ArtReview November 2021 by ArtReview

Standing proud since 1949

Renzo Martens Shirin Neshat Haneda Sumiko Rosa Aiello Lynda Benglis

Shen Chen

16.10 - 25.12.2021

217_AR.indd 217

Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong www.axel-vervoordt.com

15/10/2021 12:22

Christopher Williams

David Zwirner

november 27 2021–january 22 2022

108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris

standard pose

210_AR.indd 1 Williams_Artreview_01.indd 1

08/10/2021 07.10.21 17:59 18:44

Marina Perez Simão Sifang Art Museum Nanjing, China 5/11 2021 – 13/3 2022 Paulo Nazareth 34th Bienal de São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil 4/9 – 5/12 2021

Mend e s Wood DM São Paulo | New York | Brussels + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm

Otobong Nkanga Kunsthaus Bregenz Bregenz, Austria 23/10 2021 – 9/1 2022 Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Turin, Italy 25/9 2021 – 30/1 2022 Lucas Arruda Fundação Iberê Porto Alegre, Brazil 2/10 2021 – 16/1 2022 Art Encounters Biennial 2021 Timișoara, Romania 1/10 – 7/11 2021

Paulo Nazareth Sonia Gomes Antonio Obá Instituto Moreira Salles São Paulo, Brazil 25/9 2021 – 30/1 2022 Antonio Obá X Museum Beijing, China 11/11 2021 – 13/3 2022 Heidi Bucher Haus der Kunst Munich, Germany 17/9 2021 – 13/2 2022 Paulo Nimer Pjota Power Station Dallas, USA 22/10 2021 – 2/1 2022 Rosana Paulino MFA Houston Houston, USA 24/10 2021 – 23/1 2022

Image: Marina Perez Simão, 2021

214_AR.indd 214

14/10/2021 10:18

007_AR.indd 7

20/10/2021 10:10

MARK TANSEY Gagosian New York 212_AR.indd 1

08/10/2021 18:00

ArtReview vol 73 no 7 November 2021

All together now In this issue ArtReview takes a look at the social economies of the artworld. J.J. Charlesworth examines the sometimes-controversial work of Renzo Martens and the Dutch artist’s treatment of the exploitation of suffering in relation to Africa and Europe, and the relationship of extraction between Western media systems and their subjects (it’s for you to judge, of course, whether or not ArtReview falls into that – it tries not to, of course, but as a great writer once said, trying is lying). Martens’s broader project is to place the economics of the artworld in the context of the economics of the ‘real’ world, or cultural consumption in the context of primary commodity consumption. It’s a critical take on the operations of critical art, cultural capital and the wealth that funds the two. A different take on similar issues of economics in both the art and wider worlds occurs in Rosa Aiello’s videos and installations. Chris Fite-Wassilak traces works that explore the worlds of freelance and precarious work, so prevalent in the artworld, and the effects that they have on workers’ ideas of self and wellbeing. If that is very much an issue of the present, then Ren Scateni introduces the ways in which the much-overlooked pioneering documentary filmmaker Haneda Sumiko tackled issues of gender stereotyping and the not so gradual erosion of rural life in postwar Japan, subtly inserting these wider issues into works ostensibly focused on recording more mundane and quotidian activities, in times gone by.

Thought

009-010_AR.indd 9

21/10/2021 15:00

Elsewhere, Jo Applin catches up with Lynda Benglis, whose work, the artist asserts, is always about transformation and an attempt to give abstract ideas form. As is the case with Martens’s work, some of Benglis’s early productions (famously a 1974 spread for Artforum featuring the artist naked, oiled and clutching a dildo) split opinion, with critics unable, in this case, to tell if the work was feminist or attention-seeking in its purpose. The erotics of Benglis’s output, Applin concludes, are just as present in her work today. If a little more subtle: a flirtation between thought and feeling, between abstract concepts and the handmade. But what happens when your own identity becomes something of an abstract concept? It’s a question Fi Churchman explores while talking to American-Iranian artist Shirin Neshat about her latest body of work. And yes, one of the answers might well be to set out and create a new body of art. Meanwhile, Catherine Balston takes a look at an intertwining of art and psychiatry in a former asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro; artist Aaron Angell explores two examples of design and cosmology in a pair of London houses (and comes up with a new design movement while he’s at it); and Martin Herbert wonders why we encourage so many young artists to become tribute acts. It’s all, in the end, an exploration of our interconnectedness and more importantly of how our actions impact on others. ArtReview

Feeling

ArtReview.Magazine

artreview_magazine

@ArtReview_

ARAsia

Sign up to our newsletter at artreview.com/subscribe and be the first to receive details of our upcoming events and the latest art news

009-010_AR.indd 10

21/10/2021 15:01

The Painter, Fig. 1, 2021, 8' 2 ⁷⁄16" × 8' 4 ⅜" × 23 ⅝", overall installation dimensions © Elmgreen & Dragset 208-209_AR.indd 1 211006_ElmgreenDragset_ArtReview_Nov.indd 1

Elmgreen & Dragset The Nervous System

New York pacegallery.com

07/10/2021 17:26 10/6/21 9:39 AM

012_AR.indd 12

21/10/2021 16:55

213_AR.indd 1

08/10/2021 18:00

CMY

207_AR.indd 1

06/10/2021 14:01

219_AR.indd 219

18/10/2021 10:39

215_AR.indd 215

14/10/2021 13:54

Art Observed

The Interview Tarek Atoui by Ross Simonini 24 Bispo do Rosário’s Psychiatric Ward by Catherine Balston 32

The Materials Taste by Aaron Angell 34 Tribute Acts by Martin Herbert 36

page 34 Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House, London (with a representation of the family of four through the repeated ‘Jencksiana’ motif around windows and terraces)

017-020_AR.indd 17

21/10/2021 16:41

Art Featured

Renzo Martens by J.J. Charlesworth 40

Rosa Aiello by Chris Fite-Wassilak 60

Lynda Benglis by Jo Applin 48

Haneda Sumiko by Ren Scateni 66

Shirin Neshat interviewed by Fi Churchman 54

page 60 Rosa Aiello, Hallway Offering, 2021, c-type print, 15 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

017-020_AR.indd 18

21/10/2021 16:41

Trotskyky Mountain, 2021 © Qiu Xiaofei 208-209_AR.indd 2 211007_QiuXiaofei_ArtReview_Nov.indd 1

Qiu Xiaofei Divination New York pacegallery.com

07/10/2021 17:30 10/7/21 9:53 AM

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 74 Mixing It Up, by David Trigg Flint Jamison, by Digby Warde-Aldam nftism: No Fear in Trying, by J.J. Charlesworth Michele Rizzo, by Emily May 7th Athens Biennale, by Ben Eastham Berlin Atonal, by Martin Herbert Elliott Hundley, by Evan Moffitt Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, by Gwen Burlington Alan Turner, by Martin Herbert Gus Van Sant, by Justin Jaeckle Frank Moore, by Benoît Loiseau Jota, by Oliver Basciano Crip Time, by Emily McDermott dc Open, by Francesco Tenaglia Danh Vo, by Ana Vukadin The Things We Make, by Gaby Cepeda Muhanned Cader, by Nadine Khalil

Where at Home: Paint or Die, by Jochen Hiltmann, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Names for Light: A Family History, by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, reviewed by Adeline Chia Stay Woke, Kids!, by Kazvare Knox, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, by Laura Raicovich, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Dancer: A Biography for Philippa Cullen, by Evelyn Juers, reviewed by Naomi Riddle Walk on the Water, edited by Marc-Olivier Wahler, reviewed by Nirmala Devi aftertaste 110

page 74 Lubaina Himid, The Captain and The Mate, 2017–18, acrylic on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. © the artist (2021). Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London

017-020_AR.indd 20

21/10/2021 16:41

203_AR.indd 1

06/10/2021 13:59

222_AR.indd 222

19/10/2021 11:03

Art Observed

Distrust what seems most likely 23

023_AR.indd 23

12/10/2021 14:42

Tarek Atoui performing at the opening of his exhibition Cycles in 11, 2020, Sharjah Art Foundation, Dubai. © Sharjah Art Foundation, Dubai

024_AR.indd 24

ArtReview

14/10/2021 15:31

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Tarek Atoui

“I want sound to be objectified in a certain way”

Every so often, a composer, seeking total musical freedom, breaks down the materials of music itself. So they build their own instruments, from scratch. Exponents have included Harry Partch, Daphne Oram, Pat Metheny, Björk and the Boredoms, to name a few. Tarek Atoui is a visual artist working on the outskirts of this rarefied group of innovators. He has built a knot of glass tubes into which he blows across pools of water to vary the pitch. He plays a turntable covered in sand with an animal horn and a bundle of herbs. His instruments are objects of sculptural beauty, activated through touch and breath and motors.

For the Beirut-born Atoui, though, these instruments are only one element of a controlled situation of organised sound – others include place and history, which he researches through travel, and the curating of his performers, who are often nonmusicians. His ongoing piece within (2012–), for example, is an improvised performance by deaf people, who play instruments designed to emphasise the haptic qualities of musicianship, rather than aural ones. The sound of Atoui’s performances is richly textural, and often resists conventional musicality. His 2019 exhibition The Wave, at Okayama

November 2021

024_AR.indd 25

Art Summit, was a collection of many of his instruments playing automatically, and together they produced a metallic flutter of clicks, teeming with skittering creatures. Other works approach abrasive noise, free improvisation and drone. When performing, Atoui often appears to be lost in an emotional trance, twisting his face like a blues guitarist as he taps a stone with a mallet or explores a knob on a wooden box. Atoui and I spoke in the autumn of 2021. He and I discussed his innovative methods of listening to music and the challenges of being a musician in the ecosystem of contemporary art.

14/10/2021 15:31

Acoustic Behaviours

inside an abstract piece of software on the computer, now it’s a motor, or a sculpture.

ross simonini Did you begin as a musician or as a visual artist?

rs When you’re making instruments, what is your starting point?

tarek atoui The starting point was a musical one. Even today, I consider myself to be always doing composition.

ta At this point, it tends to start more and more from the organic materials themselves, and from thinking of ways of extracting sound or broadcasting sound through these materials. And then the electronics come at play when needed, by exploring the properties of materials and their acoustics, resonances and acoustic behaviours.

rs But you don’t release much music in the form of albums. ta I have released very few things. Bits and pieces of things here and there, besides a record release in 2006. And this characterises a bit like my situation and who I am and what I do. rs You’ve mentioned John Cage as an important early influence. How did you start with music? ta My interest in music came at eighteen with electronic music, new music, experimental music and noise music. This led me to electroacoustic music and the work of composers such as [Karlheinz] Stockhausen and Cage and many of his peers and colleagues of that time. At the same I was discovering improvised music. rs Do you still consider your music to be electronic? ta Yes, totally. And when I also say it’s all composition, this is one aspect of what I mean. What I do today is, I still use the computer and the ideas of sequencing and managing time and events, but instead of being applied

rs Working in this way, have you come to any sort of perennial truths about the relationship between visuals and sounds? I’m thinking for example of the Bouba/kiki effect, and how people around the world have similar visual associations for the words ‘Kiki’ and ‘Bouba’. ta No, not really, but something I’m now deeply convinced of is the capacity of our brains to structure and make sense of how we receive and interact with sound. You see, whether we are a trained listener or somebody who listens to abstract noise music, we are both capable of listening in the same way. And that’s a nice starting point for me to create listening conditions. rs What kind of conditions? ta Like the condition of proximity, of being able to be close to the source of sound, to witness

the mechanism. To see the process of sound happening. Like a piece of ceramic being struck by a bouncing wooden marble. Or two branches rubbing against a rough metallic surface which is amplified with contact microphones. rs Is this why you don’t release much audio on its own, because you want the sound and visuals to be married? ta Exactly. It’s not just about making it into a record and like having people be able to experience it in stereo. I want sound to be objectified in a certain way, in a certain sense, or offering people a different duration – where you can spend hours listening to something, not just like 20 minutes.

All about the source rs Do you enjoy recorded music? ta I also like the abstraction of the source of the sound. I like field recordings, I like found footage. I like listening without knowing where it came from. But I have to also question the space in which I am listening to the sound system, and the sound terminal through which I am listening. rs Right. It’s like laptop speakers – we consider them low quality now, but in 50 years we’ll remember that sound nostalgically.

within, 2016, performance at Sentralbadet, Bergen. Photo: Thor Brodreskift

024_AR.indd 26

ArtReview

19/10/2021 16:34

ta Yes. But what is poor quality and what is good quality? That’s relative, in a certain way. Should all sounds have the same qualities? As a composer, it’s very nice to be able to navigate between ultracompressed, ultramodern, powerful sound and the old, degraded sound of the wax cylinder, one of the earliest forms of sound recording. I find it great to have cheap speakers along with supergood speakers. This palette is supergood. rs Each speaker is its own kind of instrument. ta They’re really identities. You can sometimes buy cheap amplifiers that are very loud and harsh and barky, and sometimes those are amazing. rs How do you listen to other people’s music? ta I have a situation now – I have been listening to all the records that my musician friends gave me after their gigs during the last five years. I have 60 records and I’m listening to these with a turntable plugged into a transducer connected to a metal bucket in which water is dripping. This is the left channel. And the right channel is sending the sound to an underwater speaker inside a glass box. rs How does it sound?

ta Inside the glass is very resonant. Sound underwater travels superfast. So it bounces very harshly and quickly against the glass. You are in a very strange acoustic space when you listen through something like this.

ta Yes, you see, this approach has its limits. So it’s not that type of mastery. I think I would like to master a more general way of listening. This is as important as learning one instrument.

rs Do you also listen to music casually, through your earbuds and a phone?

rs Do you consider tuning systems when you’re making instruments?

ta Yes.

ta Sometimes, but that’s where I regret not having studied music earlier. I tried to study solfège and musical notation and acoustic instruments, like the clarinet, but I realised it’s going to be a lot of work. So I studied electroacoustic music and programming and film recording, and sound editing. And I knew that this kind of production is an instrument that I could learn better with focus. I think now we have enough tools and history behind us to be able to consider traditional musicianship as an additional quality a musician has, but it’s not the only, fundamental quality anymore. I think people should not be so concerned about this. This is not what makes great musicians.

rs So you’re not resistant to that kind of listening? ta No, on the contrary, I find it fun. I just also find it fun listening inside the water tank. If you don’t like what you’re listening to, or you want to play with it, you can just add more water or subtract some, or you can blow bubbles into the water. You can play with disturbing this aquatic environment, and it makes listening playful. rs How do you start making instruments? ta I came into instrument-making from a digital space, from doing computer programming, then I shifted this knowledge to circuit boards and diy electronics. That’s how I started building my first instrument, and then I started working with other people who do other types of instruments, whether strings or wind. So I went backwards, in way. rs With your own instruments, you’re always a novice. You’re not dedicating 30 years to mastering the harp, for instance.

Finding unity rs As someone working with improvisation, do you find that you’re searching for a certain feeling when you’re making your music?

The Wave, 2019 (installation view, Okayama Art Summit, 2019). Photo: Ola Rindal

November 2021

024_AR.indd 27

19/10/2021 16:27

024_AR.indd 28

14/10/2021 15:36

024_AR.indd 29

14/10/2021 15:36

above Tarek Atoui, studio view preceding pages within, 2012– (performance view, Sentralbadet, Bergen, 2016). Photo: Thor Brodreskift

024_AR.indd 30

ArtReview

14/10/2021 15:36

ta Yes, when a unity happens between the body, the sound and the instrument. When everything seems to be in conversation with the space and with the people. But what you learn with time is not to force this feeling, and not to think that it comes from any situation where you’re in full confidence. rs Have you found that working within contemporary art contexts changes the nature of musical performance? ta It allows me to go to different places. It has put me in situations that were uncomfortable and difficult, but at the same time liberating. It invited me to rethink the way I was building my machines and responding to different contexts that the artworld offered, like working outdoors, or in museums where the acoustics would not be perfect or where people’s attention was not like a concert situation. And of course, someone’s first reaction could be to say, ok, this is not a good way to perform, and actually yes, it is not a good place to transpose the musical discourse, but there is definitely something you can do with it and things you can learn from it. rs Art seems not to have decided on a correct set of parameters and musical systems in the way that the music world has. ta Yeah. But there are parts of the world where it’s the same institutions doing the music and the arts, and there is not much cultural diversity.

But I like these situations – where the musicians, artists and filmmakers are all in dialogue with each other. rs Can you discuss any particular art context for performing? ta In 2009 I was commissioned to do a performance in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. It was supposed be in a closed courtyard, and there were so many people outside, unable to get in. But at the last minute it didn’t feel right. Why would it be in a courtyard, in a closed space, where you could still hear the music from outside? And so we decided to play outside. And then it became for me a very nice, memorable moment. The audience mixed and merged with people in the street and it felt like a real opening was happening in the city. rs We think of music as isolated artform, to be watched and heard in a concert hall, but traditionally it was woven into ritual and ceremony and daily life. ta Yes. I did a performance at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2015, and for this we put nine huge Meyer Sound subwoofers inside the building. These were very resonant in the building. People could view the performance from different levels in different floors. It lasted an hour and a half, but it was nice to see that people were not even looking at the performers. They could listen to these very low-end vibrations through the wood, through the materials of the architecture.

At that moment, the building and these different people all came together at once. rs Do you test the acoustics in buildings where you work? ta No. To test and predict the behaviour of nine subwoofers inside a four-storey nineteenthcentury building requires a large budget. rs You seem to have a more punk approach to the situation. ta Yeah, it feels right. For me, I’m always considering where to spend effort and where not to spend effort. I don’t want to worry about a lot about calculations and validating them. rs Do you think you’re moving towards the Cagean philosophy in which all sound is music? ta Well, no. Of course, all sound can be music, depending on how you want to use it and work with it. But sound can be so many things. It can be a source of energy. It can be a source of emotion to be manipulated. It can be other things besides being music, and it’s nice to be manipulated. The Whisperers, a solo exhibition by Tarek Atoui, is on view at Chantal Crousel, Paris, through 20 November Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

within, 2012– (performance view, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, 2017). Photo: Florian Kleinefenn all images Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

November 2021

024_AR.indd 31

14/10/2021 15:37

The sound of trumpet toots and the bass of a surdo drum echo through this small corner of the world’s largest urban forest, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the city that grew around it. The music is coming from a carnival rehearsal session at the Polo Experimental, a squat concrete block that hosts people with various issues relating to mental health who visit daily to engage in all manner of creative pursuits. Polo is run by the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum (mbrac), five minutes’ walk away. The museum houses the archive of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, a Brazilian so-called outsider artist who died in 1989. At the Polo Experimental the final touches are also being made to the costumes, puppets, lyrics and samba music that will come together in the museum’s own carnival bloco – a street party – that will process through the nearby streets during Carnival in February next year, in a riot of colour, crossdressing and cathartic hedonism. In another room, an embroidery workshop is underway. In a third, mosaics are being pieced together to be sold in the museum shop. There is also an atelier, known as Atelier Gaia, where ten artists – who are all supported by Rio’s municipal mental-health service – work independently on their own art projects. Sculptures and paintings fill every inch of the atelier walls and shelves, while the interior

Relational Aesthetics

A former asylum on the outskirts of Rio is generating experimental artworks, new forms of collectivism and, of course, a carnival, reports Catherine Balston

above Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 1943. Photo: Jean Manzon

032_AR.indd 32

courtyards are scattered with discarded toys and other found objects awaiting transformation. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Bispo do Rosário spent 49 years, on and off, living in Rio’s psychiatric institutions. During that time he trawled local streets and asylum buildings, collecting pieces of scrap-metal and wood, cardboard, buttons, wheels, cassette tapes, combs, boots, flip flops… thousands of objects that he then organised and classified – a cataloguing of daily life that he believed was his divine mission – with the aim of constructing a new world without misery, illness or suffering. In the three decades since his death, Bispo do Rosário’s collections, as well as his sculptures and intricate embroidery, have been exhibited in London and New York, at the Venice and São Paulo biennials, and at some of Brazil’s most prestigious art institutions. Born in 1909, in Sergipe, northeastern Brazil, Bispo do Rosário joined the navy as an adolescent in 1925. There, he trained as a boxer and went on to box professionally until an injury in 1936 left him lame. Two years later, working as a handyman in Rio de Janeiro and living with his employers, he had a divine revelation, presenting himself to monks at São Bento Monastery as being sent to judge the living and dead. From there, he was swiftly taken into psychiatric care. His most famous work, a ceremonial cloak, is rich in colour and adorned with curtain tiebacks. The act of wearing the cloak was part of the artwork, a physical embodiment of the symbols embroidered on it. Bispo do Rosário’s intention was to wear it on Judgment Day in order to be recognised by God, and to take with him the hundreds of women whose names he’d embroidered on the cloak. His Grande Veleiro (large sailboat) is another iconic artwork; a 158cm-long model boat with masts and embroidered sails – a throwback to his teenage years at sea. mbrac occupies one of the dozens of buildings at Colônia Juliano Moreira, the asylum in which Bispo do Rosário spent most of his time in psychiatric care. Originally a farm, the buildings were converted to become the Jacarepaguá Colônia de Psicopatas-Homens (Male Psychopaths Colony) in 1924 before being renamed after the pioneering psychiatrist Juliano Moreira. In 1924 it was a long way from Rio’s city centre, and deliberately so – a place to deposit society’s misfits. At its peak the colony housed 5,000 patients. There are now less than 200 in residence, and the government plans to scrap psychiatric inpatient care altogether in favour of community-based care, as part of Brazil’s mental-health reform programme. The remaining abandoned buildings are slowly being reclaimed by the forest or occupied

ArtReview

14/10/2021 17:29

by low-income families as the city’s poor suburbs encroach ever closer. Despite the colony’s decline, and Bispo do Rosário’s posthumous rise to fame, mbrac has resisted becoming a relic, instead a beacon of vitality and bringing life to the local community through art. Workshops, exhibitions, art residencies and performances all bring people from the local community and further afield to visit the museum and the nearby Polo Experimental. Arte Ponto Vital, an exhibition on show during my visit, traces a panorama of the art produced by patients at Colônia Juliano Moreira, from its dark asylum days to the present. The improvement in the residents’ lives is often clear in the work. Previously the patients were taught art, and their work reflected this ‘conditioning’, whereas at Atelier Gaia there is very little direction from the curators. Early paintings by Patricia Ruth are more abstract and muted than the colourful, expressive work she has been free to create since joining the atelier. “These are all things that I’ve seen in my head, so many beautiful things,” she tells me of the rows of brightly coloured houses that fill her most recent paintings. Arlindo Oliveira’s humorous mixed-media sculptures, figures with smiling faces and hands thrown up in childlike joy, contrast with the video of a darker performance piece in which he reenacts a memory from a period when he was incarcerated alongside Bispo do Rosário in a nearby block for violent men. Ruth and Oliveira were founding members of Atelier Gaia, back in the early 1990s, and both

also experienced the ordeal of being institutionalised as teenagers, living at Colônia Juliano Moreira throughout the 70s and 80s. Although art has brought them purpose and healing, the atelier was not set up as a space for the kinds of art therapy first introduced to Brazil in the early twentieth century, in which doctors psychoanalysed their patients’ artworks as an insight into their emotions and unconscious. Instead, the professionals working alongside the artists at Atelier Gaia are curators, people from the world of art rather than of psychiatry. “It’s a place for free expression,” says museum and Atelier Gaia curator Ricardo Resende. “The artists’ work in the atelier is to think, to create. Psychiatrists and psychologists are always interested in visiting and observing what is developed and how the artistic process affects them, but there are no doctors accompanying their work.” At Polo Experimental, Elihas di Jorge introduced me to some of the puppets he’d made. The impish twinkle in his eye made me wonder which end of the sanity spectrum he was on, a question I would never ask but that he could tell I was wondering. “That’s the fun thing about being here!” he said, as he grabbed a buxom brunette called Elvira, and twirled her lifesize body round the room. “The idea is that you don’t know who is who, there’s no distinction here between psychotics and neurotics. Everyone mixes together – it’s a universe of creativity, imagination and playfulness.”

this page, from top Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Distroey – Rio Grande do Norte, undated, mixed media, dimensions variable; Atelier Gaia, Polo Experimental, Rio de Janeiro

November 2021

032_AR.indd 33

15/10/2021 17:11

How rank this ease of lotus-land I feel death in its dreaming shell. Catullus, ‘Bid me to Live’ This month, two London homes opened their doors to the public for very different reasons. Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House (Holland Park, built 1978–2019) and Ron Hitchins’s No 43 Malvern Road (Hackney, built 1955–2019). Jencks died in 2019, and his postmodernist gesamtkunstwerk – Jencks is associated primarily with theorising postmodernism – opens with Grade-I-listed status and a new institution established with the aim of reminding visitors the learned meanings behind every surface of this cultural theorist, landscape designer and architectural historian’s project. It feels important that although part of the interior has been turned into a museum, the majority remains relatively untouched – allowing visitors to witness the aesthetic domestic programme enforced on Jencks’s family (during my tour, I heard Lily Jencks, Charles’s daughter, recall how she was banned as a teenager from hanging posters on her bedroom wall). The interior design was a collaborative work created with an array of artist and designer peers, among them Terry Farrell, who led on the architecture, Piers Gough, Michael Graves and ceramicist Carol McNicoll. Cosmic House is knotted with symbolism, in-jokes and ironic transgressions, and designed, essentially, around the theme of an all-encompassing cosmogonic journey: visitors ascend from a ‘Black Hole’ in the hallway – mosaicked by Eduardo Paolozzi – and up the ‘Solar Stair’, and similarly spacey thinking pervades the rest of the house. Yet this ideal for living is carried off with relative economy: the most surprising aspect of Cosmic House is how

034-035_AR.indd 34

Postmodernesque

Simultaneous London design showcases help Aaron Angell put a name to a language without meaning

shonky much of it is up close, with most of the physical structure being made from spongepainted mdf. The most amusing culprit is the ‘Indian Summer’ kitchen, a sunkissed Jane Asher daydream and veritable sermon on naffness. The ‘Foursquare’ master bedroom is more successful, where a jigsaw has been used to carve what feels like a miniature cityscape of gleaming white skyscrapers – but is in fact a series of freestanding bedside shelving units – both heavy and light at the same time despite their towering scale. Still, it is remarkable how unimportant the actual structure of the interior appears once one switches to viewing it as less a home (though of course it was) and more an elaborate teaching tool, as well as an arena for ideas, failures and successes. Placing formal over material quality in the starkest sense, it is like a series of interlocking stage sets best viewed at a distance, only ever supposed to convey an atmosphere rather than embodying it. It is curious that Cosmic House should open now, finding itself, in its painted staginess, so unfashionably out of step with an era in which interior design seems obsessed with supposedly meaningful raw materials, patronising handmade bucolicism, a platitudinous cult of curating and a consensus eclecticism resulting in a near complete absence of real conversation. Cosmic House heroises a cheap commercial material to symbolic and complex ends. On the other hand, however, the house I visited at 43 Malvern Road seems to privilege that same fetishism of ‘material’ per se, at the expense of any meaning whatsoever. No 43 opens, for one month only, as something somehow more chimeric than Jencks’s densest machinations. Ron Hitchins was

ArtReview

21/10/2021 15:55

a self-taught artist, ceramicist, flamenco dancer, onetime Ken Russell collaborator and lifelong East Londoner who spent nearly 70 years slowly accreting his home into a London Fields Merzbau. Heavily ornamented with ceramic and fibreglass reliefs, this Victorian terrace was transformed by Hitchins into a midcentury interior that dramatised and reacted to the artist’s passions (one upstairs room contains a tiny mirrored dance-studio, positioned so as to look out over the garden once busy with Hitchins’s Hepworth-esque sculptures). The house has now been bought by one half of newly founded interior design duo Atelier lk, who, on finding most of Hitchins’s works and fixtures removed (by friends, members of the London flamenco community and the v&a), have organised an exhibition of mostly young designers and craftspeople, as well as some storied modernists, who, they say, respond to the history of the house and Hitchins’s work. It also presumably acts as a launch event for the lk brand. Yet what does a Charlotte Perriand daybed have to do with crypto-mingei furniture (Rooms Studio) and swathes of biomorphic ceramics (Dea Domus)? What does any of this have to do with this building? The experience of Jencks’s house was one of noisy but thoughtful pantomime – like being toured past a pageant of increasingly theatrical historical phantoms jostling for influence and a scrap of bare stucco to decorate – but at least eventually agreeing on a ridiculous conclusion to the stratagem. Atelier lk’s intervention is like walking into a room with 20 radios all tuned to different stations. In one room, something I surmise is a bit of old cider press stands next to a Noguchi lampshade. It is a project for a lifestyle so exquisitely captive to the current oblivious turn in interior design – a ‘this-old-thing?’ ontology of conspicuous rustication and swooning materialism. Marble, wood and ceramic are important because they are marble, wood and ceramic. The show itself has no available list of works or plan, online or off, and one must glean details by trawling Atelier lk’s Instagram. This seems apt, as to all intents and purposes this show is Instagram, and it is strange to see the algorithm made meat. These loose synaptic progressions are easy enough to digest onscreen, but irl this feels like a type of limbic magpieism disguised as considered heterogeneity. And are we not bored now of this small-c curating?

facing page, from top The Winter Room, including fireplace designed by Michael Graves, Celia Scott’s bust of Hephaestus and Chinese ‘Scholar’s Stones’, and with views into the Spring, Summer and Autumn rooms; the Solar Stair, with Eduardo Paolozzi’s Black Hole mosaic at the base. Photos: Sue Barr this page Dining room, with work by artists including Hermentaire, Oliver Cook, Atelier lk collection, Ron Hitchins. Photo: Richard Round Turne

November 2021

035_AR.indd 35

This restaging of lifestyle design as a pseudo artworld? All this is not to say there is not a lot of superb work in the house. I love Oliver Cook’s handled bowls in fatty alabaster, which in their milky waviness look something like Oribe trays reimagined by Erwin Wurm. Likewise, I like Minjae Kim’s peculiarly gnarly synthesis of very solid carved wooden furniture with the lightness of an impressionist silhouette. The preeminent voice of postmodernist architecture, Robert Venturi, once wrote that ‘reality is irreducibly plural, located as it is between the demands of the past, with its beauty, and those of the present with its new struggles’. The current mood in interior design isn’t really a serious representation of the past, or a reaction to the present. It is the postmodernesque interior in what I would call the materials taste. If the most brazen gamble of craft is that it is self-explanatory and somewhat resistant to criticism, then the central conceit of the materials taste is one of objects so comfortable in their dna as to galvanise themselves against language itself. It is a style of languid comfort that resists analysis through its lack of real information, reinstalling the sacred into special materials as a form of potential energy, and so often letting the rest of the scheme off the hook entirely. Materials can be important in and of themselves, and can be discursive in an interior. But more often they can’t do it alone, and perhaps a less emotional approach is what’s needed, taking heed of Cosmic House’s batshit intellectualism. Real warmth in an interior emanates not from the germ of the material, but comes from obsessive sympathy and the solving of problems. The warmest moments in Cosmic House come from the large collection of Gongshi ‘Scholar’s Stones’ scattered about the furnishings. These consist of grotesque natural forms variously of stone, wood or meteorite, and were first used in medieval China to inspire poetry or simply spark conversation. I suspect these were less Charles’s intervention and more the work of his late partner Maggie Jencks, who had a lifetime interest in Chinese gardens and wrote a book on the subject. They are important as material. The ancient force that prevents this house from retreating entirely into its architect’s egg. Like all special materials, they are energetic beyond language, perhaps even rational thought, but at least here they inspire it.

21/10/2021 17:04

If, like me, you’re a longstanding subscriber to music magazines like Headbanging Fossil and Wrinkly Rocker, you’ll have noticed that a central part of their editorial policy these days is the anniversary piece. Usefully for hard-pressed staffers, these require very little brainwork. Look back 50, 40, 30 years or whatever, see what revered slab of vinyl came out that month and commission a lookback, maybe even interviewing some of the makers if they’re still alive. There’s a substantial double audience for such texts: nostalgists who were around at the time, kids who wish they were. Often the articles find convenient synergy with the launch of a super-deluxe edition of the album, now expanded to 53 discs plus commemorative beermat, and advertised on the back page. All of which is, well, business, but there’s something honest about it. The jig’s basically up, such articles collectively exhale; the best stuff happened decades ago and all we can do now is memorialise it, celebrate its birthdays (not only now, but maybe again in ten years’ time). This trend has not yet infected art magazines – unless you count art-history magazines, which in any case adopt a less champagne-popping, door-slamming stance – but there’s a reason for that. If we inhabit a cultural legacy era, an age of epigones, we don’t accept it. Sure, on the level of artistic practice, which since the 1980s has gone from jigsaws of art history to unabashed reruns of specific moments, there are continuing signs of mined-out seams. But still we stagger on, or we’re tugged along. Just as the music-reissue market and anniversary-article market exist less because of demand than because someone wants to sell something, the bloated contemporary art infrastructure primarily continues to manifest and even expand because people can make money within it, and so it needs to be populated by product. In the less self-regarding arena of rock, the fact that new music of that genre doesn’t contain new ideas doesn’t much matter, because there’ll always be a critic around to call it a ‘deft synthesis of [insert the names of three canonical bands here]’ and give it four stars. In the artworld, that kind of approval can’t be enough, even though many viewers probably enjoy looking at things that are full of historical signifiers: it’s easier, it’s comforting. And so the

036_AR.indd 36

Yesterfear

Why does today’s artworld so often turn young artists into tribute acts, asks Martin Herbert. Is it simply to mask the shame of its own nostalgia?

Cover band Piss. Photo: Lenagerner. Courtesy Creative Commons

argument – I’ve made it myself – accompanying work that looks like something from long ago runs along the following lines: art history went by pretty fast, you know, and it might be edifying to see what Neo-Vorticism looks like now, how it registers in the midst of civilisational collapse. We might learn something, there might just be a tiny bit more juice in that tank. Another reason for this shilly-shallying is (misplaced) pride, particularly on the part of people who’ve been in this game awhile and must now keep psyching themselves into it. Do you want to get midway through your life and decide you devoted it to something that’s a shell of what it purports to be? (Relatively speaking, since it’s not like we’re in the business of selling derivatives here… oh, wait.) Art still has intellectual lustre, but it’s increasingly patchy thanks to all the peacocking, celebritisation, genuflecting to the wealthy, not-unrelated money-laundering, lack of visual literacy and structural concern for encouraging it. Speaking from the inside, what do you do when you’ve committed to the bit, so to speak, for so long that you’re unemployable elsewhere, which given the degree of specialisation, the cost of art education etc, need not be very long at all? You might idly ponder how many of us would do something else if they could, and yet – here’s the trap – then you might spend the rest of your life wondering if the problem, really, had been the artworld or your ageing self. So no, that’s not going to happen; and in the meantime, dignity must be maintained. Sort of. Rightly or wrongly, the art scene is too full of itself to be flat-out retrospective, to enjoy saying ‘we had a good run, and look what so-and-so did, exactly 40 years ago’ (or whatever), even though there’s surely still a ton of old stuff to exhume. Instead that yearning, over-the-shoulder impulse emerges in a slyer way, through art that is at once physically new and, in the main, aesthetically familiar, chasing historical highs. Maybe we can’t admit that we arrived a bit too late and, by way of recompense, would be happy to wallow in the collective achievements of yesteryear; so we get young artists to do it for us, enjoy the ersatz buzz and then dunk on them. And people say contemporary art isn’t funny.

ArtReview

13/10/2021 14:19

218_AR.indd 218

15/10/2021 17:26

220_AR.indd 220

18/10/2021 10:42

Art Featured

Always begin by believing 39

023_AR.indd 39

13/10/2021 14:18

A Piece of the Action by J.J. Charlesworth

040-047_AR.indd 40

21/10/2021 13:33

On Renzo Martens’s White Cube

040-047_AR.indd 41

21/10/2021 13:34

“I made a film in Congo ten years ago. And then I was invited to present But perhaps the reason Episode iii raised hackles is because many it at Tate Modern in London. When I entered that museum, I saw viewers tend to ignore that the film’s underlying question – that there ‘Unilever’ logos all over the white walls of the museum… Unilever, is an extractive relationship between Western media systems and Unilever, the Unilever series… The greatest, most famous artists of their subjects that parallels the extractive relations that already exist the world, financed by Unilever.” This is Renzo Martens, speaking in between rich and poor countries – is offered to indict critical artistic his latest film, White Cube (2020), which tells the story of a decade of his practice as well. Martens, after all, has profited from his film, as do attempts to draw the contemporary artworld into uneasy relations many artists whose work critiques global power relations and politwith palm oil workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc). ical injustices. The ethics of the film, beneath its documentary veneer, Workers who labour on what were, until relatively recently, planta- are about the politics of standpoint in supposedly critical artistic practice – that the artworld should be a space of political autonomy, tions owned by multinational conglomerate Unilever. The film to which he is referring in White Cube is his notorious allowing for work that might address the iniquities of global society Episode iii: Enjoy Poverty (2008), in which, travelling around the drc, for as long as the conditions of its own site of production and recepMartens attempts to engage local photographers in discussions about tion remain outside the frame, and for as long as it remains within the the nature of the international media economy and the Western institutional confines of the artworld. market for images of suffering in other parts of the world. We find The site of Episode iii’s reception – the artworld – didn’t quite align Martens telling the local people that with its subject. Which brings us to White Cube. Divided into two parts, they are wasting their time photoMartens, in his zealous enthusiasm it summarises the main projects graphing parties and weddings to explain the workings of inequality, Martens has pursued over the last when there is so much more money inhabits the persona of the ‘white ten years, in his attempt to force the to be made cataloguing the country’s poverty and political instability. contemporary artworld, site of highmissionary’ figure, going among Black Showing what Western photojourend cultural consumption, into Africans to ‘help’ them, with a mixture nalists get paid for photographs of direct relationship with a part of of apparent indifference and naivety corpses or of women who have been the world economy from which it is normally completely estranged, raped, he tries to plug the Congolese photographers into an economy that profits from the suffering. Soon a site of primary agricultural commodity production, at the other he runs up against the hostility of photographers resistant to giving extreme of the ‘value chain’ of economic life: the palm oil plantation. up their lucrative work and un officialdom suspicious of this odd Martens’s first experiment, in 2012, was to establish a conferDutch meddler, roaming around Congo trying to get people to re- ence and workshop site in a corner of a palm oil plantation at Boteka, direct their poverty-line work towards exploiting a cultural economy which had bought the plantation from Unilever in 1995. Unilever that is fuelled by representations of their own precarity. had owned and exploited this and other huge plantations that had Episode iii: Enjoy Poverty has provoked much confusion and contro- been established by the British industrialist William Lever, who was versy in the years since, partly as a consequence of its apparently neutral granted the concession in 1911, when what is now the drc was under or ambiguous take on the exploitation of suffering, partly for the way in Belgian colonial rule. In Boteka plantation workers are employed which it plays on the raw nerves of liberal sentiment regarding histor- for less than a dollar a day, living in the dilapidated remains of the ical Western colonialism and the racist trope of the ‘white missionary’ workers’ village first seen, newly built, in clips from a film shot for figure going among Black Africans to ‘help’ them: a persona that Pathé News in 1950. Martens – a tall, gaunt presence, sporting white shirts, straw hats and Here, Martens set up talks and workshops on the question of zealous enthusiasm to explain the workings of inequality – inhabits gentrification. We see a conference event at which the economist with a mixture of apparent indifference and naivety. Richard Florida – one of the key theorists of gentrification and author

040-047_AR.indd 42

ArtReview

21/10/2021 13:35

above Matthieu Kasiama facing page Palm oil plantation, Boteka preceding pages The catpc’s oma-designed ‘White Cube’, Lusanga

November 2021

040-047_AR.indd 43

21/10/2021 13:35

catpc member Irene Kanga working on a sculpture in Lusanga

040-047_AR.indd 44

21/10/2021 13:35

Sculpture in Lusanga

040-047_AR.indd 45

21/10/2021 13:35

Sculpture and visitors at SculptureCentre, New York

040-047_AR.indd 46

ArtReview

21/10/2021 13:35

of the 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class – calls in by video an artistic ‘product’ in rural Congo, it is transmitted and transposed to explain how the establishment of cultural infrastructure attracts directly into the creative economies of the rich West. In recapping urban economic development. The film’s somewhat quixotic sugges- a decade of Martens’s work, White Cube alerts us to how critiques of tion seems to be that such ‘gentrification’ might be achieved in rural racial capitalism and the history of the plantation as driver of the drc. Art workshops are organised, but these eventually run into capitalist world economy have come to the fore more recently in problems. A woman asks Martens what use these creative products artistic debates. But that collapsing of the distance between Lusanga have when it comes to feeding her family. Then the plantation bosses, and New York highlights what Martens has always set out to do – to directed from London, decide that Martens and his team are no longer loop the privileged standpoint of art’s critical rhetoric back on itself. welcome, and the police turn up to force them out. After all, to criticise racial capitalism from the site of Western contemWhite Cube’s second part charts Martens’s subsequent and most porary art is one thing, but to short-circuit the division between recent collaboration with Congolese plantation workers, in Lusanga commodity production and cultural consumption – to turn dollar(once known as Leverville, the colonial-era headquarters of the Lever a-day agricultural workers into landowners and cultural workers – plantation operations). Martens tries out another approach: with highlights the cultural sector’s complicated and often contradictory a group of local plantation workers he sets up a sculpture work- mediations between critical art, cultural capital and the sources of the shop, and the group soon establishes wealth that underpin them. And in that, The film follows Matthieu Kasiama White Cube offers more open-ended provitself as the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Art circle of ocations. After all, while Western instito the African collections of the Congolese plantation workers, catpc). tutions wring their hands over diversity Met, where he unnerves rubberMartens digitally scans the works they and decolonisation, they remain benegloved conservators by touching a produce, reproducing them in Europe ficiaries of global capital, of the supply cast in chocolate and palm oil. In 2017 the ritual artefact they are showing him chains and value chains that lead back to the agricultural and mineral commodity sculptures are presented in a number of ‘white cube’ institutions, among them Cardiff’s National Museum producers of the Global South. (More than agriculture, Congo’s and New York’s SculptureCenter. The film follows catpc member economy is dominated by mining – of cobalt and coltan, and huge, Matthieu Kasiama from the SculptureCenter to the African collec- unexploited reserves of lithium.) Meanwhile, as restitution debates tions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is shown sculp- rage in the West’s museums, and activists demand repatriation of tures purchased by Nelson Rockefeller from dealers in artworks from African collections, the question of where these collections should the Belgian Congo, and where he unnerves rubber-gloved conserva- end up – in countries with extreme divisions of wealth and poverty, where the conglomerates of the north continue to own and run the tors by touching a ritual artefact they are showing him. The year 2017 is also when Martens and his collaborators built the extractive operations and where civil institutions are already frail oma-designed ‘White Cube’ itself – a simple, pristine, white-walled or nonexistent – is always left unanswered. Substantial economic exhibition space in the middle of land acquired by the catpc, which development, of the kind that might make Africans part of the global had been using proceeds from sales of the sculptures to develop middle classes of the future, is what’s necessary to raise museums, a sustainable agriculture in Lusanga. “Between art and land, I would train curators and create audiences with the time and leisure to enjoy choose both,” says Kasiama in the film, “but if I’m told to take only their own cultural heritage. At the end of White Cube we see the white one, I would take the land.” Dispossessed for a hundred years by the building from above, in the verdant plantation catpc has made for colonial appropriation of land, and postcolonial ownership that has itself. That it seems so anomalous, so foreign and utterly out-of-place, perpetuated this dispossession, people in Congo know that land perhaps says something about our standpoint – that it’s impossible to imagine Congo, or Africa as a whole, as anything other than poor ownership is power. White Cube is loaded with an ironic sense of absurd improbability and underdeveloped; the site of extraction of value, never the place of at what Martens and his collaborators have achieved. Having made its consumption. ar

‘White Cube’ building, Lusanga all images Stills from Renzo Martens, White Cube, 2020, feature-length documentary. © Human Activities

November 2021

040-047_AR.indd 47

21/10/2021 13:35

Lynda Benglis The erotics of artmaking by Jo Applin

Lagniappe i, 1978, cast pigmented paper, acrylic, sparkles, polypropylene, 91 × 28 × 13 cm (dimensions variable with flounce). Photo: Rachel Topham. Courtesy Pace Gallery

048_AR.indd 48

21/10/2021 10:27

Silver Stud, 2015–16, handmade paper over chicken wire, acrylic, acrylic medium, sparkles, 140 × 36 × 43 cm. Photo: hv-studio. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

048_AR.indd 49

21/10/2021 10:27

As far as Lynda Benglis is concerned, her work is always about trans- a giant double-ended dildo between her legs. It was a witty riposte formation. During a long phone conversation one evening, we talked to the machismo then dominating the New York artworld, although about her recent work, interspersed with long segues into her child- not everyone took it in that spirit. The spread was accompanied by hood memories and family history, and the ongoing importance of an article written by Pincus-Witten, which, alongside reproductions each to her work today. Her beloved long-haired dachshund, Cleo, of Benglis’s latex, wax, video, sparkle-knot and poured-foam sculpwas present for much of the conversation, when he wasn’t playing tures, included another full-page photograph of the naked artist, hide and seek, and we talked at length about her life as an artist jeans pooled around her ankle boots as she glances coquettishly back living in New Mexico (she is an accomplished adobe builder). When at the camera of Annie Leibovitz. This photograph was also used as the we finally moved on to the topic of her most recent work, Benglis announcement for her May 1974 exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, spoke with candour about her relationship to materials and working New York. The subsequent furore over the publication of these photoprocess. She wants, she said, to give abstract ideas form, watching graphs split critical opinion. While many saw it as a brilliantly bold the object take shape, from raw material to final form (every work act of feminist subversion, Artforum published a letter by five of its starts, she told me, with daydreaming). The American artist’s latest current editors distancing themselves from the magazine’s decision exhibition (she turns eighty this year), at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, to publish images of such ‘extreme vulgarity’ that, they argued, made features the recent body of paper-and-chicken-wire sculptures she a ‘shabby mockery’ of the gains of the women’s movement (Annette has been making since 2013, alongMichelson and Rosalind Krauss It was a witty riposte to the machismo side an enormous abstract bronze were two of the signatories). sculpture, Power Tower (2019). The The erotics of artmaking were then dominating the New York artworld, exhibition’s title, Nœuds et nus (knots although not everyone took it in that spirit never far from Benglis’s mind. During the late 1960s she began to and nudes), playfully combines the artist’s long-term commitment to the abstract-erotic rendering work with liquid latex rubber, adding coloured pigment to buckets of form and flesh, while the pieces on show look back to the artist’s of latex before pouring it directly into puddles on the floor, where earlier work in latex, muslin, aluminium, gesso and beeswax from it would dry and set (Benglis liked how the finished work could the 1970s, although their delicate paper carapaces introduce a sense be rolled up and carried). A group of photographs published by of precariousness and fragility that was absent in her earlier works. Life magazine of Benglis mid-pour recalled the series of images of Wire and paper pieces, including House of Cards (2016), Odalisque (2016) Jackson Pollock at work, unstretched canvas on the floor at his feet and Queen Bee (2016), are mounted on the gallery wall in what the critic as he poured paint directly from the can. These photographs filled Robert Pincus-Witten described as ‘frozen gestures’, capturing that the frontpage of an article titled ‘Fling, Dribble and Dip’ (27 February sense of the work being in a state of becoming, mid-melt or -pour, in 1970), which reported on the current turn towards poured ‘antiform’ sculpture (Richard Serra’s molten metalworks were featured a series of gestures frozen in space and time. Benglis’s place in art history was secured by an infamous double- on the next page). Critics including the author of the Life article were page advertisement she created and published in Artforum maga- quick to compare Benglis’s work to the gestural markmaking of her abstract-expressionist predecessors, something zine in November 1974. Benglis posed for the Aquanot #13, 1980, cast pigmented paper, the artist acknowledged with one of her earliest camera, her naked, oil-slicked body thrusting gouache, 67 × 155 × 15 cm. Photo: Phoebe d’Heurle. Courtesy Pace Gallery floor pours, Odalisque (Hey, Hey Frankenthaler) provocatively towards the camera as she grasped

048_AR.indd 50

ArtReview

21/10/2021 10:28

Nœuds et nus, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Allard Bovenberg. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

November 2021

048_AR.indd 51

21/10/2021 10:28

Mold, 1980, cast pigmented paper, 74 × 63 × 27 cm. Courtesy the artist

048_AR.indd 52

ArtReview

21/10/2021 10:28

(1969), subtitled after the painter Helen Frankenthaler. Benglis Weighing more than a ton and standing over two metres tall, Power recalls the modernist critic and chief proponent of abstract-expres- Tower sits squat on the floor, as though crumpled under its own sionist painting, Clement Greenberg, scratching his head in front of weight. The surface of this giant bronze knot, polished to an intense one of her floorpieces, unsure what to make of such a literal transla- sheen, appears as though in a state of flux, delicate and smooth in some places, while in others the metal is pleated in a tight shiny tion of the abstract-expressionist gestural painting process. Around the same time that she began to work on the pours, Benglis concertina curve (the artist has compared it to a blown-out tire). This started to make long stippled lozenges from pigmented beeswax monumental frozen gesture has Barbara Hepworth-like holes that applied to Masonite panel. By the early 1970s she was making knotted punctuate the form and encourage the viewer to keep mobile, as each wall pieces from aluminium tubes of wire mesh covered in cotton step reveals a different and surprising perspective. bunting and plaster that she then tied and decorated (in 1973 she began Benglis told me that the paper and chicken-wire sculptures are to spray the knots with vaporised metals such as aluminium, copper about “interior space and their relationship to the wall”. Studding and tin). Benglis also embarked upon an intense period of working the gallery walls, they look like bleached-out bones or driftwood, in video, in line with many other artists, notably other women, in their desiccated whiteish surfaces only occasionally interrupted by which the erotics of the moving image and politics of representation splashes of colour and glitter. As they project from the wall in twisted took centre stage. Now (1973), a 12-minute video in which the artist shelllike forms, they turn and torque to reveal their chicken-wire appears to interact with an image of herself, speaking commands interiors. Benglis first began to work with handmade paper in 1978, such as “Now” and “Press record”, explores questions of coercion and although it wasn’t until 2012 she started to leave the wire support control, while Female Sensibility from the same year features closeup in place, having previously removed it once the paper dried. She shots of Benglis and another woman kissing and caressing each other. moulds the small, wet squares of cotton paper around wire armaSeveral critics have described Benglis’s love of excess as decid- tures and leaves to harden. The paper is pressed onto the wire frameedly camp, noting the delight she takes in muddling ‘high’ and work, the diamond shape of the wire twists imprinting the paper as ‘low’ cultural references through the addition of garish sparkles and though a dried-out snakeskin sheath. Benglis likens the wet paper glitter to her work. Benglis though is mix to clay and must work quickly before Whatever the specific quick to make connections to her childthe wet fleshy squares start to turn and hood in many of these works, from the go mouldy. Once she starts, the artist can reference, for Benglis flesh and extravagance of the Carnival colours she spend up to eight hours standing in her the body are never far from mind experienced as a child in New Orleans to Santa Fe studio and applying the sheets her family’s Greek heritage and her adolescent love of Hollywood and of wet paper to the chicken-wire structures before leaving them to rock and roll. A childhood memory of a particular colour or shape slowly dry in the arid New Mexican heat, aided by giant fans. often provides the basis for her current work, as much as the colour From the start of her career the move from soft, pliable material to charts and car paint swatches she would later discover in art supply hardened final form has had an air of the magical to it. Art, she says, “is stores as a student. She sees the ‘pompadour’ roll of hair sported by a an intellectual and an emotional thing”. It is this kind of approach to glamorous childhood teacher in her undulating forms, while another artmaking that set Benglis apart from her minimalist and conceptual vivid memory is the acid-bright peel of a juicy orange she remembers contemporaries, aligning her practice more with her expressionist her mother feeding her as a baby. Whatever the specific reference, for forebears and feminist peers, and which has in turn made her work Benglis flesh and the body are never far from mind, and despite the hard for critics to situate since the 1960s. It is easy to see this kind of abstraction of her works she sees them as intimately related to skin back and forth between thought and feeling, between abstract concept and flesh, enjoying the erotic potential and tactility of her chosen and the materiality of the handmade, in Benglis’s recent works in bronze and paper that tread a fine line between the monumental and materials and their ability to seduce and invite the viewer in. Benglis herself describes the paper and wire sculptures that feature the fragile in their abstract invocations of skin and skeleton, and the in the current show in insistently bodily terms, preferring ‘skeleton’ fleshy limits and possibilities of her abstract bodily forms. ar and ‘skin’ to ‘surface’ and ‘structure’. Flesh, not form, is her preferred vocabulary when talking about her sculpture (she describes the recent Lynda Benglis’s Nœuds et nus was on show at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 9 September – 16 October paper pieces as “porous, like skin”). Power Tower is an enlargement of the Elephant Necklace group of glazed ceramic curls that Benglis previJo Applin is professor of modern and contemporary art at the Courtauld ously made by hand (she has also worked extensively with sand-cast Institute of Art, London glass, tying knots before the glass hardens from its molten state).

November 2021

048_AR.indd 53

21/10/2021 10:28

Shirin Neshat The Iranian-American artist’s Land of Dreams is a multifaceted and highly personal portrait of the us circa this very moment Interview by Fi Churchman

Before the pandemic, another kind of travel ban was implemented in the us. At the end of 2017, President Trump’s Executive Order 13780 prohibited entry to nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen on the basis of protecting the us against extremist terrorism. Though this was to last 90 days, a further proclamation extended the ban indefinitely. By 2020 varying degrees of prohibition covered nationals from North Korea, Chad, Venezuela, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria and Tanzania. Some of those not permitted to enter the us were those who already held Diversity Immigrant Visas (also known as the Green Card Lottery visas). The ban, which critics called out as anti-Muslim, was revoked in 2021. Somewhere between these two points in time, Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat began working on a group of works collectively titled Land of Dreams (2019–), comprising 111 black-and-white portraits, a black-and-white two-channel video and a feature film shot in colour (these last following a central character named Simin). Each of these might be looked at, or watched, separately – but they are also jigsaw pieces that, when fitted together, form a bigger picture. Neshat’s early photoworks (Unveiling, 1993, and Women of Allah, 1993–97)

054-059_AR.indd 54

and videos (Turbulent, 1998, Rapture, 1999, Soliloquy, 1999, and Women Without Men, 2009) focused on providing a critical voice against the sociopolitical impacts of Islamic law on women in Iran and are informed by the artist’s experiences of returning to a home much-changed since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (following an encounter with law enforcement officials in 1997, she has not returned). Always semiautobiographical, those early works of Neshat’s mostly reflected on her Iranian heritage alone. This latest body of work, however, might be the most representative of her status as an “American immigrant”, as she says, a position she has long held but never quite explored. In Land of Dreams she turns her lens towards what it is to live in the us as someone who is not white. Where the idea of those titular dreams (of success, money, a better life) are sold to the many, but granted to few. In the videowork and feature film (the latter premiered at Venice Film Festival this past September), Simin is a ‘dream catcher’. She is also Iranian-American. In the video she works for a secret Iranian organisation stationed in a bunker, but in the film she is an employee of the us government (for whom, at one point, she is asked to spy on a reclusive Iranian colony). Based

in New Mexico, she travels to different households on assignment to collect the most recent dreams of their occupants. Most of the time, they are willing to tell her. Sometimes they’re not. When she likes a dream, Simin asks if she can take the subject’s portrait. She goes back to a motel room, dresses up as the person, switches on a webcam and recounts the dream in Farsi to an anonymous audience. By association, Simin is also the photographer of the pictures that make up Neshat’s Land of Dreams portraits – each featuring a handwritten background of Farsi-translated dreams. Along her journey, Simin is met with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, finding herself straddling two different identities, never quite accepted by either her Iranian audience or by the country in which she was raised. The release of a feature film that highlights themes including immigration, belonging, racism, trauma and surveillance brings into focus what Neshat has been attempting to build for nearly four years: a world – or land – in which a critique of white American values, prejudices and the American Dream is reflected in its own constructed and absurd nature. Speaking to Neshat, it’s sometimes hard to know whether she’s talking about Simin or herself.

ArtReview

21/10/2021 17:18

Denise Calloway, from Land of Dreams portrait series, 2019, digital c-print and acrylic paint. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

November 2021

054-059_AR.indd 55

21/10/2021 17:18

Herbie Nelson, from Land of Dreams portrait series, 2019, digital c-print with ink and acrylic paint. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

054-059_AR.indd 56

ArtReview

21/10/2021 17:18

artreview asia Land of Dreams (2019–21) includes portraits of real people that you yourself interviewed, some of whom appear in the video and film, together with their photographs, which it is implied have been made by the protagonist Simin. What are we to make of this slipping between worlds – or ‘lands’? shirin neshat It was a real experiment for me because I used to keep everything separate: the photography from the video, the video from the movie. The beginning of that experiment was to photograph people in New Mexico and introduce myself as an Iranian citizen before asking them to share their dreams with me. It was about trying to relate to people from different backgrounds, whether they were Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans or white Americans. Trying to create this human bond between an outsider and insider through this idea of living in America, living in the land of dreams, sharing our dreams and nightmares. Then came the video, in which this fictional character of Simin became a sort of alter ego of mine, who goes to these households and takes pictures of the residents. In the video there is a different kind of fictionalised Iranian colony compared to what’s shown in the movie. In the movie, the American government plays a sinister role. I think that there is a thread of continuity in all three mediums: that is the Iranian woman living in America in exile. She is a photographer and she is after people’s dreams. I also had this question: how can we take this theme and make it communicate different ideas

to different audiences through different artistic languages? The art of photography, calligraphy, the direct gaze of the sitters, the video and the enigmatic and poetic relationship between the two worlds. The movie is still fresh, and not many people who have seen the movie have any idea that there is an artwork that comes with it, and people who have seen the artwork might have no idea there is a film. ara That’s a sort of act of translation then – or interpretation, which is maybe a more pertinent term in relation to dreams. This also relates to the idea

“Often, as artists, we worry too much about things making sense. I like the unbelievability of poetry and dreams” of revealing and withholding (some of the characters in both the Land of Dreams video and film are willing to tell their dreams, while others are not). Is this withholding important to you? sn It’s related to the culture of Iran. I often refer to the veil as an architectural emblem. I don’t like to generalise, but in the Islamic world we like to build walls around us. Things that we want to share and things that we want to keep private. In previous work, I think the veil for me is really symbolic of a male-dominated society, the way that veils create barriers between what is personal and what is public, and what

can or cannot be shared. What was the word that you used? ara Withholding. sn Withholding. It’s exactly that. Ironically, on the other hand, I find the veil interesting in the way that it can give a lot of power to women, because as much as you have to conceal your body, you could also use the veil in an extremely erotic manner. The eye contact, the slightest exposure of the skin, becomes very erotic in a way that a naked woman on a beach isn’t. The idea of temptation and sexual provocation within the parameters of these boundaries becomes very pointed. To me it’s about how over the course of history, especially within Iranian culture, we’ve been repressing so much due to censorship, lack of freedom of expression, dictatorship, and yet we always find ways of being vocal and saying everything we want to say. That’s really what my work is about. For example, even in the video Turbulent, Sussan Deyhim is not supposed to sing, but then she sings a song that has no ties to a specific language and it’s so guttural. It’s really about revolting against all the codes. I think that ties into how I feel about the state of feminism in Iran: how women, ultimately, can still be rebellious within all the boundaries that they’re dealing with. ara In the West, Iranian women are often perceived to be oppressed and without any power to express themselves.

Land of Dreams (still), 2021, feature film

November 2021

054-059_AR.indd 57

21/10/2021 17:18

sn Many people in the West don’t understand. It’s difficult, this question of translation of ideas and cultures from one to the other. It’s almost like you fail all the time. I still have a lot of stereotypical readings of my work, which is pretty frustrating after all these years, because from my point of view I’ve always tried to show that women are constantly rebellious, defiant or breaking the rules. A lot of people look at work like Women of Allah [1993–97] and say they feel sorry. They think that I’m reiterating the oppression. The subjects [women, violence, defiance] that I’ve chosen for my work, they really are exposed to different kinds of interpretations depending on who is looking at the work, where they come from, what their relationship is to art and conceptual art. A lot of people in Iran also misunderstand it. They think that I’m just trying to sensationalise some of these issues to bring attention to myself, but that’s older work. I don’t work with the veil anymore. I don’t make work about the revolution. I’ve moved on. ara Translation is still very much part of your work. Farsi is a recurring feature – from early photoworks in Women of Allah to the Land of Dreams project. In the latter photo series, though, the script is behind the subject, rather than written onto the body. And again, there is a degree of withholding, from those who can’t read Farsi. sn The fact is any Iranian would know the meaning of the text. But I’ve lived longer in the us than I’ve lived in Iran, and although my work

goes back to my Iranian roots, it’s never meant to stay only within that culture or that regional discourse. So the relationship a Western audience would have with a text they don’t understand is still as valuable. In the Land of Dreams photographs, what is written behind the subjects are interpretations of the subjects’ dreams. These are original texts and illustra-

“I don’t see anything in any form of absolute. On a personal level, I’m full of dichotomies and feel conflicted by the parts of me that I like and respect, and the parts I absolutely hate, which I find demonic” tions, but that tradition goes back to a very ancient book of dream interpretations [Khabgozari, c. twelfth century] from Persian culture. Although they might begin with and constitute a very ethnically specific source, they transcend those issues of locality, the cultural specificities. Beyond that, the works also incorporate the idea of paradox: black-and-white film, male and female, natural and urban environment, mysticism and poetry, violence and politics. ara What is it about the idea of dualities that you’re drawn to?

sn I don’t see anything in any form of absolute. On a personal level, I’m full of dichotomies and feel conflicted by the parts of me that I like and respect, and the parts I absolutely hate, which I find demonic. I find that I’m always working against my own evils – the selfishness, the egotism, the narcissism, all of that stuff. But it’s also about making friends with those strengths and vulnerabilities. And then I’m a person who lives between East and West. I’m emotionally Iranian, but my character is very American, very Western. I’m always serving two audiences. ara How is that duality reflected in the character of Simin in Land of Dreams? sn The whole film is about this Iranian woman mediating between her Iranian past and the American culture she was raised in. But it is also about mediating between her interior life and external life, and dream versus reality. There’s a lot to do with crossing boundaries. Simin is a very strange character who doesn’t really belong here or there. For me, it was an interesting idea to develop. For example, her relationship to the Iranian community is only through social media, where she uploads videos of herself, but social media also furthers this distance. If you speak Farsi, you will understand that she has an accent, so she’s not really fluent in the language. But she’s also not quite American. While Simin is dealing with her interior world, she is also confronted by the expectations of other people. For me, this duality is about

Land of Dreams (still), 2021, feature film

054-059_AR.indd 58

ArtReview

21/10/2021 17:19

being in between, and then having to translate that idea for others through a work of art. Iranian people don’t understand my work so much because it’s so conceptual. Then American people don’t quite understand it for its cultural specificities. There’s always something lost in translation. ara But those gaps in understanding also add another dimension: a sort of mystery. Is this a case of something gained? sn In the video, the mystery doesn’t lie only with the main character, but with the whole thing – in its bizarreness and absurdity. With the feature film, I feel that most of the mystery lies with who Simin is as a character. It’s difficult to figure her out. What are her intentions? What are the reasons she does certain things? Why does she get a job at the Census Bureau collecting dreams? What is her ulterior motive? The mystery unravels itself and then at the end there is some kind of conclusion, but still, the intention was to create a character that is really hard to read. In other words, she doesn’t show many emotions and she holds something back all the time. ara So why dreams? What is it that draws you to them? sn Dreams are so telling. They’re just so powerful. First of all, I have to say, I’m really interested in the work of Man Ray, Maya Deren and Jean Cocteau. All this surrealism, it’s so beautiful the way fictions unravel

when you have one foot in reality and one foot in illusions. It’s wonderful to put a film in front of people where nothing makes sense. Then the people begin to realise that in their own dreams nothing makes sense. Often, as artists, we worry too much about things making sense. I like the unbelievability of poetry and dreams. Dreams are truly a reflection of our subconscious. Our subconscious is so inundated with our anxieties, our fears and our desires. Maybe, in the end, the way Simin relates to human beings is in their subconscious mind, because she herself has so many fears and anxieties. For a woman who never really fits into society, relating to people through their dreams made a lot of sense. I had a brother who unfortunately died young. I always felt that he was a person who never quite felt comfortable in the world. There are people who have a really hard time fitting in. In this case, art or creative imagination or impersonating someone else can help you to find a way of coping with your inability to cope with reality. ara Do you think this relates to the concept of the American Dream, and fitting in? sn That was another layer of the intention behind the film. It not only follows the journey of this single woman and her obsession with dreams, but it is also a parody about America. The more political side of Land of Dreams is about identity, and how that identity is being compromised, and the more demonic image of a country

that once was something. It’s a little bit like all of my work, because while it is very personal, it always has a leg in the political. With the Land of Dreams movie, the intention was that while we are following the life of this woman who’s haunted by these two worlds – Iran and us, dream and reality – we are also really understanding the malice of a society that is spying on people’s subconscious for whatever selfish reasons. There is definitely a question of collecting data on people, but also there’s a lot of references to racism, bigotry, political injustice, poverty. Every household that we chose to depict represents an aspect of American society. These were all really carefully worked on as self-contained ‘stories’ outside of Simin’s world. With the artwork [the video], those moments were much more about the people Simin visits, and she’s more like a bystander; they are like little poems. But with the movie, we had the opportunity to build all those layers, where each visit to a household was like a short story. I enjoyed developing that a lot because it was like six short stories, and then the main three characters moved in and out of them. As Simin travels through those stories, through other people’s dreams, she slowly transforms, and eventually, by the end of the movie, she is changed. ar Shirin Neshat: Living in One Land, Dreaming in Another is on view at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 26 November – 24 April

Land of Dreams (detail), 2019, two-channel video installation, hd video monochrome, 23 min 58 sec all images but two © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town & London

November 2021

054-059_AR.indd 59

21/10/2021 17:19

Freelancer’s Delight

060_AR.indd 60

21/10/2021 10:31

Rosa Aiello’s Caryatid Encounters by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Caryatid Encounters (still), 2021, hd video, colour, sound, 47 min

060_AR.indd 61

21/10/2021 10:32

Office Offering, 2021, two c-type prints, each 15 × 10 cm (framed). Photo: Rob Harris

060_AR.indd 62

ArtReview

21/10/2021 10:32

There are bloody thumbprints dotting the desk, with dark drips here. Weddings, conferences, announcements, funerals. You can make on a Post-it note and crimson smudges on the photocopied images them want that, right?” Helen eagerly agrees. of architectural caryatids that cover the desk’s surface. A woman Helen is a model freelancer: relentlessly upbeat, adaptable, availclutches at her thumb, alternately covering it with her fingers to able. And tens of thousands of euros in debt. Freelancing is a careful quell the bleeding, then nervously biting and picking at it to make and well-rehearsed precarity, where you can’t look what you are it worse. “Of course I want to make you happy,” she placates an (broke and desperate for work) because then you won’t get the work irate client over the phone, “I know you have other deadlines.” The you need. And typical of freelance life is Helen’s blurring of personal bleeding isn’t stopping. “Look,” she emphasises, “I really want this. and professional boundaries, where lovers, family, friends and flatAbsolutely. Yes, yes, yes, I can do that. I want to give you what you mates all need the same well-honed, high-energy pitch as a prospecwant. ok, tomorrow, I’ll get it to you tomorrow.” She ends the call, tive client. While styled like a quirky hbo drama – imagine some sort hangs her head and curses. of cross between Six Feet Under (2001–05) and Dawson’s Creek (1998– This is Helen: she’s a freelance advertising producer of some 2003) – it becomes apparent Caryatid Encounters is more like a Greek sort, who likes pastel blazers and button-up silk shirts, and lives in tragedy: despite, or maybe because of all her efforts and energy, we know that her attempts at satisa light and airy first floor apartment Her bleeding thumb from nervous faction – whether work or relationin Berlin. And she likes cooking, in ships or finding a flatmate – are the pitifully small convection oven scratching is just a corporeal reflection doomed. Even before starting work that sits on a counter in her grimy of her sacrifi ce to the infrastructures on her advert for Sanssouci (a place, kitchen; she once cooked a whole she inadvertently maintains as a woman, chicken in it, lasagne, birthday cakes ironically, whose name means ‘withand… cookies. She made cookies, out worries’ in French), she is told as a worker, as a ‘creative’ would you like a cookie? This is the she won’t have proper access to the incessant refrain throughout Rosa Aiello’s taut and nerve-racking building and will have to work with a limited budget, sabotaged with 47-minute video Caryatid Encounters (2021), as Helen repeatedly prac- a smug smile. “I have a job,” Helen defensively asserts to her sister over tises and delivers her spiel for a series of prospective flatmates: “The the phone, casually boasting how well paid the gig is and how much wallpaper is all original, and we get lovely light in here in the morn- she’s enjoying it – and then eventually asking to borrow money. ings”; “I absolutely love the views here, you should see it at sunset, Part of the impact of Caryatid Encounters is its unrelenting precision it’s just magic”; and on. in portraying the theatre and anxieties of freelance life. Despite freeAt the load-bearing centre of the narrative is Helen’s current lancing being an increasingly common way of working, particularly work commission, a video advertisement for Sanssouci Palace, an in the piecemeal realm of artistic and creative endeavours, its mechaeighteenth-century royal retreat on the outskirts of Berlin. Standing nisms – the constant performing of a professional self and submisoutside under a set of ornate figurative columns – women with arms sions to chance – are often hidden away unshared. Media theorist upheld to appear as if holding up the building, the titular caryatids – Gary Hall, in The Uberification of the University (2016), describes the type a representative from the palace sets the simple assignment: “We of individual shaped by the gig economy, each having to act as ‘freewant you to inspire people to come here. Make them fantasise about lance microenterprises’: ‘self-preoccupied, self-disciplining’ people us. Get them to imagine their most important life events taking place who have ‘lost the ability to plan and control their own futures.

Caryatid Encounters (still), 2021, hd video, colour, sound, 47 min

November 2021

060_AR.indd 63

21/10/2021 10:32

Consequently, they remain personable and positive, even when their So what can she, or we, do about this? In researching her ad for way of life is rendered poor and precarious.’ Which seems to describe Sanssouci, she surrounds herself with images of caryatids, covering Helen to a T, if a bit perfunctorily; for any freelancer (ie, most artists her walls and desk, becoming drawn into one of the stories told about and those involved in the ‘creative economy’, like art critics), that’s the origins of the Ancient Greek architectural feature, where the also pretty-long-ago ingested and rehearsed to the point of being women of Karyai were paraded through the town after its capture and self-evident. Which is maybe why Aiello’s video feels so unsettling, as cast into stone as a threatening reminder. “They weren’t just carrying it takes the self-preoccupied, self-disciplined state as a mood, a scab the weight of the structures,” Helen vents to a friend over for dinner, to pick at. Writer and ethnographer Heather Berg’s more recent Porn “but eternally carrying the weight of maintaining the social order.” Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (2021) is more insightful on the slip- Like most effective tragic figures, Helen becomes aware of her fate, pery nature of freelance work and exploitation, taking pornographic sensing through these female columns her own role in supporting acting as a site to explore precarity, affective labour and the contradic- the structures that have caught her in this relentless performance: tions of the late-capitalist refrain to ‘do what you love’. One chapter “Architecture is like a warning,” she says, prophetically, but one too explores the issue of authenticity, and the way that porn actors late to heed. Her bleeding thumb from nervous scratching is just a corporeal reflection of her sacriare meant to be believably seen to be enjoying their labour on camera. Berg Freelancing is a careful and well-rehearsed fice to the infrastructures she inopens the chapter with a reference advertently maintains as a woman, precarity, where you can’t look what you to a video by actress and podcaster as a worker, as a ‘creative’. are (broke and desperate for work) because Sovereign Syre, who proposes the And yet, perhaps in an all-too“the porn performer as a quantum apt reflection of freelance life, then you won’t get the work you need mechanic”. Citing the thought experCaryatid Encounters offers no resoluiment of Schrödinger’s cat (which was proposed to allegorically illus- tion; it starts all over again in an uneven loop of stymied apartment trate the paradoxical tendencies in quantum mechanics, wherein a tours and manically cheery grovelling for more work, a cycle that cat trapped in a box could be simultaneously both alive and dead), seems frustratingly inevitable. If there’s any way out, it’s a problem Syre poses porn work as a quantum state: “The script, the performers, that’s left to us. At the installation of the video in London’s Arcadia the setting, everything about it is false, and yet you’re expected to Missa gallery this past summer, after watching the video you’d pass generate an authentic experience, like the orgasms are meant to be by the sculpture Welcome to her Counting House (2021), a plinth topped real… and the sex that’s happening is real… [Porn performers] are with two tea towels covered in uneven columns of cookies. They expected to perform two functions at the same time, to be incredibly look unappetising: dried out, crummy and burnt. And of course, as theatrical and at the same time incredibly authentic… What’s consid- an artwork, you’re not meant to actually touch them, much less eat ered a good performer in this context is actually someone that isn’t them; but it’s presented as if taking a cookie might at least diminish performing but in fact having real experiences.” This quantum state these towers, might start to dismantle the architecture. Aiello poses a seems to reflect on Helen’s predicament, and by extension all those possible state where you both do and don’t eat the cookie: either way, working under precarious gig conditions: a state in which she both you’re screwed. ar does and doesn’t make a living from her work, does and doesn’t love what she does, can and cannot just be herself. Chris Fite-Wassilak is a London-based critic and author

Caryatid Encounters (still), 2021, hd video, colour, sound, 47 min

060_AR.indd 64

ArtReview

21/10/2021 10:32

Welcome to her Counting House, 2021, cookies, tea towels, plinth, dimensions variable. Photo: Rob Harris all images Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

November 2021

060_AR.indd 65

21/10/2021 10:32

The Films of Haneda Sumiko

Women’s College in the Village (still), 1957, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Iwanami Productions. Courtesy Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center

066_AR.indd 66

ArtReview

20/10/2021 16:37

Long neglected in the West, one of Japan’s most prolific and important postwar documentary filmmakers created poetic works attuned to the cycles of rural life, colonial history and the roles of women in society by Ren Scateni

The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (still), 1977, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Jiyu Kobo

November 2021

066_AR.indd 67

20/10/2021 16:37

In 1950 Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten branched out into together with Tokieda Toshie – was invited to direct her first film, producing nonfiction films and founded Iwanami Productions to Women’s College in the Village. Shot in a village in the Shiga Prefecture, work on educational and public-relations documentary projects the film was conceived as part of a government education project, for cinema and television. Thanks to the trailblazing work of Hani for which both the Ministry of Education (who funded the project) Susumu, one of the studio’s young filmmakers, whose Children of and Iwanami arguably tokenised Haneda’s gender. Women’s College the Classroom (1954) and Children Who Draw (1955) marked a concep- in the Village depicts children doing their homework in an unstaged tual watershed in the history of Japanese documentary, Iwanami’s manner similar to Hani’s films, but it also looks at the wider social filmmaking style was soon associated with acute subjective aware- landscape and its dynamics of domestic and agricultural labour. ness and spontaneity. Hani’s rejection of staged setups in favour of a Combining a verité style with artificial vignettes in which characcloser relationship to his subjects ushered in a rupture in the modes ters perform gestures taken from instances of quotidian life, the of educational film in Japan, one that encouraged nonjudgemental film remarkably turns the spotlight on women, who have an opporobservation and a continuous effort in keeping the subjectivity of the tunity to speak for themselves. Despite the studio’s restrictive practice of assigning projects to filmparticipants at the forefront. Women’s College in the Village looks at the Haneda Sumiko’s oeuvre can be makers, thus limiting their freedom ascribed to the same framework. wider social landscape and its dynamics of to pursue their creative interests, Unjustly overlooked in the West, it’s possible to detect, weaved into domestic and agricultural labour the film’s texture, the themes that her films are now being rediscovered and screened at festivals like London’s Open City Documentary Haneda would continue to examine throughout her long and prolific Festival and Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, and a symposium on the career. Alongside the exploration of a vanishing rural Japan – magnifilmmaker – ‘Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko: fied in later films such as The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (1977) and Authorship and Gender Discourse’ – has been recently organised Ode to Mt Hayachine (1982), both indebted to Haneda’s comprehensive in partnership with Birkbeck, Japan Foundation, bimi (Birkbeck understanding of and proximity to the profilmic space – the filmInstitute for Moving Image), the Japan Research Centre at soas and maker’s attention to women and their roles within society is often Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. embedded into her late productions. Born in 1926 in Dalian, the southernmost city of Manchuria, It is also interesting to reflect on Haneda’s positionality towards Haneda joined Iwanami Productions in 1950, working first as editor her subject matter. In the case of Women’s College in the Village, the of the Iwanami Photo Library (1950–58) – a publication that served as filmmaker’s social status and cultural upbringing made her radia training platform for the studio’s young filmcally different from the women in the village. makers – and as assistant director a few years Hence, hers is the point of view of an outsider, Women’s College in the Village (production still), later. It wasn’t until 1957 that Haneda – one of of a city dweller who had the means and the 1957, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Iwanami only two female directors active at Iwanami, Productions. Courtesy Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center ethnographic curiosity to document life in a

066_AR.indd 68

ArtReview

20/10/2021 16:38

The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (still), 1977, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Jiyu Kobo

November 2021

066_AR.indd 69

20/10/2021 16:38

Dedicated Treasures of Horyuji Temple (still), 1971, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Iwanami Productions. Courtesy Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center

066_AR.indd 70

ArtReview

20/10/2021 16:38

rural area of Japan. However, for Haneda such a condition is critically around which revolves most of the village’s activity. Focusing on complicated by her own personal history. As a Japanese person born the trunk, the camera follows the motions of insects and organin Manchuria, Haneda de facto belongs to a Japanese community isms creeping along branches and roots while the film’s whispering existing outside her home country, whose fragile status is dependent voiceover conjures up chthonic tales from under the soil. The mysteon a geopolitical equilibrium soon to be further problematised rious figure of a high-school girl seems to connect the worlds of the by Japan’s heightened colonial ambitions. In A Story of Manchurian living with the one of the dead as she’s visually associated with the Settler Communities (2008), a visit to the memorial to the Japanese image of a bridge and the dark burled wood of the cherry tree. settlers built by President Zhou Enlai in Fangzheng (China’s premier, The abstract presence of a schoolgirl is also registered in one a veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War, reasoned that the settlers, of Haneda’s early works, Dedicated Treasures of Horyuji Temple (1971), like the Chinese who died under Japanese rule, were also victims of which she directed when she was still at Iwanami. A companion to Japanese imperialism) is the occasion for Haneda to connect with war Hani’s cinematic tribute to the Horyuji temple – Horyuji (1955) – orphans, whose harrowing stories make up the core of her documen- Haneda’s film once again focuses on the poetics of temporality. The tary. Through several interviews, temple’s treasures are scrutinised Hers is the point of view of a city dweller who by Haneda’s camera in an act that the film unveils not only the atrocities the settlers had to endure had the means and the ethnographic curiosity confers upon the film a tactile feeling until one last artefact during their mass exodus after to document life in a rural area of Japan dissolves into the girl’s melanthe war, which resulted in around 80,000 people left behind, but also Japan’s despicable refusal to take cholic visage. A similar, almost sacred, attention to objects of art responsibility and offer support to its own citizens, especially to the anticipates the filmmaker’s 2008 art documentary Into the Picture Scroll – The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa. In the film, through careful handling of orphaned children brought up by Chinese families. Haneda’s interest in territoriality manifests itself ecocritically in the parchment, precise editing and rhythmic pacing, Haneda evenOde to Mt Hayachine and The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms, the film- tually turns on its head what she once called the “filmed image” maker’s first independent film. Whereas the former is at once a piece of (‘Documentarists of Japan Series: Haneda Sumiko’, Documentary Box stunning ethnographic cinema observing the tradition of the kagura 1, 1992). By that name, Haneda meant those early documentaries that dance in Iwate Prefecture and a contemplative poem on the passage were thoroughly staged, hence subject to the dictates of propaganof time, The Cherry Tree is an alchemical work experimenting with dist means. By transforming a static picture scroll into a stirring cineorganic textures and symbols. Both films look at the deep interrela- matic experience that oozes vitality, Haneda epitomises the notion tions between nature and human life, pointing at humanity’s imper- of moving image itself. ar manence amidst fertile seasonal cycles. In particular, The Cherry Tree concentrates on a singular millenary cherry tree in Gifu Prefecture, Ren Scateni is a film critic, curator and programmer based in Bristol

Into the Picture Scroll – The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (still), 2005, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Jiyu Kobo

November 2021

066_AR.indd 71

21/10/2021 15:41

Skip the fluff and get straight to the real stuff Your weekly guide to what matters in the artworld – the best shows, the latest news and fresh ideas you won’t want to miss Sign up now artreview.com/newsletters

ArtReviewNewsletter 221_AR.indd 221

18/10/2021 10:53

Art Reviewed

What seems most unbelievable 73

023_AR.indd 73

13/10/2021 14:18

Mixing It Up: Painting Today Hayward Gallery, London 9 September – 12 December Painting is having its temperature taken again, and evidently the patient is in rude health. Cramming 135 works into London’s Hayward Gallery, Mixing It Up: Painting Today is an exuberant multigenerational survey bringing together 31 painters ostensibly connected by nothing other than a commonality of medium and that they all work in the uk. Curator Ralph Rugoff explains his rationale in the catalogue, writing that the artists ‘share a significant interest in mining their medium’s exceptional multiplicity, and exploiting its potential as a format in which things can be mixed up as in no other’. Put another way, there is no discernible theme here, just an exhibition boldly living

up to its title. The result is a joyfully disjointed testament to painting’s unswerving vitality. Walking around the galleries, one is struck at just how materially conventional the selection is. It’s been more than 70 years since postwar artists began probing painting’s boundaries by expanding it spatially and materially, yet most works here are resolutely bound to the medium’s historical, market-friendly parameters. Nonetheless, some outliers are found amidst the preponderance of stretched canvases, such as the hip-hop-inspired works of Alvaro Barrington; his Ikea-inflected brutalism ditches cotton duck for carpet and wooden stretchers for unwieldy concrete cubes. Another is Samara

Scott, whose inclusion is perplexing since she describes her concoctions of toilet cleaner, shampoo and cooking oil on the wall text as ‘almost a total resistance to painting’. In a show where painting’s heterogeneity is repeatedly demonstrated from within conventional confines, her works feel like interlopers. For some, a commitment to traditional forms reflects a desire to engage with and subvert the pictorial history of painting, particularly its alliance with the white male Eurocentric gaze. Lubaina Himid, in The Captain and The Mate (2017–18), riffs on James Tissot’s 1873 painting of the same name, replacing its

Matthew Krishanu, Two Boys (Church Tower), 2020, oil on canvas, 45 × 35 cm. Photo: Peter Mallet. © the artist

074_AR.indd 74

ArtReview

13/10/2021 14:24

white sailors with black figures in reference – we’re told – to the infamous nineteenthcentury slave ship Le Rodeur, from which 39 African captives were thrown overboard following the outbreak of a mysterious eye disease. Elsewhere, Somaya Critchlow’s sensuous portraits of nubile black women rewire Western tropes of the female nude, calling up references from Renaissance portraiture to 1970s pinups. Conversely, the gentle interiority of the two boys who roam backwoods and explore ruins in Matthew Krishanu’s quietly taut scenes inspired by his Bengali childhood redress the historical objectification of brown bodies by the likes of Paul Gauguin and others. Since many of these artists treat their canvases as sites of assemblage, where references from diverse territories and time periods commingle, the principle of collage provides another possible through-line. Take Hurvin

Anderson’s richly textured paintings, which draw on his Jamaican-British heritage to demonstrate painting’s capacity for collapsing time and space. The sense of geographic dislocation and interplay of figuration and abstraction in Anderson’s works owes much to his former tutor Peter Doig, a vastly influential figure who inspired a generation of painters and is represented here by a surprisingly underwhelming selection. Upstairs, in one of the show’s most coherent and satisfying groupings, Oscar Murillo’s moody manifestation paintings (2019–20), with their dense and vigorous marks scrawled onto patchworks of canvas, velvet and linen, meet the gestural, rhythmic lines of Jadé Fadojutimi’s luminous semiabstractions and Rachel Jones’s dazzling, intensely variegated compositions that appear wholly abstract but actually depict flamboyant teeth grills.

Death is a prevalent theme in painting, and many works here allude to life’s fragility: from Graham Little’s decomposing fox meticulously rendered in gouache, to Barrington’s hulking portrait of the recently deceased American rapper dmx, to Rose Wylie’s imposing stealth bomber painted in thick impasto. The spectre of death hangs heavy over the paintings of Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami, who draws on harrowing memories of the tumultuous period following the us-led invasion of his homeland in 2003. The disquieting canvas Infection ii (2021) presents an open door, its dark shadow partially obscuring a poster of Saddam Hussein, leaving visible only the dictator’s upraised arm. In the foreground a green spider plant casts a shadow suggestive of a deadly black widow. Ambiguity prevails: this doorway could lead to death, or perhaps offer an escape to a new life. As for painting itself, death’s door has never seemed so distant. David Trigg

Rachel Jones, lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021, oil pastel and oil stick on canvas, 250 × 160 cm. Photo: Eva Herzog. © the artist. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

November 2021

074_AR.indd 75

13/10/2021 14:25

Flint Jamison Veneer Air de Paris 12 September – 9 December Since the 1970s, the idea that the art industry is essentially the advance-guard of gentrification has become a received wisdom. Yet what is the role of art itself in the equation? This is the central question posed by Aaron Flint Jamison in this exhibition at Romainville’s Air de Paris, itself recently relocated to a downat-heel former industrial quarter designated as an ‘Opportunity Zone’. The American artist’s show is a furious attempt to reckon with the artworld’s associations with neoliberalism and politically enabled gentrification, grappling with the contradictions inherent to staging such an event in this environment. Jamison, who cofounded the Portland arts institution Yale Union in 2008 only to hand it over to a Native American nonprofit in an act of ‘reverse gentrification’ a dozen years later, is evidently uncomfortable not just with his own role in these processes, but with the very nature of the art that fills this kind of space.

His anger is manifest from the outset: the Opportunity Zone (all works 2021) series sees planks of cedar wood, riddled with indentations, tilted against the gallery walls beside their aluminium brackets. Closer inspection reveals that the sections carved out from the planks are maquettelike renderings of city plans: one, most prominently, representing the built environment surrounding Air de Paris; another of a brownfield site adjacent to Yale Union; and, poignantly, a third presenting a relief map of the wasteland left following the 2016 fire that burnt down the Ghost Ship artist space in Oakland, killing 36 people. It is now an area earmarked for development. Quite suddenly, the show changes tack: a second room plays host to GraDiva, a multipart installation that directly picks apart the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s embrace of the readymade. The letters of the title – the name of the gallery founded by André Breton in 1937, whose doors

Duchamp designed – are engraved, spaced out, on the insides of two box-shaped cedar sculptures, visible only if one stoops to inspect. In another instance, two tall panes of glass flanked into cubicle form by more cedar pay explicit homage to The Large Glass (1915–23), right down to the spidery cracks on its surface. In a repudiation of readymade practice, the emphasis here is on the handmade: rhythmic lines of orange glue seep from the joints in the wood, imperfections left pointedly untidy. Jamison’s thesis here rests on the idea that the readymade is the conceptual gateway to contemporary capitalism’s more disturbing processes; that it is essentially an analogue to outsourcing and gentrification, a negation of artistic agency that has transformed the production of art into a process of procurement. Whether or not you agree with this argument, the way in which it is argued is infectiously combative. Digby Warde-Aldam

Veneer, 2021 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Air de Paris

076_AR.indd 76

ArtReview

20/10/2021 11:31

nftism: No Fear in Trying Unit London, The Stables, London 11–25 September From the get-go of the post-Beeple nft craze of 2021, Artnet’s anarchic motormouth columnist Kenny Schachter has been one of its cheeriest cheerleaders, seeing nft’s fusion of blockchain, commercial selling platforms and heterogeneous, millennial-driven aesthetics as a positive disruption of the established artworld’s snobbishness and commercial protectionism; ‘a potential revolution in the history of art and its dissemination into the collective stream of consciousness, and commerce!’, Schachter trumpets in the press notes to the show he has curated for Institut (an nft-platform offshoot of glitzy London upstart gallery Unit). The show itself is a buzz of flatscreens hung on shiny poles, and the format an unapologetic demonstration of how nft art – here mostly one-minute-ish video loops – might be displayed, if you were an art collector. In a way it works: the gallery a digitally updated version of a salon hang. It’s a lively mix of ‘contemporary artists’ trying their hand

at nfts – Gordon Cheung’s animation of an ai-degraded Dutch still-life, Power, Corruption, and Lies (all works 2021), or Jake Chapman’s one day you will no longer be loved (a strobing edit of the Chapman Brothers’ ghoulish repaintings of Victorian society portraits) – and those native to the bigger, gaudier and perhaps even more psychotic visual culture that seems to have coalesced in nft art. It’s a world of plastic nightmares rendered in toy-bright colours by a generation of artists raised on Maya and After Effects, the cgi tech that has itself produced the unmoored image-world of weightless materiality in which twenty-first-century capitalist culture and millennial minds float, or drown. A queasy extreme is Extraweg’s pink man (Crowded), squeezing his bald head like a latex balloon through a squash of other pink men, whose only respite comes when crossing a line marked ‘stop, border’. It would be Beckettian if anyone remembered who Beckett was.

The nft’s current adherence to the video loop (that weird avoidance of narrative closure that ties the nft to its status as a virtual object) means that everything has to start again, and there’s no escape; the translucent, jellylike features of Steven Baltay’s idiot simp – his tongue hanging out, like liquid running down from under his hat while a female hand slaps his face so that his head spins right round – revels in its liquidy effects but seems to condense the desperation of a culture that has given up all material sensuality for the joy of screen-based masturbation and self-harm. Still, nft art can be looked at, enjoyed, disliked, sold, bought… and deserves criticism on its own terms. It depends on pleasure, consumption and repetition in ways that the contemporary artworld tends to find vulgar – but maybe that’s just the artworld’s jealousy for losing market share to this stuff. Is it revolutionary, though? Not really. Or perhaps it is, in that it makes the art go round and round and round… J.J. Charlesworth

Extraweg, Crowded (nft), 2021, audiovisual file. Courtesy the artist and Institut

November 2021

076_AR.indd 77

20/10/2021 11:32

Michele Rizzo reaching kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 1–3 October Waiting to enter Berlin’s kw Institute for the premiere of Michele Rizzo’s reaching – presented collaboratively by kw and Julia Stoschek Collection – felt more akin to queuing for a club than a cultural institution. Crowded in the venue’s renowned courtyard, wrapped up against Berlin’s declining temperatures, the audience suddenly gravitated towards the entrance as a bouncer dressed all in black opened the doors, holding up his hand to stop the eager throng of people from entering all at once. It was a fitting atmosphere, considering that, according to the programme note, the Italian artist/choreographer’s work frequently investigates ‘rave culture and the significance of the moments and spaces in which it becomes palpable’. reaching was no exception. Inside, kw’s main exhibition hall was stripped back to its bare essentials. Chairs for the audience lined the periphery of the concrete industrial room, otherwise furnished only with two bright, white striplights on metal stands. At the centre of the space, two performers gently swayed from side to side, transferring their weight from one foot to the other. This simple, recognisable action – one that most people settle on when dancing at a party – was the backbone of reaching. Dressed in an assortment of sportswear, black leather and pvc garments, 12 other dancers entered the space. After distributing themselves evenly across it, they adopted the same motion. While many had their eyes closed, others approached them,

gently laying their hands on their heads, chests and shoulder joints. Unlike many encounters at clubs or raves, there was nothing sexual or romantic about these touches. In fact, they were reminiscent of exercises commonly used in somatic and improvisation-based dance practices: there, dancers often use touch to provide physical ‘information’ and sensations to their partners, bringing awareness to specific areas of their body and offering them an opportunity to ‘tune into’ their physicality. By including this moment of partnerwork in reaching, it was almost as if Rizzo sought to recast raving – often stereotyped as a deviant, decadent pastime – as a holistic, healing activity. It made sense: I’ve had many conversations with friends who regard dancing at nightclubs as therapeutic and even spiritual. Berlin’s infamous nightclub Berghain, for example, is referred to by many as ‘the church’. Tuning into one’s body is a timely topic in a postcorona world – during lockdown, of course, many were disconnected from the physical realm, spending most of their time sitting stationary behind laptop and television screens – as is tuning in with others. In reaching, the 14-strong cast were deeply connected to each other. Without the help of clear musical cues, they sensed each other’s energy so that they incrementally accelerated the pace of their movements, imperceptibly transitioning from gentle sways to climactic rhythmic stepping patterns. While the bottom halves of their bodies were in complete unison, all the dancers faced

different directions, their torsos free to twist and turn however they pleased: some allowed their arms to swing freely while others placed them on their knees. The cast’s faces, which had been neutral for the majority of the piece, started to curl into slight smiles as they caught the eyes of their fellow performers. This moment, combined with the fact that my mind continuously switched between viewing the dancers as individuals and as one large interconnected organism, seemed to make a beautiful statement about the ability to maintain identity while still being part of a collective or community. reaching’s onstage community was one I wished I could join. Despite thinking that the things I missed the most during lockdown were bars and restaurants rather than clubs and dancefloors, the combination of Rizzo’s simple yet intricate choreography, Billy Bultheel’s intense, pounding, electronic score and Theresa Baumgartner’s ebbing lighting design – mostly cold-white and stark, at times taking on warmer tones – roused a tight feeling of anticipation and excitement in my chest. It called me to move and expend the energy that had been pent up inside my body, and all of ours, for the past year and a half. Yet it also made me feel a degree of retrospective sorrow. Watching Rizzo’s dancers explore their bodies, both individually and as a group, seemed like the most natural, and human, thing in the world. I couldn’t help but grieve for all the nights we were kept from this catharsis, especially during a time when we needed it more than ever. Emily May

above and facing page reaching, 2021 (performance views, kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in collaboration with Julia Stoschek Collection). Photos: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artist

078_AR.indd 78

ArtReview

20/10/2021 15:30

November 2021

078_AR.indd 79

13/10/2021 14:25

7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse Various venues, Athens 24 September – 28 November Entering the abandoned department store that serves as the main venue for the Athens Biennale is like walking into George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Nor does it take long for the zombies to arrive, with Andrew Roberts’s Cargo (2020) – a sculpture of severed hands onto the knuckles of which fake news has been tattooed – and Cajsa von Zeipel’s grotesques – similarly hyperrealistic, lifesize sculptures of conjoined and contorted Barbies in luxury brands – the most painfully literal of numerous jeremiads over the ‘zombification’ of contemporary culture. It doesn’t help that this delayed biennale opens as visitors are suffering from acute disaster fatigue, but the sneering catastrophism would nonetheless feel dated. Walking through the lower floors of a shopping mall filled with lurid objects and screens,

I found it hard to avoid the point of a film made 40 years ago: the zombie here was me. These gloomy reflections were, however, quickly dispelled by Jacolby Satterwhite’s Birds in Paradise (2017–19), a video installation weaving footage of the artist being shrouded and baptised into a digitally animated world that is Boschian in its scale and imaginative scope. In building a new reality, Satterwhite’s dream-logic weaves together Yoruba rituals, rodeos, classical architectures, extraordinary flying machines and the artist’s own dancing body. The sheer vitality of the work is a reminder that disaffection in art is inherently conservative, more typically a sign that a bourgeois creative class is mourning its own obsolescence than a harbinger of the end of the world.

Rodney McMillian dresses up as the archetypal doomsayer for the short videomonologue Preacher Man (2015), displayed in the haunted interiors of the disused Santaroza Courthouse. Yet the sermon he delivers is from the scripture of Sun Ra, repurposed from a 1967 interview with the poet John Sinclair in which the musician and interstellar voyager argues for ‘go-it-iveness’ and creativity as expressions of resistance: “If [you] are obedient and are righteous, then the most appropriate thing to do is to die”. The next world belongs to those who, like Sun Ra and Satterwhite, have the energy and imagination to construct it. If McMillian’s sermon is to be believed, then Suzanne Treister is among the elect. Ringed around two rooms joined by a ‘portal’ cut into the wall, dozens of watercolours run the artist’s

Rodney McMillian, Preacher Man, 2015 (installation view, 7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse). Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles

080_AR.indd 80

ArtReview

13/10/2021 14:26

research into artificial intelligence and theoretical physics through the story of an interdimensional time-traveller called ‘the escapist’. Equal parts Hilma af Klint and Douglas Adams, these journeys into the wild fringes of the cosmos and consciousness are made wise by their recognition that what surpasses human understanding is comic. Treister’s esoteric systems find a complement in the design that Navine G. Khan-Dossos and her assistants are painting onto the courthouse’s temporary facade. Inspired by traditional murals on the island of Chios, Khan-Dossos’s work incorporates ideograms that comment on our particular place in the space–time continuum: burning oil drums and the scales of Justice. A number of compelling works play on this line between information revealed and meaning withheld, what can be decoded and what must remain unknowable. Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s protectively layered and collaged photographs of Black bodies (Exposure, 2020) avert the viewer’s gaze away from what is not

theirs to possess, and that theme is extended by the covered face of Kayode Ojo’s Silver (Belgium) (2020), the veiled figures in Yorgos Prinos’s photographic portraits, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s exceptional short video Keeping Count (2021) and Ndayé Kouagou’s wonderfully slippery meditation on what it means to be ‘seen’ or to side with another (A key is a key and this one is the one, 2021). Even Erica Scourti’s superficially confessional video installation Exit Scripts (2018), composed of voice notes left by the artist on her phone as a free form of self-therapy at times of emotional duress, is made powerful by its fragmentary form and nondisclosure of context. At the Onassis Foundation, Steve McQueen’s End Credits (2012–) draws an austere video-portrait of Paul Robeson from narrated footage of his redacted fbi files that is at once exhaustive and pointedly incomplete. The information gathered by state surveillance, no matter how voluminous, can never capture the personality of its subject. Personhood is fugitive, elusive.

In our panopticon culture, these assertions of the right to be opaque read like withdrawals of the depicted subject from circulation in systems of surveillance and data that are reliant on self-disclosure. They might also be understood as renegotiating the idea of individual and collective empowerment, away from the libertarian version of ‘freedom’ in which the self-promoting individual asserts himself on the world (“If I was ruling,” says MacMillian channelling Sun Ra, “I wouldn’t let people talk about freedom […] the only country that’s causing all the wars [the us] is the one talking about freedom”). In the context of catastrophe, the title Eclipse chosen by curators Omsk Social Club and Larry Ossei-Mensah seems oddly defeatist: these astrological phenomena might look like the end of the world, but they change nothing. The best of this biennale suggests another interpretation: that the most important things are sometimes hidden from view. Ben Eastham

Suzanne Treister, From survivor (f) to The Escapist bhst (Black Hole Spacetime), 2016–19 (installation view, 7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse). Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos. Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, and ppow Gallery, New York

November 2021

080_AR.indd 81

20/10/2021 15:32

Berlin Atonal: Metabolic Rift Kraftwerk, Berlin 25 September – 30 October The annual festival Berlin Atonal – which focuses on interdisciplinary art practices with an emphasis on sound – was established in 1982, though it took a 23-year disco nap after 1990 while founder Dimitri Hegemann focused on running legendary techno club Tresor. The latter’s main home, and that of Berlin Atonal since it rebooted eight years ago, has been the Kraftwerk, the vast, unrefurbished former East German power station in the city centre. Since early 2020, for obvious reasons, Tresor has been sleeping again. But for an event involving rather fewer bodies, the Kraftwerk recently reopened for Berlin Atonal, which this year involves not only a month of performances but also an ‘art parcours’ (the organisers’ phrase – they also use the description ‘ghost train’) that uses the work of 28 artists to lead audiences through the whole building. Considering myself as fond of dramatic postindustrial aesthetics spackled with clanks, rumbles, clicks and bursts of light as the next subscriber to The Wire, I signed up. The first phase of the show – through which one is hustled in groups, doorways glowing yellow when it’s time to move on – constitutes a sequence of installations in variously scaled concrete chambers. These spaces, barely lit and corridorlike, offer a gnomic hors d’oeuvre: videos on monitors depicting immobile figures, a little melting ice block and a parade of welded-together industrial sculptures, all zipping by without there being time to find one of the hard-to-see, unlit information plaques. This, in turn, gives way to computer-art pioneer Lillian Schwartz’s fast-paced video collage of drawings of faces, made in her nineties, when she was half-paralysed and near blind, set to battering breakbeats by Chinese producer Hyph11E. Yet the opening section’s inarguable affective highlight is Cyprien Gaillard and American electronic musician Hieroglyphic Being’s Visitant (no dancing 2020–2021) (2021).

Here we enter a huge vaulted space where fluttering techno plays through the Killasan, a legendary Japanese-made sound system central to Berlin nightlife. Dancing to it, meanwhile, is nobody except an enormous greyish winddancer figure, which gradually inflates and then undulates unpredictably, at once triumphant and tragicomic. While unabashedly on-the-nose as an evocation of clubbing’s current state, it’s a spectacular use of the space. In evoking bodies and apartness, this work is also smartly sequenced as a precursor to Tino Sehgal’s seemingly untitled, transitory contribution. Leaving the chamber, you arrive at the base of a tall stairwell, a woman performer one flight above you cooing in a vaguely seductive, faintly spooky manner. As you ascend, she does too – craning your neck, you see a delicate trailing hand on the banister. A half-dozen levels later, perhaps wishing you’d brought your asthma inhaler, you find her at the top doing a brief, elliptical performance that combines more wordless singing with abstract mouth noises – pops and clicks – and slowly opening a door. And then, ferried not across but up the Lethe, you’re out of the ‘parcours’ bit and into a free-for-all. The viewer is now high up in the building, atop a stack of open-plan expanses, turbine halls stripped of turbines. These, which you steadily navigate and descend through at your own pace, are infused with dry ice and dotted with artworks – videos, sculptures, spotlit 2d pieces on temporary freestanding walls – illuminated oases in the gloom. Congolese sculptor Rigobert Nimi’s Explorer 5 (2021) is a cityscapelike kinetic sculpture, nested with little figures in capsules and festooned with multicoloured lights like a giant toy; its futuristic and playful aspects appear to serve as speculative urban planning for the artist’s home city of Kinshasa. In an annex, Adameyko Lab – which researches the mechanistic qualities

facing page, top Berlin Atonal: Metabolic Rift, 2021 (installation view, Kraftwerk, Berlin). Photo: Frankie Casillo. Courtesy Berlin Atonal

082_AR.indd 82

of live organisms – and Finnish musician Sasu Ripatti, aka Vladislav Delay among other aliases, offer a seemingly untitled octet of videos projected down onto circular glass screens, paired with chuntering minimal electronica intended, it seems, to complement the morphing microspecies on film. A suite of early-1970s drawings by Liliane Lijn, meanwhile, presents blueprints for fantastical architectural constructions – cones, towers – that were never built. In one sense, then, the show is rich in hopeful evocations of organic and inorganic growth, setting them against the modernist ruin-porn of the cavernous building – itself a model of new usage – which is not only the backdrop for the show but gets little focused showcases here and there. One of the control rooms, full of vintage knobs and buttons, is suffused with changeable coloured light and, again, dry ice, the effect falling somewhere between Dr Strangelove and a hair-metal gig. Unpredictable growth, hopes for the future: these constitute the bassline of Metabolic Rift, whose very title suggests a momentary and not necessarily disabling fissure in a system. In other respects, the show either requires a tolerance for feeling lost, for the show as gesamtkunstwerk, or an inconsistent concern for authorship, titles, etc. The website lists a half-dozen artists (and described works) that I never find; nor is it apparent who made the Ballardian installation of crashed cars with sound systems in their boots, or that thing resembling something out of Alien if Ridley Scott’s budget mostly just ran to plastic laundry baskets lit from within. Perhaps appropriately, then, one must repeatedly take Metabolic Rift as a kind of abstract analogue of a club experience. Unless you’re a total nerd, you don’t try and discover the name of every track that moves you. You just dance in the dark Martin Herbert

facing page, bottom Cyprien Gaillard & Hieroglyphic Being, Visitant (no dancing 2020–2021), 2021. Courtesy Cyprien Gaillard; Jamal Moss aka Hieroglyphic Being; Killasan Soundsystem and Berlin Atonal

ArtReview

18/10/2021 11:08

November 2021

082_AR.indd 83

15/10/2021 11:31

Elliott Hundley Balcony Kasmin, 509 West 27th Street, New York 9 September – 23 October The ten large, intricately collaged and painted panels in Elliott Hundley’s Balcony are each named after a character in Jean Genet’s eponymous play; hung in a circle around Kasmin’s open-plan gallery, they form a kind of theatre in the round. In Genet’s Le Balcon (1957), the Queen, Madam, Thief, Bishop, General, Judge, Rebel and Sinner each enact their desires in a brothel under siege, like archetypes of a corrupt society ripe for revolution. From a distance, Hundley’s panels appear to be colourful abstractions, but at close range they reveal collaged midcentury product labels, photographs of friends in costume and cartoon images depicting twentieth-century leftist political struggles, such as the Black Power

and decolonisation movements, of which Genet was a strong supporter. Rebel (all works 2021), for instance, features drawings of Angela Davis and Che Guevara, seemingly cut from graphic novels. Madam, meanwhile, stars a woman who resembles Pina Bausch in dramatic Butoh-like poses, opposite a coquettish Bette Davis in a penumbra of mostly nude young men, registering the subversive camp of Genet’s literary output quite apart from his political radicalism. That apartness is an uneasy tension in this show, in which revolutionary politics are repeatedly atomised and aestheticised. Ancient artefacts from Africa, Asia and America also appear in a wunderkammer jumble as generic stand-ins for the oppressed Other. Melted

plastic pinheads appear to fix these images in place like insects in a nineteenth-centurynaturalist’s display. Genet’s characters are only ciphers for the powerful institutions that he thought were destroying the postwar world, and so Hundley has given us a view of history seen from the same allegorical distance – a balcony view, perhaps, safely above the pitchforks and burning torches. Hanging in the centre of Balcony is Chandelier, inspired by the fixture that dangles over all of Genet’s drama. Crafted from found pins, wood, metal, plastic and neon, Hundley’s luminaire casts little light into the gallery, as if to suggest that the prospects for a revolution now are dim. Evan Moffitt

Madam, 2021, oil stick, encaustic, paper, plastic, pins, photographs, foam and linen on panel, 194 × 199 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kasmin, New York

084_AR.indd 84

ArtReview

19/10/2021 11:05

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami When You Need Letters for Your Skin Victoria Miro, London 3 September – 6 November Kudzanai-Violet Hwami presents a group of nine figurative paintings made up of collaged, fragmented canvases in which thick paint creates texture and solid colour is used boldly. It’s a body of work concerned with identity, postinternet – how to correlate lives predominantly lived in pixels with painting. Travellers 1, 2 and 3 (all works 2021) are primarily composed of Black men and a woman painted in tones of grey, backgrounded by the immediately identifiable interface of a Zoom meeting. The main figures are depicted in a painterly mode, while the faces in the background are rendered photographically, peering out at the figure (and viewer) with expressions of contemplation, passivity and scrutiny. Referring to the prevalence of digital communication accelerated since covid-19, some paintings parallel the screen itself. In Innnspirit-ed two male figures fragment and the canvas appears to break

down into coloured squares, pixelating like a glitching screen. A potted banana plant – a recurring motif – appears floating in the foreground of the canvas, in front of the human figures in three separate paintings, sometimes skewed and sideways. Its symbolism remains ambiguous, not obviously suggestive of religious or classical iconography, but its continuous presence here grants it a spiritual undertone the artist can’t seem to shake. This work is a departure in content from Hwami’s solo exhibition at London’s Gasworks in 2019, which traversed her own roots in Zimbabwe and South Africa and her subsequent migration to the uk. Here, significance is afforded to the realm of the artist’s interiority. But these aren’t images of calm meditation; they depict an interior struggle that is tumultuous and disrupted. In the largest work on display, You are killing my spirit, a black

female figure reclines across a bed. Behind the bed, elongated pink faces of children, eerily depicted in paint like a photographic negative, can be made out, leering at the figure. In Expiation another female figure pulls her top up, exposing her breasts. With her head tilted upwards, her face is obscured, while black-and-white photographic printouts of faces are pasted into the canvas, their eyes crossed out. Hwami’s female subjects, at least, portray an uneasiness with their own selfhood and with being watched. This is juxtaposed with the male nude figures in Virtue Sermon, who are self-possessed and dominantly stare down the viewer. Hwami’s approach to figuration engages with the changes in our relationship to digital culture, and in doing so, these paintings revel in the complex, knotty and mutable nature of contemporary life. Gwen Burlington

You are killing my spirit, 2021, oil on canvas, 153 × 260 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

November 2021

084_AR.indd 85

19/10/2021 11:05

Alan Turner I wanted to make things that were ordinary extraordinary Sadie Coles hq, London 4 September – 23 October It doesn’t take long for the human body to estrange itself under one’s gaze. Look at your hands awhile. They’re admirably functional, marvels of evolution, yes; they’re also clawlike things, inset with continually growing plates of keratin, at the end of long, bendable stalks, your arms. Or consider what you’re using to see said hands with, wet rotatable orbs nestled in twin holes above your nose – Jesus, noses are weird – positioned level with gristly and bumpy hearing devices that, particularly if you’re a man, sprout more hair as you get old. Such, as the exhibition title might suggest, is the tenor of the eight chalky, midsize paintings here by Alan

Turner, made between 1986 and 1990, when the American artist was in his mid-forties, and being shown a year after his death. On one level, this is the no-artist-left-behind effect of commercial galleries’ ongoing scramble for inventory – Turner seems like the kind of wilfully idiosyncratic journeyman painter whose star faded several decades ago and who might have been rediscovered in the yellowing pages of an old Whitney Biennial catalogue. On this evidence, though, he’s eminently deserving of having his oeuvre revisited. Midway between Cubism and Surrealism – the latter’s recent vogueishness among

younger painters navigating a notably peculiar era probably isn’t incidental to this showing – a painting like Basin Bath (1989) asks what a bathing female figure would look like if it were rendered as a hierarchy of interesting aspects, seen sequentially, subject to ontological slippage and unconcerned with conventional forms of beauty. The result is a torso that bumps out into what could be a breast or a nose, inset with a single, huge, sideways-facing eye and a forwardfacing mouth below it. To one side, a bent knee is cupped by an oversize hand. This ‘body’, meanwhile, is tucked into the compact washbasin of the title. Turner, who studied

Couch Couch, 1988, oil on canvas, 168 × 142 × 6 cm (framed). © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

086_AR.indd 86

ArtReview

13/10/2021 14:28

mathematics before art, paints his scrambled scenario in an affectless, objective, almost illustrative manner. This is the weird way we see the weird things that we are, he appears to aver, though not without affection. That tonal mix is redoubled in a sickbed scene like Couch Couch (1988), which jigsaws together views of a figure on a yellow-patterned armchair, the pinkish body seemingly assuming the shape of the seat. Inside this lozenge-shaped chunk of flesh, facial features cram together via tenuous internal logic: an upwards-facing mouth sucks on a thermometer, its rounded end redoubled in the extended cornea of the eye right next to it. The contemporary associations of a painting about sickness and temperaturetaking don’t hurt – and the gallery has positioned this painting as the one that faces you upon entering – but they don’t lead the painting

towards a narrative resolution. Rather, it feels like Turner, after weirding out while staring, has taken body parts as the starting point for a workable painterly composition; it looks like a person, it looks like a pink manta ray. When they’re assembled wrongly like this, the painting itself seems out of sorts, waiting for recovery. Is it worth pointing out here how stridently unfashionable this kind of work – applying the perceptual lessons of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque while retaining relative legibility, in the twilight era of a painting revival that mostly focused on Neo-Expressionism – would have been at the time of its making? Turner can be saucier. Against the patterned backdrop of a blue-and-whitechequered duvet, Barrette (1988) focuses on a nude woman’s midsection, her unkempt

brown pubic hair and upper thighs. Descending from the top of the painting, a ropelike brown braid wraps itself around a slender bare arm – whose small proportions don’t fit the thighs, and which seems to be enacting some kind of shadow-play – and culminates in the green hairclip of the title, like a genteel game of bondage with Rapunzel. It’s a figurative image that detaches, in the absence of much sense, into a play of rhymes: the diagonals of thigh, arm, duvet pattern; the verticals of braid and the canvas’s sides – and one that plaits sexiness and ugliness. For Turner, those probably weren’t separable. Our bodies are at once deeply strange and desirable, and the very way we see them, or rub along by not really seeing them, is itself bizarre. And all of this, in the end, might just be material for a painting. Martin Herbert

Barrette, 1988, oil on canvas, 152 × 102 × 6 cm (framed). © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

November 2021

086_AR.indd 87

13/10/2021 14:28

Trouble Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisbon 23 September – 3 October A commission from Portugal’s zealously interdisciplinary Biennial of Contemporary Arts (boca) to produce his first piece of theatre led filmmaker Gus Van Sant to conceive, write and direct a musical biography of Andy Warhol (originally titled Andy, now touring as Trouble, at the Warhol Foundation’s request). The play strings together a series of vignettes from Warhol’s breakthrough period – beginning in 1959 with a wide-eyed, Tiffany shopping bag-touting Warhol visiting the opening of a Leo Castelli group show and ending just after the artist’s shooting by Valerie Solanas in 1968. Acting in accented English, a cast of nine Portuguese actors, aged seventeen

to twenty-eight, resurrect characters including Clement Greenberg, Walter Hopps, Truman Capote, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick. Staging is slick, graphic and crisp – twenty-firstcentury pop – but the play sets a tall order for its small young Portuguese cast. There’s an inevitable surreality to a musical on the Pope of Pop being produced in saudade-synonymous Portugal – whose dictatorship, and the leftist government that followed it, saw Coca-Cola banned until 1977. In 2007, film critic Amy Taubin described Van Sant as ‘the most Warhol-like film-maker around’, to which a mildly bemused Van Sant – who was once contracted to adapt Victor

Bockris’s Warhol biography for Universal – countered that if so, this was maybe more personal than artistic: ‘One of the comparisons you could make between Warhol and me is that we had a similar manner… some of his close friends call us alter egos.’ Or as actress Heather Graham would more frankly put it in a 1991 New York Times Van Sant profile, ‘You never know what he’s thinking, or what he thinks of anything you’re doing’. In Van Sant’s take on his ‘alter ego’, it soon becomes apparent that the reason you might, in turn, never know what Warhol is thinking is because Warhol, drawn here as an eager cipher, is simply waiting for others to do the thinking

Production photography from the musical Trouble, 2021. Photo: Bruno Simão. Courtesy boca Bienal de Artes

088_AR.indd 88

ArtReview

15/10/2021 16:08

for him. One scene credits the creation of the ‘Warhol’ brand to his mother forgetting the ‘a’ in her lettering of his signature, Warhola; in another it’s a hip Malanga who directs Andy’s adoption of silkscreen and his Breton-striped passport-to-the-nyc-underground-makeover. Meanwhile, it’s implied that Warhol’s infatuation with the coolest queer on the 1950s block, Truman Capote, partly motivated his desperate desire for critical kudos. It’s when conversations move into song in intermittent musical numbers that the play begins to assume a more vocal personality. Truman Capote proclaims, ad alta voce: “I’m like Ernest Hemingway/But I’m out/And I’m gay”. Warhol sings to Jasper Johns: “You paint Americana/I’ll paint queer arcana”. Greenberg and Irving Blum enter into duet-combat on the merits of Ab-Ex, Pop and artistic genius. An exasperated Edie Sedgwick sing-scolds Warhol: “I can’t get a single answer out of you/

Only yes or no”, while a disinterested Andy orders a Coke over the Factory’s landline, before announcing that he’s “bought a band” that he’ll have Nico front instead. The play holds promise, which may better develop over its forthcoming European tour, but it’s odd to see such a deliberatively queer biography played and written, for the most part, so ‘straight’. In the musical’s second scene we see the Virgin Mary descend from the heavens to dialogue with Warhol, as he prays for her help to become a painter. She is sassily aware of the controversy between the Abstract Expressionists and the Pop Artists, and grants Warhol her assurance that following his mother’s advice to paint soup cans would be acceptable to the church. It’s a standout scene of high camp, suggesting another path this project could have taken; one in greater proximity to Van Sant’s stated reading, in a recent interview, of both Warhol’s story and the musical format

as ‘impossible and ridiculous’. There’s a question of how ‘Broadway’ this play wants to be, which, perhaps fittingly, could equally be asked of Warhol and Van Sant’s enigmatic personas and oeuvres. After an exasperated, bedridden Andy (“Why did another Kennedy have to be shot the same week as me?!”) is coerced into making portraits of a coterie of aristocrats by his manager Fred ‘le Dauphin’ Hughes (a turn the play appears to posit as Warhol’s real ‘death’), the play wraps itself up by jump-cutting to the future, with Warhol and Capote reunited in heaven, as a posthumous auction for Warhol’s work plays out on Earth. Arm in arm, atop a carpet of dry ice, Capote takes Warhol off in search of a celestial gay bar. In an earlier scene Capote advises Warhol to “keep sashaying”. If this musical had taken Capote’s advice to heart, it might have fulfilled its own surreal promise with more panache. Justin Jaeckle

Production photography from the musical Trouble, 2021. Photo: Filipe Ferreira. Courtesy boca Bienal de Artes

November 2021

088_AR.indd 89

15/10/2021 16:08

More Life: Frank Moore David Zwirner, 525 West 19th Street, New York 14 September – 28 October This is the first monographic exhibition of the late American artist and social activist in nearly a decade. Featuring 14 large oil paintings in sculptural frames alongside archival material, the show confirms that Moore – who grew up admiring American surrealists Paul Cadmus and Peter Blume – was not only a remarkably skilled painter but also a captivating storyteller. Often mining his autobiography as source material, his hyperdetailed paintings deploy plots out of a fever dream: hybrid creatures and occult phenomena take up residence in mutating environments tainted by the effects of hiv/aids. (The artist tested positive in 1987 and succumbed to the virus at the age of forty-eight in 2002.) Replicating the composition of a seventeenth-century Dutch engraving, Arena (1992) depicts an anatomical theatre populated with pompadoured junkies, Castro clones and human skeletons brandishing Latin banners. (One of them quotes Horace: ‘We are dust and shadows’.) In a Boschian fashion, the painting features a myriad of overlapping scenes that illustrate America’s aids crisis in all its intricacies. At the centre, the artist’s partner – who died the year the painting was made – is lying on a stretcher attended by two medics, his spirit leaving his body in a trail of smoke before a tv crew’s rolling cameras. In the upper right corner, police officers are barricading the entrance to prevent act up protesters from storming in. Meanwhile, in the opposite corner, a group

meditation is conducted by a glowing Tibetan lama, supposedly the poet John Giorno, who instructed Moore in Buddhist practice. The unravelling fable is torn between intimate pain and hopeful reverie: a tableau clinique diagnosing the epidemic’s ills as that of an omnipresent, stigmatising gaze. On the opposite wall hangs the fabulously titled Birth of Venus (1993), a reclining portrait of Downtown drag icon Lady Bunny as a mermaid. The unlikely poster girl of medicoecological collapse, the platinum-coiffed performer appears washed ashore surrounded by syringes, used condoms and plastic pillbottles. At once erotic and comedic, her gaze is staring back at the viewer, her exposed penis covered in sea foam while her foot advertises a cartoonlike pink tentacle. (The painting’s gilded frame is rumoured to be one of Henri Matisse’s.) Correlations between the natural and medical worlds are frequent in the work of Moore, who alongside other Visual aids artists is a creator of the red-ribbon symbol. In Release (1999) a human arm covered in purplish Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions stretches across the elongated landscape format, as if trying to reach outside its frame. Budding weeds, dandelions and mushrooms are growing from the bloody wounds, which have become hospitable microcosms for caterpillars and the resulting butterflies. This is one of only two works from the show made after 1996, the year combination drug therapy rendered hiv a manageable chronic disease – at least for those

who could afford the treatment regimen. Here, symptoms of a once deadly virus give way to new forms of life: a mythical return to nature that appears both utopian and dystopian. Although the show offers a welcome reintroduction to his work, it left this reviewer wanting – excuse the pun – more. His early abstract works and later commissions for Gianni Versace – including his bloody portrait of a decapitated Kate Moss as Medusa – for instance, would have been valuable additions. Then again, the premise of David Zwirner’s More Life – a series of exhibitions marking the 40th anniversary of the aids epidemic – leaves little room for its guest artists to travel outside their diagnosis. (In fact, one would question whether the virus’s much-debated origin story truly calls for a commemoration.) Most unfortunate, however, is the omission of Moore’s diaristic practice. Aside from a display case quietly exhibiting a dozen letters and preparatory sketches from the 1980s – all relating to the artist’s collaboration with choreographer Jim Self – the contents of his hundreds of prose-filled notebooks are absent. (Surprisingly so, as who better placed than the show’s curator – Pulitzer-winning author Hilton Als – to dissect this rich side of the artist’s multilayered practice?) But for now we remain acquainted with Moore the painter, one who ‘generates images to restore to the imagination a lost equilibrium’, as he once wrote, ‘like a pharmacist dispensing prescriptions to restore health’. Benoît Loiseau

090_AR.indd 90

ArtReview

13/10/2021 14:29

November 2021

090_AR.indd 91

13/10/2021 14:29

Jota Eu vim de lá mt Projetos de Arte, Rio de Janeiro 4 September – 3 October There has been a major push in the past year among Brazil’s commercial galleries to represent the work of young Black artists. This has been a long time coming in the Black-majority country. Elian Almeida, who paints Black figures transposed to the pages of Vogue magazine, has started to exhibit with Nara Roesler; Maxwell Alexandre, whose work addresses Rio de Janeiro street culture, is represented by A Gentil Carioca; Panmela Castro (best known for her street murals) currently has a show of her oil portraits and other works at Galeria Luisa Strina. Many of these new signings were being proudly shown off at the recent Art Rio fair. What was noteworthy, as I walked the aisles of the beachside exhibition centre, was not the quality, which varies (those above are on the better end of the spectrum, but frankly I’d plump for improved

representation even if a few duds are promoted), but the uniformity: every newly signed Black artist seems to be a figurative painter. It is easy to be cynical: for collectors and gallerists, how else would your rich friends know you were a newfound ally in the post-blm landscape? With that in mind, I approached this debut show by Jota with a bit of trepidation. Born Johnny Alexandre Gomes, the twenty-year-old artist lives in the Chapadão, one of Rio’s largest favelas, and only started painting recently. Posting his work on Instagram – depictions of friends, girlfriends and family, parties and police violence – he soon drew the attention of Rio curators Ademar Britto and Pablo Leon de la Barra, both of whom have strong track records in championing artists from underrepresented parts of society. It is the latter who

has staged Eu vim de lá (I came from there) at a collector-run studio and project space in Rio’s centre. Some scenes from the approximately two dozen acrylic-on-canvas works (plus a couple of paintings on wood) are simple and familiar in their composition: in Seleção Dos Crias (all works 2021) a group of six friends nonchalantly pose in football shirts, a couple making hand gestures. Other paintings borrow from the imagery of rap: from a series of works titled Por Pura Sobrevivência (For sheer survival), one canvas depicts a young topless Black man, one beringed hand covering his eyes, the other pointing to two rows of gold teeth he shows off through a wide smile. Police violence often looms: Bala Achada (Found bullet) shows a group carrying a bloodied makeshift stretcher

Pique final de ano, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist

092_AR.indd 92

ArtReview

19/10/2021 17:51

through a favela that is on fire. Heavily armed police close in. There are tender scenes too: a boy points his phone out the window while his mother reads from a book, the Bible we assume, given the painting’s title, Deus nos guarde e nos proteja (God keep us and protect us). In Festival a group of kids fly the handmade paper kites that are ubiquitous to a Brazilian childhood; sitting on the beach (Brazil’s great equaliser), a boy and girl close in for a kiss in a painting titled Pequenas Alegrias Da Vida (Little joys of life). Yet what makes Jota’s work stand out is the oddity of the perspective he employs amidst the gritty realism. Heads are often slightly too large for bodies, the sports brand logos are outsized and can appear to float off the T-shirts onto which they would be embroidered or printed. Whatever the scene, the eye is invariably drawn to the swooshes and crocodiles of consumer culture. In Bailão (Party), an early work on wood (salvaged from Jota’s day job on construction sites), the Lacoste logo is plastered over the eyes

of a boy and a twerking girl, anonymising the subjects. In another canvas we see two friends, both in Nike-branded football shirts, one with a gold chain and big spliff. They are tucked behind a wall while a graffitied police car rolls past in the background. Yet this scene is queered by the face of the young man not smoking, his hair bleached blonde, but his eyes and nose obscured by a painted-on ‘crazy face’ emoji. There is a sense of detachment to these stylistic flourishes, in which life in the favela becomes a social-media fever-dream of logos and poses. Jota also frequently employs religious symbolism. Lined up dancing, the partying crowd in Baile do Egito edição especial (Egyptian baile special edition), the way they are gathered together is reminiscent of the disciples in Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495–98). In Pique final de ano (New Year’s energy) two boys, one bleaching the other’s hair, stare at a huge star in the sky above; this painting itself then appears hung in the bedroom of Acordando ao som De Mc Rodson (Waking to the sound of mc Rodson), next to

a tv to its left showing a trinity of men brandishing guns, the titular funk musician centre. In Fé (Faith) the symbolism is explicit: two men and an older woman pray under a picture of Jesus; Fé blindada (Protected by faith) shows a man in a crown of thorns and a leopard-print shirt, open to reveal three stab wounds. Jota’s work moves beyond mere figurative representation of Blackness and economic deprivation to pose a postmodern question of social performativity. The paintings, with equal humour and gravitas, show consumer culture, religion and the forces of the state pushing individuals to act out roles, which then, in the tight-knit community of the favela, are reinforced internally. They remind me of the almost cartoonish characters of the favela funk mcs, whose lifestyle of money, guns and girls is both real and performed: a persona acted for their legions of fans. For those on the outside looking in, Jota’s work documents his lived experience of favela life and, intoxicatingly, the image of favela life too. Oliver Basciano

Acordando ao som De Mc Rodson, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist

November 2021

092_AR.indd 93

19/10/2021 17:51

Crip Time Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 18 September – 30 January With the phrase ‘crip time’, academic Alison Kafer refers to the imperative for a new way of thinking about and understanding time in a way that acknowledges different lived realities. By borrowing a phrase most often associated with disability studies, this sprawling show with 41 artists, almost all of whom experience disability, aims to explore what it means to have, care for and value bodies and minds with different needs – an approach in which definitions are often set aside in favour of seeing things anew and from different perspectives. Some works play explicitly with the notion of time itself, including Shannon Finnegan’s clocks that are divided into days of the week rather than hours and have hands moving at various tempos (Have you ever fallen in love with a clock?, 2021) as well as Sharona Franklin’s Crip Clock (2021), which features six silver spoons holding pills arranged like six stationary clock hands, the spoon handles meeting in the centre and extending outward so the bowls appear where one might expect to see 12, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10; time here is marked not by seconds or minutes but by a medication schedule. Other pieces, meanwhile, address different spectrums of disability – everything from modes of communication to interdependency to the cost of medical care to the effects of hiv/aids, depression and substance addiction. On the ground floor, Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s two papier-mâché sculptures show her guide dog, London, standing on hind legs as if dancing, welcoming visitors to the exhibition. The works are backdropped by Christine Sun Kim’s giant mural Echo Trap (2021), which uses musical notation to concretise the American Sign Language sign for ‘echo’. In another room, Liza Sylvestre, in her video Wha_ i_ I _old you a _ _ory in a language I _an _ear (2014), recounts a childhood memory about hearing: she would turn on a boombox, place her hands on the speakers and turn the volume up to the maximum level. In the video’s first half, she stares into the camera, focused, enunciating every word clearly, but in the second half she recounts the memory by enunciating only the parts of each word that she can hear (“with so much”, for example, becomes “wi_ _ _o mu_ _”), the sentences turning into fragmented letters and sounds as tears well up in her fixated eyes. Nearby, golden-wrapped candies from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (1993) spill out from a room that is usually accessible only via stairs; by covering the stairs with candy, the piece renders the

094_AR.indd 94

space inaccessible to all. London, meanwhile, later makes another appearance in a series of Gossiaux’s drawings, one of which combines their bodies, a reference to their dependence on each other and inseparability. Over the next two floors, personal experiences continue to be reflected in works like Michelle Miles’s video hand model (2018): images of hands holding objects are paired with audio and corresponding captions that relate her engagement with a modelling agency which, after receiving her headshots, wanted to sign her. When they discovered she used a wheelchair, they revoked the offer and said she was of no use to them, to the industry. Both Jesse Darling and Emily Barker point to the burden and cost of healthcare systems. For Epistemologies (Part of a series) (2019), Darling filled eight archival binders with blocks of concrete, alluding to the psychological weight of navigating healthcare systems. Nearby is Barker’s Land of the Free (2012/21), a framed bill from Northwestern Memorial Hospital for $506,088.35, the amount due after her insurance company had paid their share for her stay at the hospital. This is complemented by Death by 7865 Paper Cuts (2019), a towering stack of only three-years’ worth of Barker’s photocopied medical bills and life-care plan. Elsewhere, in the six-minute video Black Disabled Art History 101 (2015), Leroy F. Moore Jr. offers exactly what the title suggests, telling the abridged stories of people like Skelly, Wise and Apple, aka Israel Vibration, aka three people who met in a rehabilitation centre, were kicked out for their beliefs in Rasta, found themselves homeless and started singing on the streets, and are now regarded as the founders of reggae. But among these explorations of experiences and ideas surrounding contemporary disability discourse are more obscure pieces. Take, for example, wall sculptures by Franco Bellucci. His beautifully and tightly wound knots of socks, rubber tubes, old tires and pipes convey a sense of pent-up anxiety, of rage, of determination. A toy pistol is contained in one, a dinosaur in another. Rather than his artworks, though, Bellucci’s biography appears to be what landed him in the show: he suffered a brain injury as a child and spent most of his life confined to a closed psychiatric ward. Another curiosity is a wheelchair covered with a sheet of mirror foil by Isa Genzken (Untitled, 2006), who is diagnosed bipolar. The wheelchair could be read as a comment on the relationship between mental and physical health, or evident ‘disabilities’ compared to those unseen, but

when placed alongside works by artists who are wheelchair users, it takes on a different air. The accompanying exhibition booklet, which offers indispensable insight and useful background on the vast majority of works in the exhibition, especially those that are more conceptual, problematises the work even further: Genzken is among the artists who were apparently deemed ‘too famous’ to warrant an explanatory text (the others missing are Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin and John Akomfrah, though Tillmans’s photograph of his medications, Goldin’s video installation about substance abuse and her sister’s suicide, and Akomfrah’s film on illness and death are autobiographical and more self-explanatory). With these inclusions, the show veers into the territory of tokenisation, seeming to categorise work solely based on biography or materials used. Moreover, the only reference to contemporary disability issues in Germany is in For the 12 disabled people in Lebenshilfehaus (Area of Refuge) (2021), by Chloe Pascal Crawford, an American artist whose site-specific installation is a homage to the group of people with disabilities who died during the floods in southern Germany earlier this year. And in this context Gerhard Richter’s Tante Marianne (Fotofassung zu wv 87) (1965/2018) – depicting himself as a baby with his then-teenage aunt, who was later diagnosed schizophrenic and then murdered during Nazi euthanasia programmes – feels like an abrupt, unnecessary aside. Furthermore, both Richter’s and Genzken’s works point to the fine line between disabled artists and nondisabled artists who have relationships with disabled people. This line must be navigated carefully, from both curatorial and artistic perspectives: when it’s not, the result risks coming across as appropriation. Zooming back out, to understand the show as a whole it is important to recognise ‘disability’ as ‘a site of questions rather than firm definitions’, as Kafer writes in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013). At its best, Crip Time succeeds in exposing social and political injustices related to disability, as well as in helping a viewer reframe their own perception of what ‘disability’ is, notably through its refusal to provide definitions or neat categories. But to understand and appreciate a site of questions, there must also be a clear framework of the topic at hand. Here, the deeper I engaged, the more that framework – already vague and raw to start – seemed to slip away. Emily McDermott

ArtReview

15/10/2021 17:02

Michelle Miles, hand model (still), 2018, video, colour, sound, 1 min 47 sec

Pepe Espaliú, Paseo del Amigo, 1993. Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy Pepe Cobo y Cía, Madrid

November 2021

094_AR.indd 95

15/10/2021 17:02

July, August, September St Apernstrasse 13, Cologne 14 August – 24 September A year and half back, I was prepared to switch cities: from Milan to Berlin. I’d been living in the latter but was forced to return to Italy by the announcement that the airports would close, due to the increasing spread of an illness that, admittedly, I had only followed distractedly on news aggregators. I thought I’d be back in Germany in no time. Instead, it wasn’t until last winter that I’d had enough of the endless alternating lockdowns and reopenings and took to the road: no flyover banner pronouncing ‘The End’ was ever going to appear in the sky. By then, we had grown accustomed to the undoing of finite units, rigid demarcations, predictable tomorrows, weekends, and were entering a new, slippery and boggy ‘now’. The French philosopher Henri Bergson distinguished between time, the standard

convention measured by clocks, and durée – the perceived ‘inner time’ that lengthens or shortens according to subjective feeling. The demarcation lines between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ were becoming blurry, and the pace of my relocating was my personal way of reasserting them. July, August, September – a nomadic exhibition project by curators Carla Donauer and Martin Germann, organised by the nomadic artistic initiative Hospitality – touches on this collectively felt disjuncture between, or mixing up of, these two Bergsonian times, and the melding of offline and online much debated in an art sector deprived of fairs and fake smiles. The presentation embraced logistic delays, and works were added according to different ‘deadlines’. Thanks to its maintaining seemingly disparate microgestures in a self-contained and cohesive system,

it is among the best exhibitions to address the times we’re in. Even if it doesn’t flaunt it. The exhibition takes its name from American art dealer, curator and conceptual art theorist Seth Siegelaub’s 1969 project, in which he invited 11 artists to realise a work of art in different parts of Europe and North America during the self-same three summer months of that year. The timeframe was not meant as a constricting container. Among others: Carl Andre presented a work also included in a partially overlapping exhibition in The Hague; Joseph Kosuth invited viewers to see his works in the personal residence of dealer Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf; Daniel Buren’s work travelled to various Parisian locations that were announced time-by-time in periodical publications for the duration of the show; and Lawrence Weiner threw a ball at Niagara Falls.

Shimabuku, July, August, September 1969, 2021, newspapers from 1969. Courtesy the artist

096-097_AR.indd 96

ArtReview

21/10/2021 15:22

The 2021 exhibition – held in a space in central Cologne during the interregnum between what was a tailoring store and what is about to become a handicraft shop – shares with its forerunner the idea of an arbitrary time period as a loose frame, a device to draw attention to apparently marginal and unrelated activities. Patricia L. Boyd, in Ceiling Analysis (2021), reproduces from memory, as a drawing, a frottage on tracing paper she had made of the ceiling in her psychoanalyst’s office in New York. The work was done twice (FedEx lost the first iteration in Paris), so it is perhaps a memory of a memory that absorbed, by extension, conscious and unconscious tales and ruminations from the artist’s life into an ornamental form. Some artists have focused on the location’s repurposing as a possibility for mimetic intervention: Shimabuku has partially covered one of the street windows with newspapers from that summer (July, August, September 1969, 2021); Ko Sin Tung asked the curators to drill a hole every day

at predetermined points along the wall (Minor Touch, 2021); David Horvitz sent a piece of his Los Angeles garden to be grown wherever possible on the pavement in front of the exhibition space (Untitled, 2021). Obligations and obstacles seem to be another obliquely prominent theme: Phung-Tien Phan speaks of social reproduction by presenting sculptures of a modernist-style playhouse and an altar made of waste materials (both Untitled, 2021); Michael E. Smith’s cryptically enchanting security-camera video of the empty interior of an unspecified public institution emits extremely high frequencies audible only to animals and very young humans; Phyllida Barlow’s documentation of her destroyed Nightworks series (1982–83) – which arrived during the last week of the show, just like a sculpture by Sarah Ortmeyer, Monster (2021) – recounts the difficult balance the artist had to find between motherhood and artistic work. The durational aspect of Siegelaub’s exhibition manifests itself in the most direct

and referential form in Yuki Okumura’s work 11 Locations And 11 Intersections in Cologne from the 5th to the 7th of July 2021 (2021), which created a miniaturised imitation of the map of the works belonging to the 1969 exhibition. In Yuji Agematsu’s ‘calendar’ zip, 02.01.13– 02.28.13 (2013), a showcase of compositions of objects found during long daily walks is sealed in the cellophane of cigarette packets. If the reader will forgive me for returning to an exhausted theme, July, August, September captures the ephemeral spirit of the moment – the bizarre passing of time, rethinking what’s good, living with incomprehensible impediments, the return of interest in things considered minor – without the proclamations or didacticism imposed by the dogma of thematic exhibitions. It’s not ‘about’ something but rather encapsulates the paradigm shift we are experiencing with a grace and curatorial acumen that I have not found for a long time. But, then again, it’s hard to say how long. Francesco Tenaglia

David Horvitz, Untitled, 2021, garden. Courtesy the artist

November 2021

096-097_AR.indd 97

21/10/2021 15:22

Danh Vo Massimo De Carlo, Milan 7 September – 30 October Since 2019, Massimo De Carlo has been housed on the ground floor of Casa CorbelliniWassermann, an iconic Milanese building designed by architect Piero Portaluppi in the early 1930s. Considered a prime example of rationalist architecture, its spacious interior is bedecked in an astonishing variety of marble, which runs as a linear thread throughout the gallery’s rooms along the skirting boards, floors and doorframes. When Danh Vo first saw the space in preparation for his solo show at the gallery, he thought it was incredible. ‘When they give you a space, you have to analyse it: you can decide to work against it, or together, or play with it,’ the Danish-Vietnamese artist said in a recent interview. ‘I wanted to accentuate the marble, which is everywhere here, but not refined marble like this one, I wanted the scraps.’ These scraps come in the form of antiques sourced by Vo in Europe – he is an avid collector of all manner of objects that may or may not be of use in his art – and marble pieces recovered from dismantled graves and a quarry in Bolzano. Disfigured by time, they are relics from a distant past that act as a humble counterpoint to the opulent rooms they now inhabit. They invite close attention. In one of the smaller rooms, a salt-and-pepper granite bench lies in front of an exquisite fireplace made of three different types of marble that frame an interwoven surface of copper alloy strips. The bench fits in so aptly that you would be excused for mistaking it for the original furnishing. A small sculpture has been carefully placed on the bench, balanced without glue, screws or nails. It is made up of three elements: a slightly

yellowed Carrara-marble lion head that could have been a corbel in a past life; an H-shaped wood structure into which the upper ledge of the lion’s head has been slotted; and, on it, a sleeping bronze human head, recognisable as such only once you walk around the sculpture and discern it in the back. The features seem to intimate this could be Jesus Christ, or perhaps it’s some other sleeping, historical bearded man. Something about the two antique elements hints at sea wreckage, or simply the sea itself – perhaps because of the softness of the erosion and the nature of the discolouration. The title – Untitled, like most of the works in the show – certainly offers no clues. This marine element appears to be hinted at in the adjacent room, at the heart of the gallery. Here, three sculptures lie on a low square platform or floor composed of nine white Carrara and Lasa sheets. One of the ‘readymade’ sculptures is made up of a single stone leg, flanked by a fierce sea creature on one side, and a fragment of a foot on the other. The room also contains the latest version of Vo’s signature item in exhibitions: the farewell letter the French Catholic missionary JeanThéophane Vénard wrote to his father in 1861, while calmly awaiting execution by beheading in Vietnam (2.2.1861, 2009). Vo’s father, Phung Vo, who is Catholic and does not speak French, has been faithfully reproducing the letter in beautiful calligraphy for over a decade, and will do so for as long as he is capable. Even for those who are familiar with the letter, it remains an astonishing example of human resilience and faith: ‘A light cut of a saber will separate my head

[from my body], like the gardener cuts a spring flower for his pleasure. We are all flowers planted on this earth that God reaps in His due time, some earlier, some later. May it be the purple rose, the maiden lily, or the humble violet.’ Flowers take on a newfound meaning here, via a new photographic series. Since moving to the countryside outside Berlin, Vo has been dedicating his time to nature, growing a new garden around his studio and challenging himself to get to know, nurture and recognise the names of flowers. Each flower is captured in a quietly satisfying photograph, like something from an old botanical textbook, and labelled with its Latin name by his father. They are grouped together in two separate rooms, offering both a delightful lesson in phytology as well as injecting the only bright colour into an otherwise stone-coloured show. Anyone who has taken a stab at growing plants will recognise the feeling of freedom, unpredictability, wonder and frustration that such a project can engender. In Vo’s case, it suggests a symbolic liberation in the creative process, overcoming all the traditional boundaries of the definition of art. Vo installed all the works in situ, interlocking them in a careful balancing act, without glue or nails. Ever the collector of histories as well as objects, he offers here an elegiac and humble homage to Italy, where marble and relics inevitably become imbued with the context of the country’s often imperious historical and artistic past. Offering no explanation, simply themselves, Vo’s works quietly testify to the passing of time and the frailty of everything, even stone. Ana Vukadin

untitled, 2021, pencil on paper and c-print, writing by Phung Vo, 45 × 32 × 4 cm (framed)

098_AR.indd 98

ArtReview

21/10/2021 15:46

untitled, 2021, Carrara and Lasa marble, wood, 78 × 400 × 400 cm. both images Photo: Nicholas Ash. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo

November 2021

098_AR.indd 99

15/10/2021 17:51

The Things We Make Lodos, Mexico City 21 August – 18 September This exhibition of six artists and collectives points at the idea of community, and it does so by extending the index finger of presence. By its logic, community is merely the act of gathering human and nonhuman elements together in a given space. And one can see how Gina Folly’s The Captured Heart (2021) asks for a level of coexistence – it’s a wire puzzle of hefty proportions that needs two people to solve it. Likewise, Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery, presented in the gallery as eight looping images on a screen: the grand blue pyramid of beer cases of the original work, shown in Berlin in 2011, ostensibly referencing the stolen architectural marvels of near-Asia exhibited in Europe, asked that visitors clamber atop the work and slowly destroy it by drinking the beer. These works certainly evince a kind of random arty social encounter, but it’s telling that exhibition curator

Anna Goetz seems to conflate these with the actual praxis of community and the solidarity and responsibility that are its requisites. At points, as in Charlotte Posenenske’s Series D Square tubes (1967) – the work present via photographs of a crowd moving around her large industrial objects in a Frankfurt gallery in 1967 – the exhibition is so enamored by form that it seems to think of community as just another type of it: a simple gathering of humans and things for whatever reason. But a community is not a form or an abstraction, it is defined by deep-seated customs and exchange, as demonstrated by Rehana Zaman and the Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers’ How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? (2018), a months-long collaboration that resulted in a film addressing the antiBlackness and sexism experienced by young girls of Pakistani and Somali descent in the

British city. The film is interspersed with images of antiracist organisers in the aftermath of Liverpool’s 1987 Toxteth riots, and with candid, tender interviews among the girls; both speaking to the conditions of resistance that have led them to become an actual community, to the fact that presence is not enough, that solidarity, engagement and commitment are also required. The juxtaposition of works in the show weaves a tattered definition of its main theme, wearing down the idea of community into something vaguer, the form of a gathering hanging by the thread of presence. In the end, that thread – its thinness unfortunately emphasised by two artworks presented only in absence/documentation – proves insufficient to construct any purposeful interpretations of community. Gaby Cepeda

Rehana Zaman (in collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers), How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear?, 2018, video, colour, sound, 25 min. Courtesy the artists

100

100-101_AR.indd 100

ArtReview

21/10/2021 15:32

Muhanned Cader Nightscapes 2019–2021 Grey Noise, Dubai 15 September – 1 November In Cader’s first solo exhibition in Dubai, dawn and dusk exist on the same perspectival plane. His series of seductive yet understated paintings are based on photographs of the environment around Nugaduwa, Sri Lanka, taken from the vantage point of his apartment. If they appear as a form of pastoral nostalgia, or a throwback to the painterly sublime, Cader defamiliarises that visual trope by painting the landscapes with geomorphic edges inside each smallscale canvas, so they seem unmoored from nineteenth-century landscape painting conventions and colonial frames. Dots of light glimmer in the distance of his changing nightscapes, appearing elusive against the opacity of the skies. Although Cader paints from photographs, he references

the failure of documentation by explaining that he often looks out with his naked eye in order to render intensity in his work. His subject matter is repetitive, and while he attempts to capture a nocturnal panorama seemingly devoid of politics, his work could be just as easily alluding to the murkiness of unseen violence, of representing representation. Cader, who studied under the Chicago Imagists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is primarily a draughtsman with a background in graphic design. This becomes evident in Let Sleeping Villages Sleep (2021), a leporello made of the aforementioned source photographs, which are fragmented, forming a collage of childlike wave and cloud forms. Parts of a whole, they can be pieced together front-toback and back-to-front in a continuous process.

Working across an expanded field that links painting to photography, each medium is a derivation of the other, minimising our perceptions of space and scale. In these differing forms, Cader’s work is as much about translation as it is about abstraction. Apart from their titles, his works don’t give away their location. It’s as if he is making a statement on anonymity, with a formalism that belies what’s at stake: a looking into darkness that’s a kind of looking away, especially if you consider that his first Nightscapes (1999), a series of nocturnal Bolgoda Lake views, were done during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Then, as now, the landscape – with its wars, and changing political backdrops – is silenced in a dark reservoir where totality cannot be grasped. Nadine Khalil

Nugaduwa 4 (detail), 2020, oil on wood, set of 2, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Grey Noise, Dubai

November 2021

100-101_AR.indd 101

101

21/10/2021 16:46

Books Where at Home: Paint or Die by Jochen Hiltmann, Zeno X Gallery / König Books, €29.95 (hardcover) While it masquerades as something between a monograph and a biography, Where at Home is ultimately uncategorisable. It’s also partly an art-theory text (covering everyone from Goethe and Kant, Adorno and Agamben, to Qing-dynasty landscape painter Shitao and contemporary China’s Ai Weiwei, and to poets such as Kim Chi-ha and Aimé Césaire, with a heavy dose of Gregory Bateson sprinkled over the top), part environmentalist screed, part manifesto for nonhuman rights and partly an attack on the information age (and David Hockney’s iPad). And then, underneath all that, it’s a text written by a husband about his wife. The wife in question is German-Korean painter Song Hyun-Sook. Her husband is the German sculptor Jochen Hiltmann. You could also call this a love letter of sorts, although the book is rather more academically subtitled ‘an account of the life and work of the painter Song Hyun-Sook and the cultural background of her emigration’. The ‘life’ mainly accounts for Song’s rural upbringing among the paddy fields and silkworm farming of Muwol-li, in North Gyeongsang, Korea, her emigration to West Germany in 1972, aged twenty, to work as one of the approximately 10,000 ‘Korean angel’ nurses who arrived in the country during the 1960s and 70s, and her subsequent training and work as an artist. It begins with their first encounter, in 1973, on a train from Bonn to Hamburg, when Hiltmann initially mistook Song for a boy, and then a monk, was fascinated by her packed lunch and her handling of chopsticks, before, when the truth about her sex was eventually revealed, Hiltmann pronounced that she was ‘strangely beautiful but she wasn’t a beauty’. Hiltmann attempts to be broadly analytic in his narrative. His record of their first encounter appears more an attempt to recognise his own (and West Germany’s) cultural naiveté (instances of straight-up racism are largely absent here, although Hiltmann does recall how the chief nurse on Song’s ward simply called her new charge Maria, after the nurse she replaced). In the chapters that follow he is fastidious in his description of the environment of Muwol-li during the period of Song’s childhood, from the storage pots, tools and furniture in houses, to the cultivation and irrigation of the hillside rice fields. The general impression is of people

102

102-107_AR.indd 102

working together, with their families, their local communities and to the rhythm and demands of nature itself. And yet the description of Song’s upbringing, told from the perspective of an all-knowing narrator (explaining local customs and Korean vocabulary), with interfamilial conversations (which presumably were related to Hiltmann by Song sometime after the fact) occasionally in speech marks, and an intimate knowledge of Song’s infancy, gives the section something of the feel of fiction. And of someone compensating for their ignorance at that first encounter. Which is one way of expressing love. But this lengthy account of Song’s childhood also serves a different function. After studying art at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg between 1976 and 1981, Song returned to South Korea in 1984 to spend a year studying Korean art history at Chonnam National University in Gwangju. While this may appear to have been a means of reconnecting with her roots, Hiltmann describes a subsequent return to Muwol-li as something of a shock. Two years after Song had left the town, electricity arrived. By the time she returned, the tools that Hiltmann so lovingly describes in the opening chapter are lying, redundant, outside the house. Electric water pumps now irrigate the fields, and stone shrines and markers have disappeared. Along with many of the town’s younger generation, who, no longer required to labour in the rice fields, have gone to the city in search of work. Everything that had a clear purpose and place in life has been displaced. In a sense then, Song, an immigrant in her new adopted country, was now equally an alien in the place of her birth. ‘Asked “Where were you born?”’ Hiltmann writes, ‘Song Hyun-Sook replies ‘“In the year of the hare.’” What follows, in the second half of the book, is a series of diatribes about the ruptures caused by the advent of modernism (which for Hiltmann, in terms of art, is a reaction against industrialisation as much as it is against nineteenth-century academicism), and its effects on traditional worldviews, notions of community and the relations between the human and the natural world. There are comparative studies of philosophies of the East and the West, of art traditions in the East and the West (trees planted in Honam with ingrown rock markers, dangsan-namu, are juxtaposed with an oak and basalt marker

planted by Joseph Beuys in 1982 as part of his 7000 Oak Trees project for Documenta in Kassel) and of the disruptions to both caused by capitalism, industrialism and the impact of the information age. ‘More and more people are calling for a change in a culture whose main value is marketability,’ Hiltmann howls. There are moments too when Hiltmann’s desire to describe his wife’s position between East and West seems to go a little too far, as when he writes of Song’s contracting tuberculosis, shortly after arriving in Germany, as being like a ‘shamanic journey’. And throughout, it remains somewhat unclear whether these are Hiltmann’s own ideas or a transposition of Song’s thoughts. Eventually we get to know Song’s art. Her use of egg-tempera techniques (learned through her training in the West) and a philosophy and mode of working that connects closely to calligraphic traditions from the East. The way in which she titles a number of her works after the number of brushstrokes used to make them (the number of strokes is generally minimal and Song often refers to her paintings as haikus). ‘In East Asia the one brushstroke was all of life,’ Hiltmann proclaims. But amid what is an intriguing attempt to account for the mixed influences on Song’s art and the ways in which one culture can understand another, other aspects of her life fade into the background. Her political positions in relation to South Korea’s oppressive military dictatorships, for example, or the effect on her of the Gwangju Uprising. We learn that she dreams about travelling by train from South to North Korea to make a pilgrimage to Geumgangsan Mountain, but we don’t learn a lot about her position on Korean unification. We learn that exiled dissident artists in Germany were kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned by the South Korean cia, but we don’t really learn how this affected Song, who, with her husband, was in contact with and supported many of them. That Song is attuned to politics and their effects on the lives of ordinary people we do learn in passing, and that it impacts on her work and position. But for the main part this remains a subcurrent to the flow of navigating East and West and articulating a position that is somewhere in between. A portrait of a marriage in that sense, but one that demands a volume two to come. Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

21/10/2021 16:47

November 2021

102-107_AR.indd 103

103

21/10/2021 15:38

Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint Graywolf Press, us$16 (softcover) At a book reading by a writer who wrote about his immigration experience, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint felt ‘a dull panic’. She writes, ‘The author is telling a story about the flight from the country of the author’s birth to this country, where the author now lives. The story is linear. The plane flies from one country to another.’ Thirii’s memories of departure from Myanmar and arrivals in different cities en route to Bangkok and then the us are foggy, jumbled; her experiences of living in these places marked by an unresolved sense of self-exile. This memoir, which ostensibly narrates her family’s movement in episodic vignettes, tries to articulate these experiences in a way that honours their lack of a telegenic narrative. Indeed, many immigrant stories cannot be ordered in the decisive, unilateral direction of heroic escape. Her shuffled chronology – featuring stories ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages long – features a cast of relatives going back to her great-grandparents, and takes on a folkloric quality (several family members supposedly reincarnate as others), given the frequent lack of proper names, and the skeletal dating and contextualisation of key historical and political events. The main thrust of a story about a grandfather who joined the Burmese Independence Army as a lieutenant to fight the Japanese centres on how, in the midst of a guerrilla jungle war, villagers gave

him a chicken. He became so focused on cooking it that he inadvertently sat out a battle that killed most of his men. On one level I respect Thirii’s refusal to pander to the usual voyeuristic thrills of migrant literature. To her, such reader expectations are another type of violence inflicted upon her, a form of ventriloquism: ‘I am afraid I have been given the opportunity to speak only because I am saying what you want to hear, what you wish you could say, what you are saying now, through my body, behind the protection my body offers with its brown skin, black eyes, and black hair.’ What Western audiences (the book is published by an American house) want her to say is how lucky she was to have left an oppressive culture for one that is better, freer. The reality, of course, is more complex. She approaches this by weaving family lore and her personal recollections into poetic snippets and musings that have moments of beauty and sadness. Her vivid childhood memories of outsidership in the us, which come in a glut near the end of the book, are heartbreaking, especially given her matterof-fact tone. Having no friends in school, she passed recess by walking briskly from place to place, pretending she had somewhere to be. But such directly moving confessional passages are few; on the whole the book drifts around in desultory, wan prose that circles

issues of origins, identity and belonging without engaging deeply with them. (‘This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced. Displaced is where we moved to, displaced is where I grew up, displaced is where I am from.’) While she does not want to be associated with only her immigrant identity, neither is she keen to reveal the other parts of herself. She flits between first- and third-person narration in the book, with the most personal sections rendered in the latter. As a result, reading this book is an occasionally illuminating but mostly alienating experience. An account of her first love, which supposedly sparked ‘the beginning of herself’, is told bloodlessly and anonymously (‘She loved, but her love was unrequited’), highlighting only the mundane: buying a bicycle together; writing emails to each other. The contents of which, by the way, are never even hinted at. At some points it feels as if the writing simply reflects her feelings of dislocation as a result of unprocessed trauma. (‘Sometimes, it even felt like she was looking into her own window, her own life, which she could not enter.’) At others it articulates a conscious decision to withdraw. (‘The more she learned about the world, the less she wanted to be any part of it.’) Ultimately, it’s as if Thirii is not only suspicious of the immigrant memoir genre but the concept – or the possibility? – of memoir itself. Adeline Chia

Stay Woke, Kids! by Kazvare Knox Canongate, £9.99 (hardcover)

‘Woke’ has become a word fought over: emerging out of Black radical demands that white people be more enlightened about the persistent realities of inequality, then turned into a pejorative by conservatives, for whom it quickly came to replace their older dislike for ‘political correctness’, by now it’s a synonym for the present, increasingly entrenched culture wars. How you use it depends on what ‘side’ you’re on. British illustrator and designer Kazvare Knox has a go at celebrating woke, in a book of limericks accompanied by flat, high-colour cartoon illustrations, to denounce, in verse form, the familiar bugbears of wokeness – from the impossibility of ‘colour-blindness’, to white privilege, gentrification, diversity quotas, cultural appropriation and fake allyship – all titled after

104

102-107_AR.indd 104

Beyoncé songs, such as Hold Up (2016): ‘“I don’t see colour!” she’ll yell. / Yet her clothes match impeccably well, / She stops at red lights, / Culls her pinks from her whites, / But with humans? She just cannot tell.’ It’s hard to know who will find this funny. If you’re Black or female (or both), the injuries of whiteness and patriarchy rehearsed here will make you bitter and angry; if you’re white or male (or both), you’ll probably be too busy being embarrassed or defensive to chuckle – it’s accusatory enough not to quite make it lol subject matter. It’s lucky it isn’t a children’s book, since all Stay Woke, Kids! is likely to conjure in children of all ethnicities is bitterness, confusion, resentment, guilt and misery about either their doomed lot in life or their complicity in oppressing others.

But if it’s hard to accept that this is what being ‘woke’ leads to, Stay Woke, Kids! only doubles down on social questions so serious that solving them will require more than dividing people according to the intersections of their victimhood or privilege. What’s depressing is that, through Knox’s scathing caricatures of bad white ‘allies’, white people who claim they’re not racist, men who benefit from sexism and so on, all that emerges is a sense that the perpetrators and mechanisms of inequality are self-evident and beyond debate, and that everyone just needs to stick to the script; it’s a politics of mutual suspicion so personalised that the idea of coming together to work things out is nowhere to be seen. Stay woke? Time to get unstuck from it. J.J. Charlesworth

ArtReview

21/10/2021 15:38

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich Verso, £14.99 (softcover)

‘Over the past several years, protests have erupted regularly around how museums are funded, how they are organized, what they show and how, who holds power within their structures, and how they reflect, or fail to reflect, a whole diversity of identities,’ curator Laura Raicovich writes. She’s well-placed to comment on such controversies. Previously director of New York’s Queens Museum, Raicovich took a pro-immigrant position at the height of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant politics; a position that, along with disputing the hire of the museum’s spaces to a pro-Israel lobby group event, ultimately led her to fall out with her board and resign her post. Culture Strike is an engaging and personally invested discussion of the many controversies that have engulfed American museums in the last five or so years, as various protests, rooted in the politics of identity and the ethics of cultural organisations, have come to challenge the authority of some of the world’s biggest and richest cultural institutions. Raicovich returns to the Sackler funding scandals, the race controversies surrounding Dana Schutz at the Whitney and the cancelled Philip Guston retrospective, decolonisation and restitution debates, and how the cultural sensitivities of indigenous publics should be negotiated, to argue for a vision of the art institution as ‘an alternate space within which culture can thrive – a culture that relies less on oppression and exclusion to declare its excellence, and more on the care, generosity, and action to create spaces for contemplation, connection, and perhaps even for revolution’. There’s never any doubt which side Raicovich is on. Culture Strike’s core argument is that art institutions are never ‘neutral’, arguing that the claim of neutrality ‘effectively insists that nothing critical or politically challenging can be expressed without the onus of “both-sideism”’; Raicovich holds that this spurious impartiality conceals the oppressively partial realities of white, male, patriarchal, heteronormative, colonialist power. But Raicovich’s framing of the museum’s problem as one of ‘false neutrality’ itself needs scrutiny; ‘This neutrality and universality’, Raicovich writes, ‘is claimed on behalf of a white, Euro-American perspective. Under the banner of universality, neutrality hides that there has always been a perspective, a set of biases, an exclusivity, that is at its core political.’ The problem with this sceptical view of universalism is that, while it seeks to reveal the partiality hiding in the impartiality, the idea of the gallery as a site of potential universality – a place where

a diverse public encounters the difference of human experience to better understand what it potentially has in common – is abandoned. For sure, the historical narratives that Western museums present should be open to critique and revision – any institution that sees its function as the preservation and advancement of knowledge must be open to rethinking the stories it tells and reflect on the biases that are the legacy of older political cultures. But Culture Strike tends to conflate debates over museum historiography with the curating of contemporary art programmes, seeing both as generic sites in the battle over the politics of representation. The confusion at the heart of Culture Strike (and of the debate more broadly) is that arthistorical questions – about the canon, about exclusions and biases – become extensions of contemporary controversies over the representation of societal diversity, turning the cultural institution into just another site of contestation between antagonistic social groups and political perspectives. So, in justifying her decision, while at the Queens Museum, to take a more proactively pro-immigrant and pro-Palestine stance, Raicovich seems oblivious to the obvious consequences that when museums take sides, they become the political instruments of those who run them. This does little more than explicitly repoliticise cultural institutions that, ironically, are criticised for being too political. What’s dismaying is that throughout Culture Strike Raicovich supports controversies that lead to the closing down of public dialogue and engagement, in the name of a respect for diversity that ends up as ‘stay in your lane’. So in the controversy around Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016), a reworking of the photograph of the body of Emmett Till, the black teenager murdered by racists in 1957, Raicovich insists that ‘as a white woman she has no idea what it means to be a mother of a Black child’, while fudging that ‘there is not necessarily an identity-based limit on who can address a particular image or issue’. Contemporary identitarianism also skews her reading of the Guston cancellation; Raicovich can just about acknowledge Guston as a ‘Jewish white man’, as if Guston’s own experience of anti-Semitism in midcentury America, and his solidarity with Black Americans at the time, were of no historical consideration. Ironically, overlaying the concerns of contemporary cultural politics onto the past does nothing good for the museum’s mission to make the past understandable to the present.

November 2021

105_AR.indd 105

‘False neutrality’ is a loaded condemnation of institutions whose nonpartisanship is a condition of their public legitimacy; the relative independence of the cultural institution’s mission to offer an understanding of history and a broad view of contemporary practice means it has to keep some distance from the necessarily partial and often conflicting interests of the different groups of the society it inhabits. Unfortunately, however laudable in intention the tendency of cultural institutions to side uncritically with a particular set of politics, cultural institutions have become more factional: uncritical enclaves of particular values and perspectives, impervious to any real diversity of opinion, or space for civic dialogue. Because for all its radical ‘allyship’, what really drives Raicovich’s preoccupation with changing the museum into something more politically relevant is the anxiety of cultural functionaries over the political impotence of their professional roles. Everyone wants to change the world, but inside working hours. And what’s obvious about Culture Strike is how resistant it is, in fact, to following through the more radical implications of its politicisation of cultural institutions. After all, if the Western museum and gallery is such a site of white supremacist patriarchy, it should be abolished. No amount of reform can recover it. But here there is hesitation and silence in Raicovich’s polemic. Nowhere is there a call for the radical devolution of cultural organisations, allowing those publics who might want them to invent their own organisations to do so. The assumption is that the big institution is here to stay, and Raicovich’s prescriptions for change are reformist, not abolitionist: institutions must do more to ‘listen’, to ‘center’, to learn from minority groups; board memberships must be tinkered with, but the form of governance may have to stay; more public money must be spent to counter the power of private donors, and so on. But the end result is always the perpetuation of the institution, run by the same cadre of professionals (appropriately diversified, of course), always in search of more ‘equity’. Raicovich wants to hear from people, but not hand over control, as when she muses that ‘I’m not particularly interested in the premise that museums should directly implement programmatic ideas via crowdsourcing’. Why not? That would be democratic, but it would threaten the curatorial class. This isn’t really a demand for a revolution of the cultural institution, only a reshuffle of its senior management. J.J. Charlesworth

105

20/10/2021 15:33

106

106_AR.indd 106

ArtReview

15/10/2021 17:53

The Dancer: A Biography for Philippa Cullen by Evelyn Juers Giramondo Publishing, aus$39.95 (softcover) The Australian dancer Philippa Cullen died in 1975, in the Indian town of Kodaikanal. She was just twenty-five. By then, though, Cullen – also a choreographer, performer, musician and teacher – had become a key figure in the Australian experimental art scene. At the forefront of the electronic music movement, she worked with composers, engineers, mathematicians, academics and artists to construct movement-sensitive floors and theremins. In addition to India, she had travelled to Germany, the Netherlands, England, Ghana and Nepal. She had danced in opera houses, trains, country towns, galleries and parks. And she had taught dance to conventional students, inmates at Long Bay prison in New South Wales, psychiatric patients and at children’s summer camps. In her essay ‘Towards a Philosophy of Dance’ (1973), quoted here, Cullen wrote: ‘I would define dance as an outer manifestation of inner energy in an articulation more lucid than language’. A key aspect of Cullen’s vision was her approach to the relationship between movement, technology and composition. Influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, she investigated methods for using biosensors and computer algorithms in performances, and experimented with directional photoelectric cells to transform improvised dance into sound. For Australian audiences at the

time, these performances proposed inventive new ways of thinking about dance. As the title suggests, the book is for Phillipa Cullen, and as such, it is far from a conventional biographical narrative. Its own choreographic feat, it charts not only Cullen’s life, but also her ancestry, the settler-colonial history of Australia and the larger sociopolitical context of Cullen’s time, interspersed with literary references, quotes and dream sequences. Set among this is Cullen herself, who kept diaries, recorded her research, notated dreams, made diagrams for dances and sent letters. Juers has chosen to italicise direct references within the text, so the reader must continually switch between the presenttense ‘I’ of Cullen and the ‘she’ of Juers: ‘She needs to be patient and devote herself utterly to her work. Sacrifice myself to it.’ This gives a sense that Juers is writing alongside Cullen, instead of speaking for her, and Cullen’s voice – strident, funny, restless, elated, critical – announces itself on the page: ‘I haven’t met anybody who accepts what I do without question’. The result is a sensitive and profoundly moving account of the young artist’s life – her discoveries and joys, her devotion to her work and her vision of dance as an ‘integrative art’. Throughout The Dancer, Juers pays careful attention to the web of academics, artists,

writers and performers that Cullen, directly or tangentially, interacted with. These include the Austrian dancer, teacher and choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (whose dance school Cullen attended as a child), the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (with whom Cullen had a lengthy affair) and Mirra Alfassa, founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the ‘universal township’ of Auroville, which Cullen first travelled to in 1973. For Juers, the complex lives of these individuals – their histories and trajectories – feed into larger concerns, whether the aftershocks of the Second World War or the aspirations of 1970s countercultures. Juers’s eye is not uncritical though, and she repeatedly draws attention to the ways in which art movements, such as modern dance or the postwar avant-garde, are entangled in their broader historical context. Cullen’s work was featured as part of the group exhibition Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia in 2020. In the accompanying publication, the artist Diana Baker Smith lamented that ‘Cullen’s legacy has become as ephemeral as folklore, reliant on oral histories and a handful of old photographs and video tapes’. The Dancer offers a rejoinder to this absence. It is a vast tapestry, woven together by the energy of Cullen’s own voice – alive, and in the present tense. Naomi Riddle

Walk on the Water Edited by Marc-Olivier Wahler Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville de Genève, €36 (hardcover)

Around 100 academics recently signed a petition demanding the dismissal of Musée d’Art et d’Histoire director Marc-Olivier Wahler following, among other things, the institution’s displays of ‘historical nonsense liable to mislead the public’. In Walk on the Water, Wahler argues that he is remaking the home of Switzerland’s oldest art collection as a space that reflects contemporary ways of looking. That’s achieved, he states, via exhibitions, and more precisely this one, the first in a series of displays that give carte blanche to a visiting personality, in this case Austrian artist Jakob Lena Knebl, to reimagine the collection. In one sense this book is a manifesto; in another a record. Through both Wahler seeks to present curating as a creative act.

‘The more displays are adjusted,’ he proclaims, ‘the more the interpretations are multiplied.’ Before mentioning that mediums and profilers (performing the role of curators) are among the figures on his revolutionary hitlist. Knebl has a track record of mingling contemporary with historical works. She uses humour and seduction to remove the distance that defines encounters with the objects in museums. Her mah display includes a nineteenth-century plaster sculpture of Venus at Her Bath (Jean-Jacques Pradier) placed in a shower cubicle, while a blown-up print of a man in bathing trunks from Henri-Edmond Cross’s pointillist painting The Ballaster (1908) appears to leer through the screens. Paintings (dealing with

November 2021

102-107_AR.indd 107

nature) are hung on the walls of garden sheds; a colossal statue of Ramses smirks in a velvet-lined bedroom. The exhibition’s title refers to a 1444 altarpiece by Konrad Witz (featuring Jesus walking on Lake Geneva) and a song by British metal band Deep Purple (recorded by the lake in Montreux). Which is why, reflecting the spirit of the exhibition, the catalogue includes an interview with barefoot water-skier Laurent Albisati. Also present is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘There Are More Things’ (1975), about a man’s encounter with objects with which he thinks he is familiar, but turn out to be the stuff of nightmares. The point according to Knebl is to find out whether your response to the new is to run away or find out more. Nirmala Devi

107

21/10/2021 15:39

Fresh ideas, naturally germinated and delivered to your door every month Subscribe to our print and digital editions artreview.com/subscribe

ArtReview 108_AR.indd 108

13/10/2021 14:30

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising & Partnerships

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Publisher Carsten Recksik carstenrecksik@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Moky May mokymay@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Finance

Media Sales and Partnerships Angela Cheung angelacheung@artreview.com

Production Manager Alex Wheelhouse production@artreview.com

Editors David Terrien J.J. Charlesworth Director of Digital En Liang Khong Editor-at-Large Oliver Basciano Managing Editor Louise Darblay

Financial Controller John Jiang johnjiang@artreview.com

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam@icanps.co.uk

Accountant Ning Cao ningcao@artreview.com

Subscriptions

Senior Editor, ArtReview Asia Fi Churchman

To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe

Associate Editor Martin Herbert

ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications t 44 (0)1778 392038 e art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk

Design

ArtReview Ltd

Art Direction John Morgan studio

ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y 0th t 44 (0)20 7490 8138 e office@artreview.com

Designers Pedro Cid Proença Isabel Duarte

ArtReview is printed by Sterling. Reprographics by phmedia, part of The Logical Choice Group.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: 21034) is published by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne pe10 9ph, United Kingdom.

Photo credit

Text credits

Words on the spine and on pages 23, 39 and 73 are from Emile Gaboriau, quoted in Desert Screen (2002), by Paul Virilio, translated by Michael Degener

November 2021

109_AR.indd 109

109

21/10/2021 16:50

With the arrival of the winter season comes an excuse to eat more tong yuhn (湯圓), a dessert that loosely translates as ‘soup spheres’. These sticky glutinous rice balls, typically filled with black sesame, peanut or red bean pastes, are served in a clear sweet ginger soup perfumed with osmanthus flowers. While they now come in a great variety of flavours and combinations (including chocolate, matcha, durian, etc), that trio of traditional fillings remain a stalwart of Hong Kong’s tong sui po menus; after a day spent amid the throngs of city life, there are few things more comforting than sitting in one of those late-night dessert diners and breathing in the floral, spicy steam of gingerinfused soup. Enjoyed across mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, variations on the dessert can also be found in Southeast Asian countries to which different Chinese ethnic groups have migrated and set down roots: Vietnam’s chè trôi nuóc (meaning ‘floating tea’) is commonly filled with mung bean paste, while in the Philippines ginataang bilo-bilo is served in coconut milk, as is Thailand’s bua loi. Despite being enjoyed year-round (as evidenced by the entirety of one of my freezer drawers), the making and eating of tong yuhn is most often associated with the Lantern Festival, which marks the end of Lunar New Year celebrations. In 2022 it will fall on 15 February, when the first full moon of the lunar year forms.

Aftertaste

Tong Yuhn by Fi Churchman

Tong yuhn make an appearance in the Han dynasty legend of Yuan Xiao, a young maid who lived in the courts of Emperor Wu, and whose name is often used to refer to the rice balls in northern China. Yuan Xiao was skilled at making these little balls, but she was never allowed to leave the palace to see her family. Homesick and alone, Yuan Xiao stood at the edge of a well and contemplated suicide. Before she could throw herself into

it, a trusted adviser to the emperor, Dongfang Shuo, who had heard her weeping, took pity on her and offered to resolve her predicament. Pretending to be a fortune teller, he began to tell the people of the city that the God of Fire would sweep through their houses and destroy the palace, burning the city to the ground. News reached Emperor Wu, who asked his adviser what to do. Dongfang Shuo told him that to appease the god, the emperor should hold a magnificent city-wide celebration with lanterns and firecrackers (so the city would appear aflame) and lots of tong yuhn (the fire god’s favourite food) on the 15th night of the first lunar month. That evening, the city’s residents gathered together and poured through the palace gates to watch the festivities. And Yuan Xiao was reunited with her family in the crowds. The tale is one of the reasons tong yuhn have come to represent the reunion of family and friends. The other reason is much simpler: these glutinous rice balls are shaped to resemble the full moon, a symbol of wholeness. The coming together of families is a particularly important tradition of Dung Zi (‘winter’s extreme’, known in the West as the winter solstice), during which nighttime is at its longest and tong yuhn are eaten at the end of a large family meal to celebrate the approach of the lighter days of spring. The festival, which has its roots in rural traditions, usually occurs around 22 December, and though it doesn’t enjoy the widespread attention and festivities of Lunar New Year (Macau is the only region that celebrates the winter solstice as a public holiday), it is considered by many to be the true marker of the new year, since it signals the passing of the darkest of days. Good news for those of you who can’t wait until the Lantern Festival to slurp down tong yuhn. I never do. Time to get rollin’. ingredients Glutinous rice flour Boiling water Black sesame seeds Honey roasted peanuts Sugar Lard Ginger Yellow rock sugar Goji berries, optional Osmanthus flowers, optional difficulty: 3

110

110_AR.indd 110

20/10/2021 15:35

December 2–4, 2021

201_AR.indd 1 59_ABMB21_Ad_GalleryList_235x300_ArtReview.indd 1

28/09/2021 16:47 15/9/2021 ��12:43

Photograph taken by Mateo Garcia / Belle & Company Franz Ackermann, About Sand, 2018, City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places

202_AR.indd 1 UK_ART REVIEW 235x300_HJ DIORROSE_29OCT.indd 1

07/10/2021 17:25 06/10/2021 11:45