikhail recently, interring figures and objects in Karikis, Sam Keogh and Lucy Skaer, tackle this coloured Plexiglas vitrines – as if, one might

think, suspending them between imagined past and retro-future. His new show, And Nothing But The Truth, locates another new wrinkle, or sheds fresh light while retaining the artist’s downbeat outlook: de Jong’s fascination here, we’re told, is with man’s drive for self-improvement and the uses, in this regard, of morality and science as ways of conquering death. Suddenly those antiseptic cases make a lot more sense. Moving from nothing but the truth to Public Fiction feels a bit easy, but this column prefers not to break a sweat. First up, definitions: Public Fiction, formerly a project space, is now a kind of roving if Los Angeles-based exhibition project, run by Lauren Mackler and inviting artists and collectives to ‘use exhibitions as a way to distribute ideas’. Elusive by design, it’s variously taken the form of a comedy club, a restaurant, a church and more, become something of

6 Simon Boudvin, CONCAVE 04 (Gagny), 2007, photographs. Courtesy Steirischer Herbst 2015, Graz, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin

5 Martin Honert, VSG-Gruppe (detail), 2015, polyurethane, sand, wood, oil paint, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Johnen Galerie, Berlin

7 Folkert de Jong, Doctrine of Salvation, 2015, acrylic glass, stainless steel toilet, evacuation stretcher chair, plastic, metal, 200 × 460 × 100 cm. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy the artist

May 2016

a shadow LA institution, and now it’s occupying MOCA’s storefront. The themes this time are 8 The Poet and The Critic, and the missing, they’re being unpacked via performances, lectures and ‘artist-driven interventions’ (from artists and writers including Lynne Tillman, Mungo Thomson, Isaac Julien and Quinn Latimer) and a literary aspect – short, meditative texts – is accruing online at publicfiction.moca.org. 9 The first works this writer saw by Shahryar Nashat, at London’s Studio Voltaire – during his first UK solo, in 2011 – were a suite of lusciously 10 fabricated benches and plinths, some quietly erupting with weird ornaments and giant screws, and a loose-limbed video of a dancer rehearsing and resting. Later, watching Hustle in Hand (2014), a crisply shot video closing in on body parts (hands during eating, necks), money being counted and money being exchanged, it was initially hard to resolve the artist’s different

manners of working. But Nashat, one might say by way of bridging, is interested in art as kind of hustle, one in which the exhibition space (or editing within an aesthetically pleasing video) starts to confer meaning even when it’s barely there, to sweep the viewer into confidence. We’re propelled, then, by the maker’s certainty even as he points to himself pulling the strings – and in this sense, while we have no clue yet what he’s planning for Portikus, we have an inkling of the transactional mechanics that’ll undergird it (and we’re willing to bet it won’t be scruffy). Before we take off, one for the birds: Duke Riley’s Fly By Night is undoubtedly the finest pigeon-utilising artwork to be seen in New York this season, even if Dan Colen is showing his birdshit paintings somewhere. At dusk on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, Riley will whistle to call a giant flock of pigeons from a historic boat docked in Brooklyn, and they’ll

loop over the river while throwing out a light show via tiny LEDs on bands round their legs. The work, organised by Creative Time, in turn loops back to the history of pigeon keeping, a venerable tradition in New York – cinephiles will remember, for example, the pastime’s pivotal presence in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) – and, more largely, serves to mark the distance between an old New York, particularly old Brooklyn, and today’s transformed city; and, arguably, between old means of conveying messages and the hi-tech ones of today. Marginal communities pinned to the waterways fascinate the Boston-born Riley. In the past, in the name of art, he’s organised clambakes on the Brooklyn waterfront, launched a wooden submarine and got arrested for it, and staged a gladiatorial sea battle in a reflecting pool in Queens. The ships went down. The pigeons, no doubt, will stay up. Martin Herbert

8 Public Fiction, The Poet and The Critic, and the missing, with images of work by Nevine Mahmoud and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2016. Courtesy MOCA, Los Angeles

10 Duke Riley, Fly By Night, 2016, performance, pigeons. Photo: Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro. Courtesy the artist and Creative Time, New York

ArtReview

10 miles away

YIN Zhaoyang November 5th - December 30th, 2016

PENG Jian 彭剑

Ink and color on paper 80×183cm 2016

May 28 - July 17 th

No.54 Caochangdi (old airport road), Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015, China

2016

Upcoming exhibition 2016

Ink on paper 145×365cm 2013

Claire Basler (French) Marion Bataillard (French) September 17th - October 30th, 2016

An east wind

MA Dan July 23th - September 10th, 2016

SUN Hao 孙浩

TATE LIVERPOOL 18 M AY – 18 SEP 2016

FR ANCIS BACON MARIA L A SSNIG ELL A KRUGLYANSK AYA Supported by The Francis Bacon Exhibition Supporters Group Maria Lassnig Foundation The Austrian Federal Chancellery Tate Liverpool Commissioning Circle and Tate Liverpool Members Maria Lassnig Double Self-Portrait with Camera (Doppelselbstporträt mit Kamera) 1974 © Maria Lassnig Foundation © Artothek of the Republic of Austria, permanent loan, Belvedere Vienna Francis Bacon Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho 1967 ©The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2016 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Acquired by the state of Berlin Ella Kruglyanskaya Gossip Girls 2010 Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise New York/Rome

Artists’ Artists’ Artists’ Film Film Film Film 2016 2016 2016

Biennial Biennial Biennial

Points of View

Here’s a tale from the more obscure corners of the Internet. Back in the summer of 2015, ICANN, the body that regulates the provision of ‘general top level domain names’ or gTLDs – that’s the bit after the dot in whatever website domain name, like the .com in www.artreview.com – finally decided which organisation should control the selling and managing of the new gTLD ‘.art’. And .art, when you think about all the people in the world who might want the term ‘art’ on the end of their domain name, was going to be a lucrative domain name to control. Various organisations made applications for the right to manage (and sell) .art, among them the New York-based art website and journal e-flux. It was a protracted process, and ICANN couldn’t choose, finally bringing it to a last-ditch auction process last July. E-flux and seven other contenders lost out to a UK-registered company called UK Creative Ideas Ltd. Since then, though, UK Creative Ideas seems to have pretty much evaporated, little more than a corporate shell, and art domains can’t yet be registered. In the application to ICANN, the company listed four directors, one of whom was Ulvi Kasimov. Kasimov is a venture capitalist, then also CEO of Sferiq, a Russian tech start-up and investment company, and which now lays claim to the application to .art. Sferiq’s website explains that it will ‘use this domain to unite art and the digital world, creating a global online platform for art and all things art related. It would be a community for everyone who creates, produces, deals in, values or just loves art.’ In 2014, Sferiq sponsored a prize for digital innovation in art, at the Investor Allstars awards in London. The prize was won by Artstack (a sort of artworld Instagram), over a shortlist that included other art-commerce outfits such as Artsy, Paddle8 and Saatchi Art. Writing up the launch of the prize, the entrepreneur news-site Growth Business (cohost of the Allstars awards) opined that:

Trophy hunting Disintermediation – just another term for separating collectors from their senses (and $$$$)? asks J.J. Charlesworth ‘The art market is ripe for internet-based disintermediation. Even today, the vast majority of art sales occur privately through specialist dealers, with little in the way of transparency, market data, third party validation, regulation or liquidity, making it difficult for new entrants to join the market and for investors to trade in art the same way they would in other assets.’ ‘Disintermediation’ is a great bit of corporate-speak. It basically means cutting out the middleman; or rather cutting out the old middleman – here the old world of private sales made by gallerists and dealers – to cut a different middle man in, a new generation of more hitech, data-driven platforms that would allow investors to ‘trade in art in the same way they would in other assets’. Now, somewhere on the same track is millionaire art-collector and art-magazine publisher Peter Brant’s merger, late last year, of his own magazine Art in America with the venerable but ailing American title ArtNews. Brant is well known for having made his fortune in the paper industry during the 1980s and 90s, while having assiduously collected contemporary art all the

May 2016

way back to the late 1960s (see Tom Eccles’s interview with Brant in the November 2015 issue of ArtReview). But newsprint and the printmagazine market are not what they used to be in the age of digital media. And what is interesting about Brant’s merger of his Art in America with ArtNews is the way in which he did the deal – an elegant bit of mergers and acquisitions choreography – and the company involved. ArtNews Ltd had in 2014 merged with a Poland-based company that subsequently renamed itself ArtNews SA; in 2015 Brant bought a controlling share in ArtNews SA, while simultaneously selling his Art in America to the company he had just bought. According to ArtNews SA’s current blurb, the company ‘seeks to create greater transparency of the global art market by empowering buyers and sellers with unbiased and fact-based information making art collecting better understood and more enjoyable with an ultimate objective to constantly grow the universe of art collectors around the world’. Uncanny, isn’t it? And what is interesting about Brant’s move is that ArtNews SA puts the editorial side of writing news and criticism about art into close proximity with art market analysis – ArtNews SA’s other wing is Skate’s, an art-market-intelligence agency. So the art market, nontransparent, unregulated, hard to penetrate, is fabulously attractive to those who want to capture the wealth of collectors who are also seeing art increasingly as an investment asset class. Art isn’t an investment, though. Art consumes wealth, it doesn’t produce it. But as the wealthy flock to investing in art as if it were an investment, that is exactly what it becomes. And if you want to tap into that multibillion-pound market, the only thing is to work out how to identify those buyers – make them part of some form of online social media platform, perhaps – and get them buying and selling through you.

Do you know what it’s like to exist with missing parts? To go one’s whole life haunted by some indescribable and mysterious phantom limb? A lost piece of the puzzle, an absent chapter in the story of just who the hell is this Jonathan Grossmalerman fellow anyhow?? It’s something I’ve always meant to write about in these pages, but I didn’t want to seem… you know… selfindulgent… Anyway, what could this feeling be? After all, I have my two hands, two strong legs and a fiercely beating heart! Why do I still feel apart? So different? Why do I not quite fit in? Do you know how that feels? To be slightly different? Alone in a crowd? No! Of course not! How could you? But then, out of nowhere, I received a mysterious package! An ancient leatherbound manuscript carefully wrapped in fine linens, from someone claiming to be my ‘great uncle from the old country’, a certain Jaap de Grootschildermanneke. Strange, as I had never heard of anyone by that name and didn’t know I even had family in any old country. After all, I’ve always considered myself American. Free from the constraint of history! No ties to any tradition or extended family. I’ve never even identified with my own parents! Dull, secretive people who committed tandem suicide via lawnmower the day I was accepted into art school. It was very sad… as I suppose you can imagine. In any case, back to the mysterious package! The manuscript, dated 1623, was titled Atelier Van Schande or Studio of Shame: A detailed account of the career, court proceeding and ultimate garrotting, disembowelling, beheading, drawing-andquartering and then public burning and piking of the Delft painter Johannes de Grootschildermanneke, an unabashedly virile colleague of Vermeer and also a good deal more productive! I only know this much because my slowwitted studio assistant Neal translated the entire document from the original Dutch (he has interesting, if not reliable, talents). The book was also full of amazing engravings of de Grootschildermanneke’s work. He was known primarily for highly realistic still lifes consisting of extremely moist food. Peaches, cherries, mussels, clams, oysters, sliced melons, halved

Hallelujah! I am whole!!! After a lifetime spent seeing them in front of him, New York’s most vigorous painter, Jonathan Grossmalerman, finds that there are vaginas behind him as well – growing on the family tree

ArtReview

blood oranges, pistachios, pomegranates, cloven figs and papayas, conch shells, lilies and the like, all jammed suggestively with bananas (rare at the time!), cornichons, cucumbers, zucchini and eggplants, the Spanish kind. Which he sold at market (less expensively than Bible scenes, but more expensively than landscapes). Then, according to court documents, in 1621 he exploded the conventions of the day. Abruptly dispensing with allusion altogether, he started making huge paintings of vaginas! Huge paintings of vaginas!! I’m sorry, did you catch that? Huge paintings of fucking vaginas!!! Not until the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, when a gunpowder warehouse exploded in the centre of town, would Delft be rocked like this. It is this grand gesture, this stake through the heart of culture, that ushered in Modernism. This crack in the sky! This stone cast between the eyes! From then on, Dutch painting could only limp along blindly until culture caught up with it! So popular were the vagina paintings that he couldn’t produce enough to satisfy the needs of the growing merchant class, patroons, foreign kings and emperors. Everyone needed to have a remarkable vagina painting; in fact, an aristocratic woman was not considered fit for court life until she had posed for one. And then, just as suddenly, the dream ended. Through some misunderstanding or conspiracy of prudery or perhaps a jealous Frans Hals (theories abound), de Grootschildermanneke was hauled in front of the Delft city council for failing to pay a local mule tax, where, despite having the money owed, he was sentenced to be immediately garrotted, flayed, disembowelled, beheaded, drawn, quartered, burned and finally had his head stuck on a pike and displayed from the roof of the painter’s guild building in the market square. A judge later reduced his sentence and he was spared the flaying. De Grootschildermanneke, my hero, suffered the tortures of the damned so that we might live free of allegory. Unfettered by inference and intimation. That we might be ourselves and not some whispered innuendo. The vagina-shaped hole in my heart has a name!!! It is de Grootschildermanneke!

There is no lack of traumatic events, big and small, in the world. Both today and through history. Thirty-one people killed in the recent Brussels bombings and yesterday 60 casualties in a Lahore park, most of them women and children. Not to speak of the innumerable cases – most of them likely to cause various kinds of posttraumatic stress – that never reach the headlines. Coming across Korean artist Jeamin Cha’s videos in Seoul while conducting research for my upcoming Gwangju Biennale, I encounter posttraumatic stress disorder in art too; a hysteria, to be precise. In two related videos, the artist’s confident filmic language reveals men who experience violence – both physical and psychological. Hysterics (2014) is a formally tight seven-minute video made using one shot of a camera circling a room full of tripods, cables and large sheets of paper. Black light reveals spots and blotches on the papers that become all violet and green under this light. A man is lying, seemingly lifeless, on the floor, and as the light goes white and cello music starts playing, we see his body being dragged out of the frame. Suddenly a glittery pom-pom is softly hitting a mirror while a high-pitched female voice is singing in English. The image turns black and the sound of a fire is accompanied by a bell ringing. The video is inspired by Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘The Vale of Tears’, in which a despairing poor couple commit suicide, which for Cha is a way of questioning conditions of life. And questioning in and of itself tends to lead to hysteria, according to her. The other film, Autodidact (2014), is more straightforward, based on the story of Youngchun Hur, a father who lost his son in 1984 when the latter was doing his military service in the

Jeamin Cha It’s not the presence of hysteria (in art and in the world) that interests Maria Lind, but that these days it seems somehow to have migrated to men

top Autodidact, 2014, HD video, colour, sound, 9 min 50 sec bottom Hysterics, 2014, HD video, colour, sound, 7 min 6 sec both Courtesy the artist and Work on Work, Seoul

May 2016

demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. Having taught himself forensic techniques, the father discovered that his son could not have committed suicide (as the military had claimed) but had been shot by someone else. In the video, closeups of Korean handwriting are coupled with a male voiceover that describes Hur’s persistent process but also talks about his thoughts on politics and life. Although ‘hysteria’ is no longer deployed in clinical diagnoses of posttraumatic stress disorders, it still has a lure. Essentially describing emotional excess that is out of control, it has been historically connected with women: etymologically rooted in the word hystera, ‘womb’ in Ancient Greek, the condition was thought, by the Ancient Greeks (and, by some, even into the Early Modern era), to be caused by the womb ‘wandering’ within the female body; pregnancy was often described as a ‘cure’. The nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot advanced the understanding of hysteria as a psychological disorder, while Sigmund Freud removed the Frenchman’s insistence on a hereditary streak. But whereas for Freud, hysteria was an unconscious defence against mental stress or trauma, both he and Charcot continued to see hysteria as a strictly female condition. Looking at Cha’s videos on Vimeo, I recall artworks made during the 1990s that featured male hysterics: often either paralysed or trapped in meaningless activities. In Douglas Gordon’s video installation 10ms-1 (1994), the literal appearance of male hysteria was found in First World War footage of shellshocked soldiers who cannot stand up, an inability emphasised by the artist having looped the grainy black-andwhite film snippet so as to render the task truly Sisyphean. Paul McCarthy’s characters Bossy Burger and Painter featured in separate videoworks (Bossy Burger, 1991; Painter, 1995) but shared a more figurative hysteria in the form of obsessive activities, including mega-messy and incessant cooking and painting. A couple of decades later, however, the men in Cha’s videos are different. They are motionless and composed. Whereas in Hysterics the hysteria is abstracted, Hur, for example, is determined to find out what happened to his son, giving up his job to concentrate on this self-imposed task. He uses his hysteria to become an agent with a cause, and someone with the ability to help change the course of things. Realising that I am not aware of any ‘female hysterics’ in recent art, I am wondering if hysteria has ‘wandered’ to men. And if so, why?

MARIA THEREZA ALVES Seeds of Change: A Floating Ballast Seed Garden Designed by Gitta Gschwendtner Commissioned by Bristol City Council with Arnolfini and the University of Bristol Botanic Garden. Moored between Bristol Bridge & Castle Park water taxi stops and visible from Castle Park. Events programme: June – September 2016. Ticketed. For more information visit: www.arnolfini.org.uk

MUF ARCHITECTURE / ART A stage for Lockleaze, 6 living rooms long, placed between a football pitch and a rose garden. Commissioned by Bristol City Council and conceived and produced by muf architecture / art as part of the ‘Open Fold’ commissions programme, curated by Dr Paul O’Neill. Gainsborough Square, Lockleaze, Bristol BS7 9XA . Opens Summer 2016, Free. For more information contact: +44 (0)117 922 3064

KATIE PATERSON IN COLLABORATION WITH ZELLER & MOYE Hollow Step inside a miniature forest of all the world’s trees. A new permanent artwork commissioned by the University of Bristol and produced by Situations. May 2016, Free. Royal Fort Gardens, Bristol, BS8 1TH . For more information visit: www.hollow.org.uk

OLIVIA PLENDER Easton String Games A new work for Easton Primary School commissioned by Bristol City Council and produced by Foreground. Easton Primary School, Beaufort Street, Easton, Bristol BS5 0SQ. September 2016, Free (by appointment only). For more information visit: www.foregroundprojects.org.uk

SARAH STATON Edith and Hans Commissioned by the University of Bristol and produced by Field Art Projects. Hiatt Baker Hall, Parrys Lane, Bristol BS9 1AD. September 2016, Free. For more information visit: www.bristol.ac.uk/estates/ projects/stoke-bishop

PUBLICATIONS

‘Murdered with Straight Lines: Drawings of Bristol by Garth England’ Commissioned as part of ‘Future Perfect’, a three year programme of commissions in Hengrove, South Bristol. Curated and produced by Theresa Bergne and Jes Fernie for Bristol City Council. For further information visit: www.futureperfectbristol.org. To order copies see www.redcliffepress.co.uk ISBN 978-1-908326-94-2

Art and the Public Realm Bristol www.aprb.co.uk Bristol City Council City Design Group Brunel House, St Georges Road Bristol BS1 5UY T +44 (0)117 922 3064

Art and the Public Realm Bristol is a dedicated website for Bristol City Council’s public art programme, managed and owned by Bristol City Council. © Bristol City Council 2016

Olivia Plender, Easton String Games, 2016. Photo © Jamie Woodley, courtesy of Foreground

COMMISSIONS

We have all become futurologists in our own way. The dominance of what some call ‘neoliberal rationality’ has forced us into a condition of perpetual speculation in which every decision must be a strategic one about ‘future returns’. When major life choices – children or no? College or no? Rent or own? – are framed in terms of return on investment (often must be framed in these terms), we are all condemned to fourth-dimensional magical thinking. So what does the future hold for the artworld? Here I offer three conjectures, more like the view through three lenses – geographical, technological, ideological – on a single future world, where what we understand as ‘art’ may be transformed beyond recognition. 1. China will be the global capital of the artworld. The history of capitalist centres has been a westward march (Europe to the US to Asia), and there’s nothing to suggest it will stop. China may have stumbled recently, but a national history going back more than 2,00o years, staggering demographics (1.3 billion people, four times the US population) and a rapidly ascending GDP all point to a Chinese century (or more) to come. The recent dictatorial entrenchments of Xi Jinping are a hiccough in China’s inevitable liberalisation. And as its middle class grows and begins to consume its own massive outputs, the ‘creative economy’ will grow with it and soon come to dominate. In particular, Shanghai and Guangzhou will have their own artistic cultures and identities, with Guangzhou as the site of avant-garde discourse and practice. These will be joined by Seoul, Manila, Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City as major centres for art production and consumption. These cities’ art and design schools, both independents and offshoots of major commercial media, entertainment and technology companies, will grow and thrive and will attract established international talent. An artist born in 2050 in the United States or Europe will travel to Asia to be close to these new scenes and markets. Because of the prestige of their museums and universities, New York and London will remain important centres, but like Paris, they will largely stand as artefacts of a prior era. Their current brightness will be eclipsed by the vibrancy of the northern hemisphere Pacific Rim cities. Strategically positioned as the biggest and fastest-growing port city in the US, Los Angeles will come to dominate the US art scene by 2050, drawing talent from around the world and money from real estate, technology, media and entertainment. 2. All art will be intellectual property. Advances in display technology, 3D printing and molecular dynamics will combine to make anything replicable anywhere. Multiple ‘rich surfaces’ in one’s home, apartment, office and studio will

Goodbye to all that Jonathan T.D. Neil watches as New York and London, analogue and individualism slide into history

offer access to motion- and still-picture imagery at a density and texture indistinguishable from so-called real life. VR technology will be housed in contact lenses and clothing, giving users access to information-suffused enhanced realities and entertainments, but more than this, it will increase opportunities for distributed collectivities to gather and mobilise – think of it as a merging of Twitter and teleportation. In this altered setting, all analogue artistic activity, whether static or dynamic (objectbased, performative, participatory, etc) will be a precursor to capturing, distributing and licensing digital code. Art galleries and museums will continue to house analogue stuff, but audiences will approach this material the way they do artefacts of the entertainment industry and sports, as so many props and costumes associated with the ‘making of’ Where the future lives – Shanghai. Photo: Marcus Lyon

May 2016

a discursive object (eg an abstract ‘painting’, a tournament ‘series’). Like popular music today, most art production will be distributed, with bits of code being captured or written and then bought, sold or shared within and between both professional and informal networks of makers. All of this content – also indistinguishable from ‘virtual spaces’ of gathering – will come with restrictions on access. By 2065, ‘art galleries’ will more closely resemble production companies with extensive legal and digital security investments than they will places that ‘show artists’. The growth and success of public art organisations at present offer the seeds of the new enterprise. Digital-rights management will be the backbone of elite social cachet (DRM = ESC). 3. Individualism will be eclipsed by inclusionism. The history of capitalist expansion has largely been congruent with the rise of the ideology of individualism in the West – that independence, self-reliance and self-legislation are moral first principles. By the time in 1987 that Margaret Thatcher uttered her infamous claim that ‘there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families’, however, the reign of individualism was already waning. China’s quick emergence as an economic superpower not only splits capitalism from its filiation with liberal democracy but introduces values of conformism and emulation that have a deeper history there than do current Communist Party dictates and will prove a better fit for emerging global capitalist arrangements. Mass and niche consumer movements are only the first phase of this new inclusionism, which holds ‘belonging’ as moral first principle. The move from individualism to inclusionism will render irrelevant the romantic ideal of the individual ‘artist’, which continues to underpin the artworld’s political economy. In its place will appear various and shifting bands of USPs (unique selling points – formerly known as ‘talents’) that will aggregate to concretise access to content and digital licensing. The more such ‘bands’ to which an ‘artist’ belongs over time, the greater her ESC (and so earning potential). Difference will still be promoted but will result in the production of similarities, which will be rewarded. How ‘alike’ one is will determine how well ‘liked’ and shared and recognised one is across distributed networks of association – ‘inclusions’ as they will be called. We will all commit to more inclusions. Authenticity will become irrelevant, though honesty won’t. Inclusionist culture, artistic and otherwise, will replace ‘elite’ culture (the end of ESC!): where the former grows the region with the largest number of overlapping spheres of a four-dimensional Venn diagram, the latter shrinks it. Everyone will be included.

If you were to rewind ArtReview perhaps 60 years, you’d find this very column (or something like it) written by Reyner Banham. Big beard, tweedy jackets, folding bike, Banham was both journalist and academic, the ‘historian of the immediate present’ whose fascination with pop culture and technology was in part the fuel that powered the Independent Group, early British Pop art and then the radical architecture of Archigram. Banham’s pieces took on the kandy-kolored postwar world, the chrome-finned and automated, the glowing and the animated. Which meant also an incredible fascination with America. America as the source, certainly in 1950s Britain, of a future that promised such easy pleasure, maxed-out leisure. For Banham, this consumer paradise was the fulfilment of a Modernism that he had cast as originating with the Futurists but now residing on the American West Coast; singed by the Second World War, but now dangling its feet in the Pacific. Banham’s perception of America might have been rose-tinted – rose-saturated, rather – and you can see just how awkward his excitement made him in the 1974 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, as he orders an ice cream sundae at a drive-through diner, sitting in the back of a convertible, with Ed Ruscha (one of the ‘local talents’) in front. But it was perhaps this very distance from his subject (it was only much later, and in the far less glamorous city of Buffalo, New York, that Banham finally got to live in America) that magnified the intensity of Banham’s long-distance love affair. After all, Banham made the grade with perhaps California’s greatest chronicler (and most lyrical chronicler of California’s infrastructure), Joan Didion. In her own essay on the LA freeway system, Didion quoted Banham’s description, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), of how ‘the freeways become a special way of being alive… the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical’. And between Banham and Didion, we can piece together an image of America that even then was just about intact. A place in which infrastructure was something to be marvelled at: the sublime Neo-Gothic monumentality of the Hoover Dam, the hydraulic intricacies

From commons to ruins It’s end times for great American public works, says Sam Jacob

top Hoover Dam, Colorado River, 2012. Photo: Ubergirl. Licensed under Creative Commons bottom The I-35W bridge collapse, Minneapolis

ArtReview

of the California water system, the baroque spatialities of the highway system. America – at least the physical fabric of constructed America as one machinic system – was still in motion. And it was a motion that was still driven by the kinetic energy of Manifest Destiny, even of the new Edenic dreams of the early European settlers. But fast-forward to the present and we find a nation whose infrastructure feels in a ruinous state, a country whose roads are crumbling, whose bridges are on the point of collapse and whose water supply – as in Flint, Michigan – carries poisons and toxins. This kind of physical American infrastructure is in freefall, its concrete cracked and its steel rusting. Right at the same time, the invisible, digital infrastructure is emerging. This super-high-tech new world of digital networks, of driverless cars, of transport managed by algorithms, of networks connecting millions of devices, has been born almost entirely in the private sector. So it is with the rise of the autonomous vehicle: high-tech combinations of hardware and software being developed by the digital behemoths Google, Apple et al. As they learn to navigate the road systems eulogised a generation before, they overlay a private network (of maps and navigation systems) onto the preexisting collective space of infrastructure. The infrastructure of highway, water and power is a particular kind of space. It’s one that literally connects us, forms a very distinct public sphere where we as citizens exist as equals. Now, though, our new digital systems are privately owned rather than state-backed, and address not the collective but the individual. The powers of Uber, for example, are directed not at ‘mass transit’ (as Americans quaintly term public transport), but at individual demand. And profit – which also means investment – is privatised too. If, like Isaac Newton, we ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, we can say now that the new individual worlds of digital infrastructure stand on the shoulders of the publics of the past. To witness the polarisation of this public/ private realm, one only has to see the expensive Louboutins that trot over the collapsing road surfaces of New York’s Chelsea. Here in miniature is contemporary American infrastructure: finely crafted vessels of individuality navigating the ruins of the public realm.

Teesside World Exposition of Art and Technology

An exhibition about industry, land, identity and exchange on Teesside, sourced from and with contributions by local collections, regional companies and international artists.

Opening and Summer party Saturday 25 June 2016 12.00pm - 4.30pm (speeches at 2.00pm) Until 9 October 2016 visitmima.com

Kenneth Cozens Coke Ovens, Cargo Fleet 1955 Oil on canvas Middlesbrough Collection at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

A response to the end of the steelworks on Teesside

23 June —–– 3 July 2016 Admission free #RASchools royalacademy.org.uk/raschools

22-25 SEPTEMBER 2016 THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART CHICAGO | NAVY PIER

expochicago.com

Presenting Sponsor

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 47

Savonarola on intensity Interview by

Matthew Collings

The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (born in 1452) preached against corruption in Florence at the time of the Renaissance. He encouraged the destruction of luxury goods, including art, in ritual burnings. In 1498, in an ironic reversal, he was tried and convicted for heresy and publicly burned in the same square in which these bonfires were staged.

ArtReview

ARTREVIEW What have you been doing? Girolamo Savonarola Going round the museums in London. AR Have you been to Tate Modern? Would you burn it? Is it all vanity? GS The whole Tate empire, its collection of institutions all over the UK, reflects many contrasting notions of art. It’s really not so bad. But at Tate Modern at the moment you’re encouraged to think about society. I saw a visually banal, large white object, made by Theaster Gates. A wall label explained it was about civil rights demonstrations during the 1960s. The demonstrators were fire-hosed, so the object is made from cut-up hoses. The result is a cartoonlike imitation of abstract painting, which in those days was a kind of art, the label says, that ‘pointedly ignored civil rights’. I was shocked by this obnoxious insinuation. If a painting or other artwork doesn’t have civil rights associations or ideas literally built into it, it ignores civil rights? It’s against anyone being conscious of them? Really?

GS I saw something the other day that I was impressed by in a group show at the Turps Gallery in Elephant & Castle. Do you know it? It’s part of the Turps Art School, a new institution run by artists, set up in a residential tower block. The students pay a fee, not all that high, but enough to run the school, the gallery and a magazine. The only art they teach is painting. Anyway, I’m recalling my impressions of an abstract painting in this show by Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist, an immigrant to England. He absorbed influences ranging from Turner and Francis Bacon to Jules Olitski, but also Catholic literature by the likes of André Gide, and for years he has worked back and forth in London and New York. Today, at eighty years old, he enjoys a high profile and great respect. Actually paintings by him from the 1970s were the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain two years ago. AR He was my tutor at art school in that very decade. GS Well good, so you can indulge me here, Matthew, because you’re probably familiar with this experience. It was an abstract

AR Well, today the only important art is socially minded. GS Yes, but that shouldn’t mean preaching ignorance.

AR What do you mean by ‘jackpot’? GS An illusion of relevance: Tate Modern’s wall labels are not really thoughts but basic signs whose purpose is to ensure, in the minds of the people wandering round that place, that the work is connected to a faddish idea. In the case I just mentioned, it’s not just civil rights but also the notion that if you do a one-liner joke art-object whose meaning is that art ought to have civil rights as its subject, then, for the time being at least, this will be the definition of importance. AR What kind of art do you think is morally acceptable or spiritually helpful or neutral, I mean not evil – something you wouldn’t put on a bonfire?

AR That’s a lot of differences going on. GS And yet they were graspable in a second as a powerful unity. In describing to you what’s in my mind when I think of the painting I’m also breaking it down as if all these elements revealed themselves sequentially. That’s how verbal language works, of course. Paintings are not narratives. But the feeling was really of giving oneself up to an overall immediate sensation: sensuous, even delicious. At the same time one’s rational mind was working fast, too: reason separating things out and recognising and naming every part. AR You were in a tower block doing this? GS Yes, in that galley up there. People going by outside with their shopping bags; the market nearby; the halal butchers; sheep’s heads on slabs; fish; big colourful containers of cooking oil. You walk through a market, you go up a slope, along a concrete corridor and then you’re in the gallery. It was a group show about subdued colour. I thought it was a good theme, though it isn’t connected to any important ideas outside of aesthetics. AR Ordinary people don’t know what the word ‘aesthetics’ means.

AR What do you think of art schools? GS Today they tend to encourage one direction only: gamble on coming up with a wacky idea and it’s possible you may hit the jackpot. But I would say another route you could try is to make something that has intensity. Enough people will always respond to that. You could have a future. But you have to accept that it might initially get passed over by the powers that be. Maybe later down the line it will be recognised, but you can have no control over that.

the blades have serrated edges, making a distinctive line with little triangular shapes.

painting, as I say, about six feet high, a squarish format. I’m recalling agitated surfaces, a magnificent use of white, some glinting small metallic strips set into the white. (I learned later these are the leftover packaging for the prescription morphine he takes for pain in his joints.) The white was organised into circular swirls somewhere nearby this formation of strips, but elsewhere it was treated in different ways. It was partly thick and plastered, and scraped over with some transparent matter. In other areas there was hardly anything there at all: bare canvas with a few whitish stains. And there were some edges of canvas I remember too, collaged on. They’d been cut with pinking shears, those scissors used in tailoring, where

GS Well, you can easily read about it. It’s from the eighteenth century. It names a tradition of thinking that goes back much further, to the Ancient Greeks – Pythagoras in fact, who we’re told coined the term ‘philosophy’ – about art’s combination of sensuality and intellect, how it communicates ideas about the world or interprets it. It’s not necessary to use the word ‘aesthetics’ when you’re appreciating intensity in art. You just need a bit of familiarity with the process of objective looking to be part of the communicative process that art is always involved in, at least at some level. Sometimes the level is high and sometimes not. AR Did you think it was high with this painting by Frank? GS Yes. I gave myself up to it and felt free. AR It sounds very far removed from the spaces you were in, in Tate Modern.

above Theaster Gates, Civil Tapestry 4, 2011, fire hoses, vinyl and wood. © the artist. Courtesy Tate

GS It’s actually only a few stops away on the Northern Line.

facing page Fra Bartolomeo, Portrait of Savonarola, 1499–1500, oil on panel, 53 × 38 cm. © Polo Museale, Florence – Gabinetto Fotografico. Courtesy Museo di San Marco, Florence

AR At ArtReview we sneer at splashy paintings. If you go on about them, it’s like you’ve no idea that ideology critique ever happened.

May 2016

GS I think of ideology critique as examining the idea that art is free or has the power to make people free, by exposing the power interests hidden within the cult of art. AR Yeah. I mean, we’re not necessarily constantly studying the idea. Er, could you remind me again what it is? What else is it about? GS A counter-idea, one that still acknowledges the truth of the critique, says that something can be ideological but still contain an element of truth and the potential to make people free. AR Oh, that’s interesting: how does it work? GS Well, Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism are full of surprises in relation to conventional depiction; they just do their own thing. It can broaden your mind to be exposed to the results. You saw things a certain way but now you realise there are limitless possibilities. The world is opened up.

GS It’s a myth that everyone sees art the same way. When immaculate clear representations of saints change to fuzzy shapes whose meaning is radically ambiguous (perhaps they don’t even have a meaning), it’s not necessarily the same jump for everyone from the reassuring to the alienating. AR Why not? GS Someone educated and therefore privileged is likely to be conditioned to get what’s happening. The fact is that saints in art had a different meaning for the privileged than for the excluded or marginalised, or even just the ordinary. AR What happens when the marginalised see fuzzy shapes in splashy paintings?

AR What about non-middle-class people, the marginalised? GS Ideology critique says that those without social status might not get so much of the benefit of the experience because in many cases they might not have the time to get involved. But I’m saying that lacking time relates to a more important factor, which is that the experience of art opening up new vistas isn’t about status.

GS Anyway, ideology critique notices that if you don’t have status, not having it makes you feel doubtful and fearful about the things that those with it feel perfectly fine about.

GS Yes. Being excluded from art appreciation – so ideology critique maintains – isn’t just to do with exotic visions that art goes in for that not everyone has the education to understand: abstraction, distortion and so on. It applies also to pre-modern art where usually depiction is straightforward – but only the powerful in society can really identify with the worldview pre-modern art embodies, because those pictures were created on their orders in the first place. AR Surely everyone in the olden days could identify with that art whether they had status or not?

AR But you were talking about something else with Frank Bowling: you would say not everyone can get his painting, but that doesn’t make it decadent or socially oppressive? And also it’s important even though it’s not about civil rights. Its significance is not a passing thing only, just answering a temporary fad. But rather it connects to things that have always been important, because it communicates or interprets the world: what’s out there. It does so through sensual meaning. That doesn’t mean it’s only about the senses. It means the medium through which the world is philosophised and interrogated in all its aspects, not just those that can literally be seen with the eye, is sensual. GS Yes, you’ve got hold of the basic elements of the idea: how to appreciate intensity in a painting. They could be taught in art schools, and Tate Modern could teach them too, and really put a lot of its abundant resources into getting them across to its vast number of visitors. But unfortunately it’s not going to happen, because we all live in a neoliberal hell in which art is valued only as pursuit of novelty, like any product under consumer capitalism. AR I thought cultural capital was social capital. It’s divisive.

AR Hmm…

AR So status itself when it’s affirmed by art is negative? And art always affirms it because art itself is high status?

GS Yes, it highlights it where the usual thing is not to mention it.

GS The marginalised – also by definition – already feel alienated, so, for that section of society, pictures of nothing by Abstract Expressionists are no different to pictures of saints by Dürer. AR Because an abstract painting as much as a Renaissance picture of a saint affirms the worldview and consciousness of the privileged and entitled: the high-status sector? GS Yes. AR And ideology critique in an art context looks at that issue of status? Frank Bowling, Louis Jack, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 183 × 170 cm. Photo: Rose Jones. Courtesy the artist

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GS Ideology critique is a subtle tool, not a blunderbuss or sledgehammer. It’s a shame that the assumption you just stated – that appreciating intensity in art is elitist – prevails in art circles, especially art-teaching ones, where a little learning has turned out to be a dangerous thing. If you really possess learning it doesn’t mean you want to dominate everyone. Education ought to be everyone’s right, among all our civil rights, in fact. But if it isn’t, and yet you have somehow found a way to possess the mental resources that allow you to read or gauge what an abstract painting is doing, or what an abstract value is, then that’s not something shameful. On the contrary, it’s a marvel. AR Praise the Lord. GS Yes. Or any god: there’s an Indonesian one called A’a, who I saw in the British Museum represented by a fantastically intense cedarwood carving from the nineteenth century. Praise him! Next month William Morris on de-skilling in art

MAY (NADA NY)

PETER SUTHERLAND

GUY PATTON APRIL - MAY

MAY -JUNE

PETER PERI KINMAN

26-29 MAIO 2016

Fábrica Nacional da Cordoaria

MADRID ORGANIZA

22 - 26 FEBRUARY 2017 Feria de Madrid

Guest Country: Argentina Application deadline July 4

material language new work in clay

curated by Sarah Griffin and Alun Graves 14 May - 24 July 2016 Neil Brownsword Phoebe Cummings Richard Deacon Keith Harrison Nao Matsunaga James Rigler Marit Tingleff Annie Turner Jesse Wine Phoebe Cummings, ‘Antediluvian Swag’ (detail), 2016, unfired clay, steel, wire, approx. 180 x 100 x 30 cm

Roche Court East Winterslow Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 1BG

T +44 (0)1980 862244 F +44 (0)1980 862447 nac@sculpture.uk.com www.sculpture.uk.com

NewArtCentre.

TATE MODERN 4 M AY – 21 AU G 2016

June 2 - 12 2016

CELEBRATING PHOTOGRAPHY WWW.COPENHAGENPHOTOFESTIVAL.COM

u SOU THWARK FREE FOR TATE MEMBERS Supported by AGC Equity Partners Mona Hatoum Hot Spot III 2009 © Mona Hatoum. Photo: Agostino Osio Courtesy Fondazione Querini Stampalia Onlus, Venice

Satellites Programme 2017 — — Deadline 10 June 2016 Collective is looking for visual artists, writers, curators and producers to take part in Satellites Programme 2017. Selectors include: Petra Bauer (artist and filmmaker), Bryony Bond (Creative Director, The Tetley) and Tom O’Sullivan (artist). Chaired by Kate Gray (Director, Collective).

For further information and to apply go to: www.collectivegallery.net Harris Museum & Art Gallery Market Square, Preston, PR1 2PP

www.harrismuseum.org.uk

Art Featured

Let us not forget that today’s so-called consumer society was invented in a greenhouse 61

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Wayne Thiebaud by Ed Schad

Art history, historical circumstance, an excess of confectionery and the history of one man’s life find their way into the extra-believable paintings of the ninety-five-year-old American master May 2016

above Two Wedding Cakes, 2015, oil on wood panel, 91 × 122 cm preceding pages, left Morning Freeway, 2012–13, oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm preceding pages, right Dessert Circle, 1992–4, oil on panel, 54 × 46 cm

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Suckers and Sweets, 2000, oil on canvas, 63 × 77 cm

May 2016

Cafe Cart, 2011/2012/2015, oil on canvas, 158 × 122 cm

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Candy Ball Machine, 1977, gouache and pastel on paper, 60 × 45 cm

May 2016

After visiting with Wayne Thiebaud in his studio, a one-storey metal building about a kilometre from the California State Capitol, I seized upon his painting from 1969 called Peking Ducks in Thiebaud’s recent Rizzoli monograph. The artist had directed me to it, saying that “a great number of things [in the book] haven’t been seen before”, and I had never seen Peking Ducks. During the visit, Thiebaud told me about his relationship with Willem de Kooning. In 1956, Thiebaud took a year off from teaching at Sacramento City College, to “move to New York to try and meet my heroes”, he said. He had the good fortune of not only meeting and striking up a friendship with de Kooning but with Franz Kline as well. Thiebaud thought of de Kooning not as a person committed to a particular vision of painting, or someone beholden to some theory of what art should be (as were many of his peers). Instead, Thiebaud’s de Kooning is not a very good modernist at all. De Kooning was intent on telling the young painter that he needed to decide for himself how he wanted to see, that Thiebaud needed to avoid all of the trappings of given styles and what people thought was art, and just find out, essentially, what he cared about. De Kooning himself, Thiebaud remembered, was split between the inspirations that actually drove his art and what writers believed drove his art. “‘People talk about me being influenced by Picasso,’” Thiebaud recalled de Kooning saying at the time, “‘but my big hero is Soutine.’” Peking Ducks could be an emblem of this exchange between de Kooning and Thiebaud. Large, Soutine-like carcasses hang from wires against a blank background, but that background is a de Kooning just getting started. Creamy washes of pinks and reds collect like tributes to the older painter. A solitary shaded vertical stripe is enough to give the painting the most miniscule amount of pictorial depth. I cannot say for sure that the painting is about de Kooning, but it offers a glimpse into Thiebaud’s world. Peking Ducks is de Kooning,

an immigrant’s shop in Southern California, a statement on painting and Thiebaud’s transfigured memory all at once. The work is full of historical circumstances converging and being transfigured. We’ve seen it before, but not like this. At ninety-five, Thiebaud not only still paints but also plays tennis three times a week, a passion that he has held his entire life. A longtime and dedicated teacher, his study is full of artwork by former students, along with assorted bits of treasure from Peru, Mexico and former lives. The artist walks a bit slowly these days, but he has a gentle, inviting manner that is immediately apparent. He is easy to talk to and sprinkles his stories with the names of people one would have loved to meet. “Stella has a pretty good topspin forehand,” Thiebaud said. “You would have loved Kline. A sweet man, he would sell little drawings in Washington Square.” Thiebaud seems to treasure his life, and the manner of his conversational style – interrupting personal stories with accounts of the speed of Berthe Morisot’s brush or the genuinely strange quality of Francisco de Zurbarán’s fruit – can serve as a fair account of his paintings. He can present an accurate survey of chic New York painting on the backs of arcade games that he remembered from his childhood, as in Four Pinball Machines (1962), or he can empathise with Van Gogh’s peasant farmers in a painting of shoes that were probably his own (Black Shoes, 1963). The more you look, the more you see art-historical underpinnings lingering below the surface of his bright Americana. Thiebaud’s work has long been associated with Pop art and the economic miracle that was the US after the Second World War (no Pop monograph lacks one of his paintings). Yet it would be better to think of Thiebaud, as does Adam Gopnik in the artist’s 2000 retrospective catalogue, as the son of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and the Great Depression. Thiebaud took de Kooning’s words to heart. Instead of engaging with the legacy of Cézanne, building his images with masses of

Black Shoes, 1983, oil on paper, 29 × 33 cm

ArtReview

twitchy strokes (“What art was supposed to look like,” according to Thiebaud), he began letting memories of working in restaurants or in the fairs of Long Beach take over the abstract shapes of his preliminary compositions. Triangles became pies, circles became cakes and rectangles became long lines of sandwiches, cut in half and accented with olives on toothpicks. “I hung some ties up,” Thiebaud said, “but mostly I worked from memory, of going into Kress department store and seeing those candy counters. This was during the Depression so you didn’t have a lot of means by which you got these objects. Quite amazing how beautiful displays were made in order to entice people.” In 1972, Thiebaud bought a house in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco. The move produced over a decade of cityscapes that have been associated with those by Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Bechtle. He then moved to a farmhouse south of Sacramento, where the farmlands of the river delta became another decade of landscapes. Each and every locale of his life appears in his paintings. The cityscapes and the river scenes, as Thiebaud discusses them, are products of an inner reality. The locations, as in the fantastic Apartment Hill (1980), which belongs to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, only exist in the mind: “You feel that district of San Francisco, with its hills and buildings,” Thiebaud says, “and it really gives you a sense of vertigo.” The association between Thiebaud and Pop persists, however. The Dallas Museum of Art’s 2015 survey International Pop, for example, found his Salads, Sandwiches, and Desserts (1962) next to Icelandic artist Erró’s Foodscape (1964). The paintings make an odd couple. Erró’s work, constructed from labels and pictures that the artist gathered on a trip to the United States, is a cornucopia multiplied, an exaggerated look at the American Dream through an outsider’s eyes. Each bit of food is accurately rendered and labelled, a mountain of plenty turned into a vertiginous horror. Salad, Sandwiches,

and Desserts, on the other hand, is not believable; or, perhaps more accurately, it is extra-believable. Its rows of sundaes and sandwiches certainly seem ordinary, only they are a little too vibrant, a little too orderly. The icing on the cakes is a little too plump. “The irony is that my painted cakes are quite awful things. Too much fake meringue, too much frosting,” Thiebaud said. “Americans are astoundingly gross in their pies and cakes. It is an irony that people think of them as pretty.” The day before I met Thiebaud, his wife of 56 years, Betty Jean Thiebaud, passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. The news was not yet public and Thiebaud didn’t tell me at the time. Betty Jean was a familiar face in his paintings, a frequent sitter for his long portraits, as in Two Kneeling Figures (1966). Thiebaud kept this information to himself and was more than generous with his time. Though it must have been a very hard day, Thiebaud seemed to have found a good way to live in his art and painting, a rarity in the farflung and often overheated artworld of today. He was happy to talk of his painting, which was another way of talking about his life, and so of Betty Jean. As I was leaving, Thiebaud was off to his easel to begin again, taking up his memories and the subjects he had painted his entire life. His paintings seem to hold all of his sad and happy days together at once. There was a magic, an old-fashioned alignment between art and life that is hard to describe. But then, speaking of Chardin, Thiebaud does it justice: “The wonderful thing about common objects, of almost any kind, is exactly what the poets talk about. They are talking about a transcendent potential, that they can be more than they are. For instance, let’s say a bunch of kitchen objects like Chardin: copper pipes, clay pots, a loaf of bread. Your job as a painter is to make them different enough and special enough that when you go back to look at the kitchen’s actual objects, they seem wanting.” ar

Two Kneeling Figures, 1966, oil on canvas, 152 × 183 cm all images Courtesy Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco

May 2016

A Moral by John Berger

A Moral was published in Permanent Red (1960), a collection of writing developed from articles written for the New Statesman between 1954 and 1959, which the author described (in a 1979 reissue) as being characterised by the recurring theme of ‘the disastrous relation between art and property’. Back then, Berger remarked that in rereading those articles he was struck by how much he had changed since their composition; but even today many of the issues he was dealing with remain remarkably unchanged

In Holland in the seventeenth century a picture was painted. It was a portrait of a ship chandler’s young wife. The artist was paid £50. The picture remained in the ship chandler’s family for several generations. But there came a time when no one was any longer interested in their great-great-grandmother. The picture was then sold to a furniture dealer for the price of a new dress. The dealer sold it, along with a cabinet of inlaid wood, to an English gentleman. Twenty years later this gentleman’s son moved from the family house in East Anglia to Nottingham, where he began to make a fortune from his coalfield. He had no time for paintings or inlaid cabinets. The picture lay forgotten in the attic of his house for nearly a century. Not long ago it was given with a lot of other junk to a charity sale. An antique dealer saw it, recognized it as seventeenth century Dutch and bought it for £3.10.0. Quite soon afterwards an advertising executive, driving through York, stopped at the dealer’s shop near the old city wall to see if he could buy a four-poster bed. He noticed the portrait and was instantly convinced it was a Rembrandt. He bought it furtively for £40. It was hung in his London flat in a place of honour. One of the firm’s commercial artists confirmed that it was undoubtedly a Rembrandt – and so must be worth £40,000. The executive’s friends and clients, who dropped in for a drink, were greatly impressed. The executive himself was made very proud. He also argued that with this picture

ArtReview

as security, he could take risks which would otherwise have frightened him. He took these unusual risks and made an unusual amount of money. He never asked an expert to authenticate the picture. This may be thought naive. But then who does bring in an outsider to verify a personal triumph? Besides the picture served very well as a Rembrandt. The executive had to go to the States for nine months. He let his flat to an old German friend. This man invited an art historian friend of his own to dinner. Clearly the painting was not a Rembrandt, said the art historian. When the executive returned from America, he was told the bad news. Another historian was called in and agreed with the first. The painting was taken down from the wall. The executive told his friends that he had sold it. In fact it was put into a cupboard. A young painter went to see the executive to try to get work in the firm’s studio. The executive took a liking to him and invited him to dinner. They drank quite a lot and the innocence of the young man reminded the older one of his own idealistic youth. Once he had dreamt of being a novelist. Waxing nostalgic and sentimental, he began to confess and tell of his disappointments in life. Amongst many other things he mentioned the Rembrandt. The young painter asked if he could see it. Perhaps it is not a Rembrandt, he said, but it is a marvellous painting. Then take it, the executive replied, it’s yours. Don’t try to get a job in one of our studios. You’re the real McCoy, I can see that. Struggle on. And take this as a present. Thereupon he insisted on the young painter taking the picture away with him under his arm that very night. If he had failed to discover a Rembrandt, he could at least discover how to be generous again – so he thought as he went to bed. The young painter hung the painting on the wall of the single room in which he worked and in which also he and his wife slept, ate and lived. It gave him great pleasure and he came to think that the girl portrayed was a little like his wife. He always felt guilty about his wife. She was delicate in health and yet it was she who daily went to work in order to earn the money on which they both lived. Occasionally when she lost a job and they were desperate, he tried to get work himself – as he had done when he first went to see the executive – but somehow he always failed. A few months later his wife told him that she was pregnant. Soon she would have to stop working. He decided to go and see his benefactor and try again for a job. The executive wouldn’t hear of it. But, he said, I will lend you a hundred pounds. The young man hesitated. Finally, he agreed to accept the money but only on condition that he gave back the picture as security. I know, he added, that it is not worth that much, but at least it is a token. To spare the young man’s feelings, the executive agreed. The painting went back into the cupboard. It was a difficult birth and both mother and child were weak. The hundred pounds was spent. The young painter hadn’t the face to go back to his previous benefactor. He went to another advertising firm and was given a job. In two years’ time they were able to move to a larger flat. Then he went back to pay the £100. The painter never gave up his job. But he came to an arrangement with the firm whereby he had Fridays off in order to do his own work. The picture now hangs in their bedroom for, naturally, he is not often in his workroom. The story, as you will agree, is not unusual. But since it is a story nothing need be hidden from the writer or the reader. I can tell you that the picture was painted by Carl Fabricius. Fabricius, a student of Rembrandt, was killed in an explosion when he was thirty-two years old. Consequently his works are very rare and very valuable. A newly discovered portrait would be worth about £20,000. But of course in life one can never know the whole story. In life it would be better if paintings were for looking at.

May 2016

Vanishment by Gabriel Coxhead

Famous in part for absenting himself from the artworld, David Hammons creates work that addresses presence and invisibility, keeping him – or some shadow of who he may be – at its very centre 72

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David Hammons declined to be interviewed for this article. Which, venue itself were dismantled or deconstructed, creating the sense of for anyone familiar with his career, isn’t remotely surprising. Over a show left unfinished or being deinstalled. Absent lighting panels in the past five decades, during which his explorations of race and urban the ceiling revealed bare neon, a vacant patch on the wall implied a experience have made him one of the most consistently provocative missing work, plasterboard walls were hacked away to give glimpses and influential of American artists, he’s conducted only a handful of of the normally hidden loading bay and machinery – the whole envipress interviews – this reticence being merely one facet of a famed ronment suggesting an ambiguous, concentrated mix of concealelusiveness that has reached almost mythic proportions. He rarely ment, exposure, disclosure. makes public appearances, refuses to communicate by telephone, These sorts of tricksy interventions seem, at first glance, a far cry doesn’t turn up to his own openings – doesn’t, for that matter, even from the sort of politically motivated work with which Hammons have permanent commercial gallery representation. Together, this began his career, however. Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, he avoidance of the limelight and determinedly independent stance moved to Los Angeles as a twenty-year-old; and it was there, during towards the art market have turned him into something of a cult the West Coast heyday of the Black Arts Movement, in the late 1960s figure – particularly for those of us dismayed by contemporary and 70s, that he produced what he called ‘body prints’ – pressing his culture’s ceaseless, vapid manufacturing of celebrity. It’s hard to think margarine-greased face or body onto paper and dusting the imprints of another artist, for instance, who could have garnered so much with black powdered pigment, occasionally adding other colours or attention for an unofficial retrospective – mounted by Harlem gallery collage elements. While some of the resulting images took the form Triple Candie in 2006 after Hammons himself refused to participate of crude, socially satirical role-plays – the squashed and distended – that consisted of nothing but downloaded pictures and grainy cata- features lending themselves to caricatures of a rabbi, say, or drunken logue photocopies; or who commentators would have suspected of winos – the broader aim was one of consciousness-raising. His more identifiable self-portraits frequently incorporated the American flag somehow secretly being behind the entire affair. as an ironic statement about politHammons’s own, paradoxical celebrity, then, is less about deliberical inclusiveness; while his most For all that Hammons brings an ideology ately cultivating a persona or myscontroversial work, Injustice Case of mess and matter into gallery spaces, tique, but seemingly stems from a (1970), was an imprint of the artist those works whose meanings turn almost bound and gagged in reference to the genuine distaste for the mainstream artworld: ‘The art audience is the brutal courtroom treatment of Black entirely upon their titles manifest what worst audience in the world,’ he Panther leader Bobby Seale – with can only be described as a sort of urge told Real Life Magazine, in one of the Hammons’s weirdly negativised, towards evanescence – as if they want to few interviews he has given (quotes contorted form resembling some from that 1986 feature, written by ghostly X-ray, as if seeing through escape their materiality and somehow art historian Kellie Jones, tend therethe nation’s veneer of democracy and vanish, elevate themselves, into language fore to be frequently recycled). ‘It’s equality to the violence at its core. It overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not understand. was also during this period that Hammons began using spades as a Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?’ The irony, of motif, riffing on the racist term by including the playing-card symbol course, is that refusing to play by the rules of the game becomes, at a in some prints, and making his first assemblage works featuring the certain point, a kind of game in itself. And, for Hammons at least, an metal tools themselves. Several early works are included in Five Decades, currently showing extremely effective one. In 2013, he became the first African American to enter the ranks of the ten most expensive living artists, with the (with Hammons’s blessing) at Mnuchin Gallery in New York – aston$8 million auction sale of an untitled work from 2000, a crystal chan- ishingly the first survey exhibition of his work for 25 years. As such, it delier-cum-basketball hoop. And in 2014 it was announced that he’d becomes remarkably clear how central themes of visibility and disapbought a vast industrial space in Yonkers, on the outskirts of New pearance have been throughout his career – from the obvious recent examples of his tarp paintings or his series of obscured and boardedYork, with the intention of opening his own gallery. More intriguing than these outward markers of success, however, up mirrors, to In the Hood (1993), a torn-off sweatshirt hood that holds are those works and exhibitions where Hammons reflects upon his the shape of an invisible wearer, all the way back to the body prints own teasing, antagonistic relationship towards art institutions. of the 1970s. Indeed, for all that those early prints convey a political Two recent projects, in particular, dramatise ideas to do, explicitly, message about the representation of black bodies, there’s something with visibility and access. Firstly, for a group show at MoMA in 2012, about their impressed forms – the aftereffects of physical action – that Printin’, he contributed one of his ‘Kool-Aid drawings’ – an ongoing simultaneously indicates a kind of bodily vacancy: a vanishment. In abstract series made using the popular brand of American soft drink – that sense, the works seem to presage Hammons’s current position but hid the work behind a veil, requiring visitors to book a special within the artworld – with audiences looking in vain for the real appointment and enter the museum via a side entrance in order to Hammons, but encountering only echoes, versions, traces of where he view the work uncovered. His 2014 show at White Cube, London, had once been, like a lingering rumour or shadow. meanwhile, pushed such theatrics even further. Not only did it A frequent, if somewhat romanticised, description of Hammons, feature several of his similarly obscured ‘tarp paintings’ – another indeed, is as a sort of modern-day trickster figure – irreverent, noongoing series in which huge, washy, abstract madic, always out to deceive, yet with the intenfacing page In the Hood, 1993, athletic sweatshirt tion of revealing deep truths. Certainly, there’s a canvases are draped, to oddly beautiful effect, in hood with wire, 59 × 26 × 13 cm. ragged sheets of tarpaulin – but sections of the shapeshifting quality about his practice, which © the artist. Courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York

May 2016

Untitled, 2008–14, acrylic on canvas with plastic netting, 203 × 178 cm. © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

ArtReview

Five Decades, 2016 (installation view). © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

May 2016

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May 2016

above Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983. Photo: Dawoud Bey. Courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York facing page Orange Is The New Black, 2014, glass, wood, nails, acrylic, 64 × 41 × 33 cm. © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York preceding pages David Hammons, 2014 (installation view, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London). © the artist. Photo: Jack Hems and Patrick Dandy. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

ArtReview

never settles into one medium. In the winter of 1983, having moved to New York several years earlier, and pursuing a tactic of showing work in vacant lots and other urban sites, Hammons staged what for some is his most iconic piece, Bliz-aard Ball Sale, in which he set himself up as a street hawker selling snowballs. Laid out on a blanket and priced according to size, the snowballs became a sort of ironic, disposable readymade, while the action as a whole seemed to smack of some kind of hustle or moveable scam, a piss-take at the very least – albeit one where it wasn’t clear who the joke was directed at: the buyers Hammons attracted or the mainstream artworld. And later in his career, too, when Hammons deigned to operate within the professionalised system of commercial galleries, works often retained this atmosphere of unease and uncertainty – the whiff of charlatanism. Concerto in Blue and Black, his notorious installation at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2002, consisted of leaving the 2,000sqm venue entirely empty, simply switching off the lights, and giving visitors a tiny blue torch to explore the cavernous pitch-blackness. In my experience, though, it’s Hammons’s sculptural works – his assemblages and objets trouvés – that offer a more powerfully ephemeral encounter, and that propose a more nuanced take on visibility. Not coincidentally, it’s also these works that turn most explicitly to AfricanAmerican culture and history. In pieces from the 1980s and 90s, especially, Hammons repeatedly used the same objects and materials, adopting them as signifiers or metonyms for apparent black identity, potent emblems of impoverishment and street life: hair swept from barbershop floors, broken chunks of tarmac, discarded liquor bottles, brown paper bags, cigarette butts, fried chicken wings. The idea, as with his current use of building-site materials for his tarp paintings, was to bring some aspect of urban experience – something that spoke of mess and dirt, something that stood for low, inchoate, vernacular culture – to the pristine sterility of the gallery environment; and, at the same time, to redeem these foreign objects, to point to their cultural worth by transforming them, as if through magic, into art. It was no coincidence that so many works took the form of knowingly kitsch, but nevertheless quite captivating, Africanist or quasi-mystical patterns – from hair shavings woven into tapestries, to bottle caps arrayed into ornate, beadlike designs. In other pieces, the allusions are to black successes in music, sports, popular entertainment. Not that the mood is necessarily celebratory; increasingly in Hammons’s work, the dominant tone is an acerbic starkness. Which Mike Would You Like to Be Like? asks the title of a 2001 piece, the three lonely, battered mike-stands invoking a holy trinity of

celebrity Michaels – Jordan, Jackson and Tyson – as a comment on the narrowing aspirations of black youth. A jumbled assemblage of faux African masks and mock statuettes is called Orange Is The New Black (2014), after the title of the Netflix prison serial – its spraypainting in bright orange a bitter riposte to the fashion for ethnic otherness. The punning, reference-laden titles are a crucial aspect of such works. Ever since his ‘spade’ homonyms, Hammons has relished a nice play on words – or equally, for that matter, a not-so-nice one. Cold Shoulder (1990) comes to mind as one of his more forced and flippant – the work consisting of pimp-style fur coats, shoulder-slung across blocks of ice. Yet the title’s flagrancy, its sheer obviousness, constitutes a large part of the work’s effect, serving as a reminder of how inescapable, how painfully blatant, issues of race and class are in America. So much so, indeed, that the risk is they become almost invisible. In most works, though, the punning relates to something more sophisticated. Hammons has spoken of his desire to develop a sort of black abstraction – to create art that’s inherently about black identity, yet also not limited to it, somehow beyond it. And, indeed, having eschewed the figuration of his 1970s body prints, it’s notable that in none of his works since then is blackness – black faces, bodies, personalities – ever directly represented. Rather, it’s invoked, or evaded, or altogether erased. In Hammons’s works, blackness is both everywhere and nowhere. The relentless puns, the multivalent meanings and references – these are, I think, a way of achieving this, a way of harnessing the slipperiness and subterfuge of language, its protean instability. For all that Hammons brings an ideology of mess and matter into gallery spaces, those works whose meanings turn almost entirely upon their titles manifest what can only be described as a sort of urge towards evanescence – as if they want to escape their materiality and somehow vanish, elevate themselves, into language. The idea comes across powerfully in a work such as Traveling (2002) – the term refers to a rules infraction in basketball – which consists of a tall, softly dappled, abstract drawing made by repeatedly bouncing a basketball, behind which rests a battered old suitcase. With its veneration of rule-breaking and constant movement, it’s a work that not only resonates with the ludic, linguistic dexterity of Hammons’s oeuvre as a whole, but is probably also the closest he’s come, within the rubric of abstraction, to a form of self-portrait. ar

May 2016

David Hammons: Five Decades is at Mnuchin Gallery, New York, through 27 May

Anarcho-otherness in 1980s Latin America Paz Errázuriz, Graciela Iturbide and Sergio Zevallos by Oliver Basciano

On the makeshift dressing table Evelyn has slung her handbag; hairspray and cigarettes lie beside the cheap costume-jewellery that will complete her outfit. It is Santiago, Chile, 1987. Evelyn stretches her arms back behind her neck to fix a choker. Her lipstick already applied, she’s topless, a light brush of hair under her arms and around her nipples. There is a humour to Paz Errázuriz’s black-and-white photograph: a wryness that arises from the juxtaposition of this dowdy room and the plastic glamour of Evelyn, who herself seems to smirk, perhaps glancing to someone out of shot slightly to her left. The dark comedy of Evelyn III, Santiago is absent from another work in the series La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple, 1982–7). In Evelyn II, Santiago we see the subject as a man. He’s handsome: thick dark hair, high cheekbones. He looks a bit sad. Checked shirt, top button undone, sleeves rolled up, belt and jeans. Magnolia is holding a mirror to the side of her face. She wears a long, flowery summer dress and pearls around her neck. This image, by Graciela Iturbide, seems more staged. While Magnolia is holding a mirror, it’s not seemingly for her own benefit – she’s not looking into it directly. Perhaps it’s more for ours – so we can see the profile that would otherwise be hidden. Her toes, thick with men’s hair, peek out from the rather ordinary sandals she wears. Magnolia was photographed in 1986 against a grimy concrete wall in Juchitán, a town in the southeast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Two years earlier, in a wasteland outside Lima, two figures stand on the balcony of a ruined house: stockings and high heels, makeup and wigs, among the grub and rubble. Their exact gender would be unclear, however, were it not for the fact that one, crouching, mouth open, seems at the point of giving the other a blowjob, the lucky receiver’s skirt neatly hitched up over erect cock. This is one part of a diptych, Ambulantes (the other part captures the same moment,

but before the hitching-up), from Sergio Zevallos’s black-and-white photography series Suburbios (1983). The series title has a double reference: to the outskirts of a city (populated by derelict buildings), and to the fact that the transgressive queerness of the act depicted puts the subject – one of the figures is the artist himself, it is unclear which – in a liminal zone in terms of social acceptability. All three photographs are more than just portraits of individuals (or self-portraits, in the case of Zevallos). Though fascinating personalities undoubtedly emerge from these pictures, in their photographic work – which in the case of Errázuriz and Iturbide is documentary, while Zevallos’s work is staged – these artists had greater social and political aims than merely documenting the photographic subjects. All three were working in culturally conservative and deeply Catholic Latin American countries during times of political authoritarianism and turmoil. While civil resistance was growing in Chile against the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet, the general’s dictatorial power would only weaken following a 1988 plebiscite. Similarly, though cracks in the one-party rule of Mexico’s socialist Institutional Revolutionary Party were beginning to emerge during the mid-1980s, it remained in power right up to 2000. Zevallos’s work was made under a newly democratic regime in Peru, but with chronic inflation and the constant threat of violent insurrection from the Maoist guerrilla group the Shining Path, life for ordinary citizens was precarious. Seventy thousand Peruvians died in terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2000. For Latin America in general, this was a moment of rule by military force and male-dominated politics, where leaders dealt in signifiers of virility and paternalism. The subjects of the images described above were seen as aberrations from social norms of patriarchal autocracy and male-dominated state and rebel violence. Not that such imagery would have been accepted anywhere in the ‘free’ world

ArtReview

Paz Errázuriz, Evelyn III, Santiago, 1987, from the series La Manzana de Adán, 1982–7. Courtesy the artist

May 2016

Graciela Iturbide, Magnolia, Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1986, gelatin silver print. Courtesy Rose Gallery, Santa Monica

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at this time either; yet in Latin America, belief in marianismo, the cult in November 1984. The actions were made in public or semipublic of woman as mother and virgin in the figure of Mary, and machismo, places and played with transvestism, gender fluidity, sex, religious the cult of extreme maleness, dominated. Moreover, it was played on and political symbolism, the display of bodily fluids and the imagery by the politicians of the time, leaving cross-dressers and queer figures of death. La agonía de un mito maligno (The agony of an evil myth, 1984), for instance, staged on a beach, involved fake funeral rites, the cameo beyond the political and social pale. This supposition is supported when the wider work of Errázuriz, of transvestite Saint Rose of Lima (the beatified Spanish colonist is a Iturbide and Zevallos is taken into account. The first was part of the recurring figure in the group’s output: she also crops up in a body of Grupo Chaclacayo, which was active between 1983 and 1994, and work in which prayer cards are lewdly overpainted) and the perforconsisted of Zevallos and Raúl Avellaneda, also Peruvian, alongside mance of the Virgin Mother and child in which the relationship has Helmut Psotta, a German national and their onetime visiting profes- become sexualised. In that identity politics was very much wrapsor at the art school of the Pontifical ped up in the politics of (postcolonial) Together and individually they delighted Catholic University in Lima. Together nationhood, by way of religion and and individually they delighted in belief in the family, here the group in deeply transgressive, deliberately were treading, with great theatricality, deeply transgressive, deliberately blasblasphemous actions and artworks phemous actions and artworks, deon dangerous ground. signed (in modern parlance) to troll the powers-that-be and undermine Errázuriz embedded herself with a group of transvestite prossociopolitical norms in Peru and on the South American continent. titutes, profiling their lives in both their male and female personas An early performance by Zevallos involved the public parading – in a as they went about their day-to-day business. In Coral I–III, La Carlina, gross inversion of the Catholic procession – of an altar made of house- Santiago (1987), a series of three images, we see Coral first topless hold rubbish to which, among other things, a portrait of Pinochet was in suspenders, and then in the process of picking up and pulling on attached (La Procesión, 1982). (Curator and writer Miguel A. López, in a white summer dress. One image from a group of colour photohis 2013 feature on the group, notes that the work can also be seen as graphs titled Talca (1984) shows two of the transvestites entertaining a reference to the Mexican feminist Mónica Mayer’s ‘phallus-altar’ a group of men in a dingy-looking bar. Another image from the same sculptures of the late 1970s.) Due to the contentiousness of the work, work shows some sort of beauty contest being staged: the broad which ranged from performances staged for the camera to sculptures, shoulders of ‘Miss Jaula ’84’ bear a sash. Errázuriz’s aim, however, drawings and collages (a local critic denounced was not so much to normalise the subjects but to Sergio Zevallos (Grupo Chaclacayo), Suburbios, it as merely ‘paraphernalia of blasphemy’ and offer them as a counter to the patriarchal image 1983, gelatin silver print on Baryta paper, 14 × 9 cm. that the Pinochet regime wanted to project. ‘vivisection of degeneration’), the collective only Collection Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. Courtesy 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima managed to stage a single exhibition in Peru, ‘The military and Pinochet drew on [the idea of]

May 2016

the Familial State to legitimize the decision to take and to keep polit- She’s laughing as she holds her beer between two fingers and thumb ical power,’ the American academic Gwynn Thomas notes in her study in front of her face: almost, even, as if she’s laughing at the phallic Contesting Legitimacy in Chile (2012). ‘Familial welfare (defined most bottle itself. Likewise, reptiles (which Freud argued were symbolic often as protection) was… one that justified the establishment of their of the male genitalia) frequently recur in Iturbide’s photography, authoritarian regime.’ To bear witness and profile those who do not controlled or subservient to women. Shot from below, the woman in fit this model – as transvestite men traditionally do not – can be inter- Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (1979) is shown wearing a halo of iguanas preted therefore as a political act. If La Manzana de Adán is the most (seemingly still alive) on her head. In Lagarto (1986) two women hold obvious example of Errázuriz’s contesting of political machismo, a carved wood alligator, and in Padrinos del lagarto (1984) a woman sits then it’s not the only one. Indeed, the artist did not just deal in queer with a live baby alligator on her lap. imagery. Subtler perhaps is the series Tango (De a dos) (1988), in which It would be hard to argue that any of this effected much change she photographed couples dancing in Santiago clubs. Errázuriz’s in the artists’ respective countries at the time. In 1989, as the violence choice of which dancers she portrayed is telling, though: in almost in Peru grew worse, Zevallos and the other members of Grupo all the photographs the women are taller and look stronger. The men Chaclacayo fled to Germany. Errázuriz and Iturbide stayed put, invariably appear fragile. In one of the several photographs titled Club layering their imagery in coded symbolism. Yet arguably dissent Aníbal Troilo, Santiago, for example, a middle-aged woman dominates against authoritarianism, even if it fails to achieve its aims, is somethe frame, her perfectly curled hair towering a good half-foot over thing to be admired. More recently, however, as most of Latin America her partner. He wears something of a scared facial expression. There has settled into the stability of democracy and, for better or worse, is a substantial height difference in a second image taken at the same neoliberalism, these artists are gaining recognition for the small acts of subversion inherent in their work. Iturbide is recognised as club. Mid-tango, the man looks frail, the woman powerful. A feminist reading can also be found in Iturbide’s work, specifi- one of Mexico’s most important photographers (having received cally one that deals in analogy to attack a strongly autocratic paternal- the Hasselblad Award in 2008), Zevallos’s work was included en istic government. The photograph of Magnolia comes from Juchitán masse at the 2014 São Paulo Bienal and Errázuriz was the subject of de Las Mujeres (1989), a photography book stemming from the artist’s an extensive solo retrospective at Madrid’s Fundación Mapfre that decade of travels through the narrow stretch of land between the closed earlier this year, and in 2015 was one of two artists sharing the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Women emerge as the heroes of Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Yet for all this institutional this work; indeed Magnolia is one of only a few men present within acceptance, the work still has a power to shock. There is a grimness, the book’s pages. The women are invariably big in build and strong a sense of sexual-political anarchy to much of these artists’ work: its subjects display an insurrectionary otherness, in demeanour. Juchiteca con cerveza (1984) shows Paz Errázuriz, Club Aníbal Troilo, Santiago, one that sits uncomfortably in our sanitised a woman dominating the image and landfrom the series Tango (De a dos), 1988. scape behind her as if she is larger than it all. modern age. ar Courtesy the artist

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Graciela Iturbide, Juchiteca con cerveza, 1984, gelatin silver print. Courtesy Rose Gallery, Santa Monica

May 2016

On Activating the Politics of Art in an Age of Globalised Systems by Guy Mannes-Abbott

In recent years, activist group Gulf Labor has been drawing attention to art’s connection to various systems of exploitation. Here, one of the group’s members explains why we should adopt a new perspective on the potentials of art 86

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London is an inhospitable environment in which to be thinking within such a model as being related to angles: one thing at an angle about art and activism, never mind recognising and activating the to another. An unpredictable angle with unpredictable effects. Such politics of an artwork. It’s as if London were somehow insulated from an angling recovers wriggle room, distorts flows and generates effect a shaken-up world of geopolitical transformation, hypercapitalist even within a totalised common world, I would suggest. I want to globalisation and existential climate change. Insulated from a world hold to and rearticulate that. in which the political and the creative are always in process, where Allow me to use this simple notion of angling to address the emera default scepticism about not just the role but the presence of the gent phenomenon of artists critiquing not merely institutions but the systems of the world of art. This is better understood if we plant political in works of culture or art is increasingly disingenuous. If our never-modern world was ever settled, or ‘in joint’, then the thought into the artist’s studio, gallery space, national instituI confess that I missed it. I was tuning in to legitimate historical tion, globally branded art-event or starchitectural brand extension. indignation and appetites for geopolitical transformation among It is also better understood in the context of an art that recognises the world’s majorities. Too often these have combined to replicate the and articulates its politics within these smooth systems of exchange same old structures and systems, as I’ve witnessed in the murderous and accumulation. The manoeuvre of taking-up-an-angle-to introconsequences of Hindu nationalism in Gujarat, or from running up duces anachrony to globalisation’s evergreen present, or surprise against occupation in Palestine or making clandestine nocturnal to perfectly hedged futures, in which medium-term capital returns visits to labour camps in Abu Dhabi. Nevertheless, London’s ingrained delimit all possibilities. tendency to distance the vulgarly political in sleights and sophistry Economic globalisation, a condition whereby the world becomes is related to how it has become a city for the art market more than a single market in which corporations ignore and utilise residual the artmaker. territorial distinctions for the old-fashioned accumulation of capital, My work often performs in visual art contexts and, as such, generates predictability. It uses every resource available to it to ensure I was invited by Emily Jacir to join the Gulf Labor coalition of artists that this stability in some form is delivered. A surprise, an angle and writers in the spring of 2011. A number of founding Gulf Labor introduced unexpectedly to globalised systems, can be radically effecmembers were involved in the Sharjah Biennial just as private peti- tive, even though I don't want to cede much greater and more affirmtioning of the Guggenheim over its exploitation of migrant workers ative forms and futures for that radicalism. to build its extension on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, went public in In this emergent context, making art about a political event 1 The New York Times . The next day, Doug Ashford, Hans Haacke, Emily or identification, sitting back and watching it embody the politics claimed for it in a gallery, instiJacir, Naeem Mohaiemen, Greg tution or global biennial alone Sholette, Jalal Toufic, Walid Raad As systems flow, shift and recalibrate, is increasingly fatuous. To place and I were given foot inspections so must articulations of protest, of the of a ‘model’ labour camp at one end ‘radical’ objects or supposed ‘politpresent and of the politics of the artwork of Saadiyat and the Guggenheim’s ical’ signs in white cubes, literally construction site at the other. The or otherwise, is to obey expectalatter’s Abu Dhabi team hoped to demonstrate its responsiveness tion: to be predictable. I think I have to quietly and regretfully insist to Human Rights Watch’s 2009 revelations about the ‘conditions of that this is inevitably the case today. Regretfully because it generforced labor’ 2 under which migrant workers were drilling piles for ates ambivalence, for example when encountering Simon Denny’s intriguing work on hacking within clouds of dubious sponsorship its Frank Gehry-designed museum in 2011. At the end of 2015 Gulf Labor released The Gulf: High Culture/ in a royal park in London. Or when Tate cunningly attached BP’s Hard Labor, an archive, handbook and broadening reflection around branding to New Brutalist Image 1949–55, a recent small archival show the objectives of a campaign that has kept a beam of light trained of Alison and Peter Smithson’s early work in Norfolk for the new on some very dark corners of contemporary life. The book collects postwar state. a visual-art campaign (52 weeks of…) and high-visibility protests, The problem is that art that isolates political content from everyalong with substantial reports on living and working conditions in thing else is neutered at conception. More interesting artists using Abu Dhabi. These last extend to migrants’ countries of origin, detail market value to political effect, in the admirable mode of Theaster ongoing research with returnees and unions, as well as work on the Gates, are engaged in a form of offsetting nevertheless. When Hito recruitment chain. Additional essays extrapolate these elements, Steyerl delivers a commissioned film (Is the Museum a Battlefield?, 2013) including my own contribution, focused on emergent forms of artist for the Istanbul Biennial that focuses explicitly on the event’s prinactivism directed at the system of the artworld. My interest is less in cipal sponsors, Koç, suppliers of military wares and property devel‘political art’ than art that understands and articulates its politics opers, she cuts a brilliant and unexpected angle against these systems. – as object or event. However, when Steyerl says she would show it everywhere, the laudDuring a panel at the book’s London launch I spoke of my attach- able ‘threat’ turns predictable and thus ineffective in our time. In ment to a notion of the public intellectual, lamenting that globalisa- the event, she put it online, which allows it to retain the quality of tion renders it obsolete. I understand the classic Sartrean or Saidian a surprise, everywhere. model of the public intellectual as a figure that instrumentalises As systems flow, shift and recalibrate, so must articulations of reputation in one (usually cultural) field to activate a political pres- protest, of the present and of the politics of the artwork. For these to count, they must perform across a range of ence in another. But it is surely the case that a world facing page Pablo Helguera, scales, times and locations, so that protest becomes with these kinds of settled, hermetic distinctions no from Artoons Vol 2, 2009. generative in itself. Old-fashioned ‘direct action’, longer exists. And I can only conceive of the relation Courtesy Gulf Labor Artist Coalition

May 2016

strapping on a strongly worded T-shirt to walk out of a building or The expansion of the work of the artist to include an engagetowards another one, has limits. This testosterone-driven tradition ment with the system of the artworld as it folds into larger economic has a noisy role as part of more strategic and sustained forms of acti- and political systems – like so much whipped egg white – may only vating a politics, but nowadays threatens to become a self-satisfying enact the angling I described above, but it is a significant shift. It is pantomime. Nevertheless, effective political work keeps all options no longer possible, even if it were acceptable, to separate the creain play all the time, especially when confronted with the crassness of tivity on display from the organisational infrastructure that hosts the artworks. Gulf Labor’s challenge to the Guggenheim above can a brand like the Guggenheim Foundation. Alternatively, or in addition to traditional forms of protest, also be understood simply as solidarity with exploited construcGulf Labor played a directly active role in triggering an ongoing tion workers, realigning the making of artworks with the making of International Labour Organization investigation into forced labour infrastructure or museums. This tends to bemuse those who enjoy in the UAE. More generally, it has helped expose the ‘invisible struc- the vertiginous disparities between, say, the Guggenheim’s trustees tures’ and processes by which globalising art museums like the or director and migrant construction workers building their ‘transGuggenheim Abu Dhabi come into material existence. Such expo- formative’ outlet. sure disperses responsibility among all parties to a boom in museum In March 2014 I attended meetings in Abu Dhabi when Gulf or institution building – as vehicles of emerging or revising national Labor was invited to ‘partner’ Saadiyat’s government-owned master identities – that is not yet played out. Starchitects, as the most obvious developer, the Tourism and Development Investment Company example, have invariably indulged themselves and their autocratic (TDIC), in addressing issues at the heart of forced labour. We found clients, while claiming to be powerless. Dispersing responsibility to that despite TDIC’s resources, employees apparently tasked to them (and beyond) will deflate their celebrity, but embracing respon- examine the issues and years in which to do so, they could not present sibility will restore personal and professional dignity. The model that any research: nothing. Gulf Labor’s proposals (republished in The Gulf) generated the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is bust. were rejected out of hand via a belated press release put out by TDIC. In February 2016, Gulf Labor introduced international union Gulf Labor continues to offer concrete methods, examples, representatives into meetings with the Guggenheim Foundation. personnel and easily-taken-up solutions, especially focused on Unprecedented in itself, it also offered the Guggenheim a perfect recruitment debt, the central feature of forced labour. Our subseopportunity to engage vexatious labour issues directly, rather than quent proposal to the Guggenheim in April 2015 4 – that they estabcontinue to pay lip-service through public relations. In the UK, artists lish a fund to reimburse recruitment fees as UAE law actually requires and writers are brought onto boards to add a bit of ‘colour’, some- – was issued with an offer to help raise funds by, for example, contribtimes with painful literalism. I wonder what the British Museum’s uting works by artists collected by the Guggenheim pre-2011. previous chair of trustees was thinking when he claimed that a Is it conceivable that London-based artists might offer solitrustee he described as ‘Egyptian’ regularly visited Saadiyat: ‘If she darity, donate works or raise funds to support striking art-institudoesn’t like what she sees, you’ll know about it. But, so far, every- tion workers, for example? That is, to engage the actual politics of art thing is OK.’ 3 Meanwhile, the British Museum was receiving millions in our emergent era, the work that goes on at a transparent remove, a year for its consultancy work on the Norman Foster-designed Zayed under the glass floor, as it were? It’s bizarre for those artists that claim National Museum on Saadiyat – designing spaces and programmes a sociopolitical investedness in their work to insulate themselves to fill with objects on lucrative loan agreements. All of this was from any responsibility for how the object arrives in place, literally, or how it is made publicly accessible day in and day produced or enabled by conditions of forced labour, testimony relating to which forms part of the ILO out. Might it require the relinquishing of establishRendering of Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi investigation. ment positions and a deflation of ‘radical’ image, to

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top Saadiyat Island construction site. Courtesy Gulf Labor Artist Coalition bottom Guggenheim, Saadiyat under construction, foundations wide against al Manarat, March 2014. © Guy Mannes-Abbott

May 2016

invest in what could be a formidable alliance? An alliance committed to the ‘commonwealth’ of cultural institutions as zones angular to, rather than continuous with, an all-smoothing global capitalism? If this set of peculiarly British hypocrisies is too local, let me seek clarity on the other side of the world, where I happened to be in 2014 at the end of the book tour for In Ramallah, Running. I arrived in Sydney from Adelaide in the weeks leading up to the Biennale of Sydney, as an artists’ boycott was building. The killing of Reza Barati, a KurdishIranian architect and asylum-seeker, by guards in the mandatory detention centres run by Transfield Services in Papua New Guinea, had alerted artists to the nature of the biennale’s sponsors. When a group of participating artists, including Martin Boyce, Deborah Kelly and Ahmet Ögüt, found their concerns ignored, some felt forced to withdraw rather than provide ‘cultural capital for Transfield’. 5 Elaborate security arrangements were devised for escalating protests, not least around the biennale’s office. The biennale’s office was in Artspace’s building, two storeys above the latter’s galleries, where I gave an unplanned presentation about Gulf Labor’s boycott, to an audience that included boycotting artists.6 Two days later the chair of the supporting foundation, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, resigned and withdrew Transfield’s name to allow the biennale to continue, and most artists returned. While the unapologetic public link between Transfield and an international visual art event was broken, cross-party government policy on the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers remained unaltered. So how do we measure the effectiveness of the protest here? Artists found and took up an angle to the system and succeeded in removing the cover that sexy cosmopolitan art gave a brutally exploitative business that abrogates international law. Since then, to Belgiorno-Nettis’s credit, he has divested his own and related philanthropic foundations’ interests in Transfield Services. It’s a pity this rather easy correction had not been made when Transfield won the camp contract (and its share price rocketed), but it helped corrode the credibility of national policy. I rehearse these instances to emphasise how immediate, tangible and sometimes easy these concrete systemic challenges and changes can be. Critical response to The Gulf publication included a welcome attention to my focus on systemic complicity, which the critic described as ‘dauntingly ambitious”. 7 I argued that the phase of brute globalisation that we are in has to be challenged at every level and link in the chain. This is daunting in a sense, perhaps, but not in others – a rather important point, I think. Globalisation has engendered the shrinkage of imagined communities. Recognising the migrant in each of us, past, present or future – two or three decades or centuries either side of the present – is a way to tackle this systemically. Less tangible but as immediate is the fact

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/ guggenheim-threatened-with-boycott-over-abudhabi-project.html?_r=0 2 The Island of Happiness, Human Rights Watch Report 2009, https://www.hrw.org/report/ 2009/05/19/island-happiness/exploitationmigrant-workers-saadiyat-island-abu-dhabi 3 Lunch with the FT: Niall FitzGerald By Jan Dalley, Financial Times, July 25, 2014 4 Letters to Guggenheim, 18 April 2015: Debt Settlement Fund, http://gulflabor.org/

that the Gates Foundation would have made $1.9 billion more in 2015 if, as it surely will, it had already divested from fossil fuels. In 1999, Giorgio Armani pledged $15 million to the Guggenheim, before an exhibition about him filled its Manhattan gallery.8 That figure would reimburse the recruitment debt of every construction worker at its Abu Dhabi museum, the key element in a system of forced labour that they will otherwise memorialise. Not daunting, then, nor wildly unrealistic, but easy, achievable, elemental. Sadly, the Guggenheim will not shift unless the cost of avoiding responsibility exceeds its profiting from forced labour. So to the relationship between cultural institutions like Tate and the British Museum with BP. I address this more broadly in The Gulf, praising the scope of work that Platform has done to highlight BP’s sponsorship of Tate, now brought to an end. Protests aside, Platform’s most substantial achievement came through their use of Freedom of Information legislation to force Tate to reveal how modest the scale of its sponsorship by BP actually was. Such information removes the aura of the work of sponsorship in the age of global art. This model – providing cultural cleansing for those still profiting from fossil fuel in a warming world – is bust. Anything that disrupts the current globalisation package composed of arms, art or cultural institution, property development, high- and low-end retail as well as various leisure offers is worth celebrating. Political signals are a good measure of worthwhile endeavours in the existing artworld, and specifically in the hinterland of Saadiyat, where distinctions between emirates are significant – even if too subtle for many to appreciate. When the Sharjah Art Foundation focuses retrospective attention on Rasheed Araeen, hosts conferences and exhibitions on the art of Sudan, or commissions works of Palestinian art, for example, it is building a reputation for canny but concrete radicalism. Art continues to possess a special ability to reconfigure an object, to unmake, replace or compose very small gestures in ways that have significant visceral or intellectual affects. A fold, an added or withdrawn colour, element, expectation. The ugly, banal, opaque or plain strange. These things, which might be regarded as the proper domain of artmaking, are no less potent adversaries of systems if recognised or articulated as such. My approach is instinctively and ultimately affirmative. It is a poetic (re)conception of the ‘everything’ of global systems, in place of the sensible imbrications of prose – which always knows its limits. I see continuities rather than contrast between acts of aesthetic innovation and ‘politically’ activated art practice. The former can become or generate the latter – immediately, tangibly, easily. My own role is to embrace and instrumentalise what that means to more conscious effect. ar

2015/glc-03-04/ with replies: http://gulflabor. org/2015/guggenheim-responds-nothinghas-changed/ “1. It is within the Guggenheim’s powers to initiate a worker’s debt fund. The EPP (Employment Practices Policy) on its own project states: “15.2 Recruitment Fees. The Contractor shall reimburse Employees for any Recruitment Fees paid by them, without deductions being imposed on their remuneration.” 5 https://lamblegs.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/

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an-open-letter-to-the-board-of-directorsbiennale-of-sydney/ 6 No link between my talk and the subsequent resignation is implied! http://dasplatforms.com/ videos/guy-mannes-abbott-artspace/ 7 The Nation… http://www.thenation.com/ article/standing-up-for-migrant-workersin-the-gulf-one-installation-at-a-time/ 8 http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/15/arts/ armani-gift-to-the-guggenheim-revives-issueof-art-and-commerce.html?pagewanted=all

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Marcel Duchamp spent the Christmas of 1919 with his family in Rouen 93

Goshka Macuga To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll Fondazione Prada, Milan 4 February – 19 June “Hello, Doctor. I’m ready for my lesson”: an animatronic man is talking. We are in the cavernous ground-floor space of the Podium, one of three locations in the Fondazione Prada occupied by Goshka Macuga’s exhibition, and we are viewing To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll (2016). Macuga has created this benign creature with the help of some boffins at Japanese robotics company A-Lab. The black-bearded figure looks not unlike the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen; it would be wrong, though, to expect jokes. He is seated comfortably and his accent and pedagogical demeanour are more reminiscent of Antony Sher in the actor’s younger years. Macuga has collated a selection of mankind’s greatest speeches for the robot to utter, a history lesson from a fake history man. Both his feet are encased; the left in a cardboard block, the right in some gloopy gunk done in a lurid pink. Feet of clay, then: over-obvious symbolism about humanity and its pretensions (but perhaps also a neat jibe at Prada and its footwear). This replicant rhetorician majors in endings. In his calm, unhurried tone, he tells us that “what we have now… is going to be finished”. One suspects he, and perhaps Macuga too, cannot wait to bring it on. Indeed, if the ministrations of the Prada staff are anything to go by,

there are worrying signs that he himself is not immortal. The poor fella blinks disconcertingly as his carers adjust some transparent plastic wrappings on his ever-gesticulating arms. Macuga’s robot-teacher has none of the menace of Jordan Wolfson’s scary (Female Figure) (2014). He is more like a giant Action Man doll, the type that speaks when someone pulls its cord. We might imagine him shouting martially at the various sculptural works by other artists that Macuga, in her established manner, has curated, filling the room where he sits: “Stand in line, Lee Byars!” maybe, or “Attention, Fontana!” Elsewhere, the parade includes works ranging in time of construction from Giacometti’s Cubo (1934) to Phyllida Barlow’s Untitled: hanginglumpcoalblack (2012). Upstairs, in the first floor of the Podium, meanwhile, is another collaboration using new technology to illustrate what we as a species may leave behind. Macuga gives us five tables constructed in collaboration with robotics artist Patrick Tresset, collectively titled Before the Beginning and After the End (2016). Each holds various artworks such as (controversially here in Milan) Renato Bertelli’s Profilo continuo (Testa di Mussolini) (1933) and – more clay – Fischli and Weiss’s Brick (2005). The works in turn sit

on 9.5m paper scrolls covered in biro sketches and texts drawn by Tresset’s robot drawing machines. We see scribbled versions of works by a disparate range of artists, from Goya to Raymond Pettibon. What’s going on here? One might see the tables as a Brobdingnagian version of that Golden Record aboard the unmanned spacecraft Voyager on its journey to the outer limits: a huge trove of art sent to enlighten other life-forms. This is what we are, then; the best of us, perhaps. Or, in Macuga’s own sceptical words in a neon text piece here, What Was I? (2016). The huge show continues with what Macuga calls an International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (2015), 11 groupings of famous heads in bronze, linked by long poles. One, with scattergun intemperance, connects Edward Snowden and Jim Jones under the subtitle ‘End of History’. There’s a grandiloquence here that makes one yearn for a more contemplative approach to what we might leave behind, as with Italian writer Giorgio Bassani’s modest take on that ‘which we’ll not live to see and which will not remember us’. Macuga’s pessimism and hopelessness, by contrast, are tinged with adolescent whining that ‘everything’s shit’. The message is as deliberately heartless as that malfunctioning mannequin. John Quin

Goshka Macuga in collaboration with Patrick Tresset, Before the Beginning and After the End, 2016 (installation view), five tables (blue, red, green, yellow, grey) with vitrines, biro drawings by system ‘Paul-n’ on paper scrolls, artworks and objects; one table (black) with biro drawings by system ‘Paul-A’ on a paper scroll. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

ArtReview

To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll, 2016 (installation view), android, plastic coat, handmade shoes (shoe 1: expandable foam; shoe 2: cardboard, linen). Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

May 2016

Jiří Černický Wild Dreams Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague 27 January – 10 April In the second half of Jiří Černický’s exhibition – which is vast in terms of scale and the scope of its ambition – you encounter a tabletop landscape, one of several on show here, crafted with all the skill of a fetishistic model-railway enthusiast. Titled Endless Ski Slope (2016), it features a solitary skier endlessly schussing down a snow-covered declivity: a strange utopian dream of unlimited progress and infinite leisure. And perhaps a little futility too, because the skier doesn’t really move at all; but is rather suspended, by an almost invisible plastic wire, on top of a giant revolving snowball (the size of a large meteorite) that appears to have crashlanded, throwing out a halo of snow around it, into a verdant, sparsely wooded field. One quarter of the tableaux has been sliced away, revealing the cakelike strata of the earth beneath the table/ground. And confirming, in case you had missed it, that the snowball (operating now like some science-fictional planetary core) rotates, while the skier is static, constantly skiing in his own tracks. Revolutions of some sort are everywhere in this exhibition. Plough (2016), for example, is a 1980 sculpture of Lenin – on loan from the city of Kyjov – installed with a 90-degree rotation. Its base, accordingly, is on the wall, and its characteristic raised left arm now points at the ground, allowing the artist to propose

that that arm might be rescued from a realm of ideological redundancy and delivered to one of practical usefulness by being used to till soil. To ram that point home, he has retrofitted the hand with a plough. Absurdity, the aesthetics of B-movies, pragmatic solutions to idiosyncratic problems, the lure of supposedly educational models, as well as something of a taste for that grey area between dedicated amateur and rigorously scientific professional – such things characterise much of the work on show here. When you first enter, an animation (based on an earlier drawing) features a giant rotating crane, covered in creepers to both baroque and dilapidating effect, from the arm of which a waterfall cascades as if to complete some sort of grotesque self-sufficient ecosystem (Kinetic Waterfall, 2016). Wild Dreams, in turn, comprises 50 drawings (which recall Leonardo da Vinci’s plans of his inventions – further articulated in Černický’s model for a flying bicycle) worked up into the same number of sculptures and installations. It’s mindboggling in both its diversity and complexity: from cherry seeds carved with motifs from Soviet gulags (Vast Miniatures, 2013), to a bust of Stalin revolving in a microwave and triggering a series of lightninglike sparks, via a model of a social-housing block in which

Endless Ski Slope, 2016, mixed media, 220 × 220 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

one apartment owner has stuck a yacht to the facade, using it as a balcony (Balcony, 2016). Of course, all of this is entertaining too, in the spirit of carnival (in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order’) or funfair. Some works invite you to climb onto them (Memorial to the Victims of Religious Repression, 2016, a bicycle raised up between two statues of the Madonna, such that when you pedal the bicycle, its wheels create spinning halos behind their heads). Others demand that you look over, underneath and around the material in front of you – both physically and mentally. But more than anything else, Černický’s work speaks of an optimism that, like the skier in Endless Ski Slope, doesn’t have anywhere to go. Nobody Readable (2008–16), one of the artist’s best-known works, is presented here in the form of a video of the artist, completely covered in a skin-tight bodysuit filled with advertising and marketing slogans, beneath the lights and billboards of Times Square. He both fits in and is gone, in a manner reminiscent of Harry Tuttle’s end, covered in abandoned newspapers, in the film Brazil (1985). Behind the clowning, then, is a certain melancholy, because perhaps art is the only space left in which to dream your own dreams. Mark Rappolt

Jani Ruscica Conversation in Pieces Kiasma, Helsinki 4 March – 4 September Some exhibitions show off their full potential at first sight, while others deliver aspects of themselves over time. Jani Ruscica’s solo show is of the latter type. The concentrated exhibit contents itself with one room in the museum, the walls of which are empty, with a white square podium positioned centrally on the floor like a stage set. Placed on it are six objects that seem either to be remainders of a previous performance, or awaiting activation anew. In fact, they are both. On certain dates only, performers bring the artefacts to life. The objects (all untitled components of Conversation in Pieces, 2016) include a music box modelled after a punched-tape musical clock featured in the Soviet cartoon film Shkatulka s sekretom (The Box of Secrets) from 1976, in which a boy climbs inside the instrument to discover its inner workings in a psychedelic adventure evoking Alice in Wonderland. Other items comprise a wind instrument more than three metres tall, taking the form of a wooden totem pole inspired by a 1930s Chevrolet advertisement; two marionettes modelled after the Dutch twin brothers and paleontological artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who gave the Neanderthal woman Wilma and Ötzi

the Iceman their outer appearance for popular consumption; and a materialisation of the fictional electronic instrument Parlamonium described in Walter Benjamin’s radio programme ‘Lichtenberg’ from 1933, translating human speech into celestial music for Lunarians. The artist’s self-portrait, made by a caricaturist sculptor and activated by a ventriloquist, also forms part of the ensemble. The exhibition title alludes to the ‘conversation pieces’ popular in the eighteenth century: intimately scaled paintings in which figures are depicted in sociable dialogue, often outdoors, such as Antoine Watteau’s fêtes galantes. The paintings’ function was to point to interpersonal relationships and the socially determining forms of life. In Ruscica’s exhibition, the objects themselves come to life through disconnected anecdotes rather than coherent dialogue, similar to the illogical progressions in Luigi Pirandello’s metatheatrical play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), which thematises the relationship between the author, his characters and the actors. Yet while the play and genre paintings negotiate the relationships between people, in Ruscica’s show the artefacts themselves have become animate intermediaries that function

as placeholders for social relations – they are now fetishes, soulful objects that are sufficiently complex to be the centre of conversation. Ruscica’s exhibition is the materialisation of a series of ideas, and just as history does not unfold as a linear narrative, it manifests the spatiotemporal gaps, non sequiturs and occasional conflations between them. The show distances itself from the notion that things as such exist, no matter how discussed or fetishised they are, demonstrating instead that they are only created through interactive relationships. It simultaneously highlights how things dialectically structure our field of possible actions, analogous to Michel Foucault’s ‘government of things’, which the philosopher conceived as systematised modes of power. Ruscica’s performative objects pinpoint how our location in the world is construed and changed by the objects surrounding us, while – like Pirandello’s play – calling on us to continuously review the act of interpretation. And so over time, Ruscica’s initially demure exhibition unfolds a nonlinear narrative about the absurdity of human history and the role of objects in its writing and interpretation. Stefanie Hessler

Totem pole, 2016, wind instrument, dimensions variable. Photo: Pirje Mykkänen, Finnish National Gallery. Kiasma, Helsinki

May 2016

Lydia Gifford I Am Vertical Centre International d’Art et du Paysage, Île de Vassivière 20 March – 12 June As much as the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage is a unique place to visit, it is a tricky venue in which to exhibit. Its natural context – an island on a lake, surrounded solely by nature – seems idyllic and untouched until you discover that it underwent a defining trauma: formed from the damming of the river in 1950, the lake submerged multiple hamlets in its creation. The centre’s other major trait is, well, its own architecture. Built in 1991 by Aldo Rossi and Xavier Fabre, the authoritative, industriallooking building consists of a 20m-high conical lighthouse structure and a rectilinear gallery (including a large nave and three smaller rooms) that unfolds lengthways down the slope, pointing at the dam. (A line of semicircular windows runs along the building’s length, echoing the structure of an aqueduct.) Another rupture within the natural landscape, its monumental interior spaces make it a challenge for any artist. In this context, and in its quietude, the work of British artist Lydia Gifford – whose textural abstraction bears affinities to American abstraction by the likes of Eva Hesse and Robert Ryman – might have seemed an even riskier match. Yet, by resisting strategies of confrontation or takeover of the space (which Gifford’s predecessor here, Reto Pulfer, sought to conceal underneath vast textile tents), her sculptures subtly

assert their presence by reinstating a human and natural order that resonates quite poignantly and poetically within and beyond the walls. The works presented in the long nave, lit by the windows placed loftily on the 7m-high walls, seem to defuse the building’s authority through their antimonumental and vulnerable presence. Six grey, 2m-high sculptures reminiscent of rolled-out and creased parchment lean precariously against the walls, distributed unevenly along their length as if describing a score (Peel 1–7, all works 2016). Made of paper pulp conglomerated with gesso and other materials, their crumbly presence seems frail and almost endangered by the rigidity of the space, while some 20 round, spongelike sculptures with mineral tones and texture, titled Siphons, are scattered in the middle of the marbled floor, as if striving to filter through the soil underground. Further, amidst the redbrick walls and columns of the former ‘atelier’ space, are six airy white sculptures held on steel rods, forming a small forest in which to circulate. The fusion of the materials (the folding, melding and permeating of cardboard, cotton, gesso, oil paint and kaolin slip) and their organic tactility against the raw elements of the setting conjures up at once the ephemerality and resilience

Peel (6,4,7,1), 2016, paper pulp, gesso, PVA, mesh, wood, steel. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

ArtReview

of human nature, also evoked by the 1961 Sylvia Plath poem after which the show was titled (‘Compared with me, a tree is immortal / And a flower-head not tall, but more startling / And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring’). The connection with the natural landscape deepens as you ascend into the bright upper rooms, where the rows of windows are finally at eye level. The works here sharpen the focus around the line, seen as a structural component of architecture, landscape and art; works on paper, hung in line with the windows, experiment with delicate overlays of earthy colours, textures and densities, while curved bits of steel have been bent and arranged on the floor to describe a circle. In the final room, it’s the tension between horizontality and verticality that dominates, striking an equilibrium between the concrete-saturated cloth sculptures on the floor (Vassal 1–3) and a diptych of cotton soaked with paint and gesso that has been contorted, stretched and fixed onto wooden boards with nails (Level). A level line seems to traverse both reliefs, which stand separated by a small square window; as you gaze through it, you discern the line of the dam on the horizon, as the ultimate hyphenation – for want of a full stop. Louise Darblay

Karl Holmqvist #ESLOHNTSICH Galerie Neu, Berlin 12 February – 12 March Reviewing Karl Holmqvist’s 2015 exhibition Here’s Good Looking @U, Kid, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, Andrew Durbin wrote of a ‘punk plagiarism’ in response to the artist’s work, which in that case involved him scribbling various slightly altered punk slogans on the wall. Holmqvist’s most recent exhibition, #ESLOHNTSICH ( ‘It’s worth it’), at Berlin’s Galerie Neu, may now provoke claims of ‘concrete poetry plagiarism’, given the artist’s sampling of techniques used in concrete letter poems, such as those by Franz Mon, Dieter Roth or Emmett Williams. On 180cm-square canvases, Holmqvist has produced digital prints in which black letters on a white background can be read in succession, repeating as long as there is space for them on the surface. For instance, Untitled (#ESLOHNTSICH) (2016) reads ‘#ESLOHNTSICH #ESLOHNTSICH#ESLOHNTSICH…’, and Untitled (ENTARTETE) (2016) repeats ‘ENTARTETEENTARTETEENTARTETE…’ (‘DEGENERATEDEGENERATEDEGENERATE…’). As with his borrowing from punk, Holmqvist, here borrowing from concrete poetry, reanimates a historical aesthetic to stimulate new meanings, associations and memories for the viewer.

In this case, a significant factor in the artist’s success stems from his evocation, in most of the letter poems he presents, of the history of Dadaism, the early-twentieth-century movement that preceded concrete poetry: ESLOHNTSICH references George Grosz’s dictum ‘Nehmen Sie Dada ernst, es lohnt sich’ (‘Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it’), while Entartete recalls Nazi Germany’s 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition, which defamed art considered degenerate by the National Socialist government, such as Cubism, Expressionism and Dadaism. A photograph taken at this exhibition shows Adolf Hitler standing before Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbild (1919), which was hung upside down, prompting Holmqvist to hang several of his canvases the same way, including Untitled (DADAD) (2016). As with Georg Baselitz’s upside-down paintings, this unusual presentation discourages an unambiguous perception of what is portrayed while focusing the viewer on the formal structure of the image. In Holmqvist’s case, his work becomes literally more difficult to read, while its composition – ie the repetitive linear succession of black letters on a white background – is emphasised. Thus these ‘verbal images’ seem almost abstract, especially

Untitled (dp) (2016). The letters d and p, repeated over and over, have no semantic value, yet one is the mirror image of the other. The two neon sculptures Holmqvist presents in his powerful exhibition also invoke this tension between semantics and formal structure. These are what he calls his ‘Four Letter Word’ works. Again the artist ‘plagiarises’, borrowing the aesthetic of neon art, such as that of Maurizio Nannucci, of the 1970s and 80s. Like several of his other images, Holmqvist’s sculptures stand upside down, again in reference to National Socialism, as the overturned four-letter words spell FUCK and NAZI. Untitled (FUCK) (2016) and Untitled (NAZI) (2016) thus convey a clear rejection of rightwing ideology even more explicitly than do his letter images, making this exhibition far more than just an homage to Dada as it turns a century old. In the face of the fascistic populism that is becoming more rampant by the day – from Donald Trump to France’s Front National to the AfD party in Germany – Holmqvist takes an unequivocally critical stand. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

#ESLOHNTSICH, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

May 2016

Stephen Shore Retrospective C/O Berlin 6 February – 22 May Stephen Shore’s photography shows how ingrained is our sense of what constitutes a successful photograph: the decisive moment, decisively pictured. His early-1960s works – where this exhibition begins – either conform to this definition with pointed irony, or neglect it. Head or fenders, caught in the moment’s transit, are on the way out of the frame. Signs and posters insist on the present. Alternatively, an empty forecourt shows what such decisiveness leaves out: the unobserved, defiantly observed. Shore’s defiance impelled him, in the second half of the 1960s, to veer from his traditionalist roots to spend time at Andy Warhol’s Factory – then the cutting edge of an alternative take on the image as a mean, not one-off, value – and then to enter a spell of early-conceptualist experimentation with the structural parameters of his medium. But he was always more interested in photography’s fictional possibilities than in objectively outing its artifice. In 1970, photographing some intimates sequentially occupying a garden chair, he appears distracted from his systematic remit by whether the clouds in the otherwise static composition have moved, and what that might tell us about the gaps between exposures. He was no more a true conceptualist than a formalist or documentarist. Shore’s artistic maturity is signalled by his adoption of colour film, then a medium associated with amateur and advertising photography, but being adopted – for those nonart connotations – by his peers: William Eggleston,

John Divola and Joel Sternfeld in the US; Luigi Ghirri in Europe. But whereas the conceptualist Sternfeld took the urban flux as a cue to illuminate his camera’s flash function, Shore’s Intersections (1971) – a series of grainy cine clips of nothing much happening on street corners – show the antithesis: what the camera would by rights (the rights of convention) have missed. His American Surfaces (1972–3) are as much signs of our unscrutinised idea of what they picture as they are documentaries. They collude with our generalisation of them, as if he were asking them to fail every test their art-photographic context would pose, then call that failure their distinction. You can see how much of a stretch this was by how conflicted Shore is between the essential generalisations he was reaching for – the stacked lozenges of a Conoco filling station’s sign floating above a vignette of pitch-perfect Americana, like the landscape’s dreamy speech bubble rather than its actual feature – and an anecdotal specificity that chronicles the kind of louche, bohemian milieu Eggleston was recording. Shore’s self-made postcards, eerily both particular and generic, point towards his greatest series: Uncommon Places (1973–81), made from large-format colour negatives. His reputation is based on these years. The last two rooms, summarising his output from the mid-1980s to the present, are disconcertingly disappointing. Assiduous late-80s landscapes miss a narrative to back up their dutiful factgathering. The earlier

Shore would have passed over this scene-setting with irony or aloofness. In the early 2000s, a large-format return to black and white and the ‘intersection’ theme is unsure whether it wants to portray the marginal moment or create symbolic narrative tableaux à la Paul Graham. More recent pictures look like pastiches of the Uncommon Places years. Shore’s itinerant lifestyle back then is documented by his A Road Trip Journal (1973) – collages of found images, receipts, clippings, handprinted statistics. The diaristic inverse of the photographs, they elide the personal and particular to intimate all that is missed, or generalised by memory. Shore has something of Ghirri’s mysterious ability to make reality look like its image, but the effect is less formalistic, as though the image-ness were a function of the cityscape rather than the picture that captures the view. Confirming the ways in which reality imitates its images, Shore implies how it evades those images. But Uncommon Places is far from a confirmation of the postmodern paradigm of the world as a simulation of itself. It redirects signs generated by its culture to point to all that eludes their grasp. It even signifies that elision: hence the repeated motif of homing in on a blank TV in the corner of a motel room, or looking down a street towards an intersection at dusk with a lake or mountain range blurring into backdrop like a world the photograph is unable to assimilate. Mark Prince

South of Klamath Falls, U.S. 97, Oregon, July 21, 1973, 1973, from the series Uncommon Places, 1973–81. © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York, and Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

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Paul Geelen Sliding under Traces A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam 11 February – 13 March Paul Geelen’s installation Sliding under Traces (2016) in A Tale of a Tub gallery takes us into the domain of the humble snail. We follow its glistening slime trail, and even hear the creature chomping noisily. Or rather, creatures: in the atrium of the former public baths, under the auspices of the Dutch artist – who is in his mid-thirties and often works in the overlap between art and scientific research – dozens of escargots crawl over a suspended wooden grid covered in pink Plexiglas. On the ground floor we can see them from underneath, their grey slippery bellies slithering across the transparent ceiling. From the gallery they can be viewed from above; a gleaming plain dotted with numerous green-brown shells. Meanwhile, unappetising slurping and unsavoury crunching resonates throughout the space. These are the sounds the snails produce, recorded with special equipment in a so-called anechoic studio and massively

amplified. From six speakers, hung along an imaginary line that follows the cochleoid outline of a shell, a loud grande bouffe des escargots resounds. I am not wild about sound pieces, but this brash concert has a surreal beauty that tickles the cochleae in our own ears. Underneath the ceiling stands a large glass display case. It is a shrine to the precious stuff around which everything here revolves: snail secretions. During the 1980s, a Chilean farmer from Concepción discovered that the mucus snails secrete moisturised his hands. When the healing and rejuvenating effect of the substance on human skin was proved scientifically, he set up a snail farm. A golden idea, because snail slime has become a basic ingredient in antiwrinkle cream. In the triplelimbed glass retort here, no less than the secret of eternal youth glistens. Lit from below, the bottle containing the milky white substance, like a display of cosmetics, looks magical and luxurious. It’s also the result of an artistic

research process: this exhibition marks Geelen as the winner of the C.o.C.A. Foundation Art Prize (for young Netherlands-based artists), and stemmed from his travelling to Chile to look into and collect primary materials and recordings relating to the snail’s youthpreserving capacities. The Donald Judd-style grid, the beauty salon’s shell-pink sheen, the glass grail containing the slime from the Cornu aspersa (Müller): several worlds come together in Sliding under Traces. Geelen combines art and nature, myth and science, and manages to transform the old baths into a source of eternal youth. Strange, nevertheless, to think that the escargot that makes wrinkles disappear is also, at other times, consumed as an hors d’œuvre. This may explain why, here, the promise of immortality is accompanied by deafening crunching. No beauty without disgust. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

Sliding under Traces, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Luciana Cupato Photography. Courtesy the artist and A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam

May 2016

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Jesse Jones No More Fun and Games Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane 11 February – 26 June When the Abbey Theatre, whose relationship with Irish nationalism was once as entangled as a box of Christmas tree lights, launched its programme for 2016 – the centenary of the last, semi-aborted and, at least in the short term, failed Republican uprising – it inspired a brand new uprising. By which measure, the Abbey (or National) Theatre’s move might be seen as a success, if not for the fact that the uprising, which rallied not under a flag but the hashtag #wakingthefeminists, was a response to an apparently blithe underrepresentation and inequality in the treatment of women in Irish theatre. #wakingthefeminists activated a community who felt that, 100 years after the 1916 rising, it is untenable to live under a constitution that still imposes a Roman Catholic vision of women’s reproductive rights, and that offers support to other structural inequalities. However inadvertently, the theatre had successfully set a feminist agenda for the moment at which the Irish Republic is assessing its own triumphs and values. Jesse Jones’s No More Fun and Games is ostensibly a different matter, but in fact intimately linked. And not just because of crossovers in personnel. Here, the Dublin-born artist has

created what she calls her ‘Feminist Parasite Institution’ – a curatorial committee (including members of #wakingthefeminists), a spoof reception desk, performative tours, a fanzine and talks, assembled, at least in part, to investigate the operations of the patriarchy in Irish art. The core exhibition features a collection of paintings by women artists exhumed from Dublin City Gallery’s collection by the Feminist Parasite Institution. In the gallery space, one of the approximately 20-strong collective intermittently sweeps a long train of floor-toceiling, gauzy curtain – printed with a gargantuan woman’s hand – through the gallery on a serpentine track, obscuring and unobscuring the collective’s choice of paintings (including work by Agnes Martin, Isobel Gloag, Gwen John and Grace Henry, labelled in the institution’s original etiquette ‘Mrs Paul Henry’). The appealing hiss as the curtain moves blends with a solo clarinet soundtrack commissioned for the space from Gerald Busby. Busby is here as the most tangible link with Robert Altman’s 1977 film 3 Women, a talisman for Jones and for No More Fun and Games, for which he also composed the soundtrack. Altman’s film, though the work of a male director hardly noted for his

feminist filmmaking, operates as a fable (very much in the shadow of Jacques Rivette’s nearcontemporaneous Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974, or Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, 1966) in which three women eventually form what might be called a collective, as a radical poetic alternative to the patriarchal cowboys-and-six-shooters milieu in which they find themselves. The diffuse nature of Jones’s show relates, clearly, to a struggle away from what Micheal Dempsey’s show essay calls the ‘ossified history of phallocentric art’. Like Altman’s film, Jones’s curatorial approach certainly has a bit of patina, offering the flavour of an era under reinvestigation. But in Ireland in particular there arguably remains plenty of territory in which a feminist institutional critique might usefully operate. This, in turn, makes Jones’s show more substantial and corrosive than its dispersed, poised character might suggest. Moments in contact with it have their worth, but it remains the process that No More Fun and Games initiates that dominates: the creation, via a combination of rehanging, performance and publishing elements, of a poetic device for debugging anything with distinct shortcomings in its programming. Luke Clancy

No More Fun and Games, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Miriam O’Connor. Courtesy the artist and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

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Annina Matter & Urs Zahn rite cum laude Weiss Falk, Basel 26 February – 2 April What is art, and how do people make it? It’s a question worth asking in a new gallery’s opening show. Annina Matter and Urs Zahn, for their part, do this by writing themselves rules; they devise a system. It is a sound strategy and appears right there in the gallery space, inscribed on A0 prints pinned directly to its walls. You’re supposed to know where you are with rules. The print Die Anmerkungen (The Remarks, 2016) also functions as the exhibition invitation, its English translation as the gallery handout. Point 1, ‘we go one by one in order for now’, leads up to point 11, ‘rite cum laude is a hands-on exhibition’. Yet despite the regulation, rite cum laude oscillates. Nothing changes or moves, but the works are in an erratic state. This starts with the oxymoronic title – is the exhibition ‘rite’, the Latin term used in Switzerland and Germany for a merely adequate degree result, or ‘cum laude’, suggesting (again in these countries) a performance one grade better than average? And are we even looking at an exhibition? Or is this the framework for an exhibition? Or the expression of a problematic relating to exhibitions? The rules and statements don’t clarify; they question the givens of the situation, rendering it unstable. Another list, which begins with ‘die Kunst ist ein Kartenhaus’ (‘art is a house of cards’),

is entitled Neue Mustervorstellungen (New Ideal Concepts, 2016), with points 1–19 on the left of the print while the right is covered with a diagram (a rectangular outline with grid lines and one diagonal) of potential folds. Each segment formed by the lines is numbered, 1–27; other lists written out on different works pick up at 21 and reach 27. Another iteration of Neue Mustervorstellungen references the ‘Gretchenfrage’, the incisive question Goethe’s Gretchen puts to Faust: ‘wie hast Du’s mit der Religion?’, though the question here is ‘wie hast du’s mit der Kunst?’ (‘how do you feel about art?’). Indeed, the questions here keep circling round the nature of art itself, and the statements are not all that reassuring. The diagrammatic forms, so systematic yet purposeless, recur too. The tone and references range from highbrow to nonsensical, childish doggerel. Their rhymes, which unfortunately don’t translate, lend a kind of self-evidence to the recurrent interrogation. If art is unfathomable, the artists here apply a system to other kinds of chance as well: a taller print, again named Neue Mustervorstellungen, uses the same rectangular outline size – this time three additional printed vertical lines coming down below the rectangle make it into a schematic sketch of a billboard. A few dozen pins scattered over the sheet mark holes made

by thrown darts. Yet another print features more random-looking pinning, clearly not entirely random in this case, as each pin marks the centre of a black printed dot. There is repetition in translation too – be it of pricked, printed designs, the rectangular diagram or a white powder-coated-steel version of same (Das Musterbeispiel, or The Paradigm, 2015), or the rectangles echoing the facets of a suitcase: two Rimowa bags in their original cardboard boxes are bound together with packing tape to make the work The Untitled (rite cum laude) (2016). Is this odd brainstorming just passable or successful? Does it constitute art? The artists employ backup from Adorno in a German quotation that undoes any tidy definition of artworks, translating approximately as ‘art is by no means exhausted by the artwork, as artists always work on art, not just works’. The title of one work, der/die/das Poster 014 (2012–16), suggests a fundamental inarticulateness of the work (of art) – or maybe it means ambivalence, or plain confusion. At least the artists are not lacking in empathy for the viewer knocked off their feet by all the questions – it is ‘a hands-on exhibition’, after all, and at the far end of the gallery is a powder-coated-steel handle, rite cum laude (2016), installed on the wall. There you can hold tight while you survey the damage. Aoife Rosenmeyer

rite cum laude, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Gina Folly. Courtesy the artists and Weiss Falk, Basel

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Bahar Yürükoğlu Flow Through Murat Akagündüz Vertigo Şener Özmen Unfiltered Arter, Istanbul 30 March – 15 May The sombre start to three solo exhibitions at Arter, one on each floor, was postponed by a week due to a suicide bomb on 19 March, metres from the art space in the busy district of Beyoğlu. Despite turbulent times, the arts calendar is trying to retain some normalcy, providing a respite for and injecting fresh thoughts into lives going on just that bit more anxiously. On the ground floor, female Turkish artist Bahar Yörükoğlu’s Flow Through offers a quasinatural world of kaleidoscopic colours and shapes. Plexiberg (2016) greets one first and perhaps most lastingly: a floor-to-ceiling arrangement of Plexiglas shapes in synthetic colours, like geometric shards in midair. The pedestrians outside peer in (or at themselves, as it seems to them a mirror) through the iridescent metallic film covering Arter’s street-level glass facade, which completes the effect of light reflecting in myriad directions, evoking the multicoloured glitter of sunlight on ice. Inspired by Arctic travels, the works include a floor installation that recreates mountain terrain, with floor-embedded screens and birdsong (Pingo, 2016); photo-manipulations of icy landscapes; and a video featuring the artist as a flâneuse from the future, navigating frozen remnants of soil and human settlement. Her multisensory depictions of the planet’s extremes are also an exercise in heightening our awareness of geographies that resist mankind’s intellectual methods of categorisation – like inside or outside, nature or civilisation, alive or inert – for they can sometimes contain these dualisms simultaneously. The second floor presents Murat Akagündüz’s show Vertigo, with 13 ethereal

white-on-white paintings depicting some of the world’s highest mountain peaks as seen on Google Earth. The series is named Kaf after a fictional mountain from a Persian myth, yet the individual paintings are titled for the geographical coordinates of their corresponding peak in the Himalayas. Intended to convey a process whereby nature is reduced to technological and digital precision, these paintings intentionally disorient the viewer, causing a visual vertigo that renders obsolete the reassuring empiricism of the coordinates. The scarcity of the artist’s white paint strokes and the ghostly definition of the peaks also means the viewer works harder to track the eventual emergence of the whole image. In our hypermapped and -visualised reality, where seeing the bigger picture is as easy as clicking a zoom-out button, returning to the minute contrasts that make form itself possible might translate to an equally holistic and interconnected way of seeing natural environments. Akagündüz’s paintings seek the threshold of visibility, mimicking how, in today’s accumulation of individual data points, we may be more blinded to the relational nuances of our environment. Expectations are initially somewhat deflated in Şener Özmen’s Unfiltered on the third floor. His three tahts – wooden platforms that often serve as outdoor sitting or dining spaces, common to rural Eastern Anatolia and the Middle East – first seem to leave the room bare. Yet, substantively, each bears intricate engravings that blend ancient past with recent history: including Mesopotamian iconography from Anatolia’s ancient civilisational roots, and images that surprisingly blend this pre-Turkic

Bahar Yürükoğlu, Flow Through, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Ali Taptık. Courtesy the artist and Arter, Istanbul

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heritage with the early twentieth century’s (en)forced nationalism. Özmen’s accompanying exhibition booklet describes each symbol, as the subtleties of his cross-referencing would otherwise be lost: one ancient Kufic script engraving, for instance, is actually the Republican motto ‘Be Proud If You Are A Turk’ – a juxtaposition that speaks of the imposition of a homogeneous national identity on previously diverse regions. The craftsmanship and eerie symbolism of all three tahts strongly evoke the memory of place, but Özmen then seeks to tie this collective past to the individual present with the kind of postmodernist touch that might divide audiences. An Overcast Day / Koh Samui (2016) includes a white binocular suspended above its platform: stepping up, the visitor peers into it to see a photo of the artist on holiday in Thailand. Bizarrely lurching us back to today with this playful reminder of how, for better or worse, much of our identity construction now is about disseminating visual proof of our individual lifestyles rather than living out our ethnic affiliations, the snapshot reminds of our and the artist’s own transnational present, but the symbol-laden taht below suggests a sedimentation of regional histories beneath the surface. Although Arter sets up these three exhibitions as separate, they seem in dialogue, touching on questions that cannot but be asked today in Istanbul, which is currently living through the kind of tense times that lessen the will to sense as Yörükoğlu’s environments suggest, see with the nuance of Akgündüz’s aesthetic or remember with the cultural awareness of Özmen. Sarah Jilani

John Latham Spray Paintings Lisson Gallery, London 1 April – 7 May Halloween, 1954: an astronomer and animal ethnologist couple, with an interest in the paranormal, invite artist John Latham to create a mural for a party in their Hampshire home. In response, Latham gets a spray gun from an ironmonger and spurts their white wall (or, in some accounts, their ceiling) with black paint. The resulting burst of dots sets off a series of associations for the artist: a sculpture, performance, drawing and painting all at once, that looks like an inverse night sky. The spray gun becomes a regular feature in his work, but also a tool to think through his growing theory that physics has got it all wrong: the basic unit of the universe isn’t the particle, but a minimal, time-based something, anything, happening – what he later called a ‘least event’. Latham’s widespread influence hasn’t been so much the result of his early splotchy part-figurative paintings, or his later muddy, messy assemblages and destructive performances, but is more due to his persistent promotion of the artist as a sort of eccentric natural philosopher. His playful and somewhat arbitrary cosmology animated all kinds of heavy metaphors used in his work: books as knowledge, glass as a sort of existential clean slate and sprayed paint – as is the focus of this show of his ‘Spray Paintings’ from 1955 to 1995 – as the universe itself in formation. Upstairs, a few bits of wood and panels from desks have been painted white and flecked with black as ‘one second drawings’.

The left side of Two Noit. One Second Drawing (1970–71) remains blank, the right side contains a dozen heavy spots and hundreds of tiny marks. Two official-looking stamps mark each side as a ‘noit’ (another of his conjectured terms of time measurement), the left side noted as taking place the last second of December 1970, the right occurring the first second of January 1971. The main body of the exhibition, though, is several large, colourful shapes sprayed onto unprimed canvases. These works are bold, graphic, surprisingly more akin to the language of advertising than any metaphysical vocabulary. Black, yellow and white racing stripes run down Painting not out of a Book (1963), while the faded neon yellow and burnt orange in Untitled Painting (1963) slope down the painting with a more gentle curve, both works fading in the middle to an unknown vanishing point. The best of these works is Untitled (Roller Painting) (1964), a two-metre-plus canvas that unfurls to the floor with an electric motor; lines of red and black flow down like water, with wisps of half-hidden pinks and blobs of purple. Up close, these forms disintegrate, returning to their atomised dots of spray, merging with the water stains and marks of rust and tape that pock the canvases. It would seem the spray gun gave Latham not just a conceptual jolt, but also an excuse to have fun with shape and colour. But that brief glimpse into a sunnier, more lighthearted side of his practice is the most this

exhibition provides. The unspoken tragedy behind all this is the imminent closure of Flat Time House, Latham’s former home and studio in Peckham, a ‘living sculpture’ and embodiment of his idiosyncratic approach. The building, as a site for events and experimentation, has been a more appropriate context for exploring his ideas than these bits of wood and unprimed canvas, giving more of a framework for understanding how a few spatters on a rolled-up bit of cloth might point towards a whole different scientific paradigm. But after eight years as a residency and exhibition space, it’s going to be left to be devoured by the London property market. This show emphasises how much Latham’s work needs framing and narrative around it to give it its trajectory; like the Halloween and New Year’s Eve that precipitated his momentarily cosmic excursions, there were always quite mortal circumstances that provided the boundaries for his flights of fancy. We never act in a complete void – there is no clean slate or, as Latham was seeking, single unified theory that will bind us all. It’s that seeking, rather than what arrived on the surfaces of the canvas and wood themselves, that reminds us that we can still benefit from wildly gesticulating artists’ theories that try to prod at and undermine the ground we think we’re standing on: it’s a serious zaniness that is sorely lacking in how today’s artists envision their role in the world. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Two Noit. One Second Drawing 1970–71, board-mounted on Conti board, paint, 61 × 61 × 3 cm. Photo: Ken Adlard. © The John Latham Foundation. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London

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Michael Dean Sic Glyphs South London Gallery 18 March – 22 May Sic Glyphs, Michael Dean’s solo exhibition at South London Gallery, opens with a blockade. A trio of glyphs – sculptural characters evolved from his newest text – barricade the usual entrance to the gallery, making us walk around the building to enter from its garden access. These three human-size sentinels, a concrete slab, a wooden board and a corrugated shutter drilled with peepholes resembling eyes, are a sign of things to come. Inside the glaring white of the gallery, an entire alphabet of concrete barricades, lumpen steel beams, foam tubing and corrugated sheet-metal appear alongside clumps of earth, decaying weeds, casts of the artist and his sons’ own fingers and fists – pointing and contorting – and a patch of dried seaweed sprinkled with shingle. Dean’s sculptures resemble mutated elements of a building site, a docklands, a wasteland. All have a shapeshifting quality, seemingly morphing between human figures or body parts, cursive typographies, cordons and barriers. Their physical ambiguity stems from the fact that, as with his previous exhibitions, Sic Glyphs is as rooted in Dean’s written work and the slippages of language as it is in the production

of objects. The exhibition’s title signals this back-and-forth, using ‘sic’ – in its traditional sense as a Latin adverb standing for sic errat scriptum – to indicate that quoted matter has been transcribed exactly as found, but also – in the contemporary urban sense of the word – as a tongue-in-cheek description of his glyphs as ‘interesting, cool, awesome’. For Sic Glyphs, Dean has written a new text, produced as a book, which plays on the word ‘shore’. A concept he carries through to his sculpture’s very positioning – haphazardly scattered like debris washed ashore during a storm. Moreover, a ‘shore’ can also be a prop or beam that holds something up, or supports it. With this in mind, then, Dean’s sculptural alphabet seems to encourage – or support – language’s own elasticity, exaggerated here through its physical abstraction and placing. In book form, ‘shore’ looks like it has been created with Microsoft Paint’s spraygun tool: clip-art symbols of cannabis leaves, machine guns, pennies, Bob Marley’s face, rainclouds and Playboy bunnies trace the imaginary loops and swirls of Dean’s text – dancing across the page with little regard for the margins or gutter.

The book also makes minor appearances across the exhibition in various precarious circumstances. By the entrance, one page, stained blue and twisted, peeps from a lifted corner of the gallery’s linoleum floor like a giant rollie – there both to greet you and bid you a mischievous farewell. Elsewhere, a stack of books supports a concrete limb, and crumpled pages sit atop an industrial arm, protrude from cracks or litter the floor. It is as though the sculptures have literally shed the language that produced them. Dean’s exhibition plays with the transmutation of language from the spoken word, to its graphical representation, to its physical, threedimensional abstraction. In its conception, his distorted vocabulary is never without figurative promise, and as such he positions us – the viewer – as a protagonist in his act. Meaning is as slippery here as the interpretations we might choose to imagine, and it would be pointless to try and come away with a conclusion. The work not only resists such containment but, moreover, celebrates the enjoyment we may get from the dexterity of language – as well as from the pleasure found in this visceral and corporeal cast of sculptures. Laura Smith

Sic Glyphs, 2016 (installation view, South London Gallery). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist; Herald St, London; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo; Supportico Lopez, Berlin

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Becky Beasley Lake Erie from the Northwest Laura Bartlett Gallery, London 12 February – 17 April I admire the elegance of Becky Beasley’s sculptures and photographs, but sometimes balk at the supplementary information I’m expected to reconcile with my sensory experience. The backstory, though vital to the work’s conception, rarely aids my contemplation. Literary Green (2009), a large photograph in two separately framed parts, in front of which sits a glass-topped steel table, is a case in point. The table’s zigzag design echoes the folding partition depicted in the image, an element ‘inspired’, we are told, by the ‘high green folding screen’ behind which Bartleby sits in Melville’s story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ (1853). The title and vitreous pall of the work are more than suggestive enough to set our appraisal on a metaphysical rather than merely sensate footing – is ‘literary green’ a psychic as well as chromatic state? – but the insistence on the Melville reference as the touchstone of our interpretation arrests these musings. Similarly, with Camera I–V (2014) – a set of five triangular boxes of black-lacquered walnut, with a hole in each, presented on a modernist table – the birdbox-pinhole-camera hybrids suggest a melding of avian and human

optics, or the idea of the camera as a place of gestation, only to be gainsaid by the knowledge that their ‘exterior dimensions are based on a 1977 Penguin paperback edition of Saul Bellow’s existential novel, Dangling Man’. At their worst, these supplements feel like false intellectual provenance, functioning to divert us from the material essentialism we might otherwise ascribe to Beasley’s modernist style. It’s a different matter when text is actually integrated in the work. Foresight (2015) is a set of six posters advertising Beasley’s past shows, the sculpture Perinde Ac Cadaver (2011, not present materially in this show) used as a monolithic emblem for each, with the venue and date also given. But running beneath this official information is a sequence of vignettes that chronicle the artist falling in love with the owner of a hardware store and their subsequent long-term relationship. The bit that got me was when her father is described as ‘flinching with confusion’ at her new partner as they arrive at a private view. I rarely feel any emotion when looking at contemporary art, but I was ambushed here. In fact, the realisation that contemporary art has gone post-emotional was a minor epiphany

of that day. Art concentrates so much on looking like art, and on being analytically consumable, that its structural self-awareness forestalls emotional investment. Here, on the face of it, was a work in that vein, by someone known for making inscrutable, baffling things. But the personal disclosures ran counter to its ‘constructed’ nature, the results pulling you two ways. ‘A woman of candour presenting herself as an enigma,’ I jotted down, in an uncharacteristically Jamesian outburst. But then, it was April Fools’ Day. The posters changed how I saw the other pieces, less auratic works in their own right, now, than components of a system of interdependent things. The video A Man Restored A Broken Work (2015) depicts a man doing exactly that with an earlier piece of Beasley’s, and the two photographs Build, Night (2012) show its parts laid out for reassembly. But I still didn’t need all those pointers. Beasley’s approach – her imbrication of an ostensibly modernist autonomy within a narrative register – is compelling enough when the works address each other across her œuvre rather than via the intermediary of a press release swarming with ‘references’. Sean Ashton

Foresight, 2015, poster prints, 80 × 60 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

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Ariana Reines & Oscar Tuazon Pubic Space Modern Art, London 25 February – 9 April The sculptural genre of the herm originated in ancient Greece as a mere heap of rocks or crude pillar of stone or wood. In time it acquired a head, sometimes a torso and usually male genitals, as though plonked onto the carved and squared-off column. Herms were apotropaic objects, protective or guiding figures placed at crossroads, on borders, in front of tombs. Guardians of some kind of passage, in other words – thus apt subjects for collaboration between artforms. As the poet Ariana Reines tells it, the exhibition PUBIC SPACE was first mooted when she performed at an Oscar Tuazon opening in Paris in 2009: ‘He said we should do something together called “Mein Cock”, which is the title of a memoir by the protagonist / antagonist of a book of mine, Coeur de Lion. I said we should make herms.’ The result is a show populated by roughhewn sculptural columns that are not unlike much of Tuazon’s work to date: elongated agglomerations of wood, metal, concrete and

plaster that partake of an aesthetic the LA-based artist calls ‘outlaw architecture’. There are two of these herms in the first room at Modern Art, side by side like gateway ornaments. They are called MA and PA (all works 2016): the first a tower of wood and concrete topped with burning candles and affixed with a stained polystyrene coffee cup at its notional crotch level, the second taller and capped with a bucket of soapy water that drips constantly into a hollow cylindrical concrete base. A few printouts of Reines’s poems are messily pasted onto the wooden bodies of MA and PA, another stuffed into the grey sump below, where an image of a primitive Greek herm also languishes. The precise nature of the collaboration between Reines and Tuazon is otherwise unclear from the work itself. It turns out they spent two weeks working together at Tuazon’s studio, making for example the lumps of soap that protrude here and there from the five herms in the show’s second space. But what of thematic,

conceptual or formal affinities between the work of writer and artist? Reines’s poetry – in books such as The Cow (2006), Mercury (2011) and The Origin of the World (2014) – typically pitches confessional energy against conceptual awareness. Her writing snatches voraciously from literary history, high theory and social media; her monologuist personae are given to highbrow citations and mundane musings, seized also with confused desires and ambitions. In ‘Trying to see the proportional relation’, she writes: ‘I have no idea / What it feels like to have / A cock. Sometimes I feel / As though I’m getting close / To understanding and then / Something happens to make/Me have no clue again.’ In light of such lines, the herms in Pubic Space seem like tragicomic assertions of the cultural ubiquity and comic vulnerability of the phallus, and the collaboration an erudite and extended dick joke. The thing about classical herms is that sooner or later they tended to have their genitals snapped clean off. Brian Dillon

OLD SPICE, 2016, concrete, wood, soap, paint, buckets, tap, water, leaf, paper, poems, 231 × 43 × 86 cm. Courtesy Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London

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Elizabeth Price A Restoration Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 18 March – 15 May A Procession Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 18 March – 29 May There’s a magical moment in Elizabeth Price’s video installation A Restoration (2016), in which flowers depicted in a restored fresco not only appear to burst into bloom but also to peel away from the flat surface of the wall as if made from card, folded concertina-style. While it is not spectacular as a visual effect in itself, when experienced as part of Price’s rhythmic multilayered narrative, the moment is compelling. The film is the main component of Price’s 2013 Contemporary Art Society Annual Award commission, and continues the artist’s approach to creating historically based video installations through a methodical and imaginative melding of archival imagery, sound and etymology. Price’s 2012 Turner Prize-winning video, The Woolworth’s Choir of 1979 (2012), played on the dual meaning of a church choir (or quire) as both the architecture in which the choir performs and the performers themselves. In a similar way, A Restoration embraces different interpretations of its titular term – as an act of creation, recreation or preservation.

The ‘restorer’ Price focuses on is Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the labyrinthine Palace of Knossos in Crete and former Keeper at the Ashmolean. As part of his work at Knossos, Evans commissioned the repainting of frescoes, work that employed equal amounts of artistic imagination and archaeological evidence. It’s this notion that anchors Price’s film, which spins off from the idea of the floral fresco at Knossos being an actual garden, recreated not in Knossos but in the digital space of a computer server, and not by Evans but by the Ashmolean Museum’s administrators. As in past works by Price, the film’s narration adopts the first-person speech of a Greek chorus. Accompanied by music by the artist, as images from the museum archives relating to the Knossos excavation flash by, the administrators’ words, as both subtitles and computer-generated voiceover, describe how they recreate first a garden, then a labyrinthine palace on top. Then – and this is where Price gives the administrators’ artistic licence – they instigate an increasingly frantic assembling of all the Ashmolean’s drinking vessels, followed

by all its swords and spears. “We declare an experimental restoration,” the chorus asserts. The second element of the commission, A Procession (2016), ten photographic etchings at the Pitt Rivers Museum, is based on printed copies of some of the 4,000 photographs of ethnographic objects collected and themed by Pitt Rivers’s first curator, Henry Balfour. That Price has folded these prints concertinastyle before rephotographing and printing them as etchings echoes the 2D-to-3D aesthetic in the animated element of A Restoration. The linear presentation also makes reference to the fresco or frieze, but this feels very much the secondary work. Against a background of WikiLeaks data dumps and the Panama Papers, Price’s insightful recontextualising of historical events, through a complex reworking of objects, records and archives, becomes even more meaningful, as does A Restoration’s ending, with the slowmotion tumbling through the air of a particular wine glass, hinting that restoration might also end in destruction. Helen Sumpter

A RESTORATION (video still), 2016, two-channel digital video installation, 15 min. Courtesy the artist and MOT International, London & Brussels

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Rose Wylie Tilt the Horizontal into a Slant Chapter, Cardiff 13 February – 29 May Nude pinups, Nazi generals and chocolate ghosts may all appear in this show, but there’s something to be said for getting up-close and personal with Rose Wylie’s recent paintings. Their surfaces, contrasting patches of bare canvas against heavily worked passages caked with layers of gloopy oil paint, exude a dynamism belying the artist’s octogenarian status. Closer looking reveals signs of the paintings’ making: pencil marks, incidental spatters and passages of intense reworking. Stray threads and frayed edges are also visible (these large canvases were once loosely tacked to Wylie’s studio wall but have been glued onto second prestretched canvas). All of these details, which tend to get lost in reproduction, serve to emphasise the works’ materiality as well as the labour involved in their production. It’s therefore easy to become absorbed by Wylie’s seductive surfaces, but her paintings are rich in content as well as form. Employing a playful, figurative style that can be described as faux-naif or even cartoonish, Wylie strives hard to achieve an unsophisticated aesthetic. The 18 paintings on show here, most of which are diptychs, feature a heterogeneous assortment of imagery displaying influences drawn from a range of sources including the history

of art, contemporary cinema, celebrity culture, high fashion and the artist’s immediate environment. One eclectic room juxtaposes a schematic painting of the artist’s garden with idiosyncratic portraits of a sixteenth-century German knight and novelty Halloween chocolates. The enlarged sweets, created with lashings of brown paint that Wylie has dragged, scraped and smeared across her canvas, are at once repellent and captivating. Halloween Chocs, Finger (2015), for instance, is emblazoned with a severed witch’s finger, though is perhaps closer in appearance to a soiled mattress. The adjacent Halloween Chocs, Ghost (2015), with its sinister yet comical eyeholes, brings to mind the creepy hooded clansmen of Philip Guston, an acknowledged touchstone for Wylie. Serendipity plays a large role in the artist’s selection of her subjects, though cinema is a recurring source of inspiration. An entire room is devoted to the ongoing Film Notes series (2007–), where half-remembered moments from the films of directors as diverse as Percy Adlon, Carlos Reygadas and Quentin Tarantino are depicted in Wylie’s inimitable style. The last of these cineastes is a particular favourite, represented here by Inglourious Basterds ( film notes) (2010), in which three uniformed Nazis (one of whom is missing his head) stand against

Tilt the Horizontal into a Slant, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Adam Chard. Courtesy the artist and Chapter, Cardiff

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an indeterminate backdrop littered with yellow stars and flames. Spidery text, partially obscured by the figures, spells out the film’s title and lead actors, transforming the billboardsize painting into an alternative poster for Tarantino’s 2009 box-office smash. However, familiarity with Wylie’s references is not essential. It is not, for example, important to know that elsewhere the reclining nude in Girl in Lights (2015) is modelled after Kate Moss, or that Nicole Kidman inspired the red-dresswearing women in NL (Syracuse Line-Up) (2014). In fact, remaining ignorant of Wylie’s sources preserves the enjoyable ambiguity of her images. Nevertheless, it was, until recently, quite possible to be oblivious to Wylie’s practice altogether. For many years she languished at the periphery of the artworld despite working diligently since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1981. Now, however, her reputation is in the ascendant. While artworld fashions are notoriously fickle, Wylie’s work is not. Her integrity and lack of pretension is highly refreshing; her evident enthusiasm for painting infectious. The high-profile shows and increased critical recognition of today have been a long time coming, confirming that sometimes it really does pay to come back for a closer look. David Trigg

Ali Prosch For Alraune, with love Elephant, Los Angeles 11 – 30 March Has the ritual begun? Painted flowers and shifting damask hang behind the latex cast of a hand reaching heavenward on the long table, its brother dripped with wax lies palm-down nearby. A skull wrapped in gauze stares blankly out, flanked by a collection of makeup, flesh-coloured paint and the jewellery display of half a woman’s face, long neck streaming to the jagged cut of her chest. A cup of coffee covered in fur. A sea star resting on an animal pelt. A long narrow pyramid. Everything but the fur is some shade of bruised mauve, dusty rose, flesh. Shifting only ever so, the video mesmerises. It’s title, Vanitas (worms and flesh) (2015–16), announces that it draws clearly from the tradition of still-life painting of a seventeenthcentury Flemish and Dutch genre symbolising the transience of life, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death. A track (‘Total Eclipse of the Sun’, 1999) by darkly romantic German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten plays

over the altar: ‘The beauty, tender glow extinguished / the sky dull from a breeze / ghostly the dawn without its red’: the candle flickers, the fabric rustles, the light shifts with a passing shadow and a couple of worms crawl across the table. The music and objects fulfil their morbid task, but with a carnality that tastes delicious even if it’s fleeting. This video by Ali Prosch casts a strange spell over the objects in the gallery: three triangular marble tables, all of a piece, each a slightly different shade, the colours named in the work’s title, Altar table (bone, makeup, flesh) (2016). A few feet away, flesh latex skins dry on a metal armature in Untitled (skin rack) (2016). Two gouaches on paper refer to plants with magical properties, the mandrake root and the Tree of Sorrow (a varietal of nightblooming jasmine). In the backroom, a ceremony unfolds, on video, in which a dancer shifts and moves through a room designed for rituals. On screen,

the dancer’s drapey, fleshy pink dress swishes around three tables and a potted lavender, reflected in a wall mirror coated with dripping wax. The exhibition takes its name from a German novel that has as its premise a folk tale about mandrake root made from the semen of hanged men. When used by a witch to procreate, the result is a human without emotion. In the novel, a male scientist performs the trick by impregnating a prostitute in a laboratory with the semen of a hanged murderer. The girl born of his experiment, named Alraune, suffers from perverse sexuality and, at the novel’s conclusion, avenges herself against her maker. The novel, like the exhibition that bears its name, operates under a twisted but corporeal premise. The physical, the sensual, the feminine flow and fold with a powerful, convulsive beauty. However warped by patriarchy, female magic never fails to find its power or, when needed, it’s poison. Andrew Berardini

Vanitas (worms and flesh) (still), 2015–16, single-channel HD video, sound, 13 min 43 sec, loop. Courtesy the artist

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Elaine Cameron-Weir Snake With Sexual Interest in Own Tail Venus, Los Angeles 12 March – 30 April Two blocks east of the Los Angeles River, the 1,400sqm former warehouse occupied by Venus is one of the largest spaces for showing art in the city. Indeed, for certain artists it must seem problematically vast. Earlier this year, Marianne Vitale responded to the building’s challenge by filling it with 60 tonnes of railway track and stacks of massive pine posts. The fine sculptures of Elaine Cameron-Weir, however, typically operate at the level of the jeweller’s worktable or the scientist’s lab bench. Her exhibition Snake With Sexual Interest in Own Tail could be read as an essay on the elasticity of our perception of scale. Surprisingly, in this outsize building, it works. It is not clear whether Cameron-Weir had in mind the oft-cited chaos theory about the hurricane-inducing butterfly when she cut two terrazzo tabletops into the shape of a butterfly’s wings. Each wing is the basis for a separate though virtually identical work, respectively titled Sentry Tactical Like Prey with Evolutionary Eyes of a Predator on the Wing 1 and 2 (all works 2016). The symmetrical sculptures are installed

on opposite sides of the gallery, which is divided by a central wall. On the spot where each wing would be marked with the predator-deterring eye pattern (a publicity image for the show reproduced the kinds of wings in question), Cameron-Weir has placed a crucible of frankincense, and a glass pestle and mortar. The doubling continues. At each end of the wing-shaped tables, laboratory clamps fix various objects to vertical steel rods: crooked lengths of blue neon, clamshell halves containing ground frankincense, glass oil candles, wafers of mica on which frankincense is heated and – reflecting the candles’ flames – motorcycle rearview mirrors. The setup evokes an alchemical experiment conducted by future techno-Wiccans. In order to smell it you have to put your head so close to the frankincense that you can see each caramelising grain. In order to perceive the installation’s systemic gestalt you have not only to step back far enough to see each sculpture in its entirety, but to circumnavigate the gallery in which a lumpen white adobe wall arcs

symmetrically through the central divide. Six additional neon, frankincense and clamshell apparatuses are fixed at intervals to the wall, designated by their titles – Threshold 1, 2 and 3 – as three pairs of gateposts. The titles here are misleading; the sculptures offer no sense of access to an alternative dimension, but rather are as hermetic and autonomous as living biosystems, each constituted by the same parts but each incrementally different. This idea of nature as an imperfect copying machine is borne out in five giant steel, copper and enamel snakeskins that are hoisted on cables from the ceiling like grotesque hunters’ trophies. Each individual scale (was the wordplay intentional?) is exquisitely handcrafted, recalling in its lustrous, mottled surface the nearby clamshells. While Cameron-Weir’s use of steel and neon nudge the exhibition’s set of associations towards industrial manufacturing processes, these raw and irregular qualities return one to thoughts of nature, albeit projected through the fictive lens of a chilly sci-fi future. Jonathan Griffin

Sentry Tactical Like Prey with Evolutionary Eyes of a Predator on the Wing 2, 2016, mixed media, 203 × 102 × 184 cm. Courtesy Venus, New York & Los Angeles

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Intimate Wine Reception Château Shatto, Los Angeles 19 March – 8 May If you could invite anyone, living or dead, to a drinks party, who would you choose? This seems to be what Melissa Sachs and Cameron Soren (artist duo Body by Body) asked themselves before choosing the artists, and other less easily defined entities, for their curatorial project Intimate Wine Reception. The result is a potted alternative history of contemporary art that focuses on forgotten artists, fictitious artists and galleries, and collaboration without consent. It begins with three works from British artist group BANK’s series of Fax-backs (1999), in which they graded the press releases of galleries as though they were homework assignments and then faxed them back with snarky corrections. Here these works become companion pieces to an installation from the wholly fictitious Head Gallery – a more recent venture by BANK cofounder John Russell, although he has denied his involvement – consisting of a mound of rubble and two headless mannequins reading Mo-Leeza Roberts’s Head (2015), a satirical novel about a postapocalyptic artworld hardly changed from today’s. The book is an actual publication, but the author is invented, as is the Jerry Saltz review on its back cover, which is dated 28 January 2097 and begins, ‘A SUBTLE exhibition – inflected with bourgeois nostalgia and EUROZONE criticality.’ Russell’s interest in lampooning the artworld in texts, and hoaxing it through the production of books, websites and installations that reference imaginary spaces and artists,

is mirrored in Triple Candie’s presentation of the work of the Harrogate Seven: a makebelieve collective of British grandmothers producing wallpaper designs from photocollages. Again the spoof seeks to authenticate itself through the publication of misleading texts, such as a label claiming that ‘Jonathan Jones, The Guardian’s art critic, has anointed them the modern-day heirs to William Morris.’ All of these contributions, spanning 17 years, mime much of the nonsense that continues to be written about art. Triple Candie, whose cofounders, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, insist they’re not artists but an ‘independent curatorial agency’, has in the past organised shows of real artists without those artists’ permission, such as a 2006 David Hammons retrospective using only photocopies of images of his work, and in this tradition Sachs and Soren have included in their exhibition photocopies of pictures of public sculptures that appear in a David Ireland (1930–2009) monograph. BANK’s facsimiles of press releases are another form of unauthorised collaboration, but rather than appropriations of photo documentation, they are appropriations of exhibition texts. Georgina Starr’s There’s Something Going On in the Sculpture Studio (1995) is yet another form of unauthorised collaboration, in which she secretly films Georg Herold visiting her studio to discuss the possibility of working together.

The final pieces of this exhibition-puzzle are works by three slightly lesser known artists. Jacqueline De Jong was a member of the Situationist International during the 1960s and now grows potatoes in the French countryside, casting them as ceramic Baked Potatoes (2006), of which 35 hang from the ceiling, or as 18-carat gold Pommes de Jong (2008–11). Bruno Pelassy (1966–2002), who died only ten years into his artistic career, has two films on show. Irving Norman (1906–89), who trained as a barber, fought in the Spanish Civil War and afterwards became an artist, is represented by Liberation War Prisoners (1970–71), a fantastically grim oil painting of a military automaton dragging stripped and bound figures through the streets. In an exhibition so full of mythmaking, the extraordinary biographies of these last three artists take on a mythical quality themselves, encouraging us to wonder whether the artists ever really existed. This is an artist-curated show of artists staging curatorial hoaxes or unauthorised collaborations as conceptual artworks, mixed in with artists that might seem invented but are not, in order to overcomplicate issues of authorship and truly test the audience’s gullibility. Once these potentially misleading strands are unravelled, what is left is an honest exhibition of Sachs and Soren’s favourite influences. Some of the works are very obscure, while others are well known and somewhat obvious (eg the Fax-backs), but then the things that influence us often are. Dean Kissick

Pieces from the Harrogate Seven (detail), 2016. Courtesy Château Shatto, Los Angeles

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Martine Syms COM PORT MENT Karma International, Los Angeles 9 March – 23 April With all the necessary components – lighting stands, video stills and cue cards printed on corrugated plastic – Martine Syms’s latest show at Karma International’s Los Angeles space almost alludes to a television pilot under development. It certainly would be fitting if that were the case. Her recent solo show Black Box, at Human Resources LA, presented 60 videos of new and repurposed material stitched together as if accumulated through channel-surfing in search of black subjectivity within amateur video and broadcast media. In mining this mass of aggregated video, Syms has found the constituent images for COM PORT MENT, laying each one out as a distilled gesture of black identity. The show’s 29 prints, each placed in a reflective silver frame, hang tightly in storyboardlike groupings throughout the compact spaces of the gallery. A trio behind the gallery’s desk hints at notions of mobility and social immobility as, in one piece, dark figures hopelessly try to uproot their car, which is

smashed against a tree trunk. Across from them, a sign reading, ‘Stay black and die’ hangs next to a heavily contrasted image of James Dean’s Griffith Park memorial. Further in, a group of five prints interrogate notions of inevitability and paradox (Subtle Maneuver I–V, 2016). One panel reads, ‘When entertainment frames the future, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy’, a quote taken from Syms’s essay ‘The Future of Money and the Technology of Capitalism’ (2014). This feedback loop between projection and self-fulfilment continues in the gallery’s main room, where a cinematic shadowing tool, a cucoloris, or ‘cookie’, is poised against a window and disperses incoming Southern Californian light (Cookie, 2016). On the lefthand side of the gallery, an image of a black woman peers towards this window, which is also placed next to a poster asking, ‘Is it OK to look out someone else’s window’. Well, is it? The view outside looks onto Beverly Hills, a prime signifier of aspiration, but also, during the 1940s, a ‘Sundown Town’ that forbade blacks

Subtle Maneuver III, 2016, vinyl letters on corrugated plastic, 56 × 71 cm. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy the artist and Karma International, Zürich & Los Angeles

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from visiting after dark or from owning property. The shadows cast by the ‘cookie’ reveal that even the naked, gregarious Southern Californian sun has already been divided up into tracts and unevenly distributed. We’ll just have to deal with what’s left over. What is left? One of the panels provides a hint, quoting Afrika Bambaataa reflecting on the legacy of DJ Kool Herc, who introduced the breakbeat to hip-hop, ‘… and he just kept that beat going. It might be that certain part of the record that everybody waits for – they just let their inner self go and get wild.’ At a time when the United States has seen the reemergence of mainstream white supremacism, Syms relies on the repetition and recasting of the black gesture – whether from music, film, television or literature – as a unit of defiance, pleasure and resilience. In his 2000 essay ‘Notes on Gesture’, Giorgio Agamben writes, ‘An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them.’ Martine Syms isn’t letting go of them yet. Darius Sabbaghzadeh

Michael Genovese Intervals Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles 5 March – 2 April When the Dallas Museum of Art installs its Piet Mondrian collection, the result is illuminating. The museum has enough work, made over a long enough period of time, to allow one into the artist’s head, to see his particular form of pictorial reduction. In the world of popular Mondrian (in which his work is found on coffee cups, cupcakes and Yves Saint Laurent dresses), it is easy to forget the moody plein-air roots of the artist’s blocks of colour and black lines. Mondrian painted liminal moments, when the fading sun threw dark shadows and stark contrasts across a row of trees. Analysing moments of transition or in-between spaces was how Mondrian attempted to show the structure of vision. Michael Genovese’s new paintings recall Mondrian: they offer the grids of colour, perfect surfaces and hard-edge look that made Mondrian a force not only in art but in design. However, Genovese’s grids do not derive from the crepuscular, but instead from moments of transition found online. Specifically, he finds

his abstractions through a Google Image search algorithm, which fills (only for an instant) a browser grid with blocks of colour just prior to the full loading of the images. The result is a momentary abstraction, a visual stand-in for whatever topic that brings a person to Google. If one’s computer has a fast connection, this intermediate Google space may be impossible to see altogether. Using a screenshot, Genovese matches the colour of the grid exactly. The searches that he uses to produce the colour grids from Google are suggestive and romantic on purpose; words like ‘guilt’ and ‘pessimism’. Genovese paints the resulting grids on canvas, using accumulated layers of gesso and urethane until the surface is flat, pristine and glossy. The vertical works are slightly larger than a door and installed close to the ground; they are human scale, large enough to contain a viewer in their space. As evidenced by Elation (2016), the paintings offer a sober view of their subject matter. The colours seem pleasingly matched

no matter whether the search was for ‘astonishment’ or ‘rage’. What are these paintings? On one hand, they are the straight-ahead depiction of byproducts of a system that is attempting to accommodate a contingency in its interface (the fact that the Internet’s speed is determined by a number of hard-to-reconcile variables). On the other hand, the paintings are metaphors and equations for life (and its possible expression in systems), in the same vein as a Mondrian, Peter Halley or Terry Winters. In showing the structure of trees and nature, Mondrian hoped to offer a view of the absolute. In showing a slice of the Google method, Genovese offers something else. He shows, poignantly, how the complex and the ragtag quality of existence is forced into and altered by the interfaces used to understand it. These are precise and surefooted colours, answers to the riddles of ‘guilt’ and ‘pessimism’ on the order of Deep Thought’s ‘42’. Larry Wilcox

Intervals, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles

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Hilton Als One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie, and the Rest The Artist’s Institute, New York 2 March – 24 April Hilton Als’s One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie, and the Rest is certainly one of those nostalgia factories in which the ‘bad old days’ of New York City are looked upon wistfully. This would normally be annoying. The demise of New York City as a vibrant, alternative metropolis is tiresomely restated nearly every day, it seems. Als’s show is saved however by its very sadness, since many of the trans protagonists that it celebrates (before ‘trans’ was even a thing) have since passed, and many were never in their lifetime accorded the increased acceptance that transgender champions are given now. The show revolves around the nightlife scene of New York during the 1980s, when an obscure disco called GG’s Barnum Room was one of the few places drag queens were accepted. This was back when weirdos were actually weirdos and not the status quo, a change that Als – a noted New Yorker critic and writer – addresses in his introductory essay in very personal terms, since he lived through it; he questions whether the ‘status quo always [has] to confer legitimacy onto the marginal’.

The marginal here are seen performing in Barnum’s aerial trapeze show, slides of which, all shot by Bill Bernstein in 1979, are projected onto one of the club’s posters in Als’s Dirt Nap/Disco Nap (2016). Because there is only a handful of slides, the old-school projector mostly projects ‘blanks’ of white space; the ‘gaps’ or breaks in the flow of images are important to Als, as they are used in so many places, such as Bobbie (2016). Its projector features slides from Als’s personal collection, all of Bobbie being Bobbie, in and around the city, posing for casual portraits and the like. In this instance too only about a third of the slide carousel contains any images, so what one sees are mostly throws of white light, as if something, or someone, has been lost. The mortal connotations of this are very pronounced with Dirt Nap/Disco Nap, in which the empty throws cast a lonely glare on a velvet stanchion, as if it were blocking off a club that never existed. In an adjacent room, videos by Werner Schroeter and Darryl Turner are projected onto a loosely hanging sheet, with Als’s own iPod playing tracks by Cameo and Diana Ross, among others, as if inviting the dead to dance.

Bobbie, 2016, dimensions variable, projected 35mm slides. Courtesy the Artist’s Institute, New York

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The whole thing is very ghostly, with small clusters of bare, coloured lightbulbs imparting melancholy hues on walls and works. One Man Show effectively destabilises what it means to author a work – since most of Als’s ‘artworks’ contain contributions by other people. The artist-writer’s own screen-print on cellophane, Candy (2016), blows out a Richard Avedon photograph of the Warhol Factory family from 30 October 1969, such that only Candy is visible, and barely so: she’s mostly white space, with only a vague outline of her face visible. Candy is illuminated by a group of soft white tea lights on the floor, partially unwrapped, a few of which are lit during the show’s run. Another votive candle sits in the corner, roughly next to Als’s portraits of gender-bending icon Justin Vivian Bond (Mx Justin Vivian Bond as Jackie Curtis, New York, 2009, and Mx Justin Vivian Bond as Mx Justin Vivian Bond, New York, 2008–09), as if Justin were already dead. Luckily for all of us, Mx Bond is alive and well – though certainly not forever. If there’s one thing to take away from One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie, and the Rest, it’s that life is short, so you’d better live it. David Everitt Howe

Sarah Braman You Are Everything Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 10 March – 16 April I brought my twenty-year-old brother with me to see You Are Everything, an exhibition of seven sculptural assemblages and five paintings on plywood by Sarah Braman. He has no experience with art. While I took notes he stood quietly considering the works. When I finished, I asked him, “What do you think?” And he said, “It was… too simple.” It was an assessment that I agreed with, despite considerably more hours banked thinking about contemporary art. The works in You Are Everything are beautiful. Wrought in magnificent shades of radioactive purple, pink, orange and blue, the sculptures look like furniture saved from a temporary dwelling at Burning Man. The paintings, which bear titles like T.V. and Radio (both 2016), need imagination to be activated, preferably an imagination heavily stewed in postapocalyptic fantasy fiction. If the nuclear holocaust arrives, and people must live underground in monochrome bunkers without modern technology, colour or the company of other people, such paintings might replace the entertainment

mediums for which they are named. On the other hand, they also look like amateur imitations of Josef Albers paintings. Both Now? (2016), a sculpture that consists of the rear half of a Toyota Celica outfitted with a steel bed frame and aluminium storm doors, and Driving, sleeping, screwing, reading (2016), a truck cap transformed into a shelter with walls of coloured glass and hand-dyed purple fabric, evoke the golden years of late childhood, when anything was possible – when a sloppy kiss wasn’t an immediate relationship ender, and mediocrity might still transform into genius. Now? would make for a killer spot for a first kiss or to smoke a joint with a date. Driving, sleeping, screwing, reading would be great for any of the three latter activities in its title. Outfitted with a gorgeous Persian carpet, and scattered with books Braman salvaged from her town dump, including Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and The Sacred Cord Meditations, one could see falling in love, or at least having great sex, in such a place.

Or not. ‘Too simple’ came into play for my brother because at twenty he expected more from art than some evocation of a place where the potheads he wants to forget about from high school hung out with their girlfriends. For me it came into play because the sculptures, rather than saying something new or intelligent about the way sculpture can function, just recalled a bunch of other hipster-chic installations of recent years – eg Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s Floating Chain (2014), an environmental installation that imagined the end of the world, or Please Touch the Art (2015), an installation by Jeppe Hein in Brooklyn Bridge Park that invited adults to interact with sculpture as children would with jungle gyms. Braman’s assemblages would have fit seamlessly into either, which made this show seem redundant. What if the sculptures could be reconceived as beautiful shelters for New York’s population of 60,410 homeless? Then, perhaps, ‘simple’ could have been a form of genius. Brienne Walsh

Driving, sleeping, screwing, reading, 2016, truck cap, steel, aluminium, glass, rug, books, hand-dyed fabric, acrylic sticker and acrylic set paint, 206 × 255 × 258 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

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Justin Berry Photographs Essex Flowers, New York 4 March – 10 April For some years, Justin Berry has been shooting landscapes from within videogames. The ten photographs in this exhibition (all but one in black and white) have each been stitched together from 100 or more high-resolution shots taken while playing a first-person-shooter game. Using the game's built-in camera, Berry takes the photographs at moments when his player’s weapon is lowered, leaving an unobstructed view of the surrounding environment. The pictures include scenes of human settlement (sometimes ruined) in rural settings, natural vistas (for example a path through trees with majestic mountains ahead) and landscapes seen through simple courtyard buildings in a vaguely oriental style. People are visible in only two of the photographs: one is barely noticeable, while in Perch (all works 2016), a figure sitting atop a wall is a focal point in the composition. Printed in a square format and simply framed, the photographs are of modest size. Berry could easily have presented large images in the high-definition his method affords, but it’s not his intention to immerse the viewer in a given scene; his chosen scale instead invites one to contemplate the landscapes as contexts in relation to our own. Their scenes are fairly

still, lacking the more ominous feel of Berry’s earlier works, such as Tail Wind or Last Palm (both 2012, not on show), in which waving palms in heavy jungle evoke a sense of impending drama or threat reminiscent of Apocalypse Now (1979). The most visually effective work (and the poster image for the show) is Cap, in which a rocky outcrop is seen partially covered by drifts of snow that contrast powerfully with its dark layers. The dense textural detail and striking chiaroscuro between snow and graphitecoloured rock add up to a rewarding image. It is not part of Berry’s design to include any element of trickery or trompe l’oeil in the production of these photographs. In a spirit of experimentation, he produces images that tread an undetectable line between submission and suspicion in the eye of the viewer. In these landscapes, he tests photographic conventions, a certain artworld discomfort reserved for virtual reality and digitally generated work, and what can only be described as a human urge to fully understand what is seen. Berry challenges one’s suspension of disbelief, which in a videogame is offered willingly but becomes brittle when presented with these frozen scenes IRL (‘in real life’). Here one is compelled to figure the scenes out by minutely examining their nonreality.

More or Less, 2016, archival inkjet on Baryta paper, 57 × 57 cm. Courtesy Essex Flowers, New York

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This tension between belief in the imagery and a rejection of it as unreal is most effectively staged in the contrast between More or Less, an enticingly natural alpine scene under dappled light, and Perch, which confronts one with an obviously fake figure. Through the virtual landscapes he shoots in acute detail, Berry explores ill-defined territory between perception, interpretation, expectation and dismissal – in his own words, seeking ‘to look at the virtual world with the same kind of steady gaze one applies to the real world’. The photographs are arguably addressed to that most human satisfaction in naming what is, and what isn't, and serve to question the compulsion for such ‘knowing’ in this day and age. Humour, too, features in what could be a sardonic reaction to attitudes that take the ‘real’ seriously while dismissing the virtual (according to the press release, ‘in order to get the pictures he wanted, Justin Berry had to kill more than one person’). This ongoing series signals a personal quest upon which he has embarked through the conventions of imagemaking and interpretation. It questions why landscape photography should be insulated from the glare reserved for everyday reality. Iona Whittaker

Anna Ostoya Slaying Bortolami Gallery, New York 25 February – 23 April My first adjunct gig involved teaching an artappreciation class to bored community college students in Texas. Among the challenges was the textbook, organised mostly around formal topics rather than historical movements. I recall being jolted by the section on tenebrism, illustrated solely by Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (c. 1625). The inclusion of the canvas, which depicts the knife-wielding biblical heroine Judith and her handmaiden with the decapitated head of the invading Assyrian general, was framed not by feminist analysis, but rather in terms of its lighting effects and ‘heroic’ composition. When I lectured about the painting, I included some historical context that the book withheld – not least that Gentileschi, who was raped by her artistic mentor, modelled Judith after herself. For Slaying at Bortolami, New York-based Polish artist Anna Ostoya subjects to rigorous formal analysis Gentileschi’s earlier, bloodier painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–20). In this canvas, strong-armed Judith plunges a sword into the neck of the naked Holofernes, who lies sprawled across a bed. In agony, the general attempts to push away Judith’s equally muscular servant, holding him by the throat. Ostoya’s paintings often pair early avant-garde artistic methods with politicised imagery; for the 2015 Biennale de Lyon, she created Red, Blue

and Yellow, a triptych in primary colours that reworked photographs of an Yves Klein work, a march commemorating the Charlie Hebdo massacre and a film still from Joan of Arc (1928) in a faceted, abstract style. Slaying includes 12 geometric paintings based on Gentileschi’s composition and over 40 digital collages from the Slain Traces series that layer and mirror aspects of the painting (all works 2016). According to the press release, Ostoya distances herself from a strict (second-wave) feminist interpretation of the work and goes for a statement that is more Lacanian or intersectional, depending on one’s reading: ‘the slaying is of the unknown “other” that endangers the vulnerable “I”’. The large front gallery displays Ostoya’s cubist-inspired oil-on-canvas renderings of Gentileschi’s work. Using a palette of ultramarine blue, earthy brown, black and white, Ostoya paints details and nearly full-scale renderings of the Baroque composition. In a corner, two versions of the painting with same-gendered protagonists and antagonists face off: Holofernes Slaying Holofernes and Judith Slaying Judith. Beside these works, each nearly the size of Gentileschi’s, are closeup views of the slaughtered heads. Ostoya’s choice of cubist technique and her gender-switching subjects aim to underscore the universality and very real consequences of political, patriarchal violence – such as contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, whose

beheadings have become Western front-page news – in which culture is always implicated. Modestly scaled pieces from the Slain Traces series, simple inkjet prints with additions of acrylic in a few instances – they look like X-rays of a bodily pathogen – fill the back gallery. These associative works reveal the digital and subjective traces of Ostoya’s process. In Two Faces, A Model and an Actress, for instance, she merges the face of a calm Gentileschi female figure with a YouTube still (complete with a scroll bar) of Isabelle Adjani from the 1981 body-horror film Possession. In other examples, elements such as Ostoya’s own portrait as a teenager, forms from Georgia O’Keeffe’s organic abstractions, a robot head and Picasso motifs of a guitar and a mask variously suggest processes of identity formation and colonisation. For a show that downplays the gendered aspects of violence, there are moments of shocking rage: in Beheading, Castrating and Blinding with Gray Shards, the mouths of two decapitated men’s heads are stuffed with castrated penises, and an Oedipal dagger is stabbed through an eye. Ostoya’s thesis is that Gentileschi’s original painting goes beyond an allegorical ‘slaying’ of male violence towards women. Still, her message resonates most powerfully when she embraces the feminist content of the original work, coupling it with her own fantasies of crushing toxic masculinity. Wendy Vogel

Judith Slaying Judith and Holofernes Slaying Holofernes, both 2016, oil on canvas, 199 × 158 cm. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York

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Chantal Peñalosa El panorama, sobre todo si uno lo ve desde un puente, es prometedor Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City 17 March – 23 April Pencil-eraser-size 10¢ peso coins are, by today’s exchange rate, worth so little that many stores in Mexico refuse to accept them. Even beggars don’t always bother to stoop for the silver specks abandoned to the sidewalks. Chantal Peñalosa’s solo exhibition, the title of which translates as ‘the view, especially if one looks at it from a bridge, is promising’, unites desire and repetitive labour by frottage-drawing Mexico’s smallest denomination of loose change. Peñalosa has papered the walls of the gallery, floor to ceiling, with graphite rubbings of the lowly currency on standard letter-paper. The coins on each sheet total 14 pesos, and the gallery contains just under 3,000 sheets. The gallery’s exhibition text, written by art critic Sandra Sánchez, informs us that Peñalosa intends to make rubbings of a total of one million pesos. In a corner of the gallery the artist has placed a table on which rest two papers rubbed with 28 pesos and a calendar registering the day’s exchange rate of the peso to the US dollar, suggesting that even if she

does reach one million pesos, its value is anything but fixed. By shifting the coins from material subject to a mimetic representation through frottage, Peñalosa emphasises the images of the coins as signifiers of the idea of a million pesos, separate from real money. The repeated image of the coins on standard office paper has, en masse, the visual effect of Xeroxes – which given the handmade performative method of production flattens manual, professional and artistic labour hierarchies onto the same plane. We are left in awe of the number of pages, the hours, the hand-cramps and backaches that one million pesos’ worth of rubbings would represent. But then we remember that the million pesos is a desirous fiction, since Peñalosa hasn’t made them yet. Sánchez writes, ‘Desire is a force that leads to an action that in turn results in labor.’ The labour of artists may exist in something of a privileged ghetto by virtue of its status as luxury commodity, but art for sale in a gallery is still surplus value produced by dubiously valued

labour intractable from a market system based on desire. Likewise human capital, in Mexico and increasingly in other parts of the world under financialised late-stage capitalism, has such minimal and diminishing recompense that labour often becomes a Sisyphean effort to achieve basic survival. We don’t know how much the piece is being offered for, but we can assume it is less than one million pesos (US$57,680 as I write this). Here the work employs the logic of a joke: ‘To get a million pesos, why not just make them?’ El Panorama, sobre todo si uno lo ve desde un puente, es prometedor, like many of Peñalosa’s pieces, doesn’t deliver a rich visual experience. The rubbings seem to exist chiefly as an allusion to the immensity of the task of drawing one million pesos. The strength of the work is when the text, the installation and the mental image of 71,429 sheets of rubbings triangulate in the mind of the viewer. It’s in that moment that Peñalosa prompts the question: but for what it’s worth, is it worth it? Kimberlee Córdova

El panorama, sobre todo si uno lo ve desde un puente, es prometedor, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Moritz Bernoully. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

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Henrique Oliveira Galeria Millan (Anexo), São Paulo 2 – 30 April Sculptures and installations developed out of plywood are the works most commonly associated with Henrique Oliveira, having been present in his practice since 2003. Unquestionably, the cheap material is gifted by a powerful expressiveness in the hands of the artist. But it is worth remembering that Oliveira started his career in painting, and it was from there that he began to add elements to achieve the works that have gained him recognition today. This exhibition, incorporating, in addition to the sculptures, paintings, organic elements and interventions, brings light to the artist’s versatility. In the first room are a series of three-dimensional oil paintings with cardboard, wire and glue together with a large plywood sculpture fixed to the wall. I say three-dimensional in respect to the paintings because the mass and quantity of layers of paint – once compared to the moveable thicknesses of expressionist canvases of the Brazilian artist Iberê Camargo (1914–94) – bulge out from the wall and communicate fluidly with the same vibrant, visceral and unstable forms present in the

wall-sculpture opposite. Titled Xilempasto 9 (all works but one 2016), this last consists of filled, grouped, stapled and moulded layers of wood painted in subdued tones of blue, red, green and yellow, fused with the natural tone of the wood and arranged in a large formal bracing. According to the artist himself, dealing with plywood involves an act of cocreation: his hands exchange with matter, and from this dance between the artist’s will and the material’s flow, the form emerges. Therefore, its materiality can be understood less as a representation or a cutout of the real than as potency taking place. The vivacity of this sculpture is so strong that it seems that it is about to leave the medium’s limits to expand independently into space. In the second room we find a hanging object made with branches and a six-metre sculpture also composed of branches, wire mesh, cardboard, plywood and glue on pedestals. These last two resemble natural pieces of a tree, at first glance, and seem to have transferred directly from nature into the show. In the background, an intervention – connecting the gallery

entrance to the wall where it is located – mimics a floor-to-ceiling crack. Halfway down, an empty picture frame has been hung: within it the cracked line assumes a pictorial quality (like a squiggle of ink). Fissura (2015) is better appreciated from a distance. While differing formally from the rest of the works on show, it draws attention to the strong dialogue between art and architecture, the flat plane and the three-dimensional, in Oliveira’s work. If it were confined only to the use of plywood – a material from the streets, mainly associated with the composition of the favela buildings – he could easily be classified as focused on the estética do precário (aesthetics of the precarious), a term commonly applied to Brazilian artistic production. However, Oliveira’s interest in this common material relates more to its texture than to a sustainable (he collects it from the streets) or a social character. Such a narrow classification would limit the dimensions of a practice that, presented in a comprehensive way in this show, has proved capable of moving through space and media in an imposing, powerful and poetic way. Thais Gouveia

EXLP7, 2016, oil, cardboard, wire and glue on canvas, 50 × 33 cm. Photo: Everton Ballardin. Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo

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Michael Lin A Tale of Today Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai 5 March – 10 April A Tale of Today is artist Michael Lin’s fourth solo exhibition in Shanghai since moving to this city 10 years ago. Lin is a creator of situations who likes to transform contemporary art spaces into places of social and economic activity. Although the three-floor space of Leo Xu Projects – hidden in a quiet, narrow lane in Shanghai’s former French Concession district – is too small and too private for the artist to trigger public interaction, Lin still tactfully introduces the potential for economic interaction – not the kind normally happening in a commercial gallery – into this show, with Forever (For Sale) (2016), a set of nine brand-new (sales tags unremoved) Forever bicycles, placed in a row by the gallery entrance on the ground floor. Forever is an iconic national bicycle brand founded in 1940 in Shanghai. It features in a number of works by Ai Weiwei. For many people in this country, the Forever bike recalls the memory of the socialist and collectivist era of China back to decades ago when bikes were the dominant means of transportation and the country was called the kingdom of bicycles; for Lin, who uses a Forever bicycle as a means of transportation in his daily life, the bike is basic equipment and an artistic instrument that facilitates his continuous interest in urban mobility. In Place Libre, his 2013 solo show at Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, Lin pulled down the street wall of the gallery, transformed the space into a carpark and invited people who entered 798 – the popular gallery and creative industry zone in Beijing in which

it is famously difficult to find a parking space – to park their cars, scooters or bicycles. At Leo Xu Projects, through Forever (For Sale), Lin transforms part of the ground floor into a temporary bicycle shop, encouraging people to engage with his concept by buying one of the bikes (at market price). After triggering economic activity, A Tale of Today proceeds with a narrative strategy that spreads throughout the gallery space. If the bicycle shop installation on the ground floor could be viewed as representing a streetscape of China in the golden age of the socialist era (when photographs of crowds of urban cyclists came to represent the nation), the two artistassembled bicycles that are separately placed on the first floor would seem to show that the bike is still a basic means of transportation (and an object of fetishisation to a small group of people) in today’s urban life. In addition to the actual function of the bikes and their practical and cultural role in urban life, Lin describes the facts and symbols of a high-speed developing metropolis via a series of paintings, both on canvas and directly onto walls, that spread throughout the gallery. The words, characters, typefaces and patterns used in these, all excerpted from the classic logo and design of the Forever and Phoenix (another brand by the same company, targeting the export market and formerly presented as a gift to foreign dignitaries visiting China) bikes, are appropriated, enlarged, deconstructed, reassembled, duplicated, realigned and sometimes slightly

twisted. In doing this, Lin humorously questions ideas such as ‘Made in China’, ‘Shanghai’, ‘reve’ or ‘fore’ (part of ‘forever’) and more. He also uses gold leaf, a material that he has never used before, and thus has created a powerful material visualisation of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1874 classic novel of the ‘golden age’ of America, The Golden Age – A Tale of Today. The narrative of the myth of the speed and development of the city or country that appears in both the literary and artistic versions of A Tale of Today reaches its climax on the second floor of the gallery, filled by two of Lin’s signature semidesign, semipainting wall works. Covering one wall is a painting of patterns adopted from the Forever bike logo, covered with gold leaf and suggesting the high-speed economic development that has now occupied and been internalised within the gallery: a kind of monumental architecture of ‘the tale’. Covering the opposite wall is wallpaper printed with the time and destination of flights departing during one day from Pudong International Airport: a symbol of Shanghai’s engagement in global economic interactivity at more accelerated speed (and of the way in which the international trade that once built the ‘local’ Forever and Phoenix brands might now consume them). At this point, A Tale of Today, which started from a carefully designed economic activity on a neighbourhood scale, ends up becoming a monumental sculpture of a meta-city’s economic miracle. Aimee Lin

Forever (For Sale), 2016, set of nine Forever bicycles, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai

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Liang Shuo Temple of Candour Beijing Commune 8 March – 30 April Inspired by the description of a certain ‘Temple of Candour’ drawn from the book Six Records of a Floating Life, a semiautobiographical work by the author Shen Fu, writing in early-eighteenthcentury China, artist Liang Shuo creates an evocative installation in the gallery of a circuitous route through forests and mountains to reach a representation of this temple. This realisation represents the collision between the historical space of the book and the contemporary space of the gallery, and borrows notions of site-specificity in relation to its construction; in its recreation of the literary setting, though, the work fails to address the social reality of that collision. The Temple of Candour (in the English translation of the book, this is simply transliterated as ‘Wuyin Temple’) is a ruined structure in the mountains, which the author visits in an attempt to escape from his responsibilities as a bookstore owner and calligrapher. Shen records in concise prose the temple’s picturesque dilapidation and the outstanding vistas he and his friends discover upon arrival. By manipulating the existing gallery spaces, Liang sets up a progressive experience of a winding path with various views and settings. At certain points walls are irregularly cut through and trompe l’oeil representations of temples and buildings are painted on their remaining surfaces, acting like the flats on

a theatre stage. The artist’s transformation of materials is truly effective: wooden offcuts become rocks and grave markers, and discarded metal strips of studding become a bamboo forest. This subtle and inventive adaptation of materials forces the viewer to continually negotiate their experience of the installation as straddling the boundary between reality and illusion, the present and a historical past, without ever losing one or the other from view. The pseudo-path climbs up onto stacked boxes and scaffolding structures, until finally we stoop to pass through a further gap in a wall to stand atop a small platform, as if on an eyrie, overlooking a large open gallery space with parallel lengths of translucent plastic wrapping material lying across the floor. The path taken resolves itself into the illusion of a climb into mountains, to finally look out over this layer of heavy mist trapped in the ‘valley’ of the gallery. A tentative link can be made between Shen’s story and Liang’s other activities as part of the A Diaodui collective – a group known for its ironic, literate approach to artmaking. This group also visit temples, where they sleep on the grounds and record the experience in what might be described as a performance. As I understand it, they regard this process of travelling to these significant places and surrendering to sleep as an aesthetic practice, and this seems to have a parallel in Shen’s

account of his own travels, at least to the extent that he has aesthetically privileged them through recording them for posterity. It might be said that Liang’s installation also places the audience in a similar process of negotiating the path and coming to appreciate the quality of these journeys. However, the exact significance of Shen Fu’s record remains ambiguous, and this is equally the case with the new artwork. For instance, what does the experience of Liang’s Temple of Candour tell us about the relation between the preexisting gallery space and the artist’s invented spaces? Although the physical space of the gallery is broken down and subverted by the artist’s constructions and repurposing of materials, the gallery itself as a system of relations remains seemingly undisturbed, if not ignored and hidden. While the accompanying text for the exhibition makes claims of site-specificity by virtue of the use of only those materials already present within the gallery when the artist began, the artwork lacks the critical aspect of site-specificity to propose a working-through of the installation’s own existence within the systems into which it inserts itself. Without such a critical understanding, Liang’s work can be confused with decoration – even as a distraction from questions regarding the wider contemporary meaning of the artwork. Edward Sanderson

Temple of Candour, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Yang Chao Studio. Courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune

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Books

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ArtReview

The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present by Barry Schwabsky Verso, £14.99 (softcover) The jobbing art-critic’s dream has often been to land one of those well-cushioned (mostly American) magazine gigs writing for a general audience. You suddenly have many more readers than could be hoped for at the specialist journals for which you’ve been scribbling, and longer word counts than newspapers can afford. But the weekly or monthly column one fantasised as a tyro critic may rapidly pall in reality. The problem is not the pressure to turn out informed and well-formed copy. Instead it’s the sense of exposure, the sudden visibility that can lead writers to polish their in-print personas till they reflect nothing but themselves. Barry Schwabsky, whose new book reprints essays from his first eight years as art critic at the liberal US weekly The Nation, has so far eluded that fate admirably. The 38 pieces in The Perpetual Guest reveal a writer whose attitude to his journalistic task mirrors his approach to art itself: ‘These essays aim to keep art unfinished.’ Schwabsky’s title derives from his sense that the critic is ‘a guest at the party who’s there on sufferance, contributing much less to the artworld’s functioning than was once the case’. He’s equable when it comes to the ‘crisis of criticism’: his responsibility is to the art and artists at hand. Yet also surely to a readership he must frequently assume is coming fresh

(and maybe sceptical) to the work under discussion. Schwabsky is very good indeed at essaying elegant but knotty accounts of the work of Thomas Hirschhorn or Thomas Demand, the exhausting multiplicity of the Venice Biennale, the origins of Renaissance portraiture. He has a way with the surprising one-liner: ‘All the Duchampian postmodernists, no less than their modernist granddads, are children of Velázquez.’ Whether writing about the signs and symbols of the Occupy movement, or why he has been wrong about late Gerhard Richter, Schwabsky is a democratic if not demotic critic: you come away from his columns with a properly dialectical sense of how he reached his judgements. And judgements there are in The Perpetual Guest, though the essays, mostly hung on the occasion of a current exhibition, are rarely straightforward reviews. At the outset Schwabsky declares himself allergic to the cliché of participatory art, preferring Marcel Duchamp’s conception of a critical spectator who completes the work. Schwabsky is often scathing about the banalities and bromides expressed by curators and catalogue essayists: well-meant readings of Kara Walker as historical realist, absurd psychological interpretations of Maurizio Cattelan’s stunts. And he does not hold back regarding

inflated reputations: Ai Weiwei’s is an ‘essentially literary and moralizing art replete with beauty and spectacle’. Of the Metropolitan Museum’s The Pictures Generation exhibition of 2009 he writes: ‘A lot of work in this show wants to be mysterious, but too much of it depends on having a sovereign, unacknowledged commentator whispering in your ear to point out what’s mysterious about it.’ Schwabsky’s precursors at The Nation may seem like impossible acts to follow: the magazine’s art critics have included Clement Greenberg, Arthur C. Danto and Lawrence Alloway. The temptation must be overly to opine, to seize the bully pulpit at last, while it lasts. But Schwabsky is in longer-term dialogue with his critical contemporaries, notably fellow writers for the New Left Review. In an essay on Jeff Wall in the present collection, Julian Stallabrass is taken to task for hasty dismissal of Wall’s later work: ‘For him art can only be radical sociology or conspicuous consumption.’ Which is not to say Schwabsky the trained philosopher is in any sense anti-intellectual. In an exemplary final essay on art education today, he makes a nuanced case for the uses of not-knowing: ‘Teaching art, and making art, is always sooner or later about coming to terms with one’s own ignorance.’ Brian Dillon

Munch by Steffen Kverneland SelfMadeHero, £15.99 (softcover) SelfMadeHero’s ‘Art Masters’ series, which gives the biographies of great artists from the past an inventive graphic-novel makeover, are books I must confess to thoroughly enjoying as something of a guilty pleasure. A pleasure because their combination of vivid drawings, solid research and clever narrative constructions bring the artists to life in a way that other arthistory books can’t, and guilty because they don’t shy away from including the (albeit somewhat subjective) messy emotional and sexual aspects of their subjects’ lives. Following on from Rembrandt, Vincent and Pablo (the latter reviewed by this writer in the May 2015 issue)

comes Munch, and it doesn’t disappoint. This romp through the life and works of the celebrated Norwegian artist portrays the philosophising, agonising, feuds, friendships, femme fatales and copious quantities of raucous drunken carousing that formed the backdrop to the creation of some of his most acclaimed psychological paintings, including The Scream (1893) and Madonna (1894). The structural twist is that author and artist Steffen Kverneland inserts vignettes of himself and his friend Lars Fiske at intervals throughout the book’s pages. These excerpts, told in contemporary times, draw from the

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seven years Kverneland spent researching the book, including his visits to the places Munch lived, worked and featured in his paintings. While the conversation between the two chums, amusingly portrayed as every bit as bohemian and hard-drinking and -smoking as their subject, provides additional exposition, Kverneland uses actual text from Munch’s diaries and writings and those of his circle, among them playwright August Strindberg and Polish author Stanislav Przybyszewski, for the dialogue, to illuminate how, in Munch’s words, ‘I do not paint what I see but what I saw.’ Helen Sumpter

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Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition by Yates McKee Verso, $26.95/£16.99 (hardcover) Strike Art is a study of the role of art in radical politics, written for reasons both ‘scholarly and strategic’ – ie to forward the cause – by a New York-based PhD candidate who found himself transported ‘from the intellectual comfort zone of academic art history into an alien world from the future’. It proposes, in intermittently urgent language, that both art and the left were fundamentally transformed in the crucible of Occupy Wall Street in ways that continue, with strengthening reverberations, to play out. Contemporary art, with its connections to capitalist market systems, was a sector in Occupy’s sights. Indeed, in autumn 2011, one BBC reporter proposed that this kind of art was facing its demise in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park (site of the shortlived anticapitalist encampment and source of the enduring notion that the world is divided into the 1% and the 99%). Direct action would be the artform that led to contemporary art’s overthrow. Yates McKee addresses the provocative idea that such a thing as ‘Occupy art’ – created in and around the park during its occupation – threatened to supplant the hopelessly compromised art of the market as a new avant-garde dedicated to reinventing the commons.

To bridge the gap between his view of contemporary art as a capitalist culture industry and the radical leftist project of Occupy, the author points to the work of curators such as Okwui Enwezor (for helping to create a space for independent discourse) and theorists such as Jacques Rancière (for his ideas about the emergence of new political subjects ‘in excess of the “police principle” that strives to maintain the fixed roles, positions, and identities on which the functioning of the state depends’) as well as a younger generation of thinkers such as Claire Bishop (for her attention to projects that ‘negotiate between art as a realm of autonomous, non-instrumental experience… and the pressure of social antagonism’), all of whom, it should be noted, are relatively established figures within the art system. Here, though, McKee makes a leap, via anthropologist (and Occupy participant) David Graeber, to the New Anarchism: ‘an entire world of artistic practice’ – direct action in the service of ‘reconstructing the commons’ – emerging not from the art system but from the antiglobalisation movement as witnessed for example in the Seattle protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999.

Crucial for McKee’s argument is the notion of Occupy as idea, or ‘viral matrix’. Here he develops it in three directions, categorised as verb, noun and event. These indicate, respectively, a call to action; a movement (which he places in quotes and further backs away from in notes and other digressions – a rhetorical tactic used widely here, and perhaps unavoidable when working around themes as large as contemporary art and radical politics); and ‘the event’, in Alain Badiou’s sense of a rupture in the order of things that is so great as to make turning back an impossibility. It is this last conception of Occupy that McKee, contributing, as he says, ‘to a project of para-academic “militant research”’ that works in aid of ‘movement-building’ – finds most compelling, and informs Strike Art as a call to those working in art to ‘reappropriate [art’s] values… for a new cultural commons’. It is possible, of course, that contemporary art has simply absorbed the idea of Occupy – now a brand name for activism – as a means of demonstrating its status as avant-garde and neutralising the threat to its domination. But perhaps it’s nicer to think that it has not. David Terrien

Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture by Douglas Murphy Verso, £20 (hardcover) Douglas Murphy’s history of the avant-garde architecture of the 1960s and 70s initially seems merely to cover ground familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the subject. Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Moshe Safdie, Constant, Archigram, Superstudio, Cedric Price and Yona Friedman are all given due recognition. Murphy mentions a spattering of nonWestern perspectives, but it’s telling that his focus is the architecture of the ‘free world’. Soviet design experimentation of the time, for example, doesn’t get a look-in. This is not surprising, because although told through the prism of building design, Murphy’s actual, more interesting subject emerges as the rise and fall – or rather the rise and transmutation – of liberal, and then neoliberal, utopian politics. The chapter ‘Cybernetic Dreams’ is where the book comes alive. Here Murphy expertly traces a line between Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, by this time based in the US, and the

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philosopher’s criticism of the postwar Fordist economic boom, to the countercultural hippy movement, noting how simultaneously – because of the Cold War and the space race – the US government was apparently pouring money into speculative research concerning computing, psychology and sociology. The architecture of the era has long been fetishised. What Murphy does though is offer various plausible explanations for our fascination. Nor does he shy away from implicitly criticising some of these countercultural saints, introducing dissenting voices. For example, central to much of the theory surrounding design and alternative ways of living at this time – epitomised perhaps by the vision encapsulated in Friedman’s Ville Spatiale project – was the belief that technology would set us free from labour. Murphy introduces the writing of French anarchist Jacques Ellul as a counterpoint, one that has been proved prescient.

ArtReview

In The Technological Society (1964) Ellul argues that technology only begets more technology. Instead of freeing us, we are beholden to it, ‘slaves to machinery’, as Murphy terms it, struggling to keep up. In a similar vein, Price, Fuller, Archigram and the idea of ‘transient architecture’ comes in for criticism when Murphy quotes futurist Alvin Toffler. ‘They all conspire towards the same psychological end’, Toffler wrote in 1970: ‘the ephemeralization of man’s links with the things that surround him.’ What emerges is a well-argued history in which our current state of rampant individualism can be rooted in the rejectionist politics of the hippies, while on a global level, the world is no longer ordered through democracy and nationhood, but a technological infrastructure that rests in the hands of the likes of Elon Musk and Google, who root their libertarian philosophies in the supposedly utopian ideals of 40 years ago. Oliver Basciano

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For more on Barbara Yelin, see overleaf

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Contributors

John Berger

Ed Schad

Contributing Writers

is a British art critic, fiction writer, essayist and painter. He lives and works in Paris and Quincy, in the French Alps. Berger has written extensively over the last 50 years and in a variety of genres, from novels (including G., for which he received the Booker Prize in 1972) to social essays, poetry and screenplays. His 1972 television series and 1974 book Ways of Seeing were influential in their criticism of Western cultural aesthetics. Berger was also a regular contributor of reviews and essays to the New Statesman, including ‘A Moral’ (1960), reprinted in this issue.

is assistant curator and publications manager at the Broad in Los Angeles. His writings have been included in ArtReview, Frieze, Modern Painters, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, Truthdig and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the managing editor of The Broad Collection, The Broad: An Art Museum Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and The Broad: Art and Architecture. Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, his next editing project, will be released in June. For this issue he profiles painter Wayne Thiebaud.

Sean Ashton, Andrew Berardini, John Berger, Luke Clancy, Matthew Collings, Kimberlee Córdova, Gabriel Coxhead, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Thais Gouveia, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Sam Jacob, Sarah Jilani, Dean Kissick, I. Kurator, John Quin, Maria Lind, Guy MannesAbbott, Mark Prince, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Darius Sabbaghzadeh, Edward Sanderson, Ed Schad, Laura Smith, Raimar Stange, David Trigg, Dominic van den Boogerd, Wendy Vogel, Brienne Walsh, Larry Wilcox, Iona Whittaker

Louise Darblay Kimberlee Córdova is a Mexico City-based artist and writer. She is a contributing editor at Momus, and a regular contributor to the San Francisco Arts Quarterly. Recent solo exhibitions include The Dodo Bird’s Verdict at Casa Maauad and Brief Encounters with Tezcatlipoca at Bikini Wax, both in Mexico City. This month she reviews Chantal Peñalosa’s solo exhibition at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City.

is assistant editor at ArtReview and ArtReview Asia. She also runs the programme of live events at the ArtReview Bar in London. She has BA in art history from La Sorbonne, Paris, and completed her MA in history and business of the contemporary art market at Warwick University and IESA Paris in 2013. In this issue she reviews Lydia Gifford’s solo show at the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage on the Ile de Vassivière in France.

Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Janet Delaney, Mikael Gregorsky, Anna Vickery, Barbara Yelin

Gabriel Coxhead is a critic and curator based in London. He has written for numerous publications, including the Financial Times, Wallpaper, Art in America and Cabinet, and is a contributing editor at Modern Painters. He recently coauthored a 2015 monograph on the painter Gideon Rubin. This month he profiles David Hammons.

Barbara Yelin (preceding pages)

‘But you are the ones who can tell us about that time.’ This was how Barbara Yelin, then seventeen, reinforced her plea to her grandmother to tell her something about her wartime experiences in Nazi Germany. But her grandmother remained reticent until the end, insisting, ‘I don’t want to talk about this in my lifetime.’ Yelin, a German graphic novelist born in 1977, would find this avoidance was something many other Germans of her generation had come up against. It only made her more curious. The following year, 1996, her grandmother died. While helping to sort through her belongings, Yelin stumbled across a box hidden under a cupboard. Inside she found private diaries, letters and photographs. “They told me a part of her life story that I didn’t know, when she was a young adult of nineteen.” These family secrets became the springboard for Yelin to write and draw her first longform graphic novel, Irmina, published in Germany in 2014 and translated this year into English by SelfMadeHero. “Very little was in her

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letters. In the end, maybe 50 percent of her story ended up in my book. The rest was research and artistic license. So Irmina is not a biography [nor is it Yelin’s grandmother’s name], but I took these references from her biographical material to reconstruct a possible life.” What is based on fact is that during the 1930s, before the Second World War, Irmina left Germany for London in search of work and independence, and happened to meet Howard, one of very few black students at Oxford in that period. Yelin surmises, “There was a relationship. I don’t know how close that was. Both of them were foreigners in England, both very much intended to stand on their own feet.” Irmina clearly admired how Howard had studied so diligently in Barbados to win the single annual scholarship to Oxford offered at that time to Caribbean students. “It’s difficult for them to have this relationship, he gets lots of racist abuse and attacks, and there are no places where they can be together.” Stubborn, nonconformist, disappointed in her attempts to climb England’s social ladder, Irmina

ArtReview

ignores the warnings and eventually returns to Germany, where she marries a Nazi architect, who confers social status on her. But at what price? “Looking away is one of my book’s main themes. How she probably knew about the Jews and the Holocaust, and how she stops asking questions. It’s not just an historic issue. It’s about what is the responsibility of all of us.” Yelin avoids making Irmina a moralising book by leaving her perceptive psychological characterstudy open for the reader to interpret and reflect on. Its qualities have landed Irmina numerous awards, including Bavaria’s Kunstförderpreis for literature and France’s Prix Cheminots for historical and social graphic novels. Her new Strip for ArtReview uses the metaphor of hunter and hunted to consider the connection between freedom and responsibility. “Real freedom means abandoning the gun. This would be reality in a perfect world. Still we live in hope, and hope is the last to die.” Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 128 photography by Janet Delaney

Phrases on the spine and pages 31, 61 and 93 are from Terror from the Air, by Peter Sloterdijk, published in 2009 by Semiotexte

on page 124 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 134 illustration by Anna Vickery

May 2016

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A Curator Writes May 2016 “Theory?” Julian splutters. “What do you mean it’s back?” For a moment I thought he might choke on his carottes râpées. I pause and spear one of my œufs durs mayonnaise at a deliberately glacial pace that brings to my mind Glenn Gould’s late version of the Goldberg Variations. “Yes,” I say solemnly. “Don’t tell me they’ve started reading Derrida again? The textual chain! The articulation of desire and of language!” I look up, surprised. “I might be a mere art dealer, but I read some of that stuff myself when I was forced to work with a breakaway group from Art & Language. Jackie was a great man, but of course much misunderstood. Although perhaps that was his point!” Julian laughs heartily, in an irritating manner. “No, Julian, not Derrida or any of those French commies. These days, apparently, it’s all about the life and feelings of objects. You know, when I curated my first exhibition in the kitchen of my apartment in Knokke, I called it To be with art is all I ask. And now these young whippersnappers think that they are the first to think about the lives of objects!” I gesture at the waitress to take away the remnants of the starters. “The œufs were divine,” I say to her as she gathers up the plates. I reach out towards the wooden pepper pot. “You see, Julian, these young curators think they have discovered a so-called object-orientated philosophy. Take this pepper pot...” “Splendid,” says Julian, watching the waitress turn around. “...they are interested in its specific psychic reality. How do objects relate to each other? What is the depth that lies beneath the specific form of this pepper pot?” Julian turns back to me. “Have you been actually reading this stuff?” he replies. “Ah, good, the mains. Would you like more of the Pomerol with your onglet?” Without waiting for a reply, he pours some wine into my depleted glass. “I did start reading a bit of it,” I admit. “The thing is, I was passed over by Gwangju Biennale. I thought my proposed group show, You’ve Got Me Wonton More, featuring Rirkrit and the other relational guys, would get it. But no. Apparently objects aren’t relational any more! They have their own realities.” I look at Julien’s entrecôte and can’t help but think that the reality is that in relation to my onglet it looks both bigger and tastier. “Well I’m sorry to hear about Gwangju. Who got it?” “Maria Lind,” I whisper back, barely able to bring myself to say her name. “I mean, she once spent a year showing Christine Borland works one at a time…” I trail off in disgust. Later, walking through Golden Square back to Julian’s gallery, I realise I must ask him now. If we get back to the gallery, his director will immediately kill the rapport I’ve carefully cultivated over lunch. She has still never forgiven me for our night of abandon in Cartagena during Manifesta 8. I surprised and delighted her by turning up for dinner dressed in full Spanish naval costume, knowing she had a penchant for the military. I stop him by gently putting my hand on his shoulder. “Look, Julian…”

“I know! I love walking through the square in the springtime. These work-experience girls are simply marvellous. We should get a sandwich from Eat next time and sit opposite a couple of them, eh?” “Erm, yes, quite so! Well, actually, I was going to ask you about your Venice show. You know, the one you do each Biennale when you put a load of work from your stockroom next to a couple of young artists and I come up with a clever-sounding title? I just haven’t had the call yet and we are just over a year out. I’ve got some great titles, you know, and what with Gwangju, the old bank manager is making a few queries – if you get my drift…” Julian is happily looking at the legs of several young ladies sat on the grass next to one of the benches. “Julian?” “Oh, yes, sorry! Venice. Look, old chap, the thing is we’ve actually sorted this one out. Would you believe it, but my director’s managed to get hold of one of the curatorial team from Szymczyk’s Documenta. Marvellous stroke of luck. And the funny thing is that together they’ve come up with this show called The Hidden Life of Objects. I was thinking of it when we had that fascinating discussion over our starters… I feel a terrible anger coming over me. I shake Julian by the lapels and yell, “Remember Heidegger! ‘The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.’ Just remember his words, you old fraud!” The young women on the bench stare, I think with some admiration. I gather myself and, releasing Julian, stride on towards West Soho. I. Kurator

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