ArtReview November 2015 by ArtReview

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

Jeff Wall 20 oc t ob e r – 19 de c e m b e r

Rineke Dijkstra 20 oc t ob e r – 19 de c e m b e r

l ond on

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

Jeff Wall 3 0 oc t ob e r – 19 de c e m b e r

Cristina Iglesias 3 0 oc t ob e r – 19 de c e m b e r

par i s

7 9 ru e du t e mpl e 7 5003 par i s

Christian Boltanski: Faire-Part 20th a nn i ve r s ary e xhibi t ion 2 2 oc t ob e r – 19 de c e m b e r

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

Bridget Riley

November 5 - December 19, 2015

David Zwirner New York

Donald Judd

November 7 - December 19, 2015 Untitled, 1979 (detail) Cor-ten steel; 48 x 119 x 153 inches (121.9 x 302.3 x 388.6 cm) Collection Martin Z. Margulies Photo: Peter Harholdt. Art © Judd Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, New York

David Zwirner New York

Raoul De Keyser Drift

November 26, 2015 - January 23, 2016 The exhibition will travel to David Zwirner in New York, March - April 2016.

David Zwirner London

Photo by Jef Van Eynde

Giorgio Morandi November 6 - December 19, 2015

David Zwirner New York

ORANIENBURGER STRASSE 18

D-10178 BERLIN

P+49(0)30 2888 4030

F+49(0)30 2888 40352

ED RUSCHA METRO MATTRESSES NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2016

ANDREA ZITTEL

PARALLEL PLANAR PANELS NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2016

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

THOMAS DEMAND

LATENT FORMS OCTOBER – DECEMBER 2015

HA U S E R & W IR T H

MARK BRADFORD BE STRONG BOQUAN 7 NOVEMBER – 23 DECEMBER 2015 511 WEST 18TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10011 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

SPIDERMAN (STILL),2015 DIGITAL VIDEO WITH AUDIO DURATION: 6’03” MIN.

WILHELM SASNAL NOVEMBER 6 – DECEMBER 19, 2015 — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10, D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE

FRIEZE LONDON OCTOBER 14 – 17, 2015 BOOTH C11 FIAC OCTOBER 22 – 25, 2015 BOOTH 0.B12

CEAL FLOYER NOVEMBER 6 – DECEMBER 19, 2015 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

FRIEZE LONDON OCTOBER 14 – 17, 2015 BOOTH C11 FIAC OCTOBER 22 – 25, 2015 BOOTH 0.B12

JOHANNESBURG

RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE 19 NOVEMBER – 19 DECEMBER 2015

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH BOOTH C20 3–6 DECEMBER 2015

www.goodman-gallery.com

MOTHER DAUGHTER

LINDA McCARTNEY MARY McCARTNEY

GAGOSIAN GALLERY NOVEMBER 20–DECEMBER 19, 2015 976 MADISON AVENUE NEW YORK 212.744.2313 WWW.GAGOSIAN.COM

3 – 6/12 2015 Art Basel Miami Beach

14/11 2015 – 2016 Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Adriano Costa

Mend e s Wood DM

Image: Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

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

Matthew Marks New York

Brice Marden

Rudolf Stingel

04 November – 18 December 2015 Tuesday– Saturday 11–6 Sadie Coles HQ 1 Davies Street London W1K 3DB 62 Kingly Street London W1B 5QN www.sadiecoles.com

Sadie Coles HQ

From top to bottom: Paola Pivi, Human Rights, 2010, Markers on paper, 21,6 x 27,9 cm / 8 1/2 x 10 2/2 inches | Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 1974, Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm / 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches | Alighiero Boetti, Contatore, 1967, Collage on screen painting, 44,5 x 62,5 cm / 17 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches | All images are Courtesy of Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London.

In Y2K. While the first Millenium World Peace Summit takes place in New York,

and the world dedicates a year to Mathematics,

the Millenium Bug makes the whole world wait with bated breath.

www.massimodecarlo.com info@massimodecarlo.com

@mdcgallery

massimodecarlogallery

Timothy Taylor Diane Arbus, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Shezad Dawood, Gabriel de la Mora, Armen Eloyan, Adam Fuss, Ewan Gibbs, Simon Hantaï, Hans Hartung, Volker Hüller, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alex Katz, Jonathan Lasker, Eddie Martinez, Josephine Meckseper, Richard Patterson, Serge Poliakoff, Fiona Rae, Sean Scully, Kiki Smith, Tony Smith, Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Terrazas, Lucy Williams

timothytaylor.com

ALI BANISADR PARIS MARAIS NoveMBeR – DeCeMBeR 2015 RoPAC.NeT

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

VIBHA GALHOTRA ABSUR –CITY –PITY –DITY

October 29 – December 5

513 West 20th Street

513 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 | Tel: 212 645 1701 | Fax: 212 645 8316 | www.jackshainman.com | info@jackshainman.com

Current Shows

Marcius Galan | Planta/Corte 8 October - 14 November, 2015

Beto Shwafaty | Contrato de Risco 8 October - 14 November, 2015

Upcoming Shows

Marepe | Armazém de Mim

27 November 2015 - 30 January 2016

Coleções Nessia 10

27 November 2015 - 30 January 2016

RUA PADRE JOÃO MANUEL, 755, LOJA 2, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL T 55 11 3088 2471 | WWW.GALERIALUISASTRINA.COM.BR

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

QWAYPURLAKE A GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY SIMON MORRISSEY 15 NOVEMBER 2015 — 31 JANUARY 2016 DURSLADE FARM, DROPPING LANE, BRUTON, SOMERSET BA10 0NL WWW.HAUSERWIRTHSOMERSET.COM

HEATHER & IVAN MORISON MISERY FARM: ARRANGEMENT TWO ALL ELEMENTS 2012 CLIFF CHALK, BONE ASH, CHINA CLAY, EBONISED LIME WOOD, WAX, WATER COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND WORKS|PROJECTS

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

DON McCULLIN CONFLICT – PEOPLE – LANDSCAPE 15 NOVEMBER 2015 — 31 JANUARY 2016 DURSLADE FARM, DROPPING LANE, BRUTON, SOMERSET BA10 0NL WWW.HAUSERWIRTHSOMERSET.COM

A 15 YEAR OLD BOY CRYING AT HIS FATHER’S FUNERAL WHO DIED OF AIDS, NDOLA CEMETERY, ZAMBIA,JANUARY 2000

John Giorno

GOD IS MAN MADE

“Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno”

November 21 – December 19, 2015

October 21, 2015 – January 10, 2016

A L M I N E R E C H GA L L E RY PA R I S

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

kadar brock cast with flashback cast with flashback november 19 – december 19, 2015

A LM I N E R EC H G A L L E RY B R USS E L S

November 19 – December 19, 2015

Joep van Lieshout Primitive Modern

A L M I N E R E C H G A L L E RY B R U S S E L S

All the Light We Cannot See Genieve Figgis

November 21—December 19, 2015

A L M I N E R E C H G A L L E RY LO N D O N

ArtReview vol 67 no 8 November 2015

Good luck, pk Welcome to the 2015 ArtReview Power 100. For more on that, see the bespoke introduction on page 121. Phew… that was easy. Although seriously, you’re going to have a much better understanding of the whole power-list business if you do read the introduction on page 121. So do that after you read this; no skipping to the bit with all the numbers. Meanwhile, some of you may have noticed ArtReview’s cover on the way in. As you should know by now, each edition of the Power 100 is accompanied by a parallel series of works (on the subject of power) commissioned from an artist. Their take, not ArtReview’s. Although obviously if ArtReview puts it on the cover, it’s admitting a fair degree of sympathy towards the artist’s take (ArtReview says this because keen readers may remember something of a kerfuffle surrounding last year’s cover and the limits of what ArtReview’s sympathy could achieve; fyi, that cover, despite having nothing on it, was subsequently nominated for an award – go figure). Anyhow. All this is culminating in the introduction of this year’s cover artist, Heman Chong. ArtReview would have done something dramatic with a red curtain if Heman hadn’t done that already. The work on the cover is The Forer Effect (2008), which is based on the observation that people will often consider certain descriptions of their personality to be highly accurate despite the actual vagueness and generality of the words and expressions used. One viewer who saw it when it was on show in Singapore described it as being like an arrow through their heart. We’re not saying which number they are on the power list, but perhaps there’s a point here about people’s willingness to read what they want to read and find the connections they want to find. Obviously that’s not how ArtReview’s power list works, although that description on the cover feels like it might apply to a number of people ArtReview knows in a ‘professional’ capacity. Further on in the magazine, you’ll find four more of Chong’s interventions. All of them linked by having money as their theme. (Although ArtReview was wondering what kind of connection cold, hard cash could possibly have to any of the powerful people on its list, ahem.) The first – ‘O$P$’, or ‘owe dollar pay dollar’ – derives from

ArtReview prepares for the aftermath of the Power 100

a payment reminder popular with Singapore’s informal loan industry. (‘The economy must be getting from bad to worse. Sigh…’ said one Singaporean blogger on noticing a sudden increase in this kind of graffiti; ‘Private money lenders such as the loan sharks are not the best to go for during financial difficulties,’ said the Loan Shark Malaysia website on noticing the same.) The second documents a project by Chong that involved the insertion of 13 nt$2,000 (Taiwanese dollar) notes into books by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño (who had famously switched from writing poetry to writing novels because he believed it promised a better financial future) held in Taipei’s public libraries. (It’s been three years since the project, A Short Story About Money And Fathers ( for celr), took place, but if you balance that against the facts that Bolaño may not be Taipei’s most popular writer and artworld people can be very lazy, it might still be worth getting a flight out there.) And the last two? Well, you’ll find those as you move along (note: the person who’s number one on ArtReview’s list doesn’t get to wear a crown; the crown features in another of Chong’s artworks). Now, the last thing ArtReview ever tries to do is to put its words into artists’ mouths (ha, ha, ha), but you’d have to be blind not to see that while everyone always says that art is not about money, there’s an intimate link between the current ‘boom’ in contemporary art and finance. Not just because some contemporary art costs a lot of money. And not because ArtReview’s publisher suddenly stopped asking it why it didn’t cover those nice popular artists who appeared in the arts section of most national newspapers and started barking on about art that was suddenly being included in the Financial Times’s ‘How to Spend It’ section. But because, of course, art is never really totally separate from real life – in which, whatever else you might think, money still does a lot of the talking. O$P$. ArtReview

No 67 listens in

Zhang Huan Let There Be Light

510 WEST 25TH ST NEW YORK OCTOBER 30 – DECEMBER 5, 2015

N O V E M B E R 4 , 2 0 1 5 – JA N UA R Y 9 , 2 0 1 6

9 0 9 M A D I S O N AV E N U E N E W YO R K N Y 1 0 0 2 1 +1 2 12 .7 7 2 . 2 0 0 4 D O M I N I Q U E - L E V Y. C O M

Robert Motherwell, Mural Sketch (Study for Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 100) (detail), 1975. Acrylic on canvas board, 8 ½ × 24 inches (21.6 × 61 cm). Private collection. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Art Previewed 47

Previews by Martin Herbert 49

Yancey Strickler Interview by Tom Eccles 86

Points of View by Mike Watson, Laura Oldfield Ford, Maria Lind, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Mark Rappolt 69

Peter Brant Interview by Tom Eccles 92 The Law and Its Ideas by Daniel McClean 98

Charles Sanders Peirce on Stefan Simchowitz Interview by Matthew Collings 82

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Interview by Mark Rappolt 102

page 51 Carsten Höller and Richard Wright, Dur, dur d’être un bébé (Hard, Hard to be a Baby), 1992. © Carsten Höller. Courtesy the artists and Gagosian Gallery, London. Included in Risk at Turner Contemporary, Margate

November 2015

POWER 1OO 119

Heman Chong, O$P$, 2015, site-specific wall installation, dimensions and materials variable, digital file for reproduction. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

ArtReview

Art Featured 171

The Broads: How one couple came to make a city’s art scene by Vincent Bevins 172

Revisiting the Educational Turn (How I Tried to Renovate an Art School) by Nicolas Bourriaud 182

Sun Ge Is ‘Asia’ a construct of the West or the East? Interview by Aimee Lin 176

Charisma and Causality: What if art were a kind of magic? by Timothy Morton 186 the strip 194 off the record 198

page 186 Chris Wainwright, Red Ice (Dislocated Bay, Greenland), 2009, c-type print. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

PILAR CORRIAS, GLADSTONE GALLERY AND ESTHER SCHIPPER CONGRATULATE PHILIPPE PARRENO ON THE OPENING OF HIS SOLO EXHIBITION AT HANGARBICOCCA, MILAN.

Film still: Philippe Parreno, The Crowd, 2015

PHILIPPE PARRENO HYPOTHESIS HANGARBICOCCA, MILAN OCTOBER 22, 2015 – FEBRUARY 14, 2016

We will begin by drawing, we shall continue to draw, and then we shall draw some more 15 October - 28 November 2015

GEORG BASELITZ GUST. DE SMET JAMES ENSOR KATI HECK ANTON HENNING MIKE KELLEY SUSAN TE KAHURANGI KING EDWARD LIPSKI JONATHAN MEESE FRANCIS PICABIA TAL R ED TEMPLETON TOREY THORNTON RINUS VAN DE VELDE

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY

Art Previewed

With so many to choose from, we’ve spent hours whittling them down to a top ten, taking into account the power, specs, design and most importantly: value for money 47

Previewed Risk Turner Contemporary, Margate through 17 January

Jim Lambie Anton Kern Gallery, New York 7 November – 19 December

Lisa Oppenheim Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam 12 November – 30 December

Niele Toroni Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through 10 January

Heather Phillipson Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 20 November – 7 February

Thea Djordjadze South London Gallery 2 October – 27 November

Xavier Cha 47 Canal, New York November–December

Jakarta Biennale Various venues, Jakarta 15 November – 17 January

Dana Schutz Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montréal through 10 January

Magdalena Fernández moca Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles through 3 January

1 Marina Abramović and Ulay, Rest Energy, 1980, based on the performance, 4 min, rosc’ 80, Dublin. © the artists. Courtesy the Marina Abramović Archives

November 2015

‘Only those who risk going too far can possibly and buildings; but size and spacing remain and perhaps necessarily a mutable category find out how far one can go,’ T.S. Eliot famously unbending, with all the corollaries concerning here. It can be rotated outwards, as in Pedro said, perhaps following an evening out in conceptual art, industrialisation, authorship, Reyes’s sculptural musical instruments-cumweapons, and it can be referenced without actual Margate. Mostly we don’t consider artists to originality and change within reiteration danger to viewer or artist, hence the presence be risk-takers in the sense of literal endangerthat this implies. At the Musée d’Art Moderne, of figures such as Fischli/Weiss, Kris Martin ment, though, which is why those who place the artistic wares traverse Toroni’s entire career, and Gerhard Richter. themselves in harm’s way stand out. Ai Weiwei, from 1967 – including a canvas made in public The artworld, of course, routinely redefines at the museum – to work freshly daubed in the 1 perhaps inevitably, features in Risk, Turner risk. Professional peril can stem from doing the Contemporary’s 70-artist survey, along with the institution, foregrounding the exacting joys same thing endlessly, the trick being to do it first doomed mariner Bas Jan Ader; orlan’s outré of what The Fall’s Mark E. Smith once called 2 and deliberately – as Niele Toroni worked out ‘The three R’s: repetition, repetition, repetition.’ surgical renovations; Ulay lengthily training At various historical points it’s also been decades ago. For nigh on half a century the Swiss a bow and arrow directly on Marina Abramović’s relatively hazardous to be a figurative painter painter has persevered with ‘Travail-Peinture’ or heart (Rest Energy, 1980); Ruth Proctor apparently ‘work painting’: the impression made by a paint- – not least one indebted to historical precedents freefalling in the gallery; and Chris Burden, including Chicago Imagism, Cubism, Surrealism loaded no 50 brush applied at 30cm intervals. who earned his place here several times over. and German Expressionism – but that hasn’t Even Daniel Buren, with whom, alongside J.M.W. Turner, for whose oeuvre his namesake 3 deterred Dana Schutz. For a decade or so, the Olivier Mosset and Michel Parmentier, Toroni gallery usually finds good use, is also among Detroit-born artist has been among the most cofounded the bmpt art collective, has not been the inclusions, most likely for apocryphally remarkable, dependable yet wayward-living so steadfast. The colours have varied, the work strapping himself to a ship’s mast for four hours American painters: her jewelled, intricately has been performed on canvas, walls, objects to experience a storm at sea. But risk is evidently

3 Dana Schutz, Face Eater, 2004, oil on canvas, 58 × 46 cm. Private collection, New York. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

2 Niele Toroni, Empreintes de pinceau nº 50 répétées à intervalles réguliers de 30 cm, Hommage à Marcel, 1986, alkyd paint on paper. © artist. Courtesy Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris

ArtReview

4 Jim Lambie, Our Lips Are Sealed, 2015, potato bags, chrome paint, expanding foam on canvas, 95 × 64 × 52 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

5 Heather Phillipson, Eat Here, artist’s collage/draft of the installation for Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2015. Courtesy the artist

composed scenes of figures impossibly eating their own heads, ensnared in tense dialogues or just attempting to play piano in the rain match gnarly tension to a weird evocation of delight in a way that feels inimitable (and like reality squared), though plenty have tried. As process-based abstraction stalls again, Schutz’s cartoon grotesquerie – along with Nicole Eisenman’s – is looking uncommonly relevant; here, in her first major show in Canada, she receives the survey treatment. Colour ii: Jim Lambie, an artist and 4 musician whose father ran Scotland’s only mobile disco, has long demonstrated that two ways to irresistibly affect art audiences are via music and colour, implicitly arguing that art ought to have the unmediated kick of rock. Who doesn’t like an example of his signature Zobop (1999–) vinyl-tape flooring, which most recently gave a psychedelic rehab to the steps

of London’s Royal Academy? Elsewhere, Lambie is now into his third decade as a transformedfound-object whiz, whether dusting turntables with glitter, creating collages from cutout eyes, immuring piles of records in concrete or making self-described ‘autobiographical’ Psychedelic Soulstick works by wrapping coloured twine around sticks while catching snippets of personal ephemera in them. What we saw most recently, at Basel’s Art Unlimited, were the latest in Lambie’s Shaved Ice series (2012/14) of chromatic ladders stretching from floor to ceiling, fitted with disorienting mirrored inserts, and – at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery – wall-based works like colourful origami with mirrored regions at their centres, entitled – with the inevitable nod to music culture, and specifically to Public Image Ltd – Metal Box. And Colour iii: Heather Phillipson, who 5 also features in Risk, is an artist and musician

November 2015

as well as a highly regarded poet, and her bright, tumbling, word-strafed installations – often centred on equally vivid, fragmentary, languagedriven videos – are poetic in their combinatory density, ‘addressing several senses simultaneously’, as the Schirn Kunsthalle sibilantly puts it. If her past few years of fast-moving creativity are any guide, expect the multimedia scenario Phillipson sets up for the institution’s rotunda to feature a superfluity of everyday materials that operate like a watercourse of conflicting stimuli. In the past she’s favoured cutouts and sculptures of birds, foodstuffs, bodies, tropical animals, men’s briefs, punchbags, boxing rings, giraffes and boxes of mineral water, tied together with sociable patches of painted colour and handwritten scraps of text; the result both evokes, through exaggeration, a sense of being swept along by contemporary reality’s flood of visual material and, via Phillipson’s associative

whitewater-rafting through it, recasts that soundtrack, at once derives from the Venezuelan of selfhood, Cha also evidently operates in a anxious prospect as a field of opportunities artist and trained graphic designer’s interest longer tradition of existential American video for hybrid experiences as yet unnamed. in representing the complexity of rainfall, her art – Nauman, Acconci, et al – an existential A fragmentary contemporary reality is not, admiration for Mondrian and her experience howling updated for times and impedimenta 6 however, treated so ardently by all artists. Xavier that deserve it. of a polyrhythmic recording of musical clapping. Elsewhere in installed updates (as it were): Cha, in her Body Drama (2011), explored a related For her first major us museum show, moca expanding on the rich tradition of Venezuelan disorientation-from-without via a performative collates six videos and one installation, 2i015 modernist abstraction (Gego, Alejandro Otero, installation at the Whitney in which at some (Luciérnaga) (2015), an led-based work climbing points an actor wore a body-mounted camera up one of the institution’s stairways acting 7 Jesús Rafael Soto in particular), Magdalena Fernández’s digital videos and installations are as a swarm of digital fireflies. in the gallery, and at others the footage shot was rigorously geometric and rooted in twentiethIn her last show at the Approach, London, projected. You never got the whole thing at the century pictorial innovations. Yet they also same time, resulting in what Cha has called 8 in 2013, Lisa Oppenheim used archival imagery collapse times and timelessness together, refernot as a way of pointing to the artist’s research ‘a sense of mysterious lack’. In Disembodied Selfie encing immemorial natural phenomena while skills, or as an ambiguous visual aspect clarified (2013), an unclothed actor moved through the being forward-thinking in their high-tech digital by a textual supplement, but as a question. Lyon Biennial in an apparently dislocated state, sheen. 2ipmoo9 (2009), for example, an immerIn redeployed Library of Congress images of posting selfies on Vine and Instagram in a sive set of projections in a darkened room wherein a ‘possibly erupting volcano’, for example, she performance presented simultaneously at the a gathering of glowing white dots gradually cropped off the explosion to leave only the smoke. New Museum via a dedicated website. While becomes a pulsing orchestration of lengthening Indeed, ‘only the smoke’ is arguably what our clearly relating the voyeurism, narcissism and and overlapping lines assisted by a pitter-patter expanding archive of images amounts to, frustration of social media to a fractured sense

6 Xavier Cha, abduct, 2015, hd video still. Courtesy the artist

6 Davis Rhodes, Untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 183 × 132 × 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

8 Lisa Oppenheim, A sequence in which a protester throws back a smoke bomb while clashing with the police in Ferguson, Missouri (Tiled Version iii), 2014. Photo: Sander Tiedema. Courtesy the artist and Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam

7 Magdalena Fernández, 1pm006 (Ara ararauna), 2006, and 1dpS006, 2006,video installations, dimensions variable. Photo: Valentina Álvarez. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

once detached from the relevant historical moment and its explicatory context; though Oppenheim acts to inhabit the past as best she can while recognising the limits of doing so, elsewhere revisiting antique formats like the photogram, for example, and – as in her concurrent show with Agnieszka Polska at the 21er Haus, Vienna – heliograms based on suns in historical paintings, or textiles using the Jacquard loom, famed forerunner of the computer. With that kind of range, what she’ll show at Juliètte Jongma is fairly open – particularly since they won’t tell us, no matter how many times we’ve asked – but expect it to be framed by Oppenheim’s habitual history-delving smarts. Thea Djordjadze, meanwhile, has got 9 this artistic-labour-as-treadmill situation fully sussed. Rather than bang out similar-looking work and hope nobody notices that’s the case 10 (except the collectors who want it that way),

she’s traditionally made a point of ‘reconfiguring earlier works’ – as the South London Gallery puts it – adding, each time, something new made from the things she accumulates in her studio, and she’s made this the iterative spine of her practice. This, meanwhile, also gives the Georgian artist the opportunity to reverse on herself by, for a change, not doing that and making something wholly new albeit still based on things that were lying around, as here: a low 20m structure spanning the length of the gallery, related to domestic architecture in West Georgia, but using materials found in the gallery. So no transport costs either: chapeau off. (We jest – Djordjadze’s atmospheric confluence of Arte Povera, filtered ethnography and tweaked serial Conceptualism is admirable in itself.) A 1970s-style art joke: my wife’s gone to a biennale. Jakarta? No, she went by plane. The Jakarta Biennale is no laughing matter,

though. Entitled Neither Back Nor Forward: Acting in the Present, it aims to skip nostalgia and utopianism in order to insist on the here-and-now, attending particularly to three themes: history; gender roles; and water as a requirement for life as well as a threat via flooding and pollution. Curator Charles Esche, fresh from last year’s São Paulo Bienal, and six young Indonesian curators (this being the inaugural episode of a long-term project for the biennale to work with younger thinkers) have, meanwhile, fashioned an artists’ list hewing to the local. Aside from a few South Americans and Australasians, and a scattering of Europeans – including Jeremy Millar (uk), Renzo Martens (Netherlands) and Superflex (Denmark) – the list is almost exclusively Indonesian. Did Okwui Enwezor’s Venice, in swerving away from the usual suspects, signal a biennale-curatorial sea change? We can only hope. Martin Herbert

10 Peter Robinson, Syntax System, 2015 (installation view, Artspace, Auckland). Courtesy the artist

Thea Djordjadze, Ma Sa i a ly e a se – de, 2015 (installation view, South London Gallery). Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION NEW YORK 11 NOVEMBER 2015

Viewing in New York 7-11 November 2015 JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Hannibal, 1982. Estimate $8,000,000-12,000,000. Sotheby’s New York 1334 York Avenue. Enquiries +1 212 606 7254. sothebys.com/contemporaryart © 2015 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS SOTHEBY’S, INC. LICENSE NO. 1216058. © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 20155

THE ARTIST’S MUSE POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART VIEWING · 31 October –13 November AUCTIONS · 9–13 November · 20 Rockefeller Plaza · New York, NY 10020 CONTACTS · Jessica Fertig · jfertig@christies.com · +1 212 636 2051 · Ana Maria Celis · acelis@christies.com · +1 212 641 5774

When a woman poses for a painter, she gives herself to him Amedeo Modigliani

christies.com

Property from a Distinguished European Collection AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (1884–1920) Nu couché oil on canvas 23⅝ x 36¼ in. (59.9 x 92 cm.) Painted in 1917–1918 Estimate on Request To be offered in The Artist’s Muse sale

SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY THROUGH MIST 25 NOVEMBER 2015-9 JANUARY 2016

4 0 7 P E D D E R B U I L D I N G , 1 2 P E D D E R S T R E E T, H O N G K O N G | L E H M A N N M A U P I N . C O M

Galerie Hubert Winter

FRED SANDBACK November 12 - December 23, 2015

Breite Gasse 17

1070 Vienna

Austria

o f f i c e @ g a l e r i e w i n t e r. a t

ph +43 1 5240976 (fax +9)

w w w. g a l e r i e w i n t e r. a t

RECYCLE GROUP KEEP ME UPDATED YOUR HOLINESS

20.11.15 - 10.01.16

GAZELLI ART HOUSE 39 DOVER STREET LONDON W1S 4NN | +44 (0) 2074918816 wwww.gazelliarthouse.com

Drive-in at night, Montréal, Canada, 2013

17 September –14 November 2015

time capsules by the side of the road Wim Wenders recent photographs

Beto Shwafaty, Decor, 2O15

21 November 2O15 – 23 January 2O16

I Was Once Lonelyness Jose Dávila Moshekwa Langa Joel Morrison Hayal Pozanti Mary Ramsden Samara Scott Beto Shwafaty Michael Staniak Asim Waqif

CONGRATULATES

BASEL ABBAS AND

RUANNE ABOU-RAHME WINNERS OF THE ABRAAJ GROUP ART PRIZE 2016

Carroll / Fletcher will host the artists’ first large-scale solo show in the UK in 2016 carrollfletcher.com

The Incidental Insurgents, Part 2: Unforgiving Years Artissima, Present Future (PF15) 6–8 November 2015

Queen III, 2015. Jacquard tapestry mounted on aluminium. 120 x 96 x 10 cm

21 October – 10 November 2015 144–146 New Bond Street, London, W1S 2PF +44 (0)20 7100 7144

www.halcyongallery.com

Shigeo Anzaï Index I

Photographs from a pivotal era in Japanese art 1970–6 White Rainbow 47 Mortimer Street London W1W 8HJ 25 November 2015 to 23 January 2016 Shigeo Anzaï : Index II Coming in Summer 2016

Chu Enoki in Back to the Future, rediscovering the artistic avant-garde, 1975–85 Artissima, Turin 6–8 November 2015

white-rainbow.co.uk

white rainbow

Above: Performance by Kishio Suga, Gallery 16, Kyoto, 14 July 1974

Points of View

The long-awaited Milan Expo 2015, which totes the slogan ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’, has met with much derision from critics for its slick commercial aesthetic and neoliberal values, evidenced by a list of sponsors that includes McDonald’s and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Its neat arrangement of prefabricated pavilions along a straight central road makes for a characterless shopping experience as opposed to the promised festival of food and sustainability. In this light, the exhibition La Grande Madre (The Great Mother), held at Palazzo Reale on Piazza del Duomo and affiliated with the Expo, could easily have seemed like an attempt to exonerate the trade fair of these criticisms by drawing on the charisma and cultural kudos associated with its curator, Massimiliano Gioni. However, curating an exhibition on motherhood in the twentieth and twenty-first century might also be seen as an arduous task in Italy, where the figure of the mother is practically beyond reproach. To his credit, Gioni – despite the potential drawback of having never experienced motherhood himself – manages deftly to draw out maternal associations that go far beyond simple clichés. Across its 29 rooms, the exhibition – conceived and supported by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi – includes works by over 120 artists that present an image of motherhood as a byword for sustenance and, by extension, the nurturing of the individual up to independence. La Grande Madre is a very political show, as seen in the display in Room 17 of 1960s and 70s Italian feminist political posters alongside feminist texts displayed in vitrines. This display serves to remind the public that the ‘Mother’ is a contentious figure over which some of the greatest political advances of the modern period have been made. The importance of the feminist struggle in itself reinforces the importance of the body to political opposition, a point that has never been more important than now. In the twentieth century Carl Jung famously wrote Modern Man

mother love or

a man curates a show about motherhood that is more than Oedipal by

Mike Watson

in Search of a Soul (1933); arguably in the twentyfirst century humankind is in search of a body to house that soul, having been co-opted by the runaway train of rationalism, which has reduced all things in nature to numerical values: zeroes and ones that tie us to screens. That such a concern may not be entirely new, however, is suggested in Room 7, where works by female dadaists – including Emmy Hennings and Hannah Höch – demonstrate that almost a century ago the nihilising potential of technology had been identified from a physical as well as spiritual perspective. In 1916, as the First World War raged, the Cabaret Voltaire – featuring Jean Arp, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, among others – interpreted the dispiriting effects of industrialisation through performance. The very first edition of the legendary meet-up for exiled artists seeking refuge from the war featured a poetry reading by Hennings, partner of Ball and fellow cofounder of Cabaret Voltaire, who sang the words to a Ball poem called ‘The Dance of Death 1916’ (1915–16), including the words: Death is our sign, our magic word. We leave both wife and child, What have they to do with us?

La Grande Madre (The Great Mother), 2015 (installation view, Palazzo Reale, Milan). Photo: Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan

November 2015

The photograph Emmy Hennings with Dada Doll (1917) features the artist with one of the sewn hand-puppets she used to embellish her performances. Her expression is one of anguish, her distant stare suggesting a lack of comprehension in the face of the tragic events playing out in Europe at that time. This image signals the centrality of women – and motherhood – to the politics of the body: what we do with our own, how we cherish it and how we use it to assert humanity’s right to dignity. Such a highlighting of the centrality of the individual body to political struggle is arguably far more effective than the Expo’s invocations to ‘feed the world’, which only thinly veil an imperative to spend and consume.

London City Island. You recognise it from the promotional film you watched before embarking on the journey to find it; loads of you gathered round in the tap room of the Aberfeldy, laptop open on the bar. There is a sense that this, more than any other scheme, is a personal assault: a lot of the people round here are descended from the displaced island families of Bow Creek. The film disturbed you with its dissociative scoping of boundaries – hovering outside windows, haunting unbuilt streets – the perspective of departing souls. explore the island – London City Island is a new neighbourhood on the Leamouth Peninsula by Canary Wharf. The 12-acre site, surrounded by water and connected by a specially commissioned bridge, is thoughtfully landscaped… Investors are the revenants in the scheme, never needing to be there; speak to a broker in Hong Kong, watch on a screen in a hotel lobby. The sound is mesmerising, a bland somnambulism. You sense the pull into the oneirosphere, the opiate strangeness. You think how these postindustrial realms were always softened like that – the drifts on Robitussin, Benylin, codeine, hanging around for bags of brown at the jungle in Poplar High Street. Opiates recode, they take the city and contract it, the path between corner shop and bedroom, the duvet and ceiling. Your crew has sharpened the strategy – refer to narcotics to read the situation, to plot

the enclave A wild backwater is colonised by the advance of City Living by

Laura Oldfield Ford

the warping and melding. Détourn the yuppie fitness regime, train until you’re combat-fit. This is your way of organising: going to ground, reemerging, swarming. The resistance, when it comes, is unexpected, unmanageable. Designed with a warehouse aesthetic, generous open-plan living spaces and loft-style features, City Island’s apartments offer timeless quality with an urban edge. Leave the pub en masse to see what’s happening, to scope out the potential. You’re thinking you need to expand the territory – thinking about those new apartments, all that clean space, thinking of it stripped

ArtReview

of generic paintings, of the sanitised street art, and imagining it as a labyrinth, Constant’s New Babylon, walkways and bridges connecting points of intensity, an archipelago governed by a new system of values. Beer garden leads to a forgotten orchard, the ripe fragrance of damson. The flats are grey, penitential, like Scotland, but surrounding plots are erupting: chrysanthemums, gladioli, roses blooming for the second time. Sam March House, Blair Street, tendrils forming sinewy ropes – frames buckling under coiling vines. New Aberfeldy Village rising across the courtyards, 20-storey blocks, sandcastles built in muddy craters. You remember the lcc towers there, blackened brick, grotesque distortions. Now the malice is rerouted through the easily readable. Avenue stinking of woodchips, computergenerated images of new shops and restaurants, demonic bankers with blue contact lenses. Walk down Oban Street, your street, dockers cottages standing as a totem of resilience during the Blitz. You always think how those catastrophic months became a substrate of scar tissue in the East London terrain. Oban House. Wooden scaffold on a shred of communal ground. Runner beans, gourds, squash. Tendrils again. The slow turning troubles you. You perceive it at night in that damask bedroom,

always there, a prehensile searching. The block marks the perimeter, a psychic buffer between the estate and the Blackwall Industrial Estate. You note the African church in an empty newbuild where a Tesco Metro might have been. Climb concrete steps in a chlorophyll tunnel – mountain ash, briars, banks of hogweed – to the aerial stretches of the a13; this is the covert exit from the island. You think about the plants here, how these malicious strains can be deployed as weapons – the seeds of Japanese knotweed, convolvulus, giant hogweed, strategically scattered in the new pools and gardens of City Island. You stand on a bridge spanning Bow Creek and a pallet citadel. Leamouth Peninsula, the old Orchard House. You think of your nan, the old family, the hidden realm they had there. You are pushed into a narrow pavement by the traffic. The new ‘city island’ is suddenly upon you, a tawdry version of the glowing hologram you saw in the film; toxic pall, mudflats and construction lanes. It is unreachable, a guarded plot in a skein of contaminated rivers.

You cross the bridge heading towards Canning Town, slink behind crash barriers, another portal opening in the concrete, a staircase, dank and acrid with the smell of ammonia and moss, taking you to a subway, an empty corridor beneath the motorway. You step through the scattered detritus of a six-lane carriageway and the scavengers circling beneath, diamonds scuttling from wrecked windscreens, smashedup circuit boards, cans of Tyskie, cans of Lech, Martell bottles. You come to a forgotten zone between rivers and dlr tracks. You get a rush of euphoria, the Turkish-delight scent of buddleia. From here you can see the red bridge leading to City Island, but you can’t reach it. Instead you navigate the furlongs of eel grass, the canopies of elder, the residual orchards slipping down to the creek. The track pulls you through a field of yarrow, ground elder, knapweed. The trees are laden with fruit and berries. You think this year it’s all accelerating, as if the exuberant harvest is a sign of the transformation and abundance to come. That Spiral Tribe party at Canary Wharf, summer solstice 1992. The site was chosen for its potent energy in the flight from Stonehenge, Nine Ladies, Castlerigg. The same occult forces were recognised in the avenues of Masonic architecture. Olympia & York in receivership, ghostly acres of concrete ground. A symbolic site for a party, a sense that you were striking at the dark psyche of the British ruling class. Castlemorton had just happened; there was a sense then that things had reached critical mass. You remember the pyramid of Canary Wharf pulsating, how the sound system seemed synchronised with the flashing white light. dhs, 4hero, Crystal Distortion. You remember the way buildings

November 2015

seemed to split and reconfigure, Piranesi formations built out of ketamine and sleep deprivation. You’d come down from a party on a traveller site in Sprotbrough in Doncaster, another island bound by railways, roads and rivers. You remember getting into London already wasted… been on it for days. The party at Canary Wharf had only been going an hour when the Met came charging in with batons and boots, slinging revellers into vans. You remember how he took your hand, the eyes mesmerising, how you drifted through desolate yards and abandoned office blocks away from the searchlights, dogs and tannoys. In the amber light of now, something returns, an unexpected memory of that delirious drift, the dusty chambers beneath the a13, the charred ground and burnt tyres. You remember the concrete pillars, edged then with neon magenta, tangerine, vivid green. You search the wall for traces, the names you scratched in the heat of that June night. Floating above the ground, gliding between buildings – a seam of intensity, the staining of place. The promotional film London City Island, with its dissociative tropes, unlocks a buried current, unwittingly corrals its viewers into the same disembodied trance. Those parties had been transformative: they reordered abandoned swathes of London, made you recalibrate space. Traces are still held in snugs and backrooms across Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, memories flaring involuntarily in pills and shots. In 1992 you really started to feel the reactionary backlash in the architecture, the reordering of terrain. You remember the shift into exurbia, time spooling into the fanaticism of neoliberalism – barred from the urban centres, barred from the wilds of the countryside, you were trapped in a Middle England obsession with cars and out-of-town retail parks. Autumn equinox. Blackthorn heavy with berries, a bumper crop, filling blue bags from the offie to make a batch of sloe gin – stores for the winter, the siege. You sense the excitement in the nimble grabbing, the bending of branches, the desire to hunker down, to barricade the island. You think all you need is contained here: the manufacturing, storing and hiding out. Walk around the mudflats, banks of thistledown, fluffy heads, seeds carried miles. You want to collect brambles, but the others are impatient and you only get a few, the rain’s wasted most of them anyway. Used to come with your nan picking them, the magical unmarked lanes, she knew them all, said it was a comfort being able to look across and see the birthplace, the old home. Then you’d go back and make bramble jelly, pies out of the oven oozing purple ink. You remember the radio, the 1950s songs she liked, and the warm yellow light of the kitchen.

A woman stands in front of a large painting of an arctic landscape. Then she starts to walk. The steady camera follows her every step from behind as she travels down an asphalt street. She passes red wooden buildings and a beige concrete one; snow-covered mountains show up in the background, and the sound of the wind is stronger than the chatting waterfowl. The sky is clear. The scene is at once intensely unreal and surprisingly familiar. This is the beginning of Ieva Epnere’s 11-minute film “… one can walk around in the fog and it’s alright” (2015), shot in the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden, on Spitsbergen, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and recently shown at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga. Pyramiden is remote, and peculiar: there are no landline telephones, and almost no Internet connection. Famously the region is home to more polar bears than people, despite the fact that the locals are bolstered by daily groups of tourists making brief stops on cruises around Norway. Among the tourist attractions there is, of course, what is thought to be the world’s northernmost grand piano, left behind by the Russians in a cultural centre in which pale pot-plants are also still standing. The next scene shows the same woman, dressed in a short bright-blue-and-red folkinspired dress and flat boots, continue her journey, now on a long wooden walkway that stretches across the terrain. Remnants of industrial activity, rippling water and brown grass fill the image. The sun continues to shine. Then the setting changes to a barren plain full of pebbles, and the woman faces the same mountain that appeared in the landscape painting with which we began. She is no longer following a designated route but is striding queerly across the open space. She becomes ant-size as she crosses a diminutive bridge and then disappears into the distance. There is a distinctly unreal atmosphere in Epnere’s video. The place she documents has

quiet traumas A long walk in the

wrecked landscape of a former mining town hints at

deep scars by

Maria Lind

Ieva Epnere, A No-Man’s Land, An Everyman’s Land, 2015 (installation views, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga). Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy the artist and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre

ArtReview

been radically affected by the last decades of geopolitics (founded by Sweden in 1910, Pyramiden was sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, before being closed and abandoned in 1998 and reinvented as a tourist attraction in 2007), and the resultant transformations have probably been traumatic for many people. It makes me think of author Jalal Toufic’s notion of ‘the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster’, according to which violent events not only kill and injure people but also destroy museums, archives and temples or affect them in other ways, just as literature and art, colours and shapes can be impinged on. It’s a bit like the way in which the consequences of exposure to nuclear radiation can live on inside a body and only show its effects decades later. Or like the Freudian scheme of trauma and symptom. Artist Walid Raad is famously influenced by this idea and has explored it both in relation to the civil war in Lebanon and the arts infrastructure in the Middle East, and in the Gulf region in particular. For example, he has argued that while some manifestations of war are material, like the destruction of libraries and museums, more abstract elements such as colours, lines and shapes are also affected, albeit in a less obvious way. The Spitsbergen location in Epnere’s video seems to speak to some changes of that kind. What used to be big and impressive is now small and pitiful, although the area has been subject neither to war nor any other physical violence. And yet there are still dramatic effects, a quiet drama. And now I realise why I am imbued with a sense of recognition while watching the video: the walking woman, whose face we are never

allowed to see, corresponds to a longstanding daydream of mine. In it, I leave a building and start walking. Then I just walk, and walk and walk, until nothing further is known. Walking without stopping, like the woman in the video. The familiar and unfamiliar butted up against each other – it felt like a significant art experience at Kim?

DESIGN DAY & EVENING SALES SALES • 23 November 2015 • Paris VIEWING • 19–23 November • 9, avenue Matignon, Paris 8e CONTACT • Pauline De Smedt • pdesmedt@christies.com • +33 (0) 1 40 76 83 54

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From the collection of Lorenz Bäumer JEAN ROYÈRE (1902–1981) A gilt tubular metal chaise longue with cowhide upholstery, circa 1950 €50,000–70,000

PALACIO DE CULTURA BANAMEX - PALACIO DE ITURBIDE

October 15, 2015 thru January 17, 2016 Madero 17, Historic Center, Mexico City www.fomentoculturalbanamex.org

ANTIGUO COLEGIO DE SAN ILDEFONSO November 19, 2015 thru March 20, 2016 Justo Sierra 16, Historic Center, Mexico City www.sanildefonso.org.mx www.javiermarin.com.mx www.javiermarin-fundacion.org.mx

I was doing a little cleaning up the other day, a chore I generally leave to my slowwitted studio assistant Neal, but he invariably misplaces something valuable, like that small Paul McCarthy sculpture I found under a bench in the park (at least I think it’s a Paul McCarthy sculpture), or gets himself trapped in the utility closet and repeatedly grabs at a whole mess of X-Acto blades as he fumbles around in the dark and very nearly bleeds out before anyone takes the time to even look for him. Bellyaching the whole way to the hospital about how he doesn’t have anyone to love and if he had died back there in the utility closet (which wasn’t even locked, by the way) he would have died alone and ignorant of the ways of love, etc, etc, etc. Phooey to that! No. It’s better that I do the cleaning and avoid all that drama. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, after all. Anyway, upon getting on my hands and knees and putting some elbow grease into it… and that’s really my point here. You can’t pussyfoot around cleaning, you know. You just have really to aspire to something outstanding and then scrub the fuck out of it. It’s amazing what some people consider sanitary! It’s like they grew up in a barn or something. Actually, that’s not my point, it’s just that I get worked up about cleaning, it’s one of my passions. So sue me. My actual point is that upon getting on my hands and knees to do said cleaning I came across the statuette I received from the Whitney Museum for Most Relevant Artist (White Male or Other) 1989 and was immediately paralysed by a flood of memories. I remember it as though it were yesterday. Sitting, underserved, in my crumply Thierry Mugler suit at a table with the amiable Ray Smith, the entertaining William Wegman, the mischievous April Gornik and, well, Sherrie Levine. All of whom I beat fair and square because I was simply a better artist… and more relevant. We sat through the lesser awards (Best Appropriation, Best Use of Dogs, etc), made small talk and picked at our dinners, until finally

89 minus in which

the moment came. The presenter called out my name. my name! I can still see their faces. Mouths agape, distorted with the rage and bitterness of a thousand cursed generations. Eyes cast to the heavens in disbelief and self-pity. All because I, Jonathan Grossmalerman, had won the Whitney Museum Most Relevant Artist (White Male or Other) 1989 and not them. My heart swelled as I glanced around the room. Dinner-roll crumbs tumbled down Christopher Wool’s front as he stared in horror. Ashley Bickerton drank even more. Everyone was there. The gunshot guy, the drain guy, the guy who projects video onto other things, the loss, change and memory painter guy, the feminist-critique lady, the big-single-brushstroke guy, the punchline guy, the surveillance lady, the guy who takes little things and makes them big, the balloon-animal guy, the angry-boy-art guy, the fabric lady. The guy who always throws up threw up, and a lone Guerrilla Girl trembled with rage in the corner. I rose and slowly walked along the carpet to the stage as flashbulbs exploded all around; then, just before reaching the stage, I realised I had forgotten my drink and returned to my table to grab it, thereby forcing everyone to relive my glorious voyage. A communal groan rose from the room. And I delighted in it! Finally, upon taking the stage, I thanked the Whitney and all my colleagues and spoke of penises and vaginas and why they are wonderful and how lucky I am to spend my days painting them. It was truly an unforgettable night. But what’s that? The phone! Snapping me out of my memory palace! Ugh… It’s probably just my stupid daughter or Neal calling from the hospital about something he forgot to do… Goddamn it! Well, I suppose I should answer it. Wait a second! This door appears to be locked! Well, I guess I’ll just sit here cradling my trophy in the utility closet until someone finds me.

A painter recalls a time when art was great and he was relevant or

In your face, Christopher Wool

Jonathan Grossmalerman

ArtReview

In Course of the Miraculous by Cheng Ran 5.9 – 1.11.2015 14th Istanbul Biennale In association with Erlenmeyer Foundation and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne

Zhang Ding: Enter the Dragon 12.10 – 25.10.2015 ICA Theatre, London Co-presented with ICA London

Media – Dalí 05.11.2015 – 15.02.2016

chi K11 art museum, Shanghai Co-curated with Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

Segmented Landscape by Liu Chuang 06.11.2015 – 05.02.2016 K11 art village, Wuhan

The Conference of Future Museum and Gallery Design 13.11 – 15.11.2015

University of Hong Kong Co-organized with University of Leicester and UKTI

Not so much an off-space as an exploration of the entire concept of ‘off’, the inaugural offBiennale took place between 24 April and 31 May this year, encompassing over 130 venues and featuring more than 160 projects in and around Budapest. Pointedly avoiding any Hungarian state or local government support, including state-run art venues, the biennial’s board of seven curators operated the biennial via a network (primarily Hungarian, with international elements as well) rather than as a hierarchical structure, putting the emphasis on the fact that their event relied on ‘pro-bono professional work’ rather than the distribution of fees. Exhibitions and performances took place at venues that included commercial galleries, archives, private residences, independent theatres, bars and public spaces. In part, this served as a means of positioning the ‘off’ aspect of the biennial as an indicator of a coming together of community-minded arts professionals acting through shared interests

and objectives, with no other motivation than the belief in the importance of their actions and the need for self-expression in the context of an art scene that is by and large state-funded and state-controlled. All of which seemed in turn designed to mitigate the protest aspect of a biennial that was obviously antigovernmental in tone (and therefore as exclusive as it was inclusive) and protest-oriented in nature. The backdrop to which is the influence of Viktor Orbán’s rightwing Fidesz government (whose allies effectively control the state-run art institutions and the mainstream Hungarian media) and what he describes as its ‘different, special, national approach’ to government, which, among many other things, led last autumn to a raid on the Budapest offices of the ngo Okotars, which manages funds from Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein, an event that put the position of ngos within Hungary in some doubt (the eea/Norway ngo Fund was one of the main supporters of the off-Biennale).

offspace: off-Biennale The 30th instalment of ArtReview’s ongoing guide to independent art spaces and scenes around the world, reporting on the kind of spaces that are unorthodox, flexible, occasionally run by artists and sometimes literally off the map.

This month it’s an entire biennial in Budapest, Hungary. Or at least the first edition of a projected biennial, if that can be said to constitute a biennial – definitions can be slippery things in art by

Mark Rappolt Horizontal Standing, 2015 (installation view). Photo: The Orbital Strangers Project. Courtesy off-Biennale, Budapest

November 2015

None of that can hide the fact that on one level the off-Biennale was effectively about the institutions and institutionalised art scene it sought to circumvent, raising the question of what such entities should represent (diversity or uniformity) and how they should represent them. Echoes of this issue could be felt later in the year during the European refugee crisis, when volunteers distributing aid at Budapest’s Keleti train station described how, beyond the general humanitarian issues, they were acting on the basis that the government’s hardline attitude to refugees did not represent the attitude of the people of Budapest. This, of course, is a matter of perspective (some people, after all, voted the current Hungarian government in, even if, like many sitting governments, it has used its authority to make sure that it will be very hard to vote out). But you couldn’t help but come away from the off-Biennale thinking about what you expect from your own art institutions – and about the oft-trottedout clichés about how they (certainly in the case of London) offer a mirror to society, representing diasporic or diverse communities and backgrounds, and about how much of this is true and how much of it is aspirational (at best) or rhetorical (at worst). Perhaps the answer to some of those questions was provided by one of the biennial’s most moving exhibitions, Horizontal Standing, housed in the apartment of curator Kati Simon (who put the show together, with artist Zsolt Vásárhelyi), once of Budapest’s Ludwig Museum, now effectively exiled to Berlin. Works on show were housed in kitchen cupboards, on desks, on occasional tables and in bedrooms, and included prints from Adrian Paci’s Back Home series (2012), in which the Albania-born, Milan-resident artist (he left his homeland during the 1997 civil war) photographs immigrant families in front of reproductions of their former residences in Albania; a narrative that has, like many of the other works shown here, resonances with Simon and Vásárhelyi’s own recent history. All of which enhanced the feeling that there are some sorts of artistic expression that will always be better articulated in a private space with the consequent sense of intimacy that no other environment can replicate. Something that’s perhaps easy to forget in an artworld in which, increasingly, everyone is vocationally trained and congregates in authorised assembly places (be they museums or more ‘official’ offspaces). Not that this show was put together by someone who wasn’t at core a talented art professional (the idea that curating and artworking in general is a matter of professional competence rather than political expediency was another subtheme of the biennial).

The question of what gets to be ‘on’ and what gets to be ‘off’ was something of an elephant in the room for the biennale. Happening in conjunction was Bookmarks, a sprawling exhibition that set out to document, and provide an official history of the evolution of the avant-garde Hungarian art scene since the 1960s, effectively connecting the work of artists such as Dorá Maurer to artists or artist groups of the current generation, such as Ádám Kokesch (whom Maurer taught, and indeed has written about in ArtReview), Little Warsaw and Société Realiste, all of whom were actively part of off-Biennale exhibitions. Bookmarks is organised by three of the major players on Budapest’s commercial gallery scene – acb, Kisterem and Vintage – and originally presented at a commercial art fair, Art Cologne. Exhibitions at all three were part of the off-Biennale – Vintage presenting newer works by Maurer; acb presenting Katarina Šević and Tehnica Schweiz’s Alfred Palestra (2014–), a performance and sculpture that links the histories of Alfred Jarry and Alfred Dreyfus; and Kisterem presenting Eva Kot’átková’s Black Theatre (2013), an exploration of nonverbal theatre and communication – all of which, while articulating the issues of freedom and oppression (more humorously tackled in Anna Witt’s The Rights of the Pavement, 2012, in which an Austrian policeman narrates the criminal

elements and judicial consequences of various seemingly innocent public protests, part of the exhibition Blind Spots at Supermarket Gallery), nevertheless had the character and feel of conventional gallery shows. But perhaps such a muddying of artworlds is what makes an event like this genuinely ‘off’. There’s only so far off the grid you can be if you want people to fund and pay attention to your event. So what next? In terms of the art on show, the off-Biennale was, like most large events of this nature, a mix of ups and downs (Ritual Resist, 2013, a performance by South African Kendell Geers involving a nude man and woman holding a mirror between them via bodily pressure was both inexplicable and bizarre), but as an event that raised the issue of what art can and should do for a community, it was as vital as things come. The key problem of course is that once the off-Biennale commits to a second edition (and presumably has to fund itself in a more secure manner) it becomes an institution rather like the ones against which it originally sought to distinguish itself. All of which raises the fundamental question of whether the off-Biennale, or for that matter an offspace, necessarily requires an oppositional stance in order to justify its continuing existence. That art should provide a space in which contrarian, oppositional or provocative views can be expressed should be a given (in Budapest apparently it is not), but whether that means being ‘off’ in a sense that excludes what is ‘on’ is another question entirely.

top Société Réaliste, Universal Anthem, 2013–15, performance. Photo: The Orbital Strangers Project. Courtesy off-Biennale, Budapest middle Horizontal Standing, 2015 (installation view). Photo: The Orbital Strangers Project. Courtesy off-Biennale, Budapest bottom Katarina Šević and Tehnica Schweiz, Alfred Palestra, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Csaba Aknay. Courtesy: acb Gallery

ArtReview

Autumn/Winter until November 8, 2015

STADT/BILD. Xenopolis

STADT/BILD (Image of a city) is a cooperation of Berlinische Galerie, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Nationalgalerie—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

November 25, 2015—April 10, 2016 Jackson Pollock’s »Mural« Energy Made Visible An exhibition curated by Dr. David Anfam and organized by The University of Iowa Museum of Art.

April 29—July 3, 2016 Basim Magdy Deutsche Bank »Artist of the Year« 2016

Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin 10 am—8 pm, Mondays admission free Details on the exhibitions and supporting programs deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 42

Charles Sanders Peirce on the indexicality of Stefan Simchowitz’s art-flipping practices Interview by

Matthew Collings One of the most original thinkers and greatest logicians of all time applies his complex semiotic theories to the problem of what certain issues of the art market can possibly tell us about artistic practice today

(and Picasso)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) invented a profoundly influential theory of signs. Possessing a multiplying three-part structure, with three terms at the base – icon, index and symbol – it provided the foundation for later French systems of structuralism and post-structuralism.

ArtReview

artreview What goes on with logic? charles sanders peirce In the logical world of cognition, that which is at the centre of knowing is hypothesis, or in other words, guessing. ar Should paintings be logical? csp They often are, they have an internal painterly logic. ar What’s an index? csp Whatever is present to the mind can only be so as a representation. And this is by means of signs, of which there are three kinds: icon, index and symbol. But every division has a further division. My theory is complicated and there are points in it where the number of divisions reaches 64. ar What’s a sign? csp It might be a quality, an actual thing or a matter of habit. ar Is a painting an index? csp The meanings of indexicality are heavily dependent on context. The answer to the question of what something is depends heavily on who’s asking and what else they have in mind. ar What about paintings made for flipping? csp They might be flipped but not made entirely for that aim. Or the creator might have had that purpose in mind along with a lot of

other things. Decisions and processes were undoubtedly involved that didn’t relate to flipping. Also there might be a number of creators. ar Do you think Ibrahim Mahama’s sack paintings are an index of something? csp They’ve certainly become a sign of something for many people since they’ve been made the subject of a court case, which, as we’re talking, in October 2015, has yet to be resolved. ar Do you mean that for the suspicious-minded or those with nothing better to do than to look for trouble, Mahama’s paintings might quite unjustifiably now stand for a controversial new production model where a group of businessmen create a little system to make money out of contemporary art? With your distinguished reputation I don’t think you hold that view yourself, do you? I certainly don’t. csp Those who stir the pot, as they say, might draw such a conclusion. Neither of us here in this conversation is that base. One could say in any case if one were drawn into such a conversation that the open transparency of the system is the new element and not the system itself or the notion of such a system. There’s always a system of some kind. Van Gogh, his brother, their joint

above Ibrahim Mahama, Out of Bounds, 2015 (installation view, All the World’s Futures, Venice Biennale). Courtesy Venice Biennale facing page Charles Sanders Peirce

November 2015

art dealership, that’s a system. Now, so many years after the moment of Van Gogh, it is well known as an ordinary artworld fact that artists are taken up by dealers, and they get the benefit of the confidence and resources that that relationship sometimes entails, and are able because of that to produce a great many paintings, almost on an industrial scale. Those of us that love the arts are happy that artists should be supported. Those who have a jealous disposition can sometimes give way to bitterness about it. If the artists’ dealers eventually make money from the support they offer, it’s nothing to wring our hands about. For the gossiping classes maybe there’s something deliciously scandalous about an artist who justifies his work in ethical terms finding himself in a situation where only business matters are the issue. Both of us right now can surely agree that that’s a problem of the perceiver and nothing to do with the artist. Ibrahim Mahama is an intelligent and talented man, still only twenty-eight but philosophically sophisticated. His artistic work follows an ethical model where the general public is encouraged to think about social structures and how they affect the excluded classes. In a practice where the artist doesn’t actually do much making as such, but hires assistants to carry out the labour, he takes an object, a humble jute sack, originally manufactured for cocoa, which has been recycled by the poor to sell charcoal from, as well as other things – so it becomes part

of a selling process on a very low monetary level – and he has it recycled again so it becomes art, with all the implications of fantastical highprofit that now go with that term, with our society set up in the way that it is. But levels of meaning to do with finances are part of an overall social idea and do not reflect on the artist’s motivations, which are above reproach. The content of the original court filing, a matter of public record, might present to a base mind an apparent scandalous paradox. Outsourced production relates to a political idea this artist wants to get across, but now it becomes an aspect of business as such, highlighted – at least in the eye of one that lacks any higher comprehension – perhaps embarrassingly. ar Two guys give Mahama money, he takes it, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s absolutely clear that there can be no doubt that he has done nothing wrong and they haven’t either. This is a straightforward transaction on the model of ordinary practices that go on in the artworld now. csp Yes. But there is a problem of communication, it turns out. They believe that they’ve secured his agreement that once they’ve got some paintings constructed and he’s signed them, thus endorsing them as his art, then these works can be marketed as – indeed – his art. ar Is that logical? csp There is some logic to it. As we have stated, it is his practice to have his works created in a hands-off way; that is, assistants make it. This practice relates to his ethical concept about art, labour and capital. ar But then it goes wrong. csp Yes. The guys receive from him a certain amount of the materials he typically uses, burlap sacks with a certain distressed appearance, including the imposition of different kinds of marks – crude writing, mysterious symbols and so on – by those poor people that have made use of them over time. Plus the guys obtain the patterned fabrics that Mahama often uses in conjunction with these sacks to make paintings. And they have stretchers fabricated so all these materials can be transformed by a hired assistant into paintings ‘by’ Mahama. Mahama oversees this labour and at the conclusion signs the results, as is his usual practice. But then after another certain period he states to the guys that these paintings are not actually his works. Now, no one except Mahama knows the reason for this declaration. And we can only believe that it is reasonable one, it’s just that, as we have stated, it is as yet an enigma. ar And when he won’t back down, they sue him for just under $4.5 million.

csp Yes. They say, based on the few they sold, that that’s the amount the works the assistant put together would have fetched for the dealers once they’d marketed the works, which they can no longer do since Mahama’s now saying they’re not really his works. ar It’s funny because the assistant named in the legal case, Dylan Atkins, used to be the assistant of me and Emma Biggs in the studio in which we create our joint abstract paintings: we still listen to Hank Williams on the mixtapes he kindly made for us. He was in a band whose claim to fame was that they were featured ten years ago in Channel 4 ‘idents’, those brief animated logos that identify the channel between programmes. They all wore purple retro 1970s suits like the Isley Brothers. csp That’s amusing, I agree.

Those who stir the pot, as they say, might draw such a conclusion. Neither of us here in this conversation is that base. One could say in any case if one were drawn into such a conversation that the open transparency of the system is the new element and not the system itself or the notion of such a system ar Anyway, so the logic is that Mahama reneged on the deal? csp The case hasn’t been heard, so no one can say that. ar What’s it an index of? csp Now you’re going too fast. An index is a certain concept relating to the problem of categories. You can apply it with Mahama vs Simchowitz – Stefan Simchowitz, the South African-born us citizen, sometime Australianresident contemporary art dealer/collector who came to art producing from Hollywood movie producing in 2007 – he’s the best known of the two art dealers. And in fact we have been applying it along with the other sign modalities of my theory up to the number 64. But only subconsciously, because we haven’t been philosophising or thinking in a formal way, but just shooting the breeze.

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ar Do you think Isabelle Graw’s statement about painting is right? ‘The indexical quality of its signs’, she says, suggests ‘the immediate presence of its creator’? csp To be formal, and to employ my own writerly language, which isn’t necessarily elegant or attractive even to other thinkers, which is perhaps the reason I am less well known than other sign theorists, Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, I would say A being the premise and B the conclusion, the question is whether these facts are really so related that if A is B is – if so, the inference is valid but if not, not. In other words it’s a guess, and anyone can guess. But rightness or logic would come from how Graw’s hypothesis is developed. ar I suppose I’m asking what does it mean and is it true? csp Let’s see. I think of brushstrokes, the trace of the brush, the artist’s hand and the artist as an individual, an object made in a tradition of objects, also painting as a category of art. The surface of a painting might have a handmade quality. It might be a particular hand or you might be thinking of the notion or ideal of the handmade, which wouldn’t be particular to an individual – say, Picasso – but general to vast amounts of art made over long periods of time, the far distant past and the urgent whirring present – Titian, Bonnard, Picasso and Wade Guyton, also Christopher Wool and Charline von Heyl, but Albert Oehlen and Bert Irvin as well, plus Ian McKeever and Anselm Kiefer, and Frida Kahlo and Sean Landers. ar Wade Guyton didn’t really make his paintings by his own hand. csp Indeed, he made them by running canvas through a Xerox machine. But he points to the ideal of the handmade in the way he traps, as it were, accidental blips in the printing process. He harvests them and they become a version of sensitivity, the sensitised surface that we associate with painting. The blips are an index of the handmade in the context of painting. ar What made you name Wade Guyton, and also put McKeever with Kiefer, and Frida Kahlo with Sean Landers? csp Stream of consciousness, that mode of thinking first named as such by my friend the psychologist William James. I was responding to Graw’s statement but also to her, what she has come to stand for because of her essays and lectures, a defence of the seriousness of figures such as von Heyl and Guyton. They function in a commercial system. This system represents a career. There is also an academic system that acknowledges Guyton and von Heyl, and Graw represents that form of knowledge. We might

say that Ibrahim Mahama’s ideas about socially inscribed processes of production, his ideas about content, where thousands of coal sacks might be a giant wall hanging at the Venice Biennale, or one or two might be sewn into a semblance of a canvas to be stretched so the marks that have accumulated on them in their use by ordinary people doing various jobs of work can be curiously highlighted as a semblance of painterly brushstrokes – all this comes about because of a combination of academic ideas with a definite ethical content, and commercial ideas where there is a hardnosed attitude. Otherwise I was thinking more humorously, making categories become mere absurdities, where you get the arbitrariness of the sound of certain names becoming a satire on relative power positions. Or there might be a wild clash of categories. This chaos relates to the difficulty and even the ridiculousness of attempting to claim any position at all for painting today. ar What do you think the sign of the brush says about the creator? csp I don’t think she’s saying Picasso as a person is inevitably in the mind when you’re appreciating the wrought quality of the surface of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It’s an option but not an urgent demand. The painting doesn’t become

nonsense if Picasso is left out in the way it would collapse into a grey chaos if its internal relationships were left out, if they even could be, which, of course, is a logical impossibility. But then, this impossibility is in fact the more usual thing. It’s why ridiculousness pertains today with painting. It’s quite rare for someone to know what a form is, but Picasso’s myth is well known, like any celebrity’s. ar You see lots of people in the Museum of Modern Art in New York trying to fathom that painting. csp They’re acknowledging it as a symbol of success. They might be seeing forms but not understanding them and substituting a myth of the creator for that blankness of comprehension. Why is the painting a success as a painting? Graw is doing the opposite to those people when she’s talking about indexicality. She’s trying to determine what is still there, as it were, when everything, it seems, has been thrown out as far as hard-and-fast rules are concerned about what a painting is. It is known that there are none. In fact this is the form – ‘painting’ – that she genuinely understands, she understands its new slipperiness. ar Why’s it slippery? csp Paintings exist but they don’t have to be painted or to have brushmarks or to depict

anything or not depict anything. There’s no longer any single thing or set of things they really need to be or possess in order to be what we are prepared to call a painting. Books on the subject of painting at this moment are published constantly, always with the same air of desperation about them: the producers hoping no one among the intended audience of popular consumers and students will notice that the author’s groupings and categories – ironic, sincere, feminist, abstract, political and so on – tell you something about everything except painting. Graw’s pronouncements are distinct from these fuzzy muddles because she accepts difficulty. A term is picked by her from my semiotic enquiries and used separately from my theory as a whole and almost always separately as well from the term’s neighbouring terms: icon and symbol. So it could be said that although she mentions me frequently and it sounds exciting to be bringing in my logic instead of French theory, it’s really only a transmuted version of my conclusions she’s drawing on, a version that, by now, has its own logic more or less independent of me. But so what? That’s the story with any theory as it survives in the world. next month Baudelaire on Damien Hirst’s new art gallery

Ibrahim Mahama, Untitled, 2014, coal sack, 183 × 213 cm. Courtesy the Saatchi Gallery, London

November 2015

Other People and Their Ideas No 24

Yancey Strickler is the cofounder and chief executive of kickstarter, an online crowdfunding platform for

creative projects (recently deployed by three of the artists in this year’s Power 100 list – spoiler alert! – Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramović and Olafur Eliasson) Interview by

Tom Eccles

Kickstarter was launched in 2009 by Strickler, Perry Chen and Charles Adler, and has reportedly raised $1.9 billion in pledges from 9.4 million backers to fund 257,000 creative projects. Kickstarter claims no ownership over the projects featured on its website, but takes a 5 percent fee on the total amount of funds raised. Creators place their projects into one of 13 main categories – art, comics, dance, design, fashion, film and video, food, games, music, photography, publishing, technology and theatre – and then choose a deadline and a minimum funding goal; in the event that the target is not reached by the deadline, no funds are collected. 86

ArtReview

artreview How did you come up with the idea of Kickstarter?

ar What were the first successful projects, and how did you get noticed?

yancey strickler My partner, Perry Chen, had the idea. In 2001 he was living in New Orleans and wanted to have these Austrian djs, Kruder & Dorfmeister, come play a late-night party during New Orleans Jazz Fest. He basically came up against the fact that he needed to pay them $20,000 for it to happen. In the face of that, he had this idea of proposing the concept to the public: people could buy tickets with credit cards, but no one would be charged unless the show sold out. It was a way to propose a concept publicly and then allow the public to determine whether or not it should occur. He continued to live in New Orleans, working as an artist and a waiter and a musician, and then, in 2005, he moved to New York, where he’s from and where he and I met. I was working as a music critic, a rock journalist, mainly for The Village Voice. I ran a little record label and worked in the world of culture; not in fancy ways, but I supported myself doing that. Perry shared the idea with me, and we began to collaborate on it in earnest at the end of 2005. We met another friend, Charles Adler, a graphic designer, about a year and a half later. Basically there were between three and four years of Perry and I collaborating on the idea before it was able to launch, because I was a music critic, he was an artist and a waiter, and there are just no technical skills between us. We made a lot of very dumb mistakes – like hiring bad developers and not knowing what we were doing – but fortunately, those mistakes were made before anyone knew who we were, so it doesn’t matter. The site was able to launch in 2009.

ys We started by giving about 50 of our friends invitations to start projects and five invitations they could give to their friends. That was the only marketing we ever did; it just started to work its way out. The very first project was by Perry. It was a stencilled T-shirt: it had an outline of Grace Jones and said ‘Grace Jones does not give a fuck’. But that project was not successful. The first successful one was by an illustrator named Dark Pony. It was called ‘Drawing for Dollars’, and if you pledged $5, he would draw you a picture of something. He got three people to give him $35, and that met its goal. The second project to be funded was by me and Perry, and

ar Can I ask what your start-up costs were?

ar Looking around the site over the last couple of days, this model seems to have continued to a large degree. In fact, the examples you give are quite similar to the ones you’ll find today, which are self-publishing, whether it’s music or literature or illustrated books. There are also a lot of illustrators – you give money and you get something. So, it’s not a philanthropic model, or is it?

ys None of us got paid. I got my first pay cheque from Kickstarter in November 2009. To actually build the site, once we found the right people, cost less than $100,000. That’s just for three engineers to do it. There were other legal and operational costs. We raised that money from our friends, most of whom are artists. The very first investors were actor-comedian David Cross, who had a role on Arrested Development; the president of Pitchfork; the owner of 4ad records.

that was called ‘New York Makes a Book’, and it was a 100-page book, where, for $30, you got a copy and one of the pages was yours to put whatever you wanted on it. It’s a lot of poetry and photography, but basically, yes, a 100-page book with 100 authors. Then I told everyone to come to a bar in the West Village, and everyone got a copy of their book and they got a nametag with their page number on it.

above Successfully funded Kickstarter project Autonomo: ‘a matchbox-sized, Arduino-compatible, microcontroller board’. Courtesy Kickstarter facing page Yancey Strickler. Courtesy Kickstarter

November 2015

ys I think that there’s an element of philanthropy in it. Of course, pledges are not straight donations. Generally there is something in return – a copy of what’s made, or an acknowledgement of some kind. About 20 percent of pledges are for no reward: you could just choose to give someone $20 or $1 or $5. So there is that. I think, typically, people back projects because they think, ‘I like that idea. It should succeed. I’m happy to help this person.’ They may or may not be deeply interested in the outcome of the project. I think in other cases it’s just, ‘I want to live in a world where someone is able to do this, so, ok.’ ar You’ve tried to distinguish Kickstarter from crowdfunding. Can you explain that a little further? ys Crowdfunding is a term we’ve never embraced. We’ve always just thought of ourselves as Kickstarter. I think we also take the view that the mechanics by which funds change hands is not the defining aspect of this platform. What’s defining the platform is the outcome of the work and the sorts of projects running on the site. When we created the idea for what came to be known as crowdfunding, we always saw it as something that could be applied to anything, but never had any doubt that we were trying to make a platform for people to do creative work. I just think of it as a creative tool. I think the next several years of Kickstarter will bear that out as we introduce new creative tools for artists. That is where a lot of our energy is right now: to not simply provide a funding tool, but to help with other aspects of creation. ar How do you select projects, or, perhaps, when do you reject projects? ys For the first five years we manually reviewed every project before it went live. Over the past year and a half, we’ve evolved that to where the system flags projects that we believe are in need of review, which ends up being about 30 to 40 percent, and we look at all of those. We have a set of rules that determine what’s permitted on the platform. The most common reason for a decline is someone raising money just for personal charity: it’s not actually a creative project of any kind, and they’re not making anything. We have rules specifically related to people creating more

product-oriented things, where we require that a certain amount of work has been done: they would have to have made a prototype, for example. It can’t just be: ‘Here’s something on the back of a napkin. Give me money.’ But we never turn away a project because it’s a bad book, or looks to be a bad movie, or looks to be poor art. We believe the platform is more just creative permission for people to produce work, and to not be judgemental about whether or not we think it’s going to be any good. ar You have some moral guidelines: nothing that involves genetically modified food, no guns, no pornography. ys Yes. I spent a lot of time talking to bioethicists and biofuturists about genetically modified organisms, and there was a petition with 100,000 or more signatures demanding that we prohibit these based on a project that had launched. So I spent a lot of time talking to people to understand the rules that govern how researchers use genetically modified organisms. Basically, what came back was that everyone is passing on this decision. Even the un is refusing to make a decision. So there’s no clear consensus. I created a rule that allowed projects researching genetically modified organisms but only if the organisms were not distributed publicly. No firearms, no pornography, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be transgressive work, or more challenging work, coming to the platform. I mean, generally, if it’s strongly illegal, yes, we’ll stop it. ar Do you have concerns about the quality of the projects that ultimately are realised, or do you think there’s an economic balance to that? How do you see the role of economics in terms of the kinds of projects – the creative quality – that are ultimately funded? ys We view the core mechanic of the platform – the trigger if a goal is reached – as weeding out ideas that are unrealistic or that no one cares about, and use that as a determinant of what moves forward. So there’s audience participation in that way. I don’t feel hugely concerned about the quality of what comes out. I mean, I think that there’ve been 10,000 films made through Kickstarter over the past six years. Among those: 10 percent of the movies that have played at Sundance over the past five years, seven Oscarnominated films, a couple dozen films went to Cannes. Quite excellent, lauded works. There have also been films that no one will ever see. I think that we’re asking audiences to be somewhat determinative of the level of quality of a project, or the skill-set of its creator. I’m also just happy for someone to have the opportunity to make their work; who knows how that comes out in the creative process. We’re always looking to work with quality creators, people with strong reputations, people we admire and

respect, and we’re able to do that quite often. We don’t seek to make the platform a replacement for the creation of mainstream culture, the culture industry. I don’t feel a great passion for this to be a tool of mainstream Hollywood, or for top-40 pop. Those are commercial areas that the market is already serving fairly well. So if those markets come to Kickstarter, that’s ok, but it’s not something that we actively seek. ar Recently you had a partnership with Art Basel with four organisations in different countries and at different levels. You’re obviously looking at art, and institutional art too, and how it’s presented and funded. You’ve had great success with Marina Abramović: $661,000 for her project in Hudson, New York. What role do you see for Kickstarter within the more institutional, progressive artworld, and well away from, say, illustration?

It’s the entrepreneurial age. In 15 years we’ve gone from kids growing up wanting to be in The Strokes to wanting to be Mark Zuckerberg. The notion that you have to possess the desire and passion to think of something and see it through – this puts you in the ‘good’ column of organisations. And the ‘bad’ column is for people who are nonentrepreneurial ys Ideally we could play a meaningful role. The Marina project is a good example. Marina randomly reached out, just came to our office one day, and we met with her and talked about what she’s trying to do. We’ve been reaching out to institutions from the very beginning with Kickstarter – understanding the degree to which staffs are built around development and fundraising, how much they rely on large-scale donors; and, really, approaching it as someone who is personally a fan or a patron of many of these institutions. We just had a project for the Smithsonian Institution a few weeks ago, and I’ve been talking to the Smithsonian for almost five years about trying to do something. A lot of that came from the fact that I went there frequently as a child, and that it was a formative place for me. Trying to make a case for this platform as a way for the public to engage with something like the Smithsonian would be a wonderful opportunity for a lot of people. These are very slow conversations, because you’re working through a lot of bureaucracy

ArtReview

in many layers, and it’s also quite a new thing. In the States especially, a lot of funding for institutions is corporate money, rich people’s money, and I like the idea of the public playing a democratic role in that. We’ve tried to gear and steer those institutions towards projects that are about specific shows or works, not general operating expenses – to produce something the public can engage with. Talking to a lot of the leaders of these places, you hear about the amount of money they take from J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, or from giant insurance companies. It’s part of how that economy works, but it also limits, sometimes, how challenging the work you can produce is, because you’re concerned about corporate partners. You know, ‘Would J.P. Morgan like this? J.P. Morgan, they’re thinking about China. We don’t know about this Ai Weiwei show. That could be a problem.’ I’ve been excited about the way that we’ve been a conduit for the public in general to engage with these things. I certainly saw the conversation around the Royal Academy. There’s a lot of conversation here in the States about the Smithsonian, but all the people in it, I think, were very positive about that. It’s an interesting question, because these are meant to be public institutions, yet they’re generally funded by Fortune 500 companies. ar You mentioned Ai Weiwei and the Royal Academy’s Kickstarter campaign to bring the artist’s Tree series to London. They were very shrewd to choose one specific project, so it didn’t mean the whole show would collapse without the success of Kickstarter. But it’s been successful, and the sculptures will be shown. Obviously, places like the Royal Academy and the Smithsonian rely, to a large degree, on government funding. You’ve been quoted as saying that Kickstarter’s raised more than the nea [National Endowment for the Arts, a us federal agency that funds and promotes the arts] over the last few years. Does it concern you at all that your organisation is, in some sense, a beacon for those who would actually like to defund? ys Yes, absolutely. There has been a desire from politicians, both in the uk and in the us, to embrace Kickstarter for that reason, and we have been invited to participate publicly in those conversations – which we’ll never do. I would much rather the nea be 20 times the size of what Kickstarter has done. I don’t want this to be a crutch used to justify a libertarian attitude towards absolutely everything. That is not the world I want to live in. I’m actually quite an institutionalist. I think it’s the former rockcritic in me that believes in experts, in curation. I wouldn’t want a total cultural free-for-all. But I also understand that there are shortfalls, and things that institutions will want to do that they are not permitted to do. I know

how limiting the nea is because of how politics have restricted it from taking action. I believe the public should have the opportunity to participate, but I do not think it should threaten the core funding of these institutions. They wouldn’t work if you had to have half your staff devoted to permanent fundraising. We’d see the quality go down as a result. So I think of it very much as being available for specific works and things for which they want greater public interaction. ar The other day I saw a press release where one director of a major New York museum described the museum’s mission as entrepreneurial, which struck me as incredibly odd. ys That’s our age. It’s the entrepreneurial age. In 15 years we’ve gone from kids growing up wanting to be in The Strokes to wanting to be Mark Zuckerberg. The notion that you have to possess the desire and passion to think of something and see it through – this puts you in the ‘good’ column of organisations. And the ‘bad’ column is for people who are unable to do, who are nonentrepreneurial. That’s the sort of word they use to say that we’re still alive, right? I mean, for an institution to say it’s entrepreneurial, I think, is to say, ‘We still have a pulse. We can create something. We’re not riding this out. We’re trying to imagine new ways for us to operate.’ As I’ve talked to a lot of museum directors over the past year or two, everyone’s looking for that. We believe we can play a core part in the culture, but we understand that we also need to be anticipating what the next five years are going to be like, and be ready. ar What would you say to a museum director who comes to you and says, ‘I know things are changing.’ How would you respond to that? Would you say, ‘This is how I think the world is changing, and this is how we need to address these changes’? ys I generally start by asking, ‘Is there anything that you’re imagining to be particularly engaging with the public or that has a participatory aspect?’ and then looking at those things and thinking quite creatively about how they could work. Not just sticking the next tapestry show up on Kickstarter and being like, ‘Hurry up, we need $100,000’, but to think of it as the launch of your marketing campaign for this event, and these first 1,000 or 2,000 patrons are going to be your core audience. They’re probably

going to be, most of them, under age thirty, and they’re going to be highly active online. That’s an audience that you can engage with in a deeper way. These are people that will also probably drive visitors to the show and hopefully create some feeling of a moment. It’s a very different audience from the sort of donors you’re used to going to. And it’s potentially creating more resilience for the institution in the long term. ar When I went on the site and looked at the art page today, I found an absolute gamut of projects and funding levels, from a woman called Lois who’s doing illustrations of a young girl character, which probably attracts thirteen-year-olds, to Bjarke Ingels, a Danish architect whose firm, big, have an ambitious project to create a smokestack with steam indicating carbon

sfmoma, to be the chief curator. There’s a large design project to overhaul a lot of those experiences and to bring a look and feel that more strongly conveys the space in which we feel we operate – or just a creative space. As a former critic, I understand the tension of being both populist and respectable. It’s not easy, but I think that’s what we would like to be. The other interesting thing is that the inventory of projects changes every 30 days. So at any given time there are about 6,000 projects live and funding – which is a lot, but when you think of YouTube, where something like 70 years’ worth of video are uploaded every second, or whatever their crazy stat is, it’s manageable at a human level. I think we could put together extremely strong experiences in every space that would feel quite high-end, but I don’t think that’s what the brand exactly should be. It should have an element of that, but should also be a bit wilder. A bit of wildness, I think, would be nice. ar In terms of the wildness, I was looking at this and thinking, well, when one gives money to an institution or a recognised charity, there’s some form of auditing. Do you have any concerns about all that? About what kind of checks and balances there are on how the funds are spent?

emissions in Copenhagen. Why have these two been chosen? I hate to ask, but is there any way of curating the site in such a way that you could say, ‘ok, this is the kind of art I’m interested in. Let me go to that’? ys We think a lot about showcasing a diversity of ideas. We’re always imagining who would randomly come to this page and might want to give money, as well as thinking that all who browse the platform are themselves potential creators, and we want to create an experience where they might see themselves in one of these projects. The curatorial level of the platform needs a lot of improvement, and there’s work underway to do that. We hired a woman named Willa Köerner, who was a digital curator at Rendering of Copenhagen’s Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant, 2015. Courtesy big / Bjarke Ingels Group, Copenhagen & New York

November 2015

ys Yes, that’s a core part of the platform: to have those checks and balances. There are a number of stages, the most important of which is the fact that the money is only charged if there’s public consensus. Historically that’s about 40 percent of projects. So for those other 60 percent, either there was no interest or people just thought it didn’t feel right for whatever reason. There’s a safety-innumbers concept to how we think about that. There’s also quite a bit of investigation of projects that happens before and after launch. Projects are also subject to public scrutiny while they’re live, and so things will be spotted – ‘Hey, this seems weird for X and Y reason. Can you look into it?’ – and we will remove them. Once a project is funded, it’s the creator’s responsibility to go forward with it. We don’t investigate after that. We will get reports from backers if something is taking too long, or a creator’s not providing enough information about where things stand, in which case we’ll prod the creator. The overall outcomes of the platform are quite strong, much better than one might expect. Problems are pretty uncommon. We’re doing an in-depth study into the outcome of every

funded Kickstarter project with academics here in the United States that we plan to share publicly, including the data behind this. ar You said Kickstarter is not a charity. Why couldn’t you develop this as a platform for charities? ys You could, but I think that our thought has been that to allow it to be a platform for artists and creators, you wouldn’t want those things to coexist. If you’re publishing a book of poetry and I’m raising money to save Haiti, and our projects are next to each other, I think it would make you look like a shitty person, you know? ‘What? People are dying. How can you be writing poetry?’ It’s those sorts of things – not an invalid perspective, but you could look at absolutely everything that way. There’s a reason why you don’t go to a museum and find a Vermeer next to a video of a starving child.

existence. I love the idea of there being a universe where ideas can exist simply because people want them to, and it doesn’t need that extra monetary justification. I don’t want people to be viewing projects with that sort of speculative nature. I also know that 99 percent of Kickstarter projects would be very poor investments. That is not why they exist. They’re existing to exist, and I don’t want to change that dynamic. I think that’s very helpful, and in this hypercapitalist world, I think it’s important that there be a space that is not driven in that sort of way. So we’ll keep holding that line.

ar Right. Would you allow me to be a library supporting a residency? ys Yes. There are a lot of fuzzy lines, but we thought pure charitable giving just wouldn’t mix well. Also, we want the musicians, the filmmakers, the artists, the writers themselves to feel like this is a creative and not a charitable act. You are producing work directly with an audience. This is maybe a less typical transaction than you are used to, but this is not a charitable transaction. In fact, we would view this as being exactly like the patronage systems used in the Renaissance, and by the Medici. For his English translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope got funding from 600 subscribers and spent seven years translating the 16,000 lines of poetry from Greek to English. Those 600 subscribers got their names on the first page of the first edition, and they got a copy of the book – a Kickstarter project, you know? ar Do you ever see a future where, for example, I could help support the creation of the Ai Weiwei sculpture at the Royal Academy but also have an investment in it, so that upon its sale I would see a return? ys No, we don’t have any plans for that. The mainstream culture industry already uses potential profits as the means of justifying something’s right to exist. If you’re trying to get a movie made, or do anything that requires any amount of money, you’re ultimately trying to sell someone the fact that they’re going to make money off of this. I fundamentally disagree with that being the core justification for a creative work’s

ar Which project has best realised your initial dream for Kickstarter, small or big? ys There was an artist, a woman, who raised money to sail around the world on her own and write a book. For $15 she would take a Polaroid on her trip and she would mail it to you from wherever she next went into port. So about 18 Neal Armstrong’s spacesuit, whose conservation was funded by a 2015 Kickstarter campaign. Armstrong was commander of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first man on the moon, 20 July 1969. Photo: Mark Avino, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc

ArtReview

months later I got an envelope in the mail and opened it up, and there was a letter written to me, and it’s her, describing sitting on this island in the South Pacific and painting the picture of what’s around. Then she took a Polaroid, and it’s her view as she wrote the letter. It was just lovely and made me feel such a connection. It was a unique artefact, you know? That’s one that’s very meaningful that hangs up on my wall at home. The Smithsonian project was also very meaningful for me. That was to preserve the suit Neil Armstrong wore on the moon. Then embarking, along with our lawyer, our counsel, on a multiyear process to get the United States Federal Government to understand this concept, to allow them to take the money directly from the public. That was quite exciting, and felt like a culmination of many years of effort. For the first time, I can see how this idea, this project, has become a mature organisation, and maybe even an institution of its own. Right now we are in this process of converting Kickstarter into a public benefit corporation. This is where you rewrite your core corporate documents to set goals for the company other than making money. For us, those goals are around supporting artists and creators, especially working in less commercial areas, in a variety of ways, supporting and fighting for a more equitable world. To do both of those things, we are announcing that we will be donating every year 5 percent of our profits to organisations to fight systemic inequality and to arts and music education programmes in New York City. Finally, we are binding ourselves to be a great corporate citizen, and prohibiting the company from using tax-avoidance strategies, prohibiting the company from lobbying policies that are not in the best interests of artists and creators, prohibiting the company from selling user data to third parties. Basically, we took this time to think about the sort of prohibitions that could bind Kickstarter for the long term, and very clearly determine our values, and try to do so in a pretty radical way for a modern-day corporation. How you help bring creative projects to life, how we maintain our independence and take advantage of it and really try to think beyond the entrepreneurial age that we’re in, and to think about something that is more considerate of the greater society. Having Kickstarter be a living institution is something I’d love to reach.

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Great Collectors and Their Ideas No 8

Peter Brant is a multimillionaire businessman, art collector & magazine publisher. An enthusiastic early supporter of andy warhol, he has been collecting art since his twenties, and in 2009 he opened his own art museum and art foundation outside New York City Interview by

Tom Eccles

A childhood friend of Donald Trump, Brant started out in the stock market before making his fortune in the us newsprint business. During the early 1970s he invested in Warhol’s Interview magazine. Although his newsprint business fared badly following the 2008 crash, Brant continues his enthusiasm for art and art magazines; in May this year he negotiated the merger of three of his titles, including the long-running Art in America, with competitor Art News, taking a controlling interest in the combined company.

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artreview How did you begin collecting art? peter brant My interest in art really began with my father when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. At an early age it was sports that I really did well, but my dad, who was from Europe and spoke 13 languages, was more intellectually inclined. He was interested in art, loved to go to museums and would take me to places like the Frick. He and I were very close, and art was where we joined forces. During his lifetime he collected Rococo paintings but was not very interested in modern art. He was really more interested in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, and I was with him when he was purchasing some of his pictures. We went to a lot of museums together: he took me to Europe, and brought me to see the Louvre and the Prado. So I learned a lot about art at that time, especially the Old Masters, and especially eighteenth-century English and French painting. Then at fifteen or sixteen years old I became very interested in Impressionist painting, and that was my idea at the time of breaking into the modern. But I never really studied art history. ar Where did you grow up? pb I grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and lived in a nice little house and went to a private school in Kew Gardens. Donald Trump went to the same school. He was in my class, as a matter of fact. Every year, I used to go skiing with my mother and father in St Moritz, Switzerland. There I met the gallerist Bruno Bischofberger. I think he thought that for my age I knew a fair amount about Old Masters, and he kept saying to me: “Look, the best living artists today live in New York, and you really should go to galleries like the Leo Castelli Gallery, go to Pace, go and see John Weber [an art dealer known for his early championing of conceptual art and Arte Povera].” So I did – I guess that I was about seventeen or eighteen when I met Leo, and then I got very interested in Andy Warhol’s work at his gallery, because Andy was also the favourite of Bruno Bischofberger. ar What year would this be? pb This would probably be 1964–65. I probably bought my first picture in 1967, when I was eighteen or nineteen. I bought two drawings, one by Roy Lichtenstein – a great drawing – and one by Andy Warhol of stacked soup cans. ar Do you remember what you paid? pb Five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars was not a little bit of money then. I bought the Marilyn – Shot Blue Marilyn [1964] – and I paid $5,000 for it. You know, to give you an idea,

in 1967 or 68, when I bought the Shot Marilyn, a Cadillac would have cost $3,000. So $5,000 was more than a Cadillac. I made some money in the stock market with my dad’s tutelage, and I was very interested in the stock market at the time as well, so that’s where I made my first spendable money, which I invested mostly in art. I was immediately interested in Andy’s work. I think one of the first pictures I bought was from Virginia Dwan – I bought a great [Franz] Kline painting. There’s a famous photograph that Dennis Hopper took of Virginia Dwan sat with the Kline painting in the background. I guess I bought a David Smith, an Ad Reinhardt and a work by Jasper [Johns] and [Robert] Rauschenberg. Those were the artists that I was really interested in at that time, and that was my first introduction. Leo was a big help, he was really a mentor to me, and he took good care of me.

I bought one of the big Maos. I offered it to moma, they wouldn’t take it. So then I went to the Metropolitan and offered it to them. They said it was too big, and that I had to sweeten the pie. So we gave them a great Flavin that I bought from Nelson Rockefeller. But that still wasn’t enough. So I gave them part of my Art Deco furniture collection ar When you first started collecting, did you actually perceive what you were doing as creating a collection, or was it really about buying individual works and having them in your home? pb I think it was originally about being a collector, and came out of the experience of collecting film. Certainly film has always influenced me a great deal in my life, and I have always been very interested in film, and I watched a lot of it. I just remember a lot of great films about art that I really liked, and entertaining films about art when it was in the background. Like I remember a great Fred Astaire film called Daddy Long Legs [1955], where Fred Astaire lived in his family’s museum and foundation, and you can see the (obviously) copies of the great Impressionist paintings. They used it in a humorous way, but it was culturally an interesting thing, and, you know, in a way I think that Hollywood facing page Peter Brant. Photo: Patrick Demarchelier

November 2015

and great filmmaking of the 1930s, 40s and 50s has affected our country a great deal, and certainly has affected me. ar What about your relationship with Andy Warhol? He’s an artist you engaged with both as a collector and as a collaborator. pb Yes, I think I probably had five or six works of Andy’s by the time I met him in 1968, and it was after he was shot [by radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas, on 3 June 1968]. It was the fall, and I met him and Fred Hughes, who was his business manager and organised things for Andy, but who was also a very social person. We started spending a lot of time with Andy, and by spending a lot of time with him I got involved in a lot of ventures with him, and also with Leo. After he was shot, Leo was very concerned that Andy had stopped painting. During the 1970s I continued to collect Andy’s work – at one point at that time I would maybe go out to dinner with him a couple of times a week. I was really very friendly with him, and that’s how I got to be very friendly with Vincent Friedman and [writer] Bob Colacello – guys who I have known for, you know, forever. I think that I got involved in Interview [the American magazine cofounded by Warhol] in 1969. I think Andy had published three or four issues, and I came in with my cousin Joe Allen, and we supplied the paper, got involved in the financial side and actually backed it. ar What interested you in Interview? Would it have been a gamble at the time? pb Big gamble. Bruno Bischofberger came in for a while and pulled out after six months to a year. I produced my first film [L’Amour, written and directed by Warhol and Paul Morrissey] in 1973. So a lot of things were happening. Leo said to me: “Why don’t you get him to do a series of paintings and we can all patron it: he needs things for the Factory, for the film, for the magazine.” So I talked to Fred, and Bruno did the Maos, you know, the bigger ones, the 68-by-82-inch Maos. I think he did 13 of them with Sperone in Europe. We – Leo and I and Knoedler – partnered the commission. We just basically gave him one lump sum of money with the trust he would do something great for us sometime in the next year, because he needed the money for some of his projects, and a year later they were ready. We thought they were incredible from the first day: I can remember going into Knoedler and they were on the floor all the way around the room. Later I bought one of the big Mao paintings, a 15-foot one that I gave to the Metropolitan Museum.

ar Why the Metropolitan? pb I promised Andy that I would give it to a New York museum because he didn’t really have anything other than Philip Johnson’s paintings at moma; I offered it to moma, they wouldn’t take it – they said they already had two or three paintings. They had the Marilyn on a gold field, and they had – I think – the S&H Green Stamps [1962] or one of the car crashes. They had two or three works, and they really didn’t need it. You know, it was a gift for free, and so then I went to Henry Geldzahler [curator for American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and subsequently its first curator for twentieth-century art] and offered it to him. He said it was too big, and that I had to sweeten the pie. I had to come up with some more gifts and then they would take it. So we gave them a great Flavin that I bought from Nelson Rockefeller. But that still wasn’t enough. So I gave him part of my Art Deco furniture collection, which was really incredible. But that painting, which they own today, is one of the great paintings of the post-1960s.

friendly with an artist because they are very interesting. The artists with whom I was friends during the 1960s were artists like Arman and Bernar Venet and artists like that who really enriched my life because they were good guys and because they were very smart, and they saw things in the New York School that local people in our area didn’t see: because they were Europeans and they recognised the talent of artists like Andy Warhol and Carl Andre before many others. There weren’t that many collectors at that time in America, there just weren’t. The first real wave of increase in the value of these artists really came from the encouragement of the Germans and the Italians and the French and then the Swiss. Those were really

ar Have you ever thought of collecting as a form of investing? How have you separated out – or have you separated out? – the conditions of private collecting, patronage, investment? pb I didn’t use the term investment. You used the term investment. The reason I maybe have been successful at buying art is I have never really considered it an investment. It has worked out to be great as an investment, but I think if you go in there with that kind of approach you miss a lot of things, because a lot of things that you buy, you would never think would be a good investment. I didn’t think when I bought Jeff Koons’s Puppy [1993] that it would have been considered a good investment. I think that would be considered a crazy thing to do, because how are you going to plant it, where are you going to put it, who would you ever sell it to if you wanted to sell it? It takes on its own folklore and its own life, and then it becomes something that’s really great; but most things don’t. ar Do you think that the strength of your collection has been based upon the strength of your relationship with artists? Because you seem to have quite a close relationship with the artists you work with and ultimately collect, exhibit and support in terms of museums and other kinds of projects. pb I think there’s pluses and minuses. I don’t become friendly with an artist because they’re the most famous artist in the world. I become

the collectors that first understood how great the Pop movement was. So I think that you could be very friendly with an artist that is perhaps second tier or third tier. I don’t just collect work of friends, and a lot of times, I don’t collect the work of people that I am very friendly with. I really keep it separate. The other thing is that if you are very friendly with a great artist, you are going to realise very shortly that they’re human beings, and they have idiosyncrasies and faults like everybody else. If you know they’re a great artist, you might hold them to a different Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and pencil on linen, 450 × 348 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr and Mrs Peter M Brant, 1977. © 2015 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York, and dacs, London. Courtesy Brant Foundation, Greenwich, ct

ArtReview

standard as human beings, and that could affect your appreciation of their work. So, I almost think in many cases it can be a disadvantage as a collector to be too close to an artist. ar In hindsight, what’s the most surprising change or development in the artworld for you in the last 25 years? Or in the last 50 years even? pb Everybody is held to a different standard now. Nobody can really fall asleep. Everybody is trying to strive towards excellence: the schools, the galleries, the museums, the collectors. What has caused that? I give a lot of the credit to the dealers who have become much more serious. In order to be a great dealer, you need to do more than just buy and sell paintings. You need to have really great shows, you need to have some real connoisseurship, you need to curate the shows incredibly well, and I think a lot of the dealers have done that. A dealer like Larry Gagosian has hired great curators. He has attempted to have the really great shows, and I think it has put the museums on notice. A lot of foundations have come forward and had interesting shows, and I think that’s put the museums really on a different standard. They can’t fall asleep and go through their inventory and just put something together, because people want more. People want their minds exercised, they want to see radical things and they want to understand what is going on in our society, and they want to see what culture brings forward to give hints about what’s going to happen in the future. So I think that’s the biggest change. The biggest change has really been that there’s just more information available: there are more catalogues being printed, there’s more of a history of what went on, to be judged by. That’s the biggest change. ar Do you consider the art market to be healthy today? pb The answer to that question is yes and no. The ultimate proof of how well the art market is doing on a long-term basis really has to do with how great the interest in art is on a longterm basis. They really come with one another. The ups and downs in prices have to do with many things. They have to do with economies, with currencies, with the belief that art is an asset class, something that is valuable, and there are different interpretations of what drives the price of the asset. Ultimately it’s the interest in art and the development of art and art history that really change it. I mean obviously the Renaissance was a great period. Art flourished and Renaissance art stayed with us forever

because of the patronage and the churches, the great collectors and the great families. The future will bring other great collectors and great families, and great successful people that maybe in the past wouldn’t have looked towards art, but now will look towards art. There’s an education process. It’s a way that somebody can do something other than what their normal work is and with the same intensity. So I think that the art market on a long-term basis is very healthy, because the art schools are expanding and there are more art programmes in colleges available. I mean, when I went to school there weren’t that many schools that taught art history. Today, it’s a whole different thing. That makes a big difference, plus there’s the computer, and there’s so much more that you can access if you’re really interested in art. You can basically pull up any artist’s oeuvre and see 20 percent of it online. I’m not saying that replaces actually going to see a museum and see how a particular work or artist relates to everything else that’s there. ar As a prominent American publisher of art and cultural publications, how have you addressed this shift to digital media and what has that meant for you in terms of your own cultural production? pb Well, I think that obviously the future is in digital media. You know, we’re involved in digital media. We have a digital advertising company – Code and Theory – that we’re very proud of; it’s a great company that’s been growing very quickly. The publishing business in terms of the newspaper business and magazine business has been decimated by a number of things besides social media, because the printed product has declined. In Asia it hasn’t, but it has in the United States, and I think that that’s only going to continue. I think that printed products will remain, but in a focused way. It’s like the tv over from the radio. It’s a fact that by looking at imagery on a computer or on a BlackBerry or on an iPhone, it’s not going to replace actually going to see a painting. It’s a whole different relationship, the scale and the brushstrokes. It’s a whole different thing. ar You established the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, to host exhibitions. Could you say something about the motivation of establishing a private foundation? Is it a thinking towards the future or is it a response to the present? pb I think both. I think that it was something that I wanted to do because art has given me such great pleasure my entire life. I wanted to give something back. In terms of the criticism, you know, we’ve had a lot of positive things said. I know that in the minds of a lot of artists I think they believe that we are important in terms of what we’re showing. Maybe what we’re showing

in a lot of cases is things that other institutions won’t show, or are not current enough to show, or politically can’t show. When you’re collecting with the idea that you’re going to show the work publicly, it’s a different way of thinking than just buying a picture to put behind the sofa. So that has encouraged me a great deal to have a foundation, because I’ve always wanted to collect that way. If you look at my collection over a 40-year period you can certainly see that. ar You recently organised a show called Deliverance [2014], with works by Richard Prince, Larry Clark, Cady Noland and Christopher Wool. It was impressive in the same way the Dia Center is impressive: an incredible gathering of masterpieces of their time. But it made me wonder about the difference between private collections and museums and what private collections represent over time (the Dia for example is really a private

If you are very friendly with a great artist, you are going to realise very shortly that they’re human beings, and they have idiosyncrasies and faults like everybody else. You might hold them to a different standard as human beings, and that could affect your appreciation of their work. So, I almost think in many cases it can be a disadvantage as a collector to be too close to an artist collection now in ‘public’ hands). How do you feel your responsibilities differ from that of museums; should you show a greater diversity of artists, artists at the margins, should you complicate the story? pb I don’t have that responsibility. The only responsibility I have is to do what I think is an interesting show and what my younger colleagues around here who are relatives of mine think is interesting and that I agree is interesting. If you look at the catalogue, which is ultimately what remains 10 years or 15 years from now, hopefully a certain amount of people would say, ‘Jeez, I wish I went to that show, I wish I could have seen that show.’ I mean, for me, those four artists are four really important artists. I didn’t mean to exclude anybody. It meant that those are four artists that I have really spent a lot of time studying and a lot of time collecting, and I wanted to put those four artists together.

November 2015

This is strictly about what I collected. I’m not trying to teach anybody anything. I’m trying to basically say, this is what we were interested in at this period of time. We were also interested in so many other artists of the 1980s and 90s. It doesn’t mean to say that we haven’t collected John Currin or Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik; we just don’t include them in this exhibition, we don’t think that it is relevant. Could we put Nan Goldin in? Yes, but we don’t collect Nan Goldin. ar You have quite a number of children, all of whom or many of whom are engaged either with the foundation or involved in art in different ways, some with very different characters I see. What advice do you give them? What advice would you give anybody, if they were starting out as you did, at seventeen, eighteen, in the artworld today? pb I think that history repeats itself and I think that their interest is basically coming at a similar age to when my interest in art began. I have one daughter that’s an artist and also a nurse in California, went to Yale and had a fellowship at the Art Center in Pasadena under Mike Kelley. My son Dylan is becoming a young dealer, he’s very interested in art, he just curated a show on the American cowboy in art at Venus Over Manhattan. Alison runs the foundation and is very, very good at what she does. My sons Christopher and Ryan are collectors. To me it’s all good. I don’t question where people come from, whether they start as a dealer or a curator, or they work for an auction house. It’s the idea that they’re around art all the time and that’s going to take them somewhere. You should go where your passion tells you to go, and if you enjoy and like being around artists, then that’s what you should do, and if you enjoy being around collectors and dealers, then that’s what you should do. ar Given that this interview is for the Power 100 issue, can I ask you what you think qualifies as power in the artworld today? Who are the most powerful people in the artworld today? pb To me the people who are the most powerful in the artworld are the people who walk the walk: their passion is huge. They spend as much time as they possibly can going to exhibitions, studying art, going to museum shows, being involved in the way that they most can in order to make that a large part of their life. Ultimately those are the people that are the most powerful. In order to have that, it takes a lot of work. It’s not about a natural ability that you have to look at things – that’s not the way it goes. It’s really when you say art’s a science – there’s a lot of science to it. You have to educate your sensibility, you have to educate yourself to what is really important.

31 Oct 2015 – 14 Feb 2016 Opening: 31 Oct 2015

LUMA Westbau

Löwenbräukunst Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zurich, Switzerland www.westbau.com

Commissioned and produced by the LUMA Foundation for the Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France. Curated by Tom Eccles (Director, CCS Bard College, New York) and Beatrix Ruf (Director, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).

Film still from Tony Oursler’s Imponderable – Walter Rides the Rails. Courtesy Tony Oursler

Imponderable The Archives of Tony Oursler

Featuring a new film, installation and publication, this exhibition explores the boundaries of human belief and disbelief, the paranormal, mystical exploration and more.

The Legacy of Franz West Who sits on the artist’s furniture rights?

top Franz West. © Peter Rigaud, Agentur Shotview Berlin bottom Franz West, Artist’s Chairs, 2015, multiple, first produced 2006. Photo: Marina Faust. © Franz West Privatstiftung, Vienna

ArtReview

The Law and Its Ideas No 11 by Daniel McClean

Introduction The ownership of artistic legacies is currently one of the most bitterly contested territories in the contemporary artworld. An artist’s legacy can assume many forms, among them control over the artist’s works and archive, as well as control over the artist’s intellectual property rights (including copyright, moral rights of authorship) and the authority to authenticate artworks. At stake is the question of who has the right to speak in the name of the artist, and more often than not to sell their work when he or she is no longer around. When an artist dies, ownership of some or all of the artist’s legacy rights (which can be valuable) may be fought over by different factions, including by family members and rival foundations. Artistlegacy wars tend to arise when an artist fails to plan properly during his or her lifetime as to what should happen to their legacy post mortem. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these wars occur with considerable regularity in the artworld, as attested by spectacular disputes involving the legacies of the artists Alberto Giacometti, Donald Judd and Lygia Clark. The Dispute Gagosian Gallery has recently become embroiled in a highly public legacy dispute between the Vienna-based nonprofit Archiv Franz West (created in 2011) and the Franz West Privatstiftung, or Foundation (created in 2012). The dispute regards who controls the right to posthumously reproduce and distribute copies of furniture designs created by the highly influential Austrian artist when he was alive (West died in 2012). Since his death, individual examples of West’s furniture have sold at auction for in excess of £20,000. The Archiv Franz West claims to be the exclusive licensee of copyright in Franz West’s furniture designs and is therefore entitled to control their posthumous reproduction and sale. However, the Franz West Foundation also maintains that it controls these rights and has posthumously fabricated West’s furniture works in its Vienna studio since 2014. In September 2015, the Archiv sought to obtain a temporary restraining order in the New York Southern District Court preventing Gagosian from exhibiting a selection of Franz West furniture posthumously produced by the Foundation and consigned to it by the Foundation for sale. The disputed furniture is currently featured in the Gagosian exhibition Franz West: Möbelskulpturen/Furniture Works (until 7 November at the gallery’s 976 Madison Avenue address) and includes the celebrated Artist’s Chairs – minimal dining chairs whose seats and backs are made from canvas lacquered in monochrome hues. The Archiv Franz West claimed in the New York proceedings that the reproduced furniture infringed the copyright on West’s furniture designs that it exclusively holds, and that these were therefore unauthorised versions of West’s work. It argued that the furniture

Gagosian ‘plans to sell is an unauthorized – essentially, an imitation – version of West’s work’ and one that is ‘not disclosed to potential buyers. The distribution of unauthorized copies of West’s work will lead to confusion among art buyers and collectors and reduction in the confidence of art market participants as to whether works by West being offered are genuine, which confusion is very likely to spill over to all works of West thereby damaging the artistic and commercial value of West’s work generally.’ On 10 September 2015, the New York court rejected the Archiv’s motion and declined to issue the temporary restraining order it had sought, thereby enabling Gagosian’s exhibition to proceed. Despite the Achiv’s setback, the case remains open according to reports, which means that the litigation could resume after the exhibition closes. It is not clear who owns the rights to the contested Franz West furniture designs. In its favour, the Archiv apparently points to two written and executed copyright licence agreements that Franz West entered into with the Archiv in 2011. It also points to a declaration issued by the Commercial Court of Vienna in April 2015 apparently upholding its rights to certain Franz West furniture designs. By contrast, the Foundation and Gagosian, in their defence in the New York court proceedings, maintain that Franz West nullified the 2011 licence agreements with the Archiv and thereafter transferred the rights to the Foundation before he died in 2012. Complicating the situation is the ongoing (since 2013) dispute between the estate of Franz West and the Foundation in the Vienna civil courts. The heirs of Franz West allege that the artist lacked the required mental capacity to form the Foundation, just days before his death, as he was in severe pain at the time as a consequence of a debilitating illness. So far, the Archiv appears to have been unsuccessful in its attempt to enforce its asserted copyrights in foreign jurisdictions. In particular, the Archiv failed in August 2015 in the Swiss courts to enforce an injunction against the Swiss art dealer Eva Presenhuber to prevent the exhibition of West’s furniture works (consigned by the Foundation) on her Zürich gallery premises. Conclusion The dispute between the Archiv Franz West, the Franz West Foundation and Gagosian Gallery reveals the value that an artist’s intellectual property rights can assume after the artist’s death. As the dispute shows, such control can help to determine not only how an artist’s work is posthumously publicised (for example, in books, magazines, posters and postcards) but how the work itself is reiterated and recreated over time, as seen, for example, in posthumously created editions and design works. Given that copyright in eu countries, including in Austria, currently lasts for the lifetime of the artist plus 70 years, whoever owns the rights to Franz West’s furniture designs will have a long period of time in which to sit on them.

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Great Collectors and Their Ideas No 9

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a prominent collector and patron of contemporary art, based in Turin, Italy. Much of her work happens behind the scenes, supporting artistic production, commissioning and presentation of new artworks, among them Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, (2006) and presentations at the Venice Biennale by Ragnar Kjartansson, Doug Aitken, Steve McQueen, Maurizio Cattelan and Goshka Macuga Interview by

Mark Rappolt After graduating in business studies and economics, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo started collecting contemporary art during the early 1990s. She founded the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1995 and opened its current premises in Turin in 2002. She is active both as a collector and as a supporter of artistic commissions and production, paying special attention to young artists. As an active patron of the arts she sits on the international councils of moma and Tate and is involved with a number of other art institutions around the world. 102

ArtReview

artreview How did you start collecting: was it something casual that became something more?

ar What makes you want to buy a particular piece? Are there certain themes that interest you?

patrizia sandretto re rebaudengo It was casual. I graduated in economics, so my studies were very different. At a certain point of my life I went to London, which was really important for me because it was 1992 and a particular moment after the Gulf War. The galleries were very, very open to me. I spent one week visiting artists’ studios with Nicholas Logsdail [founder of Lisson Gallery]. My first studio was Anish Kapoor and then I visited all of the young British generation. For me, it was something unbelievable. I really discovered a new world.

psrr A work has to give me some feelings. There are some works that you buy because you see the work and you want to have it in your collection. Other times there are works that need a little bit more time in order to understand what the artist wants to let us know. Generally I like to know what the work means, even if I’m not so attracted by the work – I need content in a work, you know? In fact, when we have to hang work at home, it’s always difficult, because I never buy a work thinking of the size, the colour or the shape. So for me the collection has never been a collection of names. It’s not important for me to have all the Italian artists, all the Americans. It’s important to have the right work, the work that I think is interesting. I think that art has to be precise in the moment in which it’s produced.

ar Why is it that you wanted to visit the artists? Had you seen their work? psrr No, I wasn’t used to artists’ studios. But when I visited the first one, I really discovered the difference when you collect art. In my home, I used to have antiques and more traditional paintings, things like that. Obviously, in this case, you cannot always know the artist, and so what was, for me, very important and would change my thinking, was that with contemporary art you are able to get to know the artist. You can understand what there is behind their work. This is fantastic, and maybe for me it’s the biggest difference there is. If you don’t know the artist, you can obviously collect in the same way, but to know the artist, for me, was also important in order to start to think, to be something more than a collector, to be more part of this world. When you start to know the artist, to understand how difficult it is for them, you start to understand what you can do for them, to be involved in the production. Perhaps they have a fantastic project but they need money to realise the project, and so you start to think, ‘I can help you, maybe, to do that.’

ar You talked before about wanting to make the collection public. Do you care much about what the public thinks about it? What do you think if they say, ‘Oh, this is terrible’? psrr It does happen that they don’t like it, but that’s why at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo we offer the service of our mediators. I didn’t start with an art background, and I understood from the beginning that it was important to show our visitors a pathway: not to make art easy, but to help people understand. ar What do you hope they get from the experience? Do you think that it will make them more open-minded?

above Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Photo: Maurizio Elia facing page Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Alessandro Trovati

November 2015

psrr Yes. Absolutely. I think that it’s important to start with children. That’s why we have an educational department. I think that we have to educate them from when they are very young, because when they are older, sometimes I understand it is more difficult. But we do also a lot for adults at the Fondazione. ar I guess if you were a public body, people might ask why you spend your money on this and not on, say, a cancer research facility or an eco-research facility. psrr I’m on the board of Piedmont Foundation for Cancer Research, but I think it is important to think not only of the body but also of the mind. If we have a great heritage from the past, it’s because someone in the past did that. This is not only just art, but art also means tourism, people who come to visit us. I mean, economically speaking, it’s also important because in our region, 350,000 people are working in the cultural sector. So it’s work, it’s people that can live thanks to culture. But, for example, some years ago, when there was a quite difficult moment in the city, some journalists asked our mayor, ‘What is more important? A kindergarten or a museum?’ Obviously he said kindergarten, but that is the perspective of the public. It’s important to have kindergarten, it’s important to have good hospitals, it’s important, absolutely. But we are private. We are doing work that I think is important for society, and we are doing it with our money, with our time. I think that there are many other important things, but without culture we cannot live. I also think that, for a student, it’s important to study. Not only to study Greek, Latin, mathematics, but to study subjects more closely connected to creativity, because at the end, I’m sure that in a society in which there is attention to culture, there will also be, in the next generation, students that will have more success.

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ar What do you mean, in terms of creativity? I guess one argument would be that if you give people nothing, they’d be a lot more creative. psrr Do you think so? No. I am sure that in a country that is more of a dictatorship, the artists might be more motivated to express themselves, but I’m not sure that if an artist is just alone in the desert, he can get all the stimuli to be creative: to live in a country in which you don’t see anything, you don’t know anything, you don’t have the education. I think education is important too. It’s not enough only to be creative; if you don’t know the past, then you don’t have the means to know the future. ar How have things changed since you started the Fondazione? psrr Twenty years ago, the world was quite different. Obviously, to be living in Torino, to be familiar with the Castello di Rivoli there, helped me to move in this direction, because it had a lot of attention, with a lot of visitors, you know? The challenge, which we have not yet overcome, is to reach everybody. I’m sure you saw today, in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, there were just foreign visitors. I don’t imagine that everybody in Torino will come to visit my foundation, but I think that if we start when they are young, we can have success. I remember once when I was there a visitor told me: “Ah, I’ve just come because of my son. I’ve never been in the Fondazione, it’s my first time in this place, but I came because my son wanted to come back to see the big sculpture in the Russian exhibition.” It’s important. It’s a small drop that, day after day, can also work. It’s easier when you have exhibitions about what happens in other countries – China, Japan, Korea – people are interested in understanding what happens abroad. When you have a solo show it is more difficult. But mediation is important. At the beginning, we used to receive letters. People, at the beginning, said, ‘Fantastic, I cannot talk with my forty-year-old son at home. But I can come to the museum, I can talk with Eleonora [one of the Fondazione’s mediators].’ Sometimes I think we’re also therapists! But even in this case, I think that it’s important, you know, because you start to instil a sense of culture, of something that’s good. So this is why we do a lot of education, a lot of projects, and we have a lot of people: at least five people in the Fondazione are working on educational projects, more than the curators. I’ve been lucky. I’ve collected, I want to share my collection, I want to give that opportunity to everybody, because for me contemporary art has been so important. I learned so much. Contemporary art changed my way of being, opened my mind, made me more tolerant, gave

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me the possibility to learn. And yes, if we can also help the economy, it’s fantastic. It’s true, I might have another kind of charity, but if we think that all the museums in America – the Whitney, moma, even the Guggenheim – were born only in the past century, the people who founded them were successful at work and then started to work in charity, setting up museums. So now we have moma, the Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and so I think that, in the end, it’s also important to do that. ar Now other people are opening foundations and there are more and more of these things happening. How has it changed what you do? Do you look at what other people are doing? psrr Obviously the world has changed. When I started collecting, there was just London, New York and la. Berlin had just started to become important, but not so much. It was a small world, fewer collectors than now. Now the world is

When I started, it was not glamorous, I mean, it was not like now. I always remember when we started going to Venice for the Biennale. There was just dinner in the restaurant, there were no parties like now. So I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I really wanted to be more involved in this world global, it’s normal that there are many, many other collectors like me. They have the desire to not only be a collector but also to open a foundation. I know that this sometimes could be considered a problem, because this doesn’t help the public museums. Chris Dercon [director of Tate Modern] often talks about that: why should a collector open her foundation and not give her collection to a museum?

but a collection that doesn’t need to have a space in which to be shown. A collection that you have in storage, but when you need some work you can show it, because it fits with exhibitions that the curators are organising. You can borrow, you can travel, your collection can travel, you can show it. When I started, it was not glamorous, I mean, it was not like now. I always remember when we started going to Venice for the Biennale. There was just dinner in the restaurant, there were no parties like now. So I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I really wanted to be more involved in this world, I really understood that I was lucky that I could know the artists. I wanted to give back to people living in Torino. But maybe also, in the end, I like to have a collection and to show what is possible. I can’t say that I’m just a missionary, so I don’t want to exaggerate. ar In terms of the content, are there things you won’t be interested in? You have a Thomas Hirschhorn that includes the image of a dead body – many people would be uncomfortable about that. psrr I think that it speaks about the moment in which we live. He’s one of the artists who, I think, is more precise, more attentive to what happened in the war. I think that art is absolutely not done to decorate our houses. Artists sometimes are able to give us a message and to talk to us about important things, so we have to pay attention. ar Is it hard to say no to artists? psrr Ah, in the production. Yes, sometimes. ar If they say, ‘I want to charter a spaceship, go twice around the moon.’ psrr Sometimes it’s not easy, we have a lot of artists that present us with projects. Obviously we have to choose, we cannot show all the artists, we cannot commission all the work, produce all the work. But we try to do as much as we can. ar When an artist visits your home and you haven’t put their work out, do you have to go and find it? psrr We do. In fact we change.

ar Why don’t you?

ar Finally, what are the long-term plans for the foundation? In 50 years, will it still be here?

psrr My space is more a kunsthalle than a museum. Our concept in Torino is not to show the collection. When I started 20 years ago, there were two kinds of institutions that were very important for me. One was the kunsthalle, the concept of having a space in which you invite artists, you produce work, you work with the artists. This is what happens in the Fondazione. The other was the frac, the concept of having a collection – because I started as a collector –

psrr I won’t be alive any more, but I think that the future of the foundation is obviously to maintain the place in Torino, because I think that we started here, but at the same time, to be connected to the world. Then, I really hope the collection can be maintained. If you maintain the collection altogether, you also represent a moment, a period; we can read the past century through the good artists that represented that moment in their work.

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POWER 1OO 119

POWER UP by ArtReview

How do you define power in the world of contemporary art? To say that artistic power rests with someone who can create an object of such beauty or sublimity that all those who see it swoon under its awesome effect might well chime with commonsense notions (don’t believe me, artworld people? Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary continues to define art: ‘The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’). But within professional art circles – don’t laugh… these days it seems there are such things – such ideas have been redundant for over a century. And fashionable artworld opinion has it that only shallow, self-centred hedonists think that’s a shame. That’s the thing about the artworld: it always likes to think of itself as wandering away from the flock. So is power in art simply a question of having the best idea? Is the best idea the most shocking one? Isn’t what’s best a matter of opinion in any case? Or, given that we live in a world where everything is marketing and art is no exception, is it a question of being able to publicise that idea? Or is contemporary art such a left-field concern that the idea of it being associated with power is just plain ludicrous? Talking of leftfield, here’s what former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis had to say about art and power when he gave the keynote speech at the sixth Moscow Biennale last month: “Art must not be anodyne, culture cannot be decorative” and artists “should be feared by the powerful in our society; if you are not, you are not doing your job properly.” ok, so being feared wasn’t exactly a path to success for Varoufakis. But perhaps what he’s getting at is art’s habit of proposing or analysing alternatives to reality or social norms, and powerful people’s resistance to those norms being changed. So does that mean that a list of the powerful in art would simply be a ranking of the most terrifying artists in town? Or only artists who’ve been abused or otherwise suppressed? Ha ha… what a dreamer that Varoufakis is! Of course, ArtReview wouldn’t necessarily deny that constraint can lead to greater urgency and ingenuity when it comes to art – look at former power number one Ai Weiwei – but if you read the list that follows, you’ll realise that art tangles with the rich, and sometimes the powerful, in a way that makes any black-and-white idea of ‘us and them’ hard to sustain. Instead, artists, and the art they make, participate in an ever-shifting, often tense game played by wealthy collectors, corporations, public functionaries, biennial curators, art-fair directors, celebrities, fashion moguls, Internet entrepreneurs, academics and governments – to name but a few of the powerful types who regularly come across ArtReview’s radar. Now, it’s true that this makes the artworld sound a bit too much like the classic boardgame of global imperial strategy, Risk – except with perhaps less heavy artillery and more canapé-and-champagne previews. But today’s artworld exists in the form it does because art has come to represent different things for different people – social status, or a mark of one’s progressive credentials, or a sign of one’s aspirations as a nation or a region, or even – whisper it – something that we, the public, should actually care about. Because somewhere behind all those competing interests is the art itself, and what it has to say to a broader audience, beyond those operators and fixers who make it happen. After all, no private collector wants to discover that everyone is laughing about the art she collects (unless people are supposed to – although note that an artist like Maurizio Cattelan no longer features on this list: presumably a sign that art is no longer a laughing matter); no museum director wants to be thought of as merely pandering to her patrons (unless she’s having dinner with the patrons, or guiding them through the Venice Biennale); no art-fair director wants to say that he or she merely runs a supermarket (no exceptions

to that one). Art, whatever is often said, still gets taken very seriously, which is why the Power 100 regularly features artists who are global activists, curators who deal with most pressing political and philosophical questions, and philanthropists who think that blowing millions on making art happen is more important than just buying it. That means that power isn’t always what we want it to be – and much of the criticism that this list inspires is related to how people would like power in art to appear. Power simply is. And this list – an exception to the general tsunami of subjectivity for which ArtReview normally stands – attempts to take a step back and examine what’s really going on in art: why this person gets an exhibition rather than that person; why this type of art is valued more highly in monetary or intellectual terms than that; and in some cases, just plain ‘Why?’ Despite appearances, the Power 100 is not so much a list as it is a network. Many of the entities are interconnected: a collector may support a gallery, a gallery an artist, the collector a museum, which in turn is introduced to an artist, whose show might be supported by a gallery, which in turn will be supported by the artist having a show at the museum, because it adds to the artist’s cachet. The fact that many of these network operations happen far away from the public eye is one of the reasons the Power 100 was initiated back in 2001. But how do you compare art from different regions, which was produced in response to different contexts and circumstances? In ArtReview’s case you get together a panel of experts from around the world and ask them to tell you who’s the art boss in the places they come from. To allow them to express their points of view without fear or favour, the panel (which this year comprised 16 people) remains anonymous. Then you have a debate as to what it means to be the boss in this place as opposed to that place. And then you get a second panel of external advisers to check that the first panel was evenhanded in spite of their obvious regional bias. You also ask your panellists to operate within a series of guidelines: that all considered for the list should have been active within the past 12 months; that their influence is to be judged on an international rather than a local level; that they influence the kind of art being produced today; and that they affect the idea of art that persists in society at large. Back in the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert declared the commonsense definition of an ‘artist’ to be this: ‘Are all dilettantes. Praise their disinterest in money matters (obsolete idea). Express surprise over the fact that they dress like everybody else (obsolete idea). They make heaps of money, but throw it out the window. Often invited to dine in town. A woman artist is definitely a whore. What artists do can’t be called work.’ These days we like to think that things have moved on a bit. Indeed, you’ll hear a lot of people talking, as they stuff themselves with champagne and canapés at all those receptions that accompany any contemporary art exhibition, about how the best art reflects and interrogates the world around it (Eli and Edythe Broad have that written on the entrance wall of their new museum). In many ways the artworld is a reflection of the world around it too. It’s structured by levels of access in much the same way as any elite is. Look at those regions that are having an impact on the global economy and you’ll find that those places are, in turn, making a bigger impact on the global art scene. And if a capitalist society seeks to provide an ever-increasing variety of ways by which we can distinguish ourselves from our neighbours, so too does the world of contemporary art. That’s not to say that the artworld is uniform, more that it does reflect general societal trends. But there will always be artists who dress differently from everyone else, and are completely disinterested in money matters, even if they don’t go so far as to throw cash out the window. And ArtReview certainly hopes that the artworld is sufficiently diverse and robust to allow those old-fashioned types to continue to grace its list.

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from top Iwan and Manuela Wirth, photo: Vincent Evans, courtesy Hauser & Wirth; Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton (background), photo: Hélène Binet, courtesy Hauser & Wirth; Paul Schimmel, photo: Matthew Tammaro; exterior view of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles, photo: Daniel Han, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

1 IWAN & MANUELA WIRTH

Gallerists Swiss Last Year: 3 In the 14 years ArtReview’s power list has been running, the Wirths are only the second art dealers to top it. While the first, Larry Gagosian (number one in 2004 and 2010) may continue to enjoy the highest estimated revenues of any gallery operation, the Wirths’ increased influence stems in part from what they have done to change the model of selling and promoting art. As big art dealers are becoming ever better at selling art for high prices, and as collectors want to see themselves as more than just anonymous purchasers, Iwan and his wife (and gallery copresident), Manuela, understand that selling art objects isn’t the whole story – the well-off want to be sold a lifestyle. So in addition to their more conventional gallery branches in Zürich, London and New York, last year saw the opening of Hauser & Wirth Somerset, just outside the little West Country town of Bruton. It’s a gallery, but it’s also a ‘multi-purpose art centre’ that boasts landscaped gardens, a schools programme, artist residencies, a restaurant and an estate shop selling increasingly local produce. So successful has it been that, nine months after opening, the Somerset gallery reportedly welcomed its 100,000th visitor – this to a town whose inhabitants barely number 3,000. No doubt it’s not a coincidence that earlier in the year South West Trains unveiled proposals for major timetable improvements that included a direct connection from London to Bruton (four times a day) for the first time. A sampling of the country lifestyle, then, with not a little of the thrill of a visit to a country estate (fitting for our Downton age); and a move, for Hauser & Wirth, from the arts sections of the national press to the better-bred society and showbiz pages – where the gallery was also

recently cited for having placed new employee Princess Eugenie under a ‘holiday ban’ so that she can be ‘manning a stall in Regent’s Park’ during Frieze Art Fair. The Somerset project only hints at how the Wirths’ success lies in the way that their operations are increasingly merging collecting with the tastes and social aspirations of their clientele. Next March the Wirths open Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles, a 9,300sqm space helmed by one of la’s most influential museum curators, Paul Schimmel, with the promise of a museum-style education programme, an interior courtyard for outdoor sculpture exhibitions and events, and a bookstore, bar and restaurant, anchored, of course, by a group of gallery artists that includes local heroes Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley. It may look like generous, public-facing philanthropy, but the Wirths’ approach has strategy. Integrating more closely with the cultural infrastructure allows Hauser & Wirth to cement the gallery’s representation of some of the key artists of our time: among them Isa Genzken, Pierre Huyghe, Anri Sala, Subodh Gupta, Zhang Enli and the estates of Henry Moore, Maria Lassnig, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. So while even more big estates, like that of Philip Guston, are beating a path to the Wirths’ door because of their international reach (they have made the most of art fairs and the contacts they generate to build extensive networks across Asia – the couple also sponsor a lecturer in modern and contemporary Asian art at London’s prestigious Courtauld Institute – and beyond), the galleries nevertheless maintain a local flavour. That subtle, tailored approach to the lifestyle of art taps into the insatiable desire for exclusivity that drives the wealthy. More than just a gallery, Hauser & Wirth is turning itself into a sort of club, one that the very rich are only too keen to join.

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2 AI WEIWEI

3 DAVID ZWIRNER

Gallerist German Last Year: 2 Zwirner obviously had grand ambitions for his gallery from the start: after the opening of a Franz West show in 1994 at the gallery’s first space, in New York’s SoHo, the gallerist hired two stretch limos, one black and one white, to take friends and potential clients to dinner on Coney Island. Zwirner is a man who knows the importance of making a splash. In a 2013 New Yorker profile, there’s a revealing aside in which the gallerist is said to view some exhibitions or projects as primarily marketing for the gallery. The centrepiece of this year’s Yayoi Kusama show, in Zwirner’s 19th Street space (one of his two Chelsea galleries), surely falls into this category: The obliteration room (2002–), a white room that visitors were invited to slowly cover with coloured stickers, proved a popular – and media-friendly – focus around which to hang other more commercially obvious works. That said, the sale of Richard Serra’s Equal (2015) to moma this summer would suggest that Zwirner has little trouble placing artworks. He does it with relatively unknown work too. David Zwirner London’s Concrete Cuba exhibition, a survey that introduced a little-known strain of Cuban concretism, was an exhibition that appealed not to the selfie-legions, but to the academic side of the artworld. Nor is Zwirner ignoring youth: while the emerging market may be correcting itself from the overinflated prices of a few years back, the gallery’s two young stars, Jordan Wolfson and Oscar Murillo, have sufficient backing from the chattering curator classes to suggest that their long-term prospects are solid.

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Museum Directors Swiss/British Last Year: 6 ‘Think the impossible’ is a central mantra down Serpentine Galleries way – one appended equally to exhibition-making and fundraising. For Peyton-Jones, this next year will be her 25th at the helm of the once-humble Hyde Park institution. Her appearance on the society pages alongside Pharrell Williams and other Serpentine partygoers has long been de rigueur, but as a finalist for the 2015 Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award, Peyton-Jones has been explaining how annual visitor figures reached almost a million across the Serpentine’s two galleries in 2014, and how 85 percent of their £7m turnover is raised from private sources. Codirector Obrist is, as ever, ubiquitous: outlining the ‘Museum of the Future’ in Doha; touring 15 Rooms to Shanghai; winning the International Folkwang Prize in Essen. ‘In a sense Obrist is a human aggregator,’ wrote Hal Foster, reviewing Obrist’s Ways of Curating in the London Review of Books, ‘almost a social-media-in-person or a hive-mind of one.’ As might be expected, Ways of Curating is but one of 17-odd books authored or coauthored by the hyperactive uber-curator this year – and his river of published interviews and conversation is in turn cited in dozens of other publications. Obrist’s 103,000 Instagram followers chart his ceaseless travel through the location of celebrity contributors to his Post-it notes project – Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul; Olafur Eliasson in Copenhagen; Bret Easton Ellis, John Baldessari and Miranda July in la – such that it is sometimes easy to forget his ties to an institutional ‘home’.

ArtReview

2 Photos: Benjamin McMahon 3 Photo: Dirk Eusterbrock. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London. 4 Hans Ulrich Obrist, photo: Roe Ethridge; Julia Peyton-Jones, photo: Greg Funnell

4 HANS ULRICH OBRIST & JULIA PEYTONJONES

Artist Chinese Last Year: 15 Very few artists reach celebrity status. For the few who do achieve the dubious heights of fame, most are content that their image help the art-market dollars roll in (or that it be used to promote trainers: cf Marina Abramović’s Work Relation, 2014). For Ai, however, his profile has long been used to highlight various social injustices suffered by Chinese citizens – most notably the nearly 5,000 children reportedly killed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a result of badly built school buildings. Banned from travelling for over four years – having had his passport confiscated following his 2011 arrest on tax evasion and other charges, widely reported to be politically motivated – the big news of 2015 was that Ai got his passport back. His first overseas trip (first stop Berlin, where he has a son, a studio and a guest professorship) was almost curtailed after the uk visa authorities initially denied him permission to stay long enough to both install and be present for the opening of his solo show at London’s Royal Academy. Following protests, the British home secretary intervened. Now that’s power right there. Once in Britain, the artist wasn’t shy, going on a much-publicised walk through London with fellow Lisson Gallery banner-waver Anish Kapoor: a symbolic act, the two artists said, to highlight Europe’s refugee crisis. Alongside all this worthy campaigning, Ai’s actual art often fades from view; indeed, some critics are quick to point out that when removed from the emotive narratives that inform it, and from the artist’s own biography, the work itself does not amount to much. Yet there are more than enough museum directors, curators and art lovers who would strongly disagree, finding in Ai an icon of what good art can do in the world.

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5 Photo: Hugo Glendinning 6 Photo: Nick Harvey/WireImage. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery 7 Photos: Daniel Arnold

5 NICHOLAS SEROTA

7 GLENN D. LOWRY

Museum Director British Last Year: 1 It has been a turbulent 12 months since the head of the four Tate galleries took the number one spot on this list. While discontent and protest fitfully surfaced from the activist-left over bp’s corporate sponsorship, in the spring it was Serota’s detractors on the right who made the most noise. The conservative press gleefully stretched for Oscar Wilde clichés when Tate lost not one but two directors in quick succession. Was it carelessness on Serota’s part? Perhaps not, but Penelope Curtis leaving Tate Britain for Calouste Gulbenkian Museum after a much maligned five-year tenure, and Chris Dercon announcing his decision to jump ship from Tate Modern to direct Berlin’s Volksbühne (although he’ll be staying in the post until next summer) was not a good look for Serota. The ten-storey extension, which dwarfs Tate Modern’s original building like a super cruiseliner on the Venetian skyline, is proving controversial too. Currently four years behind its original opening date – during which performance spaces in the power station’s old oil tanks, opened to much hype in 2012, have sat idle as construction continues above them – the additional space is still missing £30m of funding, although Serota says he is confident this will be found before the new launch date of June 2016. Last year’s top spot came in recognition of Tate’s vast international network of global acquisitions committees and internationally active curatorial teams. No change there. Nor has all the construction dented its exhibition programme (Tanks aside) and general popularity with punters: a(nother) record – 7.9 million visits across all four sites in 2014–15, with 5.7 million alone stepping into Tate Modern. But with his legacy projects nearing completion, is the sixty-nineyear-old eyeing retirement in some pleasant corner of Southern England?

6 LARRY GAGOSIAN

Museum Director American Last Year: 4 The knives were out for moma after this year’s universally ill-received Björk retrospective. The show made the venerable institution come across as ‘ridiculous in the way of a wannabe groupie’, according to The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, who went on to echo the words of Artnet’s Ben Davis in criticising moma, with its recent run of populist shows (Tim Burton, Marina Abramović, Tilda Swinton asleep in a box, the 2013 staging of Rain Room and Yoko Ono), for ‘reorganizing itself as something like a hipster lifestyle brand’. In the context of this list, ‘we don’t want our institutions doing what makes certain commercial galleries successful’ seems to be the message. Significantly, the vast majority of the criticism was levelled at moma as an institution (and its apparently vapid and unrigorous presentation of Björk) rather than at the artist and her work. While, naturally, some of this criticism is born out of the artworld’s innate sense of elitism, it does seem to express a belief that a museum’s remit is in part to pay attention to what popular culture and its markets do not – or to preserve aspects of visual culture that those other systems let slide by. The reason people care so much is because moma is one of the fundamental pillars of the modern and contemporary art scenes, but for it to continue to be so, it seems that certain lessons must be learned.

Gallerist American Last Year: 8 From poster seller during the 1970s to his current gilded suzerainty – 15 galleries, a shop (still selling posters), a magazine, an annual turnover of close to a billion dollars – Gagosian at seventy remains the, um, posterboy for contemporary art dealing as commercial juggernaut. But money isn’t everything. This gallery complex, time has demonstrated, is also a factory-cum-cosmetician’s, knocking the sharp edges off artists’ work and engineering sleek production lines in place of organic practices. Meanwhile, alongside a mooted new la outpost, a just-opened new space in London – headed by Richard Calvocoressi, late of the Scottish National Gallery and the Henry Moore Foundation – clarifies, like this year’s shows of Balthus, Anthony Caro, Richard Avedon and Henry Moore, that GoGo is still determined to merge dealing with museum-level exhibiting. If the gulf between highly credible historical shows and the branded baubles his younger artists put forth is increasingly obvious, the balancing act is, at least, fascinating to watch.

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Museum Director American Last Year: 18 The director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has reason to be proud this year. His new gallery, brought into the world with the help of $422 million, opened in April and has been a hit: entrance queues (fast-moving!) are a regular occurrence. The critics have been positive too. Holland Cotter said that with its new home the Whitney ‘shakes art and itself up, bracingly’, and Christian Viveros-Fauné added: ‘the Whitney has redefined itself brilliantly’. They are right to be effusive. The Renzo Piano-designed building is filled with light and excellent internal sightlines: the works in the inaugural show, America Is Hard to See, seemed to dance off each other. Basically a chronological hang of both hits and forgotten gems from the collection, with highlights including Nan Goldin’s tear-jerkingly beautiful slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) and the perhaps less-well-known but equally heartwrenching 1970 film by Howard Lester, One Week in Vietnam, in which photographic portraits of all the us soldiers killed in the war over seven days are flashed in quick succession, the exhibition positions this moment of institutional change in the wider history of American art. A smart opening gambit by Weinberg.

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Curator American Last Year: 19 Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial style is known by now: no time for niceties, no fear of being considered pretentious and probably onto the salient issues of the evolving moment before anyone else. With its Anthropocenic/ speculative realist themes, the us-born, Italy-based curator’s Documenta 13 in 2012 – the year that Christov-Bakargiev topped the Power 100 list – suggested as much. Her poetic Istanbul Biennial this year, Saltwater, which opened as Syrian refugees were washing up dead and which strung together themes of exile, political violence and lost civilisations, will require some unpacking but will likely stand as equally well timed. In January 2016 Christov-Bakargiev becomes the first person to direct, simultaneously, both of Turin’s two most important art institutions, the gam – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna – and the Castello di Rivoli (where she has formerly been curator and interim director). We look forward to seeing her adapt her innovative thinking, once again, to an institutional format.

ArtReview

9 Photo: Marco Anelli 10 Photo: Ilgın Erarslan Yanmaz

9 ADAM D. WEINBERG

Artist Serbian Last Year: 5 Following the triumphant 2013 Kickstarter campaign to raise seed funds for her Marina Abramović Institute (mai), the ‘grandmother of performance art’ has found the remaining $31 million required for the Hudson, New York, headquarters somewhat harder to extract. Numerous events held at Art Basel Miami Beach last year brought in precisely zip. Clearly narked with celebs paying lip service but failing to dig deep, Abramović started a beef with Jay Z, suggesting he’d ‘used’ her for his 2013 Picasso Baby stunt, before issuing an apology when it turned out ‘Hova’ had in fact coughed up. While she may not be feeling the love from the global ultrarich (or the artworld in-crowd – one prominent critic dismissively described her as a ‘crossover star’ earlier this year), Abramović’s popular status continues to blossom. In 2015 she focused her considerable charisma on the Southern Hemisphere, with extended residencies in both Brazil (at sesc Pompeia, São Paulo) and Australia (Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, and mona, Hobart). It’s not just the artist who was present: these days she brings an itinerant version of the mai, which runs workshops (in Brazil, 250 Abramović Method sessions were held with a total of 14,264 participants) and helps mentor local performance artists whose work is presented under the mai banner. Between the crystal therapy, the mass group-hugs and the recent announcement that she wanted a trinity of interments (with coffins in Amsterdam, Belgrade and New York), it’s hard not to ponder where the tipping point might be between cult artist and cult actual.

8 Photo: Daniel Arnold

8 MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

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Artist German Last Year: 36 Truly global influence is a tricky thing to achieve – the artist who might be a star in one region is often unknown in another. The alternative is the jobbing biennale artist, whose reach is international but mark is light. Tillmans is neither: he is a bona fide star around the world, from Asia to Latin America, Europe to North America, one who commands institutional respect and public affection (not least, as critic Sean O’Hagan pointed out this year, because Tillmans’s knack for finding beauty in the everyday is one that chimes with our contemporary Instagram and Tumblr habits). Tillmans’s cv bears witness to his reach: upcoming solo shows at House of Art, České Budějovice in the Czech Republic, later this month, and the Hasselblad Center at Göteborgs Konstmuseum (Tillmans won the Hasselblad Award this year), in December, come hot on the heels of this year’s institutional outings at the Met in New York and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and gallery shows at David Zwirner, New York, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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12 MARIAN GOODMAN

Gallerist American Last Year: 9 ‘I was incredibly shy and timid when I started. I still am,’ Goodman told the Financial Times’s ‘Lunch with…’ feature (itself an indicator of her status, the format is normally reserved for ceos and the like: two weeks prior the newspaper had interviewed United Nations head Ban Ki-moon). If Goodman really is this much of an introvert, then perhaps it explains why, once she forges relationships with artists, and they are shown across her New York, Paris and London galleries, the commitment is big and the gallerist is in it for the long haul. She has worked with Gerhard Richter, Lawrence Weiner, William Kentridge, John Baldessari and Thomas Struth for decades; and championed the most significant of a generation of (traditionally hard-to-sell) movingimage artists from the 1990s, among them Steve McQueen, Yang Fudong and Tacita Dean; so some of her more recent signings, such as Danh Vō and Adrián Villar Rojas, can expect her committed support for as long as this eighty-seven-year-old chooses to continue.

Artist American Last Year: 7 Koons, at sixty, is firmly in his imperial phase. His Balloon Dog (1994) remains, at $58.4m, the most expensive artwork sold at auction by a living artist; he himself remains America’s richest living artist. His widely lauded – though also, this being Koons, criticised – retrospective moved on from the Whitney late last year to the Pompidou and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao, and his 130-employee studio ticks over nicely. Admittedly, sometimes it does so by fabricating multimillion-dollar sculptures for Florida

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13 MONIKA SPRÜTH & PHILOMENE MAGERS

Gallerists German Last Year: 11 Currently based in Berlin and London, Sprüth Magers represents some of the most established artists on the contemporary art scene, among them Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, as well as many of art’s hottest young guns: Analia Saban, Cyprien Gaillard and Ryan Trecartin. You might say it’s a formula that explains most of the galleries at the top of this list, but what marks this one out from its blue-chip buddies (besides plans to move the London operation to a much larger Mayfair townhouse and the long-awaited Los Angeles outpost due to open early next year) is a commitment to certain ideologies. For those who might need a reminder, it can be found in the gallery’s September–October Berlin exhibition, which looks back to Magers’s earlier publishing enterprise Eau de Cologne (a magazine focused on women artists, which ran between 1985 and 1993) and features work by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel.

condominium complexes (‘Big no to this shiny shit,’ said critic Jerry Saltz on Twitter, with justification). But Koons is above it. Here, after all, is an artist who doesn’t have to choose between Gagosian and Zwirner but, when it suits him, shows with both, and whose latest exhibitions are mostly at venues like the Louvre or Florentine palazzi. And even his many naysayers can’t easily deny that Koons, with his neo-antiquities and technocratic Pop, is the artist for our queasy, neoliberal, surfaceobsessed age. Hate the game, not the player.

11 Photo: Carmen Brunner 12 Photo: Thomas Struth 13 Photo: Dagmar Schwelle. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, London 14 Photo: Chris Fanning

11 WOLFGANG TILLMANS

15 Bernard Blistène, photo: Philippe Migeat; Serge Lasvignes, photo: Hervé Véronèse 16 Photo: Gina Folly 17 Photo: Maximilian Geuter

15 BERNARD BLISTÈNE & SERGE LASVIGNES

Museum Directors French Last Year: 12 (with Alain Seban) / new Blistène, who took on the directorship of the Pompidou last year, having previously worked at the Paris institution during the 1980s, has a tough gig, what with the French government cutting museum funding and the monied patrons who might fill this gap fleeing François Hollande’s tax regime. Blistène may be able to shift day-to-day politics onto Lasvignes, the Pompidou’s new president, but the director’s ability to stage shows will be compromised. Hence perhaps crowd-pleasers like a restaging of the Whitney’s Jeff Koons show in November last year. The cynic might also suggest that the museum’s forays beyond France – a temporary Pompidou outpost opened in March in Málaga, Spain, and there are talks to establish similar ventures in Korea and China – are a way of tapping money from the overseas rich. But if this allows the museum to continue producing exhibitions such as the current Wifredo Lam and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster retrospectives, then it seems a workable survival strategy.

16 ADAM SZYMCZYK

Curator Polish Last Year: 21 One might have predicted a low-visibility year for Szymczyk, a ‘superstar curator’ (as The New York Times dubbed him) whose past activities have ranged from the Berlin Biennale to a decade-long stewardship of the Kunsthalle Basel. After all, the Polish curator has a Documenta to curate – the 14th edition of the quinquennial, opening in both Kassel and Athens in 2017 and titled Learning from Athens. As Szymczyk told Die Zeit in a thoughtful interview this year, he has been inviting artists and, in the face of complaints about the show’s division across two countries, urging them to ‘develop new works based on what they’ve experienced in both cities’. If this suggests an intriguingly experimental, nondoctrinaire approach to curating, it’s augmented by the plans he’s outlined so far, which include showing the ‘Nazi art’ hoard of Cornelius Gurlitt. Szymczyk, such decisions remind us, may be a quiet force, but he’s definitely one to be reckoned with.

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17 OKWUI ENWEZOR

Curator American Last Year: 24 Excitable media coverage in the lead-up to this year’s Venice Biennale offered a torrent of positivity, celebrating Enwezor’s status as the art event’s first African-born curator, his non-Eurocentric-artworldview, even his dapper dress sense. And then May came, and the global artworld rocked up to a Biennale that was dense and serious-minded, with a nonstop live reading of Marx’s Capital – political, accusatory, unpretty; or as one critic put it, ‘morose, joyless and ugly’ – certainly not a show that could be flitted around with spiritual ease en route to an evening of Campari-fuelled cocktail parties. Since May, as Europe has faced news of mounting desperation, death and privation occurring at its borders, the ugly, accusatory face of geopolitical catastrophe has become inescapable. Enwezor’s may not have been the Biennale that Europe wanted, but it was probably the one that it deserved.

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18 Photo: Daniel Peckmezian

18 HITO STEYERL

19 Photo: Jesse Untracht-Oakner. Courtesy New Museum, New York

19 MASSIMILIANO GIONI 20 MAJA HOFFMANN

20 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 21 Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Artist German Last Year: 47 The key theorist/practitioner of the postInternet moment – her dispatches on e-flux journal required reading, her essayistic video artworks required viewing – is too shrewd to get caught up in its impending immolation. This year, with her complex and effervescent film Factory of the Sun (set in a Tron-style motion-capture viewing environment), in which humans melt into light-driven virtuality, Steyerl made one of the few successful national presentations at the Venice Biennale (and one of the only ones that felt future-facing). At the core of Steyerl’s work – alongside investigations of the relationship between art, money, politics and militarisation – is the question of how one retains subjectivity and autonomy in our surveillance-rife, digitally enhanced era. Currently, her first solo show in her native Germany, in Berlin (where she’s a professor at the University of the Arts), featuring Liquidity Inc (2014), is prefaced with a quote from Bruce Lee: ‘Be water, my friend!’ Artist, writer, lecturer and full-on classification escapologist, Steyerl practises what the kung-fu master preaches.

Curator Italian Last Year: 25 Your momma’s so fat that when Massimiliano Gioni selected her for his Great Mother exhibition at the Milan Expo this year he had to label her ‘site-specific installation in mixed media, dimensions variable (detail of series)’. Well, that’s what the kids are saying, anyway. Gioni’s been so busy Venice-ing (Biennale curator, 2013) and New Museum-ing (elevated to artistic director, summer 2014) that it’s easy to forget his other role, as artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, an institution that looks increasingly admirable in its eschewal of both a permanent collection and site. After two quiet years he’s returned to the Milan scene with a double whammy – the five-hectare installation of Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield (1982/2015) on a city-centre site and Great Mother: a vast gynocentric show at the Palazzo Reale. Back at the New Museum, it’s been Ryan Trecartin-curated Triennial time, but Gioni still managed to helm major surveys on Paweł Althamer and Chris Ofili, as well as the art-fromand-about-the-Arab-world show Here and Elsewhere (all 2014). Goin’ it like Gioni, as the kids (probably don’t) say.

21 PATRICIA PHELPS DE CISNEROS

Collector Venezuelan Last Year: 26 Phelps de Cisneros has a 2,000-strong collection of contemporary and modern Latin American art (accumulated since buying her first work while honeymooning in 1970). You would be wrong however to think that she is on this list just because she buys a lot of art (it isn’t that easy) and has well-respected curatorial hands such as Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy to help her do it. Pérez-Barreiro describes the collection’s aim for Latin American art thusly: ‘on the one hand study it, and on the other promote it’. And promote it Phelps de Cisneros does: she sits

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Collector Swiss Last Year: 22 Founded by active collector and art ‘enabler’ Maja Hoffmann in 2004, the luma Foundation supports countless artistic projects and exhibitions around the world, among them Photo London, which launched in 2015 as the British capital’s latest attempt at getting a photography festival up and running. Hoffmann’s annual Pool project (a programme for young curators that draws on the ‘pool’ of works from the collections of Hoffmann, Michael Ringier and other international collectors, and cofounded with Beatrix Ruf and Ringier) continues apace at luma/Westbau in Zürich. Biggest of all Hoffmann’s projects however is the new headquarters for luma, designed by Frank Gehry, estimated to cost €150 million and currently under construction in Arles, France. From 31 October to 14 February, luma is hosting a large-scale research project based on Tony Oursler’s personal archive. In 2015 Hoffmann, who has played significant roles in the development of Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery and the New Museum, among other institutions, was also elected chair of the Swiss Institute.

on a great many boards and acquisition committees, including moma, the Tate and Museo Reina Sofía, among others; loans to museums internationally, as well as staging entire shows of the collection in the same institutions (the patron rejects the idea of her own private institution, as inevitably it would have a limited geographical reach); awards grants; operates a publishing imprint; arranges seminars; and supports artist-run spaces such as soma in Mexico and Pivô in São Paulo. All of which has played a significant part in bringing the continent’s art history to institutional attention.

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Curator German Last Year: 17 Ruf’s first year as director of the Stedelijk Museum has been characterised by jobs for her chums – or at least shows for artists the curator has shown a firm commitment to in the past. Luckily for the good people of Amsterdam, Ruf, a former choreographer who turned art curator in 1994, has a knack for picking artists of critical importance. Tino Sehgal has a yearlong retrospective in which a different live work is staged each month, with performances every day from the museum’s opening to its close; Ed Atkins, the artist who brought the curtain down on Ruf’s 13-year tenure at Kunsthalle Zürich, showed in February; and Liam Gillick, with whom Ruf sits on the ‘core group’ of Maja Hoffmann’s luma Foundation, made an interactive, family-friendly project for the city’s Museumplein in June. Ruf is also enjoying having an acquisitions budget for the first time: the first work she bought was Zwei Lampen (1994), by Isa Genzken, who has a show at the museum in November.

25 MARC SPIEGLER

Art Fair Director American Last Year: 14 With fairs on three continents, Art Basel’s domination of the art-fair business remains unchallenged. ‘I don’t see all these other art fairs as a problem for Art Basel,’ Spiegler told Artnet in July, as he hired the executive director of one of those other art fairs, New York’s Armory, to be his own director of American operations. Perhaps more indicative of its standing, a representative of David Zwirner told The New York Times this year that the gallery saves its best work for Art Basel (the one actually in Basel, not Hong Kong or Miami Beach – it can get confusing), reinforcing the notion that while art fairs might not be the best place to view art, they’re among the best places to sell it. So Spiegler has reasons to be satisfied. Meanwhile, Art Basel’s gallery selection committees (made up of gallerists who judge their peers) remain influential in promoting and reinforcing a vision of what a ‘good’ art gallery should be.

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23 MARC & ARNE GLIMCHER

Gallerists American Last Year: 20 This summer Pace, founded in 1960 by Arne Glimcher, announced plans to build an eightstorey ‘mini-museum style gallery’ on West 25th Street (due to be completed at the end of 2017). As other galleries leave Chelsea, Pace expands into it. The Glimchers do things their own way: when most Western galleries want to dip their toes in the Asian market, they might go to Art Basel in Hong Kong; Pace is one of the few Western outfits to have opened in mainland China (Beijing), and it did so seven years ago. In the father and son’s seven other spaces, across New York, Menlo Park, London and Hong Kong, things have ticked over nicely: painter Mao Yan’s first us show and a Robert Irwin exhibition in one of the four New York galleries, Lee Ufan in another; this spring there was a well-received, ambitious Adam Pendleton exhibition in London; in the summer Hong Kong audiences were treated to Liu Jianhua’s contemplative porcelain wall works, while September saw painter Nigel Cooke’s first outing with his new gallery. And it’s only going to get bigger.

26 TIM BLUM & JEFF POE

Gallerists American Last Year: 28 Having long been a mainstay of the la art scene, Blum and Poe are now firmly ensconced in New York as well, while their long relationship with Japan led to the opening of a space in Tokyo last year. The duo are renowned for their introduction of Japanese art to the West – they were the first gallery in the us to show Yoshitomo Nara, back in 1995, followed by the then unknown Takashi Murakami, and

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Gallerist British Last Year: 40 Last year, Gavin Brown told ArtReview that his interest in la vie bohème was sparked by necking leftover wine the morning after his parents’ dinner parties. It’s a forthrightness and instinct for conviviality that has distinguished his career as a gallerist. This year he’s opened a new space in Rome (in a building he spotted from a favourite restaurant ten years ago) and, back in New York, announced a move uptown to a new threestorey space in (appropriately enough) an old brewery in Harlem. His former space in the West Village closed in epic style with a restaging of Jannis Kounellis’s Untitled (12 Horses) (1969, which features the requisite number of live horses) and the opening up of the gallery to the street (by Rirkrit Tiravanija). And where to start on the activities of the rest of the Gavin Brown stable? Joan Jonas had the us Pavilion at Venice; Tiravanija has been dishing up pelmeni and ping pong at Garage, Moscow, followed by tea and curry at Art Basel; Laura Owens showed at the Secession in Vienna; Sturtevant (rip) has been the subject of a major touring exhibition in Germany and a moca la show. Latest signing? White-hot Brit Ed Atkins, who’s scheduled to open the new space. ’Nuff said.

their 2013 exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha has been widely credited with triggering a revival of interest in the Mono-ha movement – and now the Tokyo gallery has brought the West to Japan, with shows for Dave Muller, Richard Prince and British-born, California-settled artist Penny Slinger. Bringing it full circle, this month Nara is exhibiting on home turf. Which isn’t to say that the Pacific is the only sea Blum and Poe like to paddle in; this summer the boys headed for Ibiza, staging an exhibition of Murakami in two of the island’s arts spaces, the 280sqm Art Projects and the smaller Lune Rouge Ibiza. As if that wasn’t enough, they also announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2016.

22 Photo: Robin de Puy 23 Marc Glimcher, photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Arne Glimcher, photo: Ronald James 25 © Art Basel 26 Photo: Matthew Tammaro

24 GAVIN BROWN

22 BEATRIX RUF

Artist German Last Year: 16 For most artists, it’s hard to get richer than Gerhard Richter (net worth popularly estimated at £26 million, making him the ninth wealthiest artist in the world), whose gallery prices presumably aren’t unaffected by auction results like this year’s £30.4m for Abstraktes Bild (1986), the most expensive painting sold at auction by a living artist. But that seems never to have been a motivating force for the eightythree-year-old artist, who this year said that the price of art at auction is ‘shocking’, and who

29 PIERRE HUYGHE

Artist French Last Year: 38 The lush green countryside surrounding TarraWarra, in Victoria, Australia, feels a million miles away from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its panoramic view of New York City; yet in Pierre Huyghe they have a connection. This year, the increasingly influential Frenchman staged his first Antipodean museum show at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, having previously executed a roof-garden commission at the Met, following the third presentation of his major touring retrospective, at lacma, at the end of 2014. This year Huyghe has been grappling with an environment even more alien than these – by contrast – down-to-earth ventures: deep beneath the surface of the Sea of Marmara, the artist claims (no one has seen it) to be building a theatre for marine life, particularly Turritopsis dohrnii – the ‘immortal jellyfish’. It’s a typically extraordinary project for the artist, launched as part of this year’s Istanbul Biennale and touching on some of Huyghe’s favoured themes: the exploration of time, exhibition formats and the differences between human and natural orders.

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during the 1960s started out skewering capitalism and its products. Richter is an Apollonian quester, famously moving between figuration and abstraction, and, lately, in his Strip paintings, using digital processes to rigorously deconstruct sections of an abstract painting from 1990. Not many artists try to paint like him nowadays, and it’s hard to call his current output vital or unmissable, but his early and lasting resistance to stylistic repetition underpins the approach of many, even if they don’t realise it.

30 THEASTER GATES

Artist American Last Year: 44 Gates understands, as few of his peers seem to, that you don’t need to play by the art economy’s hidebound rules: you can be an artist, a social activist, a deliverer of ted talks, a musician, a teacher. You can convert rundown South Side Chicago buildings into cultural centres and archives for books and music; buy a huge flooded-out bank near your home for a dollar and sell ‘bonds’ from its urinals’ marble tiles for $5,000 each to kickstart renovations. This year, when not showing at White Cube in London and taking a starring role at the Venice Biennale, Gates tore up another paradigm: awarded the £40,000 Artes Mundi prize, he shared it with the nine other shortlisted artists. As he told The Guardian this year: ‘I am invested in illustrating the possible. So that other people might think: “ok, that works.”’

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28 ELI & EDYTHE BROAD Collectors American Last Year: 35 It’s tempting to think of the Broads as akin to Mr Potter in the feel-good Christmas film It’s a Wonderful Life. Not of course that they are meanspirited like Potter – they’re the opposite – but in the sense that, like Potter, they basically own a town. Or at least the artworld within Los Angeles. Eli and Edythe Broad have a monopoly of influence over la’s institutions: there’s moca, of which Eli Broad was founding chairman and where he originally wanted naming rights; lacma, whose contemporary art collections include the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (Eli Broad is a life trustee of both moca and lacma); and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which they helped found. And now, with the September opening of their 11,000sqm private museum, the Broad, built right across the road from moca and boasting the largest endowment of any institution in la bar the Getty, Broadtown just got a little bit bigger. And entry is free to all.

31 MICHAEL GOVAN

Museum Director American Last Year: 45 Though Govan can’t be credited for the swell of attention that la is currently enjoying as one of the artworld’s next major centres, he is certainly surfing it. lacma, which Govan has headed since 2006, is celebrating its 50th year, and is doing so in high Hollywood style: the Anniversary Gala in April was attended by Dustin Hoffman, Anjelica Huston and Barbra Streisand, among others, and raised $5 million. Leonardo DiCaprio will be cochairing its fifth annual Art + Film benefit gala this month, and over the summer lacma hosted Kanye West and Steve McQueen’s four-day exhibition-cumfilm spectacle, All Day/I Feel Like That (Govan’s just keeping up with the Kardashians). Govan commands real artworld credibility too. He is being honoured with Independent Curators International’s 2015 Leo Award (no relation to DiCaprio) for outstanding support of contemporary art. As evidence of the latter, one need only point to the deal lacma inked this year with Hyundai, which will support the museum’s Art and Technology and Korean art scholarship initiatives for the next decade.

27 Photo: Hubert Becker 28 Photo: Matthew Tammaro 29 Photo: Olga Rindal 30 Photo: Sara Pooley. Courtesy the artist 31 Photo: Catherine Opie

27 GERHARD RICHTER

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32 RYAN TRECARTIN

Artist American Last Year: 43 Trecartin shows as few signs of slowing down as the addled (or perhaps Adderall’d) characters in his rapid-fire, candy-coloured videos. As the latter continue to expand both in terms of facture (higher-quality cgi, filming via drones) and how they’re nested in the expansive

Gallerists British Last Year: 29 When Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor took to the streets of London in September to highlight Europe’s refugee crisis, cynics might have noted that Lisson Gallery was gaining a fair amount of publicity too. The duo are among the more media-friendly of the gallery’s artists, and with major exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the Palace of Versailles respectively (Kapoor courting more press attention at the latter over his initial refusal to remove anti-Semitic graffiti daubed on the work), they have reason to be. Yet Lisson staff members across the London and Milan galleries – soon to be joined by another in New York – aren’t just working on the a&a show: joining stalwart Lisson names such as Christian Jankowski (curating the 2016 edition of Manifesta), Haroon Mirza (who had a large survey at Museum Tinguely, Basel, over the summer), Wael Shawky (a show at moma ps1) and Rashid Rana (representing, with Shilpa Gupta, India and Pakistan at the Venice Biennale), the gallery made some astute signings this year – John Akomfrah, Susan Hiller, Stanley Whitney and Broomberg & Chanarin. Which should make for some interesting shows to come.

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35 JAY JOPLING

Gallerist British Last Year: 32 There’s a sense that Jopling’s White Cube struggled to be as cutting-edge when the yba artists on whom it built its reputation became part of history – but the gallery’s recent evolution continues, adding to its recent adoption of artists such as Theaster Gates, David Hammons and Liu Wei with some young contenders, including Christian Rosa and Virginia Overton. In 2015 the gallery also inaugurated an offsite collaboration with the Glyndebourne Festival, in East Sussex, and some of the old stable got a canter round the paddock this year too (Marc Quinn). Yet during any period of change there will be some false starts. As the lease on the gallery’s São Paulo space was up, the gallery shuttered it this year (though a sales director remains). In contrast, and in addition to two vast London galleries, White Cube Hong Kong is trotting along nicely.

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33 FRANÇOIS PINAULT

Collector French Last Year: 34 Ten years ago, the billionaire businessman and art collector (and owner of Christie’s auction house) abandoned plans for a Paris home for his collection and promptly moved his foundation to Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, on the Grand Canal. By 2009, Pinault’s foundation won the city’s competition to open a contemporary art centre in the historic buildings of the Punta della Dogana: more space for Pinault’s huge collection. And this year, with its show Slip of the Tongue, curated by Danh Vō and Caroline Bourgeois, the Punta della Dogana was one of the biggest draws at the Venice Biennale after the main event. The Palazzo Grassi, meanwhile, is staging a major retrospective of seminal French Pop artist Martial Raysse, a show the artist described colourfully as ‘revenge on the idiots who have despised me for so many years’. Idiots, watch out! If a story on fashion industry website wwd.com proves to be accurate, Pinault is returning to the hunt for a Paris site for his collection.

36 SADIE COLES

Gallerist British Last Year: 41 If you thought that taking the keys to a 1,000sqm space on Kingly Street in 2013, in addition to a smaller project space a brisk walk away in Balfour Mews, would mean that Sadie Coles’s moving days were over, think again. It’s a testament to how big the gallery has become – once a mid-tier player, now very much competing with the international gallery behemoths making their home in London – that Coles will be opening another nearby space, this one a two-storey gallery designed by 6a Architects, on Davies Street, opposite the Phillips auction house and along from Gagosian. And with gallery stalwart Sarah Lucas representing Britain in the Venice Biennale this year, complete with mobbed photo-call for the artist on the steps of the pavilion during the opening days, it looks like Sadie Coles hq , which also represents heavy-hitting artists such as Rudolf Stingel, Richard Prince and Ugo Rondinone, is firmly playing in the big leagues.

32 Photo: Anthony Valdez 33 Photo: Matteo De Fina 34 Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London. 35 Photo: Hugo Rittson. Courtesy White Cube, London 36 Photo: Benjamin McMahon

34 NICHOLAS LOGSDAIL, ALEX LOGSDAIL & GREG HILTY

installations he produces with Lizzie Fitch, Trecartin is branching out in other directions: this year, he cocurated the New Museum’s Triennial, Surround Audience, which unsurprisingly was filled with artists negotiating the ravages of the digital age. Those duties didn’t prevent him, though, from participating in a dozen group and solo shows as well; curators recognise that, for the past decade, Trecartin has been – and remains – the artist who most naturally understands the Internet’s restyling of human subjectivity and the changing meaning of community. To ask where he’s going next is, most probably, to ask the same of the rest of us.

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37 Photo: Daniel Buchholz 38 Photo: Todd Eberle 39 Photo: Mila Zacharias 40 Photo: Daniel Arnold

37 ISA GENZKEN Artist German Last Year: 31 Genzken’s exhibition schedule was on the quieter side this year, at least compared with her seeming institutional omnipresence in 2014: ‘just’ two museum shows, one at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in the spring and another at the Stedelijk Museum later this month (she was also included in Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale). Yet even those who aren’t going to make it to Frankfurt or Amsterdam may have detected Genzken’s presence elsewhere, albeit drifting through the work of myriad younger artists (in the dispassionate gaze of Helen Marten’s assemblages, to pluck one example, or the fetishistic nature of Stewart Uoo’s treatment of various motifs of capitalism, or Renaud Jerez’s uncanny objectification of the human form). And while her March exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London was not met with the usual warmth – the critique in her new series of Geldbilder paintings (2014), featuring coins and banknotes affixed to the canvas, felt flimsy in the overtly monied surroundings of their display – Genzken’s art is likely to continue pollinating other studios for a while yet.

40 DANIEL BUCHHOLZ

Gallerist German Last Year: 67 Buchholz might have told Die Welt, with regard to opening the venerable German gallery’s first us space on New York’s Upper East Side over the summer, that ‘we’re too old for Brooklyn’, but his artists are certainly on the hipper side of things – cool kids Stewart Uoo and Simon Denny rub alongside cool oldsters Isa Genzken, Lutz Bacher and Michael Krebber. The son of an antique-book dealer (he still maintains his father’s Cologne bookshop, as well as two galleries there and a space in Berlin), Buchholz and gallery partner Christopher Müller opened the New York gallery in July with a group exhibition dedicated to the French literary figure Raymond Roussel and his influence on the art of Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists. The show featured artworks by Joseph Cornell, Sigmar Polke, Marcel Broodthaers and Max Ernst, among others, interspersed with more contemporary works by the likes of Trisha Donnelly, Henrik Olesen and Krebber.

38 BERNARD ARNAULT

Collector French Last Year: 23 The long-awaited launch of the Fondation Louis Vuitton last October was accompanied by a public Frank Gehry/Bernard Arnault love-in, during which the venerable starchitect shared credit for his attention-grabbing curved glass building with the French luxury goods billionaire whose investment had made the structure possible. Two years on from the ‘Casse-toi riche con!’ headlines that greeted reports that the tycoon had applied for citizenship in the friendlier tax jurisdiction of Belgium, Arnault was again at the forefront of the international news media, but now all smiley and loveable, telling Bloomberg about the importance of ‘giving back’. The collection itself – a modish, boxticking exercise well populated by megastars (Richter, Kelly) and Bourriaud babes (Huyghe, Parreno, Gonzalez-Foerster) – attracted the ire of European intelligentsia who regarded it as the fruit of fiscal incentives and identified the choice to name the foundation after Arnault’s most prized asset as an attempt to enhance an overexploited brand. We’re more concerned about its near-unusable website, but with visitor figures of c. 100,000 a month, it doesn’t seem to be deterring the art-hungry hordes.

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39 ANTON VIDOKLE, JULIETA ARANDA & BRIAN KUAN WOOD

Artists Russian/Mexican/American Last Year: 30 It may have started out at the end of the 1990s as an artists’ self-help project, distributing emailed exhibition announcements to an increasingly networked international community of institutions, but e-flux, founded by Vidokle and later joined by Aranda and Kuan Wood, has grown relentlessly into one of the artworld’s more unusual centres of influence. Earning a tidy income from its core business of selling museum and gallery announcements, e-flux has put that cash to work to more critical ends, developing the much-read online e-flux journal, with its mix of art, politics and theory, along with spinoffs focusing on commercial galleries and art education. Add to that an ongoing programme of events and a gallery space in New York and a stream of books published with Sternberg Press, plus the addition in 2014 of discussion platform e-flux conversations, and e-flux is an unlikely critical powerhouse both off and online. This year saw the ambitious Venice Biennale-commissioned essay-and-discussion site Supercommunity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the group’s attunement to the bleeding edge of arty theorising and political angst, the tone was more than a little apocalyptic. Or maybe e-flux’s redoubtable editors were just grumpy: their long-running campaign to gain control of the new (and potentially very lucrative) .art domain name finally fell short in July.

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Artist American Last Year: 10 ‘While I agree that there have been great strides in making things better, we still have a ways to go before there’s real parity,’ wrote Sherman as part of an online debate on sexism in the artworld earlier this year. ‘I am well aware that my prices aren’t anywhere near those of my male counterparts, and while it annoys the hell out of me, I also think, How can I complain when I’m still doing so well?’ Well, quite. By any yardstick, Sherman is pretty close to the top of the tree: number five this year on the major-exhibition-derived Kunstkompass rankings; number ten on the list of most expensive living American artists; number three on the list of most expensive living female artists. Auction prices are, of course, a dismal barometer of merit – so how about popular status? Sherman’s is such that one fan issued a free set of emojis, allowing Cindyphiles to communicate in her image. As for legacy, the Pictures Generation is now looked to as the spiritual forebear of the post-Internet generation as it grapples with a sea of rapidly proliferating, authorless images, the lack of disconnect between advertising and selfexpression, and the increasing commodification of self-image. Sherman has become an informal patron saint to every artist attempting to undermine the selfie or turn Instagram to her own purposes. If anyone can smash that glass ceiling, she’ll be the one to do it.

42 RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

Artist Thai Reentry (88 in 2010) Tiravanija trades in experiences, yet the artist’s work isn’t anything like as shallow as that might suggest. In fact, within Tiravanija’s staging of group activities – examples of which this year include his vast kitchen operating outside Art Basel and the ping pong tables the artist installed at the Garage in Moscow – something rather beautiful happens. The gallerist Anton Kern (who does not represent Tiravanija but has collected the artist’s work) perhaps put it best in Noah Horowitz’s Art of the Deal (2011): ‘What I have acquired is an idea more or less, a sentiment and communal memory for all involved.’ Community has become the modus operandi for this early proponent of relational aesthetics: not least with the Land Foundation, the artist-run, communelike sanctuary Tiravanija has established near Chiang Mai in Thailand; and more recently Unclebrother, a restaurant, performance space and community centre the artist opened this year in Hancock on the New York/Pennsylvania border with longtime dealer Gavin Brown.

43 DAKIS JOANNOU

Collector Greek Last Year: 42 In times of economic crisis, art often needs its guardian angels. Greece’s art scene has Joannou, whose support ensures that international artists still visit and Greek artists can still show on a level that the artworld will take notice of. As longtime friend Maurizio Cattelan noted in May, Joannou not only continues to buy art ‘but he also takes part in keeping Athens’s institutions invigorated during this time of “crisis”’, through his Deste foundation. And he doesn’t always choose the safe options either, as this year’s provocative Paul Chan show at Deste’s Hydra space testified. Elsewhere the collector and patron was responsible for the Kim Gordon and Roberto Cuoghi exhibitions at the Benaki Museum; a reinvention of the project space Family Business within the same museum (originally initiated in New York in 2012), which will feature open-call exhibitions; and this year’s Deste Prize, supporting young Greek or Cypriot artists, with the shortlisted artists on show at the Museum of Cycladic Art (and jurors such as Pompidou director Bernard Blistène).

44 JOSÉ KURI & MÓNICA MANZUTTO

Gallerists Mexican/Colombian Last Year: 71 Kurimanzutto represents artists who are unified by their diverse intermingling of formalism – an attention to material and its framing – and an underlying political perception, present in, for example, the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas, Akram Zaatari, Monika Sosnowska and Danh Vō. The interest in the politics of form can be found too in the work of Jimmie Durham, Adrián Villar Rojas and Roman Ondák. This stems from ‘the idea of the local, of Mexico, of our roots in a broader context’ that underpins the gallery’s programming, Kuri told W magazine in 2014. It is something the gallerist expanded on in another

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interview this year. With ‘Danh for example, we share a similar colonial past. Roman, although he comes from Eastern Europe, is still talking the same language as Abraham.’ The curatorial sensibility Kuri and Manzutto display in the running of their gallery seems to be paying off: their artists have been some of the busiest this year, with numerous shows for Vō, including his cocurated exhibition for Venice’s Palazzo Grassi and the Danish Pavilion at the Biennale; Durham’s solo at London’s Serpentine Gallery; and Villar Rojas’s exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and his high-profile installation at the Istanbul Biennial.

42 Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija 43 Photo: Maria Markezi 44 this page Photo: Diego Pérez. Courtesy Kurimanzutto, Mexico City facing page and overleaf Photos: Benjamin McMahon

41 CINDY SHERMAN

45 Photo: Alexander Bikbov 46 Photo: Lena C. Emery

45 46 THOMAS BARBARA HIRSCHHORN GLADSTONE

Artist Swiss Last Year: 54 Via his immersive installations or bombastic collages spawned from a unique combination of low-fi materials and radical philosophy, Hirschhorn’s project has been to encourage people to look around them and critically examine what they see, to question the gaps between image and reality in our mediated world. Even when the reality is a headless corpse. In 2015 his work was everywhere. His 2013 Gramsci Monument project in the Bronx was the subject of a documentary film by Angelo A. Lüdin. His immersive installation Nachwirkung (Aftermath) opened at the Kunsthalle Bremen and his collages transformed the project room of the man in Nuoro, Italy. His installation in the Central Pavilion of the Venice Biennale simulated the collapse of that structure’s roof, and he brought a similarly apocalyptic scenario to the South London Gallery, complete with a quotation that takes the work back to Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci: ‘Destruction is difficult, indeed it is as difficult as creation.’ Difficult for some.

Gallerist American Last Year: 46 With Gladstone’s three galleries across New York and Brussels, the veteran dealer is steadily consolidating her cross-Atlantic and crossgenerational credentials. Paris-based Angeleno Cameron Jamie had an excellent show in New York in May, filling the gallery with a series of primordial-looking abstract ceramic sculptures. Also on the clay vibe was at sunset, with snow falling, by starlight in May, in which Andrew Lord showed three tables of his strange ceramic jugs, grouped according to the conditions of their production. There were riffs on nature too, with a show by the ever-newsworthy Anish Kapoor in Brussels, while Gladstone this year took on veteran Belgian painter Walter Swennen, with his first show in New York. Sure, unexpected challenges may crop up along the way: one of your longstanding, much-respected artists may get thrown into the media’s full glare by virtue of having a suddenly very famous daughter (that’d be Carroll Dunham, exhibiting currently), but Gladstone shows she’s capable of turning in the right circles in two cities at once.

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47 THELMA GOLDEN

Museum Director American Last Year: Reentry (78 in 2009) It’s been ten years since Golden took the reins at the Studio Museum in Harlem (she’s worked there since 2000), and 14 since her Studio Museum show Freestyle articulated the notion of ‘post-black’ art. Her influence is easy to underestimate, but it’s there. On taking the helm of the Perez Art Museum Miami this autumn, Franklin Sirmans described her influence to Art News: ‘I think of Thelma Golden and what she’s done with the Studio Museum. I think a museum is not only a place unto itself, it’s a place that is important to a community as a whole, and it has become even more important.’ Golden has plans for a $122 million building project that would expand the gallery by 50 percent, but her influence comes from the network she keeps, and while it includes committee positions at New York’s Bard College and Creative Time, she is also known to be a friend of President Obama, is often seen at White House dinners and joined the board of the Barack Obama Foundation in July.

49 AMANDA SHARP & MATTHEW SLOTOVER

Art Fair Directors British Last Year: 37 This year Sharp and Slotover have taken a step back from running the fairs they founded in London (that’ll be Frieze London and Frieze Masters, the latter the duo’s venture into not-so-contemporary art) and New York. Victoria Siddall, trusted longtime Frieze

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Curator Emirati Last Year: 48 Qasimi is normally adept at walking the thin line between what the international art community finds acceptable and exciting, and what much of Sharjah’s more conservative population (her father is its hereditary ruler) will accept. ‘You don’t start a debate by offending someone, you slowly push the boundaries,’ she told The New York Times this year. It’s clear then that the former painting student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, who now heads the influential Sharjah Biennial (set up by her father) and its annual March Meeting symposium, would prefer

to devote her energy to conversations surrounding art – activities like this year’s edition of the biennial curated by Eungie Joo (an exhibition largely seen by critics as a safe affair), and taking the curatorial reins herself for the uae Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – as opposed to engaging in internal politics or picking fights. No such luck, though: the two come hand-in-hand, as was made clear when the uae denied artists Walid Raad and Ashok Sukumaran visas over their activism with regard to labour rights in the Gulf region, a ruling Qasimi apparently had little ability to overturn.

50 TOBY WEBSTER & ANDREW HAMILTON

employee, takes over, along with a couple of recently appointed deputies, and is now in overall charge of day-to-day stuff like making sure the right galleries get into the fairs and overseeing the nonprofit projects and public programmes. So what have Sharp and Slotover been doing with their spare time? Nobody outside the firm knows, and Sharp and Slotover remain tight-lipped. Last winter Slotover was in Beijing to launch Frieze content onto Chinese social media platforms, so questions as to a possible extension or buy-in into Asia were raised. Then there’s Slotover’s influence back in London: besides chairing the board of South London Gallery, he sits on the board of Create London, a nonprofit public-artcommissioning body that supports communityfocused projects by artists in the city’s East End.

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Gallerists British Last Year: 57 Webster and Hamilton seem to know which way the wind is blowing in the artworld (well, it is pretty blustery in Glasgow, where the Modern Institute’s two gallery spaces can be found). While they are a major factor in the local scene’s artistic strength, international presence remains everything, and there are two ways a commercial gallery can go about achieving it: pour untold amounts of money into establishing a bricks-and-mortar footing around the world (that is, ‘the Gagosian model’) or be a little more fleet-of-foot and establish a network of likeminded gallerists in which, through a process of exchange, everyone and their artists can reap rewards. This is what Webster and Hamilton have been working on the last few years: setting up gallery exchanges with Standard, Oslo, in 2013; then a trip in 2014 to collector Tony Salamé’s Metropolitan Art Society project space in Beirut for a group show of five Glasgow-based artists. This year saw various of the gallery’s artists show at Mendes Wood dm in São Paulo, with the Brazilians making the return trip later in the year.

47 Photo: Julie Skarratt 48 Photo: Benjamin McMahon 49 Photo: Jonathan Hökklo. Courtesy Frieze / Jonathan Hökklo 50 Photo: Michael Jones

48 SHEIKHA HOOR AL-QASIMI

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51 STEVE MCQUEEN

Artist British Last Year: 39 Should McQueen even still be on an art Power 100? Sure, he was included in the Venice Biennale this year with his magisterial work Ashes (2014), the story of a young Grenadian fisherman who was murdered by a drug gang. But the filmmaker’s time is now predominantly spent directing movies such as 12 Years a Slave (2013, which earned him the Oscar for Best Picture) and the forthcoming feature-length remake of the Lynda La Plante-penned tv series Widows (1983); making pilots for hbo (Codes of Conduct, 2015, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Paul Dano); and collaborating with Kanye West (on a nine-minute film premiered in March at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, essentially a music video for two unreleased tracks from West’s forthcoming album Swish). What he gets described as doesn’t matter to McQueen, though: “There is no differentiation between film and art for me,” he told bbc Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (his record choices included West, Prince and Miles Davis). “It’s all one thing, as if film was the novel and visual art is poetry; one is narrative and linear, the other is abstract and fragmented. It’s all just about ideas.”

53 YAYOI KUSAMA 52 EMMANUEL PERROTIN

Gallerist French Last Year: 60 Your opinion on Perrotin’s galleries in Paris, New York and Hong Kong probably depends on whether you like your art taken with a cheeky smattering of Pop and humour: Perrotin was instrumental in the careers of Maurizio Cattelan, jr, Elmgreen & Dragset and Gelitin, among others. Yet there’s no doubt that he is serious about what he does and can still spring surprises: among the brashness the programme is known for, in June Perrotin presented an exhibition of the late Chung Chang-Sup, a major figure in Korea, but perhaps not as widely known in the West as fellow members of the Dansaekhwa group (which Chung founded in the 1970s, alongside Lee Ufan and fellow Perrotin artist Park Seo-Bo). Praiseworthy too were Perrotin’s January exhibitions of work by the Venezuelan Op and Kinetic artist Jesús Rafael Soto, in Paris and New York. It’s a shrewd move, given Soto’s art-historical pedigree and market neglect, showing that Perrotin has ambitions beyond representing only living artists.

Artist Japanese Last Year: 52 The obliteration room (2002–), a white space viewers are invited to cover with multicoloured circles of sticky paper, on show at David Zwirner’s New York gallery in May, is an apt title. The iconic nature of Kusama’s spots – which has led, among others, to a collaboration with Louis Vuitton – has tended to obscure the rest of the artist’s work, their playfulness getting in the way of the artist’s seriousness. There is perhaps a move afoot to correct this (and let Kusama’s legacy not just be about dollars: as is oft-quoted, her works’ auction prices are the highest of any living female artist). Her current exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen – which will tour various Nordic institutions, and comes after an interactive installation at the opening of the Garage Museum in Moscow and the exhibitions A Dream I Dreamed (2013–15), which travelled Asia, and Infinite Obsession (2013–15), which travelled Latin America (and was so popular in Mexico City that the Museo Tamayo had to hire extra security staff) – displays her early radical fashion and design work, as well as psychedelic filmworks from the 1960s, and foregrounds the artist’s interest in infinite space: an aspect of her work that has been partly addressed by Anselm Franke in his exhibition and publication project Animism (2010–12).

54 55 LIAM GILLICK LUISA STRINA

Artist British Last Year: 50 The shifting and expanded form of conceptual art the British-born artist is known for has for years brought him an influential, if somewhat insider following. While his exhibition work draws the aesthetics of Modernism into a critique of power and political change, Gillick’s significance lies in his restless questioning of the institutional divisions that make up the art system, all the time operating in their midst. So while this year saw creditable appearances in the Istanbul, Moscow and Kaunas biennials, Gillick also took the opportunity to bring out an anthology of his early writings and projects from the 1990s. Meanwhile, this multitasking artist remains busy as one of the core group charged with shaping the artistic programme at the Maja Hoffmann-established luma art complex in Arles, France.

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Gallerist Brazilian Last Year: 65 Brazil’s economic troubles have been brewing for a while now – and an unstable political situation only adds to those woes – which will undoubtedly cause difficulties to an art industry that has flourished there over the past ten years of boom times. The economy will shrink by 2.7 percent this year, according to Wall Street Journal estimates, and worse still for the country’s art market, the real has hit new lows against the dollar. Yet Strina is one of the best equipped to handle these challenges: she’s done it in style over the past 40 years, after all, in more troublesome times than these. With artists that include internationally lauded Brazilians such as Cildo Meireles, Fernanda Gomes, Anna Maria Maiolino, Renata Lucas and an international collector base, Brazil’s premier gallerist will probably sweat less than most of her peers.

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51 Photo: Thierry Bal. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. 52 Photo: Karl Lagerfeld 53 Courtesy kusama Enterprise, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore and Victoria Miro, London. © the artist 54 Courtesy the artist 55 Photo: Ruy Teixeira

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November 2015

58 ANSELM FRANKE

Curator German Last Year: 83 Franke is the head of visual arts and film at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (hkw), but operates on a global platform. Last November he curated the Shanghai Biennale; this past September his group show Interrupted Survey opened (for a two-year run) at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju. The former may not have met with universal acclaim, but it says something that the organisers were happy to give the curator the gig (and, for the first time, free rein to choose a theme) with just six months’ notice. And it says even more that Franke could pull it off. His exhibitions are often among the first to tackle key themes of our times. Among them are animism, which he developed into a series of exhibitions under the same title, from 2010 to 2014, and the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene Project ran from 2013 to 2014 at hkw, but the ideas contained therein percolated through to more recent programming, such as Ape Culture earlier this year.

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59 CHRISTOPHER WOOL Artist American Last Year: 55 Christopher Wool’s paintings take diverse forms, from text to monochromatic decorative patterning. But it’s his chilly, mechanised, metropolitan take on abstraction – monochromatically spray-gunning and wiping, screen-printing and splattering his canvases – that, along with the work of Albert Oehlen, Sigmar Polke and Michael Krebber, has been foundational for many young painters of recent years. Since last year this young school has hit a backlash, however – being dubbed, not unfairly, ‘crapstraction’ and ‘zombie formalism’ – as it has appeared increasingly rote and angled towards collectors. That marketability has not hurt Wool’s own prices, though: his Apocalypse Now (1988) sold at the end of 2013 for nearly $26.5 million. Still, his feet appear to be on the ground and his eyes facing forward, as witness his recent series of scribbly metal sculptures, which degrade the line-in-space notions of Anthony Caro et al to a threedimensional phone-pad doodle.

60 UDO KITTELMANN

Museum Director German Last Year: 58 As director of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, with responsibility for the Alte Nationalgalerie, Neue Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof, as well as the Berggruen Museum, the Sammlung ScharfGerstenberg and the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, Kittelmann is the institutional voice of Germany. The estimated €101 million renovation of the Neue Nationalgalerie started this year, and the museum is projected to be closed for four years. Meanwhile, a new £80m, 14,700sqm modern art institution is planned for a site next door. You may be forgiven for asking whether, with all these capital projects, Kittelmann still has time to think about art. He does: projects in 2015 have included putting together an Andreas Gursky show at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, the Impressionism–Expressionism show at the Alte Nationalgalerie and a Mary Heilmann and David Reed show at the Hamburger Bahnhof: ‘He makes art out of other people’s art because his curatorial moves are really things that we wouldn’t have thought of,’ said Heilmann.

58 Photo: Stephanie Pilick 59 Photo: Aubrey Mayer 60 Photo: David von Becker

Gallerists Chinese Last Year: 84 Zhang and Hu’s Vitamin Creative Space is one of the new breed of art galleries. Part alternative art space and part commercial gallery, the main focus of the operation (which comprises an office in Guangzhou, the newly opened Sou Fujimoto-designed Mirrored Gardens complex just outside the city, and the Pavilion, in Beijing) is to explore alternative ways of working and being, through an engagement with the confrontation between contemporary life and tradition, place and environment, and art and daily life. Artists represented mix the West and the East, from Olafur Eliasson and Danh Vō to Cao Fei, Koki Tanaka and Lee Kit. A fiction writer as well as Vitamin’s artistic director, Hu’s writing has featured prominently in Supercommunity, e-flux’s Venice Biennale journal, and extended the ideas developed at Vitamin with Zhang.

Curator South African Last Year: 33 Reputation is everything in New York, and while Goldberg’s live-art biennial festival has garnered praise for its programming, the success of the performance art genre it has championed has thrown up its own pr problems – four years ago activists Working Artists and the Greater Economy picked out Performa for criticism, and last year news stories highlighted a callout Performa made for a blogger to contribute ‘four to six articles or features’ for free. Performance art costs money to perform, an issue that won’t go away as big museums start to appropriate the model Performa pioneered, inevitably drawing attention away from it. Away from the politics, Francesco Vezzoli, Laura Lima, Ryan Gander and Heather Phillipson are among the artists included in November’s edition, and in September Goldberg announced programming beyond the Big Apple: a tour through French and Belgian venues for Yvonne Rainer’s The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (2015).

56 Hu Fang. Photo: Zhang Wei 57 Photo: Patrick McMullan

56 ZHANG WEI & HU FANG

57 ROSELEE GOLDBERG

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61 MIUCCIA PRADA

Collector Italian Last Year: Reentry (93 in 2012) Attending the opening of Prada’s Rem Koolhaasdesigned Milan space were the majority of the top ten from ArtReview’s 2014 Power 100 list, queuing up to pay their respects to the collector and patron. ‘I hate the idea of being a collector. As much as I don’t feel like a collector, I’m even less a patron,’ she told The Guardian in May. ‘I am and want to be an active part of shaping culture, but I am patronising nothing… we never sponsor exhibitions.’ She now has a lot of gallery space to do that shaping in. Besides the existing Venice venue (which showed Portable Classic, cocurated by Salvatore Settis and Davide Gasparotto, which explored the origins and functions of miniature reproductions of classical sculpture), the new Milan art centre consists of 19,000sqm of exhibition spaces, one several storeys high, another deep underground, together with an auditorium and a café, this last designed in typical retro style by film director Wes Anderson.

63 RICHARD CHANG

62 KLAUS BIESENBACH Museum Director German Last Year: 27 Björk. Just the mention of the Icelandic singer’s name might serve as summary, for those with even the slightest interest in the machinations of the artworld, of the apparent annus horribilis suffered by moma ps1 director and moma chief curator at large Biesenbach. While the fury and scorn poured over the Moma retrospective of the musician’s videos, costumes and memorabilia – an exhibition critic Jerry Saltz bemoaned as a ‘discombobulated mess’ and The New Yorker dismissed as ‘ridiculous in the way of a wannabe groupie’ – should logically be shared with the subject of the exhibition, Biesenbach’s boss Glenn Lowry and the curator himself, it was the last who took the most heat. Perhaps this is because the German has never been shy of embracing celebrity – as followers of his energetic Instagramming can testify. It would be a shame, however, if ‘Björk’ was to become all that Biesenbach is associated with, as this year’s programme at moma ps1, which included revelatory introductions to the work of artists such as Halil Altindere and Anne Imhof, proves that there is more to kb than selfies with the famous.

Artist Danish-Icelandic Last Year: 88 Eliasson’s work Riverbed – the 2014 installation at the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, in which a rocky terrain not unlike the topography of the artist’s parents’ native Iceland was laid throughout a wing of the institution – and his ongoing Little Sun project – small solar-powered lights sold cheaply in developing countries, supported by more profitable sales in Western markets – are perhaps indicative of the artist’s approach to his work: bringing the outside world into the gallery, and taking art outside it. For Eliasson, art’s value lies in its social, and indeed pragmatic, uses – something not unlinked to the formative

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time during the 1990s he spent working with architect Einar Thorsteinn, a friend of Buckminster Fuller’s. During the last 12 months, besides a commission for the new Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou, this expressed itself in a new public bridge for Copenhagen and a set design for a ballet choreographed by Wayne McGregor for the Manchester International Festival. There are not many artists whose work crosses disciplines with such ease that they can appear on the covers of both ArtReview and Wired, as Eliasson has in the past year.

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65 MATTHEW MARKS

Gallerist American Last Year: 62 While Marks’s gallery (with its six spaces shared between New York and Los Angeles) represents plenty of canonical artists – Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Nan Goldin among them, Vija Celmins just joined –there were efforts this year to shine a light on artists who have not had the attention they perhaps deserve. In the summer, across his three galleries on West 22nd Street, Marks staged What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present, an exhibition that focused on four groups of artists – Hairy Who, Destroy All Monsters, Forcefield and Funk Art – who worked largely outside of New York and Los Angeles, operating at the intersection of art, comics and counterculture. Then in September the gallery gave ceramicist and musician Ron Nagle a critically raved-about show, as well as showing Anne Truitt. The latter is well known, but this show is of works on paper made during three years (1964–7) that Truitt lived in Tokyo.

61 Photo: Guido Harari 62 Photo: Casey Kelbaugh 63 Courtesy Domus Collection 64 Photo: Ari Magg 65 Photo: Ezra Petronio

64 OLAFUR ELIASSON

Collector American Last Year: 73 Chang is one of those people in the artworld who, once you know his name, you will see popping up everywhere. There he was in March at the Hong Kong Mandarin Oriental, hosting a dinner for Tate (where he is chairman of the International Council and on the Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee), and in June another dinner, this time for Tino Sehgal following the artist’s talk at Basel’s Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Or as the copresenter of the Korakrit Arunanondchai exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, which was staged in partnership with moma ps1, New York. It goes on. Yet Chang is not hobnobbing and paying for things just for the sake of it. His Domus Collection, and the patronage it provides, aims at furthering dialogue between Asian and Western artists. So his various board positions at the Royal Academy in London and moma ps1 and the Whitney in New York have explicit purpose. All this without even touching on Chang’s spending power and clout with the world’s commercial galleries.

66 EUGENIO LÓPEZ Collector Mexican Last Year: 56 At the opening of the 4,200sqm, $50 million Museo Júmex in 2013, its billionaire patron, Eugenio López (whose contemporary art collection is said to be the best in Latin America), was the toast of Mexico City and the artworld that had flocked there. Writing in ArtReview, Christian Viveros-Fauné drily described that week’s flamboyant party as a ‘Gatsbyesque experience’. The honeymoon had to end sometime, though, and the museum’s cancellation, in February

this year, of its Hermann Nitsch exhibition did just that – although the Jumex Foundation’s then director, Patrick Charpenel, denied it was a result of a plus-5,000-signees petition against the artist’s supposed ‘mutilation, beheading, murder and display of the bodies of sentient animals’. The Austrian ambassador to Mexico publicly supported Nitsch, who berated Museo Júmex, saying ‘they wasted my time’. One of Mexico’s leading curators and critics, Cuauhtémoc Medina, damned the cancellation as showing the museum’s ‘lack of seriousness’. The New York Times posited that the decision stemmed from López’s father, the supposedly more conservative founder of Grupo Jumex, the fruit juice conglomerate and sole funder of the foundation. Either way, Charpenel tendered his resignation shortly afterwards.

68 EVA PRESENHUBER

66 Courtesy Museo Jumex 67 Photo: Alexander Salinas. Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans 68 Photo: Reto Guntli. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich 69 Photo: Ela Bialkowska 70 Courtesy luma Foundation, Zürich

69 MARIO CRISTIANI, LORENZO FIASCHI, MAURIZIO RIGILLO

Gallerists Italian Last Year: 91 If one were only to take their artists into account, Galleria Continua, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary, would stack up as a pretty global affair. From Europe there are the likes of Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren and Michelangelo Pistoletto; a strong Latin American contingent includes Cuban Carlos Garaicoa and Brazilians Cildo Meireles, Jonathas De Andrade and André Komatsu (the latter included in the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale); then there are African artists such as Cameroonian Pascale

Gallerist German Last Year: 64 Presenhuber does represent nonsculptors – painters Joe Bradley and Jay Defeo, for example – but the gallerist is partial to having abstract objects in her two Zürich spaces (perhaps noting this preference would be of use to those youngster spaces applying to exhibit at Art Basel, where the gallerist has long sat on the selection committee). Most recently it was a series of geometric Jesmonite totems with odd little steel-and-aluminium ‘roofs’ and aerials by Martin Boyce, but her roster also includes Angela Bulloch, Andrew Lord, Ugo Rondinone, Eva Rothschild and Oscar Tuazon. The father figure to these purveyors of object-based formalism might be thought to be Franz West, and in February Presenhuber presented her tenth exhibition with the artist (the first since his death). In this poignant show the gallery intermingled three groups of the great artist’s work, his early ‘adaptives’, sculptures that could be attached to the body; his poster works; and his papier-mâché sculptures.

Marthine Tayou and South African Kendell Geers; and from Asia: Ai Weiwei, the late Chen Zhen and Shilpa Gupta. Showing work by artists like these, Continua can be confident that people will travel – a good thing, given that, Beijing excepted, their galleries tend to be off the beaten track: in Les Moulins, over an hour outside Paris, and their original space in the small Tuscan town of San Gimignano. Their latest venture is perhaps the most audacious yet: in collaboration with the Cuban government, Continua has launched a space in Havana.

November 2015

67 LUC TUYMANS

Artist Belgian Reentry (96 in 2006) Tuymans’s influence as a painter hardly needs to be discussed, the most recent of his museum shows took place this autumn in Edinburgh and in Doha. Yet just showing his own work is not enough. Last October, in an interview for Apollo, Tuymans decried those who confuse ‘developing a network’ with being a curator. Recently he’s stepped up his own curating activities. His current exhibition of Belgian abstract artists at Parasol Unit in London will be followed by a solo exhibition of James Ensor at the Royal Academy in October 2016. The only blip in this year was losing a plagiarism case in January, brought by a press photographer whose photo of Belgian mp Jean-Marie Dedecker the artist had acknowledged using as a basis for his painting A Belgian Politician (2011). But even that has had a favourable resolution: photographer Katrijn Van Giel has dropped her legal action, allowing the painting to be shown and traded again.

70 TOM ECCLES School Director British Last Year: 77 ‘Seasoned.’ That is how The New Yorker described Eccles this year. In 2006 The New York Times called him a ‘provocateur’. The change of status may be partly down to the fact that for many younger curators operating around the world, Eccles is no longer just a curator (though he still is – the New Yorker article related to Visitors, a summer show he staged on the city’s Governors Island that included the work of Pilvi Takala and Darren Bader, among others), but with ten years as head of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, a way up the Hudson, Eccles is also a mentor to many. Not least Ruba Katrib, curator at Sculpture Center, one of Eccles’s first students and cocurator of Visitors. Eccles is well networked (his regular interview series with power players for this magazine being one example), and he is one of the core group advising the artistic programme at Maja Hoffmann’s luma Foundation in Arles.

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71 CLAIRE HSU

Curator Hong Kong Chinese Last Year: 80 Hsu cofounded the Asia Art Archive (aaa) with Chang Tsong-zung back in 2000, and since then the organisation has lain at the heart of the noncommercial scene in the region, both documenting its art history (through its library space and a digitisation project initiated in 2010, together with various research grants awarded to support residencies at the Hong Kong-based institution, the most recent being a privately funded $15,000 grant awarded to academic Lu Mingjun), and adding to it through a programme of exhibitions and

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events. The Ha Bik Chuen show in March was typical, profiling the late Hong Kong sculptor and printmaker’s side project of photographing exhibitions he attended, collating magazine cuttings and producing artist portraits, then using these materials to construct collage books. The aaa is far from being a region-specific affair (in reach, at least), and artist residents during the last 12 months have included Slavs and Tatars, Alec Steadman and Marysia Lewandowska, alongside Zhuang Wubin and Ricky Yeung Sau-churk. In June William Kentridge visited to give a talk.

ArtReview

71 Photo: Dave Choi. Courtesy Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong 72 Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan & London

72 MASSIMO DE CARLO

Gallerist Italian Last Year: 81 A gallerist like Massimo De Carlo could just coast along. He’s intimately linked to the rise of stars such as Maurizio Cattelan and represents the right mix of big-name artists and young high-flyers – among them George Condo and Rudolf Stingel, Josh Smith and Dan Colen – to keep the books ticking over, yet he doesn’t take the easy route. See, for example, the gallery’s participation in Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design Fair in September. De Carlo is on the selection committee for Art Basel Hong Kong but decided to test out a mainland collector base that might not be so familiar with the gallery by showing often-provocative Austrian collective Gelitin’s plasticine Mona Lisa portraits (which include the ever-smiling model with a cock coming out of her head). It’s De Carlo’s continued willingness to push commercially tricky artists such as Gelitin (whose 2015 London show included a video showing the three Gelitin members frantically shoving their, errr, ‘members’ into lumps of clay), Paul Chan, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Elmgreen & Dragset (especially the last’s recent, confrontational aids-related work) that makes De Carlo’s gallery powerful.

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73 Photo: Daniel Arnold 74 Photo: Tarek Moukaddem 75 Photo: Ismail Baydas 76 Courtesy k11 Art Foundation

73 KOYO KOUOH

Curator Cameroonian Last Year: 96 ‘She has always been somebody who was interested in much more than just contemporary art, and these are the strong people of today,’ says Tate Modern’s Chris Dercon of Kouoh. As links between the African art scenes and the wider artworld are strengthening, so the curator’s influence increases. Seen as one of the gatekeepers to the continent’s art scene since founding the raw Material Company in 2008, a white-cube space for art, education and research in Dakar, Kouoh has been busy: Body Talk, a show of six female artists from African countries, toured to four venues across Europe in 2015, including Wiels and Lunds Konsthall; next month she opens the timely Streamlines: Metaphorical and Geopolitical Interpretations of the Oceans at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, before curating eva International, the Irish biennial, under the title Still (the) Barbarians next year. She oversees the educational and artistic programme for 1.54 Contemporary African Art Fair, which launched a New York version this year, having now established itself in London, and is currently completing a ‘field research’ project for Moscow’s Garage titled Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy.

74 CHRISTINE TOHME

Curator Lebanese Last Year: Reentry (81 in 2012) Tohme founded Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts, in 1993, and she is still director of the nonprofit organisation, which supports artists locally and internationally (and includes a post-academic school and a residency programme). In 2002 she staged the first Home Works Forum on Cultural Practice, a biennial gathering in Beirut of artists, cultural activists and writers for ten days of exhibitions, performances and talks (the seventh edition opens this month). In 2007 she founded Video Works, a biennial moving image festival. Tohme has seen her standing rise yet further with two recent developments. First she was given the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in February; and then, in September, it was announced that she was to curate the 13th Sharjah Biennial, in 2017.

76 ADRIAN CHENG Collector Chinese Last Year: 100 In September Cheng announced that he was to build 17 more shopping centres – to add to the two he already owns in Shanghai and Hong Kong – and all of them will incorporate art in a major way. Cheng’s existing malls, run by his New World Development Company, currently feature works by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst and Yoshitomo Nara throughout. If this brand of bringing art to the people was not enough, Cheng is busy collaborating with various institutions internationally. One of the world’s wealthiest people under the age of

thirty-five, the philanthropist is ‘co-producing’, via his k11 Foundation, programming with the Palais de Tokyo – which included this year the touring of the Inside China exhibition from Paris to k11’s pop-up space in Hong Kong, and a summer show featuring young Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen at the Paris institution. This year he struck a similar deal with the ica, London, the fruit of which is the current Zhang Ding exhibition; he supported Cheng Ran’s contribution to the Istanbul Biennial; and he sponsored scholarships at educational institutes across Asia.

November 2015

75 GRAHAM HARMAN

Philosopher American Last Year: 68 (with Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier & Iain Hamilton Grant) At some point the band always breaks up. Although philosopher Ray Brassier was resisting attempts to call the philosophical approaches dubbed ‘speculative realism’ a movement as far back as 2011, it’s hard to miss the fact that the term has become currency in artworld debates over the last few years, broadly indicating an avoidance of ‘anthropocentric’ or metaphysical ways of thinking about the world and human beings’ relationship to it. But while last year’s four figures remain individually influential in their field, Harman is perhaps the thinker who has done most to popularise his own strand of ‘object-oriented philosophy’ to a wider public, especially when it comes to bringing those ideas to the artworld – lecturing at art colleges as much as in philosophy departments. Prolific, diplomatic and energetically networked, Harman draws followers and provokes enemies in equal measure (Timothy Morton, writing in this issue, is keen on Harman’s work; Artforum, by contrast, published a long attack on Harman in its summer issue). What’s undeniable is Harman’s ability to influence artistic and curatorial thinking when the reference points in politics, art and the humanities have never been more unstable.

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77 Photo: Alessandro Albert 78 Paweł Althamer, dla tima i burkharda, 2004. © the artist. Courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin 79 Photo: Mark Peckmezian

77 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO Collector Italian Last Year: Reentry (96 in 2002) Sandretto Re Rebaudengo was one of the early adopters of the idea that to be a serious, respected collector, one needed a private museum. Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo opened in 1995 and, directed by Francesco Bonami, is now a mainstay of Italy’s art scene. Ian Cheng recently showed in the 3,500sqm venue, and a solo exhibition by Adrián Villar Rojas opens this month. This year she was instrumental to the launch of the face

78 TIM NEUGER & BURKHARD RIEMSCHNEIDER

goup, a new network linking private European institutions Deste Foundation, Ellipse Foundation, La Maison Rouge and Magasin 3, which, she says, ‘will foster collaboration, loan works from our collections’ and generally help public institutions. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo leads by example: she sits on numerous boards and committees, including patronage and acquisitions roles at Tate, moma, the New Museum and others. This year she funded Ed Atkins’s work at the Istanbul Biennial and sits on the jury for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Prize.

Gallerists German Last Year: 79 Writing in ArtReview in September, Raimar Stange described Antje Majewski’s summer exhibition at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, as ‘something like a finely calibrated hybrid of socially critical environmental activism and visual art’. This combination – of art that casts a questioning eye on society – is one that interests a fair few of the artists on Neuger and Riemschneider’s gallery roster. There’s Olafur Eliasson, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Ai Weiwei, of course. Renata Lucas, who had a show at the gallery in May, during Berlin Gallery Weekend (of which Neugerriemschneider is a founding gallery), can also be seen to work in this manner. The Brazilian artist sought to discombobulate visitors with her series of uncanny architectural interventions, which extended beyond the gallery and into the external courtyard. While no doubt bringing in the euros, the gallery retains a political and social sensitivity. A good thing, given that Neuger sits on Art Basel’s selection committee.

79 ESTHER SCHIPPER

Gallerist German Last Year: 92 Long a mainstay of Berlin’s gallery scene – and, before that, a strong presence in Cologne – with a roster that leans towards relational aesthetics (Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster et al), Schipper surprised onlookers this year. In May she announced that Esther Schipper gallery would merge, over the next five years, with Johnen Galerie, a comparable Berlin powerhouse (representing, among others, Wilhelm Sasnal, Anri Sala and Tino Sehgal). Schipper, who takes a controlling stake in Johnen, will run the galleries; Jörg Johnen will focus on artist relationships. Whether or not this results in one big, flashy space to replace the townhouse-type venues that each currently occupies, it certainly represents a shakeup in thinking about how to keep limber, keep expansive, keep mega-galleries from poaching one’s artists. For Schipper it’s a necessary bit of strategising, with an eye to the future, since, as she told Artsy’s Alexander Forbes, ‘I’m intending to continue this for at least the next 20 years.’

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80 AKRAM ZAATARI

Artist Lebanese Last Year: 94 Zaatari’s solo show at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in the spring of 2015 demonstrated just how prolific the Lebanese artist is. Alongside the gallery displays – various relatively recent installation works that exemplified Zaatari’s formalist interest in archives and how media, particularly photography, is read in the context of changing histories and political flux – the institution also included a screening room with films from throughout the artist’s career.

82 HYUN-SOOK LEE

Gallerist Korean Last Year: new Lee first got into dealing when she opened Kukje Gallery in the Insa-dong district of Seoul in 1982, having previously amassed a collection of art and antiquities with her husband. Initially showing Korean masters working in the modern tradition, her focus changed radically during the late 1980s. ‘I was shocked after seeing a mobile by Alexander Calder at an exhibition in the us. Minimalism was ending in New York [yet] Koreans were buying and selling impressionistic paintings,’ she said in a 2014 interview for The Korea Herald. ‘The gap between the Korean and foreign art markets was so wide that I used to compare it with the gap between life in South and North Korea.’ It is partly down to Lee’s efforts that this disparity has all but disappeared. Now Kukje Gallery has three separate buildings (plus a restaurant and wine bar), representing South Korean and international contemporary artists (among them Lee Ufan, Park Chan-Kyong, Jeff Wall, Jenny Holzer, Bharti Kher and Haegue Yang). Exhibitions in 2015 included solo shows for Gabriel Kuri, Kyungah Ham and Bill Viola, as well as a pop-up exhibition at the Venice Biennale and, in collaboration with daughter Tina Kim’s related New York Gallery, a show dedicated to the art of the Dansaekhwa movement.

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Here Zaatari’s abiding interest in identity and the personal narrative came to the fore. While his work typifies an ongoing turn to questions concerning the role of archives in art, its exhibition internationally (screenings and group-show contributions this year include moma, New York; Artspace, Auckland; and the Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, among others) has, more specifically, engendered a wider interest in photography from the Middle East.

83 TREVOR PAGLEN

Artist American Last Year: new There aren’t many artists who will go from ArtReview’s annual Future Greats feature (where more-established artists, critics and curators recommend emerging artists to look out for) to appearing on this list within five years. Yet not many artists make the type of work Paglen does. Yes, he has commercial galleries (Metro Pictures, New York, is currently staging its second solo show with the artist – of new photographs, a video and a sculpture that continues his investigation of covert military and intelligence operations – while San Francisco’s Altman Siegel hosted him during the spring) and museum shows (most recently at the Frankfurter Kunstverein), but Paglen’s work, which blends journalism, geography and science, goes way beyond the artworld. It was his photographs of spy bases that launched the Intercept, the investigatory website set up in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. The artist remains involved. He also contributed cinematography of spy bases to Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour (2014) and picked up the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie’s Cultural Award during the summer. While some artists make politics and political engagement the subject of their work, Paglen seems to have approached art as merely a tool for a wider, and perhaps far more important, project: to shine light in places where the powers that be don’t want it shone.

ArtReview

81 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Artist South African Last Year: new In 2014 Kentridge had 19 institutional outings – including his touring exhibition The Refusal of Time – and the number of museum attendees being exposed to his introspective, but often quietly political animations, sculpture and drawings (work that his gallerist, Marian Goodman, sums up as ‘so bloody beautiful’) continues to rise this year, with seven exhibitions in as geographically varied institutions as muac, Mexico City; Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; Ullens Center, Beijing; and Iziko Museum, Cape Town (he was also an adviser to Carolyn ChristovBakargiev’s Istanbul Biennial), not to mention his work’s inclusion in numerous group exhibitions. Yet, like many of the artists on this list, his work isn’t confined to galleries. During the early 1980s Kentridge went to Paris to study theatre and mime, and though this interest in the performing arts and narrative certainly informs the gallery work, it comes to the fore explicitly in a series of operas directed by the artist that continue to be staged internationally: this year Alban Berg’s Lulu (1935), staged as part of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

84 THADDAEUS ROPAC Gallerist Austrian Last Year: 78 Life and death, space and Space. Of late big metaphysical themes have been preoccupying Ropac, who opened his first gallery, in Salzburg, at the age of twenty-three and now operates two in Paris and a second space in the Alpine city. Life and death were the subject of Idea of Landscape, Imran Qureshi’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, works on paper and video in Paris’s Marais. Space in terms of the body is of course Antony Gormley’s concern, not least in Space Out, the gallery’s September show of the British artist in Salzburg Halle. The final frontier came in the deftly timed (given that the recent discovery of water on Mars led the world’s eyes upwards) group exhibition, Space Age, in which works by 20 artists across the four vast spaces of Ropac’s Paris Pantin gallery riffed on mankind’s conquest of the skies. Besides these, there were shows in 2015 for Raqib Shaw, Bjarne Melgaard and Claire Adelfang.

80 Photo: Rafał Placek. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London 81 Photo: Marc Shoul 82 Photo: nk_Park @ penn Studio. © Muine 83 Courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Metro Pictures, New York 84 Photo: Peter Rigaud/Shotview Photographers

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85 Photo: Büro Schramm für Gestaltung 86 Bose Krishnamachari, courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation; Riyas Komu, courtesy Photo Gallery, Borivali 87 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 88 Photo: Seung Mu Lee

85 PHILIPPE PIROTTE

School Director Belgian Last Year: 82 Pirotte, an art historian and former director of the Kunsthalle Bern, took over the directorship of Frankfurt’s Stadelschüle, or State Academy of Fine Arts, in 2014 after Nikolaus Hirsch’s brief and contentious spell as the institution’s head (the Belgian still occasionally curates, however: he’s overseeing the 2016 Biennale de Montréal). Pirotte found an institution in some disarray, saddled with a budget freeze lasting until 2016. So far, though, he looks to have a firm hand on the tiller: he’s overseen the hires of Peter Fischli and Amy Sillman, augmenting the stellar faculty that already includes Douglas Gordon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Michael Krebber and Judith Hopf, among others. One might well expect, then, that the nearly-200-year-old institution, in which there’s been no change in the small numbers of students permitted to study there, or in the famously eye-to-eye tutor/ student dynamic, will continue to hatch international graduates – or, rather, meisterschulen – of the calibre of Maria Loboda, Thomas Zipp, Matias Faldbakken and Jana Euler.

88 SUNJUNG KIM

Curator South Korean Last Year: 89 Associate director of Seoul’s Artsonje Center, Kim has said of curating: ‘Art is a movement that strives to go beyond conventional systems… a curator should carry out the role of supporter.’ This desire to circumnavigate the expected, to surprise and innovate, can be seen in the press release for the show Heman Chong (the artist whose project accompanies the 2015 Power 100) had at the gallery in February. The release was in the form of a short story concerning ‘a space that becomes increasingly regretful of what has been done with it’. Many curators might blanch at such a move – a standard explanatory text is normally the most accessible piece of pr copy possible, after all – but not Kim. Her approach is perhaps best evidenced in the series of exhibitions she has curated along the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, the fourth of which opened in August.

86 BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI & RIYAS KOMU Artists Indian Last Year: new In 2011 the government of the Indian state of Kerala approached painter and sculptor Komu and painter Krishnamachari to organise a biennale, the first exhibition of its kind in India. The first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was a sharp learning curve for all concerned – Komu has talked of the ‘stones of accusation, criticism, widespread pessimism’ that weighed heavy on these initial efforts – but the second edition, curated by artist Jitish Kallat (and drawing on Kochi’s maritime history and the fourteenth-tosixteenth-century Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics, with works by 94 artists from 30 countries), had garnered widespread respect by the time it finished its run, earlier this year. Writing in ArtReview Asia, Rosalyn D’Mello described how ‘no longer obligated to defend the biennale against opposition, the art cognoscenti could immerse themselves in rigorous debate and conversation, with opinions and critiques being offered at will’. Sudarshan Shetty has been announced as artistic director and curator of the 2016 edition.

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87 SHEIKHA AL-MAYASSA BINT HAMAD BIN KHALIFA AL-THANI

Collector Qatari Last Year: 13 The lavish spending on art that propelled the sheikha to the top of this list in 2013 may no longer be so much in evidence, but the head of Qatar Museums still wields influence in the country’s drive to reinvent itself as a cultured, outward-looking knowledge economy. With the construction of the Jean Nouvel-designed Qatar National Museum (scheduled to open in 2016) and a longlist of architects just released for the neighbouring Art Mill project, the sheikha has been actively developing various international networks and initiatives, among them a regional artists’ residency programme, a showcase exhibition of Brazilian art and a major gathering of policymakers, artists and architects on the role of culture in urban development. For all that soft power, the sheikha was awarded the StellaRe prize, established by another female Power 100 mover, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Not that Qatar has lost interest in big-ticket art buying; in February it emerged that the Gulf state had broken its own record for the most ever paid for an artwork, reportedly buying Paul Gauguin’s When Will You Marry? (Nafea Faa Ipoipo) (1882) for $300m (£197m).

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89 RICK LOWE

Artist American Last Year: new When he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014 – a grant of $625,000 paid over five years – Lowe described how his ‘social sculpture’ initiative Project Row Houses came about. In 1990 a student ‘looked at my earlier political work and said it wasn’t what people needed, people needed solutions. He said – if you’re an artist and you are creative, why can’t you create a solution?’ It spurred Lowe to take his work out of the gallery and try and make a real, concrete difference to his city: bringing together a coalition of artists to buy, three years later, 22 semiderelict houses in Third Ward, one of Houston’s oldest African-American neighbourhoods. The 40 houses now making up the project have been transformed into an unusual amalgam of arts venue, artists studios and community support centre, in which international visiting artists mix with the young mothers who live in some of project’s residential buildings. It is such a success that the artist has initiated similar projects elsewhere, including in Los Angeles, North Dallas and post-Katrina New Orleans. And while the site-specificity of his work might mean that Lowe is not such a household name in international circles, he’s been an inspiration to artists such as Theaster Gates and many others who see art as a way of improving communities. And this year President Obama nominated him to the National Council on the Arts.

92 CHARLES ESCHE

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90 91 YUKO PHILIP TINARI HASEGAWA

Museum Director Japanese Last Year: 90 This is how Hasegawa described good curating in a 2015 survey on artnet.com: ‘It is like a knowledgeable shepherd who gives free rein to his/ her animals while being fully aware of when and how to protect them from any danger.’ Among the flock that the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo watched over this year was Gabriel Orozco, who had a solo show to kick off the institution’s 20th anniversary. Hasegawa is a member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; adviser to the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; a judge on this year’s Hugo Boss Asia Art Prize and the inaugural Nasher Prize for Sculpture; and, with architect Kazuyo Sejima in 2010, cofounder of the Inujima Art House Project, a nonprofit space in the village of Inujima, Japan. Next year she is curating Globale: New Sensorium: Exiting from the Failures of Modernization at the zkm/Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. So, a lot of pastures to cover.

Museum Director American Last Year: Reentry (84 in 2011) Appointed director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in 2011, Tinari has put the insight he gained into China’s art scene in his former role as founding editor of leap to good use. His broad programme for the Beijing institution celebrates China’s early-career artists (He Xiangyu was the subject of a show this summer) and established talents (a major spring show of works by Liu Wei) while also drawing the gallery firmly into international discourse with shows by artists driving the conversation elsewhere in Asia (Ming Wong) and beyond (William Kentridge’s largest exhibition in Asia to date). The fluent Mandarin-speaking curator’s roles on the advisory boards of the Guggenheim, the Asia Society and ntu Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore – as well as his involvement with international art bunfights like New York’s Armory Show – ensure that his vision of China’s contemporary art scene is experienced well beyond Beijing.

Museum Director British Last Year: 87 At the press conference in June to announce his plans for this November’s Jakarta Biennale, Esche spoke of the purpose he saw for biennials. They have become, the curator and director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, said, a means by which the public could “come to terms with the complexity of the modern word”. Esche’s curatorial style – and for an example one need only have visited his Bienal de São Paulo, which closed last December – combines academic thoroughness and a commitment to socially responsive work, especially that which emanates from artists

of the ‘global south’, with a rigorous public outreach programme that always feels integral to the show rather than the afterthought it often is. Back in Europe, this approach has made itself felt in the exhibition How to (…) Things That Don’t Exist, developed out of the aforementioned Bienal (and the publication of a reader stemming from the World Biennial Forum No 2, held in conjunction with the Bienal) and on show at the Serralves Museum, Porto, through 17 January 2016, and also the Van Abbemuseum programme, which this year included shows by Ahmet Öğüt and Marcel Broodthaers.

ArtReview

89 Courtesy John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 90 Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo 91 Courtesy Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 92 Photo: Sofia Colucci 93 Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo 94 Photo: Sophie Elgort 95 Photo: Rosi Riedl 96 Courtesy Adriano Pedrosa

93 FELIPE DMAB, PEDRO MENDES & MATTHEW WOOD

Gallerists Brazilian/Brazilian/American Last Year: 99 With Brazil’s economy struggling, the trio’s five-year-old São Paulo gallery, Mendes Wood DM, is well tooled to circumnavigate the domestic trouble. Their international network is impressive – much travelling and supporting their artist’s institutional forays has ensured that – and their collector base spreads beyond Brazil. One might still forgive Dmab, Mendes and Wood if they battened down the hatches to navigate a safe passage through these rough seas, yet there’s no sign of that. Immersive art-fair booths have become a thing for

the team when taking the message abroad: Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’s fun-palace of kitsch felt apt for Art Basel Miami Beach last December, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s solo booth at Frieze New York was just as seductive, albeit in a quieter manner. At home, the gallery programmed its typical mix of represented artists – Runo Lagomarsino and Paulo Monteiro among them – and invited guests (including American Stewart Uoo), as well as a group show in the gallery’s vast warehouse space of various artists represented by Glasgow-based The Modern Institute, the first part of an exchange between the two galleries.

94 95 CARTER STEFAN CLEVELAND SIMCHOWITZ Website American Last Year: new ‘I assumed there would be a website with all the world’s art on it.’ Such is the outlook of a digital native (Cleveland is in his late twenties). For a Princeton computer-science student, discovering such a gap can only mean one thing: opportunity. So began Artsy, with Cleveland gaining an impressive range of early investors, including Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Google’s Eric Schmidt, the collector Dasha Zhukova and the gallerist Larry Gagosian, who together pitched in $14.5 million, and Marc Glimcher as an adviser. Besides being a database of works from more than 400 foundations and public collections, the website also hosts work by commercial galleries for sale – and major galleries are using the platform, perhaps drawn by the distinctive feature of individual pages for each dealer. Many have tried to crack the online art market before; most have failed. With its sleek design, commissioned editorial texts and the partnerships it has struck, Cleveland might just have succeeded with Artsy.

Collector American Last Year: new What can one say about Stefan Simchowitz that Stefan Simchowitz hasn’t already tweeted, Facebooked and Instagrammed about himself? If the artworld needed its Howard Stern, its Ari Gold, its Donald Trump, it got ‘Simcho’: a brash, publicity-hungry yet highly intelligent collector-adviser-dealer who has become a magnet for attention – ‘heat’ in his own parlance – because of his self-described disruptive and sometimes dismissive approach to the established mechanisms of the art market and its means of legitimisation: museums and their boards (‘amoral’); mfa programmes and their faculty (‘losers’); galleries and their closely protected client lists (‘greedy’). Yet the force of his personality and his highly mediated – one might say digitised – self-regard has been put to use in the service of the artists he supports – such as Mark Horowitz, Petra Cortright and Kour Pour – and the clients who appreciate his star-friendly yet populist sensibility – Sean Parker, Orlando Bloom. Plus, he looked a lot less creepy in his skivvies on the cover of The New York Times Magazine than did Jeff Koons nude and pumping iron in the pages of Vanity Fair.

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96 ADRIANO PEDROSA

Curator Brazilian Last Year: 93 Being appointed artistic director of the most important museum in a major art city should push you way up this list. But in Pedrosa’s case, who took the curatorial reins of Museu de Arte de São Paulo (masp) in November 2014, it may be a case of wait and see. That said, the previously moribund institution is already showing signs of revitalisation. Pedrosa, the best-known Brazilian curator on the international art scene, has a particular knack for invoking history in the service of pressing contemporary needs, and one can see this in his reinstatement of Lina Bo Bardi’s original exhibition designs. The museum’s interior drywalls, erected later, have been removed, and paintings from the collection are again hanging on boards that, attached to floor-to-ceiling armatures, seem to float midair. All of which feels open and welcoming, in a very contemporary way, to the thousands of ordinary Brazilians who visit daily. Yet masp is severely underfunded, and with Brazil’s economy in a major dip, the situation seems unlikely to improve quickly. Life may therefore be tricky for Pedrosa for a while yet, but his wellearned reputation stands, and he will continue to be a rare curatorial conduit to the region.

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97 DASHA ZHUKOVA

Collector Russian Last Year: Reentry (86 in 2013) Last year saw the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture change its name to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. This year that step up took on more concrete form, as the Rem Koolhaas-renovated Gorky Park premises for the institution Dasha Zhukova founded in 2008 opened to the public. Beyond the starstudded (real stars, like Woody Allen and George Lucas) opening, the Garage’s initial sampler exhibition announced its intent to pursue historical research into the Russian contemporary art scene (the Garage has been purchasing significant local art archives) as well as fund Russian-art-related research projects abroad (one on African artists who studied in Russia is in the works), while bringing some of the biggest international contemporary artists to Moscow (work by Yayoi Kusama, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Taryn Simon for the opening). In a city where contemporary art institutions are thin on the ground, Zhukova has an opportunity to make a difference. She’s starting out on the right foot.

Collectors Bangladeshi Last Year: new The Dhaka-based industrialist couple’s interest in contemporary art moved from local artists such as S.M. Sultan to Western art-fair favourites – Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst – to something much more ambitious: of late they’ve been assembling a nuanced collection of South Asian art (and some more interesting Western names, such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster). But their influence isn’t just due to their collecting. Nor is it necessarily about their positions on various institutional committees, including the international councils of Tate and the New Museum (though all that helps). Instead it stems from the Dhaka Art Summit, a biennial melding of conference and exhibition set up in 2012 with a desire to develop an art scene in their homeland. Plenty of bigwigs attend (the first two editions were inaugurated by Bangladesh’s finance minister), and next year’s summit includes new commissions by Tino Sehgal and Lynda Benglis. At this year’s Venice Biennale, the Samdani’s supported works by Naeem Mohaiemen and Raqs Media Collective that were included in Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition. With construction of an art centre on 40 hectares of land near the city of Sylhet underway – a space that will provide a focus for their ongoing programme of inviting international artists to Bangladesh to offer mentorship to younger, local ones – the Samdanis have placed themselves, and more importantly Bangladesh, firmly on the artworld map.

100 DELFINA ENTRECANALES

Foundation Founder British Last Year: new From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Spanishborn Entrecanales and her then-husband, Digby Squires, ran the the Delfina Studio Trust, providing studios for a generation of British artists, as well as an international residency programme. When the couple separated, the studios remained with Squires. Entrecanales’s patronage entered a lull, until a friend took her on a trip to Syria. In 2007, the Delfina Foundation in its current incarnation, with a residency programme that

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99 EUGENE TAN Museum Director Singaporean Last Year: Reentry (95 in 2013) The director of the National Gallery Singapore has come onto and dropped off this list as he travelled the long road to this year’s opening – which coincides with Singapore’s fiftieth anniversary – of his institution. The National Gallery’s name and remit have been tweaked, but this month it opens as the largest public collection of modern art from Singapore and the Southeast Asian region. When it was founded, Singapore’s prime minister proudly announced that the arts didn’t factor as a priority in the nation-building exercise. Now it moves centre stage (the National Gallery occupies the prominent former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings at the heart of the city) in terms of Singapore’s attempts to assert its influence over the region.

supports artists and curators from all over the world, but with a particular focus on Latin America and the menasa region, was born. And while the base is in London, the partnerships Entrecanales and foundation director Aaron Cezar have formed – with institutions and initiatives in Brazil, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the uae and Mexico – and the international nature of the artists supported (at the time of writing, the foundation is hosting a curator and artists from Mumbai, Istanbul, Berlin, Amman and São Paulo) mean that the patron’s influence is global.

97 © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow 98 Photo: Manir Mrittik. Courtesy the Samdani Art Foundation. 99 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 100 Photo: Christa Holka

98 NADIA & RAJEEB SAMDANI

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THE 2015 POWER 1OO 1 Iwan & Manuela Wirth

35 Jay Jopling

2 Ai Weiwei

36 Sadie Coles

3 David Zwirner

37 Isa Genzken

4 Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones

38 Bernard Arnault

69 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 70 Tom Eccles 71 Claire Hsu 72 Massimo De Carlo

5 Nicholas Serota

39 Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood

6 Larry Gagosian

40 Daniel Buchholz

74 Christine Tohme

7 Glenn D. Lowry

41 Cindy Sherman

75 Graham Harman

8 Marina Abramović

42 Rirkrit Tiravanija

76 Adrian Cheng

9 Adam D. Weinberg

43 Dakis Joannou

77 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

10 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

44 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

11 Wolfgang Tillmans

45 Thomas Hirschhorn

12 Marian Goodman

46 Barbara Gladstone

13 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers

47 Thelma Golden

14 Jeff Koons 15 Bernard Blistène & Serge Lasvignes 16 Adam Szymczyk 17 Okwui Enwezor 18 Hito Steyerl 19 Massimiliano Gioni 20 Maja Hoffmann 21 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 22 Beatrix Ruf 23 Marc & Arne Glimcher 24 Gavin Brown 25 Marc Spiegler 26 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe 27 Gerhard Richter 28 Eli & Edythe Broad 29 Pierre Huyghe 30 Theaster Gates 31 Michael Govan 32 Ryan Trecartin 33 François Pinault 34 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty

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48 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi 49 Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp 50 Toby Webster & Andrew Hamilton

73 Koyo Kouoh

78 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider 79 Esther Schipper 80 Akram Zaatari 81 William Kentridge 82 Hyun-Sook Lee 83 Trevor Paglen 84 Thaddaeus Ropac

51 Steve McQueen

85 Philippe Pirotte

52 Emmanuel Perrotin

86 Bose Krishnamachari & Riyas Komu

53 Yayoi Kusama 54 Liam Gillick 55 Luisa Strina 56 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang 57 RoseLee Goldberg 58 Anselm Franke 59 Christopher Wool 60 Udo Kittelmann

87 Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani 88 Sunjung Kim 89 Rick Lowe 90 Yuko Hasegawa 91 Philip Tinari 92 Charles Esche

61 Miuccia Prada

93 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood

62 Klaus Biesenbach

94 Carter Cleveland

63 Richard Chang

95 Stefan Simchowitz

64 Olafur Eliasson

96 Adriano Pedrosa

65 Matthew Marks

97 Dasha Zhukova

66 Eugenio López

98 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani

67 Luc Tuymans

99 Eugene Tan

68 Eva Presenhuber

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100 Delfina Entrecanales

Art Featured

The paint’s barely dried before a new one is shooting onto shop shelves – but we don’t mind when they offer fancy new features 171

The Broads How one couple came to make a city’s art scene, and what happens when they open their own space by Vincent Bevins

above The Broad, Los Angeles, exterior view. Photo: Iwan Baan facing page The Broad’s lobby. Photo: Hufton + Crow both Courtesy the Broad, Los Angeles, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York

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The most remarkable thing about the new Broad museum in Los Angeles may not be the building itself, the exterior of which resembles an engagingly organic and extraterrestrial version of the packing material that comes wrapped around soft fruit. Nor may it be the fact that, after the escalator delivers you into the beast, you are confronted with a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century artists and once-subversive works that have since gained widespread market and popular acceptance. Basquiat? Check. Warhol? Check. The Barbara Kruger work that inspired those Supreme T-shirts? Check. A new T-shirt based on the original? Check. Huge Lichtenstein? Check. Koons overload? Check. Part of one room dominated by large Beuys works? Check. No, the most remarkable thing about the new Broad (which rhymes with lode), especially to those inexperienced in the ways of the la artworld, is that it is right across the street from moca – cofounded by Broad, and where he fought to have his name on the building. Of course, Los Angeles has other museums. There’s the excellent lacma – whose contemporary art sits in a building named after Broad and prominently featuring a photo of him and his wife, Edythe – and the Hammer at ucla – where Broad sat on the board, then left, then returned to re-embrace as he made more donations (including, most recently, his archives, among them home videos and personal photographs, to ucla’s library). In such a Broad-dominated art city, the guy builds a huge private museum across the street and slaps his name on it? Doesn’t that feel a bit less Medici and more Donald Trump? But that’s unkind. The generosity of the eighty-two-year-old insurance and real estate billionaire has propped up the top level of the la art scene for decades. Those remarkable works at the Broad, which he is offering entirely free to the public, will likely inspire some of the young (or many, many poor: when the cost of living is considered, 27 percent of la County’s population at one recent count) to get excited about art and dive in deeper. And Broad himself, in brief conversation with ArtReview, was happy to concede that the situation is not ideal. He smiles sheepishly when told there is likely no other city whose art scene is dominated to such an extent by one couple. When asked whether it would be

better if somebody else, like the government or other rich people, stepped in and did more, he answered, “We hope to inspire others,” before Edythe, who is rumoured to like art a bit more than he, chimed in: “We aren’t going to be around forever.” They of course agree that the government should do more to support the arts at all levels. But it seems unlikely the funds to do so will be found here, where the county has been unable to care for its 44,000 homeless inhabitants (including 4,000 veterans). And as almost everybody will tell you in la’s topsy-turvy, quasihippie, no-rules-and-no-shame artworld, ’twas ever thus. Everywhere else, it may feel like we are moving away from the era of the public museum to a private, ego-dominated landscape. But in Southern California, that era of public ownership and civic engagement never existed, not even in some collectively imagined, idealised version of the past. Here, nothing really ever has been public. la was built around real estate speculation, oligarchic control of development and the land, and life spent entirely in those private spaces or in private cars. The city is so big and sprawling that people living just blocks from each other may not only never see each other, they may not ever even see the same things, as they take their pods to different parts of the metropolis. It’s ironic then that the new Broad sits just next to the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall – which Broad also helped construct, of course – the structure widely believed to have started the rejuvenation of downtown. Because though the cost of living has been pushed up radically around it, there’s still never actually anyone on this street. Being a pedestrian around here just doesn’t make sense. In short, this is a private museum in a private town. The level of civic engagement here is so low that it’s extremely easy to meet educated Angelenos who don’t know who the mayor is. The only major newspaper, once owned by a wealthy local family, is now controlled by a corporation in Chicago. A note on that paper (my main employer): just before the public unveiling of the Broad, Eli made an offer to purchase the Los Angeles Times, but was rebuffed. It’s rumoured he will try again, and his influence is such that la County’s board of supervisors sent a letter to Chicago supporting ‘local ownership’ of the Times.

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Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), 1989, photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 284 × 284 cm. © the artist

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In local media as well as art circles, everyone wants to talk about be found elsewhere. And “there are less rules. On the East Coast there Broad, but no one wants him to know what has been said. Artists and is a respect for pedigree and etiquette that is antithetical to what the gallerists will mumble at length about his unique power, or about West Coast is about.” how he uses art to accumulate cultural capital and influence in the Such sentiments are echoed, in a new Californian-English accent, city. But very rarely on the record. by young artist Nevine Mahmoud, who came here from London a few At the same time, the extent of his power is sometimes not fully years ago and runs an exhibition space, Diana, in her garage. “People’s intentions and attitudes in the Los Angeles artworld feel known here. At a recent joint dinner between the François Ghebaly and Night galleries – two of the city’s many genuinely exciting enter- much more about passion than social status. Of course the latter exists, prises, both of which exist in the relative wilderness of the indus- and the former can be feigned, but the climate of the city (cultural, trial district, way over on the other side of downtown – many people social and physical) generates a space where as an artist you can enjoy didn’t know just how powerful Broad is (something he likely hopes making work, share and participate in an intimate community, and worry less about treading all over people’s backs,” she said. Since to change with the new Broad). the world of fine arts is so far from what larger But everyone will also tell you, quite credThere is a freedom to do la cares about, people are unlikely to be in it for ibly, that what has made Los Angeles such an the wrong reasons. “The people involved know, attractive destination for artists is not just that things that would be space is much cheaper than in New York. It’s also perhaps subconsciously, that we are operating ‘off endlessly tut-tutted in cities the radar’ of the Hollywood/film ‘mainstream’”. that there is a freedom to do things that would with a more established be endlessly tut-tutted in cities with a more If Eli Broad has expanded the size of an art established public art culture. Where there’s city that is thoroughly private, the nature of that public art culture precious little tradition, people can break all city is also such that much goes on here, rumbling kinds of rules. Some of what comes out of this may not be so good or underneath his influence and safely ignoring him. That is, until the interesting, but others tinker away in the relatively hidden spaces of artists or their galleries ever want to get sufficiently high on la’s own their homes, or in forgotten urban spaces, or in the desert, and create art ladder (of course there is one) to get near the city’s museums. Of the new Broad, LaBine says that “it will be nice to have another things that are truly new. “With exhibitions in la, people feel that they have a bit more institution downtown – already this week we’ve had a number of wiggle room,” says Rachel LaBine, director at the Night Gallery and people to Night Gallery who are in town for the Broad”. recent transplant from New York. “And the artist-run spaces here are So Broad has undoubtedly made the art scene larger here, again, great, they have a unique energy. In New York, if you started an artist- with his new museum. But is the museum leading the city to a deeper run space, there is the feeling that that space starts its life already understanding of art, or something different entirely? To answer that [partway up] the New York art ladder.” In la, by contrast, there is question, I’ll turn to a quotation the museum’s curators bafflingly thought worthy to prominently affix to a wall on the first floor of the freedom that comes with existing off the grid. When she first got here, she says, she wondered, “How does any- the museum: body know what’s going on?”, but then found that, of course, the I like the fact that art reflects what’s happening in the world, how artists connections existed, though not under such a microscope as could see the world. – Eli Broad ar

The Broad’s third-floor galleries, with installation of works by Christopher Wool and Jeff Koons. Photo: Bruce Damonte. Courtesy the Broad, Los Angeles, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York

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Sun Ge ‘Until the end of the Second World War, European ideology did not acknowledge that Asia could be an equal counterpart with which mutual understanding was possible…’ Interview by Aimee Lin

Is ‘Asia’ a construct of the West or the East, and is its meaning anything more than geographic? And what do the answers to those questions mean for ‘Asian’ art? 176

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Born in 1955 in Changchun, Jilin, China, Sun Ge studied Chinese literature at Jilin University and is a professor at the Institute of Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Interested in the issue of East Asia from early on, she has conducted comparative research on the literatures and philosophies of China and Japan across the boundaries of academic disciplines and departments. Her fields of interest include modern Chinese literature, the history of modern Japanese thought and comparative cultural studies. Her major works include How Does Asia Mean? (2001), Space of Pervasive Subjectivities: The Dilemma of Discursive Asia (2002), The Paradox of Takeuchi Yoshimi (2005), The Literary Position: Masao Maruyama’s Dilemma (2009), Why Shall We Talk About East Asia: Politics and History in Situation (2011).

ar ‘Asia’ was originally a name that outsiders used for a specific geographical space. Does Asia, or the concept of Asia, mean something to the people who live within this space? sg Prior to modern times, ‘Asia’ did not have any connotations of subjective identification, but in the twentieth century that changed. From the Crusades, when the term referred only to Asia Minor (Anatolia), until the turn of the twentieth century, as Europe gradually subjected the world to colonialism, the Asia discourse of the West was consistently one in which Asia served as Europe’s ‘other’. During the powerful classical period of the Islamic world, this ‘other’ was a formidable foe. In modern times, this ‘other’ has become a source of comparison – evidence against the

I What does Asia mean? artreview What does Asia mean? Does it possess meaning beyond its geographical connotations? sun ge Of course. Asia is more than a spatial concept, which is to say, it is more than a geographical concept, and it is also more than a political-historical-geographical concept. In academia, there is now a field called political historical geography in which various political, cultural and historical questions are discussed in the context of where they happened. Asia is indeed a compound concept of politics, history and geography, but in addition to that, I believe it has an important alternative function, one that is often overlooked: its spiritual fūdo character. ar What is fūdo? sg Fūdo refers to the natural geographical characteristics possessed by a given region or geographical space. The combination of these characteristics with the particular spiritual life of people via social activities is called fūdo. [Fūdo, or Fengtu, is a term used by Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji (1889–1960) in Fūdo: ningen-gakuteki kōsatsu (1935), translated in English as Climate and Culture (1961). The term signifies ‘wind and earth… the natural environment of a given land’.] So the concept of Asia is at the very least a particular natural geographical space that bears the weight of political, historical and spiritual culture produced by human activity within it. The various spiritual products of society and the humanities are discussed within the context of a particular space.

in the symbol was marked by the Bandung Conference of 1955 [the meeting of African and Asian states that anticipated the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement of countries]. Of course, that was just one phase of its evolution. In terms of major historical trends, the general development of the Asia discourse began in the twentieth century as ‘Asia’ was transformed into a symbol of self-identification in some societies in the Asia region. Japan was the first place where this self-identification occurred. The growth of Asianism in Japan reached its peak with Japan’s victory in the 1904–5 Japanese–Russian War. The Japanese saw this as a war between races: a victory of the yellow race over the white race. The unfortunate thing is that Japanese Asianism accompanied war, and their methods of war were imitations of European colonial methods. So Japan’s path was not one of genuine Asianism. Therefore, if it can be said that Asianism exists in Asia, then this Asianism has many faces, and tension exists between them. But we can say without value judgement that in the late nineteenth century a trend emerged in which several different parts of Asia, in many different forms, began to cast off the cultural symbols of the Western ‘other’ and adopt subjective symbols of self-identification. ar Then what changes have occurred in the meaning of this idea of Asia since the end of the Second World War?

predominance of European culture. Until the end of the Second World War, European ideology did not acknowledge that Asia could be an equal counterpart with which mutual understanding was possible. Even then, such a relationship was merely a possibility. And to this day, this possibility remains relatively marginal in Europe. As for Asia, it was not until the end of the Second World War that a relatively widespread trend emerged in which the meaning of ‘Asia’ was reversed in order to connote a subjectively identified political symbol. At that point, one could no longer say that Asia was merely a concept created by the West. This change above Sun Ge. Photo: Tamako Sado facing page Victor Levasseur, Atlas Universel Illustré Asia, 1856, painted copper engraving, 435 × 288 cm. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan

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sg After the Second World War, this idea of Asia was used at the Bandung Conference in the context of Afro-Asia – ie, Africa and Asia – and the national independence movements of the two continents. During the process of Asia’s rise during the 1950s, the principle significance of Asia as a political unit was political subjectivity. Asia is not like Europe in that it cannot be roughly integrated on the basis of a single religion. However, the Bandung Conference symbolised a period of integration during the 1950s in which the concept of Asia was spread vigorously through virtually the entire region. As these states gained independence and sovereignty, so the situation changed. ar Roughly when did that happen? sg I would say it happened as the Cold War structure began to disintegrate. Asia began to split up during the 1970s, because at the time the entire continent was facing a developmental problem: how to achieve modernisation. The result was all sorts of dialogue, exchange and cooperation between Asia and the West. Thus, after the 1970s, a new round of colonialism began, but this time in an invisible form. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the early 1990s, Asia was faced with the question of forming new alliances. So new coalitions, like the Shanghai

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Cooperation Organisation or the brics countries, are in fact symbols of Asia’s reorganisation of international relations. In these circumstances we discover that Asia is already incapable of acting, in terms of geography, as an independent unit in order to emphasise its identity. These circumstances have led some people to say that Asia has not been established as a reality.

II Asia as Principle ar So the integration of Asia as a geographical space was not achieved. sg That’s right. But if we recall our initial discussion, we said that Asia is more than a geographical concept. It is also an amalgamation of political, historical and spiritual culture. It symbolises people’s spiritual activities, and the fūdo character of social and artistic activities. In this sense, I believe that today we have reached a stage where we can reorganise and rephrase the discussion by treating Asia as a set of principles.

sg Art and culture give form to spiritual energy. The spiritual activities of humans must have form before they can present themselves to us. Art utilises the form of direct observation to communicate this spiritual information. I can say that, to date, the art I have been exposed to, such as the fine arts, theatre and film from East Asia, are Westernised in the mainstream. Their Asian-ness is insufficient. ar Are you saying that the reasoning behind it lacks that awareness of so-called Asian subjectivity, and it unconsciously uses Western methods or Western perspectives? sg Yes, it uses Western perspectives. The most typical example is Zhang Yimou: all of the expressions of Chinese-ness in his films

ar Before we start discussing Asia as principle, I want to ask you: do art or culture play a role of shaping the identity of Asia or the idea of Asia?

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sg I think it is definitely one factor, but it does not tell the whole story. The lack of understanding of Asia in the West is in a certain sense due to the excessive autonomy of the West, which has only just begun to change. That goes together with the historical trends in politics and economics of recent times: the West going forth to conquer the whole world from an advantageous position. Culture cannot be separated from politics and economics, even though they each have their own characteristics. Cultural people in the West with a genuine awareness of Asia are definitely on the fringes. ar There are very few.

ar You have previously written about the question ‘how does Asia mean?’ But it sounds quite new when you mention ‘Asia as principle’. sg In my opinion, the present Asia discourse is still off the mark. If Asia does not have its own principles, then it truly is no more than field material within the framework of Western discourse. To date, that is how Asia has been treated in Western and Chinese scholarship, but I believe that we should now produce Asian principles. However, producing Asian principles is not only for the benefit of Asian people. I think it is a historical responsibility for the benefit of humankind. Asian principles are simply principles that are relative to European, African and Latin American principles. The discussion of them is not an intellectual activity intended to resist or replace the West.

ar There are some Westerners who believe that the language barrier is the reason that Western people define Asian identity through culture. They can only mechanically imagine other cultures. What do you think of this opinion?

are intended to cater to the requirements of Hollywood. Of course, there are other ambitious artists who are not as superficial as Zhang Yimou. They are more inclined to seek an Asian element, but these artists, including art curators, have an essentially Western field of vision. For example, one deeply rooted idea in the minds of contemporary artists and curators is modernity. If you do not let them talk about modernity, they basically cannot function. This is a trend that exists today, and I do not believe that it should be negated, because in a certain sense it expresses the consequences of Western infiltration of all of Asia, from politics and economics to culture.

Pratchaya Phinthong, (Untitled) Singapore, 2014, from a site-specific installation at ntu Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore. Photo: Tanatchai Bandasak. Courtesy the artist

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sg But I believe there are some. When I discuss the China question with Western European and North American intellectuals, they first trot out a few frameworks, such as modernity, postmodernity, rationality, individual rights, scientism and evolution. All of these frameworks in fact constitute the quite mature cultural structure of modern Europe. It seems that every Western intellectual I encounter always tries hard to take whatever unfamiliar experience he or she witnesses and hesitantly cram it into these frameworks, and use them to interpret it. ar When you put it that way, the necessity of Asia as principle becomes apparent, because to them as well this is a huge challenge, a very difficult task. sg Yes. ‘Asia as principle’ is not an empty phrase. It means that we must redefine what is universal. We must start from this perspective: any intellectual or spiritual activity is endemic, ie, governed by fūdo. This means that you cannot take your European or North American partial experience to other regions and treat it as a global experience shared by all humankind. This is the demand that Asia as principle makes of humanity. At present, if you view Asia from the perspective of European principles, then you

will use an allegedly universal imagination to view Asia. So you will search for modernity in Asia, and search for scientific rationality. It is not just Westerners who do this. Asian people also do this. ar That is because in our minds we have already become like them due to our education and academic training. But our lives, and our physical and sensory experiences, go beyond that mental aspect. sg Everybody with this kind of educational background has trouble interpreting the change that is occurring in the various Asian societies. I do not make art, but from the perspective of intellectual history, this issue is extremely pressing. This is what compels us to discuss Asian principles. I think Asian principles in their most simplified form are a universalism based on the premise of the coexistence of a diverse plurality of physical phenomena.

III The Prerequisite for Asian Art ar From your perspective as a scholar, is there such a thing that can be called Asian art, and if so, what constitutes the so-called Asian-ness of this art? sg This is truly a big question. First of all, I think the existence of Asian art is not only possible but necessary. However, the existence of Asian art is definitely a diverse existence. So when we talk about Asian art, the prerequisite is that it does not have representatives. We cannot say that Western art has definite representatives, and I believe that Asian art is the same. But there is also a way in which it differs from Western art, in that there is no ‘primariness’ that encompasses Asian art. ar It has no unifying characteristic. sg That’s right. Over at least the last one or two centuries of forceful moulding by the West, we have become accustomed when discussing a given field to identify a representative and talk about their primariness. What we should do now is discuss the plurality of a field, but people have not yet formed this habit. This is the prerequisite for discussing Asian art. The Chinese philosopher Chen Jiaying has proposed the terminology of ‘the particular’, which emphasises the combination of the individual and the characteristic. I think Asian art comprises countless particulars, but what we want to talk about is not a buffet. If it is a buffet, then Asian art does not exist, because it is too dispersed. There are relations between the particulars, and we must use Asian principles to interpret these relations. Asian art takes form when we have the goal of establishing relations between

the particulars through mutual understanding, through self-liberation and through the individual’s transcendence. This is related to the need for us to change our practice of appreciating Asian art on the basis of European modernity and postmodernity. Our current custom of appreciation is to first translate our culture into English, and then use it to enter other cultures. ar Are there some aspects of this idea of Asia that contradict or oppose the Western world and its theories? sg Yes, but I think that point is not so important. Opposing the methods of the West has been necessary thus far, but as soon as you oppose something, you become subject to the limitations of your opposition. ar You are ‘countered’. sg Yes, which means that this part of the production of knowledge is transitionary, and not particularly constructive. For example, postmodernity is restricted by modernity, so it cannot be free. Asia is restricted by the West:

Any intellectual or spiritual activity is endemic. You cannot take your European or North American partial experience to other regions and treat it as a global experience shared by all humankind an unavoidable historical fact. If you want to work towards genuine self-liberation from this state of being restricted by the West, I think criticism is ineffective. You must relativise the West, not negate it. The crucial thing is to build our own framework of understanding and organisation that includes the effects of the Western infiltration of Asia. The establishment of Asian thought and culture requires structural construction. At present, two relatively familiar methods of Eastern intellectuals are those of critiquing the West and reforming the West. These two modes are both significant, and they are both closely linked to the West itself. But I believe that they are transitionary. They form the foundation on which we must engage in our own construction, unrestricted by the West and not predicated on opposition to the West. We must imagine more freely and build more autonomously.

But I think competition and cooperation are a difficult terminology to use to understand the realm of culture, and particularly the creation of spiritual products. In fact, I think the creation of spiritual products in Asia is intermediary. ar What do you mean by intermediary? sg I mean that I treat my counterpart as a medium, and draw on their work and their spiritual production to fuel my own imagination and creative motivation. Intermediary means that my work is not entirely their work, and their work cannot interpret my work, but if we did not understand each other, then my work would not be the way it is. ar This year is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Historical factors have created an extremely powerful state of psychological tension between, for example, South Korea and Japan, and China and Japan as well, which has still not dissipated. Can art or culture, through certain means, dissipate this tension? sg There are several ways to look at this. Ideally, culture will transcend borders, and in this way it can dispel the imagined opposition between different societies created by national tension – for in fact this opposition exists only in the imagination. But the truth is not that simple. When cultural workers do their thinking and creating, it is their mother tongue that determines their identity. The vast majority of cultural people rarely reflect on this self-identification. If culture is to transcend the tense mentality between nations, then cultural people must first reflect on the very presupposition of their self-identification, and then form an identity for themselves that is greater than their national unit. I believe that people who cannot transcend this specific unit cannot create truly world-class spiritual products. This is not to say that if you transcend your national unit then you have no nationality. No, what I want to emphasise is that one’s fixed cultural characteristics are a fundamental source of one’s creative practice, but one need not treat one’s nationality as an absolute presupposition. If a cultural identity reaches the depth of human spirit, it will reflect it [human spirit] by means of nationality, while resisting an abstract, general expression.

ar Is this idea of Asia driven by competition and opposition, or by cooperation?

ar I am reminded of certain artists and curators who live abroad. They can freely travel to the most distant parts of the world, but their spirituality seems somewhat lacking. Once a person completely ceases to believe in nationality or their original culture, they may be able to depart a place, but they ultimately never arrive at a new place.

sg A little bit of each. If we’re talking about the economy, then it is definitely competition.

sg Yes, I think that is very accurate. Artists with no roots have no prospects.

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IV Contemporary Art as the Production Platform of Asia Discourses ar Recently, new cultural and art organisations or institutions have been established in Hong Kong, Gwangju, Shanghai, Singapore and the oil-exporting states in the Middle East. They all proclaim the intention of establishing their position on a regional scale. Together, they appear to present the formation of a regional field of vision. What effect does this trend have on our Asian-ness or our self-identification as Asian people? sg To people in the worlds of art and culture, this trend you mention is a symbolic change that represents the imagination of Asia and the formation of its subjectivity, guided by the cultural world at different levels of society – although I use that word reluctantly. Some people who do academic research are still content to treat Asia as either a field for the West or a big buffet. As for China, it is treated by some intellectuals as a representative of Asia, just like Japan was previously. So when the artworld invites me to talk about Asia, I recognise that contemporary art has already become an important platform for the production of Asian principles. It also symbolises the transition from the politics-driven period of the Bandung Conference, where the subject was Asian independence movements at the state level, to a culture-driven period in which we search for principles. The various biennials in the region may take place in Asia, but the content of the exhibitions are basically a big buffet of their own region. In a lot of places, when they say Asia, they are really talking about themselves. Sometimes they switch to talking about Asia, so what is the difference between the two? It lies in whether or not you are able to deeply explore the principles of your own culture, and if you are, whether or not you are able to use open, principled, relativised methods to transcend yourself. The ability to transcend the self is one of the most important characteristics

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of Asian-ness. So I don’t think the question of being a particular region is that important. The crucial thing is how you do it. ar On the subject of the Third World, you once said that each state’s understanding of the centre of the Third World is different. When we discuss Asia, we face the impulse of different states to establish a world or an Asia in which they are at the centre. In these circumstances, there are many blind spots in how states within Asia relate to and acknowledge each other. Each of us inhabits a specific reality and culture, and we require an operational solution to overcoming these blind spots in our fields of vision. If we can do that, then we can see and understand the regional situations within Asia.

sg To elaborate on that point, I would say that the problem can be identified. In what circumstances should we seek to understand ‘the other’? For example, though I am a Chinese person, I have the desire to understand the Middle East. The blind spot is a problem of motivation, not a problem of knowledge. Where does this motivation come from? We can see that most intellectuals in the Third World today, particularly in the mainstream, have quite complete repositories of European and American knowledge. But they have no interest in Africa, no motivation. They think it is a place that does not produce ideas or principles. This kind of blind spot is the result of the prevailing Western-centric power structure of knowledge and reality. Moreover, Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Image (still), 2011, Super 8 and hd video, 66 min. Courtesy the artist

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whenever a new nation-state is formed, it reproduces this paradigm. So you cannot locate this problem solely in the West. All of the societies of Asia are like this. They put themselves at the centre and actively respond to the demands of the dominant culture. ar I have recently been observing artistic exchanges between China, Japan and South Korea (not including art programmes sponsored by government cultural or diplomatic initiatives). As an observer, I sense that China is the state that least cares about other Asian states. How do you view this issue? sg I think there is some truth to your observation, which is related to the anxiety that has afflicted the entire state since it was established in 1949. In 1958, the national slogan was chao ying gan mei: ‘Surpass England and Catch Up with the United States’. This was because our enemies came from the West, which was also the source of our modernised imagination. Once the state had been established and society began to develop, that is to say, during the reform period that followed the Cultural Revolution, the political modes inherited by the intellectual class were transformed into cultural modes. So you see our leading intellectuals are those who studied in Europe and the United States. Their discourse is essentially an English-based discourse. Their only contribution is either to critique or to reform Europe and the United States. Given this framework, our imagination of international relations in the cultural field essentially runs on a Western track. As a consequence of these circumstances, the present effort to develop an Asian imagination is a nascent one. This fact influences the fine-arts world as well as other fields that overlap with the intellectual world. There is a certain historical logic to our neglect of other Asian states, of our neighbours, but that is not a justification. Now, things are beginning to change. In recent years, curators are always dragging me out to talk about Asia, which has led me to recognise what I just mentioned: cultural people have moved to the front. The artworld has moved to the front. ar Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Revisiting the Educational Turn (How I Tried to Renovate an Art School) by Nicolas Bourriaud

At the dawn of the 2000s, the idea of an ‘educational turn’ in the Learning how to produce such singular thinking suggests folartworld was everywhere. On paper, this evolution seemed irresist- lowing personal paths, often intimate, sometimes even neurotic. ible, logical, even profound. So much so that, back then, curators How to integrate these individual givens into a teaching structure? such as Hou Hanru, Maria Lind, Okwui Enwezor and Ute Meta Bauer It also implies the mastery of a great diversity of techniques, which started to occupy significant positions within art schools. But none in turn raise new theoretical perspectives: an art school should offer lasted too long. Indeed, all returned to their prior activity: curating or the greatest possible spectrum of skills, even if some of these are directing exhibition spaces. Time will tell whether Marta Kuzma, vice- merely touched on by students, since nothing can ever allow us to chancellor of the Royal Institute of Stockholm since 2014, will be the affirm that a technique is definitively obsolete. (Who could have foreexception to this rule: it still seems that instead of being the sites for seen the return of ceramics to exhibitions that took place a few years ambitious projects and educational renewal that they could have ago?) It is, of course, impossible for most schools to make the entire become, art schools are for now (and despite that celebrated ‘educa- range of techniques available to their students, but forming links tional turn’) nothing more than parentheses or temporary homes with external studios and workshops is feasible. In the same way, art for international curators who have managed, in other situations, to schools could further connect themselves to other schools of theoretcreate new contexts and renew the functioning of art institutions. ical knowledge – the autarchy in this area is becoming intolerable. But who among those curators I mentioned ever really had free rein But the most important thing, in these circumstances, is to know what to reinvent the educational and curatorial models of these schools? discipline an art student should pursue, because here old assumpWho might have been able to reform, root and branch, their adminis- tions die hard: the division of teaching along genre lines – painting, trative structures or their recruitment models? Who could have actu- sculpture and multimedia – that still reigns in many schools now ally devised an art school that was as contemporary as the spaces in appears profoundly out of step with the reality of art today. After all, into which of those categories would which its students would show after graduwe place Mike Kelley, Pierre Huyghe or ating? Caught in rigid power structures and It seems to me that a twentyLaure Prouvost? Why should anyone have pressed to conform to the university systems first-century art school should to choose between ‘pathways’ that are no of their respective countries (as well as, in some cases, European norms), art schools longer relevant? endeavour to find a balance haven’t really changed over the past 30 years. Another turning point in the developbetween theory and practice Art, by contrast, has. ment (or lack of it) in art schools was the failure of Manifesta 6 in 2006, which was But it isn’t by renouncing artistic practice in favour of ‘knowledge production’ that we will solve this prob- abruptly and acrimoniously cancelled following disputes about lem: all that does is to defer the problem, while art schools become whether or not certain activities could take place in northern Cyprus, further aligned with the university model, without being able to but had been intended to take the form of a giant art school involving mount a critical examination of the model itself. almost 100 artists. The complexity of the political situation in Cyprus It seems to me that a twenty-first-century art school should endeav- robbed us of what would have been a decisive moment: presenting our to find a balance between theory and practice, the academy and itself as ‘a whole range of possible models for educational instituthe artworld, knowledge and know-how, between the analysis of the tions’, the exhibition-school created by Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton contemporary world and a reflection on art history. It should consti- Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel could have embodied this new relatute a hub of all available knowledge and reinstate that fusion of intel- tionship between exhibition and transmission and could have had lectual disciplines which is so particular to art. Because if a young artist an impact on art schools. really wants to develop a genuinely personal form of thinking, he or Because what is clear is that even if the educational turn has not she cannot simply content themselves with theory while neglecting produced a significant upset in art schools, it has allowed for a change practice, if by practice we mean the process of formalising thinking via in the world of curating and art institutions, introducing processes the use of any available technique. It is a matter of reconnecting the of knowledge-sharing while orienting diverse forms of knowledge two, in a thousand possible ways; and with that in mind, an extremely towards the protocols of education and dissemination. Hundreds individual route should be offered to art students right from the start. of art centres and museums around the world now articulate their Since an art school’s purpose is to create ‘producers of singularities’ programmes around discussion platforms, theory courses or arthistorical study, leading us to conclude that the (whether collectively or as individuals), the facing page Transmission Recréactions et Répétitions, art school no longer has a monopoly on educa‘core’ of the curriculum is necessarily narrower 2015 (installation view, Palais des tion. But what if it was precisely the loss of this than that for other ‘professions’. Beaux-Arts, Paris).Photo: Aurélien Mole

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monopoly that explained the traditional art school’s reticence about wanted to make an art centre of the school, to the detriment of the education that I consider so fundamental.’ This ‘education’ of which opening itself up to the artworld? After having founded the Palais de Tokyo, worked as a professor Chevrier speaks is, of course, his: and more generally, the authoritain Venice and spent three years as a curator at Tate, it seemed to me tive role of the master to dispense ex cathedra pure theoretical knowllogical, if I returned to Paris, to turn my attention to the source of its edge. From this perspective, the art centre cannot, for him, be a space art scene: the École des Beaux-Arts. An art school is, let us not forget, that produces skills useful to students, nor can it be a true ‘vector of a womb. It sets the theoretical tone, valorises practices and know-how, cultural transmission’, but represents a branch of the market, much and organises the foundations of primary information from which too ‘contemporary’ to be honest, because it is not validated by the young artists take their cue. An art school has a discreet but decisive authority of particular narrative. Now, a horizontal art school, open influence on the art scene it feeds. Having known many artists of my to the teaching of artists (who may not be staff), and to the presence generation, and those that followed, from the time when they were of artworks, brings an end to this monopoly over value-production. still students, or very soon after they graduated, it was clear to me that The voice of the master, alone in front of the students, with as its only this initial environment was key. horizon the museum and society in general, constitutes by contrast a At the Palais de Tokyo from 2001, we initiated, with the artist Ange vertical political model, reproducing the old protocols of the French Leccia, a postgraduate programme called Le Pavillon. It was directly university system. integrated into the life of the art centre, and brought together a dozen The old masters of the school knew, nevertheless, what they were young artists from around the world every year. These students-in- resisting in opposing my plans for the Beaux-Arts de Paris, because residence were integrated with the programming, and developed as getting rid of the functional and symbolic servitude of the art school part of the Palais de Tokyo. This school, installed as it was within an to the university was at the heart of it. Their rejection of ‘a school exhibition venue, functioned well for ten years, before becoming a become art centre’ actually marked a fierce negation of the discourse residency programme for young artists. Above and beyond the post- of the curator (who orchestrates polyphonies without fear of dissograduate student context, which had its own particular features, this nance, organises multiplicity and gives a platform to heterogeneous experiment allowed us to investigate the voices) in favour of the historian, who speaks dynamic created by bringing together ‘The school must remain a school,’ the Truth on the history of art by structuring art training (following an initial period its narrative. The increased fluidity of transI was often told: a specific of education elsewhere, in the case of Le mission provoked by the educational turn, Pavillon) with the site of art’s producwhich implicates other models of communiformatting of knowledge tion and dissemination. This organic link cation and puts in question existing models established by the denial of authority, certainly represents a threat. between exhibition, presentation and disof curatorial discourse “The school must remain a school,” I was tribution of work is nevertheless still a persistent and ongoing taboo; it is as if often told: that is to say a specific formatting students are supposed to see themselves as ‘protected’ from an exte- of knowledge established by the denial of curatorial discourse. rior world that their studies are nevertheless supposed to prepare While we criticised the symbolic influence of the academic world them to face. This ideology of autonomy is, in my view, a means of on the study of art, we multiplied the links with faculties in France and internationally. It is not a question of breaking ties with the university preserving pedagogical authority in its most retrograde aspect. When I took over as the head of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, my project model, but to draw gently from it the necessary resources while still consisted of creating a pedagogic synergy between all the elements affirming the singular character of an art school. Let’s not forget that that made up the school: its exhibition spaces, its collections, its since the ‘Bologna Process’ almost 15 years ago, European art schools publishing house and the studios the students worked in, led by an have had to incorporate certain norms imported from the univerartist. It was a return to the source, to the dna of an institution that, sity system: for some, this was a simple matter of realignment. Some, during the nineteenth century, had developed around the presence however, refused this protocol – as did most of the German schools – of artworks within its bounds: a museum of copies was at that time but the price was a certain isolation in relation to academic culture. The permanently on view in the Palais des Études, while exhibitions of Beaux-Arts’ choice was to position itself halfway between the artworld works by Manet and Japanese prints were organised. The school has and the world of academia; but this move closer to the artistic milieu a rich collection comprising thousands of original artworks, and the was quickly trumped up as the ‘arrival of the art market’ in the school. architecture of the school itself constitutes an encyclopaedia of styles The first statement of my successor, Jean-Marc Bustamante, focused and ornamental motifs. The presence of art and artists among the on his commitment to ‘close the school to the market’. One could students was the signature of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, a pedagogic ask how it is possible to keep a school open to the world, and to the project in itself – it was a model that had slowly disappeared over time artworld in particular, while simultaneously excluding the economic infrastructure through which works and knowledge are diffused. and which simply needed to be reinstated. But as it turned out, everybody wanted to keep their particular Doubtless we should ‘close everything off’ in order to better protect components isolated in order maintain their area of authority. One each student from the disastrous influence of our vile era… And yet, the of the professors at the school who persistently opposed this project, ‘market’ was never present at the Beaux-Arts de Paris except for those Jean-François Chevrier, explained his position very honestly in a graduates who had entered into active life. ‘Professional life’ wasn’t recent interview in Le Journal des Arts: ‘Education is the key to every- represented there except for a few annual events to which gallerists, thing, and pedagogy is today more than ever the vector of cultural collectors or institutions were invited. Where, then, did this idea that transmission. That is why I mobilised against Nicolas Bourriaud, who the ‘market’ was going to erupt into education come from? No fact,

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no action can attest to it: we are here in the presence of incantatory thought, which conjures up evil in order to exorcise it with words. My first priority had been to return students to the heart of their school, while developing strong links to the graduates, thanks to a plan of support that is now among the most comprehensive in Europe, comprising a dozen bursaries for production, prize awards and external exhibitions organised by the school. Paralleling the traditional exhibition of exemplary graduates, nominated by a jury of professionals, a counter-exhibition realised by students of Paris iv La Sorbonne (that is to say, by people of the same age) was held for the first time this year. The creation of work groups, the reform of the ‘second cycle’, the creation of a practice-based doctorate, the creation of a café as a project space (it was to open in October this year) and of a web radio, but above all of a policy of active support for student initiatives, formed the bases of a more creative school. It’s this energy – which should rightly be named curatorial – that changes the atmosphere of an art school: a spirit of ongoing dialogue with the students, analogous to that which energises a group exhibition.

At this present time, the autonomy of art education will soon become a major issue; I fought for this autonomy because I don’t believe, when it comes to the education of young artists, in a blind alignment with the university system. I tried to construct a hubschool, a school as the tip of a network, midway between the academy and the international artworld; a school in which administration would be at the service of art. And I am certain that this idea of the school has a future. But I remember too the definition that Christian Boltanski (who was for many years a professor at the Beaux-Arts) gave to his professorial role, citing François Truffaut’s film Baiser Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968), in which Jean-Pierre Léaud joins a private detective agency. The novice asks the advice of an old professional, who gives him the address of restaurant serving the best cassoulet in the neighbourhood. And that’s also the role of the professor of art, admits Boltanski: to point out the place where they make the best cassoulet. ar Translated from the French by Hettie Judah

The Way of the Rabbit – La danse perdue, 2015, performance at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Photo: Laurent Philippe

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Charisma and Causality What if art were a kind of magic? One of the thinkers associated with ‘object-oriented ontology’ argues that we’ve been thinking wrongly about art since the beginning of the Anthropocene by Timothy Morton

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For object-oriented ontology (ooo), art is far from a superficial and observes, an “energy field” that “surrounds” and “penetrates” us, and exclusively human-flavoured region of reality. Whatever human art is, we can interact with it, with healing and destructive consequences. it is telling us something very deep about the structure of how things Marx argues that capital makes tables compute value as if they were are: ‘the structure of how things are’ being a pretty good paraphrase even weirder than the dancing tables of the quasi-religion of spirituof the word ‘ontology’. Indeed, one of the things that art is telling us – alism. And so on – examples of this secret, almost completely untold that we still allow it (as opposed to what we expect from science text- history of modernity are everywhere, once you start to look. books, for instance) to tell us, perhaps – is something profound about The paranormal is what religion was already excluding, religion the very workings of causality itself. ooo thinks of art not as decora- being the way Neolithic society – otherwise known as ‘Axial Age’ tion, but as the fundamental operation of cause and effect. To make or ‘agricultural’ society (agricultural according to models such as an artwork is to interfere directly with the realm of causes and effects. that established in the Fertile Crescent 12,500 years ago) – monopoThinking this way about art is so counterintuitive that we might lised what Weber calls charisma, restricting it to the King, who has consider it absurd or dangerous, even crazy. It appears so because the Batphone to the God or Gods whom he hears ringing in his ears, the timeframe within which we think the official idea – that art is telling him to tell the people what to do, ‘what to do’ never being pretty much decoration exclusive to humans – is so vast compared ‘dismantle agricultural society, which has created patriarchy and to our customary reference frames. We are talking, as I’ll argue later, tyranny in the name of sheer survival, and return to hunter-gathering about a 12,500-year timeframe – roughly the time human agricultural and a less violent, less hierarchical coexistence with nonhuman society has existed – and we have only just started thinking on this beings’. Because that would be absurd. Heaven forbid we stop the temporal scale, thanks to ecological awareness. What ooo is arguing logistical functioning of the world of agriculture, which eventually is very similar to what Aborigines argue: that the world is dreamed gave rise to global warming, which was precisely and ironically what into existence and that causality is a kind of dreaming; which is to say, it was set up to evade in 10,000 bce: the Holocene was when earth a kind of art. Only marginalised people are allowed to say such things started warming, unsettling the hunter-gatherers. But dismantling in our world. At least until ooo showed up. that system would be ridiculous primitivism – right? To begin to get a feel for ooo’s radical conception of art, we will Restructuring or destructuring this logistics, which elsewhere I’ve called agrilogistics, is the one thing that need to go on a short journey. And at the end would end global warming, but it is usually of that journey we will still only have a feel Thinking this way about art considered out-of-bounds, because it imfor it, because my words here are few. And is so counterintuitive that plies accepting a non-‘modern’ view, a view we will have to get there obliquely: for deep we might consider it absurd reasons, there is no way to point directly at established on (although it thinks itself as what I am going to be getting at. So if you a further disenchantment of) now ancient or dangerous, even crazy want to, keep reading and begin to sidle up and obviously violent monotheisms, which to the ooo idea of what art is. We begin our journey in the late nine- in turn find their origin in the privatisation of enchantment in the Neolithic with its ‘civilisation’. We are all still Mesopotamians. teenth century. Max Weber was one of the pioneers who inaugurated the discipline We are Neolithic humans confronting the disaster the Neolithic of sociology over a century ago, but sociology’s structuring principle fantasy of smoothly functioning agricultural logistics has wrought, excludes the foundational concept on which it is based: charisma, a and we want to hold on to the philosophical underpinnings of those compelling energy emanated by certain individuals that fuels less logistics for dear life… hierarchically organised social forms. Weber argued that charismaDespite what they claim, those on the supposed other side of the based societies give way to ‘disenchanted’, bureaucratic societies. But fence – those who appear to oppose modernity, namely the so-called sociology does not see its task as related to exploring disenchantment. deep ecologists and the anarcho-primitivists – are ironically perpetuSociology acts just like the bureaucratic society that Weber argues is its ating agrilogistics and its devastating Nature concept, the idea that birthplace; sociology is part of the logistics of what Weber called ‘the humans and nonhumans are profoundly different, based on needing disenchantment of the world’. In this and other normative thought to categorise human social space as a war against such things as ‘weeds’ modes, it becomes unacceptable to think charisma as an actual force; and ‘pests’. Such needs are intrinsic to agrilogistics, the survival-atcharisma is instead thought as an ideological illusion, borrowed from any-cost strategy that began in the early Holocene and that has given the social structure, or bestowed on an individual. rise to the feedback loops we now recognise only too well via the Sixth Sociology is afraid of its founder’s concept, which was a little scary Mass Extinction Event, namely the fact that, among other things, at the time too, since charisma has to do with forces that many de- 50 percent of the populations of what biology calls animals (as opscribed as supernatural or paranormal. Weber was himself fascinated posed to fungi and viruses, for instance) have been wiped off the face by the paranormal. In general, you can think of modernity – world of earth in the last 50 years, because of anthropogenic global warming. history since the later 1700s – as a profoundly awkward dance of It is too easy to dismantle the philosophical basis of our ‘world’ (aka including and excluding the paranormal. Freud, for instance, devel- ‘civilisation’). Without this basis, that world would collapse. The only oped his theories as a way to bowdlerise the theory of hypnosis, which thing inhibiting us is our habitual investment in that world, visible, was in turn a bowdlerisation of the idea of animal magnetism, a hypo- for instance, in the resistance to wind farms – we like our energy invisthetical force discovered by Franz Mesmer (hence mesmerism) later ible, underground in pipes, so that we can enjoy the view. The very in the eighteenth century. Animal magnetism is mention of changing our energy throughput raises Chris Wainwright, to all intents and purposes identical with ‘The the spectre of the constructedness of our so-called Red Ice (Dislocated Bay, Greenland), Force’ of Star Wars fame: it is, as Obi-Wan Kenobi Nature. Think of the birds the turbines will kill! 2009, c-type print. Courtesy the artist

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(Think of the entire species wiped out by not having the turbines and also means what happens if you visualise the Rothko Chapel even so forth.) Think of the dreams we will be disturbing! We want to be if you aren’t there, even if you have never seen the Rothko Chapel, comfy in our thanatological world. Death is comfy, as Freud observed. perhaps even if you have never actually seen a Rothko painting, The 1970s ecofeminists were correct. We live in a death culture, or a postcard of a Rothko painting. an extinction culture. We might conventionally argue that the charisma of the Rothko Dismantling the underpinnings of agricultural logistics involves painting is bestowed upon it by humans: this would be the acceptable dismantling the ‘metaphysics of presence’, the idea that to exist is to Hegelian way of putting it. We make the King be the King by investing be constantly present. This idea is hardwired into Neolithic social in him. Investing what? Psychic energy – which, if you recall, is a bowdspace – ie, you can feel it in the gigantic empty car parks outside the lerisation of the Force-like animal magnetism. So this is perhaps still a superstore, the big-box houses sprawling in suburban nonplace, the bit suspect. It is as if one is saying, ‘I really do accept that there are only nihilism and murder–suicide of the mass shooters with their social plastic extension lumps out there decorated with accidents, but I’m Darwinist replication of neoliberal paradigms. To exist, according to very keen on the human meaning of things, even though I know, like this, is to be a lump of extended stuff underlying appearances. Reality Justine in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), that this doesn’t really is a plastic, unformatted surface waiting for us (humans) to write what mean anything in a vast mechanistic universe of particles.’ we want on it: ‘Where Do You Want to Go Today?’ (the 1990s Windows What if this attitude were not only masochistic in the extreme, ad); ‘Just Do It’ (Nike); ‘I’m the Decider’ (George Bush); ‘We create reali- but also – incorrect? After all, as Erwin Schrödinger already argued ties’ (Iraq War press conference, 2005). There is the regular flavour of concerning entanglement, nonlocality is the basic feature of our this metaphysics, basic default substance theories found in Aristotle, reality. The one thing you can rely on is that, at the very least, two tiny Spinoza, Descartes and Kant; or in atomism, popular today in reduc- things (an electron, a photon – but now physicists are experimenting tionist scientism (but not actual science); and so on – the metaphysics on scales trillions of times bigger than this, with positive results) can is so default it would be exhausting to list all those who retweet it. be ‘entangled’ such that you can do something to one of them and We contemporary scholars all think we are superior to such the other will react in a complementary way instantly – which is to things, but they shape our physical life, which we happily reproduce, say, faster than light. And this complementary behaviour happens at arbitrary distances. Causality just is magic. and we retweet them in the cooler flavoured upgrades, which speculative realism calls What we are talking about is what But magic is precisely what we have been correlationism, which is the Kantian (and desperately trying to delete. Einstein called ‘spooky action post-Kantian) idea that a thing isn’t real Magic implies the intertwining of at a distance’, by which he meant causality and illusion, otherwise known until it has been formatted by the Subject, History, human economic relations, the in Norse-derived languages as weirdness. quantum entanglement Weird means strange of appearance, and it Will to Power or Dasein… In a way, correlationism is a worse (in the sense of more ecologi- also means having to do with fate. Neolithic ontology wants reality cally destructive) version of the regular substance ontology flavour, not to be weird. Eventually weirdness is confined to Tarot cards and which says that things are extension lumps decorated with accidents vague remarks about synchronicity – an ‘acausal connecting prin(such as colour). Now there aren’t even blue whales – there are only ciple’, as Jung puts it – in other words a model of causality that is nonblue whales when we say there are. And lo and behold, it came to pass – mechanical. Jung developed the concept of synchronicity with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. But we usually only make use of there were no longer any blue whales… Happily, that particular extinction didn’t occur. It didn’t occur synchronicity when we admire seemingly anomalous flashes of coinbecause people became enchanted by recordings of whale sounds cidence, usually in casual conversation (‘Wow, weird synchronicity’). during the mid-1970s. Enchanted. What does it mean? In terms of Getting serious about it – seeing it as the thing that happens all the charisma, it means some of us submitted to an energy field emitted time, while mechanical causation is only a good-enough illusion – is by the sounds of the whales. The fact that this is a wholly unaccept- virtually taboo, if you want to appear smart and sane. able, beyond-the-pale way of describing what happened is a painful What does it mean, though, to entangle illusion and causality? and delicious irony. What it means is that how a thing appears isn’t just an accidental decoBut what if it were actually true? What would the emission of such rative candy on an extension lump. Appearance as such is where causaan energy field imply? It would imply, for a start, that art isn’t just tion lives. Appearance is welded inextricably to what things are, to decorative candy. It would imply what ‘civilised’ philosophy from their essence, but even ‘welded’ is wrong. Appearance and essence are Plato on has been afraid of, the fact that (shock horror) art has an like two different ‘sides’ of a Möbius strip, and so also the ‘same’ side. effect on me over which I am not in control. Art is demonic: it emanates A twisted loop is exactly what weird refers to, etymologically speaking. from some unseen (or even unseeable) beyond, in the sense that I am Unfortunately for the scientistic ideology that dominates our not in charge of it and can’t quite perceive it directly, in front of me, world and the neoliberalism that forces us to behave in scientistic constantly present. A dangerous causative flickering. In other words, ways to ourselves, one another and other lifeforms, the idea that appearmagic. Magic is taboo cause and effect, or unthinkable cause and ance is where causality lives is also just straightforward modern science. David effect: either ridiculous or dangerous or impossible, or some weird Hume’s argument (in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, borrowed-kettle combination of all three. (How can something be 1748) was precisely that when you examine things, what you can’t see impossible and dangerous?) directly is cause and effect. All you have are data, and cause and effect What we are talking about is what Einstein called ‘spooky action are correlations of those data. So that you can’t say, ‘Humans caused at a distance’, by which he meant quantum entanglement, but which global warming’ or ‘Cigarettes cause cancer’ or ‘This bullet you are

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firing at point-blank range at my temple will kill me’. You can say, ‘It is 97 percent likely that…’ – thus opening the door to the deniers, who are in fact modernity deniers, unwilling to let go of the clunky mechanical, visible, constantly present causality that you can point to. Data: things that are given, aka appearances. And Kant underwrote this devastating insight. All we have are data, not because there is nothing, but because there are things, but these things are withdrawn from how we grasp them. Kant’s example: raindrops fall on your head, they are wet, cold, raindroppy. This is raindrop data, not the actual raindrops. But they are raindrops, not gumdrops. And they are raindroppy: their appearance is entangled with exactly what they are. Things are exactly what they are, yet never as they seem. We live in a world of tricksters. We never left the pre-Neolithic. It was all a nightmare that went viral. And we know this, because we have modern science. And this is the world described by objectoriented ontology. Which is why ooo is so great, and the real reason why it comes in for such hostile fear and rage. According to this view, an artwork cannot be reduced to its parts or its materials, nor can it be reduced to its creator’s life, nor to some other context, however defined (the last decade, the current geological era, the economic structure of human society, art discourse, powerknowledge – anything). And art has an actual causal effect. Art just is tampering directly with cause and effect, because art is what cause and effect actually is. Art is charisma, pouring out of anything whatsoever, whether we humans consider it to be alive or sentient or not. So the task of dismantling the aura à la Walter Benjamin, which is the default self-hating mode we have been in since Modernism,

is impossible. Scratch some Marxists, and you will find a Platonist, namely someone who thinks art is a little evil because it has an effect on them, interpreted as an alien, demonic agency that conjures up all sorts of ideas and emotions without our supposed free will getting a look-in. I have not yet been proved wrong in my hypothesis that the more committed you are to Benjamin, the less time you will want to spend in the Rothko Chapel, which is around the corner from where I live. That’s because the Rothko Chapel emits an undeniable, very affecting aura; and because it’s not easily dismissible as ‘only’ art or as (someone else’s) religion space. So far, Benjaminians (roughly a half of those whom I’ve taken there) have needed me to rescue them after a maximum of two minutes. Or there was the musicologist who told me that he only listens to noise music, “because I can’t remember any of it”. Exposure to art should be kept to a minimum, as if it were like nuclear radiation. Such reactions actually say something deep about art, in an upside-down way: art is causal. That’s what’s frightening about it. What we think we hate about kitsch is its appeal, its incomprehensible charisma. How come there are so many of these Gandalf snow globes? Do people actually buy this stuff? Paradoxically those feelings about kitsch are saying something about art: we can’t control it, it’s the enjoyment of the other, it’s enjoyment without us, enjoyment almost as a palpable thing, like a force field. And something about what we think about art. Something not very nice: we are still Platonists at heart. But it doesn’t matter. Art sprays out charismatic causality despite us. And unlike a lot of things in our current world, and within limited parameters (sophistication, taste, cost), we still let it in. ar

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, 2011, dir Lars von Trier. Courtesy Zentropa

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For more on Pablo Holmberg, see overleaf

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Contributors

Timothy Morton

Heman Chong

Contributing Writers

is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, Houston. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (forthcoming), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (forthcoming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology Without Nature (2007), eight other books and 140 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He blogs regularly at ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

is an artist whose conceptually charged investigations into how individuals and communities imagine the future generates a multiplicity of objects, images, installations, situations and texts. He lives and works in Singapore. For this issue he contributes the artworks addressing the subject of power that grace the cover of the magazine and several of the pages inside.

Vincent Bevins, Nicolas Bourriaud, Matthew Collings, Tom Eccles, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Maria Lind, Timothy Morton, Daniel McClean, Laura Oldfield Ford, Mike Watson

Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator and writer. He was director of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 2011 to 2015. In 2010 he headed the studies department at the ministry of culture in France, prior to which he was Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London and adviser for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev. He also founded and codirected the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, between 1999 and 2006.As a curator, he recently organised The Great Acceleration (Taipei Biennial, 2014) and Threads (Kaunas Biennial, Lituania, 2015). His publications include Relational Aesthetics (1998), Postproduction (2002), Radicant (2009) and The Exform, to be published by Verso in 2016.

Vincent Bevins is a foreign correspondent and writer who has been based in São Paulo and London since 2008, covering international politics, culture and society for the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and the Financial Times. He has also lived and worked in Mexico, Germany and Venezuela, but he was born and raised in California.

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 Daniel Arnold, Heman Chong, Pablo Holmberg, Benjamin McMahon, Mark Peckmezian, Matthew Tammaro

Aimee Lin is one of the founding editors of ArtReview Asia. She was born in Shanghai and received her ma in Comparative Literature at Fudan University. A founding editor of the art magazine Leap, where she worked until 2012, she maintains a complex professional identity ranging from journalism, editing, writing and criticism to publication management and the study of visual culture. She is based in Shanghai.

Pablo Holmberg (preceding pages)

“The strip format doesn’t belong to newspapers. It is simply a short format and people should do with it whatever they please.” This call-to-arms from Kioskerman, the pen name of Pablo Holmberg, is precisely what the Internet enabled him to try when he began his weekly webcomics in 2004. Born in Buenos Aires in 1979, Holmberg avoided using the regular, merchandisable characters and undemanding, repetitive formulas that some cartoonists have traditionally relied on to maintain the productivity and public appeal of their daily episodes. The conventional gag-a-day or cliff-hanger narrative of a strip might seem too confining, but in Holmberg’s hands, four square images, clustered two-by-two, relate and resonate with each other to become an underlying rhythm and leitmotif. In their duality and parallelism, the words and pictures in Edén (Eden) (2009) reinforce each other rather than decorate each other. By stretching this apparently simple format to new limits of emotion and depth, Holmberg demonstrates that it offers more than enough space to build up over time into a world of ideas and feelings. Clearly, once he gathered some of his Edén strips into a book, Holmberg’s work took on an

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additional cumulative charge in print. Published in Argentina and subsequently in France, Portugal, Spain and Canada, it was followed in 2013 by Puertas del Edén (Gates of Eden). Augmenting his initial cast of irregulars – the little rabbit-eared king, yellow avatars and assorted animals – came a star, a cloud, the hand of God himself and other natural and unnatural phenomena. Increasingly poetic, spiritual and meditative, Holmberg’s comics also include himself and his wife and newborn son, Teo. “Edén comes from within, from a deep place whose limits don’t coincide with my body. This immersion shows me something, like exploring green lands. Edén reveals me and transforms me.” As a cartoonist, Holmberg becomes a human artist in a search of light, on a quest to find out what comics must do, in the footsteps of giants like Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Frank King, Charles Schulz and other pioneers. Then, almost three years ago, Holmberg found himself expelled from Edén. “Edén was kind of channelling an inner vision,” he says. “I can’t recreate that with my mind. It has to happen. And the very fact that I had that vision is what drove me, gave me a desire.” As that vision faded, Holmberg started to

ArtReview

wonder how long any artist’s strongest inspiration lasts. Ten years at best? Or less? It is evident that plenty of cartoonists are capable of making comics without being driven by vision, as a job to make a living, but to Holmberg, “craft is only a small piece of the cake for me. Vision is almost the whole cake.” In any creative field, true visionaries are rare. Holmberg prefers to call stories by visionaries “‘revealed fiction’, which, despite being labelled fiction, seemed to convey such a tremendous amount of reality that I’m forced to believe this must have appeared to their authors by something else than strictly reason and imagination”. Facing his own creative crisis, he wrote to Chris Oliveros, his mentor, the Canadian cartoonist and until recently the publisher of Montreal-based comic publishing company Drawn & Quarterly. In a letter back, Oliveros’s consoling advice provides the libretto for Don’t Worry, two 12-panel grids illuminated with allegorical imagery and those expressive ‘emanata’ (symbolic marks that radiate out from cartoon characters). It heralds Holmberg’s return to the medium, and his return to the world of Edén, a kind of paradise perhaps within us all, whose gates have opened again. Paul Gravett

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Heman Chong artworks on the cover The Forer Effect, 2008, site-specific wall installation, dimensions and materials variable. Courtesy the artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London on page 120 O$P$, 2015, site-specific wall installation, dimensions and materials variable. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

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

on page 151 A Short Story About Money And Fathers ( for celr) (detail), 2012, 14 c-type prints, 20 × 25 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London on page 155 Blur Queen, 2015, c-type print, 46 × 61 cm. Courtesy the artist and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong on page 167 Money / Martin Amis, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 46 × 61 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and fost Gallery, Singapore

November 2015

Photo credits on pages 125, 139, 143–4, 147 photography by Benjamin McMahon. Photograph of Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi with thanks to the Whitechapel Gallery, London on pages 126, 129, 156 photography by Daniel Arnold on pages 132, 140, 158–9 photography by Mark Peckmezian on pages 122, 135, 137 photography by Matthew Tammaro on page 198 photography by Mikael Gregorsky Text credits Phrases on pages 47 and 171 come from Techradar.com’s guide to the top ten mobile phones Craic&Divilment

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Off the Record November 2015 “Scrap the PowerPoint, Gallery Girl. All the galleries do PowerPoint. It doesn’t cut the mustard with the secret committee of movers and shakers who decide the ArtReview Power 100. This secret cabal, who are entrusted with the artworld’s darkest secrets, hopes and desires, need more!” I delete the PowerPoint presentation that I’ve been working on for the last week, ‘Bernard Black Gallery: Global/Viral/Phenomenal!’ “So what are we going to do if you don’t lobby them with a PowerPoint? I mean, if it’s good enough for Emmanuel…” “Stop! We’re going to do a Prezi! Unlike traditional software packages, Prezi doesn’t use a slide-based approach but instead lets you build presentations on a large whiteboardlike workspace.” I slam shut my Lenovo Yoga laptop, then unroll and throw my Missoni mohair-blend fingerless gloves on top of it. “Look, Bernie, even the Prezi isn’t going to get us on this list. The whole thing’s a stitch-up. Iwan one year, David the next, Iwan another and then a funny Asian dude to mix things up a bit.” “That’s no way to talk about Hans Ulrich.” “Even Gavin Brown is slumming it outside the top 20 – what hope do we really have?” “But we’re opening a huge new space in Gillman Barracks to go with the mothership here in Ealing. Believe me, when Crossrail opens, collectors will be beating a path to our door straight from Heathrow.” I shake my finger at him. He’s angry.

“This is defeatism! What ArtReview is looking for are gallerists like me, who aren’t just pushing the envelope; we’re stuffing our tumescent girth into a Smythson ruby envelope box clutch and calling dhl! Who else has the foresight to locate in Ealing? It’s like when Larry moved into that backstreet near Pentonville Road and singlehandedly transformed the area into the bleak, loveless slice of arterial roads it is today! Who else would take 100sqm stands at both Art Stage Singapore and the India Art Fair in consecutive weeks?” “Take off your jumper!” I bark at him. Bernie looks awkward. “But I thought you told me we weren’t going to do this any more, after, you know, it went a bit weird in the Ku bar after the Arcadia Missa vs Sunday Painter party during Frieze week. I still get flashbacks of Will Jarvis doing that thing. I mean, what does polysexual even mean?” “Shut up, never mention that evening again, take off your jumper and put this over you instead.” I throw him a grey woollen blanket. Then I take off my Gucci double-breasted appliquéd wool jacket, grab another blanket from underneath my desk and throw it over my shoulder. “These, Bernie, are blankets as worn by Sir Anish Kapoor and Ai Weiwei on the almost unbearably moving walk that they did in sympathy, empathy and solidarity with the world’s refugees. That’s real greatness, real power. Forget the Power 100. These artists allied themselves with the powerless by walking all the way from the Royal Academy, across the whole land, up hill and down valley, to somewhere only known as Stratford…” “Where the great bard Shakespeare himself was born?” “Not quite. The one that’s just past Hackney, where Sir Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit is. Perhaps the great duo was previewing the High Tea that is available at the Orbit on select Sundays for just £30. Anyhow, look: by recreating the walk, we can join the refugees. The power of the multitude! The power to bring real change! The power of the networked dispossessed! As the Fugees once sang, ‘I play my enemies like a game of chess!’” Bernie leaps up. “Let’s go, Gallery Girl! You’re right! Screw ArtReview and their so-called Power 100. What does it all mean? After all, if Sir Anish isn’t in it, even after Dirty Corner-gate, it must mean that they are not on the side of us refugees but, like Putin, will get into bed with anyone!” But just as Bernie is about to stride out, he stops and turns to me. “Hold on, Gallery Girl, we’re in Ealing. That would mean, like, seven extra miles or something.” He looks down at his Rick Owens drop-crotch wool-blend trousers. “I’m not sure the crotch on these strides is made for such a long walk…” “Good point,” I reply. I mull it over for a moment. “Wait! We can finish roughly where the great duo started! It will be a mirror image of their walk, like Richard Long has got hold of it and done something kooky!” “Great idea, Gallery Girl, but where?” I think for a moment and do a quick mental calculation. “Cecconi’s!” And with that, our blankets aloft, we begin our walk for the dispossessed, refugees for Sir Anish, for Ai and for true power! Gallery Girl

4.10.2015 – 28.02.2016

Ph. Stephen white, Courtesy whitechapel Gallery

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