ArtReview November 2014 by ArtReview

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ORANIENBURGER STRASSE 18

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THOMAS SCHEIBITZ RADIOPICTURES SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER 2014

THOMAS DEMAND

DAILIES 2008 – 2014 SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER 2014

ARTE POVERA AND ‘MULTIPLI’, TORINO 1970 – 1975 CURATED BY ELENA RE SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER 2014

LOUISE LAWLER

NO DRONES NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2015

ROBERT ELFGEN

I WISH MY PICTURES NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2015

7A GRAFTON STREET LONDON, W1S 4EJ UNITED KINGDOM P+44(0)20 7408 1613 F+44(0)20 7499 4531

ANDRO WEKUA

SOME PHEASANTS IN SINGULARITY OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 2014

JOSEPH KOSUTH

NOVEMBER – FEBRUARY 2015

M A R I A N G O O D M A N G A L L E RY

ne w y or k

2 4 w e s t 5 7 t h s t r e e t ne w y or k n y 10 019

John Baldessari

Movie Scripts / Art

t h r ough 2 6 no v e m b e r

l ond on

5 – 8 l o w e r joh n s t r e e t l ond on w 1 f 9d y

Gerhard Richter t h r ough 2 0 de c e m b e r

par i s

7 9 ru e du t e m p l e 7 5 0 0 3 par i s

Giovanni Anselmo t h r ough 2 0 de c e m b e r

w w w. m a r i a ng o odm a n. c om

HA U S E R & W IR T H

BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE 27 NOVEMBER 2014 – 10 JANUARY 2015 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

MET TERE HUID I, 2013 WAX, EPOXY, IRON, CLOTH, POLYESTER, ROPE 96 × 59 × 33 CM / 37 3/4 × 13 × 23 1/4 INCHES PHOTO: MIRJAM DEVRIENDT

HAUSER & WIRTH HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET

PIPILOTTI RIST LONDON WORRY WILL VANISH 27 NOVEMBER 2014 – 10 JANUARY 2015

SOMERSET STAY STAMINA STAY 29 NOVEMBER 2014 – 22 FEBRUARY 2015

MERCY GARDEN RETOUR SKIN, 2014 AUDIO VIDEO INSTALLATION (VIDEO STILL, DETAIL)

Jonathan Monk 14 November 2014 — 17 January 2015 27 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com

Art & Language Nobody Spoke

14 November 2014 — 17 January 2015 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com

WALTER DE MARIA November 8–December 20, 2014

GAGOSIAN GALLERY 980 Madison Avenue, New York www.gagosian.com The Estate of Walter De Maria is represented by Gagosian Gallery

PARIS

Richard Serra Vertical and Horizontal Reversals

November 7 - December 20, 2014

Juan Araujo, Original gallery VI, 2014, oil on canvas paper, 30 cm x 40 cm

Neo Rauch At the Well November 6 - December 20, 2014

David Zwirner 533 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 212 727 2070 davidzwirner.com

Franz West November 6 - December 13, 2014

David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 212 517 8677 davidzwirner.com

Christopher Williams November 6 - December 20, 2014

David Zwirner 525 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 212 727 2070 davidzwirner.com

MICHAËL BORREMANS DIRK BRAECKMAN ANTON CORBIJN RAOUL DE KEYSER JAN DE MAESSCHALCK MARLENE DUMAS KEES GOUDZWAARD SUSAN HARTNETT YUN-FEI JI KIM JONES JOHANNES KAHRS NAOTO KAWAHARA JOHN KÖRMELING MARK MANDERS JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM PIETRO ROCCASALVA GRACE SCHWINDT JENNY SCOBEL BART STOLLE MIRCEA SUCIU LUC TUYMANS PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH ANNE-MIE VAN KERCKHOVEN JACK WHITTEN CRISTOF YVORÉ

ZENO X GALERY Godtsstraat 15

2140 Antwerp Borgerhout Belgium

tel: +32 3 216 16 26

www.zeno-x.com

PIETRO ROCCASALVA The Queen of Gaps November 9 - December 20, 2014

ZENO X GALLERY Godtsstraat 15

2140 Antwerp Borgerhout Belgium

tel: +32 3 216 16 26

info@zeno-x.com

www.zeno-x.com

NOVEMBER 22, 2014 TO JANUARY 24, 2015

ALEX HUBBARD MAAg AREAL

NOVEMBER 22, 2014 TO JANUARY 24, 2015

CANDIDA HöFER LöWENBRäU AREAL

NOVEMBER 22, 2014 TO JANUARY 24, 2015

JUSTIN MATHERLY OSCAR MURILLO DAVID OSTROWSKI TOBIAS PILS LöWENBRäU AREAL

Galerie eva Presenhuber maag areal Zahnradstr. 21, Ch-8005 ZUriCh tel: +41 (0) 43 444 70 50 / Fax: +41 (0) 43 444 70 60 opening hoUrs: tUe-Fri 10-6, sat 11-5 lÖWenBrÄU areal limmatstr. 270, Ch-8005 ZUriCh tel: +41 (0) 44 515 78 50 / Fax: +41 (0) 43 444 70 60 opening hoUrs: tUe-Fri 11-6, sat 11-5 WWW.presenhUBer.Com galerie eva presenhUBer represents: doUg aitken, martin BoyCe, Joe Bradley, angela BUlloCh, valentin Carron verne daWson, Jay deFeo, trisha donnelly, Carroll dUnham, latiFa eChakhCh, matias FaldBakken, sam Falls peter FisChli/david Weiss, liam gilliCk doUglas gordon, mark handForth, Candida hÖFer, alex hUBBard, Wyatt kahn karen kilimnik, andreW lord, gerWald roCkensChaUB tim rollins and k.o.s., Ugo rondinone, dieter roth, eva rothsChild Jean-FrédériC sChnyder, steven shearer, Josh smith, osCar tUaZon, FranZ West, sUe Williams, miChael Williams

PHILIPPE PARRENO HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCERS FROM THE DANCE NOVEMBER 13 – DECEMBER 21, 2014 SCHINKEL PAVILLON, BERLIN QUASI-OBJECTS NOVEMBER 14, 2014 – JANUARY 15, 2015 ESTHER SCHIPPER, BERLIN

Phrygian Spirit 2012-14 Alaskan yellow cedar, holly, ebony, leather, string, milk paint 58 3⁄8 x 74 3⁄4 x 15 3⁄4 inches 148 x 190 x 40 cm

Martin Puryear

Matthew Marks

New York

JOHANNESBURG

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE 15 NOVEMBER – 20 DECEMBER 2014

WWW.GOODMAN-GALLERY.COM

RELATED EVENTS WILLIAM KENTRIDGE THE REFUSAL OF TIME A COLLABORATION WITH PHILIP MILLER, CATHERINE MEYBURGH, DADA MASILO AND PETER GALISON JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY 9 NOVEMBER 2014 – 1 FEBRUARY 2015 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE TAPESTRIES A COLLABORATION WITH THE STEPHENS TAPESTRY STUDIO WITS ART MUSEUM 18 NOVEMBER – 15 DECEMBER 2014

GENERATOR ‘

MARINA ABRAMOVIC OCTOBER 24 - DECEMBER 6, 2014 C O N C U R R E N T LY :

‘ JOSE DAVILA THE LIGHTNESS OF WEIGHT

475 TENTH AVE NEW YORK 212 239 1181 SKNY.COM PHOTO: THOMAS MUELLER

October

November

Fairs

East Room Guillermo Kuitca

East Room Florian Meisenberg

North Room Anna Bella Geiger

North Room f.marquespenteado

Frieze London FIAC, Paris Artissima, Torino Art Basel Miami Beach

Vila Romana Paulo Nazareth

Vila Romana Maria Loboda

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm

R. Marco Aurélio, 311 Vila Romana São Paulo SP 05048 – 000 Brazil

STURTEVANT RELoAdEd NoVEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 PARIS MARAIS, 7 RUE dEBELLEYME RoPAc.NET

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

LUCERNE

卢森

BEIJING

北京

Ai Weiwei

艾未未

Meng Huang

孟煌

14. 11. 2014 – 17. 1. 2015

8. 11. 2014 – 11. 1. 2015

Mármakos Mármakos Christian Christian Schoeler Schoeler 20. 2. – 24. 4. 2015

20. 2. – 24. 4. 2015

Ai Weiwei, Hu Qingyan, Li Zhanyang, Liu Ding, Not Vital

艾未未, 胡庆雁, 李占洋, 刘鼎,

Not Vital

I wanna be ignored ... 8. 11. 2014 – 11. 1. 2015

Hu Qingyan

胡庆雁

Eternal Glory 6. 2. – 12. 4. 2015

永垂不朽

6. 2. – 12. 4. 2015

ARTFAIRS 博览会 Art Taipei October 31 – November 3 Booth D-35

ARTISTS 艺术家 Ai Weiwei Chen Hui Cheng Ran Wim Delvoye Andreas Golder Hu Qingyan L/B Li Dafang Li Gang Li Zhanyang Liu Ding Meng Huang

艾未未陈卉程然

胡庆雁李大方李钢李占洋刘鼎孟煌

邱世华 Qiu Shihua Christian Schoeler 单凡 Shan Fan Shao Fan 邵北番 (邵帆) Anatoly Shuravlev Julia Steiner Not Vital 王兴伟 Wang Xingwei 夏小万 Xia Xiaowan 谢南星 Xie Nanxing 鄢醒 Yan Xing

Galerie Urs Meile Lucerne Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne, Switzerland T +41 (0)41 420 33 18, F +41 (0)41 420 21 69

麦勒画廊卢森瑞士卢森 Rosenberghöhe 4号, 邮编 6004 电话 +41 (0)41 420 33 18, 传真+41 (0)41 420 21 69

Galerie Urs Meile Beijing No. 104 Caochangdi, Chaoyang district, 100015 Beijing, China T +86 (0)10 643 333 93, F +86 (0)10 643 302 03

麦勒画廊北京中国北京朝阳区草场地104号, 邮编100015 电话 +86 (0)10 643 333 93, 传真 +86 (0)10 643 302 03

ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Artfair November 12 – 16 Booth 4-04 Art Basel Miami Beach December 4 – 7 Booth M-02 Kabinett: Yan Xing, The History of Reception, 2012 www.galerieursmeile.com galerie @ galerieursmeile.com

Richard Prince New Figures October 20 — December 20, 2014

Almine Rech Gallery Paris 64 rue de Turenne, F – 75003 Paris contact.paris@alminerech.com www.alminerech.com

The finest design Made in Glashütte, Germany: Metro

Find out more about this and other models at nomos-store.com and nomos-glashuette.com

Feast or Famine “Hey there, what’s going on?” Yeah, yeah – ArtReview knows. It’s supposed to be answering that question. That’s why you buy the magazine. To find answers. Not riddles. Although ArtReview isn’t so sure you should be totally reliant on it – or on art – for straight answers. But you probably think ArtReview exists to straighten art out for you as well. And perhaps it does. Even if it doesn’t really want to. Of course, when ArtReview has the dream about winning the Oscar for its amazing cinematic masterpiece, shortly after having scored the winning goal in the World Cup (that’s soccer, American readers) with the most beautiful overhead kick you’ve ever seen and just before collecting another Nobel Prize for the latest of its bestselling yet critically acclaimed novels (the other Nobels were for its scientific discoveries and the new system of egalitarian economics it had developed and persuaded every government to implement, which had the pleasing side-effect that Thomas Piketty didn’t have to write the book that ArtReview is currently struggling through), it starts thinking about its role as being rather like something described by the Prophet Isaiah: ‘I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.’ Which normally causes it to wake up, because when it comes down to it, ArtReview rather likes the rough places and the dark bits. They’re what make the light bits so bright and the smooth bits so smooth. Although ArtReview is not so sure it really likes too much light or too much smooth in the first place. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that while writing this November report, ArtReview is preparing to stagger out of the Power Bunker into which it locks itself at this time every year to receive and digest all the reports, recommendations and arguments from around the world related to its annual list. And because it’s spent so long with this global digest, it hasn’t been doing what it’s supposed to be doing, ie, going out and seeing exhibitions. But soon it will emerge blinking into the autumn light and the giddy merry-go-round of openings that precedes the even giddier merry-go-round of parties and dinners that marks the arrival of its hometown art fair, Frieze. Oh yes! And Frieze Masters too. (That’s the one with the more civilised dining options.) Luckily for ArtReview, it can be rather selective concerning how much of the fun of those fairs it chooses to partake of. That’s because it lives in London and can go and see most of the exhibitions taking place around town once everyone else has left. Or perhaps more pertinently, it can go and see shows even though people are not there to see it seeing shows. Not that people in general are prepared to acknowledge that.

The Japan Milk Marketing Board’s version of an art Power 100

Oh no. ArtReview will be subjected to the same pressures as everyone from out of town who is expected to see every contemporary art experience the city has to offer in approximately three days. And then have something sensible to say about all of them. So, right now, for ArtReview, it’s either feast or famine. That’s the thing about the contemporary art fair phenomenon these days: more than art or anything else, it seems to be mainly about promoting the general feeling that if you don’t see (and preferably swallow) something right now, you’ve already been left behind. Of course, ArtReview understands that that kind of hype is part of the ‘sales technique’ that leads to these fairs being commercially viable, but it’s often the same with the opening days of biennials. They cultivate a general hysteria with regard to gluttonous consumption. Indeed, you get the impression that some people allow themselves more time to travel to these things than they do to look at them. But perhaps that’s because those people want to see everything but aren’t really worried about whether or not they get anything. While ArtReview isn’t suggesting that we should all be like Horace Fletcher, ‘the great masticator’, who chewed each mouthful of food 100 times before swallowing – to which he attributed his good health, strength and stamina, even if one presumes that potential dinner companions tended to avoid actually dining with him as a result. ‘Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate,’ he used to bark, presumably showering those around him in a slurry of mulch. What ArtReview’s recommending is a few chews, perhaps a bit of tasting, rather than a straight swallow. Before it bunkered down, ArtReview was in Singapore, at a Malaysian food hall in Little India (colonialism, go figure), standing underneath a photograph of the prime ministers of those two countries (Malaysia and Singapore – Little India isn’t a country) and somewhat nervously preparing to swallow a mouthful of precious durian fruit. Next to that there was a sign telling ArtReview about why the durian was the king of all fruit. It can go for up to $700 a fruit. Go to one of the many ‘fan’ sites (such as yearofthedurian.com) and you’ll learn that trees are thinned so that their energy is focused into growing only around two or three fruits per year. The fruits themselves are covered by bags and umbrellas to protect them from the elements, and mothballs to keep out insects, and the best of them are untouched by chemicals of any kind. And of course they are rare. All of this reminded ArtReview of how people treat and look at works of art. And while many people may pull faces before they consume said works, it seemed to ArtReview that a lot of the art people it observes might be better served in another corner of the Malaysian shop, which offered chocolate under the slogan, ‘You’ll want to stuff this chocolate in your face…’, next to what looked, in the context, remarkably like a sick-bucket. ArtReview

Indulgence and a provision for its consequences

Picasso & Jacqueline The Evolution of Style

32 EAST 57TH ST / 534 WEST 25TH ST NEW YORK OCTOBER 31, 2014 – JANUARY 10, 2015

Koen Vanmechelen D A R W I N ’ S

15 Nov — 14 Dec 2014

Curated by James Putnam & Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

The Crypt Gallery St Pancras Church London NW1 2BA

darwinsdream.co.uk

D R E A M

ArtReview vol 66 no 8 November 2014

Art Previewed 47

Previews by Martin Herbert 49

Dionysus on Phallocentrism Interview by Matthew Collings 84

Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Andrew Berardini, Mike Watson, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Kimberly Bradley 69

Stefan Kalmár Interview by Tom Eccles 88 Thomas Girst Interview by Mark Rappolt 92 The Law and Its Ideas by Daniel McClean 96

page 84 Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975, performance. Photo: Anthony McCall. Courtesy the artist

November 2014

Art Featured 115

Calvin Tompkins by Bridget McCarthy 116

Allan Schwartzman – Cupidity’s Cupid by Laura van Straaten 184

The Limits of the Limits by ArtReview 122

Africa: Art in Context by Osei Bonsu 189 THE STRIP 198 OFF THE RECORD 202

page 190 Issa Samb. Photo: Sophie Thun

ArtReview

David hockney

some New Painting (and Photography)

508 West 25th st NeW York November 8, 2014 – JaNuarY 10, 2015

Power 100 125

Power 100, introduction by ArtReview 126

Power 100, profiles 29–56 150 Power Reading photography by Till Janz 157

Power 100, profiles 1–9 128

End-of-an-Era Qatar by Kevin Jones 162

The Revolving Door by J.J. Charlesworth 134

Power 100, profiles 57–80 164

Power 100, profiles 10–28 136

India’s Artworld by Rosalyn D’Mello 170

Power Reading photography by Mikael Gregorsky 141

Art and Freedom Interview by Aimee Lin 146

Power Reading photography by Jeremy Liebman, Matthew Porter 172

A Moral 100 by Neal Brown 148

Power 100, profiles 81–100 178

ArtReview

MAX WIGRAM GALLERY

JOHN GIORNO

INDEPENDENT PROJECTS NEW YORK 6 - 9 NOVEMBER 2014

106 NEW BOND STREET LONDON UK WWW.MAXWIGRAM.COM INFO@MAXWIGRAM.COM T +44(0)2074954960

Art Previewed

He is the grandson of a London police detective 47

FutureGreats 2014

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

Math Bass

The Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass works between painting, performance, sound, video and sculpture. In Bass’s hard-edged paintings, space and colour are flat, flat, flat; the canvas plays tricks on your eyes, forming faces made from collections of interchangeable symbols such as smoke, fire, alligators, matches, razor blades, cigarettes and the letter ‘z’. Shannon Ebner

Previewed Sturtevant MoMA, New York 9 November – 22 February

Martin Boyce Johnen Galerie, Berlin 28 November – 24 January

Christian Friedrich De Hallen, Haarlem through 30 November

Sean Landers Petzel, New York 13 November – 20 December

Andrea Büttner Museum Ludwig, Cologne 5 November – 15 March

Diego Thielemans Wiels, Brussels through 2 November

Janus Høm 1857, Oslo 20 November – 4 January

Conflict and Collisions: New Contemporary Sculpture, Hepworth, Wakefield through 25 January

Marinella Senatore MOT International, London through 29 November Shanghai Biennale 22 November – 31 March

8 Marinella Senatore, The School of Narrative Dance (video still), 2013, HD video, 20 min. Courtesy the artist and MOT International, London

November 2014

1 Sturtevant, Duchamp Wanted, 1969, photograph collage, 29 × 23 cm. Kolodny Family Collection. Photo: Peter Butler. © Estate Sturtevant, Paris

3 New untitled Janus Høm work produced for his exhibition at 1857, Oslo. Courtesy the artist

2 Sean Landers, Moby Dick (Merrilees), 2013, oil on linen, 285 × 853 cm. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

There are tough artists and artists who have it actions efface the received meaning already with Melville’s Ahab, being theatrically (perhaps stabilising “Duchamp,” “Warhol,” and “Beuys” also really) in search of that elusive white whale, 1 tough, and then there’s Sturtevant, who was to make a quantum leap conceptually, terrifyingly the great work of art. Moby Dick (Merrilees) (2013), both: undaunted by critical slings and arrows for elsewhere’ (and this being merely the critic’s the 8.5m painting in his new show, North most of her 50-year career, unbowed after being American Mammals, signifies so; elsewhere nine starting point). She thought and acted on a beaten up by a horde of schoolchildren when, different echelon to almost all artists of her own in 1967, she duplicated The Store of Claes Oldenburg other paintings feature outward-facing book in New York’s East Village. When Elaine and subsequent generations. She built black spines on steel grey bookshelves, their titles Sturtevant died last May, it had been over 40 holes: she won’t easily be museumified. reading as prose that might nutshell Landers’s spiritual autobiography, eg, ‘The Urgent years since her last American institutional show. [sic] was the title of a wool-gathering novel Necessity of Narcissism for the Artistic Mind’ Six months on, MoMA is finally correcting that 2 Sean Landers published in 1995, part of an and ‘When Performance Becomes Reality’. with Double Trouble, a fulsome retrospective, oeuvre that since the 90s, when the ambitious characterising her meticulous reprises of other young Yalie was considered a paragon of Diagram the system of self-awareness at Petzel artists’ works as ‘studies in the action of art and you’ll draw a pretzel. lackadaisical ‘Slacker’ art, has also included 3 The young Dane Janus Høm has previously that expose aspects of its making, reception, videos, magazine columns and, mainly, textcirculation, and canonization’. Yes, though to say heavy paintings, and collectively figures Landers been active as an artist/curator, splitting so skirts the Gordian knots, blockages and (or ‘Landers’) as insecure narcissist strung the difference by sometimes using works from startling articulations her samizdat canon sets gallery stock and altering them in what he’s between those poles of confidence and selftermed a ‘prosumer’ manner. For sure he’s a proup – how, as Bruce Hainley notes in his indispen- criticism that denote the existential extremes duct of his age and someone who, evidently, sable Under the Sign of [Sic] (2013), ‘Sturtevant’s of being an artist. Little wonder he identifies

ArtReview

intuitively understands it: Hito Steyerl’s great 2013 essay ‘Too Much World’, about the Internet moving offline, originated in a seminar Høm co-organised as a student in Berlin. Indeed, the Internet seeping into the real world is his primary interest, particularly the network of smart devices that is the so-called Internet of Things, which is reflected in his work by thematics of images coming to life and, say 1857, ‘tracking you down and even jumping out of the screen right at you’. More specifically, for his first solo show Høm is fusing image and object by printing on three-dimensional objects made from cast concrete, silicon and papiermâché, using a self-invented technique and a hydrographic (or water-transfer) printer. Martin Boyce’s dreamlike evocations of 4 Modernism and its aftermath – the objects he uses, while typically referring to modern

architecture and design, spawning linguistic fireplace – fitting for Johnen Galerie’s domestic spaces – with animist overtones. (Consider, elements and appurtenances as if trying on that note, how early Boyce got to the table to communicate from beyond the veil – have vis-à-vis speculative, seemingly sentient objects.) evolved according to an internal logic over Walls painted brown as high as the artist can the years, one piece serving as a launchpad for reach and titled ‘shit space’. A minidocumentary others. For the Turner Prize-winner’s newest filmed in a convent by a camcorder-wielding show (and continuing to extrapolate in terms Carmelite nun, focusing on gentle handicrafts. of palette, he says, from his 2006 reworkings Woodcuts and videos dealing with the artist’s of four concrete trees from 1925 by sculptors Joël attitudes to Martin Kippenberger, Bas Jan Ader, and Jan Martel), concrete-based wall works Sister Corita Kent and more; other woodcuts, that cast shuttered panels and are overlaid with broad and tranquil, that veer between nearlaser-cut steel speckled with apertures, these last filled in turn like blocked points of access 5 abstraction and mystical scenes. Andrea Büttner doesn’t make it easy, but the red thread in the (think of blocked broken windows, something Stüttgart-born (and, yes, educated by nuns) closed down). Elsewhere expect spindly mobiles artist’s work is the exploring and redeeming using industrial materials that aim, Boyce tells us, for ‘the emotional weight of a weeping of shame, embarrassment and influence. willow’, bronze casts of light sockets that suggest In the control-wresting 2 (2014) at the Museum a constellation of dead stars and a semiabstracted Ludwig, the circumference of sway widens:

Andrea Büttner, Piano, 2013, woodcut, 236 × 143 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Hollybush Gardens, London, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

4 Martin Boyce, Wolfe House Ghosts and Flowers, 2013, painted steel, galvanised steel, rusted steel, 154 × 57 × 38 cm. Photo Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist

November 2014

6 Christian Friedrich, The Stone That the Builder Rejected Twice, 2008-14, dV transferred into digital file, sound, 10 min 24 sec. Courtesy the artist and Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam

7 Diego Thielemans, L’atelier (video still), 2014, hd video, 15 min. Courtesy the artist

on video, pianos are demurely played by would vocabulary the German artist uses. In On Something The resultant film, When Rubiero comes from the -be-genteel women and elsewhere destroyed by New (Dirt in a Hole) (2014), this is expressed via Backdoor, the Friends are already in (2014), juxtamen. Büttner used broken piano pieces to make a stutterer whose speech is displaced first into posed with the works that the artists made, woodcuts also on show, and considers the force Morse code and then into photos of the code relates, according to the institution, to the cinemagoer’s sense that the lengthiness of a film of being adjudicated via a display referencing as flashing light. For the biblically titled video is determined by the comfort of the seat one is Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), including The Stone That the Builder Rejected Twice (2008–14), in: physical world and represented world interimages that Büttner believes Kant had in mind meanwhile, which was filmed in Friedrich’s mingle. Thielemans was born in 1989, so maybe while writing and images she’s come up with studio, he contacted an ‘unknown boy’ through the Internet and invited him to the studio – this is art as social network. What the idea in response to reading it. A religious study-background is, nowadays, where the latter found Friedrich hanging from reminds us of, though, is that scene in The evidently no hindrance to an artistic career. a cord, as if hanged, with his eyes closed. Ethical Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom cleverly gets 6 Christian Friedrich, a 2012 ArtReview Future questions inevitably ensue. other kids to whitewash a fence for him. When Diego Thielemans invited guests Great, initially studied theology and philology, 7 Marinella Senatore also predicates her 8 work on public participation (and storytelling, into his studio recently during his residency and his videos, sculptures and photographs (as seen in his first European solo museum show) at Wiels, they could breathe relatively easy. The and collective memory): the Italian artist’s 2012 are concerned with ‘the boundaries of human work Rosas, a screened trilogy of operas, apparBrussels-based artist asked four artist friends, ently involved some 20,000 participants, trained grace’, the subjugation of the body, and strucCésar Brun, Sebastien Capouet, Benjamin at free workshops, with each section realised in tures and relationships: both those of human Installé and Raphaël Van Lerberghe, to work a different European city, while her 2009 musical relationships and of conceptual art, whose in his workplace: he then filmed their activity.

ArtReview

U D O M S A K K R I S A N A M I S

Planet Caravan November 10–December 20 407 Pedder Building 12 Pedder Street Central, Hong Kong lehmannmaupin.com

Speak Easy utilised the talents of a hundred but finds each artist explicitly collapsing students. Here, following Senatore’s receipt together history, technologies of war and techof the 2014 Premio MAXXI Prize, expect docunologies of the present. Bircken’s sculptures, characterised by black leathery surfaces, intersect mentary works relating to the opera and to iconographic references to B-52 bombers, the free school she set up in 2013, the School of Narrative Dance; sculptural work deriving Mercedes gear sticks, wrecking balls and Barbara from Senatore’s 2010 film Nui Simu; and archival Hepworth’s stringed sculptures; de Jong has drawings connected to Speak Easy. Apparently been 3D-scanning Henry VIII’s suits of armour no reprise, however, of the tea bar she set up and contemporary weapons to make bronze in Peres Projects, Berlin, in 2012. casts; and Ziegler’s display, which extends into Still, a 3D printer in the Hepworth is a solo show at sister space the Calder, also dwells currently printing out a new teapot every day. on conflict (when not on teapots). It’s 2014, which means it’s still a hundred years 10 Tea. China. Shanghai. Shanghai Biennale. since the start of World War One, which means Anselm Franke. In the latest issue of ArtReview it’s still feasible for the institution to mount Asia, Franke writes about the commonly 9 Conflict and Collisions: New Contemporary followed, if not always commonly understood, Sculpture, a collection of shows that not only scripts that govern social interaction, and the gives UK institutional solo debuts to Alexandra ‘hidden rules’ that the powerful use to advance Bircken, Folkert de Jong and Toby Ziegler, themselves. Social Factory, his Shanghai Biennale,

spins off from his ideas of what art might do against these: pull them into the light in a country where modernisation has been visibly bloody. In Shanghai, he writes, ‘I think we need a positive, affirmative definition of what modernisation can mean. The socially implicit should not be left to the nationalists or the religious obscurantists or the ideologues of technocracy’. Anyone who’s seen his ambitious, essayistic shows at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, might not be surprised that he also thinks that what’s needed is what the website describes as ‘scholar-artists’ or ‘artist-literarati’. No names at press time, but these will be clustered in the city’s massive Power Station of Art, and seeing how Franke navigates between his principled stance and the likely need to tread carefully may well be fascinating in itself. Martin Herbert

10 Harun Farocki, Parallel II, 2014, single-channel video installation, colour, 9 min. © the artist

9 Alexandra Bircken, Fellow, 2014. Photo: Roman Maerz. Courtesy the artist, Herald St, London, and BQ , Berlin

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21 november 2014 – 24 January 2015

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CHRISTIANE BAUMGARTNER The Alan Cristea Gallery at 31&34 Cork St. London W1S 3NU Telephone +44(0)20 7439 1866 Facsimile +44(0)20 7439 1874 Email: info@alancristea.com Website: www.alancristea.com

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21 november 2014 – 24 January 2015

Dear Mr. Thanatos Modern and Contemporary Art from Latin America Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné Regina José Galindo, Patrick Hamilton, Aníbal López, Teresa Margolles, Ana Mendieta, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, José Guadalupe Posada, and Jorge Tacla October 2nd through December 13th, 2014

Jorge Tacla, Identidad Oculta 39 (detail), 2013. Oil and cold wax on canvas. 100 x 100 inches.

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17 November-27 November 2014

Mao with teracotta Army No,6

Monday-Thursday 12pm-5pm

2012, Oil on canvas 300x240cm/118x94 inches (detail)

AC Art Space 18 Wattle Street, Haberﬁeld, Sydney NSW, 2045, Australia Tel: +61 2 9799 2808 Email: info@acartspace.com www.acartspace.com

JIM DINE

The Townships

2014

Acrylic, sand, and charcoal on wood panel

24-1/16” x 36-1/16” (61.1 x 91.6 cm)

JIM DINE JIM DINE The Townships The Townships 2014 2014 Acrylic, Acrylic, sand, sand, and charcoal and charcoal on wood on wood panel panel 24-1/16” 24-1/16” x 36-1/16” x 36-1/16” (61.1 x(61.1 91.6xcm) 91.6 cm)

NOV 15, 2014 - JAN 15, 2015 NOV NOV 15,15, 2014 2014 - JAN - JAN 15,15, 2015 2015

Pedro Cabrita Reis The London Angles 16 Oct – 6 Dec 2014

Jannis Kounellis

11 Dec 2014 – 7 Feb 2015

Giorgio Andreotta Calò 13 Feb – 4 Apr 2015

Alicja Kwade Thomas Rentmeister Michael Sailstorfer 10 Apr – 30 May 2015

Alberto Garutti

5 Jun – 31 Jul 2015

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Anselm Kiefer

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Anselm Kiefer, Morgenthau Plan (detail), 2013. Acrylic, emulsion, oil, shellac, metal, fragments of paint, plaster, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on photograph mounted on canvas, 330 x 560 x 45 cm © Anselm Kiefer. Photography: Charles Duprat

Points of View J.J. Charlesworth Britain is over Maria Lind As close as it gets Sam Jacob The changing nature of power dressing

Jonathan T.D. Neil It’s time to look to our long-term future Andrew Berardini Just ease on into the water

Jonathan Grossmalerman Warhammer Kimberly Bradley Off-space No 23: Savvy Contemporary, Berlin

Mike Watson Foreign correspondents

J.J. Charlesworth Britain is over Voters in Scotland may have decided against independence in September’s referendum – a conclusive 55 percent voting against – but as far as Britain’s mixed-up politicians are concerned, the success of the ‘no’ campaign isn’t to be taken as a ringing endorsement of the idea of a United Kingdom. Rather, British politicians are desperate to push on for more devolution of powers, with Prime Minister David Cameron and other political leaders squabbling over plans (proffered as an inducement to voters by all three major British political parties) to pass new powers to Scotland anyway (er, it was a ‘no’ vote, right?) while pushing on to do the same for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This may not appear to have a great deal to do with the world of art, but the paradox – of voters voting to stay in a political union, against a political class obsessed with devolving it into oblivion – points to the crisis of the old, nineteenthcentury model of the nation-state, a crisis driven largely by the processes of globalisation, and which has ramifications for cultural institutions based on the assumption of national identity. It’s interesting to consider how the idea of a ‘national’ cultural institution has mutated in the last decade or so. While the major European art centres have national institutions committed, in part, to representing national artistic production – Tate, the Pompidou, the Nationalgalerie – the sense that these institutions are particularly committed to presenting a ‘national’ perspective on contemporary art is on the wane, especially in Britain, and nowhere more clearly shows up the fading importance of national identity than the

awkward division of Tate Modern and Tate Britain, in which Tate Britain was relegated to the care of Tate’s collection of British art since 1500, while also being committed to representing contemporary artistic production from Britain. Meanwhile, Tate Modern gets to put on all the exciting international stuff. Much ink has been spilled on why Tate Britain has languished while its young sibling has thrived since its opening in 2000: it’s in

As the artworld has become a truly international cultural system, it has tended to mirror the way in which the model of the old, Western nation-state has dwindled in importance the wrong place; Tate Modern always gets the blockbusters over Tate Britain; the competition at the ‘traditional’ end of the art-exhibition market is tougher, and so on. But the fundamental problem for Tate Britain is that no one has much of an idea what ‘British art’ is supposed to mean any more, or why you would want a special gallery to show it in. While Tate as a whole may hold the national collection of British art since 1500, and shows modern and contemporary British artists across its four galleries, Tate Britain is uniquely stuck trying to define what’s particularly British about its contemporary programme. You may be born or based in Britain, but that’s little reason, as

November 2014

an artist, to want to show at Tate Britain over anywhere else. So Tate Britain, under director Penelope Curtis (who took up the post in 2010), has started to come up with ever more experimental and eccentric curatorial takes on the history of British art – shows on British folk art, on the British art critic and patron Kenneth Clark, on the history of iconoclasm – often to the consternation of confused critics. The ‘Britishness’ of art in Britain has always been an unstable formula, even from the opening of the original Tate Gallery – the ‘National Gallery of British Art’ – in 1897. The Turner Prize, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, rose in the public imagination during the cultural exuberance of the ‘cool Britannia’ years of the late 1990s and early 2000s, alongside the international rise of the ‘young British artists’. But as the artworld has become a truly international cultural system, it has tended to mirror the way in which the model of the old, Western nationstate has dwindled in importance, in favour of the smooth functioning of the globalised economy, while multicultural pluralism has replaced strong nationalist identities. Tate may be number one in the world of art power, but as a global brand for contemporary art, not as the epitome of Britishness, while London continues to emerge as one of the new generation of ‘global cities’ – modern, outward-looking, cosmopolitan, international – and anything but ‘British’. As Britain sets out on the uncertain road of tearing itself into even smaller bits and pieces, one might wonder when it will be time to rename Tate Britain. But rename it what?

Maria Lind As close as it gets When documentary practices entered the stage of contemporary art big-time during the 1990s, they were often referred to as ‘reportage’. They were said to give witness accounts from conditions, situations and events pertaining to both the personal and the political, both micro and macro. In this way they began to fill a gap in the transforming media landscape of many parts of the world. Instead of investigative journalists reporting about hidden facts nearby and unknown things abroad, we learned about such things from individual artists who spent time and energy digging through the turf both at home and (often far) away. When I recently saw the St Petersburg-based collective Chto Delat’s new video The Excluded: In a Moment of Danger (2014) at the São Paulo Bienal I was struck by its power precisely as an eyewitness report, offering a complex and difficult account of current affairs. With unusual proximity, it talks about what has happened in Russia in the last six months, about the takeover of Crimea, the Boeing crash in Ukraine and other less mediatised events. But rather than being documentary in its formal articulation, it is highly staged and theatricalised, made collectively with graduates from Chto Delat’s own School of Engaged Art. The Excluded… is an hour-long film divided into 12 chapters, each featuring the barefoot graduates as themselves, arranged in various strictly choreographed constellations inside a studio. It is a room that is both domestic and institutional, with support structures like exhibition pedestals placed on the floor. The participants repeatedly log on to their social networks, only to realise that nothing has changed.

Standing up, they give their coordinates in time and space. “I’m 7,000 light years from the N6C6611 cluster of stars annihilated by the explosion of a supernova and 1,000 years before its disappearance from our field of vision” is one, “I’m 2,000 kilometres away from the battle for the Donetsk airport and 20 years from the first war in Chechnya” another. The camera behaves like a searchlight, moving slowly with and around the agents in the room. In chapter four the participants realise that they are part of society and also responsible for it. While sitting in a row, they touch their own bodies, then start to move up and down in spasms, only eventually to fall down on the floor. The following chapter sees the introduction of ‘the ear of society’, with a giant ear entering the room, and they retune their voices, literally, to be heard. Most of them end up sounding like animals. At the same time they lean on each other, and on the pedestals, as if collapsed. In the section where they begin to listen to one another, there are glimpses of what it can be like to live in Russia today: while one woman is ‘fucking scared’ as a lesbian, the split in society is likened to civil war by another woman. A man claims that his nonconformist tongue is his conflict. Families are divided on Putin and Crimea, according to another participant. When they are seeking points of no return in history, the signing of the act for annexing Crimea is indeed the first one. Others suggest the trial of Pussy Riot, 9/11, the US invasion of Iraq – which coincided with the birth of that man’s daughter – Chto Delat, The Excluded: In a Moment of Danger, 2014. Courtesy the artists

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the Russian presidential election and the first congress of the opposition and its failure to unite the various groups. The most striking suggestion is the 1999 bombing of Belgrade by NATO, after which a conservative turn demanded that citizens of Russia not only sympathise with their fellow Orthodox Serbs but also hate Albanians. Despite the fact that most people had never heard of them before. This is the kind of dissent that is absent from Russia’s mainstream media. Although The Excluded has given me flashbacks since I saw it, it suffers from not having been through enough formal scrutiny. In Niemeyer’s Bienal building it is presented as an installation with a large projection at the centre and three flat screens on the side walls. The latter show details of the performance in the studio, and some reference material. When I later watched The Excluded online, it was all one image, clarifying that the work is not working as an installation. The theatrical aspects do the right thing within the frames of the image but not beyond it. Not only is this theatricalisation special in terms of ‘reporting’ – with precedents like 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (2007) by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, et al, which is now in MoMA’s collection – it highlights the need to take issues of articulation as seriously as content. Too many artworks in general and documentary practice in particular get away without paying enough attention to the implications of how things are being done. Nevertheless, I hope that The Excluded, like 9 Scripts…, will enter a major collection as quickly as it gave us an account of recent Russian affairs.

Sam Jacob The changing nature of power dressing Power dressing, they used to call it in the 1980s: all shoulder pads and tailoring, broad shoulders and tight waists. This was an image rooted in an 80s idea of power: individualist, corporate, synthetic and processed, power was working out to gated drum sounds played through orange foam headphones attached to portable electronics strapped to tight Lycra. Power dressing is a form of cultural expression – a way of articulating an era’s own idea of what power is, where it comes from and what it looks like. It happens outside the world of retro music videos and soap operas too. Think of the real seats of power. The US Capitol with its gleaming white Neoclassicism. All its columns and capitals, its porticos and plinths, are like a movie set of Ancient Greece at the heart of the New World: there to invoke the image and idealism of its democracy, its enduring significance and all the rest. It’s a way of bestowing legitimacy on a young democracy, a way to make its own form of power seem plausible and a way of dramatising power. Or think of the Palace of Westminster, a very different image of power: its Gothic Revival treatment suggests Machiavellian intrigue in all of its neomedieval corridors and alcoves. In it too is an idealised image of Britain’s own history, its island independence, its split with Rome, even its origin myths. That’s what tourists take pictures of when they snap a selfie with Big Ben in the background, even if they don’t know it.

As we approach our own era, the image of power mutates. And as it does, something strange seems to happen. At the inner sanctum of British government we find 10 Downing Street’s Cabinet Room, designed by William Kent in the eighteenth century: Corinthian columns, brass chandeliers, big oak-topped table, solid mahogany chairs and marble fireplace. Yet in the 1990s a style of governing emerged that was at odds with this formality. During Tony Blair’s premiership an alternative – dubbed the ‘sofa cabinet’ – developed. No, not a new furniture hybrid,

The aesthetic of power has shifted. It is more often located in places that look like normality, hidden in plain sight but a relaxed, informal kind of power centred upon an icon of the domestic landscape. Soft (furnishing) power, as a place to cook up military intervention in the Middle East. The aesthetic of power has shifted. It is more often located in places that look like normality, hidden in plain sight. Why would it do this? What would be its motivation? We could argue that this strategy is a response to our increasing dissatisfaction with and distrust of power and the powerful. Dressed in jeans, perhaps its invisibility only serves to preserve its core. After all, it’s not power itself that changes, but the way it chooses to show itself.

Perhaps this phenomenon is even more explicit in the artworld – in the spaces that it constructs to conduct its rituals and business. The gallery as an architectural edifice was once drawn from the same image hoard as parliaments and banks: neoclassical buildings that conjured (or in the case of the Louvre, occupied) the same image of power. But wave after wave of radical practice, of Modernism, Postmodernism and every -ism between and beyond, has transformed this monolithic idea of culture. You only have to think of Tate Modern’s occupation of an abandoned industrial structure to see how the use of alternative spaces has been institutionalised on a massive and spectacular scale. It’s the absence of all the old trappings of high culture that communicate contemporary art-power. The idea of the contemporary gallery as an abstract white cube is an inversion, just like Blair’s sofa. It’s the total wiping away of all those associations embodied in historicist detailing that creates a far more contemporary relationship between image and power. The white cube, supposedly neutral, has become the seat of power. Its total absence of rhetoric is its rhetoric. Both government and culture have co-opted design languages and modes that normalise, camouflage and naturalise their inherent power. They bleed into the landscape, their edges and shapes dissolving against the fabric of everyday life. But as they do, we should understand that though they are now disguised as normality, they remain just as powerful. Perhaps even more so.

The west front of the United States Capitol, Washington, DC. Courtesy Architect of the Capitol, Washington, DC

November 2014

Jonathan T.D. Neil It’s time to look to our long-term future I feel the need to write something here about atmospherics – pun intended – rather than money, art and climate change, because, on 21 demands. The march did not seek to take or hold September, a Sunday, hundreds of thousands of space in order to conjure the genies of corporatist people from across the US and around the world power (as did the #FloodWallStreet protest that gathered on Manhattan’s Upper West Side followed on Monday). Its aims were reflexive (where I live) to stage the People’s Climate March. rather than agonistic: ‘I see you, you see me; in Neither a protest action nor a pure celebration seeing each other we affirm each other and raise – though parts of it came off as both these things – each other up’, not, ‘I face you, you face me, we the march was a kind of visibility test: move a face each other down’. Thus the march sought large number of bodies (300,000+; more than what all works of art, indeed all subjects, seek, hoped for) through a limited space (midtown and that’s recognition. Yet who would deny that money is the Manhattan) to raise awareness about global foremost medium of recognition today? It’s anthropogenic climate change, or global warming. a big part of our fascination with artists such Graphic designer Milton Glaser recently as Jeff Koons and Oscar Murillo, launched a campaign that puts this Here the author rather more bluntly, ‘It’s Not Warmwith the expansionist building makes the case ing, It’s Dying’ – that is, habitats campaigns of Tate and MoMA, for money being and species throughout the globe are with ‘power’ gallerists such as the foremost dying as a result of buildups of fossilDavid Zwirner and Iwan Wirth medium of fuel-generated greenhouse gases – that is, after all, where the money recognition today in the atmosphere, but also from is. And it’s why, following on the and implies that the systematic polluting for which activism of US college students anyone denying humans of the industrial age have calling for their universities to that is crazy become infamous. Glaser’s contridivest from fossil fuel companies, bution, with its circular gradient running from Not an Alternative, an artist collective based green to black, was just one icon among the in Brooklyn, has called for American museums flurry of artfully produced banners and signs – not just art museums, but science and natural-history museums too – to divest their and floats and agitprop that was meant to draw attention to the climate-change cause and its endowments of fossil fuel stocks and to dissovarious subgenres, all of which found their place ciate from the fossil fuel industry as well. Now, there’s little evidence that divestment on the streets of Manhattan and their voices – whistling, drumming, screaming – when, at actually does much injury to companies finan1pm that Sunday, it came time to ‘ring’ the cially. The ‘supermajors’ of the fossil fuel collective alarm bell, loud enough, it was hoped, industry are among the biggest companies on the to be heard by the UN delegates and diplomats, planet. ExxonMobil, for example, has a market just then in town for their own discussions on capitalisation of around $400 billion, which as a climate change (and other matters). measure of GDP would make it the 30th largest In this, I’d like to suggest that the Climate March was nothing if not a massive, collaborative Courtesy Light Brigading. Licensed Under Creative Commons work of performance art. Its purpose was

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country in the world. To date, the publicly stated commitments to divest from fossil fuels on the part of foundations, universities, and civic and cultural institutions and leaders have come to $50bn in total, which is impressive but not threatening. Most of the biggest pension funds, whose sizes rival Big Oil, haven’t joined in, their reason being that it is better to keep a seat at the table. Divestment is largely a symbolic act, another work of atmospherics. More encouraging than the divestment movement though has been the carbon-pricing movement. Here more than 300 institutional investors managing assets in the tens of trillions have called for carbon taxes and an end to subsidies to the fossil fuel industries. That would be financially injurious (just look how hard their lobbyists in Washington fight the prospect). It would also be redistributive, shifting the global economic picture from resource extraction (aka primitive accumulation) towards something more sustainable. Money, as they say, talks. What that ‘something’ really looks like though is a job for a new contemporary avant-garde. Money lacks imagination; it only wants to save itself. Our popular and mass culture is obsessed with and saturated by stale apocalyptic visions and adolescent fantasies, and much of our so-called ‘advanced’ contemporary art is in thrall to a similar market solipsism. Just like the supermajors, its ‘explorations’ can be technically advanced and audacious in scope and expense, but they are carried out in a state of self-serving and cowardly denial of the world outside of the artworld. Contemporary art could do worse than to take a lesson from the People’s Climate March. It needs to harness the power of a new atmospherics, a recognitive atmospherics that raises up our future rather than faces it down.

Andrew Berardini Just ease on into the water Under the sultry shine of a California sun, more than one deadpan artist and otherworldly visionary, fictive character and everyday human, has dreamed desire and class, poetry and leisure, into the placid hue of a swimming pool. An inflatable lounge drifts in the cool, chemical blue. Pink-parts swimsuited, a curve of naked skin slowly tans, and manicured fingernails dip thoughtlessly into the surface of the water. Chlorine lends it clarity but subtle impurities capture the low red of light’s spectrum, and the water beams back the wettest of cyans. In the sky above Los Angeles, weary air travellers fingering barf-bags bend against the oval windows as the plane banks for descent, their dazed eyes counting the kidney-curved blues that punctuate the tract houses under the swaying palm trees. Like bottle-blonde, the colour is too perfectly synthetic to hide its factory fakery. Like all water, a pool is a dream of life, but this stuff’s totally undrinkable. Wikipedia What isn’t laced with says that piss is diluted poison. ‘while relatively However illusory, small quantities its cool, wet kiss gives of water appear such sweet relief to be colourless, to sunbaked skin. water’s tint be-

A wastrel Benjamin in The Graduate (1967) basks in the directionless drift of postcoital bliss and suburban ennui, an earned rest from Mrs. Robinson’s mature charms. A California dream, Hockney’s naked boys make a silent splash into its depthless colour, the perfect sunlight casting rippling shadows made permanent with paint. The empty stare of Ed Ruscha’s Nine Swimming Pools (1968) is matched with swathes of blank pages and concluded with a broken glass. Zoe Crosher snaps the blank water from above in the series The Pools I Shot (2006–), each sun-dappling shadow across its placid surface soaked with sultry promise and foreboding noir. Off Sunset Blvd, Joe Gillis floats facedown in the pool he always wanted, though the black-and-white film can’t show the hue of the water in his lungs. Summer children dream of its slippery play, their eyes open underwater to a hushed world beneath this one that we can visit but never live. Following the long half-hour after lunch, parentally imposed, the two-tone call of “Marco” is met with a quiet splash and the reluctant return of “Polo”. In a water park wonderland, the endless slides, tubed and slick, empty with a splash into frothy pools, bare feet slap on the hot concrete running from ride to ride and the scent of sunscreen drips off all the shivering,

half-naked adolescents. Stretch-marked and beer-bellied, mothers and fathers lackadaisically watch over their sopping children. With bodies beyond the firm joys of youth, they still shudder with the first bracing chill and thrill of each stroke and gasp, goose-fleshed and glistening when it’s their turn to swim. In those cool waters sloshes the promise of pleasure palaces and leisure classes, desert oases and movie stars, numb languor and empty excess. Emptied out, they’re still dreamy to skaters who kill the surface and scrape the lips with hard wheels and grinding rails, but even those rebel Z-boys busting into abandoned houses have become just another industry. Out of the sun, midnight teenagers hop padlocked chainlink: a redheaded protoslut with a black eye, a thin boy with nipple piercings, a pasty-skinned gothette, a bitter blond boy with glittery lipgloss, passing storebrand vodka and skinny-dipping in the shadowy water, its colour muted but still a rippling blue under the distant blue-white streetlights. Wait long enough and the drift ends. A twilight chill, the sting of chlorine, a nightwatchman’s holler, the homicide squad’s sirens, a perfect moment passed, purchased on credit, interest paid with more than a sunburn.

comes a deeper blue as the thickness of the observed sample increases’

And continues: ‘The blue hue of water is an intrinsic property and is caused by selective absorption and scattering of white light. Impurities dissolved or suspended in water may give water different coloured appearances’ Zoe Crosher, The Pool I Shot in West Hollywood, 2006, c-print mounted on aluminium, 20 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Mike Watson Foreign correspondents

There seems to have been a slow but steady shift during the last two years from the fear that the economic crisis would lead to widespread war to the very real sensation that the world is now involved in an ongoing conflict fought on so many fronts as to be comparable to the Cold War, if not to the events leading up to the early part of the Second World War, when the reality of global conflict really dawned. Yet although Internet reporting brings us ever closer to the imagery of conflict – in the Ukraine, IS, Syria, Libya and Gaza – what is effectively the twentyfirst-century ‘home front’, the UK, US and most of Europe, has never felt further removed from the realities of war itself. How might the artworld respond to this? This is a question that inevitably evokes German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s injunction on ‘making art after Auschwitz’, set out in his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’ (and echoing a line from ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, 1949). What is often overlooked is that later in the same essay Adorno writes that art must continue even in spite of its impossibility, so that its very existence may represent a refusal to surrender to cynicism. ‘Yet this suffering’, he writes, ‘… also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.’ Adorno’s preference for abstraction – so that the artwork would not play into the very horror it tried to interpret and oppose through

a figurative representation of it – did not foresee the advent of an artform directly concerned with human relations (as with much ‘relational art’) or the hybridisation of art and politics.It’s likely that he would have rejected such forms as falling prey to the as yet unresolved antagonisms of concrete politics. This is a debate that is likely to become prominent as artists reflect on the anniversaries of the start of the First World War and – next year – the end of the Second World War, as well as on current conflicts. Though, rather than theorising, it is down to these artists to test the boundaries via practice. Italian artist Valerio Rocco Orlando started his project Interfaith Diaries in May 2014, in advance of his summer residency at Artport, Tel Aviv. The film project documents conversations across a variety of communities in Israel and Palestine, taking as a starting point Orlando’s collaboration with self-styled Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri. Proceeding via a series of interviews with people from diverse religious backgrounds in Tel Aviv, Orlando found himself considering abandoning the project as the start of the 2014 Gaza conflict made it difficult for an outsider to interpret the religious fervour that underlies the ongoing tensions between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. He continued his project up to the end of the residency in September, after Israeli bombardment of Palestine ceased in August, and will return to complete it in 2015. Valerio Rocco Orlando, Interfaith Diaries (production still), 2014. Courtesy the artist

November 2014

Questions over what value such interactions have could well be asked, and yet as the artworld has become global, with residencies and research trips a central part of certain types of artistic production, it is inevitable that the enquiring mind of the artist will probe foreign lands in increasingly ambitious ways. Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli and Federico Lodoli recently previewed their film Fragment 53, Liberian Notes – shot during two research trips to Liberia – at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, for the Biennale of Moving Images. The film featured seven interviews with generals who took part in the two Liberian Civil Wars, in which they recounted stories of massacres in which they had personally killed tens and even hundreds of people. The film opens with images of statues of war gods from different historical cultures, portraying war as a cyclical state. In twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Liberia, war was often fought with brutal tools: the machete being a favourite – as one General explained – because it saved on bullets. Such frank interviews at least confronted the almost exclusively Western viewers present at its preview with a stark reminder that war is ever-present and has extreme consequences. What seems clear is that the generals were keen to tell their personal stories to someone from outside Liberia. In this sense social art documentary may go far beyond voyeurism, allowing a mediation between distant worlds and a valuable opportunity for people to talk to an impartial outsider.

Jonathan Grossmalerman God-fucking-damn it!! Like, only about the worst thing ever is happening. Right now!!! I called the building manager about getting this window I accidently shattered, over and over again with my hammer, fixed, and the guy they sent me was none other than my onetime arch-painting-nemesis and neighbour Mike L… Apparently he’s the new building handyman! I’d heard that he’d fallen on hard times since his gallery had imploded. I don’t mean that in any metaphorical sense, it quite literally imploded. One minute it was there and the next all that was left was a small tangle of hair and a bloody tooth. No one knew where to send the mail, and they finally just put a park bench where the gallery had once stood. Now it’s been forgotten entirely. And that was just last season! I heard he hadn’t taken it well, and to add to the tragedy, the market for his particular brand of bland derivative process-oriented abstraction was just about to take off on a global scale… and he without a gallery!!! He completely missed the boat! Again, this isn’t metaphor! He actually missed the hotel boat in Venice and had to be fished out of the canal, arriving at the glamorous Gagosian dinner late, soaked and smelling like shit mixed with vomit at low tide. His networking ability severely curtailed, he was only able to secure an eventual show with a small gallery in Roquefort that didn’t seem

to notice the smell. But regretfully, one small gallery in France does not a career sustain… and… one embarrassing display of ‘feelings’ after another eventually alienated him from the New York artworld. So, now, finally, here he is, in my spacious painting studio, unable to look me in the eye as he fumbles with a pane of glass and some putty. Murmuring how it’s good to see me when it very obviously is not. The putty is too dried-out to work and I wonder when he’ll come clean about that. I know it. He knows it. But he says nothing. He just keeps pushing the crumbs in the gap and they fall out again. I can see the beads of sweat forming on his temple. He wants to say something but why won’t he? I thought to myself. Can’t he see that this is intolerable? Say something! For Christ’s sake say something! Anything! But preferably something like, “You know, I’m going to leave because this putty is old and dried-out and cannot do what it is intended to, so I’m going to go… I probably won’t be back.” It was all just too awful for words, so in a sudden fit of anguished embarrassment, I exclaimed, “Hey, Mike, I was just about to have a beer. Would you care to join me and take a load off? We could chat about painting… or some good museum shows… or–” Mike cut me off. “I just fixed the radiator in apartment 2L. Do you remember apartment 2L?” Was this a rhetorical question he was asking me? Apartment 2L? Everyone

Mike and Jonathan. Courtesy the author

Warhammer

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remembered apartment 2L. Placed as it had been, firmly between apartments 2K and 2M. “Wasn’t that your–” “That was my apartment!” he angrily interrupted. “Before everyone turned their backs on me and my beautiful large-scale works that investigated processes of abstraction, nature, chemical entropy, atrophy and oxidation, all through a poetic vocabulary of stains, flecks, smudges and splotches that were, all in all, extremely pleasant to look at…” He sipped his beer. “Now I have a room next to the boiler where at least it’s always warm.” After more silence, he inexplicably lumbered towards the couch, eyeing my most recent painting, Lovely Cunny #3. “Still painting vaginas, huh?” He sipped his beer in a fashion that could have only gotten his lips wet and settled in on the couch. “Your place is nice. Mine isn’t so nice. But at least it’s always warm. You don’t know how good it is to be warm until you’ve been very cold. Jonathan? Have you ever been really cold?” I looked at the mess on the floor under the window. Putty crumbs everywhere. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of that later,” he said. “Have you seen that Robert Gober show at MoMA? I have some really insightful criticisms I would love to share with you. Do you have any chips or anything?” With my eyes, I located my hammer. After all, it had gotten me in this hot water and it could get me out. Metaphorically speaking.

Gavin Turk: We Are One

Gavin Turk, ‘Neon Candle’, 2013, ed. of 3 + 1AP, 34 x 5.5 x 3 cm

8 November 2014 - 8 February 2015

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Kimberly Bradley Off-space No 23: Savvy Contemporary, Berlin In Berlin, project spaces come and go faster than postgrad American expats. Yet every once in a while, a space seems to have some staying power, and a decidedly different mission than the ‘hey-let’s-get-a-bunch-of-twentysomethingfriends-together-and-put-experimental-art-onthe-peeling-walls-to-rock / techno / electroclashmusic’ thing so common in this city over the past 25 years. Savvy Contemporary is one of those special spaces. Founded a full five years ago, this ‘laboratory of form-ideas’ (Savvy’s selfappointed subtitle) takes a unique position: in a city whose art production so often grapples with an Eastern / Western Europe narrative, Savvy’s exhibitions and ambitions go global. Each show represents a ‘trialogue’ between the curators, a North American or European artist, and another artist from Africa, South America, Asia or Australia. Past exhibitions, usually bimonthly, were often this simple and straightforward – in 2013, GhostBusters II (Haunted by Heroes) showed artists Kara Lynch and Délio Jasse presented by curators Nadine Siegert and Storm Janse Von Rensburg. More recent projects, however, have expanded the triad into a United Nations-like conversation. For most of 2014, for example, the exhibition and research project Giving Contours to Shadows (partially in cooperation with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein) mounted an impressively international group exhibition as well as a series of talks and symposia on how the Western canon has dominated historical discussions. The show took

Africa as a point of departure, juxtaposing artists like Nigeria-born Otobong Nkanga with Western positions such as that of French-born Alexandre Singh. A series of satellite projects has even been running in African venues, such as the Nairobi Arts Trust / Centre for Contemporary Art of East Africa and the Nest, both in Nairobi, all year. Savvy’s global approach makes perfect sense considering its founder’s origins: Bonaventure Ndikung (who contributed an article to the October issue of ArtReview) comes from Cameroon. A sharp dresser (snazzy suits, hats and splashy accessories set him far apart from the usual Berlin hipster) as well as a sharp thinker, Ndikung works as a biochemist by day, but oversees an increasingly multipronged endeavour at the Savvy mothership – assisted by coartistic director Elena Agudio and a troupe of young, friendly volunteers hailing from countries as broadly strewn as the Dominican Republic and Russia. In summer 2013, the organisation moved from a small storefront on Richardstrasse in Neukölln’s homey Rixdorf neighbourhood into a two-storey, 400sqm monolithic red-brick power station up the street – apparently the result of Ndikung’s tenacity and negotiation skills (the space hadn’t been used in decades, and part of it may still become luxury lofts, but hopefully not too soon). About the same time, Savvy won a €30,000 grant from the Berlin Culture Ministry – additional funding comes from donations, a friends’ association, project-specific grants and occasionally renting out the venue. The move has allowed

both physical and conceptual expansion: Giving Contours to Shadows, in part funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, would have been much more difficult in the smaller old space; an ambitious performance-art programme (curated by Goldsmiths alumna Chiara Cartuccia) now has more room to breathe and evolve. Savvy might still have to close for a week or two in winter when the interior spaces are simply too cold for comfort, but its lightflooded main exhibition space and reading room / library / project archive – which doubles as a stage for discussions on topics like postcolonialism, book readings and film screenings – still attract viewers and researchers. The former storefront space has morphed into a coworking space called Savvy Desk; there’s even a residency for artists and scholars. It’s humbling to consider how much goes on in this ‘laboratory’ – whose nonprofit status perhaps gives it a certain advantage in mounting projects and shows that official, more institutional (read: bureaucratic) channels for non-Western art in Berlin don’t always have the agility to address. What’s more astonishing is just how much heart Savvy has. Stop by on a weekend and you’ll catch groups of volunteers working and chatting; at openings, bands or DJs perform in the basement and the crowds spill into the back courtyard. In an increasingly transient city that often seems to have become a caricature of its own coolness, Savvy stays smart, independent, postcool. Let’s hope for at least another five years.

Jelili Atiku, Alaagba, 2014 (performance, Giving Contours to Shadows, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin). Photo: Emma Haugh. Courtesy Neues Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, and Savvy Contemporary, Berlin

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Photo: Mirjam Devriendt, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Solo artist in the Belgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, curated by J M Coetzee, commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, where her retrospective exhibition opens in October 2014

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 33

The god Dionysus on art in the 1970s exploring gender roles Interview by Matthew Collings

Worship of Dionysus is thought to go back at least to the seventh century BC. The deity is known as the giver of joy and associated with intoxication, in particular the drinking of wine, as well as with nature, vegetal growth and animals. In aesthetics, following Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the term ‘Dionysian’ refers to the side of creation associated with feeling and intuition, as opposed to reason and clarity.

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Artreview Hi, it’s great to meet you. There’s been a lot of publicity in London recently about powerful performances by actors playing strong female roles in Greek classics like Euripides’s Medea and Sophocles’s Electra. DiONYSUS Yes, unfortunately there is no equivalent role in the play that focuses directly on myself, The Bacchae. On the other hand it is certainly a warning of the danger of an out-ofcontrol femininity. With that work Euripides was acting as the mouthpiece for the Athenian masculine order, warning against the spread of my rites. Although these were always held in secret, and to this day their content remains an enigma, it was understood that women were attracted to them. The norm was that women’s activities were confined to the domestic context. What could they be up to, dancing and drinking in the dark, along with men dressed as women? These sensational matters are spoken of in an early scene in The Bacchae, in an exchange between Pentheus, the doomed king, and myself. At the conclusion of the play Pentheus is torn apart by my maenads, whose name literally translates as ‘raving ones’. Ar Yes, what’s all this tearing apart about? D ‘Dionysus’ is an evolving symbol. All sorts of concepts are made to fit it. It is undying. For example, today the international art audience is conditioned, for better or worse, to believe that Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll, from 1975, the heyday of the first wave of feminist art, represents a summit of emancipatory expression. Naked and besmeared, she draws a text from her own body. Inch by inch, legs splayed in an awkward standing position, out it comes. Maybe there’s a suggestion of the tearing that occurs during birth. What is being born is the ability to speak. It is a modern initiation. She reads the scroll as it emerges, to an invited audience of mostly women artists. It bears the transcript of a conversation between herself and a structuralist filmmaker colleague, in which Schneemann sets intuition and bodily processes, traditionally associated with women, against traditionally male notions of order and rationality. Moments earlier she declaimed another self-written text, with only an apron veiling her nudity. In that case it was some lines from a book she had just written: Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Then she cast off the apron and started pulling out the scroll. Ar Ha ha, the chaos, man – I love it. D Perhaps it is me you love. The Dionysian always relates to the body. To the ineffable, the unsayable and the shadowed. The animal. The figure of Dionysus, myself, as it is represented in art is never unambiguously male. Its womanliness is inescapable.

Ar I guess. How about another drink? D Thank you. In fact the cult is all about interpenetration of formerly distinct identities. The Greeks had their famous slogan at the Delphic oracle: ‘Know thyself’. But participation in my rites entailed precisely the opposite: loss of self. Man becomes woman. Woman acts against the rule of man. What is torn? A body. What body? Animal sacrifice was part of the natural order for the Greeks. But the initiates of my cult turned this regular practice on its head when they met secretly in darkness, and tore apart animals or human beings and devoured their raw flesh. Such devouring is called omophagia, while the tearing apart is the sparagmos. In some myths I inflict suffering and death, while in others I myself suffer and am torn apart but then return to bring new life.

‘Dionysus’ is an evolving symbol. All sorts of concepts are made to fit it. It is undying. For example, today the international art audience is conditioned, for better or worse, to believe that Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll, from 1975, the heyday of the first wave of feminist art, represents a summit of emancipatory expression Ar I’m looking up Griselda Pollock on Google. I’m sure woman-as-nature is a major faux pas. D She tells her readers that feminism is not just the study of women or gender; it is the politicisation of issues of sexual difference as sexual oppression in all the categories of its historical and geopolitical specificity. The promise of feminism’s political project is to address people across profound and obscene social divisions by calling to ‘women’, by naming as oppression the othering of the feminine and feminisation as a means of othering. Ar Is that everything she says? D No, it’s more like something she says at one point in an explanation of Julia Kristeva. The phallocentric social order is predicated on sacrifice: giving up the archaic fantasy of unity facing page Second-century AD marble statue of Dionysus, currently housed in the Louvre, Paris. Photo: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

November 2014

or achieved identity in order to accede to language, sexuality and sociality. Humanity’s sacrifice of its imagined wholeness, its archaic corporeality, to the Symbolic, to language and to representation, is experienced as violent: this is the allegorical meaning of ‘castration’ – the only contract the phallocentric order knows. In my rites, of course, the violence is all in the other direction. Nonindividuation is affirmed. To shift to the language of transcendence, everything is the same divine thing, divinely created. If thought exists in individuals, then thought must be part of the cosmic principle from which they themselves came. There exists therefore a universal thought, a universal self-consciousness, and thus creation is not simply a chance matter, but the choice of a transcendent will which caused it to be as it is. Ar I realise I’m confused by two sets of ideas featuring big dicks, whose difference I never thought about before. For feminism the phallocentric is women ruled by men. For ancient religions, worshipping a phallus affirms everyone’s rule by nature. D Hmm, yes, for you, rather than a dialectical tension, which could be fruitful, there is just an annoying clash of phalloi metaphors. I should say that Hélène Cixous’s term, phallocentrism, doesn’t of course refer to historic rural agricultural festivals in the early spring, usually including a procession called the phallophoria, in which participants bore phallic images or hauled them on carts. Rather, it means patriarchy. It is drawn from Derrida’s logocentrism, meaning a kind of thought characterised by binary opposites. Ar What exactly is your cult? D I unleash the powers of soul and body in those that worship me. My rites are profoundly antisocial, a religion of nature that opposes the religion of the cities, which is anthropocentric. I represent the stage where man is in communion with savage life, with the beasts. I’m a god of vegetation, of the trees and of the vine, and I’m an animal god, a bull god. I teach man to disregard human laws and rediscover divine laws. I represent disobedience. In India today remnants of my ritual can be found in Shivaism. The ancient legend that India was temporarily my home is an allusion to the identification of my cult with the cult of Shiva. We are the same: East to West. Ar Why all the drinking? D There has to be dissolution. Ar What would happen if I were initiated? D The initiated mystic learns that I die but I am reborn. The life of the worshipper that enters into my mysteries is renewed, culminating in the eating of the raw flesh of the animal that is

myself made manifest, the bull, whose blood also sanctified my shrines. By the way, 1975, the year of Interior Scroll, is also the year of publication of Cixous’s essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. It was men that created the Medusa, she writes, the hideous female whose countenance causes death to any man that sees it. The Medusa is men’s fear of women, Cixous asserts. But, she says, ‘She is not deadly, she’s beautiful, and she’s laughing!’ The essay is a call to all women to find a voice, to write, to speak, to resist. When she writes in the same essay that women generally should listen to the woman ‘who speaks’, once fear is overcome, the image conjured up, in its explosive unembarrassed emotionalism, might be the Schneemann performance itself. ‘She throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the “logic” of her speech. Her flesh speaks true.’

Ar She’s a great woman artist who only wasn’t successful before because of prejudice, but now she’s getting her rightful due, and it’s the success of people like Carolee Schneemann that made that possible. D Certainly feminism has created a climate in which her achievement can be brought to a wider audience. By the same token, critical reception of it can be unreliable. She is concerned with structure and process, but there was something unconvincing precisely on a structural level about her recent Tate Britain commission. Large objects were produced to occupy the Duveen Galleries. In my view, the way the parts were put together often referred to a constructive tradition while actually not being that, but being decorative instead. And the critical

Ar Why analyse in that pedantic way? Criticism today is for making sure your position in the professional power structure is OK. As critics we say what everybody else says, not something that we only think ourselves. D Her work is complex and rich, usually, so when I observed a lack of richness I found it disappointing. An exception was a columnlike sculpture made of flimsy materials. This was convincing as aesthetic experience, which, after all, is the basis of what she does. The cardboard was allowed to buckle and flare, the tape tying it up had nice colours, it had an appearance of absolute easiness, but its genuine structural logic could only have come from quite a lot of thought in the past about materials. Ar So to sum up, phallus worship is to take one’s place in the cycle of birth, death and renewal: the eternal round?

Ar Do you think Phyllida Barlow is a maenad? D There’s nothing frenzied about Barlow. In her art she obeys a modernist play-of-materials tradition, which is both sculptural and painterly. She is very successful in the aesthetic surprise that she brings to it.

D Yes, it’s my round. Ar Cheers, mate.

Next mONth Merlin the wizard on zombie abstraction

Phyllida Barlow, Dock, 2014 (installation view, Tate Britain, London). Photo: J. Fernandes. Courtesy Tate Photography, London

response to the show didn’t have the subtlety to register that distinction. It was too preordained: a woman artist must be applauded.

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Other People and Their Ideas No 17

Stefan Kalmár Interview by Tom Eccles

Stefan Kalmár has been executive director and curator of the New York-based not-for-profit Artists Space since 2009. He was previously director of Kunstverein München, director of the Institute of Visual Culture, Cambridge (UK) and curator of Cubitt Gallery, London. Founded in 1972, Artists Space currently operates two venues, Artists Space Exhibitions in SoHo and Artists Space Books & Talks in TriBeCa, which operates a bookstore, second exhibition space and a venue for lectures, symposia and debate.

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Tom EcclEs You recently were involved in the formation of a group for not-for-profit organisations in New York called Common Practice, including your own Artists Space, alongside White Columns, the Kitchen, Triple Canopy, Light Industry, Participant Inc., and Printed Matter, to discuss issues that affect and influence your organisations. The central question was, ‘What is our common practice and why do we value it?’ What have you found? sTEfan Kalmár In a context such as New York, where every institution is overly keen to brand their unique individuality, it seemed important to us to state that we indeed share common values. The fact alone that in 2014 the simple gesture of articulating communality is considered a political statement is quite telling, I think. Most organisations in this group share similar histories – Artists Space, White Columns, the Kitchen and Printed Matter being founded during the early 1970s, and younger organisations such as Participant Inc., Triple Canopy or Light Industry being founded since 2000 – together we have shared values, such as a different sense of programmatic integrity, not pandering to populism and putting artists at the centre of our programmes, but more than this a shared critical awareness towards the culture that is produced in this city and, equally, towards the culture of how we go about our ‘business’, if indeed it is a business at all. TE How would you describe the ‘state of museums’ in New York today? sK Desperate and unimaginative. TE Where do you think the problem lies? The embedded structures of private and corporate wealth? Curatorial timidity? The structural logics of these institutions? Are there examples you could cite that you do approve of? sK I guess one can’t really separate those questions from each other, and I don’t believe that the influence (or call it support) of ‘the private’ and ‘the corporate’ is something entirely new to the institutional landscape, but what is indeed new is that this support no longer comes in the form of selfless philanthropic giving and sharing for ‘the public good’. Today’s museums and their donor programmes look more like an exclusive concierge or escort service. It used to be that curators and directors taught their donors and collectors; indeed not every donor used to be a collector. Today programming itself is often deployed to attract and expand one’s donor base, so what is happening today in institutions – catering to the interest of ‘a few’– is exactly what happens elsewhere in society, the result of the all-encompassing neoliberal project that started some 25 years ago, and the logic of which has now become naturalised. ‘Being greedy is awesome’

or ‘Dress normal’ have become totally ‘normal’ advertising slogans. How has a society that is so rich become so poor? Of course there are examples that I, as you say, ‘approve of’. The voice of the Dia Art Foundation has been missing for too long; it was and still is an exemplary model. Also what one hears from the Metropolitan Museum’s plans for its new venue (the former Whitney Museum) is exciting. The Lygia Clark, Sigmar Polke and Christopher Williams exhibitions at moma have been recent examples of how to manoeuvre an organisation that was largely irrelevant to artists back into their focus. The universal free admission of the Bronx Museum shows that it can be done. The work of the [Elizabeth A.] Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum or indeed galleries such as Real Fine

It used to be that curators and directors taught their donors and collectors; indeed not every donor used to be a collector. Today programming itself is often deployed to attract and expand one’s donor base, so what is happening today in institutions – catering to the interest of ‘a few’ – is exactly what happens elsewhere in society, the result of the all-encompassing neoliberal project that started some 25 years ago, and the logic of which has now become naturalised Arts, 47 Canal, Essex Street Gallery, David Lewis or Callicoon are driven by conviction rather than returns. The many organisations that provide (free) art education to schools, foundations that were founded by artists that redistribute their wealth to artists or art organisations: I do think that the flipside of these extreme developments has resulted to some degree in an increased and more outspoken civic responsibility. Of course you could also say it only buffers the fallout. TE There is a wonderful Lutheran saying which you might appreciate: ‘A timid arse seldom lets go a joyful fart.’ Far be it from me to offer lectures from the pulpit, but I have witnessed some shocking behaviour of late. facing page Stefan Kalmár. Courtesy Artists Space, New York

November 2014

One example would be a major museum benefit last year in which two red Ferraris were promotionally parked outside the venue on Wall Street on the very spot where protesters were dragged into NYPD paddy wagons less than a year earlier. Literally occupying the same spot! That didn’t shock me so much as a leading curator of another major museum saying to me with the straightest of faces: “Oh, Tom, it’s just the way things are.” I quote the Luther from Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 Critique of Cynical Reason. How do you think we got to this place specifically in the so-called artworld? And I say this without the slightest suggestion of innocence. sK Hasn’t the ‘artworld’ always been a microcosm of the world we inhabit? The perversions that are played out here make the state of affairs very transparent, but it is also a question of where we look and how we define progress. There are hopeful examples of a different practice, based on different values that don’t make the Power 100 and don’t drive Ferraris. TE Perhaps. I thought the artworld actually offered an alternative or at least potential alternative. Maybe that’s more prescriptive than reflective of realities past but now certainly present. How do you think the role of so-called alternative spaces has changed in the last decade? This must have been an issue in the Common Practice debates. On a certain level they have been revived from a period of inertia during the late 1990s. Perhaps you could be more specific as to the ‘different practice’ and ‘different values’ they represent? sK I am not saying the artworld doesn’t offer an alternative – or at least a space that can and should project one – but it doesn’t help if we pretend that we are not implicated, to some degree. It would be simply tautological to say that we are outside of reality. I guess that’s what was wrong with the historical conception of the alternative: it had gotten a little cushy with the naive notion that pluralisation, integration and participation alone would destabilise the hegemonic order. Of course organisations such as Artists Space have historically contributed to and created a more pluralistic institutional landscape in New York and elsewhere, but this alone does not any longer constitute ‘alternative’. What the organisations of Common Practice do have in common I believe is that we are putting artists first; that our programme is not conceived to attract maximum visitor figures (most of us don’t charge anyway), but rather in terms of what intellectual impact it has on our constituencies; that we don’t shy away from pointing out the elephant in the room; that we value the community that is created around, through and supported by our organisations; that we redistribute our revenue to artists and not to a marketing machine. I think it’s important for any artist, but particularly for a younger generation of artists,

to work outside the constraints of immanent commodification. Many of the exhibitions we did in recent years – Danh Vō, Sam Pulitzer, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Hilary Lloyd, Duncan Campbell – had no commercial afterlife. Like it or not, of course, we are involved in creating (symbolic and monetary) value, but the intent, outlook and agenda of our programme are different to elsewhere. TE You recently worked with W.A.G.E. [Working Artists and the Greater Economy], which is an artist collective that raises awareness of the lack of remuneration for artists showing in museums and not-for-profits. I think you asked them to assess your organisation in terms of fairness. What did you find?

is appointed, not elected. The Kunstverein is (or at least was back when I was running it) up to 60 percent supported through public funding; Artists Space is largely funded through foundations and private giving. So, now you might ask what is for me the better model, fully aware that I am going onto a very slippery slope. While I strongly believe and advocate for public funding, I unfortunately can’t fully side with the European model of public funding in its current form, as it itself employs ‘performance indicators’ that are reminiscent of how, say, Google measures effectiveness.

sK Artists Space is the first W.a.G.E.-certified organisation in the Us. Over the past 18 months and using the example of Artists Space, W.a.G.E. has developed a certification method that can be applied to all institutions. For too long institutions of all sizes got away without paying artists at all or only disproportionally little in terms of their annual revenue – there is a telling correlation that the higher the presumed symbolic value of an institution, the lower the remuneration to the artist.

TE Your programme directly addresses ideas as much as objects, and you set up a space specifically for discussions bringing together participants who might not otherwise speak in a collective forum. You’ve also presented work that has little presence in the market and historical exhibitions that uproot less well known works and contexts utilising archival material rather than primary artworks. Not to mention the film and performance programme. Maria Lind once suggested that institutions should be reviewed by their overall programme, not just single exhibitions. What do you think she would say about yours?

TE What do you pay artists to show their work? sK $3,500 per solo exhibition and $900 for participation in a group show. That is in addition to travel, production and per diems. TE You ran the Kunstverein in Munich for a number of years, quite a different organisation, yet not without parallels to Artists Space in New York. If you say that the artworld is a microcosm of the larger society, something I’m not sure about, or at least I don’t think it’s necessarily so, then how would you describe the differences between your German experience and that of New York City? sK A kunstverein is an association, meaning it has members that every two years elect a board which in turn appoints a director, so the constitutional setup of such places for over 100 years has always had a somewhat democratic moment, but let’s also not forget that Germans have associations for all sorts of things – say the Association for the Appreciation of Angora Rabbits. Artists Space in turn is set up as a not-for-profit corporation: the board

sK Yes, we have. This is obviously a much larger discussion, complicated and I admit not free from contradictions, but we would certainly not be in a position to do the programme that we do if it weren’t for the generous support of over 40 artists that contributed to the 40 Years Artists Space Program Fund, and let’s not forget that we are talking about a programme that addresses the needs of and is largely attended by artists – these funds benefit artists very directly. So while we engage in ‘transactions’, we are not doing this for profit. But recently I was thinking that maybe Artists Space should rather buy land in the highlands of Puerto Rico and collectively grow ecological, sustainable and fair-traded coffee. I am not joking, it’s an option.

TE You have also to some extent embraced the art market as a form of fundraising. I guess you could say, “Who hasn’t?” But I’d love to hear from you about what you think of not-for-profits setting up booths at art fairs. It all seemed so harmless just a few years ago, with the occasional limited-edition print for $800. Not any more. Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Enough Tyranny Recalled, 1972–2009 (installation view, Artists Space, New York, 2009). Photo: Daniel Pérez. Courtesy Artists Space, New York

ArtReview

sK I always say that Artists Space doesn’t do exhibitions, but a programme, and that exhibitions are (only) one part of its programme. This programme works on many different levels and in many different formats and speeds; it contracts, expands, zooms in, zooms out, looks back and looks forward; it is visible or hidden; it is public or intimate. The narrative that we have been working on becomes fully legible in the relationship of all our activities to each other, and it is maybe in this that we define our greatest difference and are a real alternative to the given. I hope that we manage to transcend some of the established dichotomies – say, between the emerging and the historical – if you look at propositions such as, for example, [Charlotte] Posenenske, Christopher D’Arcangelo or our recent Capitalist Realism exhibition, then they unfold their logic and potential as much in the present as they might have in the past.

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Great Collectors and Their Ideas No 6

Thomas Girst Interview by Mark Rappolt

Thomas Girst studied art history, American studies and German literature at Hamburg University and New York University (DAAD Scholarship). He was the founding editor of the international literature and art anthology Die Aussenseite des Elementes (1991–2003) and the NY-based cultural correspondent for the German daily Die Tageszeitung. As research manager of the Art Science Research Laboratory under the directorship of Harvard University professor Stephen Jay Gould, Girst was editor-in-chief of Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal (1998–2003). Since 2003 he has served as head of cultural engagement at the BMW Group. He lectures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Academy of Fine Arts Munich as well as at the Academy of Applied Sciences in Zürich. In 2012 he curated Marcel Duchamp in Munich 1912, whose catalogue he coedited. His most recent publications include The Indefinite Duchamp (2013), BMW Art Cars (2013), The Duchamp Dictionary (2014) and Art, Literature, and the Japanese American Internment Experience (2014).

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ArtrevieW How did you start working for BMW? thoMAs Girst I just applied. Before that I was working in New York for Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard professor, for a not-for-profit called Art Science Research Laboratory, which was run out of his apartment, looking at the relationship between art and science. Ar Is there one? tG Of course, big-time. For example, avantgarde artists picked up on X-rays, chaos theory and many other advances at the beginning of the twentieth century. Painting changed entirely when the telescope was invented, and even in ancient times there was a very deep connection, so deep in fact that the Greeks didn’t even differentiate between technology and the arts, it was all one term – techne. Which is something that’s important when I talk about BMW’s cultural engagement. I keep telling people that thousands of years ago there wouldn’t have been a differentiation between creating an amazing car and creating a work of art.

visibility beyond branding. How do you behave as a good corporate citizen? What do you do within a society that you work in, outside of your core business? Outside of selling cars? Companies are being looked at in that way, and that is true for the entire value chain. Before ‘sustainability’ became the big buzzword within business enterprises, and also within the arts, BMW prided itself on being number one within the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, the number one car company in the world for eight consecutive years, and that doesn’t come from nothing. I don’t consider myself doing the nice shopwindow stuff for a company that otherwise just wants to do business. We do consider BMW a very cultured brand. Cultural engagement is neither about philanthropy nor altruism: it is about the visibility and reputation of the brand, make no mistake. Ar Does that mean there are limits on what you will do? Or the kind of art you might support? tG If you look at what we’ve done in the past ten years, it doesn’t seem so.

Ar What attracted you to BMW? tG It was partly their headquarters in Munich – my wife was working in the city – but at the same time I was interested in how you work within the coordinates of a successful international business enterprise like BMW without watering down the complexity of what culture constitutes. I thought that was a riddle waiting to be solved, and would lead to something that could be achieved in a sophisticated and smart way. I’d seen that BMW at that point was lacking an international strategy, and that a lot could be done. When you work for a company as big as BMW, with over 100,000 employees worldwide, and you’re the one person with a PhD in art history that’s gone into the company, nobody ever questions your knowledge, your network or what it is that you do best for the company. Whereas if you were to work in a museum and you were begging to write the entry for a catalogue on Albrecht Dürer, but you had written your PhD on a contemporary of Dürer, people would say you hadn’t got the required expertise. So there’s no power, there are hierarchies, whereas at BMW you have been hired to really change things around. Ar Were you hired to give BMW something they don’t have, a cultural impact that they don’t really have? Are you somehow operating a prosthesis, a fake limb? tG The business of business is to do business, somebody smarter than me once said, but at the same time, the way companies are being looked at has changed over the past decade. It’s no longer solely about the shareholder; it’s about the stakeholder approach. It’s about the

I don’t consider myself doing the nice shop-window stuff for a company that otherwise just wants to do business. Cultural engagement is neither about philanthropy nor altruism: it is about the visibility and reputation of the BMW brand, make no mistake Ar I meant limits in terms of content – say if the work you were supporting involved sexually explicit material. tG I’ll tell you one thing that I would say separates sponsorship from what we call partnerships, collaborations. A partnership means sticking together in good and bad times. We are not embracing it, but we don’t shy away from controversy. Ar Let’s say an artist proposed making some incredibly rightwing video… tG First of all, as BMW, we’re not after brand recognition. If I were to emblazon the BMW logo on the red curtain before the philharmonic started to play, we would put off the same people that we’re trying to reach. We don’t get all of them into the dealerships, but we get to engage in their walks of life. We get to create an facing page Thomas Girst

November 2014

experience for them that’s hopefully not interchangeable with whatever our competition has to offer in the cultural field. You’re asking about sexual or extreme political content – this is why, as we do not have the expertise in dealing with these subjects in relation to art, yet want to be seen as a responsible and reliable partner within the artworld, we put trust in those we partner with and do not commission individual artists outside of the BMW Art Car series. We have long-term relationships with cultural institutions – the National Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum and many others that are on eye-level with BMW as a premium car manufacturer (which means they probably have the reputation, the visibility, that BMW does in the car industry). I talk about collaboration or about co-initiation, or something like that, which means we never mess with the content of the programme. If you want to do something trustworthy and something reliable, you should never interfere with the content of the programme. There is something called curatorial integrity that we, as a business, have no other business than to wholeheartedly honour. The term ‘culture’, in Germany, was defined by Immanuel Kant, and it was all about defining culture as something autonomous. And then culture was raped in Nazi Germany. I think there’s an obligation in regard to it, an institutional obligation – not for companies to engage in the arts, no company has to do that ever or is bound by law to do so – to keep that creative freedom going. I do think that’s also a link along the same lines as techne: absolute creative freedom is also an integral part of what our designers and what our engineers do. If they couldn’t try and advance the future of the automobile and individual mobility, they would not thrive. Ar Do you trust the museums and juries you work with so completely? tG Yes, and sometimes we have to live with their decisions. Because you don’t want to interfere with what it is that they do best. Certainly you have your network, your own know-how – we’ve been collaborating in the arts for over 40 years. We have a network the world over which functions like a seismographic link, letting us know where things are happening which might be worthwhile throwing our weight behind. There are people we can call, there’s great advice that we’re getting, but at the same time, whoever we collaborate with, they get to decide. It should go without saying. In some way or another, though, you also create a buffer. The next BMW art car artist will be chosen, just like Olafur Eliasson was, by an international jury of curators. Ar Just curators? No car people?

tG I decided to convene a jury for the next BMW Art Car which is just curators and museum directors. Ar Why? tG We are the car people, we provide the car. Ar Yes, but they could be on the jury, right? tG No, I have a very clear sense in regard to that. We provide the race car, we tell the jury, they don’t get to pick the race car, the artist doesn’t get to pick the race car. We know which cars will be running when and in what race, whether it’s the M6 race car, or the Z4 Gt3, or the M3 Gt4, as it was for Jeff Koons. We get to decide on the car. That is what we do, that is our expertise; they get to decide on the artist. Do you know how much it hurts within the company if the first thing that Olafur Eliasson does if he gets the h2r – the solely hydrogen-powered car, with which BMW could prove that hydrogen could be used as an alternative to fossil fuels; the pride of the engineers and the designers; the car with which we set all the records in terms of speed and endurance – is to rip out all the BMW logos and start taking the parts of its body apart? That is part of the discussion that is going on. Are people happy about that within the company? Some probably are not, but is that the issue at stake? No.

company for the ordering of 2,000,000 better or more secure screws for some sort of car model or for BMW’s cultural engagement, my hand would go up for the screws. I work for BMW. These screws are important, but we also need to make sure that this vote will never happen. We can try to find euphemisms for the word ‘crisis’, but when the crisis, or the big challenges, or the problems for the car industry came in full force in 2008, 2009, I never got as many calls as I did then from the media asking, ‘When will you now cut down your budget? What contracts will you not fulfil?’ Once you have created the thread within culture and you want to be seen as a responsible partner, it’s important that you are with them, that they have the security of mind to know that you stick with them no matter what kind of rollercoaster ride your stock might be involved in. Of course, when you’re running

Ar What exactly does BMW get out of the cultural engagement? Pretend I’m about to shut you down and you have to justify its existence… tG Look, if there were a vote within the

Ar And why did you choose the LSO? tG Because it’s one of the finest orchestras on the planet, run by its own musicians. You might not get to choose the programme or the content, but you do get to choose who you collaborate with. Ar Is there a geography to all this? Are there certain areas you’re more interested in for business reasons?

Ar If he put Mercedes logos all over it, what would happen then? tG If you want to test your limits like this, why not? We would think that an artist who takes on the challenge of creating the Art Car example, something that already has an amazing trajectory with Stella, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons, Holzer, Mahlangu, Hockney and so forth, would not really want to mess this up. There’s trust. Or a sense of responsibility. I would think if you take on such a task, you don’t do it to stick two fingers up at BMW. Another example: we decided early on to throw our weight behind the KochiMuziris Biennale initiative, way before it got off the ground, because we’re also very much aware that BMW as a brand, and what the brand is being associated with, can be a big draw for other sponsors. It helps when we back a project early on, because then others feel safer to go into uncharted territory with us as well.

the BMW Guggenheim Lab [a mobile urban thinktank and community centre that travelled to new York, Berlin and Mumbai]. We are not sponsoring concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra, we approach them and ask whether they would consider giving a free concert in Trafalgar Square each year, and it’s called BMW Lso Open Air Classics. Thousands, tens of thousands of people are gathering on the most iconic square on the planet to listen to Valery Gergiev conduct the London Symphony Orchestra for free. And you know what it says on the big posters? It says, ‘Supported by the Mayor of London.’ It doesn’t say BMW, because BMW is within the title, we are co-initiators of this.

deficits and you have to let go of people, I could never really say what is more important. The image and the reputation of the company can only be established long-term. Once you cut loose your cultural engagement, it will take a long time to rebound. One thing I did want to get across is that anybody with enough money can sponsor a show. Let’s say there’s a museum X and a curator Y who needs Z amount of money, the difference between what he or she needs to fulfil his vision of the show and what he or she is actually getting from private, public, whatever funding, whatever country they’re in. So he or she approaches a lot of companies to get that. If I were just to throw money at that institution, I would be doing something that anyone could do. Our competition could do that. And there is competition. So what do you want to do? We are not sponsors of a show, we are co-initiators of Andy Warhol, Art Car, 1979, BMW M1 Gruppe 4 Rennversion

ArtReview

tG Absolutely – let’s just be open and upfront about this. China’s of interest, the United States is of interest, those are the growing markets, so is Europe, so is Germany. The UK is the only country in which BMW, Rolls-Royce and Mini are all being produced, so yes, we’d better do something there. At Rolls-Royce, we recently jumpstarted our very own Arts Programme. We’re also very proud we kicked off BMW Tate Live [a four-year partnership that features a series of innovative live performances and events, including live web broadcast, in-gallery performance, seminars and workshops], another thing where we, you know, sat behind closed doors for over a year to discuss what are the joint interests of BMW and Tate. What can we do for you guys without just throwing money at an exhibition that you would have done anyway? Ar What does BMW get out of all this? tG It would be futile to find out how many cars we sold for this, it would be like, as we say in German, nailing a pudding to the wall – it doesn’t hold up. I can tell you that the 7-series driver is three-quarters more interested in culture, according to market research, than the average person on the street. At the same time, other companies have ceased to do anything within culture, and their stock hasn’t gone downhill. We understand that it’s also about returning something to society, and doing

something that we are proud of having been doing for so long. Ar You mention that there is a certain level of institution or organisation you support. Do you think you could be more grassroots? tG We could be interested in art education programmes, but that also has not only to do with art or cultural engagement but with societal engagement. It might very well be that you go into schools that are in a more rugged area of town, where you are just doing something, that wouldn’t be cultural but societal engagement. You need what we call ‘lighthouses’ internationally, you need Tate, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery. This also holds true for the State Opera in Berlin, the Lso in London and so forth, and other institutions the world over, but everything that we do has to be scalable. BMW’s cultural engagement is run out of headquarters, you’ve only got that at headquarters, where you set the coordinates, the strategies, for worldwide cultural engagement. What do I know about Kuala Lumpur? Yes, I can call a few people, but the dealer there should also know. We want to help the dealer also engage in culture, where you can do a lot of things right with €10,000, you can do a lot of things wrong with €100,000. Sometimes it’s harder to engage with culture than with sports. In sports it’s rather clear-cut, you know how long your logo emblazoned on a T-shirt will be held in front of a camera for what amount of money. Ar Do you have to keep justifying what you do internally? Do people say, “Thomas, we could have had a much better racing team if you weren’t wasting all this money”? tG Well, I’d say that when BMW discontinued Formula One, culture was the big winner, because some of the budget was channelled into culture, which I think was the right decision. I wouldn’t say I have to justify myself, but look, this is a successful business enterprise on an international level, and it is in competition, and there’s also a competition within it. The competition is about who has the best things to offer within the company for whatever it is that we want to achieve, or in this case for the reputation of the company. So while there’s an understanding of why we’re engaged in culture, every year you fight for your budget. If those responsible for cultural partnerships sat still, there would be no more budget, we wouldn’t renew a single contract. This would fall through

the cracks. In total, these are not the biggest numbers when it comes to what is being spent to position brands. There is competition with sports, with societal engagement. You’ve got to make that case within the company, convince people, have your alliances. That’s what makes my work interesting. Ar Do you think that culture really attracts enough people to be worth investing in? tG Five-point-four million people at the Tate last year alone. Six million people at the Met every year. In Germany two years ago, you had 120 million visitors to museums set against 12 million visitors to stadiums for first and second division soccer teams, so that’s ten times more. I was reading in The Economist last December that more people visited museums in America than they did all the ballparks and

amusement parks combined. So yes, of course sports are also being watched on television, but then when you look at 45 million visitors each year going to the Met online, six million visitors to the building, there is something to be said for culture. Also, when it comes to gross domestic product, the cultural industry – and not only in Germany – is right between the chemical industry and the car industry, around 2.3 percent. It’s no secret that the creative class in a postindustrial society drives economic growth.

tG You’ve got to be on your feet all the time. I mean, you can’t put your money down on one country or on a conglomeration of countries. You’re very much looking into what is happening in the BriC countries, for example. These are the most rapid in development sometimes, and you’ve got to be there before anybody else. The people there, once a certain level of wealth sets in, are eager to share, or to showcase that wealth, or to finally get from A to B by their own choosing, and that’s where BMW comes in as an aspirational brand. Ar Do you never worry that the culture institutions you’re supporting need your support because they’re cultural institutions people don’t want? tG No, I don’t think so. I also don’t want to water down through my commitment what those cultural institutions are there for. I have a more subjective but much more positive view of how much arts matter. It’s now the spectator as contributor, it’s no longer about the authoritative canon. Yet if we were to put on the wall what everybody wants, nothing that you see in museums today would be hanging on the wall, so there needs to be knowledge, there needs to be professionalism. You wouldn’t let somebody who hasn’t studied brain surgery perform on your brain if you had – God forbid – a tumour. So there needs to be authority, yet in a very open, informed way that also embraces many walks of life that haven’t been embraced before. I think that the museum is set up perfectly, much more so than many other institutions, to answer the questions people have today. Ar Do you think it’s very similar to BMW’s core business? The manufacturing of desire…

tG In developed countries in which we do business.

tG Museums should operate without the tyranny of the bottom line. BMW exists because BMWs are bought. Museums don’t need to pass that test. I happen to believe in the €9 billion that Germany pours into the arts on a local, federal and state level every year. That is a gift for humankind. I believe in the philanthropy of the United States and the institutions supported there. I believe in the free-of-charge major museums in London and so forth.

Ar But that’s not your future. Surely it’s in emerging markets…

Ar You’re a Duchamp expert. Why doesn’t BMW just buy lots of Duchamps and have a Duchamp museum?

Ar Only in very developed countries.

all photos © BMW AG

tG Because it’s very, very essential once you start working that you don’t have your personal affinities overlap with the strategic positioning of the company that you work for.

November 2014

David Hockney, Art Car, 1995, BMW 850 Csi

Chapmans’ Artwork Censored

top Jake and Dinos Chapman, Piggyback, 1997, fibreglass, resin, paint, wigs and trainers, 60 × 153 × 47 cm. © the artists. Courtesy White Cube, London, Hong Kong & São Paulo above MAXXI, Rome. Photo: Simone Cecchetti. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

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The Law and Its Ideas No 9 by Daniel McClean Background A sexually explicit sculpture by the British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman was removed from public display at the MAXXI contemporary art museum in Rome in August of this year. The sculpture, Piggyback (1997), consists of fibreglass mannequins of two naked, prepubescent girls wearing trainers: one girl stands with a phallus protruding from her mouth while holding the other girl on her shoulders. The sculpture is part of a series of provocative mannequins of naked adolescents with protruding adult genitalia created by the Chapmans during the 1990s. Piggyback was bequeathed to the MAXXI by the collector Claudia Gian Ferrari in 2010. It had been included in Remembering Is Not Enough, an exhibition of works from the museum’s collection that opened last December and closed in September. The MAXXI’s decision (late in the day) to remove the Chapmans’ sculpture was prompted by the petition of an Italian children’s rights group, l’Osservatorio sui Diritti dei Minori (Observatory for the Rights of Minors), which decried the sculpture as ‘promoting depictions with a clear paedo-pornographic context behind the art’. It is not clear on what legal grounds such demands were made. While agreeing to remove the Chapmans’ sculpture from public view, the MAXXI’s director, Anna Mattirolo, hit back at this limitation on ‘the freedom of expression of artists’, stating that ‘crudeness is part of the Chapmans’ work, they are known for works that denounce a sick reality’ and ‘they want to generate discussion about false morality and provoke debate’. A statement on the museum’s website also noted that signs had always been displayed at its ticket office warning visitors of the graphic nature of the Chapmans’ work and that staff were trained to inform families with children of its presence in the exhibition. It is not clear, however, whether the MAXXI will be prepared to exhibit the Chapmans’ work publicly again. L’Osservatorio has called for a permanent exhibition ban on the artwork. Images of children and artistic censorship Sexualised representations of children are one of the few remaining artistic taboos in Western liberal democracies: artists, galleries and museums can anticipate interrogation by the media and the public when creating and exhibiting artworks incorporating such imagery. There is also the risk that the police may decide to prosecute and that the courts may punish those responsible for its dissemination. In 2009 the trustees of Tate Modern decided (wrongly and timidly, in my view) to remove Richard Prince’s iconic artwork Spiritual America (1983) from the exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World following a visit from the former Obscene Publications Unit of the Metropolitan Police. Prince’s ironically titled work re-presents a lascivious nude image by photographer Gary Gross of the then ten-year-old actress Brooke Shields standing in a bathtub. Tate’s trustees were afraid of potential criminal sanctions – though Prince’s work had been widely exhibited throughout the world for almost three decades.

Criminal legislation prohibits the creation, dissemination and possession of ‘indecent’ representations of children through a combination of antiquated obscenity offences (premised on the ‘corruption’ of the audience) as well as specific antipaedophile offences (premised on the direct and indirect harm to children incurred in the creation and distribution of such material), as contained in the UK’s Protection of Children Act (1978) and section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act (1988), which applies to indecent photographs and ‘pseudo-photographs’ of children. Punishment for those who publish and exhibit indecent images and representations of children include imprisonment and fines. Yet such fears of criminal prosecution, while real, can also be exaggerated within the artworld. It is important to remember that the law recognises the importance of ‘context’ when interpreting and demarcating the boundaries between art and child pornography. Accordingly, the UK’s Protection of Children Act provides a ‘legitimate reason’ defence for the creation and distribution of offending photographs. Similarly, the UK’s Obscene Publications Act expressly contains an ‘artistic merit’ defence, which redeems the publication of otherwise ‘obscene’ material. Furthermore, such statutory defences must be read in light of human rights law, specifically Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which gives special weight to the protection of the right to freedom of expression (including artistic expression). The convention is incorporated into UK law as well as into the law of other signatory European nations, including Italy. Considering the context of an artistic work includes evaluating the intention of the artist when making it and the situations in which the artwork is viewed and interpreted, including whether the artwork has been shown in a recognised gallery or museum and its reception in art criticism and art history. In the unlikely event that a museum’s staff (and artists) were to be prosecuted for contravening antipaedophilia laws, these factors would be highly relevant to the determination by a court of whether an artwork was pornographic or not. Placing the Chapmans’ work in context, it is clear that while undoubtedly shocking (the Chapmans court controversy, and perhaps even censure), its intention is not to promote ‘paedophilia’ or to incite inappropriate sexual desire. On the contrary, it can be persuasively argued that their art reflects unsparingly and satirically upon the commodification of childhood sexuality and the exploitation of children by adults. In this sense, while causing discomfort to its audience and to moralists, it may aid the cause against paedophilia. In creating sexualised representations of children, artworks like the Chapmans’ Piggyback operate in a highly contentious space, yet it is important for both the development of art and for social and cultural debate at large that artists like them are free to do this without fear of censorship. Galleries and museums should be cautious about removing such artworks from public display and should be robust in defending freedom of artistic expression even if this entails the risk of confrontation with the law.

November 2014

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Han Snel | Market in Bali | Oil on canvas | 80 x 80 cm

Affandi | Yogya’s Andong (Carriage) | Oil on canvas | 60 x 96 cm

ASIAN CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART 亞洲當代和现代藝術秋季拍卖 Auction: Sunday, 9 November 2014, at 13.00 | Viewing: Saturday, 8 November 2014, at 10.00 - 20.00

Venue: Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, level 2 Ballrooms, 392 Havelock Road, Singapore BOROBUDUR FINE ART AUCTION e : borobudur@singnet.com.sg | p : +65 6745 6066 | f : +65 6745 6466

Abu Dhabi Art offers a multi-disciplinary experience combining an art fair with a diverse public engagement programme which includes art, talks and sensational events. ABU DHABI ART 2014 GALLERIES AB Gallery Acquavella Galleries, Inc. Agial Art Gallery Aicon Gallery ARNDT Athr Gallery Ayyam Gallery Carpenters Workshop Gallery David Zwirner Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, L.L.C. Elmarsa Galeri Zilberman

Galerie Brigitte Schenk Galerie Enrico Navarra Galerie GP & N Vallois Galerie Janine Rubeiz Galerie Tanit Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac GALLERIA CONTINUA Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde Hanart TZ Gallery Hauser & Wirth Horrach Moya Hunar Gallery

kamel mennour Kashya Hildebrand Gallery Kukje Gallery / Tina Kim Gallery Lawrie Shabibi Le Violon Bleu Leehwaik Gallery Leila Heller Gallery Lisson Gallery Meem Gallery October Gallery Park Ryu Sook Gallery Paul Kasmin Gallery

Paul Stolper Gallery Salwa Zeidan Gallery Sfeir-Semler Gallery Simon Lee Gallery Taymour Grahne Gallery The Breeder The Park Gallery The Third Line Whitestone Gallery XVA Gallery

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Leonid Borisov, Icon - Leonid Borisov, The Wheel - Lera Moiseeva, Dot Table - Epiforma, Stackable Desk

LEONID BORISOV LESSONS IN GEOMETRY Art by St. Petersburg-born nonconformist artist Leonid Borisov with design by Epiforma. Mayfair. Until 16 January 2015

BORN IN THE USSR

An exhibition of contemporary Russian design. Knightsbridge. Until 28 November 2014

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SHINRO OHTAKE

Sustain, Sustain 11.10.14 – 21.12.14

12 October - 12 December 2014

Image credit: Extended Finger (detail), 2014. Courtesy of the artist, BolteLang, Zurich and Limoncello, London. Photograph by Gunnar Meier.

Shinro Ohtake, Retina (New Tong of Tangier I), detail, 1992-93. Courtesy of the artist & Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

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Galerie 1900-2000, Paris • 3 03 Gallery, New York • Miguel Abreu, New York • Ai r de Paris, Paris • Algus Greenspon, New York • Chr istian Andersen, Copenhagen • Applicat-Prazan, Paris • Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo • Ar t: Concept, Paris • Al fonso Artiaco, Napoli • Athr Gallery, Jeddah • Balice Hertling, Paris • Catherine Bastide, Brussels • Ba udach, Berlin • Bortolami, New York • Is abella Bortolozzi, Berlin • Luciana Brito, São Paulo • Broadway 1602, New York • Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York • Bugada & Cargnel, Paris • Shane Campbell, Chicago • Ca mpoli Presti, London, Paris • Ca nada, New York • Ca pitain Petzel, Berlin • carlier | gebauer, Berlin • Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles • M ehdi Chouakri, Berlin • C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels • Sadie Coles HQ, London • Co ntinua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Boissy-le-Châtel • P aula Cooper, New York • Vera Cortês Art Agency, Lisboa • Co rtex Athletico, Bordeaux, Paris • Cr èvecoeur, Paris • CRG, New York • Cha ntal Crousel, Paris • Cr oy Nielsen, Berlin • E llen De Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam • Massimo De Carlo, Milano, London • Elizabeth Dee, New York • Dependance, Brussels • D vir Gallery, Tel Aviv • E igen+Art, Berlin, Leipzig • F rank Elbaz, Paris • Essex Street, New York • F ortes Vilaça, São Paulo • P eter Freeman, Inc., Paris, New York • House of Gaga, México D.F. • Ga gosian Gallery, Paris, Le Bourget, New York, London, Beverly Hills, Hong Kong, Roma • Ga udel de Stampa, Paris • g b agency, Paris • GDM, Paris • François Ghebaly, Los Angeles • Gladstone Gallery, New York, Brussels • Marian Goodman, Paris, New York • Bä rbel Grässlin, Frankfurt • Greene Naftali, New York • Ka rsten Greve, Paris, Köln, St. Moritz • H auser & Wirth, Zürich, London, New York • M ax Hetzler, Berlin, Paris • Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles • X avier Hufkens, Brussels • In Si tu - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris • Taka Ishii, Tokyo • J ohnen Galerie, Berlin • Jousse Entreprise, Paris • Anne ly Juda Fine Art, London • Ka del Willborn, Düsseldorf • Karma International, Zürich • k aufmann repetto, Milano • Ant on Kern, New York • K ohn Gallery, Los Angeles • D avid Kordansky, Los Angeles • Tomio Koyama, Tokyo • Kr aupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin • Kr inzinger, Wien • Kukje Gallery / Tina Kim Gallery, Seoul, New York • kurimanzutto, México D.F. • L abor, México D.F. • Yvon Lambert, Paris • L e Minotaure, Paris • Simon Lee, London, Hong Kong •

Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong • L elong, Paris, New York • L isson, London, New York, Milano • L oevenbruck, Paris • F lorence Loewy, Paris • Luhring Augustine, New York • Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich • M arcelle Alix, Paris • M atthew Marks, New York, Los Angeles • Ga brielle Maubrie, Paris • Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf • M cKee Gallery, New York • Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo • k amel mennour, Paris • M etro Pictures, New York • M eyer Riegger, Berlin • m fc-michèle didier, Brussels, Paris • Francesca Minini, Milano • Massimo Minini, Brescia • Victoria Miro, London • M itchell-Innes & Nash, New York • St uart Shave/Modern Art, London • Monitor, Roma • m or.charpentier, Paris • J an Mot, Brussels, México D.F. • mother’s tankstation, Dublin • MOTINTERNATIONAL, London, Brussels • Murray Guy, New York • Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Wien • Na gel Draxler, Berlin, Köln • Nahmad Contemporary / Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York • Na ture Morte, New Dehli • Ne u, Berlin • Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt • ne ugerriemschneider, Berlin • New Galerie, Paris • Franco Noero, Torino • Nathalie Obadia, Paris, Brussels • O ffice Baroque, Brussels • O n Stellar Rays, New York • Guillermo de Osma, Madrid • O verduin & Co., Los Angeles • P ace, New York, London, Beijing • Parra & Romero, Madrid, Ibiza • F rançoise Paviot, Paris • P eres Projects, Berlin • Ga lerie Perrotin, Paris, New York, Hong Kong • P lan B, Cluj, Berlin • Praz-Delavallade, Paris • E va Presenhuber, Zürich • ProjecteSD, Barcelona • P royectos Monclova, México D.F. • Al mine Rech, Paris, Brussels • Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York • M ichel Rein, Paris, Brussels • Rodeo, Istanbul • Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Salzburg • Andr ea Rosen, New York • Tucci Russo, Torre Pellice (Torino) • Sophie Scheidecker, Paris •

Esther Schipper, Berlin • M icky Schubert, Berlin • Gabriele Senn, Wien • Na talie Seroussi, Paris • Sfeir-Semler, Beirut, Hamburg • Sha nghART, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore • J essica Silverman, San Francisco • VI, VII, Oslo • Sk arstedt, New York, London • So mmer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv • Pietro Sparta, Chagny • Spr üth Magers, Berlin, London • M icheline Szwajcer, Antwerp • Daniel Templon, Paris, Brussels • The Approach, London • The Third Line, Dubai • Ga lerie Thomas, München • Ti lton, New York • T ornabuoni Arte, Paris, Firenze, Milano • U BU Gallery, New York • Valentin, Paris • Ge orges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris • V an de Weghe, New York • V edovi, Brussels • Anne de Villepoix, Paris • V ilma Gold, London • Jonathan Viner, London • Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, Beijing • W addington Custot, London • Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen • W allspace, New York • Michael Werner, New York, London • Whi te Cube, London, Hong Kong, São Paulo • Jocelyn Wolff, Paris • Xippas, Paris, Genève, Montevideo, Punta del Este • Thomas Zander, Köln • Z eno X, Antwerp • Galerie Zlotowski, Paris • David Zwirner, New York, London • LAFAYETTE SECTOR WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE GALERIES LAFAYETTE GROUP Laura Bartlett, London • Che rt, Berlin • Thomas Duncan, Los Angeles • H igh Art, Paris • Antoine Levi, Paris • Parisa Kind, Frankfurt • RaebervonStenglin, Zürich • Real Fine Arts, New York • SpazioA, Pistoia • Tr iple V, Paris • Index 07/15/2014 Information — info@fiac.com www.fiac.com

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Carlos Bunga Omer Fast Theaster Gates Sanja Iveković Ragnar Kjartansson Sharon Lockhart Renata Lucas Renzo Martens Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

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Art Featured

He holds a black belt in taekwondo and considers himself a reprobate MMA-junkie 115

Calvin Tomkins Interview by Bridget McCarthy

Calvin Tomkins speaks about art with wisdom, thoughtful reflection and laughter – a combination that is not surprising from someone who has spent much of his working life writing and thinking about Marcel Duchamp 116

ArtReview

Calvin Tomkins’s career as an art reporter began with an interview with Marcel Duchamp in 1959 for Newsweek magazine, which stirred his interest in contemporary art. But it was a series of four profiles he wrote for The New Yorker in the early 1960s – on Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Duchamp – that fully revealed to him the exciting possibilities of art. According to Tomkins, these four artists comprised ‘a group of people who were all thinking along the same lines, and that really taught me more about what was going on in contemporary art than anything else. This was so powerful, that art could be all these other things.’ Ever since, Tomkins has pursued an insatiable curiosity about art, reporting on artists and their milieu, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Jeffrey Deitch, making him uniquely well positioned to comment on influence and new directions in the artworld. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1960, Tomkins has also published over a dozen books, most recently Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (2013), along with new editions of The Bride and the Bachelors (2013), Living Well Is the Best Revenge (2013) and Duchamp: A Biography (2014). Bridget Mccarthy I thought we might start where it all started for you: with Duchamp. You’ve said elsewhere that Duchamp is the most influential artist of the past 100 years. In what ways do you see his continuing influence today? calvin toMkins It seems to me that Duchamp’s influence just continues to expand. It’s reached a point now where a great many young artists – maybe all young artists – are influenced by him, sometimes without even knowing it. As the grandfather of what came to be known as Conceptual art, his idea that art was not solely and exclusively a visual thing has permeated the atmosphere. It’s also made everybody who’s interested in art – not just artists, but everybody – ask the question, ‘What is art?’ I think until Duchamp, people could pretty much assume that they knew what art was, but since then, nobody knows what it is.

It’s infinitely expandable and has been expanding in all directions. I think that largely goes back to Duchamp. BM How would you define art today? ct I don’t think it can be defined. I think that’s one of Duchamp’s contributions. He said at one point that the readymade is really a form of expressing the impossibility of defining art. Art is too diffuse, too vital. It’s always growing and changing. Certainly, we no longer can think of art as something that hangs on the wall. That is the work of art. The art remains with the artist. Art is so many things now. An artist can go in any direction. That makes it much easier in some ways and much more difficult in other ways. It’s much easier to be a bad artist now. It was always quite possible, but it’s much easier now. BM Because there’s more exposure, even for bad artists? ct Because there’s such total freedom: because art can be anything. There’s this mantra: if art can be anything, it can also be nothing. It can be of no interest or importance at all. It’s completely open-ended. Duchamp gave the freedom for this situation to become widespread, but the interesting thing is that hardly anybody imitates Duchamp. I read in somebody’s essay that there had been, to that date a few years ago, 27 works of art based specifically on Duchamp’s last work, the Étant Donnés [1946–66]. So people above Calvin Tomkins. Photo: Sara Barrett facing page Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. Courtesy Scala Archives / Philadelphia Museum of Art

November 2014

are trying to imitate him, but I don’t think he’s very imitable. His attitude can be learned from, but the things he did cannot. One of the interesting things about Duchamp’s work is that it’s so exquisitely made. His craftsmanship was amazingly good, and he was willing to devote infinite time. Richard Hamilton told me that when he was making his replica of The Large Glass [1915–23], with Duchamp’s permission he came and studied it, but he could not reproduce the detail as precisely as he wanted to. It was just too exquisite, in a way. BM Do you think people are aware of that as part of Duchamp’s legacy – the craftsmanship and patience? ct I doubt it. I don’t think that’s really a wellknown fact about Duchamp. It’s his attitudes and his insistence on freedom and thinking about art as a mental thing that have really had such a big influence. BM You wrote something in the introduction to your book Post- to Neo-: The Art World of the 1980s [1988] that I wanted to ask you about. Regarding Minimal and Conceptual tendencies in art in the 1970s, you wrote that they came right out of Duchamp, ‘who had been rediscovered in the late sixties by earnest ideologues who carry Duchampian ideas to their logical (and therefore non-Duchampian) conclusion’. What do you mean by that? ct With Duchamp you never get a conclusion in that sense. Duchamp is all about openings and contradictions and possibilities. A mistake that is made over and over again by people who are thinkers about Duchamp is that they try to figure out a system that explains him. Duchamp had no interest in systems, and his work cannot be explained that way. Duchamp eludes all attempts to trap him in a systematic theory. BM In your New Yorker profile on Duchamp, reprinted in The Bride and the Bachelors, you quote him as saying that ‘fifty years later there will be another generation and another critical language, an entirely different approach’. That was 50 years ago. Do you think

117

his prediction has come true? Or given the fact that he himself continues to have such a strong influence, does that suggest continuity? ct You know, I don’t really know. I often think a time is bound to come when there’s a counterrevolution against Duchamp, when some artist or group of artists appears on the scene with a whole new attitude and approach. So far it hasn’t happened. You could say that the Abstract Expressionist period was the anti-Duchampian era of the art establishment. It was no coincidence that during that period, in the 1940s and early 1950s, Duchamp was forgotten. A lot of people thought he was dead. It wasn’t until the late 1950s and early 1960s that the interest in him revived. It came slowly, but it was a really major revolution. But no revolution lasts forever. You keep thinking that sooner or later there has to be a counterrevolution, and that Duchamp will be relegated to a place in art history that is no longer the present. I don’t know when it will happen, but it will have to happen eventually. BM Have you seen any kernels of what might be a new revolution? Maybe it’s a particular medium? ct It’s possible that this growing interest in the social value of art has the seeds of that. There are so many artists who want their work to resonate in society, to go outside of the artworld, to go outside of art. To my mind, that could become an anti-Duchampian situation, but there are so many tendencies now. He was the one who let a thousand flowers bloom, and they’re all blooming. BM Are there any artists in particular that you’re thinking of when you mention the social value of art? ct One of them that comes to mind is Paul Chan, whose art, to me, is completely unpredictable. You don’t really know where he’s going to go with it. It goes from the Marquis de Sade to technology, and he is so bright and smart and his mind is so alert that it could go off in a completely new direction. BM Speaking of Paul Chan, for last year’s ArtReview Power 100 issue, Rirkrit Tiravanija created the artwork, and as part of it he used an image of a spread from your book Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, which was published in 2013 by Chan’s publishing enterprise, Badlands Unlimited. It’s an image of pages 28 and 29, where Duchamp talks about how at the time, in 1964, a spiritual approach was lacking and how the commercialisation of art was the leading influence on art at the time. That passage struck me as sounding very contemporary. What is your sense of how that commentary resonated then versus now? ct Rirkrit is certainly one of the artists who is involved with the social aspects. The whole idea that art can be him cooking for you is quite

118

revolutionary. But I don’t really know how to answer that. The whole thing is contradictory, because Duchamp warned against the increasing commercialisation of art, and his prophecies have been borne out way beyond anything he could have imagined. Now the commercial aspects of art have become, in many ways, more important than the art. You can see this leading to a real crash, which would be connected with the breakdown of society – the breakdown of corporate Western society. In some ways, art could have an influence on that. These artists now who want to go beyond art, meta-art, and have an influence on society: well, if society breaks down as it seems to be doing, these artists and others like them may be able to play a much more important role than they have before.

There’s this mantra: if art can be anything, it can also be nothing. It can be of no interest or importance at all. It’s completely open-ended. Duchamp gave the freedom for this situation to become widespread, but the interesting thing is that hardly anybody imitates Duchamp. His attitude can be learned from, but the things he did cannot In fact, it’s occurred to me in idle moments that we have this situation where there are not enough jobs and where unemployment is a major blot on capitalist economy. We also have this overproduction of artists in the world. All over the Western world, new artists are being hatched every year. Thousands and thousands are coming out of college. Well, what if the two things are related? What if it turns out that the solution to unemployment is that, as Joseph Beuys said, everyone is an artist? If what’s left of governments or the economic order will go along with that, it would solve the unemployment problem, because everybody who’s not actually working can become an artist. It might, who knows, even solve some of the economic problems, because artists don’t demand the kind of social benefits that the rest of us take for granted. They can figure out new ways of living and existing with the resources at hand. BM Is that a Duchampian conclusion? ct [laughter] Maybe. I can imagine Duchamp thinking this. He said things like, ‘Why should people work?’

ArtReview

BM You’ve interviewed so many fascinating people over the years. Your writing really seems to capture their personalities. How does it feel to think of yourself as an influential person, for example, in terms of how we see these people or how your writing has impacted others? ct Well, it’s very nice. I do get people, including artists, who said they read The Bride and the Bachelors when they were in art school, or even before, and that it had a big influence on them. That’s a good feeling. I attribute it to this thing, this stroke of luck, that I just went from one artist to the other in the beginning, and then discovered that they were all related in these different ways. It gave me a sense that I’d stumbled on something. Of course, now it’s been written about a great deal, but I think in the early 1960s it wasn’t written about very much, so I think it’s possible that a lot of artists went through the same process I did. They began to try to figure out what art was instead of just trying to pursue it, and this led them in all sorts of new directions. BM As a closing question, is there anything you wish you would be asked? ct Well, I’m not used to being asked; I’m used to asking. You know, I’ve always had a slight problem with the fact that some people think I’m a critic. I’ve never had any interest in functioning as a critic. I respect the art of criticism and I read critics with great interest and delight, but I never wanted to be one. I’ve always seen myself as a reporter on art. I think what’s been happening in art in this country and abroad for the last 50 years is so interesting and so varied and so connected with life in America that it’s perfectly legitimate to make an effort to report on it, to try to give a picture of the artist and the art as it’s been happening. You know, John Cage said that at any one time one of the arts is doing the talking and the others are listening. At the time he said it, he felt it was music that was doing the talking and the others were listening. I think that since the early 1960s it’s art that’s been doing the talking. When I started, there was no art coverage in the news magazines and there was no regular coverage, even in Time. There was no critic. Contemporary art, particularly, was considered a ridiculous and foolish aberration. It didn’t have anything to do with art, according to a lot of people. The change has been so enormous. The artworld, which used to be about 20 people, is now a big international industry. There’s good and bad about that, but the whole thing has changed and expanded so enormously. It’s been very, very interesting to watch, and to try to keep some sort of track of the changes and the different directions and how they worked out. ar

Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnés: 10 la Chute d’Eau, 20 le Gaz d’Éclairage… (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas…), 1946–6, mixed media assemblage, 243 × 178 × 125 cm. © Estate of Marcel Duchamp/adagP, Paris, and dacs, London 2014. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

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Steven Campbell

Limited Edition Print Reproduction of Untitled, (Chair, 1990)

Exclusive to the National Galleries of Scotland Giclee printed onto Somerset Enhanced 100% Cotton Rag Radiant White Velvet 330gsm.

£195 from the National Galleries of Scotland online shop Edition of 100, numbered with a certificate of authenticity. Courtesy of the Artist’s Estate. 60cm x 60cm, full bleed image (without border), unframed.

National Galleries of Scotland Charity No. SC003728

The Limits of the Limits by ArtReview

Those of you who are regular readers may have noticed that now are complex, such as how a magazine reconciles the often divergent and again ArtReview and its contributors like to climb up into their interests of its readers, the artists it covers, the writers it employs (up pulpits to deliver a little sermon or several on the subject of art and to 45 per issue), its advertisers and the wider audience that takes note free expression. Perhaps the odd tirade against censorship, something of what it says and does, and how it says it. But if one of those diverabout works being removed from exhibitions, that sort of thing. So gent interests loses interest in ArtReview, then it has a problem. Mostly it’s been something of an odd experience for ArtReview to find out that because it needs to sell magazines and advertising to make the money even it has limits, and that there are times when it ‘censors’ itself – as to pay its staff and writers – you get the picture. So when a magazine gives carte blanche to an artist to produce work for its magazine in the case of the artist project that’s not in this issue. Of course ArtReview generally likes to refer to these instances as (which ArtReview generally does), it has to decide whether or not the ‘choices’ rather than ‘self-censoring’ – it chooses to do one thing rather result goes beyond the tolerances of those interests. But in a sense it’s than another. Or it simply chooses not to do something at all. And it only ever guessing about where the limits of those tolerances lie. You does this all the time: this artist and not that artist gets covered; and never know for sure until you take a risk and put them to the test. he or she gets covered in this way and not that way, etc. You get the Which, ultimately, is what ArtReview decided not to do here. picture. In fact, perhaps that’s why you buy its magazine… because That’s not the point. The point is that the experience made you like the choices ArtReview makes. Hang on, is this self-sucking-up? ArtReview think deeply about how far it is willing to go when it comes to exercising its belief in art as a zone Somebody please give ArtReview a slap. Sometimes a work of art has an impact of free speech and one that’s vital Those of you with memories will that goes far beyond its immediate visual so that truths may be revealed and know that every power list since 2006 has been accompanied by an artist impact. This month ArtReview had just such an alternative possibilities and realities project on the subject of power that played out. Which was a strange expeexperience, and it was very therapeutic indeed runs on the cover and then throughout rience. Mainly because it turns out the magazine in parallel to the list. Some of you may even look forward that ArtReview is not willing to go as far as it thought it was. Which in to it. This year was no different, and ArtReview approached one of its turn made it think about whether it and its writers should perhaps go favourite artists, the American Paul Chan, to do the same. Chan duly easier on some of the people it attacks for placing limits on free expresdelivered a project that would certainly have enhanced, and compli- sion, given that ArtReview is somewhat more aware of its own limits. Of cated, your reading of ArtReview’s power list. But which, when all was course they shouldn’t! But ArtReview did feel that it should be honest said and done, ArtReview chose not to run. Not because of any legal with you about what went on behind the sealed doors of its power constraints or because pressure was applied to it by outside forces, bunker this autumn. but simply because, when everything was weighed and measured, Should you care about any of this? You’d never know that there having the proposed art on the cover didn’t seem to be in the best had been a project if ArtReview hadn’t mentioned it. As it already said, interests of its magazine (because ArtReview was worried that such a every month ArtReview looks at dozens of images that it decides not to cover might offend more people – not those on its list – than it could use on its cover, but doesn’t make a fuss about that. Perhaps the process afford to offend). And in terms of the integrity of the project, having it went through is Chan’s work, being performed by ArtReview. And a compromise work on the cover would have left the rest of it making it certainly wasn’t a waste of time. Because if its power list exposes a little sense. network of interests that decide what art gets shown, then this process Could it be called self-censorship? (And is self-censorship just a has reminded ArtReview that while it likes to think it sits outside all of polite word for cowardice?) The factors and considerations that go into that, it does not. That’s how art works sometimes, not via a physical the making of each issue of a magazine are multiple. Some are simple, object in front of you, but by triggering a process that goes on inside like what cover looks good on a shelf full of other magazines. Others your head. That process has left its mark on this issue. ar

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Power 100

She lives among vineyards outside Canberra when not travelling to England for research, visiting ancient archaeological sites along the way 125

Power 100 After 13 years, the power-ranking business isn’t getting any easier. Partly because there’s so much of this contemporary art stuff around. And most of it is no longer only in New York, London and Paris. Is one of the consequences of the muchvaunted ‘globalisation’ of contemporary art that no one person can be globally influential? Do disparate art scenes mean that art works in different ways in different places? When we talk about the ‘artworld’, are we talking about a system of distribution rather than anything to do with the production of art? Does a gallerist flapping its wings in New York cause a tidal wave in Tasmania? And isn’t the control of distribution the contemporary Western power paradigm anyway? Some of those questions might even be answered in the pages ahead… by ArtReview

Over the past year, ArtReview has been doing a lot of travelling, mostly on passenger jets, and mostly in economy, from where it leans out of its aisle seat to catch glimpses of important international artists, gallerists, collectors and curators, way up ahead in business class, being poured glasses of champagne, given neck massages and laughing. ArtReview is reconciled to this injustice. But what ArtReview’s incessant globetrotting has taught it is that the artworld is a surprisingly big place, and that each time it touches down, it finds itself in one or other locality where art has become a very big deal, and which has its own local power hierarchy. And each time ArtReview has met with its Power 100 contact for that particular region (involving coded handshakes in a designated basement bar, although the power panel is in no way a mysterious cult), it has received a very different report about who should be number one. So, whenever ArtReview meets one of its New York operatives, for example, the conversation is always prefaced by the operative whispering, “Just remember: if it didn’t happen in New York, it didn’t happen”, before a photograph of a certain Canadian curator is ritually stuffed into the shredder. Similarly, whenever it’s in Shanghai,

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the operative keeps jabbing a finger at a photograph of a certain American gallerist and screeching, “Who the hell is he? I’ve never seen him in China.” For all you hear (in the pages of this magazine as much as anywhere else) that contemporary art has ‘gone global’, regional differences haven’t been entirely erased, nor do ideas and concepts in contemporary art travel at the speed of light, to be held up as universally true. Just as any one person who tells you that he is totally in touch with everything that’s going on in contemporary art everywhere in the world is a liar. And gazing at the Internet 24 hours a day doesn’t really amount to knowing everything. By way of explanation, ArtReview’s power list is now distilled through a series of panels numbering 26 people in total. Who are they? ArtReview can’t tell you, again not because it masterminds some shadowy coven, but only to ensure that its panellists can go about their daily lives unmolested by any power-peddlers other than ArtReview. What ArtReview can tell you is that the panel is made up of operatives based in Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo, Dubai, Paris, Berlin, Milan and London. And for the observant among you, that there is occasionally more than

ArtReview

one agent in each of those cities (though they are never allowed to first major exhibition of British folk art’ earlier this year. Oh, yes, the meet). It can also tell you that all the operatives on the panel – all people who don’t go to museums tend to be among the less wealthy of whom work in the artworld in a variety of ways, and not only for and less well educated parts of society. So let’s not pretend it’s all good. ArtReview – are necessarily excluded from the power list, though But back to Tate. Which is getting a new extension. So it can some of them may, at one time or another, have been included in one compete. Firstly, like most of the big art institutions, Tate is no longer really a national museum, but rather a sifter and collector of its previous editions. Right. Pulling together these increasingly disparate perspectives, of art from around the world (which Tate bosses will occasionally ArtReview readily admits, can sometimes test its patience. Such is the suggest is somehow reflecting the many diasporic communities that price ArtReview pays in its quest for the truth. But when it regains its make up London, but ArtReview would caution you not to believe composure, ArtReview sees a big picture emerging. And what it sees that hype). And Tate both practises and represents a system that is is an artworld in which, as particular regions have assumed greater increasingly ‘the norm’ for contemporary art structures everywhere. importance, the old centres of the artworld – the US and Western And like any system, it offers all those who take part in it a soughtafter validation: the collectors who make up its various committees; Europe – now appear more regional themselves. In the context of all this, you might have gathered that for the the artists whom it approves for exhibitions; the critics who write its purposes of this list, distribution and circulation are more impor- catalogues and so on. It’s also a consultant to property developers in tant than the production of art. ArtReview has met collectors who talk Australia, governments in Asia and institutions in the Middle East. It actively spreads its message. about their ‘practice’ (in the way And in less obvious ways, too. that artists have for the past few years and that Buddhist monks Further down the list, you’ll find have for centuries), and it visited galleries who operate along the model of a museum, and even this year’s Whitney Biennial, where it found critics and pubart fairs who, via their own seleclishers included in an exhibition committees, attempt to pertion that notionally attempts to form a similar function of valitell you something about the dation – approving the ‘right’ current state of art (in the US, kind of gallery, and at the same that is; it means nothing to the time disapproving of the wrong kind of gallery. (Yes, socialists Shanghai operative). And if there and republicans should weep: is such a thing as a global entity currently the artworld is a bit in the artworld these days, ArtReview’s panel has decided it is like the court of Louis XIV, opermuch more a system than a perating a hierarchy based on levels son, and that the current chief of access and on who knows whom, one in which various proclaimer of this system is London’s Tate. Which, incidentally, gatekeepers are almost as impormakes the latter the first institution to climb to the top of ArtReview’s tant as the king. And while we’re here, let’s make it clear, as everyone does at those art receptions and dinners, that art in the end is king greasy power pole since the list began, in 2002. There are a number of reasons for this. Museums in general are and all should hail it as such.) getting more important these days. Attendance figures have more All of which reminds ArtReview to remind you of the basis on which than doubled worldwide over the past 20 years. According to The it makes its own distinctions. The power list is judged according to a Economist, more Americans visit museums than themeparks and ball- few core criteria: the ability to influence the type of art that is being parks combined, and half of all English adults visited a museum produced today; having been active during the past 12 months; having or gallery during the past year. And in Sweden three out of four an international rather than an exclusively domestic influence; and adults visit a museum once a year, because they are better and more playing a role in shaping the public perception of art. culturally sophisticated than English people, who are in turn better Finally, although for most of the year ArtReview is a magazine and more sophisticated than Americans. China opened 450 new that is all about expressing personal opinions, likes and dislikes, museums in 2012 and at the current rate will rapidly overtake the the Power 100 is an exception to that rule. And it’s not about which Americans, the English and the Swedes in the culture and sophis- artists are the best (or worst), merely a guide to those individuals who tication stakes. According to The Economist, people go to museums are influencing what art gets circulated and what art gets produced. because ‘they want to see for themselves where they fit in the wider Artists don’t necessarily get shown because they produce the best or world and look to museums for guidance’. Which seems a lot of pres- most incisive work, just as curators don’t get neck massages because sure to put on someone like Richard Tuttle prior to the launch of they’re nice people. Which they are. No, they get shown because of the his installation at Tate Modern and exhibition at the Whitechapel network of interests and influence that this list attempts to lay bare. Gallery (even if ArtReview does believe that art has an important role So for another year, ArtReview’s work is done. Which is lucky, to play in reflecting the society around it and suggesting alternatives because its kosher/halal/nut-free/vegan meal option has arrived, and to the status quo). But perhaps that kind of expecthe only cutlery ArtReview can find in the cellophane tation does explain why Tate Britain showed ‘the sleeve is a spork. ar Electricity meter (British)

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1 Nicholas Serota

Museum Director British Last Year: 6 Tate, helmed by Nicholas Serota since 1988, might not have the best modern and contemporary art collections in the world (MoMA and the Pompidou Centre would challenge for that), but the British institution – represented by the man who runs it – becomes the first such organisation to top this list as much for the way in which it so completely embodies the dominant Western contemporary art system as for what goes on inside the spaces of its galleries in London (Tate Modern and Tate Britain), St Ives and Liverpool. That’s not to say Tate fails to draw the crowds. Serota (who likes to keep his curatorial hand in more than many other museum directors) was cocurator of this year’s Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, which was gobbled up by 562,622 visitors, a record for the institution. Tate Modern remains the most visited modern and contemporary museum in the world. (Visitor numbers over the past year to all Tate museums was down from 7.7 million to just over 7 million, but that drop is partly explained by the traffic spike generated by the 2012 Olympic Games and the redevelopment of Tate Britain, now completed.) And in 2016 Tate is scheduled to get bigger, assuming a trouble-free completion of Tate Modern’s £215 million Herzog & de Meuron-designed extension. Yet Tate is here not just because it’s the leading institution, but because the balance feels to have shifted towards institutional power per se. It’s not only that expansionism among megagalleries no longer feels like growth, more like a reflex, but also that attempts by gallerists to raise young artists on pedestals have, arguably, dangerously exposed the limits of their power (and the extent of their hubris). Meanwhile, an exhibition at an institution such as Tate is often considered the seal of approval for artists, and collectors want institutional approval, too. They may have the spending power – and, increasingly, their own private art palaces to flaunt it within – but they still desire the type of credibility imprimatur, the individuating confirmation of their taste, that comes with membership in one of Tate’s eight Acquisitions Committees. Seven of them are regionally focused (North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, Africa, South Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe), with the eighth focused on photography. In total these comprise around 270 members and guarantee that the gospel of Tate extends far beyond its ever-expanding walls. In addition to a record number of loans of artworks, in the past year Tate entered into partnerships with the Ministry of Culture in New Delhi and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul (it has extensive existing partnerships in both regions), delivered a training programme for museum professionals in Oman and launched a Tate-branded Meschac Gaba exhibition

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that marked the beginning of a ‘cooperation’ with the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin. Even further afield, it is reported to be acting as a consultant to Australian developer Mirvac to oversee the development of a new cultural complex in Sydney. At home, Tate projects its collection and expertise through its lending to its Plus Tate group of partner institutions. And Tate continues to explore how to influence the world of academia, with initiatives such as the Arts Council England-supported British Art Network, an international networking group for curators and academics working on British art. With Tate, ‘soft power’ counts for a lot. Tate may punch above its weight in the global network of influence, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t vulnerable to the forces of competition which that network produces. Holding on to energetic and increasingly sought-after curatorial staff continues to be a headache: in 2012, chief curator Sheena Wagstaff left to become chairman of the department of modern and contemporary art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, swiftly followed by curator Nicholas Cullinan; last year film curator Stuart Comer, one of three curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial, left to take up a similar position at MoMA; Tate St Ives’s artistic director Martin Clark this year quit to head up Bergen Kunsthall; while Tate Modern’s high-profile curator of international art, Jessica Morgan, has been lured stateside as the new director of New York’s Dia Art Foundation. While this may on the one hand reflect the relatively low salaries that, as a public institution, Tate offers, it also reflects the demand for the skills its staff acquire. When interviewed about her move to Dia, Morgan confessed that, in light of government funding cuts to the arts (Tate gets only 36 percent of its budget from public funds), her job at Tate had ended up involving considerable fundraising (not, she says, that she minded). That’s a tricky thing for a public museum to deal with, as the ongoing controversy about Tate accepting sponsorship (but not disclosing the exact amount in question) from BP goes to show. It’s also facing increasing competition from the commercial gallery sector, the biggest examples of which (not far behind Serota on this list) are increasingly embracing the atmosphere, accessories and spirit of a public museum – the deployment of guest academic and celebrity curators, extensive publications programmes, forays into ‘nonselling’ exhibitions and public art projects, and grand historical shows – with arguably better access to finance to boot. Still, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and for the time being, none can match Tate’s international reach and institutional authority.

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top Photo: Hugo Glendinning bottom Rendering of the Tate Modern extension (exterior view from the south). © Hayes Davidson and Herzog & de Meuron, Basel

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2 David Zwirner Gallerist German Last Year: 2 Kusama were literal blockbusters. And never mind that Zwirner’s huge New York exhibition space is the closest a commercial gallery can come to being a museum. It’s probably more telling that when earlier this year Charlie Rose, talkshow host to the smart set, wanted to ask someone, ‘Why are so many people paying so much for art?’, he didn’t ask Arne Glimcher (Rose’s favourite when it comes to art), he asked Zwirner. Even the competition is marvelling at the scale of Zwirner’s ambition. As fellow gallerist Gavin Brown told The New Yorker as part of a December 2013 profile on his colleague (whose father, also an art dealer, was one of the founders of Art Cologne), ‘He’s the new dynasty’, adding, ‘It’s the Norman conquest’.

3 Iwan Wirth Gallerist Swiss Last Year: 3 A year ago there was muttering in the Somerset town of Bruton, England, that the arrival of fancy artworld types might turn the ancient parish into a rustic playground for the global ultra-rich. Once they’ve pulled on their wellies, however, it turns out that Wirth and his wife, Manuela Hauser, are ready to get down with both the mud and the cultural enrichment of his new ’hood. Hauser & Wirth Somerset – a converted seventeenth-century farmhouse and grounds, featuring multiple free-to-enter galleries, outdoor artworks and a buzzy restaurant – opened in July to general artworld approval, but perhaps more importantly, with a neighbourhood-pleasing programme of talks, workshops and site-relevant residencies. How this commitment to grassroots engagement will evolve to fit the decidedly more urban terrain of downtown LA when the 9,300sqm Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opens for business next year remains to be seen.

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A three-month nonselling exhibition from the collection of Reinhard Onnasch occupying all (then) three h&w London spaces was further evidence of Wirth’s cultural ‘generosity’. When the exhibition travelled to the gallery’s New York space, The New York Times’s Ken Johnson noted that it ‘more effectively simulates the experience of a modern art museum than any private gallery exhibition’. These days it’s hard to tell who is simulating whom when it comes to the public and private sectors, but h&w certainly seems intent on creating its own artworld. Its artists left a healthy mark on the international museum scene this past year – Phyllida Barlow received Tate Britain’s Duveen Gallery commission, Isa Genzken reasserted her position following her MoMA retrospective and Pierre Huyghe joined the gallery in the wake of his critically acclaimed 2013 Pompidou Centre exhibition (now moving to LACMA).

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2 Photo: Jason Schmidt. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London 3 Photo: Matt Cardy / Getty Images

Never mind that two of the most talked-about young artists this past year (Jordan Wolfson and Oscar Murillo) show with Zwirner in New York (which remains the financial capital of contemporary art), as do, now, Wolfgang Tillmans (perhaps the most significant photographer working today) and Richard Serra (who will debut a major steel sculpture in the gallery next year); or that Zwirner has taken Kerry James Marshall’s work to his London showrooms; or that Zwirner is able to call on the heavyweight minds of Hal Foster, Richard Shiff and Robert Storr to write the catalogues that support his exhibitions of work by Serra, Bridget Riley or Ad Reinhardt; or that Zwirner’s exhibitions by Doug Wheeler and Yayoi

4 Glenn D. Lowry Museum Director American Last Year: 8

4 Courtesy MoMA, New York 5 Photo: Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello

It can’t have been an easy year for Lowry. In January he announced plans for an expansion of MoMA’s just decade-old building, an expansion, designed by starchitects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that would increase public and gallery spaces by 30 percent and be dedicated, in Lowry’s words, to ‘transformative acquisitions that have added new dimensions and voices to its holdings’. But wait, the plans call for the demolition of the just-13-year-old former American Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien; and according to the critics, DS+F were

offering something between a ‘department store’ and a ‘parking garage’. The people screamed, ‘Cultural colonialism!’ ‘Real-estate overreach!’ ‘We want Jane Jacobs but we’re getting Joseph Schumpeter!’ Glenn, tell them about your groundbreaking Sigmar Polke and Lygia Clark shows, about the museum’s first purely digital publication (Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912–14) and its first acquisition of a downloadable app (Björk’s Biophilia, 2011). Tell them about the Robert Gober retrospective and the digitisation of the complete Warhol film collection. They’ll forgive you.

5 Marina Abramovic Artist Serbian Last Year: 11 If the cult of the artist’s personality has returned with a force that might make Giorgio Vasari blanch, none literally embodies guru status like Marina Abramovic, the performance artist who has found a strong foothold in the imagination of a general public lacking spiritual direction and hooked on technology. Cast it all off, Marina instructs them, in endurance performances such as this year’s 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery, for which 126,857 queued to give up their phones at the door and be touched by

greatness, and through endeavours such as the Marina Abramovic Institute, soon to be located in a vast space in Hudson, New York, which is currently being adapted by architects OMA, and where she will teach her legions the ‘Abramovic Method’. What’s doubtless is that Abramovic’s insistence on immateriality touches a nerve with a public that struggles to escape immaterial labour to focus on human presence, and that her use of celebrity (her own as well as Lady Gaga’s and James Franco’s) grants her a huge audience.

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6 Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones What to do at the end of your tenure as mayor of New York City? Why not become chairman of a small art gallery in a London park? Thus did Michael Bloomberg this January – a tribute, if there ever was one, to Julia Peyton-Jones’s pulling power as fundraiser and profile-booster for the Serpentine. A year on from the launch of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, with its flaring Zaha Hadid-designed extension, this now not-quite-sodiminutive London institution has augmented its programme to become a calendar-flooding hub of intellectual stimulation, with offsite projects popping up as far away as Milan and, er, Hackney. This was the year that you could walk Serpentine, wear Serpentine and even smell Serpentine, thanks to tie-in products from COS (ladies brogues), Comme des Garçons (perfume) and Brioni (menswear sponsor to the summer party).

As ever, Hans Ulrich Obrist has been everywhere – not least Instagram, where his Post-it notes series featuring the jottings of cultural celebrities has netted him close to 100,000 followers (a book is no doubt in the works – the list of publications in which hUO has had a hand in the last year stretches to seven pages of Amazon). The deathless allure of his Do It project received an ICI-organised 20th-birthday celebration at the Garage Museum in Moscow, and his 89plus initiative with Swiss Institute director Simon Castets came of age with a Serpentine Marathon and an inaugural exhibition, Poetry Will Be Made by All, with Luma in Zürich. Not to be outdone in the architectural stakes by Peyton-Jones (who this year received the Architecture Journal’s AJ100 award for services to the profession), he also found time to curate the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

7 Jeff Koons Artist American Last Year: 56 It is difficult to deny Jeff Koons’s influence, even if younger generations aren’t too ready to admit it. Yet Koons’s calling card of cold neoliberal Pop can be found in a plethora of artists, from Jordan Wolfson to Parker Ito; his fetishisation of aesthetic perfection appears in the shimmering surfaces of Hannah Sawtell and Ed Atkins; and his updating of what was the Warholian play of the artist as celebrity is quoted in artist brands from Bernadette Corporation to K-Hole. Hardcore theorists and academics have shied away from the artist, however, perhaps wary since the pornographic and wildly egocentric Made in Heaven (1989) series of works. The Koons onslaught was impossible to ignore in New York this year, however, as his Whitney retrospective roared into town. The naked, DGAF iron-pumping photoshoot (cringey yet alarmingly Terminator-like) with

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Annie Leibovitz in Vanity Fair, the h&M Balloon Dog bag advertised on the side of every bus, the 11m-high flower sculpture Split-Rocker (2000) outside the Rockefeller Center. The omnipresence of Koons confirmed that he must be seriously appraised, if not loved. His collaborations with and co-options of commerce and celebrity are today’s currency, the manufactured ‘delight’ the buzzwords on the lips of every Silicon Valley executive and his commitment to perfect execution undeniable – but so is something more difficult to tap, a clear-eyed reproduction of infantilisation and pleasure that has proved eerily inexhaustible. And let’s not forget the prices people are prepared to pay for all that: $58.4 million for his Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994–2000) at Christie’s New York last November – a record for a work of art by a living artist.

ArtReview

6 Hans Ulrich Obrist: Photo Kalpesh Lathigra. Julia Peyton-Jones: Photo John Swannell 7 Courtesy bMw Group, Munich

Curators Swiss / British Last Year: 5

8 Larry Gagosian Gallerist American Last Year: 4

8 Photo: Nick Harvey/WireImage. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York 9 Photo: Thomas Struth

Gogoland continues to grow. Fourteen galleries worldwide, with the newest on the corner of Park Avenue and 75th Street in Manhattan, a rare commercial ground-floor storefront among a sea of exclusive residential addresses (since featuring new work by Urs Fischer when it opened in April, the gallery was given over to Harmony Korine for almost the whole summer). He’s aiming to take it to 15 in the next year, with a long-planned third London space – over 2,000sqm of prime Mayfair real-estate – due to open around the corner from young upstarts David Zwirner and Iwan Wirth. Meanwhile, all those spaces are home to a programme that continues to offer up exhibitions by masters such as Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp, more recent greats such as Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan, topped by a sprinkling of the latest stars,

such as Taryn Simon and Tatiana Trouvé. But Gagosian’s most notable recent expansion is actually into the culinary arts. Kappo Masa, which opened this autumn in the basement of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue flagship store, is a high-end sushi restaurant and partnership with the famed Masa Takayama. Now Upper East Side art prowlers will have even more ways of handing Gagosian their hard-earned cabbage. Will other Gagosian branches also get eateries? It’s an open question, and let’s face it, there remains little that Gagosian can’t, or won’t, do these days in the name of art. Current court cases notwithstanding (a battle with collector Ron Perelman rumbles on), he’s been at the top of this list on two occasions, and in his current expansive mode, there’s no reason to think he won’t clamber up there again.

9 Marian Goodman Gallerist American Last Year: 14 Let’s just put this out there: no other dealer on this list can claim to represent a ‘Best Picture’ Oscar winner. It’s not quite a Nobel, but it’s up there. To her credit, Marian Goodman recognised Steve McQueen’s ferocious talent during the 1990s (he had his first solo show with her in 1997), and for Goodman, her artists have always come first. ‘A model I aspired to’, is what David Zwirner thought of Goodman when he opened his gallery in New York. And now Goodman is following in Zwirner’s and others’ footsteps by opening a big branch gallery in London, designed by David Adjaye. When she does something like this, though, it’s not to build a global ‘brand’; it’s always for the artists. Breaking in the space are some 40 works by Gerhard Richter, by anyone’s measure one of the most

respected, important and – let’s face it – bestselling artists of the age. And just to prove that she’s into any age, Richter will be followed by an exhibition of works by an artist born 43 years after the German – Danh Vō, bits of whose We The People (2010–13) have popped up seemingly in every major group exhibition recently and who will be representing Denmark at next year’s Venice Biennale. Oh yes – while she’s been gearing up for those, her Paris space has featured exhibitions by Richard Tuttle, Annette Messager and Oscar Murillo, and her New York homebase has been ticking over with shows by some of the other influential artists of our time: Tacita Dean, William Kentridge, Gabriel Orozco and Thomas Struth.

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The Revolving Door With commercial galleries hiring from the museum sector, museums hiring from the commercial sector and private museums popping up like mushrooms, what is left of the distinction between public and private? by J. J. Charlesworth

In the power game that is the world system of contemporary art, a be a typical commercial gallery branch: occupying a vast complex longstanding border is in the process of being torn down. Where once of old warehouse buildings, it will be, according to the gallery’s there seemed to stand a clear distinction between the private interest publicity, ‘a dynamic multi-disciplinary arts center’ offering ‘innoof the commercial gallery and the more elevated role of the museum vative exhibitions, museum-calibre amenities, and a robust schedule and public art gallery, today that distinction is becoming hard to of public programs’. define, as commercial galleries behave increasingly like public instiWhat’s striking about such an initiative is its ambition to assimitutions – hiring curators to produce ‘museum grade’ shows, devel- late the breadth of informal, noncommercial activity associated with oping publishing activities beyond the usual exhibition catalogues nonprofit art centres, and the aspiration to assume the mantle of – while museums are becoming more like corporate, commercial authority of the museum; but then such was his standing in LA that to entities – charging the public, fundraising from private donors some degree during his 22-year tenure at MOCA Schimmel had become and competing as brand names on the world stage. Meanwhile, the the museum. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2013, he imagined concept of the museum is itself being producing exhibitions that ‘come out reworked by an explosion of privately of the Hauser & Wirth program but feel When Paul Schimmel was ousted funded museums, designed to showfrom his position at MOCA LA, it was more museum-like in terms of scale, case the tastes, collections and projects scholarship and complexity’. less than a year before he was hired of private individuals rather than repreSuch a scale of endeavour projects sent a more aloof overview of artistic the power of the commercial gallery by megagallery Hauser & Wirth culture – private ventures, moreover, into the public realm in an entirely new way. Other private interests are busy with similar projects: in with which public institutions are increasingly happy to partner. On one level there are pragmatic reasons for this increasing traffic October, megacollector Bernard Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton between the commercial and the public. The vast expansion of the will finally (after several delays) open its doors, offering the Parisian top end of the commercial market means that professional expertise public a mix of Arnault’s collection, temporary exhibitions and live in dealing with large-scale exhibitions and audiences is an increas- performances, and, at the opening, a string of concerts by electro ingly valuable asset: when Paul Schimmel was ousted from his long- godfathers Kraftwerk. As Arnault would have it, ‘We see our role as time position as chief curator of MOCA LA in June 2012, it was less bringing the artists we show at the Fondation closer to the public.’ than a year before he was hired by megagallery Hauser & Wirth, to The expansion and evolution of these new institutional formats, head up their new LA outpost Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. Speculation which has been ongoing for the past several years, signals a profound as to what financial incentives might have lured Schimmel to the development, in which the characteristics that once distinguished commercial side aren’t as interesting as the detail of what he is doing public institutions from private interests are constantly being blurred now that he’s there. Opening in 2015, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel won’t and fused. In that, Schimmel’s contemplation of a ‘museum-like’

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activity of ‘scale, scholarship and complexity’ is key. Although that of a major cultural centre: shows of current art, shows of historical ‘-like’ suggests that he still believes a space operated by a commercial art, live events, talks programmes, curatorial scholarship – nothing gallery cannot be a museum (no matter how much it’s run in a prin- distinguishes these as the exclusive activity of ‘public’ or ‘private’ cipled and public-minded fashion), the idea that it could perform the institutions. What, after all, is Tate Modern, for example, other than just a very big building where a lot of art-type things happen? same kind of function has taken hold. How has this come about? A bit of long-range historical perspec- Nothing inherently distinguishes these, other than one residual tive is useful. Up until the 1970s, the separation between the commer- characteristic that public institutions retain – the ideal (or the myth) cial gallery, the museum and the nonprofit or publicly funded ‘art of their impartiality, of their position as deciders of what art matters centre’ was distinct. Museums tended to see their role as that of pre- most, in the long term. serving, building and presenting collections of historical work, in But if it appears that commercial interests can almost step up which the presentation of contemporary artistic production was only to the level of public institutions, it is because, in many ways, the a minor part of their activity, more properly dealt with by commercial cultural function and purpose of the big public institutions have declined. In fact, the claim of impargalleries and the emerging small publicly tiality is increasingly difficult for large funded art centres and artist-run spaces. If commercial galleries, with their With museums, the general idea was vast resources, are behaving in a more institutions to maintain: all presentations of contemporary art are a form of that a work needed time for evaluation ‘museum-like’ fashion, museums have value-judgement; all historical exhibiand consideration before it could enter tions are subject to revisionist interprethe canon. But from the 1970s onwards, moved in the other direction tation, based on academic and scholarly larger institutions evolved or emerged to focus more fully on contemporary production. Paris’s Pompidou debate, over which museums do not have a monopoly; the rise of the Centre and London’s Hayward Gallery are early examples of large- proactive museum implicates it in shaping the field of contemporary scale institutions of contemporary art, established in response practice and its transition into history. to demands that contemporary practice be better represented by It is no secret that many of the biggest now-public art institutions public institutions. were founded out of the enthusiasms and resources of private indiSo where there had been a strong distinction between public viduals: the Whitney, the Guggenheim and Tate, for example, all find ‘museum’ and public ‘gallery’ (art centres, kunsthalles and other their origins in private wealth. Yet these institutions were set up with publicly funded and nonprofit forms), the last 20 years has seen the a view to a bigger purpose, championing ideals that went beyond the business of presenting contemporary activity folded into the func- immediate interests of their founders. The original Tate Gallery, for tioning of major institutions, in which collection-building and example, born out of the private collection of Henry Tate, began as a historical exhibitions happen side-by-side with contemporary pres- gallery for the celebration of British art, when none existed, helping entation, to the point that they have begun to eclipse many nonprofit to define the idea of a ‘national’ art in the age of European empire; and smaller public art galleries. And when it comes to historical the Whitney set out as a museum of American art; others, such as exhibitions, museum institutions are also no longer so passive, no the Guggenheim, championed the cause of Modernism and ‘nonlonger merely rehearsing the canonical definitions and interpreta- objective’ art, when forces such as Nazism sought to destroy it. And tions of art history; if anything characterises the style of historical throughout the last century, these large institutions evolved into exhibition of today’s big museums, it is the breathless rediscovery institutions increasingly closely associated with a national audience, of neglected or overlooked artists, movements and parts of the especially in Europe, as social-democratic states took on a greater world, the hyperactive revising and reinterpreting of past art into responsibility for the support of culture. a new global art history – ‘history’ is no Today, however, those trends are in more stable than the present. abeyance. No one cares much for a nationIt is no secret that many of the In other words, if commercial biggest now-public art institutions al perspective, and contemporary art galleries, with their ever-increasing redoesn’t really incite much serious cultural were founded out of the enthusiasms conflict. Nation-states are little interested sources, are behaving in a more ‘museumlike’ fashion, museums have moved in and resources of private individuals in asserting a national culture in the era the other direction – into influencing of globalisation, where fluidity and exthe production and presentation of contemporary art, to the point change are privileged, at least for the very rich. In these circustances, the where the two sides are beginning to occupy common ground. big public institutions have reached outwards, towards the internaThe fusion and incorporation of these previously distinct activities tional stage, since, shorn of their earlier rationale, they risk looking produces a new middle-ground type of institution, in which the merely like big versions of smaller institutions, all of them involved in priority of ‘public’ or ‘private’ in what defines it has become ambig- the homogeneous circulation of international contemporary art. uous. After all, there are now many ‘public’ institutions that derive At its origin, the public institution was always to be found in the the majority of their income from private sources, so what makes desires of private individuals, but it was bigger ideas, about history, them ‘public’? or artistic progress, or nationhood, that turned them into truly public When this is the case, the ‘museum-like’ mix of contemporary institutions. Today, those big ideas are conspicuous by their absence, currency, historical overview and scholarly and theoretical authority and big public institutions are slowly winding back towards their becomes something up for grabs. Anyone, today, with sufficient origins. The border between private and public steadily dissolves, resources, can create an institution that incorporates all the aspects and the revolving door becomes a merry-go-round. ar

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11 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers

10 Cindy Sherman Artist American Last Year: 13 Sherman’s multimillion-dollar selling status may have come relatively late in the artist’s almost-40-year career, but collector and museum endorsement have helped maintain it. That and the continuing importance of her work to younger generations of artists whose use of costumed theatricality and multiple personas owes much to Sherman’s pioneering photographs, in which she has transformed herself into a range of often exaggerated cultural, historical and social types – from centrefolds and ageing society ladies to clowns and the subjects of Old Master-style paintings. Among those she has influenced are actor and artist James Franco, who ‘restaged’ Sherman’s seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) photographs at Pace, New York, earlier this year. Sherman has also engaged in some reimagining of her own: her version of Louis Vuitton’s travel trunk, part of the brand’s ‘Celebrating Monogram’ series of collaborations, goes on sale in selected stores this month. Following Sherman’s major American touring retrospective in 2012–3, her three-venue European touring show, Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors (2013–4), recently ended its run at Kunsthaus Zürich.

For their first US outpost, Sprüth and Magers (who already operate out of Berlin and London) are readying a space opposite LACMA, in LA, which opens next spring with a show by John Baldessari. That’s then, however, and this list is about now. When four of your artists are on the Power 100, and you also represent Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, you’re always going to be busy. In previous years Sprüth Magers have taken on younger artists (albeit carefully – waiting until artists such as Cyprien Gaillard and Analia Saban had proved themselves critically); this year it was about an older generation: their first show with Reinhard Mucha in Berlin in May, and at Art Basel’s Unlimited (alongside works by their other artists, including John Bock, who joined the gallery earlier this year), a vast installation by Hanne Darboven, the German conceptualist who died in 2009. All while tracking the inexorable rise of Ryan Trecartin, whose latest solo show hit Berlin’s KW this autumn.

12 Alain Seban & Bernard Blistène Museum Directors Both French Last Year: 12 (with Alfred Pacquement) / NEW Beaubourg sails on, with a new five-year pop-up Pompidou opening in early 2015 in Málaga, Spain, cocommissioned exhibitions around the world and a host of monster shows in its Paris mothership and Metz satellite. The elegant boots of Alfred Pacquement, the omnipresent director of the Pompidou since the 1970s who departed last year, have been ably filled by longtime Pompidou player Bernard Blistène, who curated his first shows at the centre during the early 80s and has run the museum’s annual Nouveau Festival since 2009. The only question: what are Alain Seban’s plans? Will the career bureaucrat, who took over in 2007 and is now the institution’s longest-standing president, move back into the purely political fold – or does art now run too thick in his veins?

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10 Photo: Mark Seliger 11 Photo: Dagmar Schwelle 12 Alain Seban: Photo Loic Venance © AFP Bernard Blistène: Photo Philippe Migeat Both courtesy Pompidou Centre, Paris

Gallerists Both German Last Year: 33

13 Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani

14 Marc Spiegler Art Fair Director American Last Year: 16

Collector Qatari Last Year: 1 13 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 14 Courtesy Art Basel 15 Photo: Gao Juan 16 Photo: Hubert Becker

Last year the sheikha’s extraordinary spending on contemporary art (more than Tate and MoMA) took her to the top of this list. This year it’s not just a lack of quite so conspicuous consumption that sees her move away from its summit. While the negative publicity surrounding Qatar’s World Cup bid and treatment of foreign labour may not directly affect her position in the artworld, it certainly doesn’t help. In 2014 Richard Serra followed the path laid by Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst with a major exhibition in Doha, indicating (along with shows by Mona Hatoum and, opening this month, Shirin Neshat) the Qatari capital’s ongoing determination to be a centre for art. A $6.8m Urs Fischer sculpture graces the city’s new airport, yet there’s a sneaking suspicion that the Qatari public’s enthusiasm for contemporary art doesn’t quite yet match that of the sheikha’s herself.

This year’s Art Basel (in Basel) felt like a Swiss watch: accurate, smooth. This might be because its director knows exactly what works, a knowledge that also applies to greater Art Basel – Art Basel Miami Beach launches a new art-historical sector called Survey this year, while 2015’s Art Basel Hong Kong moves into a mid-March slot to ease the artworld’s hectic spring scheduling. What else? A juicy new book celebrating the fair’s global presence; thriving partnerships, such as the Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist-curated performance fest 14 Rooms; and collaborations with companies like Kickstarter. Some have criticised the latter, as well as the fair’s corporatisation (and both Magnus Renfrew, who ran the Asian operation, and former codirector Annette Schönholzer left the franchise within the space of months, although replacing the former is a priority), but a closer look shows that under Spiegler, the art on offer has never come from a more diverse background.

15 Ai Weiwei

16 Gerhard Richter

Artist Chinese Last Year: 9

Artist German Last Year: 15

When a show of Ai’s work opened at Alcatraz, California’s former island penitentiary, in September, one can imagine Ai wasn’t unaware of the irony. The exhibition, titled @Large, alludes perhaps to the travel ban by the Chinese authorities that means, besides his work, Ai’s most reliable means of communication with the outside world is social media. But his work is everywhere. Evidence, an 18-room exhibition, ran in Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau over the summer, as did another big show in the UK’s Blenheim Palace. Despite his lack of passport, and effective silencing within his own country, Ai remains an active artist and forceful provocateur from afar. As he told Open Democracy in January, ‘Once the internet age arrived we have had a very different kind of politics. An individual can bear much more responsibility and be much more powerful.’ Ai continues to show precisely how that can be so.

It’s become something of a cliché to say, on this list and elsewhere, that for many people Gerhard Richter is the most important artist of our times. Does that mean money? Last year Domplatz, Mailand (1968) sold for just over $37m. And does that mean lots of exhibitions? His website lists 78 solo or group shows taking place this year (two down from last year). The pick of them came over the summer, when art lovers were treated to an extremely personal display of his work, Gerhard Richter: Pictures / Series – an encounter between his series and iconic single works, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in cooperation with the artist and exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler. And with whom would Marian Goodman choose to open her new large-scale London outpost? Herr Richter, of course.

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18 Adam D. Weinberg

Curator German Last Year: 7

Museum Director American Last Year: 18

Ruf, a highly respected curator and tastemaker, made Kunsthalle Zürich one of the most influential exhibition spaces in Europe (not least by spearheading the purchase and renovation of the building in which it is housed) while also occupying strategic positions at JRP/Ringier (associate editor) and Luma Foundation core group, as well as on the cultural advisory board at CERN, the board of Mumok Vienna and the artcommissioning board at Swiss Re. This year she put on what has become a signature mix of exhibitions by cult established artists (Haim Steinbach) and the newest kids on the block (Ed Atkins, Slavs and Tatars). But all that’s behind her now, as Ruf has just taken up a new role as director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The artworld looks on with interest to see how Ruf will steer such a large ship, and what she can achieve with such a wealth of history at her fingertips.

One could be faulted for thinking the only thing the Whitney will be known for in 2014 is the Jeff Koons circus it unleashed upon New York. The doors have closed on Koons, and Weinberg’s museum is finally on the move to its new Renzo Piano building, whose inaugural show next spring promises to rethink the history of American art since 1900 (but only after an opening bash sponsored by fashion house Max Mara, long a museum supporter), with surveys of Frank Stella and Jazz Age legend Archibald Motley to follow. Taking advantage of its new location, Weinberg announced a partnership with real estate concern TF Cornerstone and the High Line park to bring a public art programme – first up, a major Alex Katz piece – to the side of an adjacent building. And in September, Weinberg secured a gift of 75 photographs from Sondra Gilman GonzalezFalla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, a significant enhancement of an already important collection. You see: it’s not all Koons, all the time.

19 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

20 Marc & Arne Glimcher

Curator American Last Year: 20

Gallerists Both American Last Year: 17

And she’s back. Number one on this list in 2012 for her lauded curating of a Documenta that variously anticipated and synthesised intellectual trends, Christov-Bakargiev didn’t even try for the brass ring in 2013, regrouping and focusing on professorships in America, Germany and the UK, but earlier this year it was announced that she’ll steer next year’s Istanbul Biennial. Given Turkey’s turbulently evolving engagements with both neoliberalism and fundamentalism, this will be no easy task; but the formidable curator is likely to make a powerful, engagé attempt. Her Istanbul Biennial, she has said, concerns ‘the alliance, the line, the wave’, and ‘will embark looking for where to draw the line, to withdraw, to draw upon, and to draw out. It will do so offshore, on the flat surfaces with our fingertips but also in the depths, underwater, before the enfolded encoding unfolds.’ We look forward to finding out what that means.

Pace has once again been in an expansion phase over the past year. After its initial move into China in 2008 with an enormous outpost in Beijing, the gallery followed a number of other large global players to Hong Kong, where in May it opened a jewel-box showroom with an exhibition of Zhang Xiaogang works on paper. Just a month prior, Marc Glimcher brought Alexander Calder’s work to a ‘pop-up’ space – a former car dealership, actually – in Menlo Park, California. The budding Silicon Valley collector scene was then treated to Tara Donovan and, now, A Brief History of Pace (because, presumably, the tech guys didn’t take art history as undergrads). To cap it off, in February Pace opened Chesa Büsin, a landmark twelfthcentury-house-turned-showroom in the town of Zuoz in the Engadin valley, Switzerland, yearly host of the Engadin Art Talks, which are curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, of course.

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17 Photo: Robin de Puy 18 Photo: Marco Anelli 19 Photo: Nils Klinger 20 Marc Glimcher: Photo Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Arne Glimcher: Photo Ronald James

17 Beatrix Ruf

21 Photo: Tadeusz Rolke 22 Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans 23 Photo: Todd Eberle 24 Photo: Max Geuter

21 Adam Szymczyk

22 Maja Hoffmann

Curator Polish Last Year: Reentry (52 in 2012)

Collector Swiss Last Year: 26

Szymczyk came off this list last year, during a relatively quiet time in his old job as director of the Kunsthalle Basel, and then seconds after it went to print he was appointed artistic director of Documenta 14. Drat! Now that he’s in charge of the biggest event in the contemporary art calendar – which he announced in October will be spread between Athens and the traditional host city of Kassel – he’s back with a vengeance. And not just on this list. Barely a week passes without the artworld’s society pages capturing him in a different part of the world; nor is he absent from any self-respecting talks programme (Arco Madrid, Art Dubai, Frieze New York and Art Basel Miami Beach have all tapped him in the past 12 months). The invitations are going to be flowing thick and fast, as all minds, and eventually eyes, turn to the Graeco-German extravaganza.

Maja Hoffmann has always seen herself as a producer or an ‘enabler’ rather than a simple collector. What does that mean? Well, it means that she’s involved with a lot of institutions, among them the Kunsthalle Zürich Foundation (president), Basel’s Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation (vice president of the council), the New Museum (board member), CCS Bard (board member) and Tate (trustee and chair of the International Council). In whatever time is left over, she’s working (with a ‘core group’ that includes Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf) on the ambitious construction of Luma Arles, a €150m Frank Gehry-designed experimental cultural complex – including exhibition spaces, public gardens, research facilities, archives and artist housing. And the Luma Foundation itself, which she founded in 2004, produces art projects and supports a number of institutions worldwide.

23 Bernard Arnault

24 Okwui Enwezor

Collector French Last Year: 31

Curator American Last Year: Reentry (52 in 2011)

How many times this year, in galleries and studios around the world, did the owner or artist approach us, as we stood in front of the largest or loudest work on display, and whisper, “It’s just been bought for the Fondation Louis Vuitton”? After years of delay, France’s richest man’s newest plaything, a giant cloud of glass (11,700sqm incorporating 11 galleries at an estimated cost of $143 million) in the Bois de Boulogne designed by Frank Gehry, whose work is the subject of a simultaneous retrospective at the Pompidou Centre, opens its doors to the public on 27 October. Among the artists commissioned to produce original works for the institution are Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly, Sarah Morris and Taryn Simon. Under the direction of Suzanne Pagé, formerly head of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, will it transform the Paris art landscape? Or will it serve as a mere vitrine for LVMH, Arnault’s luxury-goods empire? On veut savoir… et on va voir…

Although the piece of Enwezor-related news that most captured our imagination this year was the revelation that the dapper director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst owned a pair of lederhosen, the rest of the artworld seems rather more bewitched by his anointment as curator of the 56th Venice Biennale. The first Africa-born curator in the Biennale’s 120-year history, Enwezor continues to be a bona fide agent of change in the artworld, with his commitment to new geographical territories playing a well-judged supporting role in his investigation of larger ideas – the impact of his tenure as artistic director of the radically international Documenta 11 in 2002 is still being felt. In the run-up to Venice, Enwezor seems to be pondering the role of the artist as citizen and the role of the space of art in the production and emergence of civil society. We’re sure there’s still a role for natty leather legwear in there somewhere.

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26 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Curator Italian Last Year: 10

Collector Venezuelan Last Year: 25

This former curator of the Wrong Gallery (a 1sqm New York space he ran with Ali Subotnick and Maurizio Cattelan) continues his inexorable rise with his July appointment as artistic director of the much bigger New Museum (where, for the previous seven years, he had been associate director and director of exhibitions). His new role and title no doubt suit him, as they’re the same ones he carried for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Gioni took a short break from the expansive thematic shows he is now known for by bringing solo outings of Paweł Althamer and Ragnar Kjartansson to the New Museum this year. But he was back at it in no time with Here and Elsewhere, a rangy, convention-busting and remarkably timely exhibition of ‘art from the Arab world’, which opened on 16 July, a mere week into this year’s Israel–Gaza conflict. Finger. Pulse. You get it.

Cisneros’s engagement with Latin American art has been so deep and sustained that her influence does more than shape the collection at institutions like MOMA, on whose board she sits, and advance the scholarship of all periods of art from the Hispano and Lusophone worlds; rather, it affects how history and culture are understood and studied. This year, London’s Royal Academy presented an exhibition of 90 works of geometric abstraction drawn from her peerless holdings. Its catalogue adds to the extensive scholarship generated by her eponymous Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, which also sponsored an online series of wide-ranging debates on criticism and launched an ambitious, interactive programme of articles and talks by artists and scholars that examine art, influence and originality beyond exchanges across the North Atlantic.

27 Klaus Biesenbach

28 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe

Museum Director German Last Year: 23

Gallerists Both American Last Year: 30

As director of PS1 and chief curator at large of MoMA, Biesenbach gets to hang with some cool people in his jobs. He’s recently been with Wael Shawky (who will have a show at PS1 next year), Ryan Trecartin (whose September show at the KW, Berlin, Biesenbach cocurated) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (with whom he curated the high-profile 14 Rooms at Art Basel this year). There were lauded PS1 exhibitions this past spring of the work of two of the more influential artists of our times: recently deceased German filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief and Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (who died during the run of the exhibition). Biesenbach is also involved in the ongoing relief operation in the Rockaways, the New York peninsula devastated by Hurricane Sandy, not least as the driving force (alongside singer Patti Smith) behind Rockaway!, a free arts festival drawing visitors and their money to the area.

Tim Blum and Jeff Poe are not merely riding a groundswell of interest in historically significant but commercially and critically undervalued art; they’re propelling it. In 2012 they mounted a show of Mono-ha, curated by the Hirshhorn’s Mika Yoshitake, jumpstarting interest in this Japanese movement. This autumn they featured a show of COBRA master Karel Appel in their recently opened New York gallery, and a survey of Tansaekhwa – Korean monochrome painting – organised by scholar Joan Kee in their LA space. Such presentations combine intellectual heft with a feeling for work that fits current tastes for bold painting or minimal and conceptual practices, and expand the gallery’s brand beyond stars like Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and Mark Grotjahn. In addition to their New York and LA digs, and their regular presence on the fair circuit, they have also opened a gallery in Tokyo.

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25 Photo: Marco De Scalzi 26 Courtesy Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 27 Photo: Casey Kelbaugh 28 Photo: Joshua White

25 Massimiliano Gioni

Marina Abramović 5

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Iwan Wirth 3

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Nicholas Logsdail 29

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Sadie Coles 41

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Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones 6

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Art and Freedom Writer and curator Pi Li discusses art fairs, megagalleries and why Chinese art can’t flourish without freedom of expression Interview by Aimee Lin

Pi Li is the Sigg senior curator at M+ Hong Kong. Previously he lectured at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing as well as cofounding the Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing. He was on the curatorial team of Mediacity Seoul 2006 at SeMA, the Seoul Museum of Art, and has curated a number of museum shows, the latest of which is Right Is Wrong: Four Decades of Chinese Art in M+ Sigg Collection (2014), at Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden. Artreview How is the art ecosystem in China constructed? Pi Li Chinese contemporary art has always been under ideological pressure. There is no complete local ecosystem here. When Chinese contemporary art was first accepted during the 1980s and started being circulated globally in the 1990s, its success was determined by Western academic evaluation and its validity established by exhibitions in galleries and institutions – that is what we now call ‘the postcolonism situation’. On the commercial side, when the market was first built up, it was not for the purpose of dealing but to liberate art from ideological pressure. Since 2000, the country’s participation in the World Trade Organisation and its hosting of the Olympics have generated a new wealthy class, which needs to differentiate itself from the high officers in the government and the real-estate tycoons. One way is through buying contemporary art. This need, together with the other developments in the market since the 1990s, has contributed to the boom since 2005. In this

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process, the community of taste built up by critics during the 1980s was absorbed and dispelled during the 90s. However, after 2000, the booming market didn’t spur academic development and it was still consuming the art that had been produced by the academic mechanism in the 80s and 90s. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the market is getting bigger, but because of ideological pressure, artists’ interpretation of art is shrinking and weakening. Meanwhile, because of issues with Taiwan, Tibet and Ai Weiwei, the Western

In a country that lacks freedom of speech and infrastructures such as museums and institutions, local collectors might need to take more responsibility leftist intellectuals have lost faith not only in the Chinese government but also in Chinese artists and their art. So overseas research and exhibitions are decreasing, too. Personally I feel quite pessimistic now. Ar It has been two years since Art Hong Kong was ‘Basel-ised’. What does it mean to the Chinese art market? PL Let’s first talk about fairs in general. During the 1990s, when the artworld was globalised on the back of post-oil-crisis money, frequent

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international travel and Internet technology, art fairs started to change the art ecosystem dramatically – primarily because one starts to be able to buy art from places other than where one lives. We can view Chinese art’s postcolonism situation during the 1990s as part of this bigger context of the artworld’s globalisation. Since then the territory of art has been continuously expanding: first Russia, then China, Asia Pacific, Southeast Asia, India and Latin America; and more recently Africa, the Middle East and Israel. This is the good part of art fairs. The bad part is that it shocked the galleries. To participate in an art fair, a good gallery needs to expend money, stock and manpower. Besides selling art, galleries used to support local artists by making exhibitions in their local communities, and encouraging research. Now galleries are busy dealing with the fairs – where they indeed profit – and can’t support local art so much by their regular programme. And a local collector might not get the work he wants in the local gallery, but will have to travel to the fair to buy it – because it is reserved for the fair. No wonder some gallerists are talking about nonfair models now. I used to support local collectors buying international art, but now I have changed my mind. In a country that lacks freedom of speech and infrastructures such as museums and institutions, local collectors might need to take more responsibility. Concerning Art Basel Hong Kong, it indeed changed the map of the Chinese art market.

Since 2011 and 2012, the trading centre has been moving to Hong Kong because of the exchange rate and tariff issues in China. At the same time, artists and especially collectors and especially more and more events are moving to Shanghai, and Beijing is on the wane. International art fairs have changed the ecosystem here. Local galleries keep the best works for Hong Kong, which forces the collectors to travel to the fair. Therefore, an art fair is not only a commercial organisation, but also a power system, which selects the local galleries. In order to be selected, the galleries need to provide the best programmes and certify their influence over the collectors – by contributing their local collector resources to the art fair. Fairs also crush each other. For example, Art Basel Hong Kong is moving to March next year, so in China the fairs in April and May will all be problematic. I am not a nationalist, but I think it is necessary to have a nationalist view on this. Ar Let’s go back to the ‘changing situation’. Who is getting more power or getting stronger in the current chapter? And who is crushed or weakened? PL Those international galleries with branches or representatives in China are becoming more and more successful. They are like the bulldozers, taking away everything created by the local galleries. Therefore the local galleries have no choice but to pursue quick success and instant benefits, to survive the art-fair mechanism. And the big galleries also create a monotonous taste. Ar Can artists deal with this situation? PL I have met a lot of interesting artists, for example, in those new small galleries in Shanghai and Beijing. I don’t know very much now, but from what I have seen, there is potential and possibility. I think Shanghai is now seemingly more energetic than Beijing, because the big international galleries haven’t touched it yet. But I can’t really answer this question at the moment. Let’s wait and see. The evaluation system in China is still quite monotonous. There should be the museum and biennial system, the critics and the market, but in China, the only centre is the market. I am not sure if the value system will be diversified or not. But I know that if it shakes, artists will surely be awakened. Ar The last 20 or 30 years in China have created a group of what we call ‘established artists’. Some people think that they have too great a position and that younger artists have to face this internal situation as well as a changed, external environment. Where is the space for these young artists? PL From my point of view, they are just less lucky. The older generation got lots of opportunities via the postcolonism discourse. But since

2008, as Western leftists have lost their favourable impression of Chinese contemporary art, the concept of ‘Chinese contemporary art’ itself has also disappeared. The younger artists must separate their own work from the idea of ‘Chinese contemporary art’. They must be artists first, individuals. Then a more equal relationship will begin. Ar What’s the challenge, then, for those artists who were successful during those first 20 years? PL It is determined by the next economic trend. If the Chinese economy becomes more conservative and domestically oriented, they will have a better chance. Because a conservative society always needs cultural difference, or uniqueness. If the economy is getting more export-oriented and more liberal, they might face some problems. But it is very dangerous to talk about ‘those artists’. I have been looking at them for years – most of them are painters who have used the same language and style for 10 or 20 years, and it will be too difficult for them to change rapidly.

China is a country in which expression is severely limited. Even the most successful artists can only speak a special code in a relatively secret world. In this way, art does create a new elite, but it is a silent elite… I’m waiting to see art that is capable of intervening in social events We need to observe them over a long timescale, and to evaluate them case-by-case. It is easy to think that those artists are not so creative now, but who knows what they will be when they are in their sixties or seventies? Let’s wait and see. Ar What is art’s role in Chinese society? Is it related to everyday life? PL Let’s look at it from a different angle: how is art accepted in everyday life? I think in China, art is seen as a kind of fashion, a kind of success story. I think it is not so different in Western society. Ar Is art an alternative way to create a social elite? PL Yes and no. It does create many stars, but in the end China is a country in which expression is severely limited. Even the most successful artists can only speak a special code in a relatively secret world. In this way, art does create a new elite, but it is a silent elite. I am not saying everyone should act like Li Xianting or Ai Weiwei, but any elite that wishes to have a social impact must

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have personal points of view on public affairs and a public platform to express them. At this moment I can see art that is abstract or aesthetic, but I am waiting to see art that is capable of intervening in social events. Ar In the global art pattern, is Chinese art a better participant today than it was before? PL I think that is what I am working on at M+. From the 1980s to the 2010s, whenever we explained Chinese contemporary art, we always located it somewhere outside the mainstream artworld – Chinese art was first socialist, then orientalist… We were always emphasising its differences, because only by doing so could it have its own selling point. But that also caused new culture barriers. Chinese art has entered the circulation of international art since the 1990s – I think it is just as important to establish an international understanding of it. So where we used to talk about difference, now we talk about understanding. Only when the new understanding is established can younger artists finally step onto a bigger, brighter stage. Ar Have Chinese artists contributed something valuable (not just valued by price) to the world? PL Sure, like the works of Huang Yong Ping, Gu Dexin and Chen Zhen, which expanded Chinese art from symbolic figurative expressions to a more conceptual level. Their works are not only rooted in local cultural tradition, but are located and developed in global art families as well. Therefore, their value will be more recognised over time. And Ai Weiwei, although today he has become something of a structural and stressful power, back in 2007–8 he brought art to society’s attention. His being overinterpreted is another issue, not the one we are focusing on. And the local interests and development in ink art, cinema and photography are also part of China’s cultural contribution to the world. Ar If there is a ghost haunting the artworld in China, what is it? PL The lack of freedom of speech. It is crushing the core value of art. I hope it is just temporary. Ar In general, is art playing a positive role in Chinese society? PL I think so. The fact that we are talking about these matters now is of great significance. You can still see a number of interesting developments in China in recent years, for example the development of small and new galleries and of fairs in Shanghai, of artists’ self-organising in Beijing, and young artists and curators who studied aboard coming back home. In this sense, Chinese art is in its time of globalisation. It is not the best of times, it is not the worst of times. ar

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A Moral 100? Some things get you nowhere on the big list – things like ethics, values, modesty, etc. And that tends to make some people very upset. So what would this list look like if those values were the ones that counted? ArtReview asked one of its UK-based dreamers to have a think… by Neal Brown So who is on ArtReview’s Moral Power 100 list this year? Who has are always around. Michael Landy was delisted ever since he failed moved up or down it, or is new to it, since last year? And how, exactly, to go naked, even for a few seconds, after destroying all his worldly can a hierarchy of ‘moral power’ be arrived at in the context of the art- possessions. Matthew Higgs is also delisted, following crimes of intraworld, anyway? (Aren’t ‘moral’ and ‘power’ and ‘art’ in a permanently imperialist contradictions against the people. Billy Childish (62-ish, conflicted relationship with each other?) These questions have no cantankerous but holy) went up and up, but is now down slightly, answers, because there is no such thing as a Moral Power 100 list. The after signing with big-bucks Lehmann Maupin. (Worldly success is following list is only an experiment. It exists because ArtReview maga- not intrinsically bad, but poverty and starvation are better.) Camden zine – powerful and moral, its heart aflame with ideas of truth and Arts Centre (65, quiet excellence, no celebrity toxicity) displaced the justice – is generously giving it space. For which, thank you, ArtReview Serpentine Gallery (ill with celebrity toxicity) years ago. Chisenhale (66) remain high up, conditional on regular unannounced inspec– you can go high up the list. It’s usually best to start with definitions, but we’ll make an excep- tions to ensure they really do only employ females. The Henry Moore tion here. If you’re the kind of person who assumes an equivalence Institute scores well (68, excellence, modesty), as do Cubitt, Tate, Raven between moral and moralism, stop reading: we know you consider it an Row and Matt’s Gallery (the 70s, all of them). There are zero – repeat, zero – curators on the list. Other artists affront to see ethically sourced bananas The folk on the official 100 list are when you go shopping. Although bainclude Patrick Keiller, Mark McGowan, nanas do not give moralising lectures, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Mark – how shall we put it? – probably not you feel they do. But moral evaluations Wallinger, along with amateur and – ethics, values or whatever you want to as interested in love, truth and justice as children’s art, and of course the very religious Chapman brothers (74, total call them – are matters of life and death, those on the Moral list. Basically, it’s the moral fervour). Laura Moffatt and Art not bananas. The folk on the official moral lot who are nicer to kittens. Power 100 list are – how shall we put it? and Christian Enquiry magazine (75) do – probably not as interested in love, truth and justice as those on the well, as does Art Monthly (76, constancy of social duty). These magaMoral list. Although only a few dozen are actually criminally insane, zines underpin art’s moral life… and their anachronistic design styles they tend, as a group, to stop slightly short of God’s image. Basically, are inspirational. it’s the moral lot who are nicer to kittens. Our list helps tell them apart. Then there are the art book dealers – all of them – but especially The first 1 to 50 or so are anonymous. They are so modest or over- Franz König. Specialist art publishers are next. The ICA (79), Common looked that they are invisible. Their moral power is arrived at through Practice London (80), Peer (81) and the National Art Library (85) can be having no power – a subversion of the usual values. But we can guess noted, Critics (as a group) should, but do not, come in high. Individual who they are. Some might be in the therapeutic categories: caring for critics do well, but it’s best not to attract the death squads upon them traumatised patients by alleviating, through art, psychic suffering. by naming names. Remarkably, only one gallerist makes it, Steve Lowe Or perhaps they are educationalists: assisting children suffering of L-13. Studio providers like ACAVA, Space and Kingsgate are there. economic or emotional poverty, or lost souls in prison. Librarians, Charidee is off, but charity is on. Rolf Harris is off. Philosophy is both administrators, toilet cleaners and museum guards are among them, on and off. as well as toiling kitchen workers, staff who serve at opening parties So who is number one? The problem with humility and anonymity and people like that. (There’s a widow who supports Tate, whose is that you can never tell who is practising it. It may just be that penny donation is part-funding a new wing.) These are usually con- someone on the Power 100 list (or similar) is – quietly, modestly – sidered the little people. So it’s nice to big them up a bit, on our list. doing fine, noble things. Thus, such a person (a collector?) could be on the Power 100 list, but also make the Moral Power 100. It is that Thanks, guys. Numbers 54 to 100 are more visible. Artists Richard Wentworth (58, complicated, lovely confusion of a person, whoever you are, who we good spirit) and Jeremy Deller (60, unceasing, good social intention) choose to be number one. ar

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Kenny Louie, Kitten in Rizal Park, Manila. Licensed under Creative Commons

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30 Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood

Gallerists All British Last Year: 32/ new / new

Artists Russian / Mexican / American Last Year: 21

In June, London’s long-established Lisson, under the directorship of founder Nicholas Logsdail, son Alex (international director) and Greg Hilty (curatorial director), confirmed plans to open a new 800sqm gallery in Chelsea, New York, an addition to Lisson’s two London spaces and one in Milan. The new gallery, to be headed up by Alex, is scheduled to open in the first half of next year. While continuing to promote both younger and senior artists – as a surface scratch, Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei and Lee Ufan had major museum exhibitions, Cory Arcangel delved into art history to excavate Andy Warhol’s digital art and septuagenarian painter Joyce Pensato joined the gallery – Lisson continued the general trend of emphasising its institutionlike status by expanding its talks programme and cohosting a pop-up exhibition of sculpture by gallery artists during this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

Celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, e-flux retains its curious status in New York as a locus for exhibitions and critical discussion, an identity that coexists with its more international profile as a lucrative press-release service, publishing house, review site and journal (both on- and offline). In their long-running bid to ICAnn to become the administrators of the .art domain, this year e-flux joined forces with online art community site DeviantArt to send a strongly worded open letter to the ICAnn Board and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), imploring them to save the future from purely commercial interests. An important platform for the ideas of thinkers including Hito Steyerl, Boris Groys and others, e-flux earns its place on the list for its inventiveness with the forms that artistic activity can take, and its direct interventions into the systems of distribution and economics that continue to shape what we see.

31 Isa Genzken

32 Jay Jopling

Artist German Last Year: 35

Gallerist British Last Year: 22

Wherever young artists are getting their theoretical ideas, their aesthetics frequently look a lot like Isa Genzken’s – shiny, ominous, urbanite assemblages of repurposed objects and imagery. This year the German artist’s exhibition schedule found her seemingly omnipresent: while her firebreathing MoMA retrospective closed in March and then toured to Chicago and Dallas, a different and relatively austere retrospective, I’m Isa Genzken the Only Female Fool, took up residence in Vienna’s Kunsthalle, and another show commandeered seven rooms of Edinburgh’s Inverleith House. It’s been Genzken’s moment for a while and she’s not going to let us forget it. Asked, this year, by Interview magazine (in a rare interview) what viewers could expect in future, she mentioned outdoor works and said, ‘I will only exhibit sculptures in the future that will enrich their surroundings’. As if that hadn’t always been the case.

Jopling was the Great YBA Survivor – and he’s still the man to go to for the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn, et al – but lately there’s been a concerted effort to reinvigorate White Cube’s artist stable and expand the business. That it is David Hammons’s venue of choice for London exhibitions says a lot, as does the fact that it represents international heavyweights such as Theaster Gates, Anselm Kiefer and Doris Salcedo. And White Cube is bringing on a younger generation of artists such as Elad Lassry and Eddie Peake. Its expansion to São Paulo has had a muted response in Brazil, however (it’s only picked up one Brazilian artist, Jac Leirner), and former head of exhibitions Tim Marlow’s departure to the Royal Academy will lead to a change of pace. But with the biggest commercial space in London, plus São Paulo and a Hong Kong outpost, Jopling has room in which to manoeuvre.

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29 Nicholas Logsdail: Photo Ken Adlard Alex Logsdail: Photo Luiza Xavier Greg Hilty: Photo Lisson Gallery, London 30 Courtesy e-flux, New York 31 Photo: Elizabeth Webb 32 Photo: Hugo Rittson-Thomas

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29 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty

33 Photo: Patrick McMullan 34 Photo: Matteo De Fina 35 Courtesy the Broad Foundation, New York 36 Photo: Karl Kolbitz

33 RoseLee Goldberg

34 François Pinault

Curator South African Last Year: 24

Collector French Last Year: 19

Not content with having written the book on performance art (Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 1978 / 2011) and almost singlehandedly dragged it back to prominence in contemporary art practice (commercial galleries, museums and even art fairs have now co-opted it as a central part of their programmes), via Performa, the organisation best-known for its biennial New York-based festival celebrating performance as an artform and its commissioning of new works, often from artists for whom performance had not, up to then, been a key medium, RoseLee Goldberg is now also the go-to person for commentary on performance in general. When curiousanimal.com wanted a commentary on the papier-maché-headed antics of Frank Sidebottom to coincide with the release of Lenny Abrahamson’s movie Frank (2014), to whom did they turn? RoseLee, of course.

A low-key year for France’s second-richest man, even if the big contemporary art sales in New York in May at his auction house, Christie’s, more than doubled those of his main rivals. His Palazzo Grassi exhibition space in Venice also attracted giant crowds. Work proceeds apace on his ambitious artist-residence project in the city of Lens in northern France, and big-item purchases like Adel Abdessemed’s black marble edition of the head-butting Zinedine Zidane (Coup de Tête, 2012) continue unabated. Yet the luxury-goods billionaire, who converted his Haunch of Venison gallery space in London into Christie’s private saleroom in 2013, has relinquished the stranglehold on the market that made him number one on the power list in 2006 and 2007.

35 Eli & Edythe Broad

36 Wolfgang Tillmans

Collectors Both American Last Year: 28

Artist German Last Year: 44

Forbes estimates Eli Broad’s fortune at $7.2bn. And a staggering $2.2bn of that is said to take the form of art. Where to put all those assets? The Broad Art Foundation, which the couple formed in 1984, has made over 8,000 loans to more than 500 institutions around the world. Next year however that might change, when the founding chairman of MOCA Los Angeles and his wife open their long-awaited $140m private museum, the Broad. To fan the fire of anticipation, they tapped a series of major artists – including Takashi Murakami, John Currin and Jeff Koons – for a series of attention-grabbing talks held under the Broad banner. The worry among those who have relied on the philanthropist couple’s support in the past is that their time and money are now concentrated on this new project. Perhaps that’s also because Eli Broad’s self-help book is called The Art of Being Unreasonable (2012).

This year, Tillmans’s work popped up everywhere from Manifesta in St Petersburg to the Venice Architecture Biennale to the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition in London: proof, if needed, that once his (newly digital) camera has gone everywhere – as it seemingly has – then his art can too. Our most important photographic artist also joined a megagallery, David Zwirner, while at the same time his relaunched Between Bridges space in Berlin found him initiating a ‘Playback Room’: a gallery for sound, starting with the semiforgotten 1980s music of Colourbox, because there is ‘no dedicated space or place where one can go to to hear the works of musicians with the studio sound quality that the original recording was made in’. Some artists do world-straddling ambition, others attend to small and transitory joys, and still others restlessly pioneer new formats of reception. Tillmans, uniquely, does all three.

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38 Pierre Huyghe

Art Fair Directors Both British Last Year: 27

Artist French Last Year: 45

In September Slotover and Sharp announced a major restructuring of the art fair management within the Frieze brand they founded, handing over the directorship of Frieze London (established 2003), Frieze New York and Frieze Masters (both established 2012) to colleague Victoria Siddall, director of Frieze Masters since its inception. In addition they will be creating two new artistic directors to assist Siddall, Joanna Stella-Sawicka, another Frieze insider, to be based in London, and an (at the time unnamed) equivalent in New York. Slotover and Sharp stated that the reason for their decision was to allow them ‘to focus on the future and to explore new projects for Frieze’, which has inevitably led to speculation about new fairs and new magazines, both met by denials, in the initial round of postannouncement probing. Similar questioning about the possibility of a new fair for China, following Slotover’s research trip to Beijing in August, resulted in the same response, for the short term at least.

39 Steve McQueen

40 Gavin Brown

Artist British Last Year: 36

Gallerist British Last Year: 34

The whirlwind of international media attention that surrounded McQueen’s BAFTA- and multi-Oscar-winning feature film, 12 Years a Slave (2013), might have given mainstream cinema as much entitlement as the artworld to claim the Turner Prize-winning artist as one of their own. But despite taking himself out of the running for the 2014 Hugo Boss Award earlier this year (due to commitments promoting 12 Years…), McQueen has no interest in taking sides. In April he premiered Ashes (2014), a quiet and poetic short film incorporating footage shot on Super 8 in Grenada in 2002, at the Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, and now showing at London’s Thomas Dane gallery. McQueen’s next project may see him taking on another screen-based medium: in August the artist held opening castings in New York for an HBO TV series described as ‘Six Degrees of Separation meets Shame’.

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His heterotopic midcareer survey show steamrolled Paris and Cologne, and will most probably do the same in Los Angeles this month, picking up new sculptures, films, performances, puppets, bugs, fish and viruses at each stop, and attracting some of the biggest audiences to ever witness highbrow contemporary art. The Hugo Boss Prize winner also joined Hauser & Wirth, and his show at the Swiss powerhouse’s London gallery in September was among the most talked-about of the season. What’s next? The cerebral second-generation conceptualist is in an enviable position: his deterritorialising world-as-readymade approach to art production is unstoppable, and the success of his Midaslike touch – everything he touches turns to art – means he can find seemingly limitless funding to fold everything in his mind and in his wake into his art.

ArtReview

When collector Dasha Zhukova was photographed sitting on a sculpture by Bjarne Melgaard, a blaxploitation version of one of Allen Jones’s furniture sculptures of trussed-up S/M women, Brown was having none of the media’s faux outrage. With Melgaard, he released a statement: ‘We applaud both the sitter and the seated. To fault the sitter, now in the age of the Anthropocene, in the midst of enormous and real obscenities that threaten our actual existence, reflects a civilization that is not dying but already dead.’ Elizabeth Peyton may have left the gallery, but the introduction of Joan Jonas and Ed Atkins, and a just-announced supplementary space at the Chinatown end of Grand Street make up for that. Add to this 356 Mission, the LA-space run and programmed jointly with Wendy Yao and gallery artist Laura Owens (pictured with Brown above), the programme of which is heavily populated with Gavin Brown artists.

37 Photo: Jonathan Hökklo. Courtesy Frieze / Jonathan Hökklo 38 Photo: Olga Rindal 39 Photo: Thierry Bal. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London 40 Courtesy Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

37 Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp

41 Photo: Juergen Teller 42 Photo: Maria Marches 43 © Ryan Trecartin. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin & London 44 Photo: Sara Pooley

41 Sadie Coles

42 Dakis Joannou

Gallerist British Last Year: 55

Collector Greek Last Year: 37

Sarah Lucas, at the time one of the less well known YBA artists, was one of the first artists Coles showed after establishing her first gallery, in London’s Heddon Street, in 1997. Seventeen years on, Coles is one of London’s most active and high-profile gallerists, and Lucas will be representing Britain in Venice in 2015. Coles currently has three London spaces, and she needs them, with a list of nearly 50 represented artists, including John Currin, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Hilary Lloyd, Urs Fischer, John Bock, Matthew Barney and Helen Marten, participating in gallery and museum shows around the globe. Coles may have scaled up in size and influence, but rather than change her approach, she has simply scaled that up accordingly.

Art Basel is one of the biggest events in the artworld calendar, right? So what of the guy who can persuade dozens of top-notch professionals to cut their Swiss trip short and head to Greece? The Greek collector did not need to go to Art Basel, he apparently told Artforum’s Scene & Herd; the artists come to him. And who would argue with that? This is the man who kept Jeff Koons afloat during the difficult years and now owns a boat decorated by the great man. Last year he got Maurizio Cattelan to design his furniture catalogue. This year the opening days of Joannou’s earlyJune exhibition of self-portraits by Juergen Teller at his Deste Foundation in Athens were attended by at least half a dozen of the faces you see dotted around these pages: Iwan Wirth, Adam Szymczyk, Richard Chang, Sadie Coles, Massimiliano Gioni, Burkhard Riemschneider. And longtime favourite Paweł Althamer occupied the Slaughterhouse, Joannou’s small space on the artworld-hangout island of Hydra. Now that’s pulling power.

43 Ryan Trecartin

44 Theaster Gates

Artist American Last Year: 64

Artist American Last Year: 40

Profiled in The New Yorker in March as a ‘video-art visionary’ whose work is ‘full of breaking news about the future’, the savviest reflector of Internet-imprinted selfhood appears neither distracted by plaudits nor out of ideas. In September, at KW in Berlin, Trecartin (with longstanding collaborator Lizzie Fitch) launched his most ambitious installation to date: alongside a sound installation for massage chairs was Site Visit (2014), a crash-pad cinema for a stunningly edited multiscreen film, partly shot using drones and mixing live footage and weightless CGI. Trecartin then dashed to reboot his 2013 Venice Biennale sprawl, Priority Innfield, for London’s Zabludowicz Collection, followed by another solo show in LA; after that, he’ll presumably focus on cocurating (with Lauren Cornell) next year’s New Museum Triennial.

Visual artist, social activist, urban planner, musical performer, teacher: from his base in Chicago, Gates has been redefining the role of the artist. As founder of the Rebuild Foundation, Gates has developed what The New York Times describes as a ‘circular economy’ in which his large-scale arts-and-education-based urban renewal projects on the South Side of his hometown as well as in St Louis and Omaha are financed through the sale of his artworks, created from materials salvaged during the process. Now something of a public figure, the range of awards and honours he has received in the past year alone speaks for itself: after receiving the Medal for Sculpture in the Expanded Field at the Skowhegan Awards, Gates saw the Place Project (which he leads) awarded a $3.5m Knight Foundation Grant, was invited to give the 2014 Lewis Mumford Lecture on urbanism at CUNY and is currently shortlisted for the Artes Mundi prize in Wales.

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46 Barbara Gladstone

Museum Director American Last Year: 57

Gallerist American Last Year: 29

The thing about being a museum director these days is that only a small percentage of your time is spent thinking about art. So sure, Govan, who since taking over in 2006 has made LACMA Los Angeles’s premier art institution, got to enjoy the process of staging the yearlong James Turrell retrospective that ended in May, or last December’s Calder show (which Christopher Knight in the LA Times called ‘a wonder… beautiful’). And he can look forward to Pierre Huyghe’s show opening later this month. Yet the majority of Govan’s time is spent worrying about the bank balance (the director has estimated needing $450m to realise the museum’s Peter Zumthor-designed extension, with an additional $200m for operations), a meagre endowment ($115m) and curveball crises caused by the protection of neighbouring tar pits (which forced a redesign of the capital project). Still, if there is one man who can deal with all that, it’s Govan.

The proprietor of Gladstone always has a lot on her plate – and not just the infamous Chicken Knickers (1997), on the menu during Sarah Lucas’s exhibition at one of Gladstone’s two Chelsea, New York, galleries in March. The artists she shows span the complete spectrum of practice and ages, from market heavyweights such as Anish Kapoor to bright young things such as Claudia Comte. Besides the New York and Brussels galleries she operates, her artists’ institutional commitments must occupy whatever is left of her time. Just a taste: Allora & Calzadilla were shown by the gallerist in September in the wake of a solo show at Redcat, Los Angeles, and turns in the Gwangju Biennale and 14 Rooms at Art Basel; Thomas Hirschhorn had solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo and the Schinkel Pavilion, as well as performing the star turn at Manifesta; Shirin Neshat had solo shows in Seoul, Budapest and New York. Oh, and earlier this year painter Elizabeth Peyton joined the Gladstone family.

47 Hito Steyerl

48 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi

Artist German Last Year: 69

Foundation Director Emirati Last Year: 48

You’d forgive artist/filmmaker/writer Hito Steyerl for not putting one of her hugely influential, hard-driving, devoured-by-every-post-Internetartist essays up on e-flux Journal this year (aside from her ‘fan prose’ eulogy for kindred spirit Harun Farocki). ‘Circulationism’, the buzzword she coined that describes so much recent art, still has life in it (even if we’re apparently ‘post-Circulationism’ now), and anyway Steyerl’s been busy wearing her other hats: mounting major surveys of her videos at London’s ICA and Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum, and a new installation in Beirut, while continuing her professorship of new media art in Berlin. Steyerl’s recent films have focused on types of escape act – from the financial crisis, from the extreme visibility entrained by social media – but as long as her finger remains so firmly on the pulse, she’s going to stay highly visible.

You’d think the sheikha, as president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, would be spending all her time gearing up for next year’s Sharjah Biennial (directed by Eungie Joo and for which the foundation is responsible), the upcoming instalments of the foundation’s increasingly important annual March Meeting (at which issues relating to the production, distribution and organisation of the arts are debated), and administering the various grants, residencies, commissions and other public and educational initiatives that come under its purview. You’d be wrong. She’s an active participant on the boards of MoMA PS1, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, the International Biennial Association, Gwangju, and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. She’ll also be one of the curators of the UAE Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale. And in between all that, she found time to pick up the Kennedy Center Arts Gold Medal last April.

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45 Photo: Catherine Opie 46 Photo: Lena C. Emery 47 Photo: Thomas Meyer 48 Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

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45 Michael Govan

49 Agnes Gund

50 Liam Gillick

Collector American Last Year: 43

Artist British Last Year: 42

49 Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 50 Courtesy Liam Gillick 51 Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 52 © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy KUSAMA Enterprise, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Singapore, and Victoria Miro, London

An online search for Gillick in 2014 throws up as many references to film as to art. Alongside his credible acting debut in Joanna Hogg’s 2013 feature film, Exhibition (released in 2014), he made his own short film, Hamilton: A Film by Liam Gillick, a homage to the late artist Richard Hamilton, to coincide with Tate Modern and the ICA London’s retrospective showings of Hamilton’s work earlier in the year. Having long disregarded distinctions between the roles of artist, activist, writer, critic and teacher, and between definitions of art, design, architecture and discourse, Gillick’s complex practice is hard to categorise but ensures he’s always in demand. Solo gallery shows in 2014 included Revenons à Nos Moutons at Esther Schipper, Berlin, Complete Bin Development at Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, and From 199C to 199D at Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, the second part of his collaborative project with students of the Center for Curatorial Studies at New York’s Bard College.

Back in 2005 the collector and philanthropist declared, ‘I don’t want to be in-name-only for committees’. Nine years later there is more than enough evidence to suggest she stands by this vow. ‘Aggie’ Gund doesn’t just dash into MoMA once in a while to fulfil her role as its president emerita or as chairman of MoMA PS1; she gets involved. In September she even appeared on PS1 director Klaus Biensenbach’s Instagram feed doing stretches in preparation for a rehearsal of a Xavier Le Roy performance (the artist currently has a show at PS1). Besides MoMA, Gund chairs the Mayor of New York’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, is founder of the Studio in a School Association, is on the board of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and is honorary trustee of Independent Curators International and, in her hometown of Cleveland, of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She collects, she donates, she’s irrepressible.

51 Anne Pasternak

52 Yayoi Kusama

Curator American Last Year: 47

Artist Japanese Last Year: 67

Highs and lows for Creative Time this year. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, a giant sugar Negress posed like a Sphinx, was both critically lauded and incessantly, sometimes offensively Instagrammed. A tricky moment arrived when over 100 artists and intellectuals, including Lucy Lippard and Walid Raad, signed a petition calling for artists to withdraw from ‘Living as Form’, a Creative Time exhibition put together by the organisation’s influential chief curator, Nato Thompson, which toured to the Technion in Israel, a university and research centre connected to military technologies then being used to bomb Palestine. Black Radical Brooklyn, four projects set around Weeksville, a community centre in Brooklyn, met with a warm reception, however, highlighting an important history while creating artist-led community projects.

No doubt the crowds who queued for up to eight hours to get 45 seconds inside Kusama’s twinkling LED-filled installation Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, at the artist’s inaugural solo show at David Zwirner, New York, last year, were as much an indication of the human desire for an escapist, immersive sensory experience (and the FOMO effect of social media) as they were about the power of art. Still, there’s no denying the influence of the eighty-five-year-old artist behind it. Kusama combines the accessibility of a superbrand – putting her dotty motif on everything from keyrings and T-shirts to sought-after paintings and giant bronze pumpkins – with a back catalogue of work that places her at the heart of New York’s 1960s avant-garde art scene and sales figures over the last decade exceeding £100m.

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54 Thomas Hirschhorn

Auction House Director British Last Year: 50

Artist Swiss Last Year: 39

Just as you were the settling in to read last November’s Power 100 issue, Gorvy, the chairman and international head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s auction house, saw his New York saleroom hammer down Francis Bacon’s triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) for $142.4m (£88.3m), the most expensive contemporary artwork ever sold at auction. That figure, along with the current vogue among collectors for paying high prices at auction for new works by very young artists, goes perhaps a little way towards accounting for the fact that sales of contemporary art now account for close to half of all auction business. For Gorvy, it’s booming, and with new collectors flooding in there’s no sign of a bust in sight. In a market like this one, and when your auction house is top of the food chain – Christie’s had record sales of just under £800m in the first six months of 2014, a rise of 20 percent over the same period in 2013 – you’re going to have to move jobs before you’ll be off this list.

At a time in which the disappearance of nonmonetised public space sparks violent protests, Thomas Hirschhorn’s political, relational work resonates more than ever. The Swiss artist’s populist moment began in earnest in the summer of 2013 with Gramsci Monument, an installationcum-community centre in a South Bronx housing project. This year, Hirschhorn brought the public back indoors with Flamme Éternelle in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo. Made with his usual low-budget materials (a stagelike structure of old tyres, brown packing tape, a campfire as literal eternal flame), the installation created a platform that encouraged visitors to communicate and contemplate; computer stations, 200-odd artistic collaborations, a working bar and the artist’s constant presence didn’t hurt, either. And Hirschhorn’s Abschlag was also a highlight at Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg. Has his vision become a kind of artworld Occupy movement? Perhaps, and it’s not a bad thing at all.

55 Christopher Wool

56 Eugenio López

Artist American Last Year: NEW

Collector Mexican Last Year: 66

In June Jerry Saltz penned an article for New York magazine asking, ‘Why does so much new abstraction look the same?’ He may as well have titled it, ‘Why does so much new abstraction look like Christopher Wool’s work?’ In addition to last winter’s solo show at the Guggenheim, New York (which travelled to Chicago) and a record sale at Christie’s in November, in which his 1988 painting Apocalypse Now fetched $26.5m, Wool is on this list for his influence on process-based painters. The legacy of his ‘gray paintings’, washy abstractions the artist has been producing since the early 2000s, can be found in the work of Angel Otero, Josh Smith and Korakrit Arunanondchai, and his smeared silkscreening is deep in the DNA of Wade Guyton’s art. Likewise Wool’s blocky text paintings have been iconic enough to be directly quoted by as diverse a range of artists as Michel Majerus (who died in 2002) and more recently Jose Dávila.

After two decades collecting, and eight years planning, López’s Museo Jumex finally opened in November 2013 with a weekend of tequila and Jumex-juice-fuelled festivities, and celebrity rubbernecking. A worldclass art museum in Mexico City, designed to house international exhibitions as well as displays from the Fundación Jumex collection, the David Chipperfield-designed building is distinguished by what The New York Times applauded as ‘a sort of British reserve’ in a city ‘renowned for homegrown architectural eccentricity’. The display was rather more divisive – too much art-by-numbers (Warhol? Tick. Hirst? Tick. Koons? Tick) and not enough of the Mexican art in which López’s collection is so strong, thought some – but it’s early days, and a subsequent programme mixed displays of canonical heft (Cy Twombly), buzzy young’uns (Danh Vō) and local stars (Abraham Cruzvillegas).

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53 Brett Gorvy in front of Warhol’s Triple Elvis. © 2014 the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Christie’s, New York 54 Photo: Alexander Bikbov 55 Photo: Aubrey Mayer 56 Courtesy Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City

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53 Brett Gorvy

Udo Kittelmann 58

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Anselm Franke 83

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Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 11

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Marc Spiegler 14

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Esme Buden with her mother, Hito Steyerl 47

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End-of-an-Era Qatar The emirate’s love affair with global art wanes in the shifting sands of its politics by Kevin Jones Qatar is an anxious place. Some unease stems from simple popula- while triangulated tensions between the government, the public and tion imbalance: 85 percent of the nearly two million residents are Qatar Museums ignite social media. Within this domestic context, non-Qatari expatriates, leaving the curiously minority locals to fend there is cause to wonder if contemporary art has not become a liability off the challenges of a smothered identity. Occasional media flare-ups in the kind of nation-building the emir has in mind. The sheikha’s by incensed columnists rallying to rein in perceived expat excesses funding of artists and exhibitions subsequently roped into the Qatar – notably Faisal Al-Marzouqi’s Qatar Museums Authority-targeted cultural corral – Takashi Murakami at Versailles in 2010 followed by rants in the Al Arab newspaper in the summer of 2013, which mush- his 2012 exhibition, Murakami-Ego, in Doha; Damien Hirst’s 2012 Tate roomed on Twitter under the hashtag ‘What’s going on at the QMA?’ – Modern show, which segued into his 2013 Relics exhibit at Doha’s Al combine with regularly reinforced modesty-minded dresscodes Riwaq Art Space – is locally lacklustre. Much of the so-called daring and an increasingly visible aniconic slant to leave foreign residents public art Mayassa has introduced – Adel Abdessemed’s hotly critifeeling like they are perpetually transgressing. Looming above it all cised Coup de Tête (2013) immortalising the French footballer Zidane’s is ‘Qatar National Vision 2030’, the framework document that will inglorious 2006 headbutting of Italian player Marco Materazzi, or transit the peninsula state away from its finite resources towards a Hirst’s weirdly monumental Miraculous Journey (2013) series of 14 flourishing of human capital. It reads like a must-have list for any bronze statues covering the steps of foetal gestation – have done little globally serious state: world-class healthcare infrastructure, check; to help her cause in the eyes of a local public that is at once confused environmental preservation, check; diversified local workforce, and conformist. check. The countdown ticks away even as the country finds itself “The public is timid,” confides a long-time Doha Arab expat embroiled on the world stage with the now jeopardised 2022 FIFA resident and former cultural sector employee. “They are afraid to push the door of a gallery or see a show. World Cup bid and accusations of funding There is an uneasy hollowness Even expats.” While the Hirst retrospecIslamists of an unsavoury ilk. Expressions of soft power abroad abound, undaunted. to cultivating public discourse on tive was a benchmark, audience-wise, for Qatar is so well known for its deep investTate, in Doha, organisers resorted to ‘pull’ a diamond-encrusted skull when tactics to generate interest. The world-class ment in key Western interests – Harrods and the Shard skyscraper in London, that same public has no say in social marketing rollout consisted of an ersatz for example; Printemps and Paris Saintshark tank hitched to a 4×4 and towed policy or urban investment Germain FC across the Channel – that around town, a succession of higher-ordersculptor Richard Serra’s recent East-West/West-East (2014) installation benefit-touting ads on art appreciation (‘This is not just a diamond in the Qatari desert could perhaps be read on a deeper level than mere encrusted skull’, promises the headline copy) and ‘SharePoints’ set up in shopping malls for potential viewers to register their thoughts geographical coordinates. An end-of-an-era atmosphere prevails in Doha. The June 2013 on Hirst’s art. Similarly, Serra’s sculpture benefited from a hashtag ascension of the new emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, campaign inviting visitors to complete the sentence ‘I felt…’ with a signalled a shift away from past slow-burn, out-of-the-limelight single word. Rounded up in a word cloud on the website, the result cultural endeavours – his mother, Sheikha Mozah, was instrumental in (both ‘big’ and ‘small’ vie for position as the plumpest word) seems Qatari education modernisation, while Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed far less telling than the very process of canvassing popular opinion in bin Ali Al-Thani (founder of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, an absolute monarchy. There is an uneasy hollowness to cultivating and deputy chair of Qatar Museums, as the former Authority is now public discourse on a diamond-encrusted skull when that same known) was quietly amassing a motherlode of modern Arab art, long public has no say in social policy or urban investment. before Sheikha Mayassa’s buying binges and blockbuster spectacle. Increasingly, though, voices will matter. Insiders tell of a body of His trove constitutes the core collections of the Mathaf, yet these are work to be featured in the upcoming Jean Nouvel-designed Qatar rarely displayed. Sheikh Hassan himself, like Sheikha Mozah, has been National Museum – the National Oral History Project. Predicated on the knowledge that much of the nation’s past cultural wealth has eclipsed by Mayassa’s globally publicised collecting practices. The new emir seems to be shunning soft power for a harder been constituted orally, rather than imaged, the project sets out to approach at home. The mood is decidedly disciplinarian: police document this history. Yet as the collection and recording campaign presence has increased, as have closures of nightlife venues serving unfolds, one question resounds: whose voice will be heard? Will the alcohol. Rumours augur massive layoffs in certain sectors (on the voices so keenly solicited in cultural hashtag campaigns be asked to heels of 40 redundancies at the Doha Film Institute earlier this year), contribute to this institutionalised, lasting narrative? ar

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The centrepiece of the marketing campaign for Damien Hirst’s Relics exhibition, held at Al Riwaq Art Space, Doha, during 2013–14. Courtesy Scott Campbell, Doha

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57 Toby Webster & Andrew Hamilton

58 Udo Kittelmann

Gallerists Both British Last Year: 51 / NEW

Museum Director German Last Year: 49 The director for Berlin’s State Museums since 2008, Udo Kittelmann is currently confronting some structural issues – not so much in curation, but in construction. The Neue Nationalgalerie closes in early 2015 for several years to allow for long-overdue renovations and an expansion by architect David Chipperfield. The Museum Berggruen’s new expansion was closed in October 2013, six months after it opened, due to moisture and mould (a reopening is forthcoming). And the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, a Karl Friedrich Schinkel church where nineteenth-century German sculptures are normally on view, is also closed for renovations until further notice. The good news is that Kittelmann is busy acquiring contemporary wall works by the likes of Rosa Barba and Marjetica Potrč for the museums’ permanent collections. And best of all, Kittelmann has a number of monographic shows featuring female artists up his sleeve: in the works are shows by Mary Heilmann and Elaine Sturtevant. Hurrah.

60 Emmanuel Perrotin

Collector Swiss Last Year: 53

Gallerist French Last Year: 58

It’s a safe bet that few corporate chairmen are as involved in the artworld as the chief of the Ringier publishing empire. Though his business includes the German art magazine Monopol and JRP Ringier, the art book publisher whose recent output ranges from the Art Basel catalogue to artist Scott King’s graphic novel, it’s not for these that our man is included here. Ringier is an avid collector and all-round art fan. More than 200 works populate the publisher’s Zürich headquarters, and artists have been commissioned to design the company’s annual report since 1997 (last year it was Laura Owens). More of Ringier’s personal collection is made available to Pool, a programme that gives an emerging curator time with both Ringier’s and Maja Hoffmann’s art. This year Arthur Fink was the appointed fellow, staging a show at Luma / Westbau, Zürich.

The tentacular reach of France’s most extroverted gallerist continues to stretch out into new corners of the artworld aquarium. A giant new Paris gallery and party space opened a few months back, just down the road from the existing space, and the newish galleries in New York and Hong Kong have enjoyed solid years. Paris, however, remains the nerve centre of Perrotin’s ambitions. Many of this year’s shows there were of museum quality, with highbrow, artworld and pop-star curators (the Pharrell Williams-curated Girl launched the new Paris space), handsome catalogues, not-for-sale loans and Perrotin-funded commissions and other activities. Beyond the galleries Perrotin proved he is still the man to pull off ambitious and innovative projects, like the floating chalet by Kolkoz moored near the disused Marine Stadium at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

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60 Photo: Karl Lagerfeld

59 Michael Ringier

57 Photo: Michael Jones 58 Courtesy Udo Kittelmann 59 © Ringier AG

Webster and Hamilton’s gallery, The Modern Institute, met Scotland’s vote on independence with a show by English artist Jeremy Deller (which included Monarchs of the Glen (Richard Benyon MP has an unexpected meeting on his grouse moor with some raptors), 2014, a painting imagining the Tory landowner – and richest member of the House of Commons – dead and being mauled by various birds of prey, entrails flailing). But for the most part, aside from an incredible Richard Wright exhibition, the notable stuff this year lay beyond the Glasgow gallery spaces. Webster’s generation – now in their mid-forties – was venerated in a Scotland-wide survey of art that included a host of gallery artists showing across the nation’s public spaces. Elsewhere the gallerists continue to develop an international network. Following last year’s invitation to Standard (Oslo) to curate a show in Glasgow, Webster and Hamilton staged a show of gallery artists in Beirut, in February.

61 Alexander Rotter & Cheyenne Westphal

62 Matthew Marks

Auction House Directors Austrian / German Last Year: NEW / 52 (with Tobias Meyer)

Gallerist American Last Year: 46

61 Alexander Rotter: © Jenny Lewis Cheyenne Westphal: © Sotheby’s 62 Photo: Ezra Petronio 63 Photo: Curtis Anderson. Courtesy Sprüth Magers 64 Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich

Alexander Rotter and Cheyenne Westphal, the new worldwide heads of Sotheby’s contemporary department, oversee an auction empire with 90 locations worldwide, including ‘new’ markets such as Brazil, Argentina and Qatar. Rotter and Westphal have also been successfully developing their curated and thematic sales. September’s New York ‘Contemporary Curated’ sale netted $28.3m, exceeding estimates. In keeping with the theme of recognising provenance as key, Westphal is also the driving force behind Sotheby’s support of the annual Tate Britain Commission. It’s not all been plain sailing at Sotheby’s, but things might have settled now that activist shareholder Daniel Loeb’s long-running (and expensive) proxy fight with the board has come to an end. After all, he only wanted the company to become more profitable.

Once the furore of Art Basel’s VIP preview has subsided, conversation usually turns to which of the city’s many museum shows are unmissable. Matthew Marks must have been smiling at his booth: Charles Ray’s sculptures at the Kunstmuseum Basel seemed the prevailing top tip. It proved a good one, such was the exacting beauty of the works shown. A healthy crop of shows appeared across Marks’s four New York galleries and two LA spaces, too, including Ken Price, Darren Almond, Michel Majerus, Thomas Demand, Paul Sietsema and Rebecca Warren. But it is another museum show that proves the gallery’s 2014 highlight: Robert Gober’s current 13-room survey at MoMA, New York, which Roberta Smith described in The New York Times as ‘a partial, often painful portrait of a nation… It highlights some of the conditions of Americanness: the country’s triumphs and tragedies, its amazing grace and falls from same, its faith in a spirit unseen and preoccupation with sin.’

63 Rosemarie Trockel

64 Eva Presenhuber

Artist German Last Year: 41

Gallerist Austrian Last Year: 59

By her recent standards the past year has been a relatively quiet one for Trockel on the exhibition front. There was a solo show at New York’s Gladstone Gallery at the end of last year, another at the Paris gallery space of rebooted journal Cahiers d’Art and a survey of ceramic works from the past decade of her thirty-year career at the rebooted Aspen Art Museum. And, of course, her work featured in a number of group shows, among them the Gwangju Biennale. Featuring a wide range of media – sculpture, video, drawing, textiles to name but a few – Trockel’s oeuvre is notoriously hard to pin down, but that didn’t stop her picking up the CHF 150,000 Roswitha Haftmann Prize, the biggest in Europe, in recognition of both the importance of her extraordinary artistic output and the influence she exerts on younger artists, in part through 16 years of teaching in her role as Professor of Sculpture at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

‘Besides talent and ambition, an artist needs a lot of endurance,’ gallerist Eva Presenhuber has said about how she assesses potential charges – and what it takes to have a lasting artistic career. She clearly knows what she’s talking about, as the traits she’s looking for are ones she herself possesses in spades. Working from two huge exhibition spaces in Zürich, Presenhuber manages more than 30 artists, ranging from Ugo Rondinone to Latifa Echakhch, and is present at six or more major international art fairs a year – including Art Basel in Basel, for which the Austria-born dealer is a longtime selection-committee member. Her artists and staff tend to stick with her for years, but she’s always looking for the new – this summer she showed a Joe Bradley exhibition in a pop-up gallery on the posh Greek island of Antiparos, and a late-year group show in the Löwenbräu complex will feature Oscar Murillo and David Ostrowski.

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66 Tino Sehgal

Gallerist Brazilian Last Year: 61

Artist British-German Last Year: 54

With 40 years in the business, Luisa Strina remains the grande dame of the Paulistano gallery world. In 1974 her interests lay in introducing Brazil to the fruits of the American Pop art scene, showing the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol for the first time. Nowadays she represents some of the big guns of Brazilian art – during this year’s São Paulo Bienal, Strina hosted an architectural installation of coloured rooms by Cildo Meireles at the gallery, while Renata Lucas premiered the results of her 2013 Absolut Art Award commission during the ArtRio art fair. Currently showing at the gallery is the first show by Anna Maria Maiolino since she joined Strina earlier this year. It’s all very well being a big fish in a small pond – for many years São Paulo seemed far away indeed from the rest of the artworld – but now channels to the ocean have opened up and Strina is navigating them with aplomb.

If 2013 was the year of artworld laurels for his live, undocumentable encounter works – a Golden Lion at Venice, a much-fancied nomination for the Turner Prize – 2014 has felt like the global roll-out of brand Sehgal, kicking off with a revival of This Is So Contemporary (2005) at the Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and culminating in an exhibition of This Progress (2006) and This Variation (2012) in and around the Roman Agora in Athens. In between he supplied a gallerist-tormenting reboot of This Is Competition (2004) as part of 14 Rooms in Basel, a response to the work of Frank Gehry at Luma Foundation’s Solaris Chronicles at Arles and a marathon chat at the Swiss Pavilion of the Venice Architectural Biennale (all three Hans Ulrich Obrist-related projects – make of that what you will). While there has been some critical wearying of his interventional shtick, and questions as to how well his works endure, there’s no doubting either his popular pulling power, or the influence he’s having on the status and practice of performance.

67 Daniel Buchholz

68 Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier & Iain Hamilton Grant

Gallerist German Last Year: 60 Even a selective run-through of exhibition highlights at the exhibition spaces that Buchholz operates (with business partner Christopher Müller) in Cologne (set up in 1986) and Berlin (where he opened in 2008) should give you an indication of why he ranks so highly on this list: Wolfgang Tillmans, Simon Denny, Sigmar Polke, Lutz Bacher, Michael Krebber and Frances Stark have all graced his walls and floors. That his gallery is also home to two other artists included on this list – Isa Genzken and Mark Leckey – doesn’t hurt either. But perhaps the true secret to his success is that Buchholz cultivates a programme that allows the edgy to become the established without ever having to conform to market standards or art norms.

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Philosophers French, American, British, British Last Year: 81 As prolific philosopher Graham Harman put it to ArtReview in September, ‘Artists, with their sensitive antennae for the new, have correctly detected something new here and embraced speculative realism.’ Harman, one of the more prominent among a group of philosophers whose work has become increasingly referenced by the artworld in the last few years, might be blowing his own trumpet. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore how speculative realism offers new challenges for artworld thinking – curator Nicolas Bourriaud, for example, name-checking Harman in his current Taipei Biennial. Gaining traction among a second generation of young academics, speculative realism’s influence – for better or worse – is growing fast.

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65 Photo: Bob Wolfenson 66 Photo: Roman Agora 67 Photo: Deborrah de Biehl 68 Courtesy (from left) Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux & Ray Brassier

65 Luisa Strina

69 Photo: Mustafa Hazneci 70 Photo: Elizabeth Webb 71 Courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City 72 Courtesy West Kowloon Cultural District Authority

69 Vasıf Kortun

70 Allan Schwartzman & Amy Cappellazzo

Curator Turkish Last Year: 68

Advisers Both American Last Year: Reentry (63 in 2005)/Reentry (74 in 2012)

Istanbul, whose biennial arguably launched the global biennial boom of recent times, appears increasingly established as a key node on the global contemporary art map: it’s increasingly speckled with smart commercial galleries, and the art fair Art International has just celebrated its second edition, newly augmented by dealerships from the Far East. Extract Kortun from this picture, however, and it’d likely look very different. Curator, writer, teacher, director of nonprofit gallery and research centre SALT, and go-to sounding board and mediator for the Turkish art scene (see his insider commentary during the Gezi Park protests and supportive intervention in last year’s troubled biennial), he’s been – and remains – inestimably important in the infrastructural growth of a city which, as next year’s Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev-directed Istanbul Biennial gathers pace, will only receive more attention.

Amy Cappellazzo, who regularly appeared on this list as Christie’s chairman of postwar and contemporary development, left the auction house this year to team up with adviser sans pareil, Allan Schwartzman. His is the curatorial vision that transformed Bernardo Paz’s Inhotim from Fitzcarraldo fantasy to major institution and guided Howard Rachofsky in building his collection of postwar Italian and Japanese art, now promised to the Dallas Museum of Art. Called the most creditable person in the artworld by a colleague – he works on retainer rather than the standard 10-percent commission – his client roster also includes Nicolas Berggruen and Penny Pritzker, among others. Cappellazzo brings her own Rolodex to Schwartzman’s already extraordinary level of access. Their joint venture, Art Agency, Partners, aims, in her words, to build an empire, by developing a new business model combining curatorial and financial expertise.

71 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

72 Lars Nittve

Gallerists Colombian / Mexican Last Year: 74

Museum Director Swedish Last Year: 73

In 1999 an exhibition titled Economía de Mercado opened at an indoor market in Mexico City. Featuring work by artists including Abraham Cruzvillegas, Damián Ortega, Eduardo Abaroa, Daniel Guzmán, Fernando Ortega, Gabriel Kuri, Jonathan Hernández, Minerva Cuevas, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sofía Táboas, it was the debut show from a pair of young gallerists who stepped up on behalf of a generation of Mexican artists with no local representation. Fifteen years on, the stable provides nutritious fodder for the international museum circuit, not least in the Colección Jumex, which brought all eyes to Mexico at the end of 2013 with the opening of the Museo Jumex (Cruzvillegas has a major show opening this month). The success of Kurimanzutto’s new generation of artists – including the ubiquitous Adrián Villar Rojas – suggests that they still have a canny grasp of the economía de mercado.

Overseeing the major construction project of a base for M+, a contemporary art institution for the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong, while also building a museum collection from scratch and maintaining a taster offsite programme sounds stressful. Nittve has done it with aplomb. Earlier this year the museum announced the acquisition of all Tehching Hsieh’s performance art from 1978 to 1999 (making it the biggest collection of the Taiwanese artist’s work in a public institution), and in January the Chinese collector Guan Yi donated a further 37 contemporary works, including Canton Express, a collective project created for the lauded Z.O.U. – Zone of Urgency at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Talking of Venice, M+, who commissioned Lee Kit’s You for the 2013 Hong Kong Pavilion, restaged that show back on home turf, and commissioned Tsang Kin-Wah to represent HK next year.

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74 John Baldessari

Collector American Last Year: 70

Artist American Last Year: 63

This year Chang has been busy organising a major exhibition, drawn from his Domus Collection, which will tour five cities. Based in New York and Beijing, Chang operates according to a philosophy that is grounded in fostering dialogue and exchange between Eastern and Western artists. He also executive-produced artist Ran Huang’s The Administration of Glory (2014), a short film that was nominated for the Short Film Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, launched an art publishing company, Link and recently became vice chair of the Executive Committee at Tate, where he also sits on the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee. If that wasn’t enough, he’s extremely active in his roles as a trustee at MoMA PS1 and the Royal Academy of Arts, and continues to support museum programmes and art events around the world.

In last year’s Power 100 we gushed how cool this West Coast stalwart is. Well, it’s always the way – the cool people just get cooler. For his Autumn/ Winter collection for Saint Laurent, Hedi Slimane issued an invitation and showbook featuring artwork supplied by Baldessari and centred the collection around three heavily-sequined dresses inspired by the artist’s 50-year career. Sticking to things French: the artist also unveiled a 30m-long light installation in Paris titled Your Name in Lights (2011), in which members of the public’s names are… well, you get the picture. Yet it was back home that Baldessari showed what an artworld powerhouse he is – beyond, even, the fact of his canonical art – when he, alongside peers Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie, gave MoCA’s new director, Philippe Vergne, a vote of confidence by returning to the beleaguered museum’s board in March this year, after having left it in June 2012 in protest at the direction Jeffrey Deitch was taking the institution.

75 Chang Tsong-zung

76 Nicolas Bourriaud

Gallerist Chinese Last Year: 65

Art School Director French Last Year: 87

To describe Chang as a gallerist (his Hong Kong gallery, Hanart TZ, celebrated its 30th anniversary this year with Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies) is rather like calling a tiger a relative of a domestic cat. Most people call him a pioneer, in the light of his work – both in terms of research and exhibition organisation – in reviving Chinese art, while Chang himself is likely to think of himself as more curator than dealer. ‘In a way,’ he told Art Radar journal earlier this year, ‘the gallery has become one of the multiple platforms I operate.’ Other platforms include the Asia Art Archive (which he cofounded), the China Academy of Art (where he is a guest professor) and the China Club in Hong Kong (which hosts the collection he put together with David Tang). And who was on hand at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong to introduce Anselm Franke, the then-recently announced curator of the upcoming Shanghai Biennale? Chang, of course.

Director (since 2011) of Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, France’s best-known curator and original proselytiser of relational aesthetics found himself, this summer, in very public disagreement with a group of staff and students of the École who were agitated by their director’s allegedly high-handed management style and the perception that Bourriaud was renting the venerable art school out for one too many corporate shindigs (Bourriaud had previously signed a €1m sponsorship deal with Ralph Lauren). Bourriaud stood his ground, however, bolstered no doubt by a petition signed by almost every major contemporary artist, gallerist and curator in France, just in time to finish work on his latest curatorial opus, the current Taipei Biennial. Subtitled The Great Acceleration, it’s another showcase for Bourriaud’s restless enthusiasm for epoch-making ideas. If only art schools could be reinvented as quickly as biennials...

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73 Courtesy Domus Collection 74 Photo: Hedi Slimane 75 Photo: Anthony Dickson 76 Courtesy Taipei Biennial 2014

73 Richard Chang

77 Photo: Lisa Quinones 78 Photo: Andreas Nenninger 79 Paweł Althamer, Dia Tima i Burkharda, 2004,mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin. © the artist. Courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 80 Courtesy Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong

77 Tom Eccles

78 Thaddaeus Ropac

Art School Director British Last Year: 80 (as Bard College)

Gallerist Austrian Last Year: 71

The curators who have studied under Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard in upstate New York since 2005, can be found everywhere. Aside from such figures as Ruba Katrib (curator at the SculptureCenter, New York), Chen Tamir (curator at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv) and Gabi Ngcobo (founder and director of the Center for Historical Reenactments, Johannesburg), a multitude of former students occupy positions in institutions internationally. It is Eccles, too, who oversaw the construction of CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, establishing links with major institutions that have resulted, for example, in the Eccles-cocurated Haim Steinbach – Once Again the World Is Flat opening at Bard, before stints at the Serpentine and Kunsthalle Zürich. Away from the school, Eccles is part of the core group of Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation, is an adviser to Adobe for its Museum of Digital Media and has a regular interview series for, ahem, this magazine.

The Ropac orchard did not grow this year (and given the scale and ambition of his spaces in Paris Pantin and in Saltzburg, growth is something we now associate him with), despite rumours of a new Asian branch. The gallerist did, however, add new artists to his blue-chip trove, including the Pakistani miniaturist Imran Qureshi and the multimedia Austrian Markus Schinwald. The two galleries in Salzburg (in Ropac’s native Austria) and the two more in his adopted Paris bore much fruit, with ripe showings by Gilbert & George, Robert Longo, Richard Deacon, Alex Katz, Tony Cragg, Amos Gitaï and Georg Baselitz, plus younger blossoms by Oliver Beer and Claire Adelfang. And the rumours surrounding that Asian move continue to circulate – look out for announcements in the coming months.

79 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider

80 Claire Hsu

Gallerists Both German Last Year: 72

Curator Hong Kong Chinese Last Year: 76

Notorious for its understatement (as seen in its ultraspare web presence and nearly hidden location in a former chocolate factory in a Berlin-Mitte courtyard), Neugerriemschneider just celebrated its twentieth birthday – as well as the tenth edition of Berlin’s Gallery Weekend, which Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider helped launch – without much fanfare or hype. But the gallery’s international artist roster remains as heavy-hitting as ever, including Olafur Eliasson, Isa Genzken, Elizabeth Peyton, Simon Starling, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Ai Weiwei (whose largest one-man exhibition to date was held this year in Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau). While many of their stalwarts are still Berlin-based, Neugerriemschneider seems to be looking to South and Central America these days – on view at Gallery Weekend 2015 will be Brazilian Renata Lucas; also joining the roster is Mexico City-based Mario Garcia Torres.

Since Hsu cofounded the Asia Art Archive (AAA) with Chang Tsong-zung in 2000, the organisation has become the institutional backbone of art in the region. Its mission is to collect and make available (through its library space and a digitalisation project initiated in 2010) documents that relate to modern Asian art history. Summer of 2014 saw the AAA branching out into a cross-disciplinary cultural investigation – Mapping Asia – that comprised an exhibition, talks programme and linked issue of Field Notes, a thrice-yearly bilingual e-journal edited by Hsu. Alongside its numerous talks and education initiatives, the AAA hosts a residency programme, briefly occupied this year by Walid Raad. As a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of the Arts in Society, Hsu’s musings on the state of the arts in Asia are now as likely to appear in the context of Davos as they are MoMA or Art Basel Hong Kong.

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Family Ties India’s art scene may feel like a soap opera, but informal solidarity keeps it together in the face of official indifference by Rosalyn D’Mello

Atul Dodiya, Celebration in the Laboratory, 2012 (installation view, Aspinwall House, Kochi, India), 231 framed archival digital prints of different sizes on Hahnemühle bamboo paper. Photo: Ajai Vadakkath. Courtesy Atul Dodiya

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Perhaps it is strangely fitting that one of the biggest contemporary artists in a country whose primetime TV slots are inundated with every conceivable permutation of saas-bahu (literally ‘mother-in-lawdaughter-in-law’) soap operas should choose to describe the Indian artworld as a ‘large joint family’. It is the perfect analogy, and Atul Dodiya was the right person to come up with it, considering that his 2012 photo installation Celebration in the Laboratory, which debuted at the inaugural edition of India’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale, was an ode to exactly this notion. Featuring candid portraits of the many members that constitute the Indian art scene, Dodiya’s extensive artwork played at showcasing what was familiar to artworld insiders as unfamiliar to the larger public, whose lives have always been more or less divorced from its existence. Dodiya referred to these faces as representative of the various players that dominate the artworld, creating a veritable pantheon of the art cognoscenti. He had arranged the framed portraits irreverently on and along the many surfaces of an abandoned laboratory in the rundown seaside Aspinwall House. Veteran members of the Indian artworld who visited the installation during the Biennale’s opening week ventured in with a single-minded resolve: to wade through the dank December air in search of their portrait. Those who found their likeness staring back at them were gleeful, their association with the club whose membership criterion remains elusive now firmly reinforced through Dodiya’s lighthearted art. A few were disappointed not to find themselves similarly canonised. Sweat-drenched, exhausted and desperate for the respite promised by evening sea breezes, I suddenly found myself the unwitting subject of Dodiya’s digital lens. Without knowing it, I had been initiated. If you’ve been unlucky enough to sit through a viewing of a quintessentially Indian soap opera chronicling the saga that cohabiting with an extended joint family entails, you will be familiar with the superfluous use of editing techniques to belabour the melodramatic nature of the exchanges that transpire over the 20-minute span. From omniscient histrionic scores to hammed lines to gaudy outfits to wafer-thin plotlines, each episode packs in more than its fair share of punch. Mercifully, the contemporary Indian art scene is comparatively subdued. But like the televised world it often mimics, it is bound by a series of nebulous ties that are, unlike its Western counterparts, less professional underpinnings than an ambiguous sense of familial kinship. Consequently, exchanges between its kith are imbued with a curious mixture of pettiness, rivalry, mutual admiration, politics, generational nostalgia and a general uncertainty in terms of the direction in which the narrative is proceeding. To the uninitiated, this heady setup can sometimes resemble a cult, one that congregates periodically at festive arty dos over several cases of liquor, one whose physical space you may share without ever becoming a part of its psyche. Loyalties and allegiances are everything. Legal contracts are subsidiary. Word of mouth is paramount. The ecosystem of this extended joint family is obviously stratified, for like the society it reflects, it is endemically governed by the caste system. At the apex are the privileged, the collectors and gallery owners, who decide the fate of the subsequent strata, the artists, who can be further subdivided into those who have made it, those who have yet to and those who perhaps never will (at least not in their lifetimes). Next in line are the curators, who, in India, are usually not professionals actually adept at the fine art of curating, but rather reformed art writers successfully masquerading as the arbiters of taste. Needless

to say, the art writers are the untouchables and have little place or say within the pyramid. They are the pariahs, the social outcasts who must be content to eat the vestigial scraps thrown their way. In an attempt at a professional makeover during the boom years and even after the subsequent 2008 crash, the ecosystem had started to incorporate features from Western models. Newer galleries are now keen to represent artists exclusively. Older galleries, however, continue to work with their roster of artists in an informal, familial way, functioning as a support system should their artists find themselves in financial distress. Curators have begun to form guilds in order to facilitate their interests and protect themselves from exploitation. Academic research on contemporary art practices is flourishing; however, art writing continues to languish. The absence of space in newspapers and magazines for critical art reviews has contributed to its early demise. Its impending death is occasionally mourned. The historic lack of government-sponsored art infrastructure has forced this ecosystem to rely on private initiatives like the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art to sustain its legacy. Art is deemed a luxury in an impoverished country. The state cannot be depended upon to nurture or even archive the evolution of Indian art post-Independence. The supposedly prestigious National Gallery of Modern Art hasn’t made an acquisition in at least six years, though it finally has, to its credit, begun including midcareer retrospectives by contemporary artists as part of its regular programming, much to the dismay of many veteran artists who are still waiting in line for their long overdue moment in the spotlight. Truth be told, though, given the circumstances, the fact that this joint family has managed to extend itself and multiply is a miracle worthy of celebration. Despite the odds, the Indian artworld remains closely knit and highly conscious of its ancestral connection to the first generation of post-Independence artists, the Progressives, who, for the sake of their art and for want of a locally bred support system, were forced to leave the country and move to Europe. That artists practising today are able to earn a living on home soil is a testament to how far we’ve come. In a country where liberality is a mirage, where conservatism is the norm and censorship a very real threat, choosing to be an artist is like having a death wish. You have to learn to make peace with imposed self-exile, like the late Progressive M.F. Husain, who was compelled to seek refuge in Qatar on account of political restrictions, vandalism and harassment by cultural vigilantes, and who was buried in London; or his contemporary Souza, who was fortunate to be able to die on home turf after many poverty-stricken years spent abroad perfecting his art, and whose work is only recently receiving the critical attention it rightfully deserves; or Zarina (Hashmi), whose oeuvre resonates with a single overarching question – ‘Do exiles just wander around, or do they look for a home’ – the consequence of her having been born a refugee in Partitioned India; or influential printmaker Krishna Reddy, who would probably never have managed to reinvent the medium with his discovery of the colour viscosity technique had he continued to live in India, where printmaking is still seen as a stepsister of the arts. And that is what is responsible for the Indian artworld’s cohesiveness, apart from the in-jokes, the wild parties, the drunken brawls, the shared sense of grief at funerals or joy at weddings, and photographer Ram Rahman’s daily doses of animated memes caricaturing its prominent members on his Facebook page – the knowledge of being a fellow refugee destined to exist on the margins of the mainstream. ar

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Marian Goodman 9

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Liam Gillick 50

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Tim Blum & Jeff Poe 28

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Tom Eccles 77

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Klaus Biesenbach 27

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Marc & Arne Glimcher 20

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82 Philippe Pirotte

Gallerist Italian Last Year: 77

Art School Director Belgian Last Year: 78 (as Städelschule)

With a typically impressive list of shows – on the critical side, Matt Mullican, Steven Claydon, Gelitin and Rudolf Stingel; and perhaps more market friendly, Josh Smith and a pairing of Gary Hume and Thomas Grünfeld – Massimo De Carlo’s 2013/14 programme at his Milan gallery shows why he’s a major force on the Italian art scene. In his London gallery he has favoured group shows, and solos by younger artists (such as Aaron Young) and overlooked older generations (the late Dadamaino, for example, a member of Milan-based experimental group Azimuth). Having played a significant hand in the careers of the likes of Elmgreen & Dragset (whose retrospective Biography is currently travelling through Scandinavia) and Maurizio Cattelan (the busiest ‘retired’ artist ArtReview knows), De Carlo continues to look forward, recently signing two young artists, Tony Lewis and Andra Ursuta.

Four years after Daniel Birnbaum stepped down as rector of the Städelschule to concentrate on trifles like directing Sweden’s Moderna Museet, his successor, Nikolaus Hirsch, has in turn given way to Philippe Pirotte, who oversees a dream team of professors including Peter Fischli (fine art), Douglas Gordon (film), Michael Krebber (painting), Isabelle Graw (theory) and Birnbaum himself (philosophy). How Pirotte’s promotion will register on the almost-200-year-old institution remains to be seen, though we know from an interview with the Frankfurter Neuer Presse that he’s explicit about protecting students from any threatened austerity measures, and his curating duties for the school’s storied gallery, Portikus, have ranged interestingly from John Latham to Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy. In any case, expect the Städelschule – whose rigorous ethos has, in recent times, stamped students such as Danh Vō, Maria Loboda, Nora Schultz and Sergej Jensen – to remain an intellectual dynamo.

84 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang

Curator German Last Year: 92

Gallerists Both Chinese Last Year: 91/NEW

The chief curator of this year’s Shanghai Biennale and head of visual arts and film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Franke is constructing a new curatorial model, informed by his interests in science, storytelling and the figure of the scholar-artist. Never shy of the recondite and occult, Franke’s exhibitions are essayistic and wide-ranging in their inclusion of nonart to elaborate on their central themes – they complicate rather than simplify, throwing out sparking clouds of questions and shards of ideas. The multifaceted HKW project After Year Zero (2013) examined the new world order, decolonisation and the politics of historiography. Against the hi-tech postindustrial backdrop of Shanghai later this year, this auteur-curator promises contemplation of the collective production of the subject, the determination of national myth and the relationship between the machine and subjective experience.

Zhang Wei and artistic director Hu Fang established Vitamin Creative Space in 2002. In the 12 years since, the gallery has become one of the most prominent in the Chinese art scene, as well as one of the most consistent and intriguing Chinese presences on the international art-fair circuit. Vitamin is not all about China: this year the gallery coproduced and hosted Walk-in-Progress, a project by Olafur Eliasson’s Berlin-based Institut für Raumexperimente, while Japanese artist Koki Tanaka (whom Vitamin also represents) was honoured as Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2015. Beyond Vitamin (though definitely inspired by his work within it), Hu Fang, who writes both art criticism and fiction, published Dear Navigator, a critically acclaimed (by ArtReview Asia at least) collection of essays that merges both genres, earlier this year.

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84 Zhang Wei: Photo Hu Fang. Courtesy Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou & Beijing

83 Anselm Franke

81 Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan & London 82 Courtesy Staatliche, Frankfurt 83 Photo: Jakob Hoff

81 Massimo De Carlo

85 Victor Pinchuk

86 Mark Leckey

Collector Ukrainian Last Year: 38

Artist British Last Year: 82

It remains to be seen what impact the ongoing unrest in Ukraine will have on the man Forbes estimates is worth $3.2bn. The Ukrainian businessman is for closer ties with the West, but the interests of Interpipe, the pipe manufacturer that made his fortune, will be put into jeopardy if conflict with its main customer, Russia, continues. ‘Remains to be seen’, therefore, because none of this has so far affected the international $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize, awarded to an artist under thirtyfive, the 2014 winner of which is due to be selected in December by a jury including curators Adam Szymczyk and Francesco Bonami, and artist Doris Salcedo. Nor is there evidence of cause for concern in the day-to-day running of the Pinchuk Art Centre, though the political crisis figured heavily in Fear and Hope, a show featuring the three past winners of the domestic version of Future Generation, the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize.

Leckey might not be the only artist successfully engaged with current philosophical ideas around ‘triple-O’ (object-oriented ontology) – Helen Marten and Camille Henrot are two others who come to mind. But his sculptures, videos, installations and curatorial enquiries into the relationships between humans, objects and images are not only influential for being ahead of the pack, but for reflecting a deeper, more personal engagement with popular culture, art history and technology in a way that other artists do not. After a busy 2013, Leckey’s schedule has shown no signs of easing up. Following on from his show Mark Leckey: A Month of Making, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, earlier this year, his current major retrospective, Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials, curated by Elena Filipovic, opened in September at Wiels in Brussels, accompanied by an extensive monograph, Mark Leckey – On Pleasure Bent, and featuring a new installation, UniAddDumThs, that will travel to Kunsthalle Basel next spring.

87 Charles Esche

88 Olafur Eliasson

Museum Director British Last Year: Reentry (84 in 2005)

Artist Danish-Icelandic Last Year: Reentry (50 in 2008)

By any standard, this year was a good one for the British-born director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. In January Esche won the CCS Bard’s $25,000 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in September his iteration of the São Paulo Bienal opened. ‘His’ is a pronoun he would dispute, however. On his appointment in 2013, Esche refused sole direction and brought together a curatorial collective; if this is telling of his political philosophy, then the expansive, socially engaged (and brilliantly angry at times) exhibition, which strenuously championed artists outside Europe and North America, made it explicit. When some of the Bienal’s participating artists protested sponsorship from the Israeli consulate in São Paulo, Esche and his team backed them and requested that the Bienal Foundation remove all logos, and called for a wider discussion on the funding sources of major cultural events.

The Danish-Icelandic artist is not just back on this list because of his return to Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum, where a seventeen-year-old Eliasson took part in a breakdancing performance in 1984. This year Eliasson swapped the dance floor for… well, no floor at all, transforming the museum’s galleries into a rocky landscape. He’s also back for his work in pushing the boundaries of what an artist does. Alongside his numerous architectural commissions, his Little Sun project has proved a remarkable success, in part netting him the 2014 MIT McDermott Award in the Arts. Developed with engineer Frederik Ottesen, the sun-shaped solar lamps are sold at an affordable but higher price in ‘on-grid’ areas, to fund the sale at far lower prices by local agents to communities without electricity in eight African countries: 200,000 units have been distributed to date.

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90 Yuko Hasegawa

Curator South Korean Last Year: 94

Curator Japanese Last Year: NEW

If you go to Korea, Kim is the woman to meet. Good luck, though: as the curator and founder of Samuso, a curatorial office based in Seoul, the associate director of Artsonje Center and artistic director of Asian Culture Information Agency in the Asian Culture Complex in Gwangju, she is understandably busy. In previous years perhaps more so: Kim was the artistic director of Mediacity Seoul in 2010, coartistic director of the Gwangju Biennale in 2012 and a curatorial agent of Documenta 13. The best place to pin her down, however, might, oddly enough be on the border areas near the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. This summer Kim cocurated the third edition of her annual Real dmz Project, a brilliantly conceived exhibition at various sites along the highly emotive, politicised border (this year’s instalment included Seung Woo Back, Koo Jeong A, Tomás Saraceno and Adrián Villar Rojas).

Chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and curator of last year’s Sharjah Biennial, the vastly experienced Hasegawa seems to have biennials in her bloodstream. She has been artistic adviser to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, cocurator of the 2010 São Paulo Bienal and of Mediacity Seoul 2006, and curator of the 2001 Istanbul Biennial. This year she’s also been a visiting fellow at Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific. Hasegawa’s interests often lie in the ways in which art can reveal or respond to social issues, so it’s no surprise that alongside teaching (she’s a professor at Tama Art University, Tokyo), she’s also art director of the Inujima Art House project, located off Okayama in the Seto Inland Sea – which last year opened two more galleries to add to an existing three, and aims at integrating art into the fabric and daily life of a small Japanese village.

91 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, Maurizio Rigillo

92 Esther Schipper Gallerist German Last Year: NEW

Gallerists All Italian Last Year: 85 Galleria Continua will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year guided by the same trio who built it up from an ex-cinema space in San Gimignano, Tuscany. There they continue to show a winning generational mix: this year, market and critical favourites such as Kiki Smith and Michelangelo Pistoletto, and a trio of younger Brazilians, Jonathas de Andrade, Marcelo Cidade and André Komatsu. Their La Moulin space, an hour outside Paris, featured longterm projects by Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Pistoletto and Sislej Xhafar. In the Beijing gallery: solo shows by Kader Attia, Etel Adnan and Hans Op de Beeck. Some hard grafting then. And they clearly love it, because they also produced an offsite project with Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou in a remote village in Switzerland.

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Since opening her first gallery in Cologne, in 1989, Esther Schipper’s trajectory has mirrored postwar Germany’s art scene, yet is also a testament to a personal aesthetic and vision. She moved operations to Berlin in 1997 and became a crucial force in shaping its evolving art scene, as co-initiator of Berlin’s Gallery Weekend and ABC, and internationally, on various committees at Art Basel. Of late her exhibitions’ conceptual bent seems even edgier. Moving to a two-storey space near Potsdamer Strasse in 2011, Schipper has mounted Pierre Huyghe’s colonies of ants and influenza viruses; and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ari Benjamin Meyers recently performed in a circus tent. The gallery’s roster has recently expanded beyond longtime stalwarts such as Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick and Angela Bulloch, the most recent inductee being the Brazilbased artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.

ArtReview

89 Courtesy Sunjung Kim 90 © Hisashi Kumon 91 Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins 92 © Helenio Barbetta

89 Sunjung Kim

93 Photo: Mauricio Jorge 94 Photo: Marco Milan. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London 95 Photo: Rossana Magri 96 Photo: Sophie Thun

93 Adriano Pedrosa

94 Akram Zaatari

Curator Brazilian Last Year: Reentry (98 in 2012)

Artist Lebanese Last Year: NEW

Just announced as the new artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Pedrosa was already Brazil’s preeminent independent curatorial voice abroad. While gigs such as advising for the Frieze Masters art fair since its inception, involvement in the development of the expansive collection of Lisbon-based lawyer Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas and the 2013 curation of an open-submission exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard maintain Pedrosa’s standing internationally, it was actually at home that most of the curator’s work lay this year. In addition to the postacademic Programa Independente da Escola São Paulo, which he conceived, Pedrosa curated two major shows, both held concurrent to the São Paulo Bienal: a retrospective of Rivane Neuenschwander at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and (with Lilia Schwarcz) Histórias Mestiças at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, which charted Brazil’s fraught racial history of colonialism, slavery and injustice to the Amerindian people.

Zaatari, whose work involves a self-reflective examination of photography and documentary, has been busier than ever these past 12 months. His use of archival research and history as both subject and material, with a deft nod to the longstanding political turmoil of the Middle East, has won him curatorial fans far beyond his base in Beirut. Besides 2014 shows at Salt, Istanbul, and the Power Plant, Toronto, he had a survey at Wiels, Brussels, centring on the artist’s recurring motif of the letter. Last November he had a well-received exhibition of photographs and multimedia installations at Thomas Dane, London. That show included the 38-minute film On Photography People and Modern Times (2010), which, in part, is a portrait of the Arab Image Foundation, an expanding collection of over 600,000 vernacular and studio photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora, which the artist cofounded in 1997.

95 Bernardo Paz

96 Koyo Kouoh

Collector Brazilian Last Year: 75

Curator Cameroonian Last Year: NEW

In the words of Emmett Brown, another wild, white-haired visionary: ‘Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’ But roads certainly help if, like billionaire mining magnate Paz, you want to bring people to see your 5,000-acre botanic garden and sculpture park (neither of which terms really do justice to Inhotim, his vast playground of exhibition pavilions and large-scale installations, overseen by curator Rodrigo Moura and advised by Allan Schwartzman). Because now that the truly dedicated art pilgrims (not to mention the people from underprivileged local communities who also visit) have already flown to Belo Horizonte in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and taken the 90-minute, mostly dirt-track drive, Paz is after the rest of us. Roads will help, as will the hotels, theatre and convention centre that Paz says he is also planning. Whether all this development will spoil Inhotim’s mystique remains to be seen.

Kouoh is the founding artistic director of Raw Material Company, an interdisciplinary gallery and residency programme in Dakar, which also possesses a large archive library on Senegalese and wider African art history. Recent shows have included a solo presentation by Issa Samb and she has been recruited to develop a thorough reform of the Dak’Art biennial. She’s not afraid to tackle controversial issues: Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness, an exhibition (part of a wider programme on personal liberties) she cocurated, was attacked and vandalised one day after it opened this May and then subsequently shut down by the government (homosexuality is illegal in Senegal). Beyond that she was on the international finding committee that appointed Adam Szymczyk to curate the next Documenta.

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98 Jennifer Flay

Collectors British/Finnish Last Year: Reentry (87 in 2012)

Art Fair Director New Zealander Last Year: 99

With art ‘flippers’ hogging the media limelight, Anita Zabludowicz’s ongoing commitment to artists can be seen with new respect. She has established herself as a major collector, increasingly internationally, with an eye (helped by a curatorial team) for what fits with her and husband Poju’s London-based private institution (together with a space on Broadway in New York and a residency programme on an island in Poju’s native Finland). In September Anita told The New York Times, ‘We prefer artists who like to work on longterm projects with institutions. The get-richquick painters are another story.’ So no ‘crapstraction’, then. This policy is borne out in their shows over the past year, including Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch (on now), Michael E. Smith, Adriano Costa, Heather Phillipson and, from an older generation, Albert Oehlen. Over in Finland hotshots Caragh Thuring, Sam Falls and Nicolas Deshayes holed up on the island to make work, as various vIps stopped by to take a peek.

The director of the FIAC in Paris continues to extend her power base. France’s premier art fair, which some say has eclipsed London’s Frieze on the international calendar, will this year house a record 191 galleries in the Grand Palais, plus a host of big-ticket art installations in the Jardin des Tuileries and the Jardin des Plantes. Around 60 ‘young’ galleries are showing for the first time at a new ‘official’ satellite fair – (Off)icielle, at the Paris Docks – thus squashing the hopes and dreams of the unofficial satellites. Next year America will be added to the FIAC mix, with a Los Angeles edition, directed by Aurelia Chabrillat, slated to take place in March.

99 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes, Matthew Wood

100 Adrian Cheng

Gallerists Brazilian Last Year: NEW

Collector Chinese Last Year: NEW

The artists represented by Mendes Wood, which has two galleries in São Paulo – one all glass and elegant ferns in the upscale Jardins neighbourhood, the other a supersized industrial space in the north of the city – seem everywhere, and their careers are very much spurred on by the globetrotting of its three directors. Among the trips this year were those made to support Adriano Costa, Mariana Castillo Deball and Runo Lagomarsino’s inclusion in the Guggenheim Museum’s Under the Same Sun, Paulo Nazareth at the ICA London and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s current solo show at CRAC Alsace. Mendes Wood represented three out of the five Brazilian artists exhibited at last year’s Lyon Biennale. At home the gallery’s programme mixes big domestic names (such as Tunga) with a steady succession of gringos (Michael Dean, Neïl Beloufa).

Executive director of the Hong Kong-based New World Development property and retail empire, and the Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group (founded by his grandfather and great-grandfather respectively), Cheng is rated one of the world’s youngest billionaires. And while modernising the family business, he’s placing art at the core. Earlier this year his K11 Art Foundation (which operates a residency programme in Wuhan, China, and uses New World’s shopping malls to bring art – paintings by Monet and Zhang Enli, for example – to the masses) sponsored a symposium to accompany the Armory Show’s China focus, as well as the Met’s Ink Art exhibition at the end of 2013. This October saw the launch of Inside China, the first fruit of a long-term partnership with the Palais de Tokyo, part of Cheng’s mission to raise the international profile of emerging Chinese art. And, naturally, he sits on Tate’s Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee.

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97 Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith 98 Photo: X. Cariou 99 Photo: Paulo Giandaglia. Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo 100 Photo: Almond Chu

97 Anita & Poju Zabludowicz

The 2014 ArtReview Power 100

Nicholas Serota

François Pinault

David Zwirner

Eli & Edythe Broad

Vasıf Kortun Allan Schwartzman & Amy Cappellazzo

Iwan Wirth

Wolfgang Tillmans

Glenn D. Lowry

Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp

Marina Abramović

Pierre Huyghe

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Steve McQueen

Gavin Brown

Sadie Coles

Dakis Joannou

Ryan Trecartin

Theaster Gates

Michael Govan

Barbara Gladstone

Hito Steyerl

Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi

Agnes Gund

Liam Gillick

Anne Pasternak

Yayoi Kusama

Brett Gorvy

Thomas Hirschhorn

Christopher Wool

Eugenio López

Toby Webster & Andrew Hamilton

Udo Kittelmann

Michael Ringier

Esther Schipper

Emmanuel Perrotin

Adriano Pedrosa

Alexander Rotter & Cheyenne Westphal

Akram Zaatari

Matthew Marks

Bernardo Paz

Rosemarie Trockel

Koyo Kouoh

& Greg Hilty

Eva Presenhuber

Anita & Poju Zabludowicz

Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda

Luisa Strina

Jennifer Flay

& Brian Kuan Wood

Tino Sehgal

Felipe Dmab,

Isa Genzken

Daniel Buchholz

Jay Jopling

Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman,

RoseLee Goldberg

& Julia Peyton-Jones 7

Jeff Koons

Larry Gagosian

Marian Goodman

Cindy Sherman

Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers

Alain Seban & Bernard Blistène

Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Marc Spiegler Ai Weiwei Gerhard Richter Beatrix Ruf Adam D. Weinberg Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Marc & Arne Glimcher Adam Szymczyk Maja Hoffmann Bernard Arnault

Okwui Enwezor

Massimiliano Gioni

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Klaus Biesenbach

Tim Blum & Jeff Poe

Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail

Ray Brassier & Iain Hamilton Grant

November 2014

José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

Lars Nittve

Richard Chang

John Baldessari

Chang Tsong-zung

Nicolas Bourriaud

Tom Eccles

Thaddaeus Ropac

Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider

Claire Hsu

Massimo De Carlo

Philippe Pirotte

Anselm Franke

Zhang Wei & Hu Fang

Victor Pinchuk

Mark Leckey

Charles Esche

Olafur Eliasson

Sunjung Kim

Yuko Hasegawa

Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo

Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood 100 Adrian Cheng

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top Allan Schwartzman with Art Agency, Partners cofounder Amy Cappellazzo. Photo: Elizabeth Webb bottom Bernardo Paz’s Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil, where Allan Schwartzman has long been a curator. Photo: Ricardo Mallaco

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Art Adviser Allan Schwartzman – Cupidity’s Cupid As the artworld globalises, consultancy is on the rise. ArtReview catches up with one of its leading exponents by Laura van Straaten

When I first meet art adviser Allan Schwartzman, it’s the eve of an openAn art-history major at Vassar, he interned at the Whitney, where ing at Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, the contemporary-art he met curator Marcia Tucker, who took him with her when she left Shangri-la in Brazil’s pastoral state of Minas Gerais. Schwartzman to start New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, where he has served as its lead curator since Inhotim was a glint in the eye of became curator. Subsequent stints as director for Barbara Gladstone mining magnate and megacollector Bernardo Paz, a kind of Richard- Gallery, New York, and then as an independent art-writer for prestiBranson-meets-Father-Time visionary. Today Schwartzman’s got gious print publications followed. a jetlag-y scruff. I find him in shorts tending to the installation of Before 1997, Schwartzman never considered working directly for work by Romanian artist Geta Bratescu. Schwartzman, along with collectors. But when art PR maven Andrea Schwan heard that Dallas several other curators, is struggling to put in biblically-chronolog- collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky needed help, she recommendical order Bratescu’s 1974 Mitologie series of spare, Thurber-ish draw- ed Schwartzman, whose writing the Rachofskys had long admired. ings of New Testament scenes. Howard Rachofsky says that before he met Schwartzman, he and “OK, wait, is that the Annunciation or the Resurrection?” Schwartz- his wife were “naive” and their collection was “a mishmash” from man asks. “Ack, what’s a nice Jewish boy like me…?” and trails off in being “under the influence of not advisers but art gadflies”. Working with Schwartzman was a welcome “paradigm shift”, Rachofsky says, contagious laughter. In the artworld, Schwartzman is considered what Paz would call because “in essence, he is as much a teacher as an adviser”. número um of a rarefied few art advisers who also function as curators “I think it’s because Allan has that rare trait where he understands and whose work for private collectors the curatorial world and the commerhas – and will continue to have – a powercial world. And he is a quick study.” “Allan has that rare trait where he ful impact on not just artists but also an At Inhotim, I ask Paz about workunderstands the curatorial world and ing with Schwartzman. “Allan knows unsuspecting museum-going public. Many of Schwartzman’s clients sit on the commercial. And he is a quick study” me. Allan knows everything,” Paz says, the boards of top art institutions. (He crediting Schwartzman’s fast underhimself sits on the board of New York not-for-profit Artists Space.) standing of what Inhotim could become. “He’s brilliant,” Paz adds, He estimates that a third of the dozen or so collections he advises are his admiration getting ahead of his command of English: “I never ask already bequeathed to museums, including MoMA, LACMA and the of him nothing. I never call him in the United States. Never. And all Dallas Museum of Art. the pieces he brings to me, I like.” Currently he’s crammed with his team of seven into a one-room While Schwartzman won’t name names, some sleuthing reveals office in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, but in a few months he that he also works with Nicolas Berggruen, the hotel-dwelling billionwill take over an entire floor near Madison Square Park, where he aire with close ties to LACMA. (Other clients include a husband-andwill be joined by Amy Cappellazzo, former Christie’s chair of post- wife team; the husband is a household name, about as far outside the war and contemporary development. Their new venture, Art Agency, artworld as one can get, and Schwartzman is supporting their broad Partners, will help Schwartzman enhance services for clients, he said, but nascent interest in contemporary art.) like deaccessioning. With each client, particularly for unusual exhibition spaces, such Schwartzman, fifty-seven, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West as custom pavilions in a Brazilian botanical garden or minimalist Side and remembers his mother taking him to the Whitney during Richard Meier-designed manses like the Rachofsky House in Dallas, the mid-1960s, shortly after it settled in its uptown Marcel Breuer- Schwartzman says the motivating question is, “What can resonate in designed home. His lawyer dad and homemaker mum collected, but this environment better than it would in any other environment?” “not on a grand scale”, he says, mostly Chinese and Japanese ivories, And especially when collections are destined for institutions, it is, jades and porcelain, plus a few painters, including Oscar Bluemner, “What can we build where we can create a niche that is additive to Charles Burchfield and Marsden Hartley. “I don’t think their knowl- scholarship?” Howard Rachofsky cites his own Schwartzman-led sorties into postwar Italian art and their debate about whether the edge was deep, but their appreciation was great.”

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collection “could tell a more additive story” to future generations by Schwartzman puts it, people whose “commitments are to the flow of “having a fifth or sixth [piece by Lucio] Fontana” versus something new. merchandise that is coming through their doors”. There was no one to And then there’s the question of how and when to pursue work turn to who was wholly or professionally responsible to the interests by emerging artists. “The acceleration of interest in and pricing of of the collector and the collection, as Schwartzman is today. many emerging artists has been so rapid and heated that the nature of Take art historian Bernard Berenson, who, explains Reist, “gained collecting the new is very different from how it had been in the past,” his reputation as the art adviser sans pareil by publishing authoritaSchwartzman says. “We see the works show up at auction that are less tive lists of Italian paintings and then he worked behind the scenes than a year old and by artists that are less than a year old [and] that with dealers to matchmake great works of art with eager collectors are now not even $20,000 or $30,000 but $400,000 and $800,000.” whose taste he was helping to shape”. Scholarship since Berenson’s So collectors “need someone whose job it is to stay on top of it all” death in 1959 suggests that secret arrangements with dealers lined and to “help them suss out price and value”. He adds, “As the popula- Berenson’s own pockets. tion of artists multiplies, the popula“Museum curators also often served as tion of great artists does not.” This is “A big difference between then and now advisers,” Reist says, noting that Henry how Schwartzman’s email inbox has Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan and others relied is that curators today don’t profit from on those near and far, like Wilhelm von become an unlikely lever of power. With each jpeg he deletes or forwards Bode (Berlin’s Bode Museum is named their ‘expertise’ as they used to” after him) and Roger Fry of New York’s to clients, he plays God with an artist’s future reputation. MoMA’s associate director Kathy Halbreich doesn’t Metropolitan Museum of Art. “For the collectors, befriending curabegrudge Schwartzman that power. “When generous, civic-minded tors and having the assurance of their opinions, then as now, would individuals collect well, it can only be better for us all,” she says. “I’m strengthen their resolve to buy, even at a high price,” she adds. “A big always happy to know he’s working with someone who could help difference between then and now is that curators today don’t profit MoMA or another institution.” from their ‘expertise’ as they used to.” There can be little doubt that advisers like Schwartzman do. Harking back to the cupidity of America’s Gilded Age, Inge Reist, Schwartzman himself made another important distinction. Back director of the Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting, offers some context: “It may come as a surprise to many that the land- then, he says, “what you collected was Old Master paintings that were scape of art advising hasn’t really changed all that much.” The nine- proven”. Even though public collections are “not a place to experiteenth and early-twentieth-century collectors, with surnames like ment” with brand new artists, Schwartzman encourages “everyone Gardner, Havemeyer, Morgan, Frick and Carnegie, “got valuable to devote a certain amount of their budget to collecting young artists, advice from scholars, curators and dealers”, she says. to stay connected to art as it’s being made, to fall in love with things Those advisory roles were less clearly defined than they are that haven’t yet been proven”. That, he says, is part of the fun of today. Caveat emptor to collectors then or now taking advice from, as getting to be a big collector in the first place. ar

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above and facing page Works from Geta Bratescu’s 2014 exhibition Gradina, Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil, photographed by, respectively, Cosmin Bumbut and Rossana Magri

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Art in Context

She has worked as a trapeze artist and actor 189

Art in Context

A yearlong survey (in monthly instalments) in which artists, curators and cultural commentators explore the question of what African art (of the contemporary flavour) does or can do within various local contexts across the continent

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ArtReview

IV Osei Bonsu BritishGhanaian independent curator and writer based in London, who has worked closely with Raw Material Company’s Koyo Kouoh as an associate researcher

The Bare Necessities: Raw Material Company in Dakar

It is safe to say that the geographies of the artworld are expanding, the West, there has been a clear reclamation of ownership on the part as are the various activities and movements of its multiple constitu of Africa’s cultural narratives. The aim of these meeting points is not encies. At once distanced from the traditional centres of monolithic merely one of proclaiming the fact that contemporary art exists. The power, the penetration of the Internet accompanied by the prolifera development, to my understanding, has more to do with the engi tion of global biennial culture have brought the art of elsewhere into neering of new spaces for the production, reception and discourse of focus. Now places like Cairo and Kampala find themselves on the art within complex societal frameworks. international radar, feeding into the frenzied exchange that is today’s Raw Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society interconnected world. This has been evidenced by countless exhibi based in Dakar, is perhaps the most resolute example of institution tions testifying to the globalisation of artistic Modernisms, and more building in Africa. The space is situated within the suburbs of Dakar recently by the unprecedented rise of cultural centres in places like in a multipurpose building; it runs an average of four exhibitions per Douala, Lagos and Dakar. However, we shouldn’t be so shortsighted year, artist residencies, as well as a restaurant and a reference library as to assume that the artistic communities in these regions were of books on contemporary art with an alternative educational and without fields of cultural production before centres for contemporary publication programme. Since its inception in 2008, the centre has art were instituted. While the first decade of the addressed the antinomies of artistic production above Artist Issa Samb twentyfirst century may have brought about and structural development in Africa, while facing page Courtyard of Samb’s atelier in Dakar a deterritorialisation of African art, prompted resisting institutionalised cultural schemes both photos Sophie Thun mostly by postcolonial discourses conceived in that often dampen the political convictions of

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artistic practice. Senegal is marked by a discrepancy between an offi up in the late 1990s, and another that chronicled the revolt of spring cial national culture and one that is determined by artistic commu 2011, when activists took to the street to protest changes to the coun nities and local audiences. It is also a place where art and nationalism try’s constitution. These exhibitions are not related to art per se, but are intrinsically linked – after gaining independence from France in an investigation into the space of civic intervention as a means of 1960, the country was transformed by its first president, Léopold Sédar cultural production and a tool for visual literacy. Senghor. An accomplished poet and cultural theorist, Senghor is one One of the other aspects of these expanded forms of exhibition of few African leaders to have conceived of art as a medium of social making as practices of historymaking or knowledgebuilding is the and political change. His administration established a cultural system potential for hybridity. Using art as a raw material in itself, the exhi complete with art schools, a national museum and festivals, which bition constructs – typically meant to reinforce the authority of an fostered a rich visual language under his institution – are abandoned to allow During the height of Léopold Sédar theories of Negritude. But the govern artists the space to question authorita tive discourses. The openendedness of ment’s ambition to reflect the country’s Senghor’s patronage system, artists postcolonial identity through art was this hybridisation gives way to a kind of contested the president’s vision met with resistance from a number of artistic antagonism, which locates art at and broke away from traditional artists who resented the government’s the centre rather than the periphery of a use of art for political gain. During the wider conversation on subjects as broad artistic forms. Among them was Issa height of Senghor’s patronage system, as homophobia and religion. Take the Samb, a founding member of the artists contested the president’s vision Algerian artist Kader Attia, whose work and broke away from traditional artistic Laboratoire AgitArt, probably the first is rooted in his engagement with the forms. Among them was Issa Samb, a legacy of French colonialism. In his African artist collective in Africa founding member of the Laboratoire dense and multilayered practice, Attia AgitArt, probably the first artist collective in Africa. The collective deconstructs traditional discourses on authority as grounds for – composed of writers, actors, artists and thinkers – transformed the subversive interventions. This destabilisation of accepted understand nature of artistic practice from a formalist, objectbound sensibility to ings of collective identity (as evidenced by his works in the exhibition forms of agitation that resulted in ephemeral experiments. Precarious Imaging, 2014) engages a conscious process of deterritoriali Today, little remains of Senghor’s utopic vision – the national sation. His interpretation of complex issues such as the place of Islam museum of art is no longer in use, and the pedagogy of the École and the impact of marginalisation within Muslim communities bears Nationale des Arts is thought to be outdated – however there a certain congruity with Senegalese culture, which is predominantly continues to be a cultural festival (in the form of the Dak’Art bien Sufi and deeply marked by its French colonial past. nial, established in 1992). Samb (one of the last remaining members of We may use Raw Material Company as an example of how ques tions of locality and culture shouldn’t the movement) still operates from the be estranged from systemic ques courtyard of his atelier in the Rue Jules Samb (one of the last members tions of education and infrastruc Ferry in Dakar, a place of monumental of the movement) still operates from ture. The very idea of raw materials is importance to artists and thinkers the courtyard of his atelier, a place of extracted from the language of indus that exists somewhere between a national heritage site and a permanent monumental importance to artists and trial ecology. Otobong Nkanga (whose seminar – Samb’s openair studio. The thinkers that exists somewhere between work was presented in the exhibition Faites Comme Chez Vous, 2011) has offered radical dimension of Samb’s indeci pherable practice and its aesthetic a national heritage site and a permanent a boundless meditation on mental and physical identities, and their implica innovation defined by sharing and seminar – Samb’s openair studio tion within varied environments and collaboration seems to be the impetus that drives Raw Material Company. Which is why his firstever geographic contexts. Born in Nigeria, a country understood via its solo exhibition focused not on the groundbreaking capacity of his densely populated urban areas as well as its exploitation of natural artistic oeuvre, but rather on the political ambition of his dialog resources, Nkanga’s work articulates a uniquely African paradox. ical approach to artmaking, a processbased project enlivened by his Her work speaks to a rising awareness among artists of the processes relationships to various actors and agencies within the political space of desublimation that force art into a state of contingency. This ex of his surroundings. haustively curious practice activates a very specific tension between Perhaps one of the key distinctions that separates cultural spaces the use of cultural value connected to resources and the environ in Africa from those seeking to represent African narratives within ment. Issues of personal displacement align with transformations Western contexts is a willingness to subvert and question commonly of commodities to take a central role, as Nkanga’s work unpacks held assumptions around art’s agency. In this respect, it seems that resourcedriven conflicts that underline our global world. One can Raw Material Company has been committed to a shifting tension think of few places on the continent aside from the Raw Material Company to present such a palpable between art and its public. Such was facing page, top Samb in the exhibition the case with its recent archival exhibi critique of the African condition, Word! Word? Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form, 2013 cementing its primacy as a meeting tions looking at the legacy of a group of facing page, bottom Precarious Imaging, 2014 (installation view) point for art, knowledge and society, printmakers who practised at the Gorée Institute Printmaking Workshop set civilisation’s bare necessities. ar both photos Courtesy Raw Material Company, Dakar

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TEN YEARS PULSE MIAMI BEACH CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR DECEMBER 4–7, 2014 INDIAN BEACH PARK 4601 COLLINS AVENUE MIAMI BEACH

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Life / Drawing

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by Richard Graham

For more on Richard Graham (richardgrahamx.com), see overleaf

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Contributors

Laura van Straaten

Kevin Jones

Contributing Writers

is a New York-based writer who has written about art and culture for the Wall Street Journal Magazine, Whitewall and a number of regional publications in the USA. She is also at work on a theatrical adaption of a Henry James novella. This month she examines how American art adviser Allan Schwartzman’s inbox has become an unlikely lever of power in contemporary art. For further reference she recommends the Center for the History of Collecting at New York’s Frick Collection for anyone interested in learning more about how and where collectors from the Renaissance to the present day have sought help and advice in shaping their collections.

is an independent arts writer currently based in Dubai. New York-born and Paris-bred, he has lived in the Middle East for the past eight years. He is the United Arab Emirates desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific and contributes regularly to artforum.com, FlashArt International, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Canvas and Brownbook. His blog, unfinishedperfect.com, devoted to fostering a critical voice on art in the region, is perpetually launching. For further reading on Qatar, he recommends James Panero’s 2013 article ‘The Widening Gulf’ in The New Criterion and Sheikha Mayassa’s 2010 TED talk, earnestly titled ‘Globalising the Local, Localising the Global.’

Andrew Berardini, Osei Bonsu, Kimberly Bradley, Neal Brown, Matthew Collings, Rosalyn D’Mello, Tom Eccles, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Sam Jacob, Kevin Jones, Maria Lind, Bridget McCarthy, Daniel McClean, Laura van Straaten, Mike Watson

Rosalyn D’Mello

Bridget McCarthy

is a New Delhi-based critic. Her writing has appeared in Art + Auction, Modern Painters, Art India and Take on Art, among others. She was the editor-inchief of Artinfo India and a 2014 nominee for Forbes’ Best Emerging Art Writer Award and the inaugural Prudential Eye Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art. A forthcoming work of nonfiction, A Handbook for My Lover, is being published by HarperCollins. This month she writes about the Indian artworld. For further reading she suggests the collected writings of the late Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic (2012), which provides an insider’s account of the evolution of India’s art scene and on which D’Mello worked as associate editor.

is editorial assistant at Phaidon in New York. Prior to that, she worked on a book at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artists for Artists: Fifty Years of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2013). She is a master’s candidate in art history at Hunter College in New York, and holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Northwestern University, Illinois. McCarthy’s two main areas of art historical interest are art and architecture of the Islamic world, and art of the mid-twentieth century. This month she interviews Calvin Tomkins. For further reading, McCarthy recommends all of Tomkins’s New Yorker profiles, and his 2005 book Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg.

Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Richard Graham, Mikael Gregorsky, Till Janz, Jeremy Liebman, Matthew Porter, Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Richard Graham (preceding pages)

Making is at the core of the multiple practices of Richard Graham (richardgrahamx.com). He takes pleasure and pride in the hands-on physicality of fashioning objects. By expanding and experimenting with these skills, this London-based art fabricator is in demand. His recent output includes illuminated signage and sets for Punchdrunk’s immersive theatrical experience The Drowned Man (2013), and a 3D statue of ‘Ricky Rouse’, based on graphic novelists Jörg Tittel and John Aggs’s satirical Chinese imitation of Disney’s iconic rodent. From this prototype, Graham is envisaging further character-based sculpture commissions. Whether making sculptures and installations for other artists or for department stores, fashion brands and advertising companies, Graham is aware of the inherent contradictions: “On the one hand I am

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creating and crafting, which I love, but this making is not a personal vision of the world, but rather someone else’s.” In his self-directed work, Graham’s ‘lateral seeing’ can repurpose the most random rubbish into pun-filled assemblages. For his first solo exhibition in London in 2008, he collaged faces and profiles of dogs from brushes, scraps of underlay, chains, tools and whatever. “I named them ouR Mutts as a reference to the father figure of the readymade objet d’art, Marcel Duchamp.” Among Graham’s most striking large-scale sculptures is an owl composed from a bathtub, ironing boards, pitchforks, a baby’s pram for eyes and a pair of yellow stiletto heels for its beak. He has also applied this process to print, turning a birdcage head, a suitcase body, saws for wings and twigs for legs into the hero of Junk Birds, the first of his mixed-media

ArtReview

children’s books. Not some Photoshop virtualities but actual constructions, these sometimes also serve as templates for his illustration work, such as his current children’s book project entitled The Cranky Caterpillar, and a proposed graphic novel, Life Is An Open Book. His new Strip overleaf, Life Drawing, relates to this. As Graham explains, “I have found photographic comics hugely underexplored and conceptual art a bit boring. So out of my play I have ended up bolting the two mediums together to create something new.” Graham mischievously reinterprets Cesare Ripa’s allegorical figure of Art from his influential 1645 emblem book Iconologia, casting himself as the artist’s model, now holding a banana and yo-yo. “This strip is a moment of reflection about the making of others’ interpretations. A fleeting move from craftsman to artist.” Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

Text credits Phrases on pages 47, 115, 125 and 189 come from author biographies in the January–June 2015 Faber & Faber catalogue

on pages 141–5, 197

photography by Mikael Gregorsky

on pages 157–61 on pages 172–6 on page 177

photography by Jeremy Liebman photography by Matthew Porter

on page 202

November 2014

photography by Till Janz

Luke Norman & Nik Adam

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Off the Record November 2014 The weak sunlight of the October afternoon is fading as I skip down the strange rampy bit outside Tate Modern, my Rick Owens wool and white silk lace-up coat keeping me snug against the early autumn chill. I wink at the security guy, who looks suspiciously like the handsome director of one of the only leading galleries to have a drive-thru McDonald’s within 100 metres of its doorstep. Inside, people mill around for the regular Friday evening late opening, looking up at the Richard Tuttle fabric sculptures. In among them I start to pick out people I think I recognise. Lurking near the ticket booths are three figures, who despite their disguises of red Marni woven wool capes and Berghaus Windstopper balaclavas could well, with their mix-andmatch physiques, be a legendary American family of collectors. Then again they could just be three oddly shaped punters buying tickets for the Polke show upstairs. The friendly-looking Chinese man serving them behind the ticket desk has the pleased look of someone whose paintings recently set auction records for work by an Asian artist, and the bespectacled elderly gentleman with a mane of grey hair next in the queue seems to be clutching his copy of October: The Second Decade a little too tightly. And then, around them, figures appear who seem like ghosts from the distant past. A handsome Indian gentleman of a certain age in a cravat looks angry and gestures at the void of the Turbine Hall’s space. “It was me here once!” he shouts at a bald man in a pinstripe suit with the sharp features befitting a former Swiss ambassador. A serious German man who could be an art-book publisher chats to two smart British gentlemen art dealers with identical receding hairlines and holding copies of Tim Noble & Sue Webster’s tome British Rubbish. All of them look at me as I walk purposefully to the centre of the Turbine Hall. Bang on cue, a crew made up of technicians who have worked for Reena Spaulings and Bernadette Corporation lower a stage entirely constructed from copies of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and I clamber onboard.

“My friends!” I begin, tapping on the Shure 55sh vintage-style microphone. “Noam Chomsky once said that there’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. And the same is true for the ArtReview Power 100. You were once on that list! And then, suddenly, you were not, cruelly discarded by the whims of art power.” The Indian gentleman has had enough. He leaps onstage, pulls off his cravat and waves it in the air. “When the world is mine, then you all will be the 99.9%!” he yells at the crowd as the Bernadette Corporation guys lower a painting that seems to be a reworking of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde with a chap’s equipment up his own backside. I grab the microphone back from the Indian fellow. “Power is up its own ass! Where’s Christoph Büchel now? Does anyone read e-flux any more?” The old guy holding the October anthology sheepishly puts his hand up. The Bernadette Corporation people set free a flock of doves, a number of whom fly straight into the Tuttle sculptures and immediately combust. The two British art dealers and the American collector family join us onstage and start belting out the chorus to the Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull World Cup anthem. “Ole ole ole ola!” they sing. “From the streets of Cairo to the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street to here, Occupy Power 100! Put on your goggles and let’s pretend we’re in Hong Kong!” I shout above the harmonising, waving around a tear gas canister. I’m just about to put on my comedy Jeffrey Deitch spectacles and unveil my plan for hacking into the Power 100 website in order to restore all these great art figures around me to their rightful place when I feel the crowd’s attention drift upwards. There on the balcony are various high-net-worth individuals applauding. “Hold on,” says one of the British dealers, “isn’t that the Middle Eastern and North Africa Acquisitions Committee?” “Could be, or perhaps it’s the Photography Acquisitions Committee,” replies his colleague. “Whatever, we’ve got to get up there.” In the confusion, a man who I had assumed was a once-prominent Middle Eastern collector slips off his Isabel Marant keffiyeh, revealing himself to be ArtReview’s dastardly editor, who, whispering “wrong cover” through gritted teeth and having a quick glance around to check if there are any ‘sponsors’ he might need to ‘silence’, rips the cock-upbutt painting to the floor. “It’s because of precisely this kind of cockup”, he says to an early supporter of Damien Hirst, waggling his fingers to put speech marks round the last bit, “that you people are no longer on the list”, before disappearing in a puff of purple smoke. The Indian chap grabs his cravat from the floor. “Excuse me,” he says, “I think that’s the International Council up there. Or perhaps it’s a group of private museum holders desperately seeking Western intellectual validation. Or perhaps, perhaps… it is the great man himself. I have no idea but I must go meet and greet.” As he runs, his Church’s monkstrap shoes tear the remains of the painting from its frame, and bits of it wrap around his ankle. He bounds towards the stairs, joining the crowds thronging upwards, climbing on each other’s heads and trampling the ass-cock into the dust of the concrete floors. Gallery Girl

SEEING SOMETHING NEW. The Courtyard at Rosewood London, steps away from Covent Garden

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