ArtReview May 2017 by ArtReview

‘You do not understand’ is always the last word May 2017 001_AR.indd Custom V

Mark Bradford and other tales from the Venice Biennale 28/04/2017 10:52

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Archi Dior collection

White gold, pink gold and diamonds.

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LONDON Jorinde Voigt Both Sides Now 27 Bell Street Joyce Pensato FORGETTABOUT IT 67 Lisson Street NEW YORK Carmen Herrera Paintings on Paper 138 Tenth Avenue Susan Hiller Paraconceptual 504 West 24th Street MILAN Spencer Finch Via Zenale 3

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Brussels 18/04 – 17/06 2017 Neither. Curated by Fernanda Brenner

Adriano Costa Alexandre da Cunha Ana Mazzei Anna Zacharoff Christina Mackie Christodoulos Panayiotou Cibelle Cavalli Bastos Dan Coopey Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Manuel Raeder Dries van Noten Djordje Ozbolt Erika Verzutti f.marquespenteado

Mend e s Wood DM 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium +32 2 502 09 64 @ mendeswooddm Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 Sao Paulo SP Brazil +55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com

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Fernando Ortega Francesco João Scavarda Franz West Giulio Delvè Hamza Halloubi James Ensor Jason Dodge Joëlle Tuerlinckx Kasper Bosmans Katinka Bock Lawrence Weiner Laurent Dupont Lucas Arruda Luiz Roque Mariana Castillo Deball Matthew Lutz-Kinoy Mauro Restiffe Meriç Algün Ringborg Michael Dean Nick Mauss Nicolas Deshayes Nina Canell Otobong Nkanga

Paloma Bosquê Patricia Leite Paul Sietsema Rineke Dijkstra Robert Janitz Rodrigo Hernández Rosemarie Trockel Runo Lagomarsino Sonia Gomes

São Paulo 27/05 – 29/07 2017 Leticia Ramos Julie Beaufils Felipe Meres

Michael Dean Skulptur Projekte Münster 09/06 – 01/10 2017

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NO TITLE, CA. 1962 OIL ON CANVAS 30.8 × 36.2 CM / 12 1/8 × 14 1/4 IN PHOTO: STEFAN ALTENBURGER

HA U S E R & W IR T H

LEE LOZANO C. 1962

19 MAY – 29 JULY 2017 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

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HA U S E R & W I R T H

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN THE BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2017 PHYLLIDA BARLOW BRITISH PAVILION 13 MAY — 26 NOVEMBER 2017

MARK BRADFORD US PAVILION 13 MAY — 26 NOVEMBER 2017

PHILIP GUSTON AND THE POETS GALLERIE DELL’ACCADEMIA DI VENEZIA CURATED BY KOSME DE BARAÑANO 10 MAY — 3 SEPTEMBER 2017

ANDY HOPE 1930 TAKESADA MATSUTANI ANRI SALA IN ‘VIVA ARTE VIVA’ INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION CURATED BY CHRISTINE MACEL 13 MAY — 26 NOVEMBER 2017

ELLEN GALLAGHER IN ‘DIASPORA PLATFORM’ PALAZZO PISANI A SANTA MARINA 13 MAY — 26 NOVEMBER 2017

WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF HAUSER & WIRTH DISCOVER MORE AT WWW.HAUSERWIRTH. ART

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AT THE ITALIAN PAVILION, VICE VERSA, CURATED BY BARTOLOMEO PIETROMARCHI EXHIBITIS: MASSIMO BARTOLINI AND GIANFRANCO BARUCHELLO AMONG OTHERS.

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

PALAZZO GRASSI PRESENTS: A SOLO EXHIBITION BY RUDOLF STINGEL

IL PALAZZO ENCICLOPEDICO, CENTRAL PAVILION - 55TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE, 2013

THE 55TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, IL PALAZZO ENCICLOPEDICO (THE ENCYCLOPEDIC PALACE), CURATED BY MASSIMILIANO GIONI, INCLUDES: GIANFRANCO BARUCHELLO, GEORGE CONDO, ROBERTO CUOGHI, MATTHEW MONAHAN, MATT MULLICAN, DIEGO PERRONE, JIM SHAW, ANDRA URSUTA.

VICE VERSA , TESE DELLE VERGINI ALL’ARSENALE, ITALIAN PAVILION, VENICE, 2013

55TH VENICE BIENNALE

RUDOLF STINGEL, PALAZZO GRASSI, VENICE, 2013

IN 2013

@MDCGALLERY MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

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STURTEVANT

UNDENIABLE ALLUSION 1966 – 1998 PARIS MARAIS MAY – JUNE 2017 ROPAC.NET

LONDON PARIS SALZBURG

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kurimanzutto

monika sosnowska

roman ondak history repeats itself

gob. rafael rebollar 94 col. san miguel chapultepec #sonora128 1 1850 mexico city minerva cuevas may 20 – july 8, 2017 kurimanzutto, mexico city

paro general

until may 31, 2017 av. sonora 128, mexico city

march 25 – september 17, 2017 kunsten museum of modern art aalborg, denmark

akram zaatari double take: akram zaatari and the arab image foundation march 27 – september 3, 2017 national portrait gallery, london

+52 55 52 56 24 08 www.kurimanzutto.com info@ kurimanzutto.com

akram zaatari contra la fotografía. historia anotada de la arab image foundation april 7 – september 24, 2017 macba, barcelona

@kurimanzutto #kurimanzutto #kurimanzuttolibros 13th sharjah biennial tamawuj allora & calzadilla, mariana castillo deball, monika sosnowska march 12 – june 12, 2017 sharjah, united arab emirates

soil and stones, souls and songs haegue yang jimmie durham mariana castillo deball tarek atoui march 18 – june 11, 2017 para-site, hong kong

documenta 14 learning from athens alexandra bachzetsis, nairy baghramian athens: april 8 – july 17, 2017 kassel: june 10 – september 17, 2017

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adrián villar rojas the theater of disappearance the roof garden commission april 14 – october 29, 2017 the met fifth avenue, new york

57th international art exhibition, la biennale di venezia viva arte viva anri sala, gabriel orozco, leonor antunes life in the folds carlos amorales pavilion of mexico

abraham cruzvillegas the water trilogy 2: autodefensión microtonal obrera campesina estudiantil metabolista descalza april 21 – july 2, 2017 ginza maison hermès, tokyo

adrián villar rojas the theater of disappearance may 13 – august 27, 2017 kunsthaus bregenz, bregenz

adrián villar rojas the theater of disappearance june 1 – september 24, 2017 neon, national observatory of athens, athens

jimmie durham: at the center of the world june 22 – october 8, 2017 walker art center, minnneapolis

carlos amorales herramientas de trabajo july 26 – november 6, 2017 museo de arte moderno de medellín

skulptur projekte münster 2017 nairy baghramian june 10 – october 1, 2017 münster

may 13 – november 26, 2017 arsenale, venice

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Zach Harris “Glass Guillotine”, 2016-17. Carved wood, water-based paint, ink. 157.5 × 108 cm / 62 × 42 1/2 in

N EW YOR K

PAR I S

HONG KONG

S EOU L

TOKYO

13 0 O R C HAR D STR E ET

76 R U E D E TU R E N N E

50 C O N NAU G HT R OAD

5 PALPAN- G I L

P I R AM I D E B U I LD I N G

LOWE R EAST S I D E

MAR AI S

C E NTR AL

JONGNO-GU

6-6-9 R O P PO N G I, M I NATO -K U

IVÁN AR G OTE

ZACH HAR R I S

TATIANA TR OUVÉ

TH I LO H E I N Z MAN N

PI E R R E S OU LAG E S

“LA VE N GAN ZA D E L AM OR”

“PU R PLE CLOU D”

“H OU S E OF LEAVE S”

“WE, R IVE R S & M OU NTAI N S”

7 J U N E - 19 AU G UST

TH R O U G H 11 J U N E

18 MAY - 29 J U LY

TH R O U G H 17 MAY

TH R O U G H 18 MAY

XU Z H E N

LE E S E U N G-J I O

DAN I E L AR S HAM

“CIVI LI ZATI ON ITE RATI ON”

“N U CLE U S”

“CRYSTAL TOYS”

18 MAY - 29 J U LY

26 MAY - 8 J U LY

25 MAY - 8 J U LY

CLAU D E R UTAU LT 26 MAY - 8 J U LY

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JOSÉ PEDRO CROFT ArtBasel June 15 - 18 Hall 2.1 - Booth P7

57th Venice Biennale · Villa Hériot Official Portuguese Representation

G A L E R Í A H E L G A D E A LV E A R Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid · 34 91 468 05 06 · www.helgadealvear.com

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L AU REN LU LOFF MARCH 17 - MAY 14, 2016 GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON GENEVA

CL AUDE VIALL AT www.bernardceysson.com

MAJOR WORKS : 1967 - 2017

MAY 6 - JULY 15, 2017 Opening reception : Saturday 6 May, 6 - 8 pm

Ceysson & Bénétière 9 5 6 M a d i s o n A v e , N e w Yo r k www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

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JANAINA TSCHÄPE , UNTERIRDISCH AUCH DU, 2017

JANAINA TSCHÄPE IVAN ANDERSEN 21/04–17/06/17 UNTERIRDISCH AUCH DU

LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE

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INTUITION

May 13 – November 26, 2017 Palazzo Fortuny, Venice Organized by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation www.intuition.art

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ArtReview vol 69 no 4 May 2017

cr Last month the opening of Documenta 14 in Athens; this month the opening of the Venice Biennale; next month Skulptur Projekte Münster and the second part of Documenta, in its homebase of Kassel. Amazing! In a world that’s falling apart, the artworld is getting it together! Looking at things, talking about things, from every corner of the globe. Naturally, for those with a travel budget, these are exciting times. For those without one… well, there’s ArtReview, social media and the Internet to keep the conversation afloat. Much as all this is incredibly exciting, it’s hard too not to feel a certain jadedness (already) when looking at this plague of big, traditional European art festivals, and the attendant booking numbers for bizarre budget airlines looming in the diary. Particularly if you’re a magazine committed to a postglobalisation world and the particularities and nuances (albeit affected by globalisation and its economics) of particular places and particular art scenes. Of course, contemporary artists and curators lavish inordinate amounts of time and energy in an attempt to give each one of these festivals a different, novel or ultimately ‘contemporary’ spin – some sort of crushing urgency – and then expect magazines like ArtReview to do the same. The festival mediates the artwork and the media mediate the festival. How else would you know what to think? And who would want to know about a new celebration of art that was exactly the same as the last one? Crikey! It is just like putting out a monthly magazine. Except on a biennial, quinquennial or decennial basis. All of which might make you think about the nature of contemporaneity and the velocity of change in art,

Good luck

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and perhaps more importantly, how those thoughts relate to contemporaneity and velocity in lived life. ArtReview can never make up its mind as to whether it measures the first in relation to the second or whether the entire thing is the other way round. Perhaps the difference is vocational: the art historian versus the futurologist. Though, naturally, the best position is both. In any case, what ArtReview wanted to say is that it comes out nine times a year because there is always an exhibition, performance or other presentation of art worth commenting on. And also because, if it purports to cover such events around the world, it’s impossible to cram everything into a single issue. At least in a way that ArtReview likes to describe as ‘responsible’. Events such as the Venice Biennale enable it to take a more global view on art. To look at trends, sometimes movements even, and the similarities and differences between the approach of one artist and the next. This issue then features profiles of Mark Bradford, Geoffrey Farmer and Samson Young, representing the us, Canada and Hong Kong respectively at this year’s Biennale. Of course, in traditional magazine format, each profile is presented as being about a separate ‘thing’. But ultimately ArtReview wanted to consider three artists, who in different ways reflect on sociability and social engagement as tools in art, deflecting the general setup of the national pavilions at the Biennale, which are geared to promoting staggering works of individual genius. Not that works involving a degree of social engagement can’t be that too. On a sadder note, ArtReview has learned of the death of regular contributor Claire Rigby. Claire’s engagement with her adopted city of São Paulo was passionate, in-depth and heartfelt – she knew that while global ideas and international networks were important, the real social value of art often comes down to is its ability to arrest the viewer, galvanise action and build a local community. Our thoughts are with her partner, Jorge, and the rest of her family. ArtReview

These boots are made for walking

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Leo Villareal 537 West 24th Street, New York May 4 – June 17, 2017

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ek Ficz of May c n Fere o 31st t 8th

Car 12a l Kos t W1S Savi yál l e kos 3PQ Lon Row tya d l.c om on

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Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 37

Mary the Mother of God on ld50 Gallery and Damien Hirst Interview by Matthew Collings 52

Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth Maria Lind 47

page 38 Geta Brătescu, Vestiges (Vestigii), 1978, textile collage on paper. Courtesy Luisa Malzoni Strina Collection

May 2017

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Art Featured

Mark Bradford by Jonathan Griffin 68

Marion Baruch by Martin Herbert 80

Geoffrey Farmer by Craig Burnett 76

Samson Young by Mark Rappolt 88

page 76 Geoffrey Farmer, Notes for Strangers (detail), 1989/1990, small typewriter, six typewritten notes on paper, transfer ticket, shelf with Plexiglass top, notes 15 × 9 cm (each). Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver

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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Untitled, 1982 Estimate upon request

Contemporary Art Evening Auction New York 18 May 2017

Viewing 5 – 18 May 1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 ENQUIRIES +1 212 606 7254 SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARY © 2017 THE ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT / ADAGP, PARIS / ARS, NEW YORK SOTHEBY’S, INC. LICENSE NO. 1216058. © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2017

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DOWNLOAD SOTHEBY’S APP FOLLOW US @SOTHEBYS

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions 102 Richard Mosse, by Ben Eastham Jesse Darling, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Michael Sailstorfer, by John Quin Ned Vena, by Mark Prince Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, by Mike Watson Colori: Emotions of Color in Art, by Hettie Judah boca – Biennial of Contemporary Arts, by Justin Jaeckle Mihai Olos, by Phoebe Blatton Andrea Büttner, by Aoife Rosenmeyer These Rotten Words, by Lizzie Lloyd Franki Raffles, by Susannah Thompson Maeve Brennan, by Louise Darblay Knut Henrik Henriksen, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Jaki Irvine, by Alice Hattrick Irma Blank, by Gabriel Coxhead Ewa Axelrad, by Fi Churchman Would You Rather…, by Lindsay Preston Zappas Derya Akay, by Andrew Berardini Juan Antonio Olivares, by Oliver Basciano Dara Friedman, by Brienne Walsh Sue Williams, by Ashton Cooper

Korakrit Arunanondchai, by Jeppe Ugelvig Wong Kit Yi, by Owen Duffy Jennie Jieun Lee, by Jennifer S. Li Alexandre da Cunha, by Nathalia Lavigne art life 130 New York, by Sam Korman books 136 Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art, by Marcus Verhagen The Debutante and Other Stories, by Leonora Carrington Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life, by Nato Thompson One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, by Terry Smith the strip 142 a curator writes 146

page 120 Ewa Axelrad, satis, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and The Ryder Projects, London

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ANTON HENNING 18 May - 24 June 2017

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Samson Young

Hong Kong in Venice 13 May – 26 Nov 2017 Curated by Ying Kwok www.venicebiennale.hk

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Co-presented by M+, West Kowloon Cultural District & Hong Kong Arts Development Council Coordinator in Venice: PDG Arte Communications www.artecommunications.com

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Art Previewed

And he will wander off into a labyrinth of words from which nothing will extricate him but the end of your endurance 35

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Art Review 2 (23,5 x 30 cm).qxp_Layout 1 10/04/17 17:52 Page 1

REPRESENTAÇÃO OFICIAL PORTUGUESA OFFICIAL PORTUGUESE REPRESENTATION 13.05 — 26.11.2017 VILLA HÉRIOT, CALLE MICHELANGELO, 54P GIUDECCA, VENICE CURADOR/CURATOR JOÃO PINHARANDA

JOSÉ PEDRO CROFT / MEDIDA INCERTA UNCERTAIN MEASURE /

Sponsors Fundação edp Fundação Millennium bcp Lusitania Seguros OTIIMA Dimpomar – Rochas Portuguesas, Lda. Fundación Helga de Alvear Fundação Carmona e Costa Institutional Partners Comune di Venezia Embaixada de Portugal em Itália Communication Support RTP – Rádio e Televisão de Portugal Strategic Partners TAP Portugal AICEP – Portugal Global Production Support Câmara Municipal de Lisboa Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos Catalogue Sponsor MDS – Global Insurance and Risk Consultants

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Previewed 57th Venice Biennale various venues 13 May – 26 November

Maria Farrar Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin 24 May – 1 July

Heather Rasmussen Acme, Los Angeles 13 May – 10 June

Geta Brătescu Camden Arts Centre, London through 18 June

Rachel Whiteread Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome 26 May – 29 July

Win McCarthy Silberkuppe, Berlin through 24 June

Ding Yi Timothy Taylor, London 19 May – 24 June

Bruno Gironcoli Clearing, Brussels through 15 July

Shara Hughes Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York through 25 June

Simone Fattal Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris through 17 June

8 Heather Rasmussen, Untitled (Three legs in mirror with towel, yellow), 2016, pigment print, 61 × 81 cm. Courtesy the artist and Acme, Los Angeles

May 2017

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Let’s say you’ve agreed to direct the 57th 1 Venice Biennale, and your stint coincides with a pivot point in modern history. Do you go all-out topical, making the 122-year-old event an exhibition-as-newspaper? Then you’re not Christine Macel. Viva Arte Viva, the title the Centre Pompidou’s chief curator has chosen, positions art as a humanist category, outlasting the moment; ‘the last bastion’, she’s said, against individualism and indifference. Accordingly, her international exhibition is not a showy barometer of the new. Though 103 of its 120 artists have apparently never before exhibited in the Biennale, the show is – she told a blogger recently – ‘the fruit of my research since 1995’. Partly a rebuke to short memories, it will offer a ‘connected wandering’, in nine professed chapters (including a ‘Pavilion of Artists and Books’ and a ‘Pavilion of Time and Infinity’), involving artists ranging from the missing-and-presumed-dead Bas Jan Ader to the Chinese conceptualist Tao Zhou; from

Ceaus,escu’s regime, Brătescu focused on the the octogenarian Giorgio Griffa to the barelystudio as a space for self-preservation and the thirty Rachel Rose; from the excellently named, protection of identity: see her filmed perfortransgenerational, relatively sub rosa Mondrian mance Atelierul (The Studio, 1978), in which Fan Club – David Medalla and Adam Nankervis she defines the studio with gestures even – to the ubiquitous Olafur Eliasson. (That artists and not themes are the heartbeat of Macel’s show as it circumscribes her movements. Within was reaffirmed by the announcement of Open her atelier’s confines, and while focusing on Table, a weekly lunch-with-an-exhibiting-artist redefining ‘the line’, she exhibited a pointedly programme.) The national pavilions, of course, expansive range. She moved, specifically, from will be as directly topical as they like: with classicist drawings of hands to textile works Bosnia and Herzegovina’s group show University – a self-defined style of ‘drawing with a sewing of Disaster, Ireland’s Jesse Jones solo Tremble machine’ in which she sometimes used materials Tremble, Latvia’s What Can Go Wrong and the bequeathed by her mother, and explored the sinking Polynesian island of Tuvalu’s Climate Greek myth of Medea, the mother who killed Canary, you won’t forget it’s 2017. her children after her husband betrayed her – The Romanian Pavilion will be dedicated to to, later, collage works, or ‘drawing with scissors’. In her London show, the approach taken concern2 Geta Brătescu, ninety-year-old former linchpin of the East European avant-garde, who previing Brătescu’s work is discernible in the title ously showed in Venice four years ago and before – The Studio, A Tireless, Ongoing Space. that 53 years earlier. Hot property these days, Across London, China. Since the mid-1980s she also has a solo exhibition at London’s 3 Ding Yi has restricted himself too, limiting his Camden Arts Centre. While working under painterly vocabulary to miniature ×’s and +’s,

1 Giorgio Griffa, Canone aureo 868, 2016, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Giulio Caresio. © Archivio Giorgio Griffa. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Roma

2 Geta Brătescu, Lady Oliver in her travelling costume, 1980–2012, b/w photograph. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, and Ivan Gallery, Bucharest

3 Ding Yi, Appearance of Crosses 2016–9, 2016, mixed media on basswood, 240 × 240 cm. Courtesy Timothy Taylor, London

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4 Maria Farrar, Saving my mum and dad from drowning in the Shimonoseki Straits, 2017, 0il on linen, 180 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin

5 Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Double Door), 2016, resin, 250 × 124 × 28 cm. Courtesy Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome

for various reasons: he worked early on for a printing company, and the cross is a printer’s mark used to divide a surface; he didn’t want visible influence from either classical Chinese art or Western Modernism; and, to judge from his changeable canvases, he sought to show just how much can be done with such unpromising ingredients. Over the decades Ding’s paintings have shifted from winking grids recalling Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–3; he self-confessedly didn’t get Modernism out of his system after all) to something like psychedelic tartan; from hot interlocking patterns recalling the bright artificial light of his home city, Shanghai, to – lately – ominous, dark abstractions that look like aerial drone-views of cities at night, data streams or unknowable diagrams, all composed of tiny iterations of his signature blank glyphs. One of China’s most marketable painters, Ding is thus also perhaps one of its most philosophical. Whatever

Saving my mum and dad from drowning in the aesthetic arises – whether the modernising face Shimonoseki Straits (2017), which zooms in of China’s cities, or views for computers rather on wavy, inky-blue Japanese waters, lifebelts than people – crosses, rearranged, can translate and convey it. Here, he has his first solo show and limbs, and feels at once tumultuous in the uk’s capital, focusing on recent work. and humorous, improvised and right. We can safely assume Rachel Whiteread A comparable synthesis of East/West 5 hasn’t seen Farrar’s work, as in a recent news4 influences animates the paintings of Maria paper interview the British artist said she doesn’t Farrar, who was born in the Philippines, look at new art (but even so, she’s certain it’s educated in Japan, art-schooled in the uk and all rubbish). Always more inclined to Mittelis now based in London. Her markmaking, european gravitas than her yba peers, Whiteread as the Mother’s Tankstation exhibition straits diverts the saved time into her work, and if the demonstrates, sits midway between Japanese latter has long dealt with traces of history on all calligraphy and the expressive brushwork of scales, that makes Rome a logical, if not too logmodernist painting post-Manet – the stroke ical, site. Whiteread has been casting doors there, not just as tool for depiction but autonomous alchemising them into bluish clear-resin pseudothing-in-itself. From what we hear, Farrar paints paintings propped fragilely against the wall. Zen calligrapher-style, pausing lengthily over While doors turn transparent, windows are effeca mark and deciding what it might portend tively smoked, figuring – in examples we’ve before diving in and adding to it. The results, seen – as solid blocks of deep blue or rust-brown pointedly out of time and place, nevertheless slant autobiographical; as see, for example, resin. Elsewhere she branches out into

May 2017

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6 Bruno Gironcoli, One Body, Two Souls, 2001, aluminium, 220 × 230 × 100 cm, edition 3/3. © Rüdiger Lubricht / Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen

7 Simone Fattal, Le Mont Sannine, 1979, oil on canvas, 114 × 145 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris

‘sculptural drawings’, involving papier-mâché and gold leaf, and looking like unfolded packaging coaxed into abstract compositions somewhere between Richard Tuttle and James Lee Byars; jokes about ‘casting aside’ aren’t applicable. ‘Sculpture based on everyday objects’ is a category commodious enough that both 6 Whiteread and Bruno Gironcoli can inhabit it. That’s despite the former’s artworks looking, well, how they do, and those of the Austrian modernist – who first trained as a fine metalworker, emerged as an artist in the mid-1960s and died in 2010 – being complex agglomerations of familiar things, scaled up and fused in defamiliarising ways, unified by monochromatic coatings of metallic paint. If his art first looked futuristic and later retro-futuristic, when contextualised in a forward-thinking gallery like New York/Brussels space Clearing, it appears outside of time, its idiosyncratic

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strangeness a testament to explicatory contexts falling away. (Admittedly the artist always fell voluntarily between the cracks, his practice owing something to surrealist-era Giacometti and something else to Pop.) Either way, Gironcoli now looks new and confounding again, and surely he’d approve of that. A similar chic gallery/older artist approach is underway at Balice Hertling, which has been 7 rewardingly exhibiting Simone Fattal awhile. The Damascus-born artist, who has lived in France, Lebanon – leaving in 1980, five years after civil war broke out – and California, and now resides again in Paris, has worked extensively in the very hands-on materials of clay and collage. Her ceramics – heavy-legged and small-headed standing figures, interacting or lonesome; buildings, barred windows, animals – withhold the worldly specificity that bursts out in her collages, fashioned from newspapers and magazines, and punchily assembling bits

of antiquity, hot splashes of colour, Arabic scripts and images of Fattal herself in a kind of ongoing autobiography, testament to being here, to dailiness. Before she left Lebanon, though, she made paintings, and it’s these that the current show focuses on. Their date-range stretching through the 1970s, they’re variously glowing and wispy landscapes, sometimes sliding into full abstraction but often halfway between a thing and a feeling about it. A year before war begins, Fattal’s imagery becomes bleached out, and by Le Mont Sannine (1979) there’s almost nothing left: just pale pinkish streaks suggesting mountains in a mottled field of off-white. 8 The body is a repeated focus in Heather Rasmussen’s work, and unsurprisingly so, since the artist, who operates mostly in photography, video and sculpture, is also apparently a dancer. Her Untitled series of photographs (2013–), sitting somewhere between refracted sculpture and still life, and concerned with

ArtReview

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movement and deterioration, includes casts of featuring some homespun, loosely Robert Gober-ish sculptures, came complete with her own lightly bloodied feet and uses fruits and a press-release poem. Two years later, for his vegetables as limbic stand-ins. Such preoccupations continue in her new work, which has debut show in New York, the thirty-one-yearold Brooklyn-born artist supplied a contextual the appealing crispness and poise of editorial screed about trying to draw his own face, an photography but is contrarily full of jammed accompaniment to a seductive yet elusive show signals. Expect cleanly unhinged choreographies revolving around latex casts (with handwritten of bare limbs concealed and multiplied by sheets angst-laden annotations, eg the one-worder of mirror, plus the odd phallic gourd. In these ‘nausea’, and, yes, partial self-portraits) and works, though, the Santa Ana-born artist is also making ‘recitations’ of ‘surreal and visceral’ wood, glass and steel constructions. For his third solo exhibition we’re primed to expect a series images by René Magritte, German-American of ‘new glass mask sculptures’, and looking artist Hans Breder and Hungarian artist/ performer/musician Ujj Zsuzsi. She’s figuratively forward, since on past form McCarthy can take inhabiting other artists’ bodies (and minds) a relatively stock subject – the unscratchable for a while, and, perhaps, continuing her latent itch of self-knowledge – and, via his grasp of unbuttoned aesthetics, make inquiring inwardproject of articulating that most fundamental, ness reverberate with intrigue. existential commonality – what it means to Third in this unofficial trilogy of ‘American live in a body – without being obvious about it. Win McCarthy could easily write his own artists sticking to one theme and getting 9 text concerning his show at Silberkuppe, and 10 something new out of it’, meanwhile, is Shara maybe will. A 2013 exhibition in Düsseldorf, Hughes, a kaleidoscopic figurative painter in

her mid-thirties. Part of a recent lineage that includes Katherine Bernhardt and Dana Schutz, in her exuberant, loosely handled interiors and landscapes – sometimes peopled, sometimes not – Hughes allies colours with Matissean heat to truncated narratives and overflowing detail work. Lately, she says, she’s ‘been thinking about the many ways in which one can view the same object, and how far one idea or one shape can be stretched, simply through how it is presented’; her new show accordingly runs variations on a fixed subject via a set of ‘inverted landscape’ paintings (plus some 15 drawings), in irradiated hues, where space seems to twist itself inside out. There’s some Paul Gauguin channelled here, but the closest cousin might be David Hockney’s latter-day landscapes in the Los Angeles canyons, and you can imagine that Hughes doesn’t care whether that’s cool or not, so assertively if sociably hermetic do her works appear. One title nails the prevailing mood: Comfortably Edgy. Martin Herbert

10 Shara Hughes, Soft Opening, 2017, oil, dye and acrylic on canvas, 152 × 132 cm. Photo: jsp Photography. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

9 Win McCarthy, Mister Production #2, 2017, print on paper. Courtesy Silberkuppe, Berlin

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CONTINUUM MAY 11TH – NOV 26TH, 2017

SUPPORTED BY

Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China

COMMISSIONER

China Arts & Entertainment Group (CAEG)

CONTRIBUTOR

Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum Beijing Times Art Museum

Arsenale-Magazzinodello Cisterne, Castello 2169/F-30122

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Ve n e z i a , I t a l y

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CURATOR Qiu Zhijie

ARTISTS

Wu Jian’an

Wang Tianwen Tang Nannan Yao Huifen

THE 57TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION – LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA PAVILION OF CHINA Arsenale-Magazzinodello Cisterne, Castello 2169/F-30122

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Points of View

The current Documenta, headed by curator Adam Szymczyk, is titled ‘Learning from Athens’. The Kassel-based quinquennial’s extension to the Greek capital opened in April, while the Kassel mainstay opens in June. It would be fair to say that Szymcyzk’s Athens experiment hasn’t been met with universal praise. Beyond the professional-artworlder complaints of a sprawling show that’s hard to navigate, bare-bones information accompanying works and little notice of who or what was in the show until days before, the rationale for the exhibition’s presence in Athens has itself been the object of much of the confusion and misgiving. After former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s early snipe, back in 2015, at the show’s ‘crisis tourism’, the impression that the relationship between Kassel and Athens mirrored the relationship between a creditor Germany and a debtor Greece has been hard to shift. That suspicion of a ‘colonial’ relationship hasn’t been helped by the reportedly aloof and secretive attitude of the organising team when dealing with members of the city’s art scene. But perhaps that impression of a ‘colonial’ attitude isn’t just the unfortunate symbolic fallout of a wealthy Euro-north-based art event deigning to rock up in solidarity with the impoverished peoples of the Euro-south. It’s more straightforwardly down to the nature of any big art event headed by a star curator. Biennials and quinquennials aren’t democracies, they’re benign dictatorships; whatever Szymczyk’s intention in pushing the issue of art’s pretensions to social effect to the fore by displacing Documenta from its enclave in boring, comfortable Kassel, and regardless of Documenta’s rhetoric concerning a world riven by political fragmentation, migration crises and failure of democracy, Documenta remains just another curator-authored megashow. And while its rubric ‘learning from Athens’ sounds equitable and collaborative, it inevitably runs into the limits of the agendas its curators want to pursue, its own eccentric mix of political and theoretical tendencies currently occupying the artworld’s curatorial elites; tendencies that, in Documenta

documenta against democracy J.J. Charlesworth on the issue about which the arts festival offers no comment 14’s case, are largely indifferent to the conditions that its Greek hosts currently endure. Szymczyk’s Documenta is brimful of political opinions: so, for example, the agenda for the forthcoming programme of talks, organised by trans activist Paul B. Preciado, asserts apocalyptically that ‘the planet is going through a process of “counter-reform” that seeks to reinstall white-masculine supremacy and to undo the democratic achievements that the workers’ movements, the anti-colonial, indigenous, ecologist, feminist, sexual liberation, and anti-psychiatric movements have struggled to grant during the last two centuries’.

Stencil in the Omonoia district of Athens, 2016. The message is signed by ‘i8ageneis’, which in Greek means ‘The Indigenous’. Licensed under Creative Commons: aestheticsofcrisis

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These are the recognisable currencies of discourse that preoccupy identitarian radicals in and around the artworld; intersectionalist and minoritarian, they have little to say to the majority of Greeks who are faced with the usurpation of their democracy by outside forces. But representative democracy seems of little interest to Documenta’s programmers – in an article titled ‘The Stateless Exhibition’ Preciado writes in vague and generalising terms about ‘a war of the ruling classes against the world population, a war of global capitalism against life, a war of nations and ideologies against bodies and immense minorities’. He goes on, with cool disdain, to state that ‘the economic and political sacrifices to which Greece has been subject since 2008 are simply the beginning of a broader process of the destitution of democracy extending throughout Europe’. Preciado quickly turns to blame the ‘ultra-conservative turns in Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey, the coming to power of Trump, Brexit...’ This is strange, to say the least, since the one force which has destituted democracy in Greece is, after all, the eu – an institution with its own severe democratic deficit, desperate to hold on to its systems of power even while citizens across the continent regularly express their antipathy towards the eu ‘project’. Yet in all the coverage of Documenta, and its own prolific pronouncements and publications, almost nothing has been said of the Union, that vehicle defending the interests of the ‘ruling elite’ against those of the Greek people. That particular elephant in the room of Documenta should be evidence enough that ‘large international exhibitions’ are not good places to pretend to do politics, since the autocracy of such institutions is by definition incapable of accommodating the democratic participation of local art scenes, artists or publics, of truly representing the experiences of those they claim to engage with. If Documenta in Athens has generated resentment and confusion, it might be precisely because the one single issue most affecting Athens today is the one thing about which Documenta refuses to speak.

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‘Copper, iron and potassium aluminium sulfate growths on deep sea coral, fibre-optic cables in epoxy with patinated copper and plant pigments,’ reads the caption. It pertains to Shelf 1, a component of Ane Graff’s work What Oscillates (2017), which was on view as part of the group show Myths of the Marble at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (hok) in Oslo earlier this year. Four additional captions, accompanying four shelves, describe similar abundances of metals and minerals, many of which are components of the screenbased devices with and through which we go about our daily lives. Indeed, our smartphones contain at least 70 different elements, and it is precisely this material side of what is generally considered the immaterial virtual and digital sphere that interests Graff: from the reactions that occur when these materials are put into contact with one another, to the way in which tactility and the act of touching is at the core of the digital today. Graff’s captions, like doors in Narnia, take us to another place. Each component of the work itself resonates with potential: with possible reactions and transformations,

molecular dramas Exploring touch in the virtual and the material, a Norwegian artist’s chemistry experiments capture Maria Lind’s heart and mind

depending on how it is connected to other components. Copper, integral to our communications infrastructure, is the most important material in this work. Malleable and conductive, it features in several different states, from crystal to fibre-optic tube to woven ribbon. The five shelves of What Oscillates rest on a suspended spindly structure made of steel and aluminium, displaying what look like five chemical experiments, each shimmering in silver and blue. While taking a close look at the work in hok’s somewhat James Bond-like building, I think of Donna Haraway’s version of ‘material semiotics’. Her methods suggest a way of making new combinations and collaborations, not just becoming something else, but ‘becoming-with’ – an idealistic way of dealing with the dilemma of individuals knowing either too much or too little. In her book Staying with the Trouble (2016), Haraway toys with the term sympoiesis as an extension and alternative to autopoiesis: ‘making-with’ rather than a (self-satisfied) self-making. Graff seems to try some of the making-with materially, by involving herself and various

Ane Graff, What Oscillates (detail), 2017, mixed media, 350 × 250 × 130 cm

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substances in a range of processes with mostly inorganic materials. As small stages for molecular dramas, Graff’s shelves demand close inspection. The substances have had concrete encounters and altered each other, changing shape or colour, hardening and crystallising. They have been in touch, and through this process have changed identity. At the same time, they are also touched by humans, who restlessly finger their phones without knowing much about the materiality behind the screen. Although the term ‘digital’ is etymologically rooted in digitus, Latin for finger, you are not allowed to touch Graff’s sculptural microperformance. I have a hard time keeping my fingers away. The fluidity of materials and how they interact returned in a new series of works by the artist titled Mattering Waves (2017), which was on view during the Bergen-based Entrée gallery’s guest appearance at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York this past April. There was a lot of blue and silver here, too. Seven Plexiglas trays were spread out on the floor, requiring you to kneel down to catch the details. While the viewer’s posture is thus more that of an archaeologist or a criminal investigator than the stereotypical gallery visitor, the trays themselves are reminiscent of both a chemical laboratory and the display cases of a jewellery shop. Mass-produced objects

like glass bottles, silk gloves and a T-shirt neckband are absorbed by chemical processes, radically altered and turned into unexpected shapes and substances, appearing like a necklace or a giant snakeskin. The caption for the third tray in Mattering Waves reads, ‘Epoxy and pigment covered hand-blown glass vessel filled with a mixture of polymer, dust, soil and human dna, gallium, epoxy with mixed plant material, copper powder and synthetic pigments, Plexiglas and mdf base’. Here the human presence is integral to the work. Polymer literally exemplifies how things can be combined: a large molecule made up of smaller molecules, for example Styrofoam or dna; it’s a combination that can be both synthetic and natural. Again the work is highly tangible, and it evokes the enchantment of science. What Oscillates and Mattering Waves are both seductively beautiful to the eye. Simultaneously, they are much more than that. They perform ‘respons-ability’, as Haraway would describe it, seeking reactions and orchestrating unexpected encounters, concretely and materially.

top Ane Graff, Mattering Waves (3), 2017, mixed media, 31 × 49 × 62 cm. Photo: Paula Abreu above Ane Graff, What Oscillates, 2017, mixed media, 350 × 250 × 130 cm all images Courtesy the artist

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秦 Qin 琦 Qi

SOLO EXHIBITION OF Q IN Q I

2017.05.27 - 2017.07.23 策展人：崔灿灿

CURATOR: Cui Cancan

开幕 OPENING 2017.05.27 16:00

北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路 2 号 798 艺术区唐人北京第一空间与第二空间 The first and the second space of Tang Contemporary Art Beijing， Gate No.2, 798 Factory, Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing www.tangcontemporary.com

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info@tangcontemporary.com

+86 10 59789610

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from May 6th 2017

MAXXI will amaze you once again MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo via Guido Reni, 4A, Roma www.fondazionemaxxi.it

founding members

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 55

Mary the Mother of God on ld50 and Damien Hirst Interview by

Matthew Collings

Mary emerged as a figure in the earliest decades of Christianity. She has appeared to many believers over the centuries. In 2004 a ten-year-old slice of toast with Mary’s image miraculously imprinted on it was auctioned on eBay for $28,000. The following is a recording of a rare manifestation of the Virgin to an atheist.

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artreview Do you think modern art and Modernism have neglected your image? mary the mother of god You make it sound a tragedy, but it doesn’t matter to the meanings associated with Marian veneration that images of me should be new. An individual can have faith regardless of whether or not others have it, or whether there’s a global manufacturing industry devoted to producing iconic Marys. There aren’t many pictures of me in high art now, it’s true. Although one does come to mind: Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. ar Is it religious? mtmog It refers to religious ideas but doesn’t pretend to be a manifestation of one or a devotional object. But then it isn’t an obscenity either. At least, its obscene aspect isn’t its only meaning. ar How would you describe it? mtmog It’s over 20 years old now. You see a black Holy Virgin in a robe, drawn fast in felt pen, with a big exposed breast made of elephant shit, and all around it are little circles that, if you peer into them, turn out to be black bottoms from porno magazines, showing the ass and vagina. ar Do you remember the row about it? mtmog Yes. The painting was controversial following a global touring show in which it featured. It was damaged and then repaired during its period of display in New York’s Brooklyn Museum in 1999: a seventy-two-yearold vandal smeared it with white paint: a significant colour choice, in my opinion. What had happened was the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights declared that the painting was offensive. Judging from a photo in the show’s catalogue drawn to his attention, the league’s president, William A. Donohue, issued a statement saying people should picket the museum. Then New York mayor Rudi Giuliani called the painting ‘sick’, and Cardinal O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, said that the show in general was an attack on religion. It’s interesting that the

row was geared, at least in its ostensible form, to blasphemy when it was really about race as much as religion. It’s not just that the iconic figure is decorated with porn and shit but also that she’s racially transposed from ideal white to unavoidable black. ar What would you say the meaning really is? mtmog A comment on iconic power that actually possesses iconic power, plus it’s a satire on the role of women in society. I think it’s wrong to say that presenting a picture of me adorned with crotch shots amounts only to an attempt to grab attention. I once read an article by an art historian that claimed this. ar What’s wrong with that as a view? mtmog It’s too limited. The work’s painterly treatment connects it to Modernism. A painting by Manet, for example, doesn’t say: ‘Here’s a chunk of reality I saw that I’ve recorded as a depiction’. Instead its statement is: ‘This is reality’. Manet presents his expression of reality as a complex totality through the event he pictures, which he has constructed: a particular bar, a barmaid and a man meeting her blank stare. But painting generally is also a kind of event through which Manet shows

“I’m not against hipster coffee, I really appreciate it, but I agree hipster Nazis can fuck off. Once Christ was manifested in my womb, I had a radically different destiny to the generality of mankind, so I can help with certain issues, but it’s not really my area to pronounce on politics. If it were, my views would be pretty ordinary. Not informed by deep knowledge or enquiry. So I would probably say anything can be expressed, and then it’s up for debate: anyone can object to it. It’s in that sense that I’m on the side of the demonstrators”

us reality – because the painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, is such a vivid commentary on the possibilities for depiction and expression in painting. ar And Ofili is like that? mtmog If you think of the basic elements already described, and then all the controlled, playful layering of space that Ofili typically went in for in those days – he exploits the transparent properties of certain mediums, and linear patterning; decorative glitter and rhythmic pacing of accents also all play a part – then yes, he is like Manet. He presents a painting of a contradiction, but he is content not to tell his audience ‘what side they should come down on’, as this historian demanded he should, with great disdain for the painting’s ambiguity. ar As if Manet couldn’t be charged with the same refusal? mtmog Exactly. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is Manet’s own obscene Madonna. ar Damien Hirst went a bit religious, didn’t he, when he went off drink and drugs? Did you welcome him into the fold? mtmog Hirst is no more a sinner than anyone else. God welcomes them all. Maybe you think drugs are sinful? Or Hirst’s art is sinful? Sin is much more complex than that. ar Can you manifest yourself anywhere? Did you go to Hirst’s private view in Venice in April? mtmog Yes. The show – which is very good – might be thought to be covering every base of art. In fact the ostensible base is classical or antique, although it’s true that references to lots of postmodern and modern artists are gathered in as well – but the classical stuff seems to be the sign he’s interested in getting across. He seems to see that most people do read art as signs, whatever the true nature of the art may be and regardless of whether it’s by Rembrandt or Duchamp. He knows he’s perceived as shallow, and to look at the meaning of that he explores its opposite: the deep. Deep art,

facing page Sassoferrato, The Virgin in Prayer, 1640–50, oil on canvas, 73 × 58 cm. © The National Gallery, London

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from the depths, the deep sea, the Freudian depths, depths of emotion: all the missing things in the sign ‘shallow’. Each object that results is transparently idiotic as an object, and he seems confidently in charge of its object-idiocy, which is why complaints in the press at the time about the objects’ shallowness were wrongheaded (and in fact shallow themselves – and lazy). But each object is full of signs, and the sign nature of each object – what the sign says – is a bit modified in your mind every time you encounter a few more of the objects that make up the whole group. I do think any collector buying an object from this show is buying nothing at all, really; hardly even a souvenir. In fact the collector is buying an object whose sign will be ‘What an idiot I am!’ when the object’s displayed in the collector’s private museum in Qatar, Beijing or la.

ar Critique is so complicated nowadays – were you on the side of demonstrators against the London gallery LD50 making itself a platform for white supremacist ideology? There were signs at the demo saying ‘Fuck off hipster Nazis’. Did you agree? mtmog Yes. I’m not against hipster coffee, I really appreciate it, but I agree hipster Nazis can fuck off. Once Christ was manifested

in my womb, I had a radically different destiny to the generality of mankind, so I can help with certain issues, but it’s not really my area to pronounce on politics. If it were, my views would be pretty ordinary. Not informed by deep knowledge or enquiry. So I would probably say anything can be expressed, and then it’s up for debate: anyone can object to it. It’s in that sense that I’m on the side of the demonstrators. ar What do you think about Lucia Diego, the architect who started that space in 2015, and was its director and owner? She said it was anti free-speech to demand the closure of the gallery. mtmog Well, it was enough that she engaged the guy that inspired and praised Breivik’s bombings and shootings in Norway to contribute to the gallery programme. I don’t think the definition of sin is stretched by that kind of thing. It’s quite understandable that people might shout at her.

ar You’re an icon of Western art; what do you think about Hirst’s presentation of women in that show?

ar Would you burn Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till?

mtmog My icon status is that of the mother. Artemis and many others precede me, no doubt back to the Stone Age. The difference with me is passivity and sorrow. The women in Hirst’s Venice show are many types but mostly dynamic, active, empowered creatures, often warrior maidens. However their power is a joke, since their jutting breasts and Brazilians only emphasise their meaning as sex toys for collectors. Hirst seems in control of the joke, as he is with all the other mockery and needling in the show.

mtmog I’m impressed by the originality of expression in artist Hannah Black’s letter calling for that. But the painting, too, is impressive. It’s quite untrue that it’s rubbish, as its attackers say in supporting Black. Or that it’s not one of her best, or that it’s an unfortunate choice of subject, as her defenders claim. Or even ‘not very good’, as you often hear, even though whoever’s stating it decries essentialism in Black’s letter, and supports free expression. The painting is not ‘not very good’; it is very good, as all her paintings tend to be. Black’s letter was not pretending to be stating provable propositions. It was a rhetorical mixture of theoretical ideas and jazzy subjectivity. White privilege isn’t even its only target. Privilege as such gets a few knocks. In the realm of art it could certainly do with a few.

ar Do you think the show is commentary or aesthetics? mtmog Certainly not aesthetics but a play of signs, and I think it’s great that he comes up with a museum critique that is pagan rather than Christian, not goody-goody moralising like institutional critique or relational aesthetics.

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ar What was good about the painting? And how do you assess the success or otherwise of the way the Whitney dealt with the row? Did you read the interview with one of the curators on the Artnews site? mtmog The colour was good, the organisation and the dissolve from representation to abstraction: the way it left the whole thing quite ambiguous. Yes, I read that interview, and the further I got with it, fighting back the yawns, the more I felt the point could be seen of the call for the painting’s actual destruction, as it stops the death-by-blandness of the curatorial conversation – in fact, Black’s call for destruction is actually a health aid for art. ar I’m lost now – is the Mother of God talking, or is it Matthew Collings? mtmog Well, you should know, since you are Matthew Collings. ar I often forget. I think it’s because they make so little of it in the format for these interviews. mtmog Well, who are you now?

ar Belief in the incarnation of God in the Son through you? mtmog Yes, such a belief is the basis for calling me the Mother of God. ar Are there any artists you venerate? I know I don’t. It’s a ridiculous idea. But I often post on Facebook, and I see people there worshipping artists and saying they love them, they love Philip Guston or Cy Twombly or whoever. mtmog The language of a five-year-old… ar Exactly. And now I see established critics my age are doing it. There was one the other day posting Rembrandt’s portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels and saying he loved it. On the thread someone else ‘loved’ the life behind the eyes, and this critic went along with it, replying: ‘And he was in love at the time’. mtmog Oh, that kind of thing makes me so exasperated. A painting doesn’t appear to be tender or full of love because the painter and the model love each other. ar It’s because of successfully constructed illusions, right?

ar Matthew Collings, I guess. mtmog Are you religious? ar No, I’m asking you – you’re religious. I mean you’re a sort of religion. mtmog Not really, I’m part of religion, or one of them: the Christian religion. But that’s already very fragmented. I’m part of it to different degrees in the different fragments. Protestants don’t even think I’m all that important. They concede I’m the Mother of God. ar That’s a lot. mtmog Yes, but they cut it down. They forbid veneration. It’s the main pillar of Protestantism, rejecting veneration of the saints, and I’m the saint above all others. ar When did the venerating start? mtmog No one knows, but it became dogma in 431 at the Council of Ephesus.

“My icon status is that of the mother. Artemis and many others precede me, no doubt back to the Stone Age. The difference with me is passivity and sorrow. The women in Hirst’s Venice show are many types but mostly dynamic, active, empowered creatures, often warrior maidens. However their power is a joke, since their jutting breasts and Brazilians only emphasise their meaning as sex toys for collectors. Hirst seems in control of the joke, as he is with all the other mockery and needling in the show”

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mtmog Of course: if the very success of the construction causes the viewer to overlook that there has been any painterly constructing at all, it’s forgivable. But only if the viewer isn’t involved in any analytical work: I mean, it’s not their job to do that. But it’s absolutely baffling as to what’s up with an art critic who can’t see what’s going on. ar I know! And then if I ever point this kind of thing out on Facebook, all these posts flood in saying: ‘Oh, you’re so analytical – I respond with my emotions!’ mtmog For God’s sake! Oh, sorry – I mean, goodness! It really is enough to cause a hernia. A critic has an emotional response the same as anyone else. But who cares? The difference with a critic is it’s a critic’s job not just to report that the critic had some emotions but also to analyse the reasons for it. ar Everyone has emotional responses to some degree to everything. mtmog And yes, paintings too evoke an emotional response. ar With paintings that have a high degree of illusion of the real world, often the emotional response is to the subject. The painter’s illusion has power, sure: to want to think about how that power works, what went into it, what the construction of it was – to see it in the painting and be intrigued by it – is not to deny the emotion provoked in the first place. mtmog Oh, I agree, it’s the opposite, it’s to respect it – you want to go into it and find out about it. ar So what do you think all this sentimentalism is about that doesn’t acknowledge that? mtmog It’s a signal about what kind of person you are. You’re saying you’re someone interested in culture. It’s about codes; you want to be seen as someone against consumer values. To say, ‘And Rembrandt really loved that woman’ is the equivalent of saying: ‘And of course he was passionate and sincere, too – as I am’. next issue Gramsci on the Venice Biennale

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Unbodied Objects Xooang Choi 2017.5.18 – 6.24 DOOSAN Gallery New York

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11.5 — 4.8 2017 Steina and Woody Vasulka bergcontemporary.is

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Klapparstígur 16 101 Reykjavík / Iceland

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22 APRIL - 13 AUGUST FREE ENTRY

HULL

FREUD, MUECK & TUNICK RON MUECK IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ARTIST ROOMS

SKIN explores how artists have responded to the body, and in turn how we see ourselves.

FERENS ART GALLERY Queen Victoria Square, Hull, HU1 3RA Tel: 01482 613902 www.hcandl.co.uk/ferens @HullFerens #FerensSkin #SeaofHull Facebook.com/HullMuseums @ferensartgallery Hull Museums

Ron Mueck, Spooning Couple 2005. ARTIST ROOMS National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Acquired jointly through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Art Fund 2008 © Ron Mueck

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LISBOA 18–21 MAIO 2017 Cordoaria Nacional

MADRID 21–25 FEBRERO 2018 Feria de Madrid

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Art Featured

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Mark Bradford That’s not gonna happen by Jonathan Griffin

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It was a stupid question anyway. Something about having success either. He dropped out twice, finally graduating in 1995, returning and opportunity and yet continuing to experiment, still taking immediately to follow up with an mfa. risks. Though he has made sculptures, videos and site-specific instal“When I decided to go to art school, hell or high water I was going lations, Mark Bradford was first celebrated, early in his career, for to be a subject,” he tells me. “Some people, God bless them, are born his panoramic, expressively exhausted collage-paintings made from with subjectivity. For some, racially, or for some genders, for some sanded strata of coloured paper, which were almost always under- classes, it’s easier. But that wasn’t me. I was born very sensitive, I was stood as reflecting the gritty streetscape of South Central Los kind of pretty, I had low self-esteem. You put all that together, you get Angeles. A long Los Angeles Times profile from 2006, a decade after in and out of a lot of cars.” he graduated from art school, describes him as a ‘hometown boy Bradford appears only very occasionally in the art that he has made good on the international art scene’. His first solo show at a made since the 1990s, and even then in disguise. In 2003 he made major commercial gallery was in 2001, at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, Practice, a video of himself awkwardly bouncing a basketball, wearing New York, sassily titled I Don’t Think You an la Lakers jersey and a billowing yellow Ready For This Jelly. Since then his work has and purple antebellum skirt. (He was climbed in value, shored up by solid instinever a basketball player, although strantutional support – a professional status gers always assume he is, especially when reflected this year in his representation of he travels first class: just one of the many prejudices from which success does not the United States at the Venice Biennale. “All that stuff just sounds like you protect him.) wanna make me an object,” Bradford tells More recently, Bradford recorded a me. “That’s not gonna happen. You’re not monologue inspired by the notoriously going to make me an object of fame, or homophobic standup routine captured make me an object of a hierarchical system. on Eddie Murphy’s early video Delirious (1983), which Bradford had witnessed I’ve already been an object. I’ve already been live. Spiderman (2015) is an audiowork that put on the stroll.” Even back in 2006, that LA Times article cautions its readers of unfolds in the gallery accompanied by canned laughter and subBradford’s ‘media-hyped professional mythology’. It remains an titled text on a black screen. Bradford’s body is absent, which sets his unavoidable part of any profile on his work, as is reference to his voice free: he is at once mimicking the delivery of Murphy and all striking physical stature. You can see why he’s tired of being an object. black standup comics, delivering an updated (but still unfunny) So, with apologies: Bradford grew up in the West Adams neighbour- monologue in a tone also partly inspired by a female friend of the hood of Los Angeles, south of the 10 Freeway, in a once-grand mansion artist’s, who had sat next to him in the audience at the original perforturned into a boarding house for mainly African-American families. mance. Bradford remembers hearing Murphy talking about his fear He is the only son of a single mother who of ‘faggots’ at a time when gays throughran a hair salon where he hung out and out America were dying, seeing people occasionally worked. When he was eleven laughing uproariously, and thinking:‘Uh his mother decided to move out of the oh. This is not going to go well.’ increasingly troubled neighbourhood to From the outset, Bradford’s abstracSanta Monica, near the beach, which was tions compressed representations of both almost exclusively white. the macro and the micro – a satellite’s view At fifteen, after a dramatic growth spurt, of the urban grid, as in Black Venus (2005), for example, made from the collaged Bradford tells me his body “became a thing. detritus of hair-styling endpapers and It has always been a thing, it will always be a thing.” Although he was still only a boy, at posters for small businesses torn from a svelte 2m-plus, his childhood was behind South Central fences – but, increasingly, him. He began going to nightclubs, and microscopic cellular patterns and motifs dancing, and discovering his sexual identity as a gay man. Bradford have entered the work. aids, Bradford tells me, was too vast and turned twenty in 1981, when aids was taking hold in the gay commu- painful a subject for him to deal with until recently, when he showed nity but did not yet have a name. Owing to his striking appearance, he paintings such as Sample 1, 2 and 3 (all 2015), peppered with maligreceived a lot of attention from other men, which he found himself nant-looking spots, based on hiv-infected cells, at an exhibition at powerless to refuse. “I was way in over my head. I just couldn’t say the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, titled Scorched Earth (2015). no. Just hoping that I would not get sick. And the worst feeling was Paradoxically, the extreme closeness of the micro perspective funcknowing that I couldn’t say no. That I wanted to please them.” tions as another distancing mechanism, an abstraction that relieves the By the time he was nearly thirty, he says, viewer of the pain of apprehending horrifying above Practice (video stills), 2003, single-channel he realised he was too old for that life – subjects at 1:1 scale. For the artist, though, that video, 3 min, colour, sound “I didn’t want to be the last guy on the bar abstraction is an entry point. “I had to find a facing page Sample 3, 2015, mixed media stool” – and he decided to apply to CalArts. He way into all this stuff but through a non – quote on canvas, 161 × 123 cm hadn’t really made art up until that point and, unquote – real gaze. I’m not good at describing both © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser for a while, he didn’t make much at CalArts the real. I’m good at pointing to it in an emo& Wirth, London & Los Angeles

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top Art + Practice exterior, Los Angeles, 2017. Photo: Natalie Hon. Courtesy Art + Practice, Los Angeles above Rio Terà dei Pensieri Social Cooperative participant working in the kiosk at Campo S. Stefano, Venice, July 2016. Photo: Agata Gravante preceding pages Black Venus, 2005, mixed-media collage, 330 × 498 cm. Photo: Jason Dewey. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London & Los Angeles

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Mithra, 2008, plywood, shipping containers, steel, 2134 × 610 × 762 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London & Los Angeles

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tional way or an intense way.” The real, in Bradford’s work, is neverThe six-year project, titled Process Collettivo, follows the Art + theless fully present; the posters and endpapers are, in a sense, the Practice foundation that Bradford set up in 2014 with his partner, very fabric of the city, fragments from its economic margins through Allan DiCastro, and the philanthropist Eileen Harris Norton. which other more ephemeral or subjective realities are triangu- Based in Leimert Park, a middle-class, predominantly Africanlated. As such, Bradford owes much to the affichiste techniques of American neighbourhood where Bradford’s mother once ran her Nouveaux Réalistes such as Raymond Hains and Mimmo Rotella. In his salon and where he once had his studio, Art + Practice is both a ‘Déclaration constitutive du Nouveau Réalisme’ of 1960, the French support centre for youth transitioning out of foster care and an critic Pierre Restany wrote: ‘If man succeeds in reintegrating himself exhibition space that has hosted shows by Fred Eversley, Charles into the real, he further likens it to his own transcendence, which is Gaines and Alex Da Corte. emotion, feeling, and, in the end, poetry’. Bradford has spent his career reflecting on the vulnerability of the When, two years ago, Bradford was asked to represent the us in margins and the power of the centre. He began working on his Venice Venice, his first instinct was to decline. He did not know what to do presentation long before Donald Trump’s election in November 2016; he acknowledges his own position with the invitation. He got grumpy, he says, with people telling him how to be, what it “I know how to live in a dangerous of power – within certain sections of the artworld, at least – but admits he never meant, “people turning me into an object. world that doesn’t want me” imagined that he would be dragged back I don’t like that.” Beyond a survey of old and new paintings, video and poetry in the us Pavilion, the project to the margins by such an oppressively conservative administration. for which his contribution may well be remembered actually takes “But we’re here!” he says, defiantly. “And I know how to be here. place outside the walls of the Giardini, in the central Frari district. I know how to live in a dangerous world that doesn’t want me.” All Bradford has collaborated with the Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a self- of us, he says, must remember what it felt like to be the weirdo in the supporting collective run from inside two Venetian prisons with the room, before we found our tribe, when the room was violent. “That aim of rehabilitating prisoners. With Bradford’s support, the collec- person”, Bradford says, “is stronger than you think.” ar tive has opened a shop selling products made by prisoners, including bags and accessories made from recycled billboard vinyl. Mark Bradford’s presentation for the us Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, titled Tomorrow Is Another Day, is on view from 13 May to 26 It is easy to see why the bags would appeal to Bradford. He is not, November. The Rio Terà dei Pensieri kiosk is located in Campo S. Stefano, however, appropriating the collective’s wares as artworks, nor exhibVenice. Bradford’s work is also included in Darkness Made Visible: iting their activities in an art context as an excerpted sliver of the real. Derek Jarman and Mark Bradford, at the Museum of Fine Arts, His only authorial intervention is to allow Rio Terà to use one of his Boston, through 30 July, and Shade: Clyfford Still/Mark Bradford images on a limited-edition bag, “to make money”. (He started by at the Denver Art Museum and Clyfford Still Museum, both in Denver, listening to the group’s needs; money, he observes, is usually the first through 16 July thing that people need.)

above Rebuild South Central, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 109 × 244 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London & Los Angeles facing page Mark Bradford in his studio, Los Angeles, 2017. Photo: Joshua Anderson

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Only Connect How a violent collision forged Geoffrey Farmer’s fountain for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale by Craig Burnett

In 1990 Geoffrey Farmer started writing notes to strangers on public considerable intellect, that didn’t mean you had to be dry. Intuition, buses. In those days, in Vancouver, buses issued paper ‘transfers’, language, emotion, performance, perhaps a hint of madness: that a time-limit punched into its thin newsprint, which enabled passen- year in San Francisco gave him the permission to become himself – by gers to change buses and continue their journey. Farmer rode the bus becoming someone else. with an old typewriter on his lap, rolled the transfers into its creaky Farmer took the title for his pavilion, A way out of the mirror, from the frame and tried to write a tiny note-poem for a stranger before he Ginsberg poem ‘Laughing Gas’ (written in 1958, published in Kaddish or she alighted. One of them read, ‘I can see the dog you / are hiding and Other Poems, 1961): ‘A way out of the mirror / was found by the image in your bag. / I wish we were in Paris. / Thank You, / A Stranger’. / that realized its existence / was only… / a stranger completely like The slumber of the daily commute was ruptured by a random act myself’. Why Ginsberg? In part because of his memory of hearing him read in San Francisco, but the reference to the poet – and the 1958 date of empathetic weirdness. Notes for Strangers, created while the artist was a student at Emily – are part of a larger network of connections and coincidences enacted Carr College of Art & Design, heralded a set of ideas that Farmer has in April 2016, just as he started thinking about ideas for the pavilion. been working on for almost 30 years: ephemerality, chance encounFarmer’s sister emailed him two black-and-white press phototers, connections across space and time, a desire to communicate. graphs, dated 1955, that she had found in the basement of their Yet, less than a year later, his worldview was changed completely: father’s house. Both depict the aftermath of the same accident: between 1990 and 1991 Farmer attended a pickup truck slammed against a railwayHe came to understand that while the San Francisco Art Institute (sfai). crossing sign, pushed there by a train, its you could be an artist of considerable cargo of timber spilled out across a bank The models he’d encountered at art school of earth like the buckling floes in Caspar in Vancouver, where detached intellection intellect, that didn’t mean was prized above all else, were exposed as David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823–4). In you had to be dry a particular, limited way to be an artist, one of the photos, a train zips by behind rather than the only way. When I talked to Farmer about his plans for the crash, getting on with the business of transporting goods. In the the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, it was not the pavilion other, from a slightly different angle, a dumbstruck kid – anonymous, or even the work that first came to his mind, but a series of vivid recol- placed there by the photographer – looks blankly at the scene, a halflections of that transformative year. eaten apple in his hand. There might have been no particular reason to In San Francisco, he heard Kathy Acker read, in a manner that he’d pay much attention to the pictures – despite the voyeuristic melodrama never heard anyone read, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). He saw of any accident, they are from bygone era, seemingly irrelevant. But it John Cage perform in January 1991, a performance that was mostly turns out that they had a profound personal connection to the artist: silence punctuated by guttural noises; while he initially thought Farmer’s paternal grandfather was behind the wheel of the truck. And the performance was ridiculous, when Cage discussed it afterwards, though he walked away from the wreckage, he died a couple of months his eloquence and openness changed Farmer’s mind. He discov- later from a heart attack. Farmer had never heard the story before, only ered William S. Burroughs’s ‘cut up’ method. Tony Oursler taught the faint susurrations of past family trauma from his emotionally a class; Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann showed up. Amidst clenched father, a man prone to violent outbursts. The potent images the aids crisis, he became immersed in queer culture and history. He had been languishing for decades, their story all boxed up. came out. He learned about the Venice Biennale, via a 1970 Artscanada For an artist whose raw material is found imagery, these longmagazine with a cover story on Michael Snow, Canada’s represent- dormant photographs were a boon. The press photographs became ative at the Biennale that year. He heard Allen Ginsberg read, and for Farmer what he calls a ‘spring’: the point of departure from which watched astonished as the poet shifted from calm, discursive lecturer flowed a range of inchoate thoughts and feelings, both personal and to rhapsodic bard. What I understood listening to political. A nexus of coincidences started to bubble facing page, both images Farmer discuss his experiences was that he came up the more he meditated on the images, and he Unknown Photographer (Collision), 1955, to understand that while you could be an artist of wanted to incarnate all those immaterial leaps archival photographs. Courtesy the artist

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top The Last Two Million Years, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable above The Surgeon and the Photographer (detail), 2009, paper, textile, wood, metal, 365 figures, 45 × 13 × 13 cm (each)

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facing page Notes for Strangers (detail), 1989/1990, small typewriter, six typewritten notes on paper, transfer ticket, shelf with Plexiglas top, notes, 15 × 9 cm (each) all images Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver

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between events and ideas into a new physical structure. Ginsberg was the first of many connections Farmer started to make: when the email arrived from his sister, he happened to be reading Ginsberg’s Howl, which was written in 1955, the year of the accident. Turns out, in 1955, the students at sfai had organised a reading of the poem. And this was also about the time that the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini, a small hut of brick and angled glass, was being proposed (and eventually built in 1958, the year Ginsberg wrote ‘Laughing Gas’). One of the founding members of its architects, Milanese firm bbpr, had died in Mauthausen concentration camp, and one of the practice’s first postwar projects was a memorial – a gridded, geometric cube, with some similarities to the Canadian Pavilion – to the victims of German concentration camps. The Canadian Pavilion formed, moreover, part of the war reparations from Italy to Canada. The Giardini itself was born of war, with Napoleon razing a neighbourhood and rearranging the city at the end of the eighteenth century, the Canadian Pavilion atop a hill constructed from rubble, a residue of the Frenchman’s brute violence. In the process of developing all of these connections, Farmer read Kaja Silverman’s The Miracle of Analogy (2014); her ideas about found images, and the way in which photographs allow ‘us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies’, echoed many of his own thoughts about found photography and this project in particular. (Think of the immeasurable networks of found photographs the artist used in installations such as The Last Two Million Years, 2007, or The Surgeon and the Photographer, 2009–13.) Farmer had thus discovered the source of his ideas for the pavilion in a couple of old press photographs, at once anonymous and yet intimately connected to the very formation of his existence and identity. It was the question of how to give these ‘vast constellations’ concrete form that drove Farmer’s imagination. Farmer decided he wanted to create a public space that incorporated references to Ginsberg, San Francisco, architecture, poetry, transparency, protest and the history of his family. While he was at sfai, he spent a lot of time at the fountain, a small octagonal structure with Moorish tiles. He thought of Ginsberg in Greenwich Village, and the fountain in Washington Square. He thought of his husband, who’s from nyc, and his memories of that fountain, and again of Ginsberg, who, like him, had to leave his hometown to forge his identity anew. The fountains became metaphors for origin myths, oases of communal learning, pleasure and healing. He decided to combine the external shape of the San Francisco fountain with the high-shooting water feature from Washington Square, creating a hybrid water feature that, conceptually at least, spanned a continent. With the history of the pavilion’s architects in mind, and their antifascist desire for openness and transparency, the artist will open up the pavilion to the Giardini, converting a cramped exhibition space into a public piazza.

Thus the pavilion, and the hybrid fountain Farmer will create for the site, grew into a fusion of structures, a uniting of polarities, a memorial to a buried past and a spring of enlightenment. But how could Farmer integrate the content of the photographs, the story of his family? Farmer knew that the planks of lumber that spilled from the truck were important. He decided to remake them, all 71, and incorporate them into the fountain. He cast facsimile planks in bronze, applied a print pattern and a patina to mimic wood, perforated them and devised a program to regulate the flow of water through the hollow bronze; he also punched holes in the ends of the planks so that water would spurt playfully from the ends of their hard, geometric edges. His recreation of these long-forgotten strips of timber echoes the nature of the whole project: Farmer starts with an accident, and transforms the residue into a playful, flowing dance. Another feature of the fountain will be a grandfather clock, an axe in its back, and from this structure the main jet of water will shoot 13 metres into the sky, matching the height of the Washington Square fountain. There is yet another element: a human-mantis figure, lifesize and cast in rough bronze, hunched like some sci-fi monster imagined by Giacometti, will sit in the centre of the fountain, a huge book on its lap, a pair of scissors jutting from its back. Is it a figure of the artist? In the course of thinking about Farmer’s work, even before I’d heard anything about the pavilion, a line from William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (1790–93) kept coming to mind: ‘The cut worm forgives the plow’. I had an image of the artist as one of those farmers (no pun here – just another coincidence) who, one day in the field, hits a cluster of ancient artefacts with his plow, then spends a lifetime interpreting the objects. The photographs of the accident are just such objets trouvés: unearthed by accident, portentous and strange, sending the discoverer on a hermeneutic quest. For Farmer, the press photographs allowed him to talk to his father about his grandfather, unlocking an episode of his family’s history that was almost lost forever. His grandfather was a labourer, and both he and Farmer’s father endured the tribulations of midcentury life in the raw landscape and economy of Vancouver in its rough becoming. These stories of suffering allowed the artist to empathise with his father, come to some comprehension of his rage and gruff aggression. The past is a plow that leaves its mark unintentionally, just getting on with its daily tasks. A train is an almighty force. A violent father an inescapable presence. A life smashed, dug up, reformed; a pavilion cut open. A fountain placed at its core, a source of life, a site of synthesis and gratitude. The cut worm forgives the plow. ar

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Geoffrey Farmer’s presentation for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, A way out of the mirror, is on view from 13 May to 26 November

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Marion Baruch

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A Leap into the Void by Martin Herbert

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above Echo de mer et de soleil, 2016, fabric, 188 × 406 cm. Photo: Yann Haeberlin. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Laurence Bernard, Geneva preceding pages Marion Baruch and A.G.Fronzoni, Contenitore-Ambiente, 1969, Plexiglas, dimensions variable. Photo: Berengo Gardin. Courtesy Marion Baruch and A.G.Fronzoni

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In the sunny nook of a glass-and-steel modernist villa outside Milan aesthetics, itself an updated version of the Beuys-inspired social art that serves as her modest live-in studio, while a fox-faced blonde dog of which Baruch has been a longstanding practitioner. called Gipsy prowls around, Marion Baruch is describing a revelaThe immediate roots, though, of gorgeously casual recent works tory encounter with a sack of discarded fabric. She got it from a man such as her Echo de mer et de soleil (2016) – another black remnant, full of she met in a pizzeria who worked in the Italian fashion industry (for swooping, loosely birdlike apertures – are in those relational projects, Gucci et al), and it contained the negative space of style: unwanted made under the pseudonym Name Diffusion. This legally incorpocloth left over once the shapes for haute couture and high-end prêt-à- rated company created sardonic ‘products’ for exhibition, eg Museum porter had been cut out. She recalls the moment when she pulled out Fashion (1993), a rack of orange pure-silk shirts for the Netherlands’ the first remnant and held it up: “I said, ‘My God, what is this? It’s what Groninger Museum, patterned with a logo alternating Baruch’s you throw in the bin, and it looks like a Klee.’” trading name and the institution’s. In later works such as 2008’s Trame Or, if you prefer, like a Baruch – like, say, Sculpture (Spirito della di Penelope, her artful pseudo-business presented tumbling installaGiungla) (2015), one of several works by her recently on show in Rome’s tions of scrap cloth, encouraged viewers to recline in its spaces, and National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. This relief struc- used them as sites for philosophical conferences, because, says Baruch, ture of stirruplike black loops – after she selects her garment discards, “people think and talk so differently when they’re lying down”. One it’s all about how she pins and painstakingly drapes them, collabo- ought to mention here that her late husband and her children were rating with gravity – is both tattered and graceful, and demonstrates and are, respectively, involved in Italian textile manufacturing. her format’s versatility. Sculpture… is in formal conversation with She, however, appears perpetually interested in fashion’s other the modernist past (Robert Morris, side, the improvisatory obverse of its “It’s the void, and there’s possibility Eva Hesse, Lucio Fontana, Supports/ psychic controls. in the void: it contains everything, Surfaces artist Daniel Dezeuze), yet its As early as 1970, Baruch had made attitude to the exclusivity of fashion Abito-Contenitore, a tombstone-shaped it contains surprise, life and emotion, – the way in which it creates aleadress, covering head and body like a which is what I need” tory richness from what the industry burka, in which she performed a hapdisdains – feels lithely ironical and fresh. The work suggests a young pening of sorts, strolling down Milan’s main fashion street, Via Monte artist, schooled in art history, gazing askance at capitalism’s relentless Napoleone. (For that, she ended up on the cover of one of Italy’s bestrhythms. Marion Baruch is eighty-seven. When, in 1950, she left her known weeklies, Panorama.) Around the same time she decided to native Romania to go to art school in Israel, her tutor there had studied have a huge Plexiglas ball manufactured, put a young man in it and under Klee. roll it down the street, stopping traffic. This led to an association with A multilingual cosmopolite with a dry wit and ascetic tastes, Dino Gavina, the Italian furniture producer (and friend of Marcel Baruch is increasingly being shown by adventurous young European Duchamp and Man Ray) who first mass-marketed Bauhaus furnigallerists alert to the correspondence between her slackly elegant ture. Gavina helped Baruch realise a few rogue furniture pieces, such works and those of post-postminimalist artists five decades or more as Ron Ron (1971), a furry spherical footstool with a tail; and though her junior. But she isn’t the type of journeywoman figure, like Carmen she sees them as art, such works are now being shown again in design Herrera, being feted late in life for something she’s done for decades. circles, for instance at the Milan Triennale last year. Such is the pattern Baruch began working in this way – a lightweight, adaptable, self- of her career, which moves in surprising circles but also consistently replenishing format as suited to her age as Henri Matisse’s cut-outs forward. Like fashion, then – and the things she makes now keep her, were to his – in 2012, shortly after returning to Italy after 14 years in she says, connected with that world and the larger one it’s nested in. Paris. “I ran out of money,” she says cheerfully, this condition being Textiles, she says, are “living material for me, and I feel the flow of it, perhaps not unconnected to the fact that from the early 1990s, when a continuous flow, which is the whole society. And also fashion is all she was in her early sixties, onwards she was an exponent of relational about new materials, new forms…”

La tartaruga, 2016, fabric, 44 × 167 cm. Photo: Yann Haeberlin. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Laurence Bernard, Geneva

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above Marion Baruch and A.G. Fronzoni, Abito-Contenitore, 1970, fabric, dimensions variable. Courtesy Marion Baruch and A.G. Fronzoni preceding pages Name Diffusion, 1993 (installation view, Business Art/Art Business, 1993, Groninger Museum, Gronigen). Courtesy the artist

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Indeed, Baruch has almost always self-aligned with the new, however idiosyncratically. She was born in 1929 in Timisoara, but when she got a rare chance to go and study in Jerusalem – “at art school in Romania, we just had to paint Stalin” – she took it. Then, on the back of a successful show in Tel Aviv, in the mid-1950s she went to Rome, an odd fit for her outlook. “A big mistake. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the city, Giotto, etc, and I didn’t learn anything.” For the next couple of decades she lived in Italy and in France, where she made “big sculptures in iron”, and then popped up in, of all places, Milton Keynes, circa 1980 (a new town, pointedly). From here, visiting London’s museums, she’d paint miniature copies of works by Rembrandt overlaid with Duchamp’s maxim-on-the-Mona-Lisa, ‘l.h.o.o.q.’, the French pun ‘she has a hot ass’. “I was the one with the hot ass, sitting on my seat, painting the big master,” Baruch recalls. She took them to Nicholas Logsdail at London’s Lisson Gallery. “He said, ‘It’s interesting, but it’s not interesting to me’.” From an outside perspective, it appears she had to reconnect with the garment business – the locus of her linkage of art and life – as she did when she ‘became’ Name Diffusion, for her work to get into gear. Now that it has, her latest style is already evolving. (Which is typical for Baruch.) At first she selected discards that were rectangular like a painting, the computer-cut shapes offering a Rorschach-like experience of flitting, fragmentary allusion; later, she began bunching them together in treelike formations. Nowadays she’s increasingly drawn to fragments, and this has analogical force for her. “It’s the void, and there’s possibility in the void: it contains everything, it contains surprise, life and emotion, which is what I need.” A work like Pleine détente (2016) bears this out: it’s a sky-blue offcut, a horizontal strip from which dangle a few skimpy fabric lines that

nevertheless create sophisticated polyhedral areas of negative space. As if staring at clouds, you see little glimmers of things in it, made by the white wall: the curving edges of screens, for example. (Her forthcoming solo show in Paris, Baruch says, will include a piece called Cloud, referring to clouds both natural and digital.) ‘Full relaxation’, the translation of the work’s title, seems an apropos sentiment – the unknown, seen this way, is something one eases into, something welcoming. And yet, as she points out, her elective negative space contains ‘everything’, for better or worse. A work from 2015, Mister Horror (L’Éternel Retour), features two crossed, ragged black fragments, like overlapping rifles or knives; no coincidence that it was made after the terror attacks on Paris that year. Due to mobility issues, Baruch mostly stays in her workspace, with its sunlight-streaming floor-to-ceiling glass, its teetering stacks of archive boxes, works-in-progress pinned to all walls, pulling fabric from bags and seeing what chance has handed her. Downstairs, her archive is being photographed. She gestures around. “Here I’m closed off and I can’t circulate. But I’m not alone, you see. On summer nights this big moon comes right through the windows and I’m here at 3am, the whole world comes in to me through these materials, and I work with these voids, which for years have been becoming bigger and bigger. You know, at first I was afraid to insist on the void. But now,” she smiles, “I’m not afraid any more.” And with that, she rises; time to get back to work. ar Marion Baruch’s solo exhibition Le parti pris des nuages is running from 20 May to 13 July at Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, Paris. Her work is also included in Entangled: Threads and Making, Turner Contemporary, Margate, through 7 May

Mister Horror (L’Éternel Retour), 2015, fabric, dimensions variable. Photo: Alexander Hana. Courtesy the artist and Bolte Lang, Zürich

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Samson Young Ricochet by Mark Rappolt

Still from video documentation of We Are the World as performed by the Hong Kong Federations of Trade Unions Choir, 2017, video and eight-channel sound installation. Photo: Dennis Man Wing Leung. Courtesy the artist

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A dark theme keeps me here, I’ll make a broken music, 2016–17 (installation view). Photo: Simon Vogel. Courtesy Düsseldorf Kunsthalle and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Like much of the best contemporary art, that produced by Samson Young exists at the moment when concept and reality touch, only to then recoil and ricochet their separate ways. Perhaps the most literal demonstration of this can be found in his live performance work Nocturne (2015), shown that year at Team Gallery, New York. For much of the almost two months of his solo exhibition (titled Pastoral Music) the artist would sit in the middle of the gallery space (otherwise decorated with his drawings), and use a series of everyday materials and a large marching-drum to create Foley-effect explosions to accompany a six-hour video of found and edited footage of nighttime bombing raids (largely conducted by the us in the Middle East). Fed through a computer and broadcast via a radio station, the sound of dirt, lightly dropped on a microphone, or of a fan blowing some rice paper, or of a gentle tapping of the drum became that of a bomb going off somewhere in, say, Baghdad. Physically the setup (of artist, mikes, computer, monitor and a variety of tools) is complicated; conceptually the work is simple, bringing together a series of binaries – truth and falsehood, the real and invented, the micro and the macro, the mediated and the directly experienced, cause and effect – and letting the viewer, or listener, imagine the consequences of their collision in this live reconstruction of dead events. We might, for example, think about news pitched as entertainment, which was the vehicle through which much of the world experienced the events recorded in Young’s bombing videos, via news feeds and other media. A longer encounter with the work might lead to meditation on the meaning of ‘monotony’ too. Of course, this artist’s work is anything but monotonous. Trained in classical music composition, Hong Kong-born and -based, Young

is generally described as a ‘sound artist’ but that’s a categorisation the experience of his work suggests he actually escapes. While Young continues to work as a composer, his work in the realm of art mixes live and recorded sound, performance, video and drawing in increasingly complex ways. When I have fears that I may cease to be, what would you give in exchange for your soul (2016) was a soundwalk produced for last year’s Frieze Art Fair in London. Its title fuses the opening line of an earlynineteenth-century mock-Elizabethan sonnet by Romantic poet John Keats with the title of a twentieth-century country gospel song; the narrative of the walk, inspired by Graham Greene’s novel The Ministry of Fear (1943), a wartime tale of paranoia and espionage, took the form of a series of surveillance reports on a bookseller called Lok and was supplied via headphones and an iPod. Like much of Young’s work it took the form of a constellation of influences and ideas mapped out over space and time. It incorporated videos activated at specific locations in the fair, an archived playlist, a live performance by singer Michael Schiefel (whispered in your ear), and by Young himself (accessed by calling his mobile at the end of the tour). Besides its evocation of the disturbing disappearance of five Hong Kong-based booksellers and subsequent reappearance following a period of detention in mainland China in 2015, and the unsettling effect that had on the Special Administrative Region, the work had the more immediately disorienting effect of strobing you in and out of the space of the art fair itself as if you were trapped on some defective Star Trek transporter deck, continually ricocheting from one space to another. Reports on Lok were accessed at ‘the gallery where Regina works’ or the ‘tour desk where Lillian works’ in a way that balanced an increasing intimacy with the bookseller with your increasing intimacy with the space

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Michael Schiefel recording his performance for When I have fears that I may cease to be, what would you give in exchange for your soul, 2016, soundwalk. Courtesy the artist and Frieze, London

and operations of the art fair. Although, for all that, you felt truly intimate with neither at the same time: the walk effectively disengaged you from the other works in the fair and offered only fleeting glimpses of the life of Lok. Young’s particular brand of subtle politics also surfaced in Canon (2015). Performed as part of the Unlimited section of last year’s Art Basel, it featured the artist, dressed as a Hong Kong policeman, standing on a scissor-lift, using bird whistles to project bird sound through the exhibition hall with the help of a Long Range Acoustic Device (conventionally used to scare off pest birds or, by riot police, to disperse crowds). The work combined seeming innocence (and a certain romanticism that is present in much of Young’s output) with an underlying and sinister demonstration of power. The performance was accompanied by a caged room filled with Young’s drawings of distressed bird sounds, which, like much of his graphic work, recalls the onomatopoeic works of Dada and Kurt Schwitters, or the graphic works of Asger Jorn combined with a messy form of mapmaking. Young’s genre-defying artworks are currently enjoying the kind of ‘moment’ that will make him seem ubiquitous this summer. Having won the inaugural bmw Art Journey award in 2015, he is now a finalist for the 2017 Absolut Art Award. His 56-minute composition Such Sweet Thunder (2017), a meditation on the social function of bells derived from research conducted during the artist’s bmw Art Journey, is currently part of the radio programme at Documenta 14. His fivepart radio series, One of Two Stories, or Both (Field Bagatelles), inspired by stories of seventeenth-century Chinese migrants travelling to Europe

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on foot, will be performed live and broadcast as part of this summer’s Manchester International Festival. And before that, he will represent Hong Kong at this year’s Venice Biennale. While the exact nature of Sounds for Disaster Relief, the work he will produce for Venice, is shrouded in the usual veil of secrecy, it is, appropriately at a time when so much contemporary art seems to have taken a social and socially conscious turn (perhaps the result of a paranoia about its relevance to the rapidly changing world in which it exists), inspired by the fad for charity pop singles – notably Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas (1984) and usa for Africa’s We Are the World (1985) – during the early 1980s. For Young, the mix of good intentions, lyrics that reflect patronising colonial attitudes of them and us, and such songs’ reflection of the neoliberal politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher offer not an opportunity for mockery, but rather an opportunity (in the wake of recent remakes of some of those songs, and the continuing appeal of the charity single in Hong Kong) to measure where such efforts and such relationships now sit. And naturally it will involve his own ‘super messed-up’ remakes of some of the originals. Perhaps these will be a perfect reflection of the increasingly complex ‘super messed-up’ world of today. ar Songs for Disaster Relief is on show at the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 13 May – 28 November. One of Two Stories, or Both (Field Bagatelles) will be performed 30 June – 4 July, at the Old Granada Studios in Manchester. Such Sweet Thunder can be accessed through the public radio section of Documenta’s website

ArtReview

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A Leap into the Void by Martin Herbert

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30 March–9 July 2017 Lucas Blalock Anne Collier Sara Cwynar Natalie Czech Andreas Gursky Elad Lassry Richard Prince Thomas Ruff Cindy Sherman Erin Shirreff Wolfgang Tillmans Sara VanDerBeek Jeff Wall Christopher Williams

Lucas Blalock, Athena’s Fruit Dish, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Ramiken Crucible, New York

ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION

Alan Cristea Gallery 43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG +44 (0)20 7439 1866 info@alancristea.com www.alancristea.com

Langlands & Bell Infinite Loop 27 April – 3 June 2017

Nvidia, 2016

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HOMO MELITENSIS

MALTA PAVILION ARSENALE - ARTIGLIERIE BIENNALE ARTE 2017

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rumors and murmurs

Martin Beck 6.5.–3.9.2017 MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 A -1070 Wien www.mumok.at

Martin Beck, Detail von Flowers, 2015, Courtesy der Künstler und 47 Canal

Schools Show 2017

22 June – 2 July Royal Academy of Arts Free entry #RASchools RA Schools sponsored by

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FROM OCEAN TO HORIZON

7 July - 29 October 2017

Artist reflections on living and working in present-day Hong Kong www.cfcca.org.uk

ON-GOING SUPPORT FROM:

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Switzerland‘s first international art fair dedicated to photography based art.

Volkshaus Basel Rebgasse 12 – 14 4058 Basel photo - basel.com

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Eduardo Paolozzi Lance Wyman Metro: Art at Velocity 19th May – 5th August April 14

May 27

Sophie Jung

PRODUCING MY CREDENTIALS

21 Roscoe Street London EC1Y 8PT kunstraum.org.uk

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C I N E M A

Wendelien van Oldenborgh An installation for the Dutch Pavilion Curator: Lucy Cotter Commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund Biennale Arte 2017 13 May – 26 November 2017 www.venicebiennale.nl

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Art Reviewed

But it does not get beyond wondering why the world was created, and whither it is going. The gods, being subsequent to the origin of the world, cannot explain its mysteries 101

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Richard Mosse Incoming Barbican Centre, London 15 February – 23 April Richard Mosse’s exhibition opens with a sweeping video survey of the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. This makeshift settlement was shot at several kilometres’ distance from a raised vantage point using a thermal imaging camera of the type used by the military for long-range target acquisition. Exhibited on a suspended bank of 16 monitors, each of which intermittently flickers and swivels before the composite image resolves into a whole, Grid (Moria) (2017) combines the spectral look of a photographic negative with the aesthetics of surveillance implied by its mode of display. Its search through the shanty streets comes to rest on a snaking line of wraithlike bobble-hatted migrants shaking out their legs for warmth, then skims over the curls of razor wire atop chain-link fences and lands on a small child at play. Mosse shares with artists including John Gerrard and Trevor Paglen the mission to make visible the concealed infrastructures and phenomena of twenty-first-century life. His previous project, The Enclave (2013), documented the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a conflict largely ignored by an international community for whom the country carries little strategic importance. His innovation then, as now, was to use military surveillance film that captures radiation – in that case infrared light – outside the visible spectrum (a very literal interpretation of what it means to bring the hidden to light). Congolese child-soldiers and jungle landscapes were rendered in a shocking pink hue that lent

the images a hallucinogenic unreality; in order to challenge documentary photography’s failure to communicate the horror of war, Mosse rendered it even more strange. The Irish-born artist employs his heat-sensitive camera to similarly defamiliarising effect in these works that explore the migrant crisis. The thermographic triptych Skaramaghas (2016) renders the Greek refugee-camp as if it were a scene from a Bruegel painting realised as a pin-sharp Man Ray photogram, its featureless ‘margizens’ picked out against the prevailing grey by their ghostly luminescence. A sprawling industrial landscape that would seem mundane through the lens of a conventional camera – kids playing football on ad hoc football pitches amidst shipping containers – is transformed into something altogether more otherworldly. The danger of these estranging techniques is that they dehumanise the subjects they depict in much the same way as the bureaucracy of statehood reduces them to statistics. This alienating effect is exaggerated by the fact that Mosse’s bulky equipment requires him to record his subjects – none of whom have consented to his gaze – from a considerable distance. This extends, in the immersive three-channel video Incoming (2014–17), to recording scenes from the Syrian conflict from across the Turkish border. On the two occasions I visited, a large audience sat rapt before its three vast, curved screens. They watched children scramble from boats and jet planes pour fire down on the landscape overlaid by the noise of war and

snatches of dialogue, including an attempt to resuscitate a drowned body. The effect is powerful, yet I found its ambiguity troubling. Against the artist’s stated intention to use military technology against itself to ‘create an immersive, humanist art form’, the work serves better to illustrate the asymmetrical relationship between citizens – including the artist and audience – and the refugees depicted. It reproduces in its audience the exhilaration of power and, if we are being generous, the guilt of recognising one’s own susceptibility to that thrill. The depiction of refugees from a literally remote viewpoint, in foreign locations, in an exotic visual register risks reinforcing the attitudes that this unquestionably compelling work seeks ostensibly to critique. Installed in London, its arm’s-length empathy chimes uncomfortably with our government’s policy of making substantial financial donations to humanitarian camps in the countries bordering Syria at the expense of settling anything more than the barest number of refugees within its own borders. Mosse’s gaze turns inward only once, when he sets his camera up in the stands of a Greek athletics stadium, the central playing surface of which has been repurposed as a camp (Hellinikon Olympic Arena, Athens, 2016). Floodlights loom over serried rows of tents surrounded, like a theatre in the round, by thousands of empty seats. The crisis has moved onto the heart of the polis, but nobody is looking for it there. Ben Eastham

Hellinikon Olympic Arena, Athens, 2016, digital c-type print on metallic paper, 127 × 265 cm

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top Incoming (still), 2014–17, three-channel hd video with 7.2 surround sound bottom Incoming, 2017 (installation view, Barbican Centre, London). Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images all images Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin

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Jesse Darling Armes Blanches Galerie Sultana, Paris 24 February – 22 April ‘Pone seram, cohibe. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? cauta est, et ab illis incipit uxor.’ Around the turn of the second century, the Roman poet Juvenal wrote what is possibly the most misogynistic piece I’ve ever read, Satire VI, a diatribe against women and their supposedly innate perfidiousness, addressed to a certain Postumus in order to dissuade him from marriage. Exquisitely cynical, the verse literally translates into: ‘Lock her up, constrain her! But who will watch the guards? The woman is sly and with them, she’ll start.’ The question alone has since become a common Latin phrase, used to point out the corruptibility of anyone placed in a position of power, and therefore the impossibility of so-called guardians of morality imposing it on others. Yet the overall context of gender bias from which the question originated is typically ignored. Now, not that this quote appears anywhere in Jesse Darling’s first solo show at Sultana, but I believe it perfectly sums up the premise driving the otherwise subversively feminist and perhaps gender-fluid harlequinade at play here. More than a display of artworks, Armes Blanches (meaning ‘cold weapons’) comes across as some kind of theatrical improvisation involving a troupe of ten anthropomorphic sculptures within the debris of an air disaster, albeit a playful one. Indeed, for the latter work,

Planes (all works 2017), the British artist has flown and discreetly crashed little aluminium foil aeroplanes into the corners of the narrow exhibition space, which in his aesthetics may as well stand for the decline of modernity’s inequitable duality. Hanging centre-stage on the wall and overlooking this whimsical apocalyptic scene, the devilish red half-mask Silicone Pantalone (all works 2017) invokes the eponymous commedia dell’arte character: a greedy, crooked old fool, merchant and butt of all jokes in the harlequinade genre. Against his will and his penny-pinching values, yet right under his hooked nose and prominent eyebrows, The 1st Lady completes the expected farce: Pantalone’s disobedient daughter Columbine surreptitiously eloping with Harlequin – not a guard per se, but certainly a servant. These ‘figures’, though, fixed on steel pipes leaning against the wall, are quite abstract: Columbine is represented by a paper wedding veil, her beloved trickster by a used and dirty work glove that caresses (or delicately soils) her. Darling, here, decisively draws a parallel between feminism and class warfare, one that more or less subtly, but always humorously, transpires through the rest of the show and the timeless sexist clichés it addresses. For instance, the steel-tubing sculpture Ass Priest, which wears among other items

a medical latex glove, further embodies this dual notion of womanhood and labour – but on all fours, as it brandishes not a cold weapon as the exhibition’s title would suggest but an adorable pink foetus. Next to this grotesque self-delivery, the mop-headed Watcher 1 cheerfully cleans the bay window, which makes the entire length of the gallery visible to the street. Closer to the entrance, Watcher 3 seems to frantically wave paper disposal bags for sanitary pads, perhaps in order to lure passersby into the bawdy show. From what I have read about Darling’s work, art critics are often quick to perceive it as inherently queer. While some of these works may revolve around the notion of queerness, this particular exhibition conveys a feminist point of view. However, what current transgender and feminist fights have in common is that they both defend the right and freedom to live a new identity, one that falls outside the heterosexual mainstream or those biased societal roles and prospects it restrictively assigns each of us at birth. Strongly believing in that aforesaid autonomy, I didn’t at all experience Armes Blanches as inevitably queer, just as I assume readers won’t necessarily perceive this exhibition review as merely feminine. Quite frankly, if they did, it would seriously get on my tits, as ironic as that may be. So as long as there is humour, let’s fight on! Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Ass Priest, 2017, welded steel, foam, cast silicon, silk ribbon, jesmonite, 195 × 55 × 53 cm. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Galerie Sultana, Paris

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Michael Sailstorfer Hitzefrei König Galerie, Berlin 11 February – 12 March Johann König’s gallery is housed in a conversion of the St Agnes church in Kreuzberg, a brutalist structure from 1967 designed by Werner Düttmann and typical of those commissioned all over Western Europe by the daring – at least architecturally – Catholic hierarchy of that time. The enormous, lofty, stucco-walled central hall on the first floor is filled with Michael Sailstorfer’s new series of works, all six titled Brenner (2017), while upstairs in the bell tower, reached by a rickety and vertiginous wooden staircase, you find an accompanying videowork, Traenen (2015). Climbing the concrete stairs to reach Brenner, the viewer passes a prelude: a pile of split logs wedged into a corner. This is to be fuel. The next awareness of Brenner is physical, thermosensitive. That familiar chilliness associated with religious venues is suddenly dispelled and the place feels warmer, more welcoming. You smell woodsmoke and then see two lines of what appear at first to be burnt-out vehicles. Six cars, three on each side, black and windowless, workings and fittings removed; all are static, moored on metal tracks. From each emerges a long thick flue that extends many metres diagonally across the breadth of the church and up to the roof. We deduce these are flues because the heat is coming from the cars, wood burning

in stoves where each engine would have been. A production line is recalled – but one paradoxically frozen, even if apparently overheating. It’s easy to read the work as an analogy of our car problem, our traffic jams and global warming; Hitzefrei, the show’s ironic title, means the hot days when you can officially bunk off school and suggests a link between the success of the German car industry and our climate distress. But there’s more to Sailstorfer’s allusions. With a lightly humorous tone he also references the wispy communications that announce papal elections at the Vatican. (Once outside the gallery, you see the white smoke – an even earlier hint of Brenner, had you been forewarned.) Yet clearly there are darker resonances here, given the traumas of German history. The title of the work can mean ‘burner’, and the sculpture is redolent of industrial death and cremation. Simultaneously, more benign ecclesiastical funeral rites are recalled with their talk of ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Sailstorfer loves total destruction: to take just one example, he’s previously made a sofa from the rubble of a demolished house (Herterichstraße 119, 2001). The steep climb up to the bell tower leads to an old wooden platform where Traenen is projected. Beginning with a house in the country, we see large

droplets, like big blue tears, falling from the sky. A hard rain is going to fall: these are in fact digitally manipulated images of wrecking balls, which set about the cottage with gleeful intent. Sailstorfer knows we take a sadistic delight in seeing old buildings destroyed. There is satisfaction in seeing the job completed, but again the queasy sense that the German artist is referencing his nation’s damaged past. The fragility of the bell tower itself, while witnessing such battering, also disconcerts. Sailstorfer is prodigiously accomplished in investing his sculptural works, which at first view appear relatively uncomplicated, with multiple potential interpretations. And his love of taking things apart sustains his deadpan absurdist jesting, which delights in removing function from form. But perhaps his subtle and serious referencing of his country itself has gone relatively unnoticed – his fixation on the clichéd mythos of Germanic culture. He has previously obsessed over the forest, the hidden Wagnerian trove of gold, and in this current show he reengages with German car fetishism, the popular Green agenda and the dreadful experience of bombing. Sailstorfer is a diligent artist; you cannot imagine him lazing around on those Hitzefrei days. John Quin

Hitzefrei, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Roman März. Courtesy the artist and König Galerie, Berlin

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Ned Vena Société, Berlin 17 March – 15 April What fashion illustration was to the early career of Andy Warhol, digitally generating logo stencils for the pop-culture industry has been to Ned Vena’s. Like Warhol, the Boston-born Vena, now in his mid-thirties, presents himself as an outsider from a commercial context, out to qualify an existing tradition he is nerdier about than its proponents, yet from which he holds himself aloof. For Warhol, the tradition was modernist abstraction; for Vena it is postmodern painting that ultimately derives from Warhol’s silkscreens, and dramatises the tension between the subjective trace and its containment by signs – such as the printed, decorative patterning that can’t quite hold Christopher Wool’s black enamel in check, or the lines traversed by Wade Guyton’s inkjet printer that sometimes eloquently bleed over their tracks. This is painting in which the gestural excess is only authenticated by the printed form to which it refuses to conform; only credible as the exception to a rule. On the East–West axis of us art, this lineage is as New York as it gets. The striated vectors Vena printed, in black rubber onto raw linen, in paintings of the mid-2000s were like relief versions, cast for the blind, of the mazy, centripetal stripes of Frank Stella’s ‘Black Paintings’ (1959–60), which Stella characterised as having a ‘New York quality’, recalling the city’s geometric gridwork. At Société, Vena literalises this history by printing nocturnal New York City

skylines onto a range of Ab-Ex-size canvases. He has created photographic silkscreens of spray paintings dashed off by Times Square street artists for tourist consumption. Three versions of the skyline are on offer – with the Twin Towers (pre-2001), without them (2001–12) and with the ‘Freedom Tower’ (post-2012) – each produced by a street artist, dragging sprayed paint with a flat-edged instrument to adumbrate the juts and peaks of the Cubistic, high-rise city (all works 2017). The technique combines summary with interpretation: a Blade-Runner-ish futurism with an impression of speed, as if a lit object were blurring its trajectory across a nighttime photograph. That the skyline paintings Vena prints are not his own is emphasised by the flashy scrawl of a signature in the bottom right. But evading subjectivity is here a means of spotlighting it: the street artists paint the cityscapes as reflections in Spiderman’s eye – a black ellipse surrounded by red webbing – which in Vena’s paintings become signs for the subjective vision his appropriation elides. To complete the tortuous back-and-forth between expression and its evasion, the skylines are printed onto gesturally brushed and rollered white paint, oozing beyond the image frames as if the plateau of river under the Brooklyn Bridge were spilling to become Spiderman’s tears. Print of the spray the street artist used to signify a starry sky is in places indistin-

guishable from Vena’s real splashes of white. This anarchic spread of signifiers, spiralling beyond the control of the series’ neat binaries – appropriated/self-made, mass-produced/ artisanal – liberates it from the confines of a studious revision of a Warholian template: silkscreen on gestural abstraction is a form so tied to Warhol’s legacy that it signifies it. A series of rubbings made from logos on parked cars (‘Focus’, ‘Defender’, ‘Crafter’, ‘Jumper’) would succumb to another hard binary – between ancient frottage and corporate global branding – were it not for the odd surplus of nostalgia that destabilises the clash. Both series suggest that you cannot escape the past’s example, however much you side with the ephemera of contemporary pop culture, because that remains an echo of the traditions it presents itself as relinquishing with its novelties. The car logos look like hieroglyphic relics, unearthed from an archaeological dig in the distant future; while the sci-fi skylines are the past’s projection of a future, a past to which artistic authorship can be symbolically relayed. Like Wool, Vena prints an image, paints over it and then reprints, creating a concertina effect in which it becomes unclear whether it is his own process or someone else’s that his painting is trying to recall through its compacted strata. Or indeed who is doing the recalling: Spiderman, the street artist, Vena or some composite ghost of the ‘New York painter’? Mark Prince

Ned Vena, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Uli Holz. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

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Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani Dynamis Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome 11 March – 6 May Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani’s fourth solo show at Marie-Laure Fleisch centres on the German duo’s hd video Dynamis (2014). Though made three years ago, the work, which focuses on the precarity and resilience of Greece’s inhabitants, remains as relevant today as it was then, particularly as the eyes of the artworld are fixed upon Athens as cohost of Documenta 14. Dynamis was originally commissioned by the Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki, and documents a collective performance whereby the duo randomly encountered and interacted with the city’s residents and tourists. Over its 22-minute runtime, it focuses upon willing volunteers who have agreed to undertake the task of balancing an egg upright on one of the stone or marble surfaces that characterise the city. With parks, café terraces, an indoor market, a butcher’s and the seafront as backdrops, the viewer witnesses individuals do something with, and seemingly for, the city: that is to say, the simple, patient act of balancing something fragile – which takes the protagonists anything

from seconds to minutes to achieve – here assumes a new symbolic relevance, connecting locals and visitors alike to a regional capital deeply affected by Greece’s debt crisis. Once a major centre of investment under Ottoman rule, Thessaloniki currently endures the fate of the Greek economy as a whole, brought about by structural weaknesses, corruption and the pressures of being tied to the eu. As such, the painstaking effort put into balancing an egg on a wall that is revealed – as the camera pans away – to be part of a branch of the National Bank of Greece conveys the adaptability and ingenuity of Greece’s inhabitants in the face of financial hardship. Perhaps most striking is not the fact that almost all of the participants managed to balance their egg upon the given surface, but how differently people approached the task. Efforts range from the scrupulous attempts of one teenage boy, who celebrated eventual success with a victory cry as his egg stood upright on a granite bench, to the effortless first-attempt success of a teen

girl who placed her egg on a sliver of marble atop a ruined wall. Elsewhere, a poultry and egg vendor takes seconds to place an egg upright on a wooden stool in his store, before proudly surveying the shop while puffing away on a cigarette. Of course, personal sensibilities dictate how tense or carefree the various participants are, though common to all is a sense that something enormous is at stake. Besides the video, the gallery also displayed a floor piece (Untitled, 2017) consisting of a plinth with a wooden base and granite top, modelled on a plinth situated on the seafront of Thessaloniki. Gallery visitors are invited to take an egg from a glass bowl placed upon the plinth and to try to position it upright on the stony surface. With the video running and the gallery assistant having retreated to the office space, I succeeded on my third attempt; it seems eggs have a natural centre of gravity that, once found, enables them to stay up. That can’t be said for the Greek economy, though its people will surely persevere with their balancing act. Mike Watson

Dynamis, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Giorgio Benni. Courtesy the artist and Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome & Brussels

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Colori: Emotions of Color in Art gam, Turin, and Castello di Rivoli 14 March – 23 July Picked a big subject for an exhibition? You’ll want to select some limits too: geographical, temporal, art historical, critical, political or even merely fed by random prejudice; whatever works, really, so that you know where to stop. As sizeable themes go, ‘colour’ is up there, but with two large venues to fill, a sagely edited show would have space to play with. Yet Colori – organised by the institutions’ director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and a large team of collaborators – staggers, breathless, beneath the weight of its own ambition. ‘Emotions of color in art’ is a foggy notion at best. In practice it seems to translate into an exploration of colour in art from all possible angles (including its absence). Attempts to break the exhibition according to subthemes are complicated by a shakily delineated separation of focus between the two institutions: in theory, the works shown at gam are the historical aspect of the exhibition, and those at the Castello di Rivoli the more contemporary. In practice, high-profile historical loans are on show at both sites (an Édouard Manet and Edvard Munch at the Castello; Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky at gam), and one is as likely to find, say, Arte Povera in the one as in the other. The size of this bifurcated show is biennialesque: including approximately 400 works by 130 artists from the last four centuries, it begins, in temporal terms, with theoretical treatises on colour in books by Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and ends up with newly installed works by Jim Lambie (the sparkly floorpiece Zobop (Prismatic), 2016–17) and Aslı Çavus,oğlu (delicate paintings in cochineal with a geopolitical edge). Along the way, colour is explored from spiritual, mineral, optical, synesthetic, psychedelic and symbolic perspectives, via diagrams, short films, light installations, sculpture, painting and even (courtesy of Simon Starling) pianola music.

There are tantalising stories – of evolving fields of thought and of chains of influence – and arresting discoveries. Christov-Bakargiev cocurated an exhibition in Chicago last year that responded to Annie Besant’s ‘thought forms’: attempts to depict precise states of mind such as Angry Jealousy or Greed for Drink (both c. 1905) in forms and colour. At a guess, this Victorianera theosophist and social reformer’s work was a starting point for Colori too: Besant’s quaint but fascinating illustrations are placed in pole position at gam (alongside somewhat redundant contemporary facsimiles by Lea Porsager, likewise shown in Chicago). Other delights include Marianne von Werefkin’s crepuscular, expressionist Swiss landscapes welling with intensely pigmented arcs of colour; Milanese collective Gruppo mid’s hypnotic Synthetic Images / Experimental Films (1965), three-screen projections that pulse with coloured shapes and bars of light; and Gustav Metzger’s liquid crystal environment Supportive (1966/2011/2017), installed with the artist’s input shortly before his death. The show regularly darts off in the most unexpected directions. One tiny vestibule takes in the high camp of Turinese artist Piero Gilardi’s new, hot-toned tropical landscape reliefs in polyurethane. Elsewhere, a small display is devoted to doodle works by Edi Rama, an artist whose profile has received something of a boost since he became prime minister of Albania in 2013. Executed with writing implements on paper available at his office table, the doodles all date from Rama’s time as an active politician. The problem with Colori is not a lack of ideas or of quality (though there are some less lovely works – one Yves Klein lingers, vivid, in the trauma banks) but a lack of editing and direction. Overcrowding generates some uncomfortable bedfellows. A lightwork by James Turrell

facing page, bottom Paul Klee, Blumenanalage im Park von V., 1936, pastel on cotton on cardboard, 30 × 47 cm. Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

facing page, top Jim Lambie, Zobop (Prismatic), 2016-17 (installation view, gam, Turin). Photo: Giorgio Perottino

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is cached in a cubicle flanked by Op-ish, Pop-ish, attention-grabbing displays, and across the corridor from a neon-lit Carlos Cruz-Diez colour environment. Who has time for the meditative patience Turrell demands when art nearby will deliver a faster hit? Similar steamrolling is achieved in placing a 1988 Irma Blank breath painting – Radical Writings, Schriftzug=Atemzug vom 4-8-88, composed of lines each painted in time with a single breath – cheek by jowl with a particularly insistent 1969 Op work by Victor Vasarely. Extended wall texts for each artist, many represented by only one work, make progress for studious visitors prohibitively slow. Certain works seem to have earned inclusion thanks largely to curatorial enthusiasm. Camille Henrot’s painting series 11 Animals that Mate 4 Life (2016) is enchanting and disquieting, the loving animal pairings backed with bright washes in greeting-card tones, but it’s only about colour insofar as any painted work is. What Colori has in greatest excess, perhaps, is barely veiled agendas, all of them laudable but inevitably muddling. The show is fullto-bursting with overlooked female artists, works from less-travelled territories and sensitivity to cultural tensions. Yet for all that it reads as ‘woke’, its most coherent narrative remains one that traces colour in art from Goethe by way of theosophy and the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) through Pop and Arte Povera to the digital glow. Many of the big-name loans, positioned throughout the exhibition in the manner of well-paced highlights, are works by famous, usually male, European and American artists. Wellintentioned but seemingly rushed, Colori ends up feeling like it’s trying to prop up its new (global, inclusive) art body on an old Euro-American skeleton. Hettie Judah

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boca Biennial of Contemporary Arts Various venues, Lisbon and Porto 17 March – 30 April Established by theatre director/actor John Romão, the inaugural boca connected diverse cultural institutions to coproduce 30 works. Framing itself as an ‘agora’, the festival quoted Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ and Paul Virilio’s faith in nomadism to bolster its agenda of equivalence across all artforms – whether housed in black boxes or white cubes, theatres or nightclubs – envisioning all as ‘temples’ of cultural conversation. As such, one could perhaps see boca as a foot soldier in a burgeoning revenge of the performing arts, following their recent co-option by art institutions. Reflecting upon the ‘eventised museum’ and art’s adoption of performance in a lecture in Lisbon last year, Claire Bishop suggested that “when an institution colonises dance, it almost guarantees a lack of critique, as the home of dance is the theatre, elsewhere”. Devotedly pan-artistic, yet founded in performance’s lineage, para-institutional structures like boca perhaps offer a stage upon which dance and theatre might bite the cannibalistic artworld back, to redigest and absorb its ‘performative turn’ in continuum with live arts’ context and critical vocabulary, while combating the perceived hierarchal supremacy of visual art through a promotion of the plural arts. boca in no way framed itself as part of a war between disciplines, but embodied theatricality undoubtedly remained the biennial’s commander-in-chief, influencing the selection, commission and display of works. Its exhibitions typically lasted an evening or a few days, and this productively framed them as ‘events’ of equal billing to the theatre, dance, concerts and films they were placed alongside in the programme. Through boca’s filter, artist Héctor Zamora’s destruction of Portuguese fishing boats at maat, Ordem e Progresso (2017), read as musique concrète, while acclaimed pianist Marino Formenti’s Internet-streamed 20-day recital in Gulbenkian’s garden amphitheatre – architectonically transformed into a home

by artist Ricardo Jacinto – saw the musician treated as a living sculpture, in Nowhere (2017). Nightclub Lux became a (p)opera house through Tianzhuo Chen’s kitsch, untitled performative queering of Western youth culture and Eastern ritual, in collaboration with the Asian Dope Boys and dj/producer Aïsha Devi, while the dancefloors of club nights at diverse boca venues were coloured as sites of participatory performance. When viewed at boca, Ulla Von Brandenburg’s film It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2016) – wherein dancers perform a trouping of coloured blankets in an abstraction of power relations on a stage set of stairs – asserted its place in a lineage of dance film, Busby Berkeley and mime, expanding the position of performance within the film from component to context. And the stage of Teatro Nacional D. Maria II exhibited João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s installationscenography of seven 16mm films across five screens. A filmed encounter with Japanese Noh theatre (Pavão (nue), 2016) and a reverie on strutting peacocks ((Pavão) Época de Acasalamento, 2016) suggested costumed performance to be a rite common across species, while Projector (teste de camera) (2016) used slow motion to reveal the phantasmagoric stagecraft of a projector’s fluxing gate. boca hosted four resident artists. The Portuguese artist duo Musa paradisiaca created a stage in public space, Casa-animal (2017), to platform projects selected through open call. In Lisbon’s resplendent Rococo opera house, accompanied by Marie-Pierre Brébant on bandura, dancer/choreographer François Chaignaud incanted and writhed his way through an archaic twelfth-century choral work by Hildegard von Bingen. Sporting matching gymwear and female drag, the pair’s queer séance sought the ethereal divine. Still to be performed at time of writing was boca’s commission of Tania Bruguera’s first piece for theatre – an abstraction of Samuel

Beckett’s Endgame (1957) – and the biennial similarly invited filmmaker Salomé Lamas to direct her first piece for the stage. Combining techniques of documentary with a theatrical monologue, Lamas’s heavily footnoted dramatisation of Middle Eastern conflict, Fatamorgana (2017), felt like it had challenged director and audience both, illustrating the complexities innate to inviting artists to transfer their practice to a different craft. Contrarily, offering a third space between the heavily guarded hagiographies of dance and visual art allowed choreographers to shine. The deceptively casual Muse (2017) saw Florentina Holzinger collaborate with her former tutor Renée Copraij. Both women clad in swimsuits, Holzinger popped her muscular body with militarised sexuality to blaring edm, before Copraij led her through yoga poses and then recited Martha Graham’s philosophy of makeup. Retiring to eat lobster on a table at the stage’s rear, the pair louchely switched to an ‘artist’s talk’, awkwardly taking in ageing, sexuality and the nature of the muse – referencing the significantly older Copraij’s 20-plus years of performing for choreographer Jan Fabre – before segueing into a finale inspired by Madonna and Britney Spears’s infamous kiss at the 2003 VMAs. As fog filled the stage to a screwed version of the former’s song Hollywood (2003), Holzinger slipped from her one-piece into a hoodie, Copraij donned a strap-on dildo. The muse then penetrated her student and, prosthetic fully inserted throughout, delicately danced across the stage in an acrobatic pas de deux. “It needs work,” Holzinger concluded. And yet, wry and surprisingly beautiful, the evening’s many layers resonated, while speaking to the biennial as a whole. While they’ve long been fuck-buddies and mutual muses, the visual and performing arts’ ‘complicated’ relationship may be showing signs of more conscious coupling. boca is evidently eager to play their matchmaker. Justin Jaeckle

facing page, top Héctor Zamora, Ordem e Progresso, 2017, installation-performance, dimensions variable facing page, bottom João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Avantesma Fantasma, 2017, installation, seven 16mm videos, colour, silent, durations variable both images Photo: Bruno Simao. Courtesy boca, Lisbon and Porto

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Mihai Olos The Ephemerist: A Mihai Olos Retrospective mnac Central, Palace of Parliament, Bucharest 10 November – 26 March (Phase One) ‘The Romanian’s favourite material is wood,’ wrote the prolific Romanian artist, poet and essayist Mihai Olos (1940–2015) in a 1988 essay. From ‘the peasant’s spoon and pot’ to Constantin Brancusi’s elegiac Endless Column (1938), an early version of which was rendered in oak, wood ‘has (human) warmth and tolerance and extinction’. In the same text Olos recalls his friendship with Joseph Beuys, and the performative exchanges that followed their collaboration at Documenta 6 in 1977. Later, when Beuys created 7000 oaks (1982), Olos ‘remembered that he had asked me what wood I used most frequently to carve my sculptures in – “Oak wood”, I told him. His oaks will grow into timber for his posterity.’ The essay ends with the poet’s touch for enigma, in three seemingly disparate images that go from flight to fall; ‘I dreamt of Beuys (...) playing the violin – from a distance, with a long bow, I was playing the same violin. Then, on no violin, we played together, using only the two crossing bows. It is snowing. 4 March 1988 – a remembrance day of the sinister earthquake from Bucharest.’ In these lines there is an echo of the ‘warmth, tolerance and extinction’ that Olos recognised in wood and in humanity. The following year, the pan-Eastern Bloc revolutions of 1989 hailed a violent end to the megalomaniacal leadership of Nicolae Ceaus,escu in Romania. The Ephemerist is the title of this twophase retrospective of Olos’s career, housed

in a fraction of Ceaus,escu’s obese folly, the Palace of the Parliament. A bittersweet title, referencing the code name of the surveillance files held on Olos by the secret police pre-1989, it also indicates the artist’s discursiveness. Olos rarely dated his work, but approximately 400 pieces from the late 1960s to 2000s feature in phase one (with a reshuffle for the second phase, from 27 April to 8 October, to concentrate more on drawings and documentary material). A core arrangement of tabletop knotted objects that incorporate readymades such as paper receipts, pencils and playing cards leads towards larger wood, ceramic and basketry sculptures, and paintings that range from abstraction to erotic expressionism. The display propels you around the gallery’s tiers in a fashion mirrored in the painting Sâmbra Oilor (Celebration of the Fellowship of the Sheep, undated). This is a more obviously figurative work than most here, but it perfectly exemplifies the exuberance found throughout Olos’s oeuvre. The knot, a structure based on the intertwining of six elements found in the peasant’s home, is a motif that surfaces repeatedly. Conjuring an association with early mystic Constructivism, the infinite combinations of the knot were, for Olos, part of a utopian, philosophical strategy that would unite East and West through the transfer of sacredness from the local to the universal. Intentionally or otherwise,

some paintings invoke a mental overlay of the hammer and sickle, or the swastika. Alluding to the current ‘dangerous resurrection of all sorts of nationalisms and fundamentalisms’, the exhibition’s accompanying text speaks of ‘looking without prejudice’ at how Olos’s ‘radicalism of experiment is fuelled precisely by a radical, uncompromising understanding and appreciation of the popular culture’, namely the Romanian folk traditions into which the artist was born. In an untitled gouache on paper from 1974, interlocking timberlike beams (again, the knot) float, disconcertingly impossible in perspective, over what appears to be a loosely drawn semiindustrialised landscape. An arching line, underscored with an arrow, shoots across a sun drawn with childlike charm. This combination of the diagrammatical and naive has a playful yet pointed effect that is as abstruse as the motion in the picture plane, and I’m reminded in this instance not of the shamanic practice of Beuys, but of the irony of Sigmar Polke and the aesthetics of ‘Capitalist Realism’. That Olos may be found at almost every juncture of late Modernism is worth the investigation this retrospective affords, but what resounds is the singular, uplifting voice of an artist whose nation bore the postwar experiment with arguably more turmoil than most. Phoebe Blatton

The Universal City, 1974, gouache on paper, 128 × 113 cm. Photo: Marius Poput. Courtesy Olos Estate and Plan B, Cluj & Berlin

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Andrea Büttner Gesamtzusammenhang With David Raymond Conroy and the Friedensbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum Berlin Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen 4 March – 7 May If intermingling art and activism is the topic of the moment, Andrea Büttner can claim precedence, having long examined how people act on their convictions: for example, she filmed nuns who live with a travelling fair and work in its community for the work Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia (2012). The German artist’s latest iteration on the theme is this exhibition, which gives other voices a platform – or, to use her lexicon, a shelter. Her own works are here too, with their air of modesty: more than a dozen woodcut prints, made between 2005 and 2017 and exploring signature themes – elementary architecture in Tent (marquee) (2012) and Tent (two colours) (2012–13), holy orders in Dancing Nuns (2007) and hooded, begging figures in three works titled Beggar (2017). In these mostly oneor two-colour works, sometimes more than two metres wide and generally at least one-metre tall, subjects are limned with sharp lines carved into the wooden block and minimal detail: the supplicants, for example, are sacklike cloaked shapes, just two outstretched hands visible. Placed centrally, however, in the Kunst Halle’s first gallery and prominently in the third is an exhibition from the Friedensbibliothek/ Antikriegsmuseum (Peace Library/Anti-War Museum) in Berlin, an institution of the Protestant Church that produces travelling educational displays. This one, mounted on rudimentary wooden stands, highlights the writing of Simone Weil, writ large on A4 sheets interspersed with A4 prints featuring familiar

black-and-white images of key events from the last century. Three chapters are created in the display from quotations of Weil’s writings from the 1930s and 40s (the French philosopher and teacher died, aged just thirty-four, in 1943). The opening section, ‘The Needs of the Soul’, outlines her thoughts on the responsibilities of freedom, while ‘Uprootedness’ bemoans the influence of money, capitalism and nationalism, with August Sander images of workers, industrialists and soldiers segueing into Don McCullin, Leticia Valverdes and others who reported on war, famine and misery in Vietnam, Brazil and elsewhere. Finally, in ‘The Growing of Roots’ Weil’s words argue that good and evil must be taught and the young motivated to act, alongside pastoral and still-life images by Josef Sudek and photographic portraits of noteworthy figures. In the middle gallery, Büttner includes British artist David Raymond Conroy’s film (You (People) Are All The Same) (2016), a 40-minute handheld record of the artist’s attempts to make an artwork, his (ultimately aborted) plan being to ask a homeless person to gamble the production budget accompanying his Las Vegas residency. Conroy is stymied by events and lack of time as well as his own reservations about the dubious endeavour, his being just one of several voices recounting the events that happen off-camera over footage shot like a video diary, while the whole is tied together by another, authoritative American woman’s critique, spoken as if picking over evidence.

All three elements of the exhibition share a diy aesthetic (and, no matter how well meant, demonstrate how easily the art market will be able to absorb this ethical candour). Each part is a scaffold sustaining something more substantial – be that literally, in the case of the Weil exhibition; Conroy’s would-be diary that weaves a complicated fabric of naivety, guile, calculation and moral judgement; and Büttner’s prints, in which the bare lines relate to systems and questions of faith or life. As conductor and author of the composition, Büttner’s bigger picture (as the exhibition title translates) consists of immense concerns about human nature, though the topic of presentation embedded within it is important too. Why, for example, does a didactic tool appear anomalous in an art institution? Is the appropriation and instrumentalisation of documentary photography in the exhibition warranted? We are more at ease watching Conroy’s video, second-guessing the sincerity of what is on display even while understanding that his questions relate to ethics. ‘Das Höchste ist nicht, das Höchste verstehen, sondern es tun’ (‘The greatest achievement is not to understand greatness but to do it’) is one of Weil’s quotations; in this context, should we interpret it as an indicator that we are too fixated on understanding when we look at art? I don’t believe Büttner wants to discredit the art space, but maybe to show that an aesthetic forum is inescapably a moral one too. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Gesamtzusammenhang, 2017 (installation view, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen). Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, and Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz

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These Rotten Words Chapter, Cardiff 18 March – 11 June Word-heavy shows can tend towards the dry and worthy. Steering clear of such a possibility, this exhibition – curated by George Vasey and commissioned by Chapter to coincide with Cardiff’s annual arts festival Experimentica – dwells less on words than on their dissolution. Here, language spreads awkwardly, tackily, bodily; it is resistive, its meaning passing temperamentally from the intended to the received. A key critique, which Vasey’s excellent accompanying essay further unpicks, is the illusion of the apparent disposability of verbal language. Words seem to spread, unchecked and with abandon. Their implicit meaning percolates promiscuously through fast-paced media outlets, after which they appear to simply dissipate without consequence. Not so, this show convincingly argues. The artists assembled here – Rebecca Ackroyd, Johann Arens, David Austen, Anna Barham, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Foundation Press, Anneke Kampman, Joanna Piotrowska, Devlin Shea – are bound by a common interest in enacting and interrogating the volatility of language, albeit in various ways. First to greet you is Kampman, whose text score – as she calls it – is recorded and pressed onto vinyl. It is built up in stirring layers of spoken narrative that mount operatically, with a growing sense of foreboding.

That’s if you choose to listen, of course; it’s up to you to put her record on. The body as a silent but significant medium through which communication passes is a recurrent theme. Austen’s slight watercolours and Shea’s paintings of figures converse across one room; their subjects are pictured looking, holding and touching, enacting actions that speak volumes. Nearby, Ackroyd’s crude and preposterously large knobbly limbs – made from chicken wire, white plaster bandage and air vents – jut incongruously into the room; one of these, a lower leg, reaches floor to ceiling. And, from Arens’s On Haptics series (2015), hand shapes impress and partially protrude through darkened, glossy acrylic sheets reminiscent of primitive computer screens propped on office desks. They reach out but don’t get very far, meeting with little but resistance. This gulf between words’ articulation – in print, in a mind, on a screen, in a mouth – and its reception is precarious, rife with misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Piotrowska’s photographed and filmed female figures mutely point, mime or twist themselves into bodily contortions, literally tying themselves in knots to make themselves understood. Anything but neutral, such translations strain at the confines of bodies, language

and media. Wallpapered to a largely hidden corner is one of the few text-heavy works of the exhibition. Barham’s Knives (2017) uses voice recognition software to render a passage by Vilém Flusser. Presented matter-of-factly, in small black type on white, closer inspection reveals a garbled transcription, flawed by technology’s relative crudeness. Stuttering, words appear in disconnected rows that don’t quite recur, their flow interrupted by blank spaces and excessive, insistent hyphenations. Nonsensical columns of repeated letter patterns emerge. It’s almost unreadable, like code. The text’s font size and unpredictable alignment add to the difficulty, as does the work’s placement: low down, taking in two corners of the gallery – which means that in order to follow it you have to move along its length. Turning reading into a peculiarly estranging physical performance like this is just one of the challenges that These Rotten Words poses. By prodding, poking, pasting, printing, muting, enacting and singing, it assiduously attends to the undermining of spoken and written utterances. Its warning, if not new, is certainly timely: to cast words as straightforwardly explicative carriers of knowledge, feeling or information is not only disingenuous but deeply problematic. Lizzie Lloyd

These Rotten Words, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Jamie Woodley. Courtesy Chapter, Cardiff

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Franki Raffles Observing Women at Work Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art 4 March – 27 April There has been a revival of interest in twentiethcentury women photographers and filmmakers from Scotland over the last few years. The works of Margaret Tait and Maud Sulter, for example, have featured in new monographs, exhibitions and screenings. Observing Women at Work focuses on feminist social documentary photographer Franki Raffles (1955–94). The exhibition is divided into four sections, the first three of which each focus on one specific photographic series; the fourth comprises a small contextual section of works by early-twentieth-century women photographers whose work shares subject matter or approach, including Margaret Fay Shaw, Helen Muspratt and Doris Ulmann. An image from Hackney Flashers Collective’s Women and Work series (1975) is also on show. The centrepiece, though, is undoubtedly Raffles’s extensive Women at Work series from 1989, which shows women labouring in the ussr during the final years of the Soviet regime. In these 34 works, some of the images are accompanied by captions from Raffles’s exchanges with her subjects, introducing wry humour to images that are formally representative of much (very serious) black-and-white agitprop photography of the 1980s. These

conversational ‘snippets’ function effectively both to counter the ‘ethnographic gaze’ and to refuse the trope or stock-character tendency of some social-documentary practice: a roadbuilder asks, ‘You have people called housewives, don’t you?’ Elsewhere, a potato lifter turns the gaze firmly back on the artist: ‘Why don’t you come over and live here? I could get you a job no problem.’ Raffles replies to say that she already has one. ‘Yeah, taking photographs of me.’ Curator Jenny Brownrigg’s juxtaposition of the Russian project with an almost parallel series of women workers in Edinburgh from 1988 (To Let You Understand…) serves to underpin Raffles’s political agenda, and the pairing invites a comparative reading. The Russians are shown, almost invariably, as ‘heroic’ and happy in their work. Smiling, strong, often looking directly into the lens, they appear to embrace roles traditionally regarded as male (plasterers, roadbuilders, railway construction). In stark contrast, the literally darker images of cleaners and office, hospital and factory workers in Edinburgh depicts the Scots under Margaret Thatcher as indentured, downtrodden, subservient. In these, women

are often shown facing away from the camera, or side-on. In the comparison of women’s place within opposing political systems there are echoes of Frank Clarke’s 1985 film Letter to Brezhnev – in both instances Soviet Russia is proposed as the better deal. Retrospectively, the Edinburgh works are particularly timely – childcare in the Scottish capital is still the most expensive in Europe outside Switzerland, and in-work poverty is a continued crisis. If Raffles’s work has been largely forgotten since her death, her contribution to the ground-breaking Zero Tolerance campaign during the early 1990s – which makes up the third section of the show – is truly memorable, and demonstrates again the steadfastly feminist lens of her practice. The campaign marked a new approach to raising awareness of men’s violence against women and children. Rather than showing bruised or battered faces, facts and statistics were shown beneath photographs of women and children in familiar and ordinary domestic settings. Anyone who encountered these works during the 1990s will remember both their power and their force, and the potential of photography to effect social change. Susannah Thompson

Plasterers, from the series Women Workers, Russia, 1989, caption: ‘They told me that they had worked together as a team for fifteen years. They chose the work they took on. “Refurbishments like this are boring. It’s more exciting working on new buildings.”’ Courtesy the estate of the artist

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Maeve Brennan The Drift Chisenhale Gallery, London 31 March – 4 June The Drift (2017), produced by the Chisenhale together with Spike Island, Bristol, is Maeve Brennan’s latest film. In it, the artist turns her attention to questions of heritage and conservation in a country damaged by a civil war, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the increased looting of heritage sites. Filmed, using long and wide static shots, in the arid, semideserted plains of the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, 30km east of Beirut, the 50-minute work captures the melancholic sense of stillness and immutability that such grand-scaled landscapes can evoke. Alternating with these are extracts from recorded interviews – partly authentic and partly staged, according to the exhibition text – with three men who serve to humanise these landscapes and seem to have been selected by the artist for their vocations as ‘caretakers’ of sorts. One is Fakhry, an older man who, since the 1970s, has been guarding the ruins of Roman temples around his native town against thieves, while also engaging in some reconstruction, and is proud to share his passion for these old stones. Another is a conservator, who remains silent except for his concentrated breathing as he, armed only with a scalpel, a toothbrush and some superglue, patiently attempts to reassemble broken pottery in the basement

of the American University of Beirut (these last dialogue-free scenes create an intense sense of frustration, as the conservator never succeeds in restoring any pots to even an approximation of their original state: they remain unfinished puzzles). The third interview is with a young man – a less conventional type of ‘caretaker’ – who drives around the region in his old bmw, picking up car parts from scrapyards seemingly with the sole aim of upgrading his car. When he’s not changing the car’s door or wheel in the middle of a deserted road, he kills time by spinning his car in circles – what car enthusiasts call ‘drifting’ – in the dusty plains. The deliberate slowness and contemplativeness of Brennan’s film, in particular when capturing the landscape, seems at odds with the activities going on in the Beqaa Valley. Indeed, the vast chain of mountains on the horizon forms a border with Syria, and the multiple ‘outlaw roads’ the young car-driver shows us snaking through the mountains have made the region a central junction in antiques smuggling from Syria. The valley is also reputed to be a haven for carjacking gangs, drug trafficking and counterfeiting of all sorts, as well as being known for its high number of Hezbollah disciples. This reality

is not absent here, but placed in perspective. The young man stops to show us the remains of a Hezbollah member’s car, bombed by the Israelis in 2012, before saying with a smirk: “God have mercy on his soul. But those wheels are brand new. One day I’ll come here and take them.” Elsewhere we witness someone who could be an antiques smuggler, filmed at night under a streetlight. We see only his hands as he swipes a finger across photographs of presumably looted artefacts on his smartphone. His tone when describing the objects is light and intimate, like that of a regular salesman. Emerging from these contrasts is the mundanity of people getting on amid the rubble around them – a subject dear to other post-civil war artists, such as Akram Zaatari – and the unusual passion and interest they demonstrate for this detritus, be it car parts, Roman stones or broken pottery. What is revealed, in turn, is a human drive to preserve and rebuild, even if here the attempts can feel at times pointless, in a Sisyphean way. The reason why, perhaps, the young man drifts almost obsessively: “We go and drift on the main roads, in the fields, in the mountains… We must leave our mark, a souvenir.” Louise Darblay

The Drift (video still), 2017, hd video, colour, sound, 50 min 29 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Knut Henrik Henriksen The story of a man who lost interest in his job and started walking in circles Hollybush Gardens, London 24 March – 13 May It was only at some point during the twentieth century that a life of leisure for everyone became an aim in itself. Machines would take over all the necessary labour, leaving humans to a work-free existence. Then the problem became: what would we do with all that time? Cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener thought we would spend our time in endless play and enriching our spiritual lives, an idealism that seems almost cute at this point. Knut Henrik Henriksen, in his show of sculptural interventions, suggests the more likely scenario: that we will just keep working, either keep making stuff or walk eagerly in circles, and still be just as stressed out and ruled by the clock. A giant set of arrows dominates the far wall at the back of the main gallery, their appearance as oversize clock hands assisted by the title Tick Tock (all works but one, 2017). The dull brown lengths of each shape turn suddenly to glittering bright pink arrow tips that abut the ceiling, as if testily reminding us that we should enjoy being dominated by time. It seems to read around 11:05. The rest of the show is filled with a range of laborious constructions, from Gert, the tall, imposing column of pale wood that half-blocks

the entrance to the gallery, to the alternating black and white boards of Day and Night that line the hallway floor and encircle a small portion of the gallery’s front hallway wall. Walking into the back gallery, Le Palais Idéal reveals itself, a large pebbledash triangle that bisects the entire floor, slanting up to a corner midway on the wall. An angular portion of the impressive lumpy surface is painted a pale yellow, giving it the air of an excerpt from a corner of a housing estate: something that appears semidecorative, but is actually there to deter skateboarders and rough sleepers. This might not seem quite like an ‘ideal palace’, but its name actually comes from the intricate early-twentieth-century folly built from found stones by the French postman Ferdinand Cheval over a period of 30 years. Though named after Cheval’s intricate (sparetime) life’s work, and perhaps aspiring to such dedication, Henriksen’s own constructions have none of the rough, improvised solutions of Cheval’s naive art; his work more often has the sense of a maths buff on an acid trip, obsessively finding golden means and concentric circles in every nook and cranny.

The painted design on his Palais Idéal no doubt finds its origin in the intricate intersections of the room’s proportions; though he also seems aware that such abstract conjectures eventually hit reality: Tool (to John) is a silver wheelbarrow that has been smashed flat, leaning against a wall as if having tried, and failed, to run through it. Giving up on work, on usefulness, seems to be a central concern for Henriksen; his architecture is informal, decorative, but with an overdetermined sense of play, as if still hung up on the functionality that his constructions have left behind. Monument to the Unknown Worker feels like the actual centre of the show, a series of thick, gold marker lines on the floor, tracing the semicircular grooves left from whatever light industry inhabited the building before the gallery. It feels like an attempt at communion with purposefulness, with having a defined sense of use and meaning, looking back fondly, but also with a sort of envy. The story of a man who lost interest in his job and started walking in circles is a mausoleum for the lost job, and a melancholic ode to a life of play to which we have been reluctantly liberated. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The story of a man who lost interest in his job and started walking in circles, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London

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Jaki Irvine If the Ground Should Open… Frith Street Gallery, London 3 March – 13 April The gallery is silent when I enter, though only temporarily. Most of the time, black-and-white videos of women singing and playing musical instruments – bagpipes, cello, piano, violin, double bass, drums – play on bulky screens supported by their own cases and dispersed throughout the space. Irvine’s exhibition was commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art to commemorate last year’s centenary of the Easter Rising, specifically the role of women in the fight for Ireland’s Independence. The name of one of these women, Elizabeth O’Farrell, is circled on a page from a novel written by Irvine in 2013, titled Days of Surrender, that page rendered here as an etching on paper. O’Farrell was selected by Patrick Pearse (one of the leaders of the uprising) to carry his message during opening negotiations for the rebels’ surrender to British General William Lowe; her feet (caught on film as she was retreating from the camera) were subsequently erased from the photographic record of the event. Irvine has transformed O’Farrell’s name into a musical ‘ground’ or melody using the canntaireachd system, a kind of notation primarily used for bagpipes. Rather than put O’Farrell back ‘into the picture’, her name, her existence,

alongside those of other women who played a role in the Easter Rising, becomes a series of pieces of music. A woman removed from the historical record has reemerged in the present as song, which makes for a far more animated experience (aren’t bagpipes one of the most lifelike of instruments, appearing like living, breathing lungs?). It’s as if she has summoned herself. Irvine has also incorporated into her compositions extracts from telephone conversations between male Anglo-Irish Bank employees in the run-up to the 2008 financial crash. The workers’ assumption of invisibility, and power without responsibility, stands in sharp contrast to the actions of O’Farrell (in one story, told in another book-page etching on the gallery wall, she stepped behind Pearse when the British Army photographer raised his camera, taking control of her own image). The employees’ conversation sounds like a joke, which of course it is: “You get them to write a big cheque,” says one. “They have to support their money, you know.” When these voices – I could name them, draw circles around those names, but I won’t – are silent, the whole piece feels more thoughtful, more contemplative, but maybe also more sentimental.

Short periods of silence between each piece of music allow for shifts in register, like chapter breaks or, indeed, pauses between songs on an album. While giving structure to the work as a whole, these breaks are also generous to the visitor, who is allowed time to think – perhaps about recent images of female resistance, which are not included in the show. For example: Olga Lozina carried by police during a protest in Moscow, or Ieshia Evans calmly accepting her arrest at a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge. Women, it seems, are no longer edited out of images and stories of protest and uprising. In fact, in our current era, images of women are our most ‘iconic’ images of protest. The use of male voices – monstrous when Irvine loops their laughter – makes for an unsettling juxtaposition. At times it seems like the priority is to damn these already-damned men who destroyed a country’s finances, rather than remember the actions of past generations of resistant women, so easily erased and forgotten. We have heard these male voices, or others like them, emerge so often that it seems misjudged to give them prominence in the mix. Alice Hattrick

If the Ground Should Open..., 2017 (installation view). Photo: Steve White. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

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24/04/2017 13:24

Irma Blank Life Time Alison Jacques Gallery, London 24 March – 26 April Irma Blank is one of the most interesting artists to have benefited from the artworld’s recent mania for overlooked or forgotten talent. Though she’s been making work since the late 1960s, the German-born artist was hardly known outside Italy, where she’s lived for the past six decades, until a solo presentation in the 2013 Frieze Masters Spotlight section sparked a dramatic surge of interest (seriously, her ranking graph on artfacts.com shows probably the steepest ascent you’ll ever see) to the extent that now, aged eighty-three, she’s included in this year’s Venice Biennale. As is often the way with such rediscoveries, a point of comparison is habitually trotted out – and for Blank, the standard one is Hanne Darboven. Both artists, certainly, share an interest in ideas of writing and repetition, the similarity being strongest in the case of Blank’s works from the 1970s, which consist of dense, rhythmic scrawls of minute text, like a kind of primal, illegible calligraphy – blank verse, as it were. Perhaps it’s in order to shake off the Darboven comparison, then, that nothing from that early period is exhibited in Blank’s second show at Alison Jacques Gallery. Instead, selections have been made from two more recent series, the most compelling being the Avant-testo

(‘avant-text’) works of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In these intense and visceral pieces, which range from small works on paper to large, polyester canvases, Blank completely abandons her previous linear structures and neat paragraphs. Using cheap blue or black ballpoints, she draws thousands upon thousands of curling, looping scribbles, as if her (non-) writing were being exploded in all directions. There’s a subtle, penumbral framing effect around the edges of each work, where the marks gradually tail off; but the vast majority of each surface ends up completely coloured in – not like a child’s frantic, section-by-section colouring-in but a more even distribution, suggesting a methodical, meditative approach, an attentiveness to time and process (each work’s title, indeed, includes the date of its manufacture). The final results are quite mesmerising: scratchily opaque, like a fog of swirling static, a veillike thicket of lines. It’s a kind of obliteration – that is, an obliteration: a denial of readability, as if the forms and shapes of written language have become hopelessly unravelled and tangled; have become, in essence, drawings. As such, the works imply a different sort of readability, along materialist lines. With the works on paper, for instance, you notice

the impressions and striations left by the biro. On card, meanwhile, the obsessive scribbling scuffs up the surface, giving it a softly fuzzed, almost cobwebby appearance. And as for the big polyester pieces, the bright-blue ink makes them look like nothing so much as an Yves Klein homage, with the added effect of the plastic’s slight translucency letting you see the wooden stretcher frames below; yet up close, the surfaces look weirdly, dizzyingly shiny, the maelstrom of pen marks creating a marbled, almost nacreous effect. Blank’s newest works, the Global Writings series begun in 2015, aren’t quite as madly scintillating, but still explore this fertile territory to do with language and material form. Except that here she approaches the idea from the opposite direction, writing actual alphabetic letters in marker pen, repeating the same short set of characters in a long continuous line or as dense blocks across adjacent sheets of paper. ‘HRi’, they read, over and over; or maybe it’s ‘ltKj’. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know. The gestures are so quick and small, the divisions between letters so uncertain, that the screeds once again seem constantly on the verge of dissolving into a seething, abstract mass. Gabriel Coxhead

Ur-schrift ovvero Avant-testo, 28-5-02, 2002, ballpoint pen on polyester on wooden stretcher, 56 × 50 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

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Ewa Axelrad satis The Ryder Projects, London 9 March – 15 April ‘I can’t breathe.’ Those were the last words of Eric Garner, who died on Staten Island in 2014. Several police officers had confronted him about the alleged illegal sale of ‘loosies’ (single cigarettes). When he refused to be handcuffed, they put him in a chokehold – a form of restraint prohibited by nypd regulations – and forced him on his knees before pushing him facedown to the ground. He fell unconscious on the sidewalk as officers looked on; they made no attempt to resuscitate him. In satis three piles of cast-concrete gloved hands stand on the floor. Titled Minimum, Necessary, Objectively Reasonable #1 (2015, one of four works from the series in this exhibition) and stacked three and four high, each pair of hands is cast in the position required to perform a cpr-style chest compression. Creases between the fingers of the flesh-stretched material and the faint outline of a knuckle are the only traces of a hand that might have filled the glove cavity. But these hands are heavy and static; their material density suggests an oppressive, perhaps suffocating intent. The work’s title is evolved from terms used in us police guidance regarding the appropriate use of force. Either side of the concrete hands, two works, Minimum… #4 (2015–16) and Minimum… #5 (2016), are placed diagonally opposite one another: the first features coiled latex tubing attached to a glass rod and sits on a table; the second is a

metal-framed medical screen made up of three hinged latex panels. When stretched out, the rubber tube – soft, and the nauseating colour of raw pork – would be 6m, roughly the length of a human’s small intestines. Indeed, it resembles equipment used for colonic irrigation, the fleshy tone adding to this distinctly invasive subtext. There’s something disquieting about the small white brickwalled space in which this series and two other works are shown. It’s as if one has accidentally stumbled into an ‘enhanced interrogation’ room – the surrounding works look for use in such activities; whether intentional or not, the effect brings about an instinctive need to back out of the room. A disembodied male voice vibrates through the space, repeating a single Latin word – the title of the show – at long intervals. On the back wall, a photograph (Fetor. Greetings, 2014) showing a scene of civil unrest and composed of collaged images hangs as a clue to piecing together the exhibition. 2014 marked a breaking point in trust between state police and civilians in the us. Wide media coverage of police brutality – especially against ethnic minorities – increased public awareness of instances in which the abuse of power led to fatalities. At the end of 2015, a study found that ethnic minorities made up more than half of the total unarmed people killed by police that

year. In light of this, the exhibition (and particularly Minimum… #1, where the concrete hands are more likely to crush, rather than restart a heart) raises questions about what happens when an institution set up to safeguard becomes a threat. Anomalia (2015), a portmanteau of ‘anomaly’ and ‘animalia’, is a sculpture of a crouching black puffer jacket with its arms rooted to the ground, calling to mind someone who has been brought to their knees. Axelrad appears to position this item of clothing, which is synonymous with ‘street wear’, as a comment on the way police officers use profiling – a judgement based on someone’s appearance – when suspecting a person of committing a crime. Here, the jacket, in a similar way to the concrete hands, reflects the absence of a human – and in its hunched stance, it is ambiguously agonistic. The dehumanisation of the ‘anomaly’ runs throughout history, rendering those targeted as other to ‘normative society’, therefore making it easier to justify elimination; at the same time, the act of committing violence calls into question the humanity of the perpetrator. But there’s also a resistance in Anomalia – the puffer jacket, frozen in position, refuses the floor. Long after leaving, the voice that accompanied the exhibition echoes inside the ear, a strained wheezing of the word Satis: ‘enough’. Fi Churchman

Minimum, Necessary, Objectively Reasonable #1, 2015, concrete composite, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, bwa Warszawa and the Ryder Projects, London

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Would You Rather… bbqla, Los Angeles 26 March – 22 April Going through ml Dodge’s art-crate-cumtunnel to enter the gallery space at bbqla is like walking through Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970): you are different from when you came in. The work itself isn’t overly remarkable (a recycled shipping crate with painted wooden strips flanking the interior walls), yet its placement, blocking the gallery entrance wholesale and forcing you to enter through the open end of the crate, gives it power. Contending with and contorting oneself to get through this passageway elicits a sense of transformation, offering us a fitting introduction to an exhibition that revels in slow and measured methods. If Dodge’s crate is the rabbit hole, then Samuel Scharf’s flooring invention, Picket Parquet (2017), roots us firmly in Wonderland. Blanketing the gallery floor are sliced segments of whitewashed picket-fence posts, arranged to create a beautiful grid design. The work is simple, and suggests that a certain kind of meditation is achievable through repetitive motions such as traversing a space.

Curated by Michael Smoler, director of Blum & Poe Los Angeles, Would You Rather… makes clear Smoler’s partiality for Mono-hastyle artists (Blum & Poe is largely responsible for reintroducing this Japanese movement to Western audiences). It’s no surprise then that a work by Kishio Suga (himself represented by Blum & Poe), one of the leading proponents of the movement, is given prime real estate. Still, Suga’s Opening Situation (1990–2016) offers a blueprint into the collective process and mentality of Smoler’s grouping of six artists: the work consists of a tree branch resting inside a simply constructed wooden frame. The tree branch splits into two prongs, and the frame ends at each offshoot, leaving the rectangle unfinished. A chunky block of wood placed in the lower corner of the frame acts as a bold counterweight to this negative space. Opening Situation is startling in its simplicity and humble materials. Arlene Shechet’s Face the Music (2016) also exposes a potential meeting ground between the natural and the handmade. A small wooden stump, which had been sculpted and painted

by the artist, is kissed by a mirroring ceramic form. A glowing fluorescent yellow has been painted or glazed (it’s hard to tell which) onto the intersections of the two forms, where their quiet interaction is garishly highlighted. Elsewhere, Damien Hoar de Galvan’s small wood assemblages carry on this kind of visual puzzling. Coloured wooden scraps abut to form crude likenesses: cross, mushroom, wave (all 2016). Paul Pascal Theriault is a bit of an outlier in this lot of methodical makers. His The Ying-Yang Eyeball / French Cookie (2017) follows in his schlocky assemblage style: bits of Cosmopolitan magazine, trash and nail polish are arranged on a loose wooden armature, and blasted with a Pollockesque paint application. Where Shechet shows reserve and restraint, Theriault forcibly offers an anything-goes ethos. His work embodies those pesky thoughts about work or to-do lists that must be overridden in order to reach the lotus. While we may not ascend to Nirvana in the middle of industrial Boyle Heights, Would You Rather… boldly asserts its own quiet power. Lindsay Preston Zappas

Would You Rather…, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy bbqla, Los Angeles

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Derya Akay Pumice Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles 27 January – 27 April The poetry of a recipe might appear to reside in its list of ingredients: logwood and indigo, rudbeckia and eucalyptus, coreopsis and walnut husk and madder root. In an actual poem, it might seem to squat in the words. But anyone who has tried either (the poetics or the recipe) truly knows that the poetry of both is not on the page but in your mouth. In the two spare bedrooms of the apartment that make up Del Vaz Projects, Derya Akay has left T-shirts that appear like cum-rags for colours ejaculated from his garden (which grows the ingredients listed above), as well as stitched-together photographs of a tattooed lover’s flesh, hanging acetate sheets rolling down from the ceiling and curling on the floor riddled with words inscribed freehand and printed. On the wall of one room hangs a cut of wood lath from the artist’s flooded Vancouver apartment, bearing the brightest splooges of impastoed paint. Wilting flower petals are tucked into its cracks. Next to it on the white wood floor sits a Plexiglas replica of the lath,

looking like it’s been pressed against the original (paint stains on the clear plastic offer evidence of coupling). Those gooey pigments have been dusted with paprika and borage, sumac and turmeric, all filched from the Del Vaz spice rack. Between these works sits one of two bouquets in rough-skinned ceramic pots, titled Vessels for Nicole (2015), the flowers and foliage a loose spray, as if plucked and bundled from wild fields en route to an evening date, one for each bedroom. Peeling through those stitchedtogether scans of that lover’s body, stacked one on the other in a box, his armpit decked all around with tats (and a chain whip over his heart and a spiderweb above his belly button), I turn the pages to a hard cock pressed against a scanner bed between two muscular thighs, cut by the stitch of images just so. The entire print of this corporeal atlas is lined with scrawled words, but only the large ones overwriting it all are truly legible: ‘this is so sad […] my knees are shaking’. It is not my lover, but I can surely taste the grief and desire on my lips.

Food and flowers, time and words, gardens and dreams, distance and longing, the tactile skins of ceramics and the brightest colours of spiced pigment – these are the sensual ingredients that make up Derya’s show, all of it an expansion from a short-run book published last year by Perro Verlag and titled A Flower as a Poem. The words are a mess of layering, legible at times, but it’s more likely that these loose, smeary letters aren’t meant to be read but experienced. Like a plea faintly overheard through bedroom walls, you can sense the texture of their emotion even if you can’t understand the exact words. In the corner of each room of the exhibition sits a single bed with white blankets and sheets, big enough for only one body. I want to lie on the bed. The proprietor of Del Vaz, Jay Ezra Nayssan, surely wouldn’t mind. I want to sleep away an afternoon smelling the ingredients, the shadows of the acetate words shifting through the room as the sun bends towards dusk. I want to dream near these artworks. Andrew Berardini

Poetry Painting (Scotty), 2016–17, inkjet print, acrylic paint, beeswax, ink. Courtesy the artist and Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles

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Juan Antonio Olivares Moléculas Off Vendome, New York 19 January – 4 March “I think it’s really a deep memory: it must have been from when I was very young,” reads the first English subtitle of Juan Antonio Olivares’s ten-minute hd-projected animation Moléculas (2017). The opening shot pans from darkness to the furry feet of a teddy bear, then slowly upwards to reveal the bear’s belly, and finally its plaintive face. The bear’s mouth is moving; it would seem that it is he who is speaking the words of the Spanish soundtrack. As the shot moves to a wider angle, the bear is revealed to be missing an arm. Ted goes on to recall how, as a baby, he crawled out the front door of the family home – situated near a copper mine – because it had snowed and he was curious. The bear is sat on a therapist’s couch. As he gets up from his horizontal position and limps over to a mirror, the ‘camera’ passes through the back of the bear’s head, entering into his white stuffing-filled insides.

Ted recalls his mother: what she looked like, how she was. There is an unscripted, hesitant feel to the monologue. We take on Ted’s point of view, staring at his unblinking reflection as he notes, sadly, that his mother’s life in the mining town was tough, that “she was forty but looked like a woman of sixty”. The bear finds a photograph of a bathroom and designs for a house on the therapist’s desk, and we then ‘enter’ the image of the bathroom, which in turn starts to fill with water from an overflowing bath – the memories get more painful. How Ted’s mother loved him more than his brother; his mother’s death; how he missed her funeral. The bear begins to weep. We never find out whose story this really is, for what body the bear is an avatar – it doesn’t matter. It is the motif of the teddy bear that does. Such bears exist to be filled with emotions; stuffed with childhood anxieties, a steadfast

friend when the world is an alienating place. And then adulthood encroaches and their magic disappears. The life falls from them; they are forgotten about or discarded (though the world doesn’t get any less tricky of course). Yet Moléculas is not about the social and psychological use of toys per se – though certainly we can recall Mike Kelley’s work on emotion as a commodity here – but about us and our finite bodies and how we are also packed with memories and emotions, feelings and thoughts, until the moment we too are not. In the last scene of the video, the bear explodes – slowly, silently – into fragments that fall across the therapist’s office. Death is a subject of art for the ages, but this work brings with it such delicacy of feeling – as the viewer becomes seduced by the anthropomorphism – counterbalanced by the shocking ending, that one does not begrudge the return to such a theme. Oliver Basciano

Moléculas (still), 2017, hd video, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and Off Vendome, New York

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Dara Friedman Mother Drum Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York 4 March – 22 April It’s retro and perhaps even offensive to childless women to say so, but I was not a whole person until I became a mother. Caring for an infant has become a positive outlet for a powerful well of energy that, in years past, I felt I wasted on bullshit, which led to boredom and depression. I didn’t know how to articulate this until I read the text that accompanies Mother Drum, a 2017 three-channel film installation by Dara Friedman that depicts the members of tribes on three Native American reservations dancing, drumming and raising their voices in song. Written by Shuel-let-quaQ:olosoet (née Cynthia Jim), a descendant of native tribes from what is now Canada, the text states that a mother is ‘the conductor of an orchestra of energy’. She goes on to say that motherhood is a dance that, when combined with ceremony, song and drum, is able to ‘take an energy that is otherwise chaos and reform it to the needs of community’. The text gives meaning to a work that otherwise looks a lot like a Beyoncé video. Shots of single dancers, singers and drummers

performing and bathing in a deep-blue river flash between the three screens in the installation, culminating in a drum circle in what appears to be a campground. The bright, saturated colours, the stomping feet, the retro filters on the lenses, the intricate, jangling costumes on the dancers, are all reminiscent of Beyoncé’s 2011 Run the World (Girls), and her performance at the 2017 Grammy Awards, in which the popstar co-opted a number of vaguely ancient, mythological symbols, as well as her own pregnant body, to create the vision of ur-motherhood. Beyoncé doesn’t attribute anything she borrows to its source, making an encounter with the authentic – the Native American dancer in Friedman’s film – feel not only vaguely familiar, but also unoriginal. Friedman at least credits her sources, but her film is no less colonising of a culture that isn’t her own. Friedman was born in Germany, and her area of interest is experimental film. The text claims she was inspired to create Mother Drum when news broke of a 2014 archaeological dig in Miami (where she lives) that had uncovered

the remains of the first-century-bc city of Tequesta. She then placed an ad on PowWows. com, a website that is a sort of Craigslist for Native Americans, asking for fancy dancers and drummers willing to perform for her camera. Friedman is known for works such as Musical (2007–8), in which she filmed dozens of singers performing show tunes and love ballads on the streets of Midtown Manhattan, and Play (2013), in which 17 couples act out scenes of intimacy. Capturing performances on camera is her thing. If you’re looking to be entertained, then Mother Drum delivers. It is beautiful. I stayed for two iterations. But missing from it is this revelatory sense of a mother as a conductor of an orchestra of energy, and as a force for good in society – something that the statement by Shuel-let-quaQ:olosoet captured with raw honesty. But whereas the statement is authentic, the video is derivative.Everyone expects pop culture to be hackneyed but entertaining; something made under the rubric of an art film has to be more than voyeuristic. Brienne Walsh

Mother Drum, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Lance Brewer. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

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Sue Williams 303 Gallery, New York 28 February – 14 April The arc of Sue Williams’s work is often characterised as a shift from feminism to formalism. The machismo-laden history of modern painting that has been handed down to us has largely failed to account for feminists with formal concerns, but Williams has continuously short-circuited our reliance on such categories to understand what we’re looking at. In this show of new paintings and a series of collages, Williams further elucidates a careerlong thesis: formalism doesn’t erase feminism. She deals with the male-dominated history of American modernist painting not by positioning herself in opposition to it, but by giving it the finger, not playing on its terms. These seven paintings employ much of the same formal vocabulary as the artist’s last show at 303, three years ago, but in many places they are sparser, with more empty stretches of unprimed canvas. In these works, Williams’s parodic and truncated bodies are sometimes

front-and-centre – like the fussily dressed little girls in Chicken Leg in Yellow (2017) – but also often cloaked. In All Roads Lead to Langley (2016) a wide stroke of blue paint becomes a belly and butt when Williams paints on a little crotch and navel. With Horizon Line (2017) it took several viewings before I realised that the arch of lines at the top of the painting congealed into a spread -legged torso. Strokes and lines themselves become anthropomorphised. If the whole Ab-Ex shtick is to proffer painting’s supposed universality, Williams is directly linking abstraction to the body and all of its specificities and seepage. In the space of her canvases, things are unravelled and revealed; legs are spread and butts are bare. The exhibition’s largest and most prominent work, Memory and Paint (2017), contains a repeated motif of houses coming apart at the seams amidst swirling lines and patches

of paint. I couldn’t see these painted houses without thinking of Williams’s 1995 Flesh House sculpture, in which a simplistic triangle-ontop-of-a-square home is constructed from what appears to be mottled fat: a meditation on the actual bodily violence that exists behind structuring categories and conventions. In its refusal to adhere to sanctioned categorisation, this work feels like an immense relief. It is working through something without completely naming or qualifying it. I feel Williams’s exhaustion with the oppressive trappings of gender, with formal and political binaries, and with the goonish weight of masculinist art history. She is showing us that these restrictive categories do not hold. The work is a messy space where things don’t have to get cleaned up; all of it can hang in suspension. She is showing us the rebelliousness of being a feminist and a formalist. Ashton Cooper

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Korakrit Arunanondchai with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 Clearing, New York 11 March – 7 May In this idiomatically titled exhibition, Korakrit Arunanondchai poses a question: will you find beauty in this sea of data? This not only signals the Thai artist’s longstanding investment in formal lyricism but in his strategy of ‘making sense’ of our increasingly abstract techno-material condition through aesthetic techniques. He tackles the unrepresentability of the somewhat tired term ‘the Anthropocene’ through projections of cultural, personal and religious myth sourced both from his native Thailand and his adopted home of New York City. This culminates, stronger than ever, in with history… 4, in which an eponymously titled 23-minute cine-essay addresses the present through two intersecting historical moments: the rise of Trump and the death of the king of Thailand. Although the two are worlds apart geographically and ideologically, the artist draws comparisons to the gathering of people at protest rallies and mass-mourning events – a return to physical togetherness in times of global political uncertainty. We also meet

Tipyavarna Nitibhon, the artist’s grandmother, as she is descending into dementia, trying to cling on to the familiar materiality of her surroundings. “In this body the data is alive but it is stuck in a loop,” the narrator muses, as Nitibhon is portrayed ritualistically placing a brick piece inside a slipper atop a pile of tabloid magazines. These spontaneous and domestic ‘assisted readymades’ are displayed in the farthest room of the exhibition, entitled With History… 4 (house) (1979–2017), and demand a sombre meditation as material indexes of cognitive deterioration. Recent neuroscience affirms that the brain is itself materially plastic, and rewires its faculties according to need. Philosopher Catherine Malabou finds in this new forms of domination, but also resistance. Arunanondchai too is invested in formulating new alliances between psychic, cultural and technological life. A totemic installation, With History… 4 (garden) (2017), manifests this materially: on a bulky terrain of soil and seafood shells (sourced

from nyc restaurants), he envisions a postapocalyptic temple of Nāga, the Buddhist and Hindu snake-deity too powerful to be subjected to any state power, in a potpourri of fibre optics, dead pine trees, old car parts and glowing glass bulbs. In the artist’s hands, these examples of popular animism are like hackers, guiding spirits that travel across the materiality of globalised capitalism, reconfiguring postures of resistance. While Arunanondchai previously gestured to the constructed artist-persona and the mythologised site of painting, he is here more urgently concerned with the ‘stuff’ of the world – the cycles of carbon, of capital, of spirits and of data, all jumbled together in an overwhelming cosmology that nonetheless possesses moments of powerful clarity. This position is effective, and much less fashionable. Facing outward, its success lies in the idiosyncratic investigation into the human sensorium and its impulse to plastically produce connections and find beauty in our material, psychic and digital life. Jeppe Ugelvig

with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 (garden), 2017, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Stan Narten. Courtesy the artist and Clearing, New York & Brussels

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Wong Kit Yi Futures, Again P!, New York 8 March – 12 April ‘I thank first of all God, and then my patrons, who have granted me everything.’ So Giorgio Vasari rhapsodises in his conclusion to The Lives of the Artists (1550). Patronage is no less important to the contemporary artworld, and a bespoke model of it courses through the heart of Wong Kit Yi’s exhibition. This layered show builds on North Pole Futures, which took place at P! during spring 2015. For that exhibition, Ali Wong, the artist’s self-styled ‘investment manager’ and alter ego, offered collectors the chance to commission customised works of art in order to fund the artist’s stint with the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency. Prospective patrons selected a colour, an esoteric English word and a date during Wong’s residency when she would produce the tailored work. That autumn Wong sailed to the Arctic Circle for three weeks. In her current exhibition, she displays the fruits of this journey, including a new video, A River in the Freezer (2017), while also offering for sale the few remaining dates from 2015: the yet-to-be-commissioned memories from the residency. Should a collector acquire one of these unrealised pieces, Wong would produce a work that evokes the memories of both artist and patron.

Wong recruited fellow expeditionary residents – artists, scientists and writers – to help her execute October 8, 2015, p.m. / Argus-eyed / Gold (2015). Bracketed by eight smaller pictures, this piece’s central photograph presents eight individuals as they form an outward-facing circle. Gazing out at the surrounding tundra, Wong’s collaborators clutch gilt pinhole cameras. Producing the index of Wong’s experience, these cameras have created the eight hazy landscapes that frame this work’s central image above and below, revealing a black-and-white sense of isolation, absent humans. Other commissioned works, like October 11, 2015, a.m. / Emmetropia / Forbidden Red (2015), read initially as arresting, romantic and performative documents of the artist immersed in the natural world. On the fifth day of her residency, the captain of Wong’s ship dropped her off on a small landmass so she could create a picturesque image, dramatically staged against the backdrop of pale-blue glacier. Here, the camera framed Wong as an intrepid explorer with a blazing distress flare grasped in her hand. The artist’s rich research-based practice fluoresces in A River in the Freezer, a video that nimbly cycles through themes of geologic time, the arctic and cheating death. A soothing male narrator discusses cryogenics while clips

of Cygnus Hyōga, an anime superhero who wields icy magic (and has a last name that means ‘glacier’ in Japanese), flash across the monitor. A biochemist explains the process of coring and studying ice samples. Rainbow-coloured singalong lyrics move viewers from scene to scene, switching between documentary and music video. Auto-Tune voices sing the idiosyncrasies of Longyearbyen, Norway, one of the world’s northernmost settlements, where people cannot be interred – bodies buried in permafrost do not decompose, so the dead must pass to the afterlife further south. Addictive and enrapturing, Wong’s ode to the subzero world underwrites her commitment to subject matter beyond novel economic models. Futures, Again spotlights a tension some of us would prefer to ignore: the push-and-pull between the financial system in which art operates, and the weighty meanings ascribed to works of art. At one point in the video the narrator asks, “Who owns the right to harvest ice?” Paralleling this question, I think, ‘Who owns the right to acquire this art?’ The answer to both of these is, ultimately, the same: whoever possesses the requisite capital. Wong’s alluring take on the artist-asentrepreneur is franchise-ready. Owen Duffy

A River in the Freezer (video still), 2017, hd video, sound, 25 min. Courtesy the artist and P!, New York

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Jennie Jieun Lee Seizure Crevasse The Pit, Los Angeles 12 March – 23 April Jennie Jieun Lee’s glazed ceramic contortions quiver with the spiritual and formal ghosts of abstraction and the spectre of personal demons. Her latest solo show is named after the fissures and cracks that occur in the clay during the firing process, a material phenomenon that may also be a psychic metaphor for the artist’s agoraphobia, bouts of depression and self-confinement, about which she has spoken openly in various places. While Lee also produces usable ceramic wares for sale at chic boutiques, the work on view here veers categorically away from traditional ceramics and squarely into abstract sculpture. Adeline Boone (2017), a slab-rolled floor sculpture, caves into itself at the top, as if a physical emblem of the artist’s despondency. Hanging on the opposite wall is Public Transportation (2017), which, with its swirls of pink and green etched with black, looks remarkably like Lee Krasner’s The Seasons (1957), another work of psychic trauma (The Seasons was created just a year after Jackson Pollock, Krasner’s husband, was killed in a car crash). Several largescale works in this show are the result of the artist’s access to a 2,500

square-foot outdoor kiln patio, part of her recent residency at California State University, Long Beach, with avant-garde ceramicist Tony Marsh. These are some of the largest works of her oeuvre, and though they do not feel as intimate or poignant as her smaller pieces, they hold their own as abstractions. The gallery installation, for which Lee used wood reclaimed from the gallery’s vicinity in an industrial area of a Los Angeles suburb, recalls an elevated seaside pier. The viewer’s experience is choreographed with distinct, dictated vantage points, not unlike the windowed and screened views of a Japanese or Chinese garden. Four of the large works, including Night Cavern (2017), which resembles a craggy totem, are grouped in the centre of the space, and are treated like Chinese scholars’ stones or Zen garden rocks: visitors are not meant to approach these works, but rather to observe them from the platform above. Also to be viewed from above are two busts, The Witch (2016) and Queen (2017), which are displayed below the floor level in the former garage’s pit (for which the gallery is named). Queen’s delicate features rival those of Greek

antiquities, though the expressionistic red and green glaze application and asymmetrical headdress mark this bust as distinctively contemporary. With its ovoid head placed on its side, The Witch draws comparison to Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910). Lee has said in numerous interviews that her bust sculptures were first created as a therapeutic act to deal with her best friend’s losing battle with cancer. Placed in the shadowy recesses of this cavity – not quite six-feet under, but just about – the two distorted visages have a solemn, elegiac aura about them. Square Head (2017), on the gallery wall across the walkway from the pit, is representative of Lee’s masks, which she explained as being fraught creative outgrowths of her extended periods of self-imposed confinement in her apartment due to agoraphobia in a 2014 interview. With a cartoonish frown and a sweep of black textured clay resembling the artist’s long ebony mane, this mask certainly does look autobiographical. Although the artist has been vocal about the inspirations of death, depression and melancholy, Seizure Crevasse vibrates with life. Jennifer S. Li

Untitled Red, 2016, slipcast stoneware and glaze, 107 × 33 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and the Pit, Los Angeles

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Alexandre da Cunha Boom Pivô, São Paulo 1 April – 10 June While its onomatopoeic title suggests that Alexandre da Cunha’s show will offer something in the way of percussive explosions, the mostly monochromatic works gathered in Boom offer a prevailing sense of quietness instead. The exhibition also reveals these works’ intimate relationship with the gallery’s brutalist architecture: canvases made of white wool and fragments of towel and carpet (such as Garden Court, 2016) often almost hide within the space; other works, such as the trailer of a cementmixing truck that the artist has sliced into four pieces and arranged in different angles (Mix (Boom), 2017), assert themselves by restricting the viewer’s path through the show. Though such mixers are a common enough sight in São Paulo – given the abundance of construction – this one, dissected, seems alien. At first glance, one is distracted by the helical plates in the interior structure of each element, or by the intriguing black and red stripes over the surface, reminiscent of Kazimir Malevich’s black-and-red crossing paintings (though this is, in actual fact, the mixer’s original paintwork). Yet as soon as we grasp the origin of these strange objects, the work feels at home in Pivô, located in Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist landmark, Edifício

Copan, the largest reinforced-concrete building in the country – even if that relationship might seem a little too literal. In da Cunha’s artistic output, form matters. The textile installation Kentucky (Biombo) (2017), for example, is constructed from mop heads that are almost unidentifiable when stretched and woven together and hung from the ceiling. Moreover, da Cunha has referred to himself primarily as a ‘collector’ of ordinary objects – among them the mops (a material the artist has used previously) – and this model of working is apparent too in the video Contratempo (2013): a series of more than 300 found still-images of explosions – often but not always nuclearweapons tests – edited together as a looped montage. Its title, which both suggests the music’s displacement of regular metrical accent by stressing the weak beat, but also an unpredicted or inopportune situation, is similarly a subtly clever way to refer to these horrible events. In Contratempo, any sense of a documentary index is eliminated, inviting the viewer to see these images on a purely aesthetic level, disassociated from place and context. As such, da Cunha seems to apply the same methodology used in the production of his sculptures.

Although the reduction of these destructive events to an exclusively formalist view could be problematic, the video plays a significant role in reinforcing the conflict between silence and noise, restraint and explosion that runs through the works here. This reading is reasserted by Straight-Jacket (2002), made from windsurf-sail material, displayed at the exhibition’s entrance. Along with the video, this work continues to assert a relationship between movements of constraint and release – a very materialistic principle that seems to be behind most of the objects da Cunha reconfigures. Even if a work such as Contratempo can be read from a political perspective – a likely reference to Brazil’s economic boom and social progress that has suddenly failed years later, for example – these messages are not as strong as the artist’s clever formal experiments in appropriation. This is no Greenbergian formalism, however: rather than obsess about the originality or autonomy of the object, da Cunha is blurring the border of art and life and our own perception of these items in accordance to where they are seen and circulated – which is very far from being a formalist idea. As a social critique, the message of this process can also be noisy enough. Nathalia Lavigne

Kentucky (Biombo), 2017, cleaning mops, thread, metal, 310 × 690 × 16 cm. Photo: Everton Ballardin. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

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Art Life New York The Whitney Biennial is not the only story in town, as this roundup of exhibitions reveals by Sam Korman

Sarah Zapata, If I Could, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

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The wrongness of alrightness Even before the 2017 Whitney Biennial opened, it had already been rendered nostalgic by the world around it. Commissioned during the course of 2016, the biennial, and most of the work it presents, was conceived with the expectation that, by the time it opened to the public, Hillary Clinton would be our president and, as her campaign promised, the public would be ‘Stronger Together’. Of course, when the 78th edition of the biennial did open, all that was not the case. The biennial’s struggles to interface with the world that has inherited it is a problem tragically embodied by the new building itself. A year and a half has gone by since the Whitney Museum of American Art decamped to its sterile and stately Renzo Piano-designed building in the Meatpacking District. In the moment when we might cling to the museum as a sanctuary for vulnerable ideas, and more importantly, people, the building is complicit in the spectacle of real-estate speculation, as part of the 20 blocks of starchitecture that ends with Hudson Yards, the us’s largest-ever private real-estate development. Naturally, curators Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, surfing the rising tides

of identity politics, were eager to leave a different mark on the new building. Their ambitious artist list, the most diverse in recent memory, proposed to renegotiate the conversation this already rebranded institution hosted: one in which the act of representation was posited as means to broker racial, gender and sexual intersectionality. Really, it promised pictures, but I’m still waiting for punchier provocations. The biennial brings together a fairly traditional range of media associated with a more sincere, earnest and empathic artistic approach. If this seems like a relatively banal statement to make, it does demonstrate how easy it is to slip into a mood of tepid alrightness within the show. Like Matt Browning’s minimalist wood carvings, which retreat meditatively into a world of handicraft, they’re fine, and offer a moment of peace or ironic distance, but they don’t quite address exactly what they’re retreating from. In fact, it is the more (literally) conversational works that seemed to embody the issues around the biennial. In her series of Liquor Store Theatre videos (2014–17), Maya Stovall canvasses people about the value of art as they loiter outside Detroit-area liquor stores. Lo-fi and grassroots, collegial and fun – it also involves Stovall doing improvised

dance routines in the parking lot – these videos recognise that art’s value lies in fostering a public discussion. Asad Raza’s Root sequence. Mother tongue (2017) is a mini-arboretum that hosts conversations with the trees’ caretakers about the trees and the personal effects they added to the installation. During my visit, tree-related conversations lulled people into engaging personal anecdotes. Following a kind of factionalising withdrawal during the first months of Trump’s presidency, the experience was refreshing and rewarding. But the emotional release also revealed how hamstrung our reactions could be, and the extent to which, throughout the show, we were able to witness the dramatic effects that changes in politics and history have on the reception of art in real time. Ultimately it is mythology and storytelling that really thread the show together. When the world feels shaky, it’s easy to understand the more urgent desire for art to assume its traditional responsibility and tell a community’s stories. In this respect, the pairing of Deana Lawson and Henry Taylor deserves extra attention, because it speaks to the biennial’s ability to rouse the political dimensions of pictures. Lawson’s photograph Sons of Cush (2017) dovetails with Henry Taylor’s a happy

Whitney Biennial, 2017 (installation view, left and right: Henry Taylor, The 4th, 2012–17, and the times thay aint a changing, fast enough!, 2017; centre: Deana Lawson, Ring Bearer, 2016). Photo: Matthew Carasella. Courtesy Whitney Biennial, New York

Asad Raza, Root sequence. Mother tongue, 2017, 26 trees, uv lighting, customised scents, carpet, cabinet with possessions of caretakers. Photo: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy Whitney Biennial, New York

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day for us (2017), with both works offering parables about the complex institutions that guide children into this world, be they family, money or God. Other works by these artists conflate masculinity with violence, celebration with solemnity, or sexuality with home. But it’s the restrained emotional tension of a middleaged woman seemingly daydreaming about a symbolic black horse in Taylor’s Reflecting (2017) and the woman prowling naked on her living room rug in Lawson’s Nicole (2017) that imbue these bodies with life, and declare a new realism for the black body. The biennial captures an activist spirit from 2016, and distils its mood into a context for engagement rather than articulating a strict polemic. It’s laudable, and if there is some handholding, the show still often stresses the audience’s responsibility of interpretation. It is telling that the most significant controversy surrounded Dana Schutz’s misguided and misinformed appropriation of Emmett Till’s likeness – Google the photo if you need a reminder, because it is sad how much the power of the image, and bravery of Till’s mother, was lessened by its depiction here. I can’t pretend to claim the historical trauma Schutz’s painting triggered, merely that I felt all too aware that the art community seemed impossibly segregated

and unable to de-escalate the situation without outside interference. Really, no official response acknowledged anyone’s trauma before it was propelled and exacerbated by the national news cycle and the rampant backlash of social media. What should be a measure of this (or any biennial) is its ability to meaningfully offend and to impishly challenge its own context. Disappointingly, the 2017 Biennial doesn’t manage a major offence of its own accord. Some artworks push on the architecture, but even these tend to mete out a challenging encounter one selfie-vista at a time. And while Jordan Wolfson’s hyperviolent vr video tried, really, just close your eyes. Other works, such as Cameron Rowland’s Public Money (2017), offer direct critique: Rowland implicates the museum in a seeming cycle of public exploitation by investing biennial funds in a Social Impact Bond, offered by governments to encourage private investment in public services. Pope.L’s Claim (Whitney Version) (2017) commandeers the museum’s entire fifth floor with the unctuous smell of old bologna. It’s a room covered inside and out in a grid of 2,755 slices of bologna, each displaying a tiny portrait – they’re all Jewish people, according to a framed text hanging inside the installation, next to an open bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 malt liquor. Every gesture

is a rabbit hole that only leads to the work’s irreverent and stupefying magic. It musters the best response the biennial could hope to offer about what’s been happening outside its doors. The framed inscription warns against hubris: ‘When we quantify, we point with a wavering finger. Like a child. Like aaa drunk or a dyslexic. Like a palsied person. Like a curator filled with helium. Like a venerable black artist filled with schism, we point with a wavering finger. And of course we insist, we insist, we insist we know where we are pointing…’

Rumours Pointing crane towers have become synonymous with art for me lately. I walk by the numerous construction sites on my way to nearby galleries (or the bar) most days of the week. It’s easy to feel hostage to the construction here. The precariousness it creates for any living situation in its midst is isolating, and localises a renter’s concerns to a few square metres of space. We might turn to nonprofits as relatively stable sanctuaries, safe spaces in which we can look to an outside perspective. But even Art in General was forced to move out of the Tribeca space it occupied for more than two decades.

Pope.L aka William Pope.L, Claim (Whitney Version), 2017, acrylic paint, graphite pencil, pushpins, wood, framed document, fortified wine and bologna with black-and-white portraits, 500 × 500 × 500 cm. Photo: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Postcommodity, Es mas alcanzable de lo que se imaginaban, 2017, photograph. Courtesy the artists

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The organisation’s new location, in dumbo, hosts Postcommodity’s powerfully understated show Coyotaje, a potent illustration of migration and life lived in extremis. An audiowork plays overhead, repeating phrases like, “Quickly! We need to go! Children! I don’t want you to die out here!” in Spanish, filling the exhibition space with urgency and menace. Border patrols use the recording to trap migrants on the us–Mexico border. An invisible cctv system captures our likeness, which is then projected onto an inflatable rendition of the mythological chupacabra. Postcommodity expertly conveys the desperation on the border, when the subterfuge of politics can reduce your life to a rumour. For many years, Otis Houston Jr’s career was a word-of-mouth affair, and most of his artistic output has been destroyed; though he was the subject of a recent documentary. What survives of his work, however, is on view at Room East. His few extant collages, magazine pages arranged on sheets of metal, demonstrate a rigorous approach to both composition and appropriation. He also hung two banners in the window, spraypainted with the cliché: ‘A good artist copies’, ‘A great artist steals’. In a way, it’s a manifesto for Houston Jr’s approach to artmaking, having performed and constructed temporary sculptures

at the intersection of 125th Street and fdr Drive for approximately 20 years. To steal is to claim as one’s own, and Houston Jr uses art to lay claim to public space. He’ll extemporise on Muhammad Ali, replete with boxing gloves; hang a banner that says, ‘Read more’; and make quick sculptures with staple crops from the Caribbean, like sugarcane, coconut and bananas. His work is committed to art’s human scale, performed primarily for a few passersby in East Harlem and the car-bound commuters on the fdr. He goes by the name Black Cherokee and he doesn’t let you forget: art is best seen wherever you are.

In bloom Long Island City is a neighbourhood with a baroque street system that makes no sense, though it makes a place like Deli Gallery feel secreted away. Sarah Zapata’s If I Could requires visitors to take off their shoes: as soon as our toes curl around the hand-woven rug that fills the entire gallery, we’re allowed to indulge in something daringly informal rather than bother ourselves with decorum. Zapata is Peruvian-American, and she studied indigenous rug-making on a residency in Peru. While her approach to craft isn’t new, it works – discovering

a pocket of plush feathery fluff lulls me into euphoria. The installation affects a blooming Andean meadow, populated with freestanding sculptures that resemble hunched pack animals or high-altitude foliage. If all this feels too downy and impervious to critique, check your fucking shoes at the door. Zapata spawns eroticism out of craft, flooding us in jouissance that’s greater than the sum of our sensations.

The look that says ‘together’ Both Zapata’s show and Am Schmidt’s show, Rachel’s Wardrobes at Clinton Hill’s 321 Gallery, approach women and work through fastidious arrangements of materials, but Schmidt’s humour triggers a more cerebral reaction. For the exhibition she sourced Jennifer Aniston’s outfits from certain episodes of the iconic television series Friends (1994–2004). For Season 1, Episode 19, Scenes 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14 (2017), three pairs of cream knee socks, two plaid skirts, three off-white turtlenecks, one trench coat, one hairclip, one turquoise ring and three pairs of patent leather Oxford heels are arranged with utmost care on chrome clothing racks. The mise-en-place highlights the subtle differences between like items, as if Rachel,

Am Schmidt, Rachel's Wardrobes, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Daniel Terna. Courtesy 321 Gallery, New York

Otis Houston Jr aka Black Cherokee, The perfect place to play (detail), 1984–2017, collages, steel, magnets, 122 × 81 cm. Courtesy Room East, New York

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a barista constantly blowing hair out of her face, represented the utmost discriminating style. Another rack displays two white T-shirts with red crosses on them and three pairs of denim overalls to choose from in Season 1, Episode 16, Scene 14 (2017) – isn’t this how Rachel dresses in every episode? It’s also how all the moms walking around Clinton Hill (and other family-friendly Brooklyn neighbourhoods) have dressed the past couple years, redefining the outfit as well-moneyed and got-it-together, rather than suggesting the wearer is still trying to get her life together. If the work doesn’t sell, Schmidt will return or resell the clothes and racks.

Fucking things up: the early years A confidently light touch leads us through Jochen Lempert’s exhibition at Front Desk Apparatus. It is a rigorous interrogation into image-making, with the debate between nature and culture at its heart. His subjects include plants, which he most arrestingly reproduces in photograms, and migratory birds, which he confidently and delicately formalises in photographs that range from just over 6 sqcm,

to 24 by 18 cm. Taped to the wall, the photographs’ curled edges make for a satisfying accent to his diaphanous images, as if to imitate the foliage depicted in several works. Vanessa atalanta (2014) sums up the show’s approach well: depicting a butterfly aloft over a street scene, it captures how the world of natural phenomena becomes visible through the backdrop of the city. Lempert’s photographs make surprising bedfellows with Allan McCollum. Both explore value by means of absence, presence and material potentiality. Works 1968–1977 at Petzel Gallery explores McCollum’s clumsy early paintings, process-driven attempts that were abandoned for more systematic forms of fucking things up. Still, a vitrine containing a thoughtfully strewn pile of black photographs seems to anticipate the logic of his later ‘Surrogates’ (plaster-moulded objects that resemble matted and framed photographs) and their confrontation with the frame.

The Bateman school of interior design Andrea Fraser’s video May I Help You? (1991), made in cooperation with McCollum, introduces the former’s exhibition Lost Objects at Mary Boone.

In it, Fraser plays an art dealer charged with selling works from the Plaster Surrogate series. Staring straight into the camera, her pitch vacillates between dismissiveness, desperation and flare – we’re her client. The video humorously combats the Machiavellian self-seriousness that marshals consensus, and therefore value, in the artworld. But it’s funny, because the video predates an identical sketch on the mtv 1990s show The State, in which Michael Showalter also plays an art dealer who desperately projects onto the art he sells. And that’s not to mention that every time I see a ‘Surrogate’ I am reminded that they appear in the film American Psycho (2000), decorating the villainous investment banker and possible serial killer Patrick Bateman’s highrise apartment.

Dressing down and climbing the walls on East Houston A gallery, like a house or a mind, is a place where we can let the various parts of our identity dissemble like clothes strewn across the floor. Baseera Khan’s exhibition iamuslima makes such a use of Participant Inc, spilling out a collection of the artist’s personal effects

Jochen Lempert, 2017 (installation view, left: Phasmids, 2013; right: Vanessa atalanta, 2014). Courtesy Front Desk Apparatus, New York

Baseera Khan, Braidrage, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Participant Inc, New York Allan McCollum, Lost Objects, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York, and Petzel Gallery, New York

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alongside performance costumes, prints and sculptures. The centrepiece of the show is Braidrage (2017), a rock-climbing wall composed of cast fragments of the artist’s body and embedded with gold chains and hair. Khan climbed the wall on opening night. It’s a somewhat obvious move, but the other works in the show, such as the Acoustic Sound Blankets (2017), in which she embroidered blankets given to protesters with her family’s heirloom patterns, demonstrate what it means to keep the body safe as she moves between political worlds. The fractured body in Braidrage promotes an exercise that melds intimacy with knowledge to develop ever more complex ciphers.

When two become one I wish Andrea Crespo had a Saturday morning cartoon show. In Joined for Life, at Downs & Ross, the artist guilelessly insinuates us into a narrative about a fictional pair of twins and their attempts to conjoin themselves. In a video, parapagus (2017) – which affects the edifying air of infotainment found in much children’s tv – they tell the story about embodiment, in which two bodies think of themselves as one,

or both, or neither. It’s a complex set of permutations that the twins navigate with withdrawn innocence throughout the dreamy animation. Ostensibly, the plot follows their self-reckoning through meetings with doctors, and various memories – it’s not enough that they think of themselves as one, and metaphor offers little succour, they need to physically actualise it. The twins in the video spend a lot of time explaining things to people. We hack bodies with braces and implants, the video suggests, staging language as yet another technology with major impact on the body. However, underlying all the innocence is a dread; the twins use a quote from the book of Luke 9:39 to explain things: “A spirit seizes him and he suddenly screams; it throws him into convulsions so that he foams at the mouth. It scarcely ever leaves him and is destroying him.”

What a Debord There’s a kind of bratty incredulousness about Nicolás Guagnini’s exhibition Bibelots at Bortolami. The show negotiates the limits of an embodied experience, attacking

authenticity with a series of unique ‘test tiles’ inscribed with Guy Debord’s 1968 protest slogan ‘Ne travaillez jamais’ (never work). Guagnini appears attracted to craft as a last bastion of Marxist critique of signs – it’s a lowbrow rejection of an authentic form of labour, namely ceramics. Fine. That’s merely the macho context for Madeline Hollander’s performance Competition (2017), which was commissioned for the show. Dancers entered the room in a balled-up human chain, slowly unravelled and began a series of trust exercises that involved passing a sheet of paper from one mouth to another or holding balletic fourth position until falling into each other’s arms. The dancers cycle through exercises meant to reveal the true threshold of the body for the next three hours. What does it mean to rehearse your limits? Certainly it leads the dancers to feelings of angst, impetuousness – a series of fitful gestures suggested it here. But then every expression of endurance and fortitude encouraged the same in the other dancers. Guagnini’s show is blind to what Hollander adds, and uses to resist: all that immaterial labour that bootlegs the self for just such occasions. To keep the original copy safe.

Nicolás Guagnini, The Lettrist Dictatorship, 2016, glazed ceramic, 33 × 43 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York

Andrea Crespo, Part of Your World I (1996), 2017, unique digital prints on acetate and acrylic glass, aluminium, 152 × 73 × 1 cm. Courtesy Downs & Ross, New York

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Books

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Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art by Marcus Verhagen Sternberg Press, €20 (softcover) This is a beautifully ambitious book about the ways in which globalisation has come to feature as one of contemporary art’s most significant conditions and key concerns. The globalisation model features in Marcus Verhagen’s study in two distinct ways. The first, and somewhat more obvious of these, is as a series of developments affecting the contact of cultures and societies, and as a reorganisation of temporal and spatial patterns of distance and proximity – all of which art and artists attempt to visualise and comment upon. (Martin Kippenberger and Francis Alÿs, for instance, are important to Verhagen as models for tentative, as well as ironic, renders of the artist as self-conscious global protagonist.) For the most part, though, Verhagen argues that art attempting to demonstrate ‘what globalisation looks like’ risks merging with and disappearing in simplistic neoliberal narratives. Even art that aims to develop implicitly critical, mimetic dialogues within this matrix (for example Sarah Morris’s abstractions), Verhagen suggests, often ends up glossing over the prohibitions, constraints and enacted violences that make up the political and experiential realities of globalisation in its current shape and form. The second way in which globalisation features, and this is where the author’s real investment lies, is not as an object

of commentary, but as an increasingly enforced condition under which and in response to which a lot of today’s art is inevitably being produced, circulated and discussed. And because of the ways in which this globalisation is uneven and distributed through bias, it features in this book as a hindrance instead of enabling leveller. In exquisitely differentiated readings of Walead Beshty’s FedEx series (2007–14), for instance, or Haegue Yang’s Storage Piece (2004), Verhagen is interested in works that aim to render strange the compressions of time/space that fall outside the largely impersonal masternarratives of mobility and speed. Some underlying polemics surface time and again, and animate the argument throughout: Verhagen’s dissatisfaction with the ways in which art features as illustration rather than critical render; his suspicion of the proto-colonial dimension of contemporary art and its markets as a global export underpinning the conceited vantage points of Western privilege; his reservations about celebrations of what he calls romantic localism, as though the local were ever conceivable independently of the global dynamics that shape it and its supposed attractiveness; and about the ‘slow art’ of Kim Sooja, for instance, or de Rijke / de Rooij, which seem to suggest, in Verhagen’s readings, that

the deceleration of individualised experience might be able to offer more than a therapeutic placebo against the violent temporalities of global capital. Globalisation as we know it, the author argues throughout, offers a poor way of organising the world, and a reductive set of interpretations when it comes to understanding the conditions under which, and in response to which, a lot of art now operates. The book operates in a precarious place: explicitly, it locates its thinking in the tension between globalisation as geopolitical schema and as a set of conditioned experiential realities; implicitly, it operates at a moment in time and intellectual history when some of the key identifiers of debates on globalisation, its speeds and proximities, are tentatively displaced towards and under pressure from planetary registers of complexity, deep-time perspectives and posthuman speculations. But alternatives to globalisation are not the problematic of this book. Instead Verhagen presents a stark reminder of the attention and intellectual diligence required to work towards a critical, complex and at times multivocal understanding of art in the light of the conditions under which it operates and the critical perspectives it might still be able to suggest. Edgar Schmitz

The Debutante and Other Stories by Leonora Carrington Silver Press, £9.99 (softcover)

Leonora Carrington’s short stories, 26 of which are collected (for the first time) in this volume, defy the archetypal fairytale. Animals, halfhumans and spirits stalk these pages. They whisper and stare out from the dark corners of Carrington’s nameless locations, places that are filled with mansions and beautiful gardens, midnight landscapes and thriving forests. While the oneiric settings of the stories reflect a fairytale aesthetic, this is where the similarities with the genre end. There are no great love stories or gallant knights, nor magical godmothers or happy endings – if this is what you’re looking for, you have the wrong book – and there are certainly no princesses. At the heart of these tales are wildwomen and feral girls who seduce, screech, bite and radiate a savage energy that is exhilarating to read and educes from the reader an awareness of the body and self that is more primal and less cultivated.

Born in 1917, in Lancashire, and tutored by governesses and nuns, Carrington was expelled from several schools for refusing to observe etiquette; she later attended art school, joined the Surrealists and had a (mutually supportive) relationship with Max Ernst. Shortly after Ernst’s escape from the Gestapo to the us in 1941, Carrington – who had moved to Spain – suffered a nervous breakdown. Her parents had her hospitalised in a Spanish psychiatric hospital, during which time she was exposed to electroconvulsive therapy, hallucinatory drugs and sexual assault. André Breton encouraged Carrington to write about her experiences; in 1944 she published Down Below. She then spent most of her adult life living and working as an artist and writer in Mexico. It would be easy to read Carrington’s biography into her writing, and yet her unruly protagonists resist such an analysis: they don’t

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need a narrative. Most of the stories have no conclusion in the conventional sense of story structure – they fade into ambiguity or else briskly shut the reader out of the private worlds that shelter nocturnal animals, living corpses, gods and monsters. In these lucid-dream-like tales, Carrington’s use of imagery is intoxicating; feasts, fabrics and bodies are described with such intensity that the reader is left feeling gorged on her words. The act of consuming (from insects and festering meats to honey, blood and even migraines) is a key feature of the collection, and Carrington (whose work predated, but also continued through second wave feminism) reclaims the experience of a woman’s body, not by writing on it, but by writing through it. On the evidence here, it seems as if in order to embrace and express the body in all its sensuous and gloriously abject states, she first had to swallow the world. Fi Churchman

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Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life by Nato Thompson Melville House Publishing, $24.99/£20 (hardcover) American curator Nato Thompson’s latest book sets out to investigate the specific role of art in a world in which everyone is an artist. For Thompson, art is already an expanded terrain, encompassing activities ranging from the traditional visual arts to music, cinema, fashion and the multiple offerings of what has become the entertainment industry. And, broadly speaking, his thesis goes like this: the ability to stir emotion is a tool common to the workings of art and of power. Thanks to the twentiethcentury efforts of advertising and marketing executives, first to sell products, then to sell ideas, we live in a world in which affect and feeling are used to manipulate us at every turn and on every level. From Thompson’s perspective, if the creation of narratives through which to locate ourselves within the world, or within worlds to come, was once the domain of art (for Thompson artists are ‘oracles’, ‘resisters’ or ‘worldmakers’), it is now embedded in every part of capitalist existence: from the commercial operations of Apple and ikea, to the rebranding of the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, most immediately of all, in the emotion-driven rise to power of Donald Trump. In the age of social media, emotional intimacy is a public property, and its manipulation is open to all. ‘Art and life have in fact merged,’ Thompson writes in his introduction. So what’s the purpose of art?

The first half of Thompson’s book sets out his battleground, in the form of a potted history of how, during the course of the twentieth century, various aspects of cultural production, originated as means of making individual identities visible, were repeatedly co-opted as sales tools for politics and capitalism: how the exception became the norm. Along the way he takes in jazz and hip-hop, Beat literature, the Marlboro Man, the rise of Hollywood, the aesthetics of the Nazi party, the commercialisation of Woodstock, the us culture wars of the 1980s, the election campaign of George H.W. Bush and the role of soup in the careers of Mother Teresa and Andy Warhol, and in the lives of homeless people. The pace is breathless. The history at times too glib: Guy Debord (whose statement that ‘all that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ could succinctly cover the transformation Thompson is talking about) is introduced as ‘a petulant type’, Mao Tse-tung briefly appears as a guerrilla tactician and someone who is ‘often aphorized’. Indeed, there are times when Thompson’s book seems to do little more than assume the forms of sloganeering it is affecting to critique. Things begin to get interesting during Thompson’s description of how the use of culture as a tool for city branding

(and urban gentrification, or social cleansing) might indicate that culture is not always a force for social good. Related to that, his description of how anthropology and social engagement have been adopted by the us military to normalise the abnormal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is fascinating, as is his investigation of the paradoxes of contemporary philanthropy, in which corporations such as McDonald’s, Gap and others support cultural programmes that critique social problems those companies are in part responsible for generating – and, in doing so, sell more goods. In all this lie the book’s key points: that culture occupies an ambiguous status in society today; that feeling – from an emotion to a swipe – is how we experience the world; and that both the powerful and the powerless use the same tools to make their presence felt. Thompson implies that these outcomes are now a given, but that they can nevertheless be exploited too: if social media has made intimacy public property, then it can be used to create a newly intimate public as well. Witness the early days of the Occupy Movement or the Arab Spring; and, of course, the kind of socially engaged art of which Thompson, the curator, champions as well. Even if it contains nothing particularly revelatory, Culture as Weapon does remind us to be always en garde. Mark Rappolt

One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism by Terry Smith Duke University Press, $22.95/£19.99 (softcover) If much of the art made today depends on battles fought five decades ago, then the latter is not so much history as unfinished business. That tension underpins this collection of five essays, published between 1974 and 2012 by Australian critic and art historian Terry Smith. Smith is no disinterested observer, mind you: during the mid-70s he was a member of the conceptual art group Art & Language. And anybody looking for a straight-talking introduction to Art & Language, and the broader implications of conceptualism, could do worse than read these texts. The first essay, ‘Art and Art and Language’ (published in 1974) is a succinct and lucid bit of advocacy for the group’s activity, but it also sets up what Smith holds to be properly ‘conceptualist’ in art – the reflexive attention to the conditions of art’s reception and production – while registering the turn to the political

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and social realm that many conceptual artists made through the middle of the 1970s. The subsequent essays pick up 16 years later, with ‘The Task of Translation’ making a retrospective account of Art & Language shows in Australia and New Zealand during 1975 and 1976, in which the issue of centre and periphery – of a Modernism ‘transmitted’ from the us to cultural ‘colonies’ – presages the wider globalisation of the artworld to come. It’s from this point that the history of conceptual art becomes the subject of active art-historical revision, and Smith’s 1999 essay ‘Peripheries in Motion’ pushes the argument that there was ‘a roughly simultaneous emergence in a number of art centers and art communities around the world of a conceptual questioning of the nature of art’. That dilation of the timeframe, picked up further in the final text, ‘One and Three Ideas’, allows

for ‘conceptual art’ (the us-European ‘movement’) to be absorbed into the bigger, global emergence of ‘conceptualism’. Such a historical rearview mirror plays well in the present, since Smith’s account demotes the historical and geographical specificity of ‘conceptual art’ in favour of an already-everywhere notion of how, as editor Robert Bailey puts it in his introduction, art ‘becomes conceptual’ and ‘finds new conceptions of art’. There is, however, a dubious sense of historical inevitability to this – that art’s development couldn’t help ‘becoming conceptual’, while Bailey can’t quite resolve the issue of whether ‘conceptualist’ art – if it is a global development – isn’t identical to the ‘monolithic historical trajectory’ he accuses Modernism of having been. Or whether, in some sense, conceptualism was actually globalisation’s art-mode of choice. J.J. Charlesworth

ArtReview

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FOCUSING ON THE MIDDLE EAST

MASOUD AKHAVANJAM Exhibiting in

PERSONAL STRUCTURES: OPEN BORDERS FOCUSING ON THE MIDDLE EAST In the context of the Venice Biennale 2017

13 May - 26 November 2017 Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy

In association with

JANET RADY FINE ART 50 Jermyn Street, London, SW1Y 6LX janet@janetradyﬁnear t.com Tel: +44 (0)7957 284 370 www.janetradyﬁnear t.com

Masoud Akhavanjam Ballerina, 2016 Mirror polished stainless steel & bronze 190 x 90 x 70 cm Editions: 4 + Artists proofs

Emma Somerset Davis In Vista:Like Stars High and Still Mark Metcalfe An American Anima New Painting, Sculpture, Performance

Emma Somerset Davis

Mark Metcalfe

Anna Lovely Gallery London SE26 5JZ thelovelygallery@gmail.com thelovelygallery.com +44 0203 686 1328 29 April -14 May 2017 Opening 28th May 6-9 2017

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For more on Olivier Kugler, see overleaf

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Contributors

Jonathan Grffin is a critic and writer based in Los Angeles. He writes for various publications, including Art in America, Art Agenda, Cultured, Financial Times and Frieze. His book On Fire, about artists whose studios have burned down, was published in 2016. He is now working on a biography of the artist and collector William Copley. In this issue, he profiles Mark Bradford ahead of the artist’s presentation at the us Pavilion in Venice. Matthew Collings is an artist and writer. His collaborative paintings with Emma Biggs are shown at Vigo Gallery, London. He is the art critic for the London Evening Standard, and his TV series, This Is Modern Art, won a bafta in 2000. He is the author of Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop (1997), in which he satirises the London artworld. His forthcoming book, Painting Is Over, is to be published next year. He has been contributing to ArtReview since 2011 with ‘Great Critics and Their Ideas’, a series of fictive interviews with the writers, thinkers and other personalities who have shaped the way we think about art. In this issue, he talks to Mary the Mother of God about the ld50 gallery controversy and Damien Hirst’s Venice show.

Jennifer S. Li is the Los Angeles desk editor for Art Asia Pacific and a regular contributor to Art in America and ArtReview. In this issue, she reviews Jennie Jieun Lee at the Pit in Los Angeles. Ben Eastham is cofounder and editor of The White Review, assistant editor of Art Agenda and an associate editor of Documenta 14’s magazine, South as a State of Mind. He is the coauthor, with Katya Tylevich, of My Life as a Work of Art (2016). In this issue, he reviews Richard Mosse’s show at the Barbican Centre, London. Claire Rigby It is with sadness that ArtReview notes the death of Claire Rigby, who contributed to the magazine for many years. Claire’s writing, primarily from São Paulo, brimmed with passion, often touching on the social issues she cared about so greatly. For visitors to the Brazilian city, she was an indispensable and exuberant guide. Hailing from Brighton, but having lived in Brazil since 2010 (after stints in Buenos Aires and Mexico City), she wrote regularly for The New York Times, la Times, Folha de S.Paulo, The Guardian and Vice.

Contributing Writers Andrew Berardini, Phoebe Blatton, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Craig Burnett, Matthew Collings, Ashton Cooper, Gabriel Coxhead, Owen Duffy, Ben Eastham, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Alice Hattrick, Justin Jaeckle, Hettie Judah, I. Kurator, Nathalia Lavigne, Jennifer S. Li, Maria Lind, Lizzie Lloyd, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Mark Prince, John Quin, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Edgar Schmitz, Susannah Thompson, Jeppe Ugelvig, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Joshua Anderson, Mikael Gregorsky, Olivier Kugler, Anna Vickery

Olivier Kugler (preceding pages)

Olivier Kugler’s approach to graphic reportage takes him into firsthand, face-to-face exchanges with his subjects – confronting and communicating their experiences and realities in print and online press, from features in The Guardian and Harper’s to full-length book projects. While Kugler’s documentary comics are related to the wave of cartoon journalism sparked by Joe Sacco’s genre-redefining comicbook, later graphic novel, Palestine (1993 and 95, respectively), they typically avoid autobiography and self-depiction. Kugler’s focus is on the individual, the locale and the story. Aside from some scene-setting and arrowed captions, all the words are quotes distilled from extensive audio recordings of their conversations. Born in Stuttgart in 1970, Kugler is based in London, where he was twice selected for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Illustration Awards: as runner-up in editorial illustration in 2006 for Kugler’s People, his series of portraits of contemporary British lives for The Guardian; and in 2011 as overall winner for Un thé en Iran, a 30-page illustrated diary for the French current affairs

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quarterly XXI of an Iranian trucker’s four-day journey to deliver bottled water from Tehran to Kish, a small island in the Persian Gulf. A chance to join young French veterinarian Bertrand Bouchard on a weeklong mission to care for domesticated elephants labouring in the logging industry in Northwest Laos resulted in the 48-page journal Mit dem Elefantendoktor in Laos (2013). Out of this came an invitation from the Swiss chapter of Médecins Sans Frontières (msf) to produce a series of drawings documenting Syrian refugees. Kugler was flown to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he spent two weeks in December 2013 in the Domiz refugee camp. He preferred not to draw on location, aside from a few rough sketches, but to concentrate on conducting interviews and taking hundreds of reference photos of the refugees he met, reviewing them each night to rough out scenes and compositions. ‘The men I talked to were mainly receptive,’ Kugler told Grafik magazine in 2015. ‘I found it difficult though to talk with and photograph women. The few women I was able to draw were either employees of msf or their patients.’

One of whom was Vian, whose testimony fills Kugler’s new Strip for ArtReview. Returning with his photos, audio recordings and roughs, Kugler draws in pencil on A1-size paper, which he then scans, composes and colours using the program FreeHand. He does this while listening again and again to the recordings of his subject’s statements, until he can distil their words, which he then handletters and combines digitally into his layout. In London, his work currently forms part of the group exhibition Call Me by My Name: Stories from Calais and Beyond, at the Migration Museum in Lambeth through 30 July, while throughout October much of his Syrian project to date will be exhibited at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green. Supported through commissions and an Arts Council England grant, Kugler has been able to record the complex lives of Syrian refugees displaced on the Greek island of Kos as well as in Calais, Birmingham and Bogotá, and is now bringing these visual essays together in his next book, Escaping Wars and Waves, to be published initially in German later this year. Paul Gravett

ArtReview

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 140 photography by Joshua Anderson

The words on the spine and on pages 35, 67 and 101 are quoted from The Land of the Lingam (1933), by Arthur Miles

on page 136 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 146 illustration by Anna Vickery

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A Curator Writes May 2017 I wake from the hotel armchair with a start. Someone’s knocking on my door. I take a moment to check I’m actually inside my room this time and then reflect on yesterday – doubtless another splendid evening in Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke – before concluding that I have tarried in Berlin too long. I really should be wending my way to Kassel to see the mighty Documenta, perhaps with a short stop at a very good Weinwirtschaft I know in Leipzig. I answer the door to find Lukas, the hotel’s ever-willing concierge. He looks flustered. “Lukas, mein kleiner Freund, what is the problem?” “Mr Kurator, I’m afraid we have a message from your office. They wanted to let you know that the art show you are going to see is in fact… in Athens.” I step back in surprise, deliberately letting my Turnbull & Asser paisley dressing gown come slightly asunder just below my midriff. “Athens? Everyone knows that it’s always in Kassel – that godforsaken little shithole.” “Yes, but this year it opens in Athens.” “But why?” I reply, flustered. “Perhaps to focus on the way that Germany’s obsession with the European Union as some sort of redemptive step in the wake of its having lost all moral legitimacy during the Nazi era and refusing to countenance creative bailout solutions has resulted in Grexit becoming a real policy option and bleak austerity an inevitability for Greek citizens?” “The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they’re capable of anything,” I quip, quoting dear Christopher Isherwood. “Whatever, there is a Documenta Ambassador outside on a motorbike waiting,” Lukas says. He looks sad, so I change my tone. “Good God, you are correct. The Greeks need Documenta! They’ve had their pensions cut 12 times, bond yields have soared and farmers are blockading roads! What they really need is Documenta, an exhibition inexorably linked to Germany’s post-Nazi rebirth, to park its tanks on the Acropolis. It reminds me of the time I curated Stick It Up Your Junta! in Buenos Aires following our glorious recapture of the Falkland Islands, a thoughtful survey of New British Sculpture, including a powerful installation of Tony Cragg’s Britain Seen from the North.” With that I stride out of the room, down the stairs and past the front desk. “Send my bill to Boodle’s!” I shout. I swiftly climb on the back of the motorbike of the Documenta Ambassador, carefully arranging the folds of my robe around his splayed thighs. As we pull away, I catch a glimpse of his face in the wing mirror. I would recognise those emotionally distant yet extraordinarily compelling eyes anywhere. “Yanis?” I yell, my voice lost in the wind.

But surely the former Greek finance minister, known for his radical leftwing views, his dislike of Documenta’s presence in Athens and his taste in leather jackets, would have better things to do than ferry me to Documenta? I have no chance to answer this question, as over the next 36 hours he says nothing, not even when we stop for a comfort break in Novi Sad, where he refuses to take off his helmet. We drive in silence at high speed, me clinging onto his leather jacket for dear life, until finally we get to Athens. “Brilliant!” I say. “Can you take me to Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s ecosexual Cuddling Athens installation or Marta Minujín’s powerful work that suggests that Greece’s huge financial debt can be cancelled out with clever sales of olives? I fucking love Documenta!” My driver, who might or might not be the radical former finance minister of Greece, says nothing. Instead he revs down and the motorbike silently glides to a square where what must be participants in one of Documenta’s magnificent installations huddle.They hold placards. My Greek is a bit rusty since taking Greats at Balliol, but the sentiments displayed on the placards seem a tad negative, if you ask me. I don’t recall there being any placards asking for the fall of neoliberalism or late global capitalism when I was last in Greece, curating Magnate/Man-gate: Shipping and Masculinity at the Deste Foundation during the early 1990s. My driver looks at me and finally speaks. “What do you know about Greece?” I quickly refer to Magnate/Man-gate as well as its follow-up, Drop Yer Sails!, held on Hydra to a rapturous review in Artforum’s Scene & Herd. “We are not here to celebrate Documenta,” he says gravely. “We are here to watch the soft-soaping of Greece’s third bailout guided by Germany’s Eisenfaust im Samthandschuh approach. Over seven years, sustained austerity has not significantly changed the debt-to-gdp ratio, unemployment remains over 20 percent, pensions continue to be cut, and around a fifth of the population cannot afford basic services like heating. Fifty thousand or so refugees are trapped in limbo here since the rest of Europe closed its borders a year ago. And so you come to see the famous art show premised on postwar European reunification and the reemergence of Germany? That dream of redemption cost us our dignity. There is nothing you can learn from Athens.” I look around. Pensioners protest quietly but without hope. The European Union’s roots in a trade cartel have ruined their futures. We went to the barricades for the monster of neoliberalism. And here I am to see an exhibition predicated on an ideal of Europe that is fading in front of my eyes? What would Arnold Bode say? What of Harald Szeemann? And my dear Jan Hoet? “Is this it?” as the Strokes memorably asked. I drop to my knees and remember Homer’s words. ‘I’ve lost the will to live, to take my stand in the world of men.’ I. Kurator

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ArtReview_235x300_ExpoChicago_v1 4/3/17 2:15 PM Page 1

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Opening EXPO ART WEEK

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