Because shopping in the airport is time worth spending
Richard Tuttle Sabelo Mlangeni Theo Eshetu
vol 66 no 7
Latifa Echakhch
ORANIENBURGER STRASSE 18
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17 September — 1 November 2014 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com
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Eric Fischl Art Fair paintings 14 October - 19 December 2014
Victoria Miro 16 Wharf Road · London N1 7RW victoria-miro.com
Kerry James Marshall Look See 11 October - 22 November 2014
David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ 020 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com
brussels AyAn fArAh ‘noTes on running wATer’ joel shAPiro ProjecT rooM: Piero goliA ‘The coMedy of crAfT (inTerMission)’ october 9 – november 12, 2014
london MArk hAgen ‘A PArliAMenT of soMe Things’ october 13 – november 8, 2014
& frieze london • booth f8 october 15 – 18, 2014
PAris richArd Prince october 20 – december 20, 2014
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From top to bottom: Matt Mullican, M.I.T., 1993, Wood, tissue, 100x400x800 cm | Photo from Gallery archive | Paola Pivi, Do You Know Why Italy Is Shaped Like a Boot? Because So Much Shit Couldn’t Fit in a Shoe, 2001, Leather boot, 50 pins, 46x26x10 | All images: Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London
In 1993. April Matt Mullican participates in Documenta IX, and in the same year shows at Massimo De Carlo in Milan.
July Massimo De Carlo moves space. His last exhibition in Via Panfilo Castaldi is with Roman Signer. The artist installs the work (flooding the space), and the gallerist deals with it.
November The Maastricht Treaty becomes law and the European Union is formally born. Goods and people can circulate freely within the European states, and the art world becomes even more global.
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Doug Aitken MArtin Boyce Joe BrADley AngelA Bulloch vAlentin cArron verne DAwson JAy Defeo trishA Donnelly cArroll DunhAM lAtifA echAkhch MAtiAs fAlDBAkken sAM fAlls urs fischer peter fischli/DAviD weiss liAM gillick DouglAs gorDon MArk hAnDforth cAnDiDA höfer Alex huBBArD wyAtt kAhn kAren kiliMnik AnDrew lorD gerwAlD rockenschAuB tiM rollins AnD k.o.s. ugo ronDinone Dieter roth evA rothschilD JeAn-fréDéric schnyDer steven sheArer Josh sMith oscAr tuAzon frAnz west sue williAMs MichAel williAMs
Galerie eva Presenhuber maag areal Zahnradstr. 21, Ch-8005 ZUriCh tel: +41 (0) 43 444 70 50 / Fax: +41 (0) 43 444 70 60 opening hoUrs: tUe-Fri 10-6, sat 11-5 lÖWenBrÄU areal limmatstr. 270, Ch-8005 ZUriCh tel: +41 (0) 44 515 78 50 / Fax: +41 (0) 43 444 70 60 opening hoUrs: tUe-Fri 11-6, sat 11-5 WWW.presenhUBer.Com
latiFa eChaKhCh, l’air dU temps
Matthew Barney Crown Zinc 10 October – 13 December 2014 Tuesday–Saturday 11–6 Sadie Coles HQ 62 Kingly Street London W1B 5QN www.sadiecoles.com
Sadie Coles HQ
Title, date
The City, The Firewalker and the aftermath of copper cable theft. Queen Elizabeth bridge, Johannesburg, 29 December 2011
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FRIEZE LONDON BOOTH H1 15 – 18 OCTOBER 2014 FRIEZE MASTERS SUE WILLIAMSON BOOTH S18 15 – 18 OCTOBER 2014 ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH BOOTH C20 4 – 7 DECEMBER 2014
GILLIAN WEARING WE ARE HERE 13 OCTOBER – 16 NOVEMBER 2014 MAUREEN PALEY. 21 HERALD STREET, LONDON E2 6JT +44 (0)20 7729 4112 INFO@MAUREENPALEY.COM WWW.MAUREENPALEY.COM
Merlin James fiac (off)icielle Booth c33 cité de la Mode et du Design 22–26 october 2014 Kerlin Gallery Dublin www.kerlingallery.com
Merlin James Untitled, 2014 (detail) acrylic, wood and mixed media 114 x 91.5 cm
Western Standards Recently ArtReview was worrying that you might get the impression that it spends all its time swanning around on aeroplanes, collecting unmeasurable quantities of airmiles and generally doing what by now is the established art-tourist thing (go to a place because it’s hosting an art biennial or fair, hang out with the art people it always hangs out with and then leave having seen very little of the place itself other than some exhibition halls and a couple of restaurants that local people don’t usually frequent). You’re not alone in thinking that. Sometimes ArtReview thinks that itself. Like just last week, when it was in Seoul ‘wooing’ an artist from whom it is seeking a project for a future edition. Poor ArtReview hadn’t slept in two days because of a brutal flight schedule ; part of its sushi was in its mouth and another part was on its lap.The soy sauce was everywhere. The artist was asking ArtReview a number of questions concerning the ideas of Korean art that it had formulated on its trip, but ArtReview couldn’t remember which of the artists whose work it had seen recently was genuinely Korean (the first names that came to mind were Lee Bul and Jewyo Rhii, both of whom are featured in the current issue of ArtReview Asia – so they didn’t count – and someone of Korean origin who was basically American, about whom ArtReview has freqently written), or, if it remembered, in great detail, the work of particular Korean artists that it had seen over the previous two days, it couldn’t remember the name of the artists who made it without fumbling past the sushi that had missed its mouth and its lap, and was carpeting the floor, for its notes. More generally it was worried about using a three-day visit to announce its sweeping and universalising thoughts on Korean art, given that it had little real insight into the consequences of a Japanese occupation, a technically ongoing civil war, and a subsequent fight for democracy – none of which seemed comparable to Scotland’s debate about whether or not to leave the UK – let alone the history of the country’s various art movements (although it did find a studio visit with an artist involved in the Dansaekhwa movement very enlightening, but more on that in the December issue). In a way, the most important thing that ArtReview found out on its Korean research trip was how little it did know. Which, given that ArtReview is world-reknowned as a positive thinker, merely served to whet its appetite for the process of correcting its ignorance over the years to come.
ArtReview’s check-in luggage: to protect the purity and essence of its natural fluids
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As it has to explain to its girlfriend every time it unpacks the rubber tubing, car battery and bicycle pump, nothing gives ArtReview greater pleasure than the process of making the unfamiliar familiar. ‘Where’s all of this going?’ ArtReview hears you asking. ‘Didn’t you say that ArtReview Asia just featured some Korean artists in its Autumn & Winter issue,’ (btw. if you don’t know about ArtReview’s sister magazine you should go online and check it out). ‘Have you accidentally – or lazily even – dropped the editorial for ArtReview Asia into the ArtReview slot?’Oh you poor fools! ArtReview has done nothing of the sort. Rather, ArtReview firmly believes that the context in which art is produced or displayed plays an important role in how it is received. And that it’s partly because of situations such as ‘the Seoul episode’ that ArtReview exists. As the ‘artworld’ becomes more global (yeah, ArtReview’s fully aware that that makes absolutely no logical sense), ArtReview feels ever more obliged to focus on what makes each and every artwork and artist particular and individual. It’s why ArtReview Asia is largely written by people who live or work in Asia. It’s why ArtReview conducts extensive research projects on art scenes around the world like the one on the African art scene in this issue. In a yearlong series of articles beginning here, ArtReview has asked various people involved in art (in the roles of producer, distributor, commentator, documenter, etc) in various locations across the continent to produce a short feature that attempts to explain the role that art plays in the society of which they are a part. Identity and its construction isn’t just a subject that concerns what Western people would consider the geographical margins of the artworld.Debates surrounding it also play a key role in artworks created by people operating within the West. Such as those of Latifa Echakhch, who graces the cover of this issue. And if the identity of people and cultures is subject to change and conflict, that’s no different from the way in which ideas of what art is and can be are constantly up for debate. Because for ArtReview, art, at its best, plays an important role in the generation of alternative views andfresh persectives. ArtReview
Cowboys
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26 September – 8 November 2014 6 Burlington Gardens, London, W1S 3ET
In collaboration with Fondazione Merz
pacegallery.com
Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin Daily 10 am – 8 pm Mondays admission free deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com
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Meschac Gaba Architecture Room (detail), from Museum of Contemporary African Art 1997–2002 Installation shot at Tate Modern, 3 July–22 September 2013 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014
ArtReview vol 66 no 7 October 2014
Art Previewed 33
Previews by Martin Herbert 35
Hegel on Sploshing Interview by Matthew Collings 68
Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Andrew Berardini, Mike Watson, Mark Sladen, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Louise Darblay 53
Eric Fischl Interview by Tom Eccles 72 Relations Without Relations: A Response to Graham Harman by Michael Newman 78
page 34 Ed Clark, New Orleans Series #4, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 135 × 168 cm. Courtesy Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans
October 2014
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Art Featured 97
Latifa Echakhch by Violaine Boutet de Monvel 98
Jacob Hashimoto by Erik Morse 112
Richard Tuttle by Sherman Sam 104
Africa: Art In Context by Gabi Ngcobo, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung & Cristina De Middel 116
Trisha Donnelly by Martin Herbert 108
page 108 Courtesy Trisha Donnelly
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Art Reviewed 131
Exhibitions 132 Beverly Pepper, by Gabriel Coxhead Inventory, by J.J. Charlesworth Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem), by Oliver Basciano Eustachy Kossakowski and Goshka Macuga, by Helen Sumpter GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, by James Clegg Hayley Tompkins, by Sarah Lowndes Douglas Gordon, by John Quin Mood Is Made / Temperature Is Taken, by Susannah Thompson Another, Once Again, Many Times More, by Tracy Zwick Carl Andre, by Joshua Mack Robert Melee, by Siona Wilson Here and Elsewhere, by Joseph Akel Fixed Unknowns, by Brienne Walsh Morag Keil, by Laura McLean-Ferris Daniel von Sturmer, by Jonathan Griffin Andrew Cameron and Emilie Halpern, by Andrew Berardini Allora & Calzadilla, by Ed Schad João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, by Barbara Casavecchia Wilfredo Prieto, by Gesine Borcherdt Carsten Höller, by Raimar Stange
Le Mouvement, by Olga Stefan Paul Chan, by Joshua Mack Isola Utopia: Fragments and Moments for New Utopias, by Mike Watson Bunny Rogers, by Karen Archey Roni Horn, by Keith Patrick Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950, by Sam Steverlynck Yokohama Triennale 2014, by Mark Rappolt Defying Stability: Artistic Process in Mexico 1952–1967, by Gabriela Jauregui Os Gêmeos, by Claire Rigby Books 162 33 Artists in 3 Acts, by Sarah Thornton Shooting Space, by Elias Redstone Lives of the Orange Men, by Major Waldemar Fydrych A man in a room spray-painting a fly… (or at least trying to…), by Francesco Pedraglio THE STRIP 166 OFF THE RECORD 170
p148 Shirana Shahbazi, [Komposition-40-2011], 2011, c-print on aluminium, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York
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Photo Eugene Kukulka
Rome, via Guido Reni 4a www.fondazionemaxxi.it follow us download the free MAXXI app
Art Previewed
See buy fly 33
FutureGreats 2014
ArtReview and EFG International are proud to present the fifth in a series of six specially commissioned poster projects featuring unique artworks created by artists following their selection as 2014 FutureGreats. Each artwork is reproduced in ArtReview and is available as a full-size limited-edition poster in subscriber copies of the magazine.
Luiza Baldan
Luiza Baldan works mostly through photography to investigate man’s relationship with architecture, searching for little oddities and breaks in the sameness of everyday life. A recent project, for example, focused on the 1930s Raposo Lopes building, in the Santa Teresa neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, which contains one of the largest residential swimming pools – albeit currently deactivated – in Latin America. It is the sharpness and complexity of Baldan’s photographs, associated with the urgency of her themes, such as the decay in landmark buildings in Brazil, that makes her one of the most interesting artists of her generation. Fernanda Brenner
Previewed Prospect.3 New Orleans 25 October – 25 January Mariana Castillo Deball Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin through 1 March Tony Conrad Inverleith House, Edinburgh 25 October – 21 December
Puddle, Pothole, Portal SculptureCenter, New York 2 October – 5 January
Korakrit Arunanondchai Carlos/Ishikawa, London through 1 November
Martin Soto Climent t293, Rome through 21 October
Will Boone Jonathan Viner, London 10 October – 8 November
Stephen Shore 303 Gallery, New York through 1 November
One Million Years – System and Symptom Kunstmuseum Basel 11 October – 5 April
David Altmejd Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 10 October – 1 February
7 Stephen Shore Mar Saba Monastery, Judean Desert, Israel, September 20, 2009, 2009, c-print, 91 × 114 cm. © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
October 2014
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2 Mariana Castillo Deball, Sculpture of Kaiser Wilhelm ii in the basement of the Hamburger Bahnhof, which stood on the dais in the main hall before the end of the war, 2014. Photo: Gerd Kemner, 1984. © Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin
1 Ed Clark, New Orleans Series #4, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 135 × 168 cm. Courtesy Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans
3 Tony Conrad, Fair Ground Electric Horn, 2003, large funnel, hose clamps, copper tubing, metal mouthpiece, 182 × 122 × 56 cm. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne
the biennial to the city and its regeneration, Prospect New Orleans is the beleaguered following the lead of various earlier thinkers, biennial par excellence, somehow forever rising the original focus on site-specific work appears calls the ‘biographies of things’ – objects in or falling. What began in 2008 as a demonstrato have been restored. various Berlin collections – tracking their ‘itin Last year, Mariana Castillo Deball won erant lives’, their movements between display tion of civic pride and self-determination for 2 the National Gallery Prize for Young Art, cases, courtyards, venues, private collections, post-Katrina New Orleans had, by the second edition, lost funding, been postponed until 2011 organised by Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, for exhibitions, etc. (How those ‘lives’ are shaped by institutions will also be explored by an audioand shrunk dramatically. Backers have evidently a pseudo-ethnographic rendering of the pre1 been located since, as Prospect.3: Notes for Now guide detailing background research.) Expect Columbian city of Teotihuacan: a woodblocknot only features some 50 artists, including a voguish aspect to these loosely animist objects, printed map on the floor surrounded by costumes and fabricated artefacts. The same year, then, though Castillo Deball doesn’t just want high-insurance figures such as Paul Gauguin the Berlin-based Mexican artist had elsewhere objects to live again, but to sing: she aims, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but is free to visit she says, at ‘a type of opera, in which a repertoire exhibited plaster casts of Mayan reliefs and the and comes trailing numerous public projects made up of objects, buildings and architectural results of riffling through British artist Eduardo and ‘myriad’ auxiliary programmes. The theme reconstructions appear as the main characters’. Paolozzi’s archive, aspects of a research-driven this time, established by overseeing LACMA curator Franklin Sirmans, is the social progress ArtReview once had dinner in Reykjavík work process that perpetually delves into the that art can theoretically enable, so fittingly lost or half-forgotten material past and gener3 with Tony Conrad: he strode out of a couple Theaster Gates is here alongside artists includof restaurants first, finding them unacceptable. ates alternative, renewed readings of it. For If you know anything about his extraordinary, ing Ed Clark, Andrea Fraser and Zarina Bhimji. her show in the main hall at the Hamburger And most importantly in terms of tying restless career, that’s not wholly surprising. Bahnhof, Castillo Deball explores what she,
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Conrad, trained in mathematics at Harvard, has resulted in Conrad playing, for example, a ladder spheres. And perhaps never more so than in persistently had it his own way or not at all. with a baseball bat and loosening his violin the centrepiece of the Quebecois artist’s first He pioneered structural film on binary principles strings until they dangle off the instrument. French retrospective, The Flux and the Puddle with the epilepsy-inducing pulse of The Flicker Talking of originality: when even your (2014), a labyrinth of clear cubes containing all (1966), which shuttled rapidly between black press-release writer feels obligated to mention kinds of suspended pseudo-bodily matter, like and white. He pickled celluloid in vinegar. He Matthew Barney, David Cronenberg and David a hi-tech office block crossed with an aquarium made the brilliant Yellow Movies (1973), cinema by Lynch, you’re probably not covering your tracks, crossed with a graveyard. 4 and in David Altmejd’s case, we could add other means, by painting black squares onto This column doesn’t often get to link via sheets of photographic paper that have changed Paul Thek, too. But Altmejd’s sculptural fields the word ‘puddle’, so when the opportunity 5 arises, we jump. Puddle, Porthole, Portal at colour over time: film in ultra-slo-mo. And as of glittering grotesquerie – organic forms ema minimalist musician (who, incidentally, gave bedded or stabbed with crystalline or mirrored SculptureCenter, cocurated by the institution’s the Velvet Underground their name), Conrad has forms, oozing grottoes, bodies intersected Ruba Katrib and the seemingly ubiquitous artist not only pioneered his own scales but also his with minerals – gain from being unshackled Camille Henrot (who also pops up in Prospect.3), own instruments, as seen in Invented Acoustical from their precursors’ narrative structures, plus takes as its starting point a variety of children’s Tools. Showcased at Inverleith House and dating entertainment and cartoons that demonstrate he raises their neo-Surrealism and glistening from 1966 – when Conrad’s requirements that an elastic approach to space and depth, from corporeality to new levels of physical envelopment. What’s left is abstract reverie veering The Flicker have a soundtrack as inventive as its the highbrow graphic art of Saul Steinberg to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and uses them visuals led him to early electronics – to 2012, they into abstract nightmare in a ‘psychic flux’ that to consider space as something we explore allows unpredictable fluidity between the two reflect an attitude to soundmaking that has
5 Judith Hopf, Lily’s Laptop, 2013,video still. Courtesy the artist and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan
4 David Altmejd, The Flux and the Puddle, 2014. Photo: James Ewing. © the artist. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
October 2014
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8 Korakrit Arunanondchai, Untitled (Body Painting) (detail), 2013, acrylic on denim, inkjet print on canvas and 100 DVDs, 218 × 162 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Clearing, New York & Brussels, and Carlos / Ishikawa, London
6 Martin Soto Climent, The Pleasure of the Seed, 2014, bras, mixed media (nine elements), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
cup, and the purple underpainting beaming excitedly and clumsily, like children. Expect The Seed (2014), a brown, globular form made from repurposed brassieres that looks explicitly through the scratched-up table is quotidian associations with digital and virtual space – aesthetic heaven. Shore, a self-taught whiz who the curators present Steinberg, whose centennial vaginalike, or the wild, nude-strewn conjunctions created by folding magazine pages in sold his work to Edward Steichen (then of MoMA) this show marks, as a pioneer of virtual realities, The Equation of Desire (2010–11). This, it seems, has age fourteen, has been elevating banality for while Jordan Wolfson is on the artist list along side figures such as Jos de Gruyter & Harald less to do with the maker’s predilections than decades now, often fuelled by roadtrips, and Thys, Maria Loboda and Judith Hopf. Meanwhile, with ecological awareness (and perhaps a bit he remains on the move: this year saw him it’s surely no accident that an exhibition conpreparing a book of photographs shot in Israel, of deep-rooted rebellion against his heritage): cerned with expanded notions of space launches and Phaidon published A New York Minute (2014), ‘I see my own work as a result of female energy, a digital book featuring 16 moving images (within SculptureCenter’s newly extended and renobecause it’s not about transformation or damage a nonmoving frame) that capture moments vated building. or penetration,’ he’s said. It’s not his mind Born into a family of successful industrial of metropolitan clamour. He’s also comically that’s dirty, but rather our planet. consistent, so when he shows, as now – with the In Perrine, Florida, 11/11/77 (1977/2003), 6 designers, Martin Soto Climent thought he’d follow them, but changed his mind eight years 7 a photograph by Stephen Shore, nothing and included photographs focusing on Israel and Ukraine – you should go. ago and almost immediately showed his work everything is going on. We see only a half-eaten at Art Basel. That’s indicative. The Mexican artist The New York Times has called Korakrit McDonald’s burger, fries and drink sitting on 8 appears not to want to make but rather to remake, a table, but in the interplay between pale salmon Arunanondchai ‘the rapping, body-painting via unruffled prestidigitation, manufactured polystyrene packaging, glossy mustard-coloured free spirit of the art world’ and a ‘countercultural table, the zingy white of paper bag and drinks sprite’, identifying a particularly millennial objects so they resonate wildly differently: see
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G A L E R I A
H E L G A
D E
A L V E A R
DR. FOURQUET 12, 28012 MADRID. TEL:(34) 91 468 05 06 FAX:(34) 91 467 51 34 e-mail:galeria@helgadealvear.com www.helgadealvear.com
18 de septiembre - 31 de octubre de 2014
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15 - 18 de octubre de 2014
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CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIÓN HELGA DE ALVEAR Las Lágrimas de las Cosas Proyecto de Marta Gili 26 de abril de 2014 – 11 de enero de 2015 Cáceres, España
www.fundacionhelgadealvear.es/apps
spirit in the Bangkok-born artist’s conflation of painting, performance and video. Certainly there’s a lack of anxiety in Arunanondchai’s dalliances with abstraction in general and action painting in particular. He happily strips off and uses his body, Yves Klein-style, as a paintbrush. He learned to paint, so he told Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview, using Microsoft Paint; his canvas surfaces are denim, splashed with bleach, burned and appliquéd with photographs of the flames that arose during the ‘performance’ of making the work; and the question of whether the painting is on fire now or not is, he’s said, ‘confusing… like an object that gets constantly repho tographed and circulated around the Internet’. The Internet, dependable alibi of young artists everywhere – but Arunanondchai is clearly on his way, and in the right place for his skill set; this, after all, is the gallery that launched Oscar Murillo.
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One might look at Will Boone’s canvases and think they resemble cleaned-up Robert Motherwells. They do, but they’re also about communication – or noncommunication, since Boone’s chunky black-on-white graphics feature letters neatly overlaid so that they descend into clotted, nonsignifying abstractions. Boone likes graphic marks at the edge of legibility: elsewhere, he’ll lackadaisically spraypaint a rectangle and a triangle in glowing orange and 10 call it, mordantly for a work being displayed at an art fair (as this was), A Silk Hat and a Pile of Gold (2014), or make dirty minimal sculptures out of petrol – or coffee cans, or fill a dark cube with Elvis memorabilia, weight benches and a Chevy car seat. The word that comes to mind concerning Boone’s revisions of twentieth-century American culture is ‘burnout’; but clearly it’s the kind of burnout that spurs iterative creativity. From the mid-twentieth-century heyday of cybernetics – a word that, admittedly,
apparently goes back to Plato’s Alcibiades – to the present, systems theory has a venerable history in modern intellectual life, never really dating because we continue to live within nested systems: ‘economic systems, value systems, communication systems, judicial systems, health systems, training systems, transport systems, scientific systems, systems of living, educational systems, production systems…’ as the Kunstmuseum Basel points out. In One Million Years – System and Symptom, curator Søren Grammel is accordingly devoted to the systemic, dividing between mostly modernist ordering systems by the likes of Hanne Darboven, Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt and the late On Kawara, and artists who unveil hidden ordering processes and styles of the normative, including Henrik Olesen, Martha Rosler, Andreas Slominski and Fiona Tan. Clockwork critiqued – could there be a more seamless alloy of contemporary art and Switzerland? We think not. Martin Herbert
10 Andreas Slominski, Angled Fish Trap from Helgoland, 1998, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel
9 Will Boone, A Silk Hat and a Pile of Gold, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 152 × 102 cm. Courtesy Jonathan Viner, London
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© eState of Martin Kippenberger, gaLerie giSeLa Capitain, KöLn
Contemporary art evening auCtion London 17 october 2014 exhibition 12–17 october
Martin Kippenberger Ohne Titel (Meine Lugen sind Ehrlich) Untitled (My Lies are Honest), 1992 estimate £2,500,000–3,500,000 enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 5401 34–35 new bond Street, London W1a 2aa register now at sothebys.com
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irMA sTErn (1894-1966) Still life with African Woman, 1945 £800,000 - 1,200,000 US$1,300,000 - 2,000,000 The South African Sale Wednesday 1 October 2014
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YusuF ADEBAYO CAMErOn GriLLO (B.1934) African Woman with Gele, 1975 Sold for £80,500 (US$132,600) Wednesday 21 May 2014 A New World Record
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T. 93 467 44 54 · F. 93 467 44 51 infobarcelona@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com Frank Auerbach: Head of William Feaver, 2013, oil on board, 61 x 48,6 cm
Untitled II, 2013-14. Mixed media and resin on board. 150 x 100 cm Photograph © Tom Carter
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HARLAND MILLER ANNIE MORRIS STEPHEN NELSON TIM NOBLE AND SUE WEBSTER NON ZERO ONE ANGELA PALMER CORNELIA PARKER NIK RAMAGE ALEXANDER SETON
CONRAD SHAWCROSS DAVID SHRIGLEY GERALDINE SWAYNE JAMES THURGOOD GAVIN TURK KEITH T YSON JONATHAN YEO CHARMING BAKER BARTHOLOMEW BEAL PETER BLAKE ROB AND NICK CARTER DANIEL CHADWICK
10 October – 5 November 2014 50 contemporary artists respond to Duchamp’s legacy
KENDELL GEERS COLIN GLEN RICHARD HAMILTON GRAHAM HUDSON HENRY HUDSON SHELLEY JAMES ANNIE KEVANS IDRIS KHAN JOSEPH KOSUTH JANET LAURENCE CHRIS LEVINE JULIETTE LOSQ DAVID MACH ALASTAIR MACKIE
CEDRIC CHRISTIE OLIVER CLEGG SUSAN COLLIS MICHAEL CRAIG‑MARTIN MARTIN CREED MARCEL DUCHAMP MIRIAM ELIA JUDITH FEGERL CEAL FLOYER NANCY FOUTS PAUL FRYER
Untited, 2014, oil on canvas, 194 x 144 cm
YAVUZ GALLERY Gillman Barracks, 9 Lock Road, #02-23, Singapore 108937 info@yavuzgallery.com | www.yavuzgallery.com
Points of View J.J. Charlesworth Are artworld boycotts turning biennials into a political battleground? Maria Lind If you’re just offering me some more art, then you can go somewhere else Sam Jacob No more normcore
Jonathan T.D. Neil Art’s greater good?
Mark Sladen Alphabet soup
Andrew Bernardini How LA is witnessing an evolution in collective thinking
Jonathan Grossmalerman Playing to the heartland
Mike Watson Naples and Rome, an aesthetics of emergency
Louise Darblay Off-space No 22: La Salle de Bains, Lyons, France
J.J. Charlesworth Are artworld boycotts turning biennials into a political battleground? As I suggested in this column last month, the growing enthusiasm for cultural boycotts against Israel was never going to stop with Western artists pledging to refuse invitations from Israeli cultural bodies, but would, sooner or later, turn to the censure of artists receiving Israeli cultural funding to exhibit abroad. No surprise, then, that the opening of the São Paulo Bienal, at the beginning of September, would become the stage for another spontaneous gesture of protest, this time involving the majority of the exhibiting artists (55 out of the 68 participating individuals and groups), in an open letter to the Bienal foundation, in which the artists demanded that the Bienal ‘refuse’ the funding it had received from Israel. ‘In accepting this funding,’ the artists declared, ‘our artistic work displayed in the exhibition is undermined and implicitly used for whitewashing Israel’s ongoing aggressions and violation of international law and human rights. We reject Israel’s attempt to normalise itself within the context of a major international cultural event in Brazil.’ After various negotiations, the protest resulted in a half-cocked compromise by which, according to the artists’ later statement, the Bienal ‘committed to clearly disassociate Israeli funding from the general funding of the exhibition. The logo of the Israeli Consulate, which was presented as a general sponsor of the event, will now only be related to those Israeli artists who received that specific financial support.’ While the weird result of this was the symbolic ghettoisation of the Israeli Consulate’s logo – ‘don’t put your dirty, bloodstained logo next to ours’ seemed to be the message –
and while there’s no indication that the Bienal has actually handed any cash back, this latest example of artists and ‘cultural workers’ signing up to gestures of condemnation of Israel suggests open season on Israeli artists working or living abroad when it comes to their receiving Israeli state cultural funding, with the objective of making a ‘pariah state’ of Israel on the world stage. As readers know, I’m against cultural boycotts in general: artists should be the last people demanding censorship (that’s what a cultural boycott is, in the end) of fellow artists, since it makes a mockery of any real commitment to freedom of expression – free speech for me, but not for you. But for those in favour of cultural boycotts, such actions are justified to indirectly punish and isolate the country in question, with artistic freedom an unfortunate, but ultimately trivial, casualty. For many, Israel’s bombings and its continued military control of the Palestinians has become a unique kind of cause célèbre, an exemplary battle of good against bad, of Palestinian martyrs and Israeli oppressors. For this sceptic, the obsessive focus on Israel seems more like a kind of narcissistic moral grandstanding by those on the outside of a conflict seeking to show themselves to be on the side of the righteous. For sure, Israel’s dismal, unending reflex of suppression and containment of the Palestinians cannot lead to any lasting or just peace. But what disappears in the relentless focus on Israel itself is any real political awareness that the conflict is part of the bigger tensions of the Middle East, for which Western countries bear enormous
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responsibility, but which evade any serious scrutiny. After all among the other logos, left unmolested at the Bienal, were those of the British Council and the Institut Français – but there were no calls for boycotts of European artists at the Bienal; it seemed that those on the ‘right’ side of the debate can still separate the receipt of cultural funding from any sense of complicity with the foreign policy of one’s own government. Of course, to subject cultural funding by any state to this kind of scrutiny would be to turn international artistic activity into an overt political battlefield. Unfortunately, in their haste to appear on the right side of the argument, and the protesters, the Bienal’s curators (Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente and Oren Sagiv) guilelessly managed to argue just that, declaring that the artists’ protest should be ‘a trigger to think about the funding sources of major cultural events’, while requesting that the Bienal ‘revise their current rules of sponsorship and ensure that artists and curators agree to any support that is forthcoming for their work and that may have an impact on its content and reception’. In effect, such reasoning opens the door to the complete politicisation of all international cultural funding, in which all financial support is contestable on whatever political ground. But who would be the judge of such political ‘correctness’ (for want of a better phrase)? Those footloose, professionally stateless, nomadic curators and artists whose would-be political voices are only made audible by the massively funded platform of the art biennial?
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Maria Lind If you’re just offering me some more art, then you can go somewhere else I imagine myself browsing the shelves in a quiet public library in Stockholm. I am in the literature department, towards the end of the alphabet, randomly taking out books, flicking through them while catching a sentence here, a paragraph there. Suddenly I am holding a slim volume full of notes. It is Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) in Swedish (in which language it was first published in 1958). Someone has underlined passages and written comments in the margins, wanting to enter into a dialogue. Not only with Woolf but also with me and other subsequent readers. Half a page is marked with a thick pencil line accompanied by the words ‘it is noticeable that she is upper class’; further down it says ‘integrity’ and ‘I do not agree’. In fact I am standing in front of one of 12 white vitrines on the top floor of Malmö Konstmuseum, looking at Kajsa Dahlberg’s A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries (2006). It’s the centrepiece of the exhibition A Voice of One’s Own: On Women’s Fight for Suffrage and Human Recognition. The vitrines are filled with photocopies of each page of Woolf’s book, assembled from all the copies of her classic that the artist could get hold of via Sweden’s public library system. As a further part of the project, those pages on which various readers have left notes have also been collected in a beautiful little white book (an edition of 1,000 copies). A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries came about as a response to an invitation from the nonprofit space Index in Stockholm. During Mats Stjernstedt’s long directorship (2001–11), a stream of great artworks, this one among them, were made within the framework of Index’s programme. Without it ever being publicly articulated, many of the individual projects, as well as their coming together under the general umbrella of Index, evoked a sense of consistency and urgency. Each work was
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clearly different from the next, but they all tended to take their respective author’s oeuvre one step further, in their sensitivity and awkwardness, poignancy and poetry. On the part of the institution, there was a wish to support a precise selection of emerging artists and forgotten or unknown old-timers, and to facilitate their creation of new work, an important value in relation to programming an institution. Today I would say that Index as an institution during this time had a clear sense of quality, consciously or unconsciously. Right now it is crucial to make such a sense of direction public, to put forth the reasons for doing what we are doing. It is not about quality in terms
We are about to drown in rubbish art and populist programming. Politicians and bureaucrats pride themselves on providing more art, relying on the blunt value of quantity to back them up. of eternal values and canons, classics and masters. Quite the contrary. In a cultural condition marked by assessment and control, and driven by quantitative measurements, it is urgent to propose and insist on values and notions of quality different from the ones that both the commercial art market and a new public art management system impose on us. Why? One obvious reason is that we are about to drown in rubbish art and populist programming. Politicians and bureaucrats pride themselves on providing more art, at least in the part of the world where I am based, relying on the blunt value of quantity to back them up, Kajsa Dahlberg, A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries, 2006, book, edition of 1000. Courtesy the artist
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just as the dominant forms of evaluating the performance of institutions privilege high visitor numbers, media hits and budgets. All of which means that a higher quantity of substandard work features prominently in commercial galleries and public spaces alike, finding fast ways to trickle into so-called public institutions and the media. But then how do we know what has quality? By arguing for our case, in relation to the case of others. In this struggle of values, curators and directors have consciously to communicate their choices of artists, themes, methods, etc. Quality is about openly supporting and fighting for something – insisting on the fact that this ‘something’ is more important, necessary and / or relevant than everything else – and to constantly revise the criteria driving this. It is about distinctions. It is about arguing for ‘this’ and not ‘that’. But not as an arbiter of taste; rather, such distinctions function as markers of urgency. This urgency can pertain to aesthetics, ie, the way in which the artwork is articulated (the ‘how’ question), and to subject matter (the ‘what’ question), conditions of production, context, etc, but more than anything else it requires a certain amount of courage, to be tough and stake such claims, and to have the guts to deselect people you previously staked claims for. In the wake of the establishment of cultural theory and critical studies, and in light of poststructuralism’s deconstruction, old hierarchies have thankfully crumbled. We are all more than aware of that. Today debating quality has to do with publicly questioning and scrutinising what we decide to do, and acknowledging that absolute notions of quality are being replaced by mutating, context-sensitive negotiations that generate qualities in the plural. So please don’t offer me any more art per se; all I want is good art.
Sam Jacob No more normcore Luckily for us, just as we’ve apparently lost the organic ability to generate trends and movements ourselves, there are trend forecasters more than willing to do it for us. Such is the case with ‘normcore’, a word coined by the self-styled ‘trend forecasting group’ K-Hole in late 2013 that has gone on to feature in columns like this one ever since. It’s a word that, though it may not actually describe a real phenomenon, does suggest a semblance of zeitgeisty sensibility. ‘Normcore doesn’t want the freedom to become someone,’ K-Hole wrote in the ‘Youth Mode’ report that introduced the idea: ‘Normcore moves away from a coolness that relies on difference to a postauthenticity that opts into sameness.’ In other words, it’s postavant-garde, an imaginary trend that declares itself exhausted by the stylistic revolutions that have traditionally characterised youth culture. It suggests that only by rejecting the trappings of stylistic expression can we find a new authentic form of expression; normality as something uncompromising, ordinariness being as in-your-face as the Do you distinguish aural assaults or fleshy provocayourself via tion that ‘-core’ usually denotes. your superlative normalcy? The irony being, of course, that the world normcore wants to escape from is the very world co-opted by trend forecasters and their ilk, a world where
everything we own is imagined to be a prop, where our clothes are costumes and the places we live are stage sets. In other words, any authentic cultural expression has been rendered impossible by the kind of industry that K-Hole represents. Normcore is the sound of that world collapsing from the inside even as it smirks. The idea of the normal-as-radical is, of course, nothing new. Back in 2005, designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa coined the term ‘supernormal’ as a way to describe objects of design ‘with the design left out’. Morrison wrote, ‘I have been feeling more and more uncomfortable with the increasing presence of design in everyday situations and in products lined up on the shelves of everyday shops… Design, which is supposed to be responsible for the man-made environment we all inhabit, seems to be polluting it instead.’ For Morrison and Fukasawa, the agents of design culture – magazines, blogs, marketing – have distorted the real role of design (and designers). If, they say, contemporary ‘design makes things seem special’, then ‘who wants normal if they can have special?’ Their collection of supernormal objects included the Rex vegetable peeler, the simple plastic bag as well as design classics like Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel side table and Dieter Ram’s 606 shelving system. Reclaiming ‘normal’ was, for Morrison and Fukasawa, an idealistic project that attempted
to reclaim authenticity, a heartfelt plea from designers caught in the cycles of production that industry demands. Unsurprisingly, they were struck by the idea in the midst of the Salone del Mobile, the gigantic Milan trade fair that annually debuts a vast slick of new and entirely unnecessary designer objects. Both supernormal and normcore are tactics that attempt to construct an escape from the contemporary world of design, an escape we all sympathise with. But beware the idea of normality in design, because ‘normal’ itself is just as artificial a concept as that which it seeks to escape from. What we imagine normal to be is simply a set of established codes and typologies that are subject to exactly the same cultural tides as the most extreme designed gestures. In other words, there is no escape. If anything, the idea of the normal, through its rejection of the possibility of an avant-garde, denies the possibility that we might design our way out of our current predicament. Instead of showing us a way out, it simply freezes us in an eternal present. The elevation of normality sets design apart from the grand sweep of history and annexes it from the socioeconomic milieu from which design actually emerges. The cult of normality may reject the excesses of designer culture, yet at the same time it only serves to reinforce those very tendencies.
Rex vegetable peeler, 1947, at Super Normal, Axis Gallery, Tokyo, 2006. Courtesy Jasper Morrison Studio, London
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Jonathan T.D. Neil Art’s greater good? Are we prepared to admit that under the broad banner of ‘art’ – and here I’m already cutting the banner down to size by thinking of visual art alone – there are different kinds of goals, different kinds of aims, which different kinds of artwork may seek to achieve? Even talk of aims and goals can feel anathema to a contemporary art discourse fed on a modernist legacy that wanted art to have no other aim than its own full self-authorisation (or to be done with authorisation entirely). But that’s an aim nonetheless, and a moral one at bottom too. Put the question this way: is there an art for the museum that is different in kind from, say, art for the gallery or the home? Few would argue that the art of the international art fair (whose aim is to be sold) shares much common ground with the art of the international biennial (whose aim is to be seen), though there is contested and occupied territory between. Some critics have suggested that there is an art for the ultra-highnet-worth elite, and that this art, regularly on public display and sale during the seasonal evening auctions, is different in kind from the art that the merely wealthy, or even the aspiring intellectual upper class, might spend their money on. Though perhaps that has less to do with art than with the markets in which it circulates. Others have suggested that outside the domesticated confines of the professional civic and commercial artworld there lives ‘wild art’, for which personal satisfactions and public enjoyment are mostly the aim. This question of goals and aims is a question about goods, not what kind of good art is – consumption good or luxury good, exclusive good or rival good – but what good it is and what good it is for. In the contexts just mentioned, whatever good might be being served – public or private, political or social – can
be difficult to discern, mostly because few ask the question or take the time to think about criteria of measurement or assessment, which isn’t to say that criticism doesn’t abound. So take an example where the good is easy to discern: to minimise suffering. Art in hospitals and health clinics, once thought of primarily as a means to enhance the aesthetic appeal of an otherwise morose environment, is now increasingly called on to improve patient and staff mindsets, and so recovery times and service provision (not to mention hospital bottom lines). That such art is now being called ‘evidence-based’ points to its being scrutinised for verifiably measurable
Talk of aims and goals can feel anathema to a contemporary art discourse fed on a modernist legacy that wanted art to have no other aim than its own full self-authorisation outcomes. It’s not hard to imagine how, as a recent article on the ‘Healing Powers of Public Art’ in The Wall Street Journal notes, such evidence-based art is dominated by ‘nature themes and figurative art with unambiguous, positive faces that convey a sense of security and safety’. Such staple terms of contemporary art’s approbation as ambiguity, complexity, difficulty or difference do, quite literally, no good here. Not everyone subscribes to the evidencebased approach, for sure. According to the curator of the Cleveland Clinic Art Program, a leader in the field with a collection that includes work by Ori Gersht, Jennifer Steinkamp
Loris Cecchini, The Ineffable Gardener and the Developed Seed, 2014 (installation view), stainless steel. Courtesy Cleveland Clinic
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and Jonathan Borofsky, among others, the art ‘provides color and warmth, distraction from personal anxiety, levity and lightheartedness, a focus for meditation, a vehicle for escape – and not insignificantly, a way of helping patients and visitors find their way around the sometimes confusing maze of hospital buildings’. When compared to the writing on speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies currently making the rounds, it’s little wonder this fails to stimulate the critical nerve. Of course most of us believe that art serves, or should serve, more of a purpose than way-finding, be it around a hospital or out of one’s own pain. This could well be one of its goals, and a laudable one at that, but one doesn’t imagine, say, Jennifer Steinkamp having the alleviation of patients’ or their families’ suffering in mind when producing her animations. Nor would anyone expect Gersht or Borofsky to turn their full artistic attention to such aims, for fear that this narrowing of focus would limit the reach of their art – in other words, that it would limit the number of places, and so the good, it is for. This is not to link the aim of art to a kind of debased utilitarianism, which holds everything to the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. But it is to ask that even contexts in which art’s aims couldn’t be clearer – to minimise suffering, say – should link up to and support others in which they are not – to animate the exchange of ideas, say – and the linking should be done in the name of those aims, in the name of the good for which they are. So there may be different art with different aims for different contexts, but we should not be prepared to leave it at that, to accept this stratification, as it would minimise, if anything, art’s greater good.
Andrew Berardini How LA is witnessing an evolution in collective thinking Collective – participation porous, generally anarchic and there really isn’t any money in it. Los Angeles collectives – I have participated in the last year, in one form or another, in almost all of them. I have wandered in off the street and picked up an instrument, stood pressed in a throng bathed in sweat and sound, organised talks and screenings, lectured and discussed, written and edited, and even produced a public-service announcement about colour. Collectives and collective artmaking are hardly new, but emerging out of a former kung-fu movie theatre and dank offices above a pho shop, in the backroom of a witchy boutique, tucked into a rehabbed warehouse, collectives in Los Angeles have flourished and morphed into collaboratives. Though essentially synonymous, the difference is that collaboratives are about making space rather than defining content. Some What’s the differare more hierarchical than ence between a collective and others, but loose volunteerism a collaborative? and openness still prevail even within the ones governed by boards or chief provocateurs. Members are generally self-selecting and authority accrues through involvement. Emerging more from punk than from Marxism – though Marxists are welcome too – these new collaboratives help create an environment in which art might happen. The first began almost a decade ago, and its former participants are now scattered through the rest. Piero Golia and Eric Wesley began the Mountain School of Arts (MSA) in 2005 out of the nowdefunct Mountain bar in Chinatown to give the community the experience of a school without the crippling debt and accreditation of a graduate programme. Though Golia has long acted as the primary organiser, the school functions through a collective of volunteers; it takes in no money and thus pays no salaries.
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The application process is modest and includes no images of artwork. The school, approaching its tenth anniversary, has gone nomadic, but it is still defined by exemplary lectures from artists (Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe and Paul McCarthy among them) and experts as well as the growing community of students drawn to Los Angeles from the rest of the world. Around the corner from the Mountain, in a space formerly occupied by David Kordansky Gallery, is Human Resources, which emerged as a space primarily for performance (both art and music) as well as exhibitions – from one-day art shows for soon-to-be-shipped-off paintings to queer operas and incidental screenings. The crew that runs Human Resources is the only formalised collective in the classic sense, but the space always seems wholly open to the community. KCHUNG, just a block away, was born from the ire of MSA alumnus Solomon Bothwell. It was in a class I was leading at MSA, actually, that a lecturing public-radio producer pissed him off. Disgruntled about the limitations of content on public radio, he decided to start his own station. Tapping artist-friends Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons and Harsh Patel, two other MSA graduates, KCHUNG began in a basement on Chung King Road with a barely legal, unlicensed shortwave and online broadcast. The station has metastasised with a shifting cast and dozens of shows, from ephemeral one-offs to weird stalwarts. Just about anyone who wants can have a show, with dues of merely $10 a month, and most everyone I know has a show or has been on one. Programmes include hip hop and experimental music jams, art talkshows and chitchatting skaters. Yelena Zhelezov gives on-air ‘Women’s Dinner in the Desert’, March, 2012. Photo: Thea Lorentzen. Courtesy Women’s Center for Creative Work
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running descriptions of movies she’s watching; scholar Norman Klein regularly waxes philosophic; and the Hammer’s recent Made in LA 2014 Public Recognition Award-winner Jennifer Moon presents her revolutionary self-help show. The most recent collective project is the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW), which emerged out of a women-only dinner started by Kate Johnston, Sarah Williams and Katie Bachler (with whom I started the equally volunteer-run Art Book Review). The dinner became a regular event, with diners numbering over 100. Out of it emerged a book group, storytelling gatherings, tarot card readings, comedy acts, workshops for basket-weaving and doll-making, and an art-typical spate of residencies, panels and talks. The simple twin premises of their collective? ‘Feminism is for everybody!’ and ‘A network of rad women’. The WCCW feels like an important local spark for a new wave of feminism, one that is inclusive and invites supportive community rather than ideological posturing. As far as I know, every single person involved with these groups is a volunteer. Though I have mentioned individual names, there are scores of others equally important who make these projects thrum with life. There is a very sound argument that artists should get paid, but there’s also the agency of working outside of traditional systems of patronage and profit economies, of the DIY ethos that you make the world you want to live in by direct action and grassroots organising. Each of these projects attempts through its actions to make space for others, to encourage individual making within a community. These groups do the important work that Italo Calvino describes at the end of Invisible Cities (1972), where he writes that even if we’re in hell, we can ‘seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space’.
Mike Watson Naples and Rome, an aesthetics of emergency Rome and Naples, cities just 190km from one another, are widely seen as inhabiting two vastly different realities. A train ride from one to the other will take you between one and two hours depending on whether or not it’s high-speed. Yet the shift in architecture is profound as one goes from Rome, a city of light, the Catholic Church and Baroque architecture, to Naples, a Gothic-influenced black silhouette seemingly rising out of a mercurial sea, dominated by the volcanic Mount Vesuvius. Yet today, travelling by train from Rome’s Termini station to Napoli Centrale – Naples’s central station – presents less of the shock of two incongruous worlds colliding, and instead offers an increasingly seamless shift across two very different cities which however inhabit one reality. Rome’s Termini, once the pride of Mussolini’s fascist Italy, has now become an emblem of Italy’s present and future. It has perhaps never been busier, yet as a central hub for Italy’s business and tourism infrastructure, it now exists side by side with another phenomenon, no longer inspired by the bold adventurism of fascism that saw heroism in the image of the speeding train. Rather, it is an emerging reality born of necessity that sees relative security in the station infrastructure: the fact that it has constant lighting, that there are always people around and that it is relatively central with good links to work opportunities outside Rome. It is a reality in which the station has become home to hundreds of illegal
immigrants, who sleep along its outside wall, or in clusters of tents that gradually grow in number, differentiated only by the nationalities of their inhabitants. Meanwhile, Napoli Centrale opens, not onto a growing makeshift housing complex, but onto a temporary marketplace where immigrants from Asia and Africa line the pavement with consumer goods ranging from lighters and socks to iPads and an anonymous array of odds and ends salvaged, presumably, from bins: computer wires for long defunct systems, computer monitors, plastic leather shoes with
In Italy, a state of emergency in arts funding has seen a new movement formed around the notion of the ‘bene comune’ – common ownership a permanent film of dust on the uppers, etc. Around both Termini and Napoli Centrale – a kind of developing metropolis linked by 190km of railway track – one finds this ‘aesthetic of emergency’ (I have to thank Italian critic Luca la Banca for the term). This ‘aesthetic’ gives the lie to the absolute dominance of capital, which sees its logic inverted in the development of alternative housing developments and markets, albeit born of desperation. This aesthetic of emergency is also developing in the artworld. In Italy, a state of emergency in arts funding has seen a new
movement formed around the notion of the bene comune – common ownership or the ‘commons’ – which saw occupiers run an impressive free programme of theatre and workshops at Rome’s Teatro Valle, until it was closed under the threat of forceful eviction on 14 August, the keys having been returned to the Comune di Roma. Closure – at the Mayor’s request – cannot change the fact that Rome’s oldest theatre had become, in the last three years, the most cited contemporary arts body in the foreign and national press. It operated out of necessity, in the absolute void in cultural provision that otherwise exists in Rome. In Naples, as always (readers may wish to consult a wartime diary kept by Norman Lewis, Intelligence Corps officer in the city during the Second World War), adversity leads to ingenuity. Gian Maria Tosatti’s installation – entitled 2_Estate (2014), supported by MADRE museum and Fondazione Morra, and situated from 6 June to 5 July on the top floor of a building disused for decades – recreated an internecine government office. The installation, in the ex-public records office, comprised ancient key-operated computers, posters issuing archaically worded edicts to vote and piled-high peeled wallpaper. Visitors, asked to enter alone, were subject to the eerie sensation of witnessing the protracted death of a way of life: the stagnation of bureaucracy and a reminder that change may not come from above, but from street level. The powers that be would do well to heed the coming of a new aesthetic of emergency.
Gian Maria Tosatti, 2_Estate, 2014, environmental installation (detail). Courtesy the artist
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Mark Sladen Alphabet soup The main item in Jean-Michel Wicker’s recent exhibition at Cubitt Gallery in London was a 70m-long, 1m-wide scroll that spooled out onto the gallery floor. The work was made by assembling paper scraps from the artist’s studio, including offcuts from the pages of his printed works, scribbled notes and the dismembered elements of works on paper that had returned from exhibitions. These components were taped onto supports – made from paper, plastic or tarpaulin – that were pieced together to make the scroll, which had in turn been overprinted using oversize stencils of a lowercase ‘e’. The work was a vomit of information, by an artist who says that he is bulimic with written and visual matter. Wicker was born in France in 1970 and has had a peripatetic life: he spent some years in London, then Nice, and has been living in Berlin since 2008. While in the French city Wicker’s main activity was the creation of an urban garden, and by his own account it was while working on this In recent project that he began to years he has conceive of a garden as featured in a library. This anticipated exhibitions a shift in his practice, and at organisafor much of the last decade tions such as the artist has concentrated Kunst-Werke on books and printed matter, in Berlin and formats that have brought Kunsthalle Bern – often, him to wider attention. Wicker’s first bibliograph- notably, through the ical projects were scrapbooks
initiative of other artists
that he assembled in blank school exercise books. An example is Muenchenmaroc (2003), a folio stuffed with magazine clippings, photocopies and handwritten notes. Susan Sontag, William Burroughs and assorted male pinups make appearances, alongside modernist villas, Moroccan courtyards and train maps of Munich. Subsequently Wicker turned to publishing single-issue A4 fanzines, made on coloured paper using simple scan-and-print technology. One representative journal is Lolita’s Fanzine 1 (2007), which circles around Nabokov’s heroine and features a careful selection of texts and images – touching on subjects as varied as the punk icon Jordan and a Matisse mural – from a family of contributors that includes the curator Gregorio Magnani and the artist Mai-Thu Perret. Wicker’s scrapbooks and fanzines are, in the first instance, machines of connection and identification. Such artistic formats have a significant queer history, due to their capacity to construct identities across established cultural boundaries – think of the explosion of queer zines in the 1980s, or the collaged panels of art-historical images by artist Henrik Olesen. Like these other gay bricoleurs, Wicker throws multiple references together, constructing an alternative space for himself in which disparate subjects can rub along together: from the melodramas of Proust and Fassbinder to the celebrity playground of the Côte d’Azur, to the fantasy space of club culture. However, Wicker’s work with scrapbooks and fanzines began to draw to a close when
Flyer (detail) for Berghain, Berlin, July 2014, by wicker industries GmbH & Co. KG
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he moved to Berlin, since when his bookish interests have informed a wider range of activities. For one overarching project the artist has edited the whole alphabet down to ‘b’ and ‘e’, which he uses – multiplied, mirrored and inverted – to make endless equations. The principle of collage that informed the scrapbooks and fanzines has latterly been focused through these letters, which are combined with all sorts of other written and visual information in what Wicker calls an ‘impure’ way. (The artist’s use of bold, sans serif, lowercase letters contains a nod to Concrete poetry and the Swiss typographic revolution, but his font of choice is the decidedly contemporary Arial Black, which he likens to a ‘fake’ Helvetica.) Wicker’s work with the letter ‘e’ is the subject of ‘e industrial’, a project on which he has worked since 2007 and which has manifested in forms that include books, posters, cards, rubber stamps and lapel badges. This cycle of work culminated in the creation of the scroll at Cubitt, which the artist says was inspired in part by the Italian situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, who made ‘Industrial Paintings’ that he fabricated on long canvases and sold by the metre. At the end of the exhibition in London – as this magazine comes out – Wicker’s scroll will be cut up into metre-long sections, some of which might be hung as paintings and others folded as books. This recycling of his grand meta-work appears as yet another attempt by the artist to regulate his bingeing and purging of information.
ArtReview Asia FutureGreats On sale now
Zhou Tao, Blue and Red, 2014, single-channel HD video, 16:9, colour, with sound, 24 min 25 sec. Courtesy the artist. Selected by Aimee Lin, editor, ArtReview Asia
ArtReview Asia and EFG International present the inaugural edition of FutureGreats Asia, a guide to young or less-established artists who leading artists, critics and curators predict will be making it big in the coming year. Read all about Zhou Tao and ten other artists in ArtReview Asia’s Autumn & Winter 2014 issue.
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Jonathan Grossmalerman Playing to the heartland Well… here I am, just a couple of weeks away from the premiere of the new hit comedy series based entirely on my life and starring me, which I wrote, called (after a lot of backand-forth and one high-level firing) The Grossmalerman! Show. I guess I have to admit to being more than a little excited. You will permit me that, no? Sure, the production has had its ups and downs leading to this momentous point. There has, as is often the case in these situations, been some minor retooling. The ‘paedophile neighbour’ subplot was rewritten to be less morally scolding and more a whimsical contemplation of growing up. Also, a lot of the artworld-insider lingo – that incomprehensible mishmash of Polari, back slang and thieves’ cant – had to be exchanged for more pedestrian fare that could be understood as far as Wisconsin. My favourite scene, probably the funniest and most insightful thing I’ve ever written, had to be cut when one of the executives misheard Austerlitz as Auschwitz. And when
you find yourself explaining that a joke is referencing the battle of Austerlitz and not the death camp Auschwitz, you’ve kind of already lost. So we just cut the scene. Even though it was a real window into the character of Grossmalerman. Not me Grossmalerman. The TV character Grossmalerman. To be honest, it gets confusing who’s who. Also we got rid of a lot of the longwinded ruminations on the nature of painting that weren’t, frankly, very funny, but along with all the vaginas (we also had to cut those) provided the spiritual underpinnings of the show. But that is to be expected. People will be watching this in Wisconsin, and people in Wisconsin are idiots. And still, I feel the show has retained its initial spirit of scrappy, feel-good, ingratiating fun that got it green-lighted in the first place, even without the incessant female nudity that held the plot together. After all, there are still, between the many good-natured guffaws and chortles, a number of gruesome murders,
The Grossmalerman! Show, season poster campaign. Courtesy the artist
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incredible physical comedy involving my studio assistant Neal on heroin trying to serve a curator a bottle of spring water, an awkwardly long spit take and a female-on-male rape scene (the funny kind!). I’m not really sure what else a viewer could want or need, really. Yes, of course it would have been lovely to have maintained the internalised critique of the sitcom’s form. I had insisted on that when I accepted the gig and wouldn’t budge for a long time. Sure! Who wouldn’t want that? But ultimately hasn’t it already been done so many times? What would I be adding, really? What’s wrong with making something people can enjoy after a hard day’s work? Something that makes them feel good? When you think about it, isn’t a show about a charismatic painter and the crazy cast of characters who surround him and have fashioned a sort of ragtag family that’s a lot more like your own family than you’d like to think ultimately what we really need in this difficult time? I ask you! And do you have any idea who watches television?
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Louise Darblay Off-space No 22: La Salle de Bains, Lyon, France Sitting on the heights of the historic hill of La Croix-Rousse in Lyon, La Salle de Bains has, over the past 15 years, become a key alternative not-for-profit exhibition space for international contemporary artists in the city’s cultural landscape. The project started in 1998, when Olivier Vadrot, Lionel Mazelaygue and Gwenaël Morin, who were then students at Lyon’s school of architecture, decided to open an exhibition space in what used to be the bathroom (salle de bain) of a ground-floor apartment in the historic centre of the city, where they would invite artists who inspired their work as architects to create site-specific proposals in response to the 40sqm space. As the initial trio gradually shared then delegated the direction of the space to new members – most recently to Caroline SoyezPetithomme, who codirected the space with Jill Gasparina from 2008, before becoming the sole director in 2013 – the aesthetic choices have slightly shifted from an emphasis on site-specific, installation-based works to more formalist works, with an inclination towards abstract painting and digital art. However, the ethos has remained consistent; to develop well-produced artist projects that have a particular resonance for the artist’s trajectory – be it as a transition show or with a middle- or late-career perspective. Over the years, La Salle de Bains has produced up to seven exhibitions a year, working with a wide range of international artists, from established names like Thomas Hirschhorn, Jonathan Monk and Nathaniel Mellors, to younger artists such
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as Magali Reus and Anthea Hamilton, resulting on several occasions in acquisitions by major public collections. It’s the same ethos that makes La Salle de Bains so resilient in the face of art-industry pressures, which have pushed many institutional and independent spaces to prioritise accessibility at the expense of artistic content and to lapse into increasingly peripheral programmes and activities. For Soyez-Petithomme, you don’t need to banalise art to make it accessible; rather, you need to work on its mediation and its communication to the public. Focusing its energies on the mounting of exhibitions
You don’t need to banalise art to make it accessible; rather, you need to work on its mediation and its communication to the public onsite and off-space, and on the publishing of artist books, La Salle de Bains is working towards new exhibition formats and methods of mediation, such as the 2012 show Tell the Children / Abstraction pour Enfants (an echo of Andy Warhol’s Painting for Children Pop art show at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich, in 1983), which introduced children (and adults) to very contemporary abstract paintings by artists including Claudia Comte, Lisa Beck and Olivier Tell the Children, 2012 (installation view). Photo: © Aurélie Leplatre / La Salle de Bains, Lyon
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Mosset – all hung at children’s eye height, on vividly patterned wallpaper. It’s with this kind of involvement with local audiences that Soyez-Petithomme hopes to ensure the future of La Salle de Bains, which is currently uncertain. Having established itself as something of an institution over the years, La Salle de Bains has gradually received support from the French Ministry of Culture, the Rhône-Alpes region and finally the city of Lyon, which also owns La Salle de Bains’ current premises. There are cracks in the walls, however, and for a year now, rain has leaked periodically into the exhibition space, to the point where the ceiling fell in and the gallery was forced to close for a few months earlier this year. Unable to afford a commercial space, La Salle de Bains is hoping the city will relocate them to a new, potentially larger space, one that would allow it to develop collaborative programmes with a wider network of art centres and kunsthalles. The other option would be to become an affiliated public art centre, which would mean losing part of their independence and taking on a whole lot more paperwork. While the local government is so far unmoved by the critical situation, which means that the space might have to close by the end of 2014, Soyez-Petithomme is actively working towards the opening of its upcoming exhibition with the young Londonbased artist Gabriele Beveridge (through 8 November), as well as developing other artist projects. While these will definitely make it into public view, it’s hard to tell if this will be on the heights of La Croix-Rousse. To be continued…
24 September – 16 November Lower Gallery and Theatre
Neïl Beloufa: Counting on People
Also showing... Beware Wet Paint 24 September – 16 November 2014
Cybernetic Serendipity 14 October – 30 November 2014
Supported by the Neïl Beloufa Exhibition Supporters Group Supported by:
Exhibition partners:
Off-Site: Old Selfridges Hotel 14 – 18 October 2014
Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH 020 7930 3647 www.ica.org.uk
is a registered charity number: 236848
Image: Neil Beloufa, Superlatives and Resolution, 2013. © photo Blaise Adilon
3 Oct—23 Nov 2014 Free admission artangel.org.uk/plot
Holborn Library 32–38 Theobalds Rd London WC1X 8PA Holborn
José Damasceno
PLOT
Image from ‘Plot’ by Jose Damasceno, original photograph courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archive Centre
Great Critics and Their Ideas No 32
Hegel on Sploshing Interview by Matthew Collings
The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His method of reasoning, based on the premise that there can be no immediate access to truth, influenced every major philosopher from Marx to Foucault, even though his ideas about ultimate purpose were largely forgotten shortly after his death in 1831 and have never been revived. One of Hegel’s students published a book of his ideas on aesthetics based on a transcript by the philosopher (now lost) and notes taken at his lectures.
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ARTREVIEW How’s it going? Seen any shows? HEGEL I enjoyed the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition a few months ago. I assumed if it was by royal command it would be the most important art. Bert Irvin’s work made me reflect on British abstract painting generally in the 1970s. What was logically lacking in the sploshes of those days was recognition that the picture of art had entirely changed. You can turn back the clock now and it’s obvious to everyone what was wrong. But then it was as if the sploshers hadn’t noticed. However, what seems valuable about that work, which you can see in the work of survivors who still splosh, and in the work of the fallen, like John Hoyland, is an engagement with materiality. AR You mean real materials, paint and canvas? HEGEL Yes. Such an engagement with process is sadly lacking in contemporary work that nevertheless asks us to believe it foregrounds the material nature of contemporary life. This lack might make one ask what is expected of art now. In my lectures in the early 1820s I sometimes spoke of art as the sensual embodiment of a political and critical idea, an idea that cannot be apprehended without this embodiment. AR What’s the point of ideas generally for you? HEGEL The point of them as far as my works were concerned is no longer believed in by
anyone. But for me all ideas throughout history are on some kind of forward march. By dialectical processes opposites become new unities that are then confronted by new opposites. AR Where are they all headed? HEGEL Self-knowledge. The Absolute. Identification with God. The German word I use for this ultimate goal is translated into English sometimes as ‘spirit’ and sometimes as ‘mind’. What I mean by it is self-realisation or ultimate freedom of self. Before the onset of Modernism, I concluded that the modern state, by which I mean political community, was the highest realisation of the human community on earth, the highest form of human life, if we consider life forms as a whole. But at this stage it was not yet the highest realisation of ‘spirit’. This endpoint cannot be provided by the state. A different mode of consciousness can offer proposals about it, though, and one such mode is art. Art is the intuitive level of consciousness of spirit. AR Going on about how great the state is, is presumably why those on the left have to absorb your insights above Fiona Banner, The Nam, 1997. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London facing page Johann Jakob Schlesinger, Portrait of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, 1831. Courtesy Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Scala Archives
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but then get over you, and is the reason no one wants to know about you now? HEGEL There is a movement under way on the left, not only in philosophy but also in art history and art criticism, to rehabilitate many aspects of my thought. AR Oh, OK. HEGEL Permit me to return your own question: what was the last art you saw? AR A documentary about Fiona Banner on Sky Arts. HEGEL That is a coincidence, as I too caught a few minutes of it. I grew dismayed at professional art experts outdoing each other in posturing vacuity describing the greatness of The Nam. AR I suppose nowadays The Nam, a 1,000-page book from 1997, in which six different Vietnam War movies are viewed and everything that happens in them described in writing, would be considered typical of art coming out of Goldsmiths College at that time: the idea is everything. HEGEL Some of the Goldsmiths 1980s/90s ethos was urgently necessary, in that it forced you to pay attention to the fact that art has an internal logic. So for example on the MA course, if, as a would-be artist, you’d somehow become distracted and had built up a lot of justifying myths to explain why you hadn’t
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got anywhere, the Goldsmiths treatment could clear those cobwebs away. The bad thing, on both the BA and the MA, was when the emphasis on ideas led to a sort of oblivion about process. The idea of The Nam as you just put it actually involves a process, which is the writing down of what the artist sees when viewing these films. This result, though, is disastrously confusing, as the style appears would-be macho, and not even deliberately, but inadvertently and helplessly. It is this that makes the book unreadable, and not, as the Sky Arts documentary has it, the disturbing nature of war or the inevitably great length of the book. On the other hand, it is important, of course, to ask, in the quest for a full and rational self-knowledge that is the task of philosophy, and the task of art, in its aid to philosophy’s ultimate aim, philosophy being the highest form of enquiry, if this project was in fact a pursuit relating to self-knowledge in terms of gender. Women have a consciousness in which their consciousness of not-man-ness is an important factor. This must be acknowledged if one is looking critically at art resulting from that consciousness. One cannot just say, “What a pseud.” Or, “She doesn’t do it very well.” AR Surely it’s just writing? HEGEL ‘Writing’ isn’t all the same. For it to convey meaning economically, some strenuous thought is usually involved, revision, rewriting. It’s a process and there are many dimensions to it. There is a definite suggestion in The Nam of a proposal about contrast: the machismo of the movies the artist has chosen to scrutinise on the one hand and female subjectivity on the other. But the concept becomes muddied in the execution because of unconscious identification between the writing style and what’s being written about. Rather than objectifying machismo, there is a caving-in to its glamour. AR Do you think Goldsmiths was the cause of the problem? HEGEL Well, if you went there as a student, you were faced with an emphasis on ideas alone, as we have established. Now it is truly an idea that Vietnam movies are macho and that a woman appropriating filmic machismo constitutes an event of some kind. A problem arises, though, if you ask in a spirit of objective criticism what other ideas can be pointed to so that this initial rather dumb one becomes something more than merely a dumb initial idea long after the moment of Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements or Screen’s analyses, which incidentally is the moment
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of the alternative to painterly sploshing – that is, the moment of deconstructing mass desire as manifested in the phantasms of the mass media. But when you look for this next level in The Nam, you don’t find anything. AR The Nam was a good idea though, wasn’t it? HEGEL The reason I have dwelt on it is that I find it an example of a current problem of art culture being too posturing. In the Sky
A warplane is an object that has a prophylactic role for society, helping preserve a lack of consciousness Arts documentary it was hard not to notice the art expert whose method of pretending to be imparting valuable information (“All the hours she spent rewinding the VHS tape!”) was to widen and rapidly swivel his eyes while talking as if he was literally seeing many angles of all possible thoughts. But it’s not that other works by Banner I have encountered are not successful. On the contrary, the defunct fighter planes stripped of their war paint installed in Tate Britain constitute a great moment of power-surrealism. We saw a feminist undermining power by the counter-power that dreams possess. Also she once exhibited a work consisting of her text describing Apocalypse Now but full of erasures, from where she’d been proofreading it; she found she’d deleted almost every other word. Here the notion of lacunae becomes genuinely potent, since a view of the world where it is full of gaps is the view that feminist interpretations of the social setup point to. Where The Nam deadens an idea, this spinoff work does the opposite.
But institutional art critique seems to be obedient to the norms of power far too much of the time, and is capable of being read as salon behaviour AR I see her at all sorts of events; in fact I used to share a studio with her. She’s really chatty and friendly. HEGEL She is a model of getting somewhere in a situation that is as it is. It’s not her fault alone that the artworld has become a travesty of seriousness. But I have been using one of her works as an example of a syndrome, what I referred to earlier as the disappointment of a certain kind of virtuous statement that tells us society is bad.
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AR Well, what do you have to say generally about this kind of art, then? HEGEL Oppression and unfairness exist. Since my time you have exported your exposure of this uncomfortable fact to the developing world, so you don’t have to live with it at the forefront of your consciousness. A warplane is an object that has a prophylactic role for society, helping preserve a lack of consciousness. But institutional art critique seems to be obedient to the norms of power far too much of the time, and is capable of being read as salon behaviour, rather than as genuine criticality. AR What did you mean before when you said 1970s painting in Britain, which seemed redundant at the time compared to other art that was more focused on reality, at least had something material about it? So what if paint is a material? HEGEL In my lectures I used the German word meaning ‘lively’ to characterise cultural expressions that succeed in saying something significant about the nature of reality. Such significance is always conveyed by analogy, never directly. AR But aren’t splashes just random? HEGEL No doubt there are random starting points for a painting of the Bert Irvin sort. But then, as I reflected to myself in the Royal Academy last summer, a visual structure is built bit by bit. Everything is intentional in the end, but it’s a process. Step by step, one intuitive decision about placement or intensity, and so on, follows another. Eventually initially random elements take their place in a balanced unity and are no longer random. They are the birth, which is then swallowed up. This unity in works of painterly abstraction is often to do with accents and rhythm. We see different orders existing in a syncopated relationship with each other. In musical terms the initial move is something like Miles or Coltrane starting with, say, the Benny Goodman standard These Foolish Things and then improvising. Such musicians go from a material ‘something’, a structure in itself but one that could really be anything, to a differently embodied something that has its own complex mathematics. It is an embodied expression of the thought of the time. In my view we could wish for a dialectically materialistic encounter between painterly complexity in the 70s and the idea-reigning present moment of art, so that these ideas we’re all supposed to be challenged by had more depth. Next month The god Dionysus on exploration of gender roles in 1970s art
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Other People and Their Ideas No 16
Eric Fischl Interview by Tom Eccles
Figurative painter Eric Fischl, a 1972 graduate of CalArts, rose to prominence in the 1980s with his psychosexual depictions of suburban America: swimming pools, summer homes and the beach became places charged with sexual tension. The artist has occasionally strayed from canvas into print- and sculpturemaking, taking on a broad range subjects, from Indian culture to 9/11 and bullfighting. A new body of work, titled Art Fair Paintings, is being shown at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London, from 14 October to 8 November. Fischl’s autobiography, Bad Boy (written with Michael Stone), was published in 2013.
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ArtReview In 1966 Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter wrote: ‘If someone wants to become a painter, he needs to consider first whether he wouldn’t be better suited to some other activity: teacher, minister, professor, manual worker, assembly line, because only truly great people can paint!’ Do you think that’s true? Eric Fischl Oh, those crazy German artists! Painting is not art. Painting is a way some people organise experience and sensation that keeps them in their present moment. In and of itself, that is not art. It is activity. It is a craft. And it is a wholesome and fulfilling one to boot. Why would anyone want to deny someone those pleasures? Occasionally there are those who transcend the craft. Richter is not one of them. Polke is. AR That’s pretty provocative. Can you explain your idea of transcendence here? I think it probably has something to do with experience; conveying what is lived through painting. EF No, not entirely. It is conveying what is shared through deep understanding of what has been lived. But that distinction still falls short. Because shared experience, deep understanding, life lived, must include eloquence in order for it to become a work of art. Eloquence is where content transcends craft. AR I never really understood that quote from John Ruskin: ‘In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner.’ I’m not quite
sure what you mean either, but it feels somewhat Victorian, which isn’t necessarily a criticism. ‘Eloquence’ usually connotes oratory: a form of persuasion. Could you expand on your idea as it refers specifically to painting? EF To a painter, ‘oratory’ is an apt word, though an unexpected one to people who don’t paint. Paintings talk to their maker. I agree that eloquence connotes a form of persuasion. It also connotes language that is powerful and moving. The ingredients that make up great painting are the forms, gestures, colours, surfaces, edges and compositions that are irreducible; cannot be altered in even the slightest way without the whole experience being compromised. I don’t know why you think this Victorian. Doesn’t all art seek to persuade? It seems to me that you can find this quality in great works throughout history and including the present. In fact, it seems to me that that is how you define masterworks. above Eric Fischl, Art Fair: Booth #1 Play/Care, 2013, oil on linen, 208 × 285 cm facing page Eric Fischl (second from right) in a ‘battle of the bands’ party at artists Paul McMahon and Nancy Chunn’s New York apartment, 1979. Also pictured (from left): Dan Graham (obscured), David Salle, Mike Smith and Barbara Kruger (obscured). Photo: Paul McMahon
October 2014
One of the problems facing painters today is that their audience has become illiterate. The subtleties, nuances, references, etc go unno ticed and unappreciated. Craftsmanship has been mistakenly elevated to painting’s most important quality because it is the most easily verifiable. Unfortunately, my generation shoulders some of the responsibility for this, because they intro duced ambivalence within painting as a way to prove it had lost its powers, poignancy and status. That ambivalence has had a profound erosive effect and also produced a reaction from the succeeding generation of painters who sought to counter this ambivalence with meticulous detail and obsessively carried-out processes. AR I find your answer a little surprising given your stated struggle with the ‘quality‘ of your own painting. One of the great surprises for me in your autobiography, Bad Boy, was your modesty with regard to your technique as a painter from your time at CalArts to the early days in New York and beyond. It’s quite disarming for the reader. Victorian? Well, maybe because it suggests that painting has something to teach us, persuade us of morally. As in: what is life or the good of life, or the bad life for that matter? That’s why I’m a little ambivalent. EF Without the academy (they have all the answers), painters have had to answer the question of how much is enough, which is a question that each painting made seeks to answer but
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never does answer. The question persists. When is a painting done/finished? And of course the answer is always personal, transient and, for me, volatile. I take courage from Jack Kerouac, who sought to find a language of description that was full of flavour, full of atmosphere, rich in detail and observation, written at the speed of light. You are convinced, listening to him read, that he is devoted to the discipline of spontaneity: the act of naming at the moment one sees it. Listen to him describe a room full of people, a band, music playing, smoke and the smell of beers, sometimes with just a word, sometimes with colours and body language, all unfolding in front of you as he speaks – and as he speaks, you feel him encompassing something complex and teeming. His accuracy is in what choices he makes. Not too laboured, not too fancy, not too ‘arty’, but full of life. That is what I try to do while painting. Make choices that keep me in the moment, keep me in the flow of the scene I am depicting. How much detail does it take to tell it is a door? What is on TV in the room you’ve just entered? Is that person getting up or sitting down? The questions are endless until they are no longer important, because what you have created can no longer be changed. AR If paintings talk to their maker, what can or should they say to their viewer? Not an easy answer, I know. EF Paintings ‘talk’ to their maker by introducing themselves, by revealing themselves. The painter projects his intentions, imagines their meaning, and the canvas pushes back. There is a point where the painter’s intentions no longer matter. The painting has its own requirements, and you must follow them. That is when the painting starts talking to you. Now it is saying: this is working, this is not. It is saying: there is no truth here, only bravura and posturing. It is saying: here the colour is saturated enough but the edge is too hard. And so it goes. AR Should an artist work obliviously from his or her audience? EF There are two audiences for art. The primary audience exists in the head of the artist. They are the voices of heroes and demons, detractors and supporters. They are the resistance one needs to perfect his choices. The second audience is the public. They have come to see the result of the contest that took place in the artist’s studio. They are fickle and cannot be relied on. It is a mistake for the artist to listen to them. As for painting having something to teach us, I am not a subscriber. For me, art is witness beau tifully imagined. My motto is: give people what they want, but not what they think they want. AR If you were to offer advice to a young artist with regard to building a career, what would it be? Reading Bad Boy
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offers a fairly brutal, and I must say frank portrait of the highs and lows of commercial and critical success. EF The artworld that young artists are inher iting bears little resemblance to the one I came into back in the 1970s. I am not sure if my advice is at all relevant. But here it goes. Stay close to your peers and help each other. If you are ambitious for your art then you should put yourself into a group of artists that share your ambitions. Healthy competition will fuel your creative moves, help you define your goals and what it will take to get there. Keep your eyes and ears open. Each generation has issues that define them. Learn what they are and use them to develop your art. Timing is everything. Put yourself at the centre of the moment. When the moment happens, you will be there to embrace it.
(the legacy of abstraction, for example). I think many readers would be surprised at your participation in both these programmes today. I certainly was. Of course this division became a battleground in the 1980s, particularly in the area of art criticism. Why do you think critical thinking ultimately rejected painting?
Always take opportunities when they arrive, even if they seem completely outside your frame of reference. Great careers depend on skill, luck, bravery and helping hands. Pay attention. As Alex Katz once told me when I asked him how he made the transition from his school work to his art: “Aah, you jump out a window and just hope you have your shit together before you hit the ground.”
EF The short answer is feminism, sexual/ gender equality and every other marginalised group that had been more or less shut out from the modernist intellectual, curatorial and economic structure of the artworld. Painting was the domain of the male and it had to be brought down in order for the other groups to be included. The argument against painting took many different forms (outmoded tech nology, decorative object, elitist, commercial, etc), but the one focusing on male hegemony was the most effective. Our most essential narrative is the liberation narrative. It is within that struggle that we find the authenticity of the tragic and/or heroic. Painting during the 1980s, with a few excep tions, could not compete with the other mediums of expression (photography, video, performance), which had become the undeniable alternatives for those seeking liberation. All painting had left if it wanted to compete within the liberation arena was to deconstruct itself. Ultimately, the ‘death’ of painting came from within. It was the male painters that tried to finish it off with their strategies of wilfully bad painting, slacker art, use of either toxic or fugitive materials, joke art and, ultimately, paintings that make themselves. It was, I’m sure, subconscious, but they were deconstructing male identity without replacing it with a convincing new one. (That might be why so much male art became childish, preadolescent and naughty.) Another reason painting’s power was diminished has to do with the disappearance of the body. Not simply the removal of images of figuration but of the object itself having a direct relationship to the human body. As that happened, painting began to lose its ability to deliver the somatic engagement essential to the transformational magic of the art experience. But now we are getting into the long answer.
AR There’s a fantastic photo in your book of a ‘battle of the bands’ party at Paul McMahon and Nancy Chunn’s place at 135 Grand Street in Soho in 1979, with you, Dan Graham, David Salle, Mike Smith and Barbara Kruger rocking out. It’s an incongruous group when you think about it today. When you talk about your student days at the beginning of CalArts and subsequently teaching at NSCAD in Halifax, Nova Scotia (two of the most legendary schools), you often mention this divide between those exploring conceptual art practices (an emerging orthodoxy certainly) and those who retained a belief in painting or other art practices
AR Of course artists have continued to paint! And in fact there is a resurgence of interest, particularly in abstract women painters, here in the United States. I’ve just shown a survey of Amy Sillman’s works (One Lump or Two, 28 June – 21 September, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) that fluctuate between figuration and abstraction. Your longtime partner and wife is the American landscape painter April Gornik. During the early 1990s, you noted that you felt outside the centre; that going to galleries for example no longer excited you. You’d had a major survey at
There are two audiences for art. The primary audience exists in the head of the artist. They are the voices of heroes and demons, detractors and supporters. They are the resistance one needs to perfect his choices. The second audience is the public. They are fickle and cannot be relied on. It is a mistake for the artist to listen to them
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the Whitney Museum in 1986, enormous commercial success with Mary Boone; you were, as they say in New York, a boldface name. You retreated (if that’s the right word) to Sag Harbor, on Long Island. How did this shift affect your work and your way of thinking as an artist? EF We moved out of NYC full-time in 2004. Before then we would split our living/working time between Sag Harbor and NYC. Six months or so in each location. Usually the winters were spent in NY, which is also the artworld’s high season. I’m not sure, but I think age had a lot to do with moving out of the city. That and 9/11. Pat Steir once said to me that “working as an artist in NYC, there are a thousand reasons to leave your studio, but only one reason to stay. You better know what that reason is.” As a young artist, the energy and chaos of the city fed my passions and my work. The tension of city life was helpful in clarifying what was important and essential to my artmaking. After twenty-something years and a great deal of success, the distractions became just that: distractions. I am not sure how to measure if the shifts in my work are due to the break with the city or with maturing as an artist. I am not particularly interested in figuring it out. Right now, living outside the city is very conducive to working in my studio, and as long as that is true, I will stay here.
AR You have also tried in various forms to engage a wider public than the artworld per se. Surprisingly you turned to sculpture and proposed public monuments – some successfully; others, it can only be said, disastrously. The sculpture you donated to Oklahoma City Museum of Art of a man carrying a child commemorating the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building seems to have been warmly received, while Tumbling Woman caused enormous controversy when it was unveiled a year after 9/11 and was quickly removed from public view. Most recently you tried to organise a travelling caravan of artists’ works (including performance and music) that would reach a ‘nonart’ public throughout the United States. Do you find the artworld now limited? EF Yes, the ‘America Now and Here’ project was a real eye-opener for me. In my naivety I believed there was such a thing as shared values that stand for a national identity. I learned that not to be true. The local values don’t seem to transcend their locality, especially in their respective artworlds. Very few philanthropists and art institutions saw any reason to reach out past their immediate cities. Few saw any benefit in financing art projects in places they’ve never been to. They all wanted their museums to be involved in ways that drew crowds to them Eric Fischl, Art Fair: Booth #1 Oldenburg’s Sneakers, 2013, oil on linen, 208 × 173 cm both works © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London
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and not go far enough with their outreach. Because ANH was about using art to start a national dialogue aimed at trying to bring the whole country into a civil dialogue, we insisted it be 100 percent funded. There would be no admission fees. This was not a circus or rock concert. This was not about making money. That is not a good business model when going to banks and corporations looking for sponsorship. The government was absolutely leery of sponsoring or helping us. They vetted the list of artists for potential blowback during election cycles. When they saw [Andres] Serrano’s name, they said they couldn’t help out. In Seattle they saw ANH as an entrepreneurial exercise. In LA they saw it as putting on the big show. They saw it as entertainment. In Kansas City they saw it as patriotism. In Chicago they understood it as civic engagement and social responsibility. In NYC they saw it as cultural stewardship. The same project filtered through local identities. All wanting to be leaders, but none wanting to leave their cities. From an artistic point of view, ANH was an amazing project. It was the first time in probably forever that artists from all disciplines agreed to think about the same thing at the same time. Fifty-four great American poets collaborated on one poem! That in itself was a historical first. And a beautiful poem it is: ‘Crossing State Lines: An American Renga’.
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Image credit: Saskia Olde Wolbers, Trailer, video for projection with sound, 10 minutes, 2005 © artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Twixt Two Worlds
Exploring the transition between photography & film 11 October - 4 January 2015 townereastbourne.org.uk
Relations Without Relations A Response to Graham Harman Michael Newman
Following philosopher Graham Harman’s article last month on the importance of speculative realism to artists and curators today, critic Michael Newman makes a case for why human subjectivity still matters 78
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Philosopher Graham Harman’s intervention in artistic debate is I’m thinking here of Helen Marten and Mark Leckey, among others. welcome, and his title, ‘Art Without Relations’, cuts to the core. My There has also been a new interest in the object work and incorporaresponse is, ‘Yes, so long as we think of art in terms of the question tion of nonart objects of established artists and artists of the recent of what would be a relation with that which is without relations.’ But past – Hanne Darboven’s collection of things (recently on show at that would necessitate the return of the privileged human subject in Reina Sofía, Madrid), Rosemarie Trockel’s ‘Cosmos’ of objects and Haim Steinbach’s recent Serpentine exhibition. And there have been a way in which Harman would surely not approve. Before I go any further, I want to introduce the philosophical a number of group and thematic exhibitions dealing with objects, approach known as speculative realism (SR), of which Harman is a including the pathbreaking Making Things Public by Bruno Latour founding practitioner of a particular strand, which has become known at ZKM, Karlsruhe, as long ago as 2005, through to the 2013 Venice as ‘object-oriented ontology’ (OOO), and say a few words about why it Biennale’s The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. So matters. Basically, SR is a form of realism based on a critique of the where do art and object-orientated ontology connect? privilege traditionally accorded to the relation of objects, or things, Harman tends to present his ontology in opposition to his main to the human being as knower, perceiver or the subject in relation to competitor in the turn from the subject to the object, Bruno Latour, which manifestation takes place. Can we think the world before us or who conceives both in terms of networks of relations between ‘actants’ after us? Can we give an account of objects where they are not ‘for us’ (which include subjects and objects, without the subject being privand we would be just objects among other objects and not privileged? ileged), and whose philosophy he seems to associate with relational art. Harman’s approach to objects comes out of his study of Martin Why would we even want to do that? Since the 1960s, in the kinds of philosophy that had a strong Heidegger, and crucially the master’s famous discussion of ‘readiimpact on art discourse, we see the following pattern. In the Marxist ness to hand’ and ‘presence at hand’ in Being and Time (1927), with its structuralism of Louis Althusser we see the evacuation of the human famous example of the broken hammer. At the everyday level, things subject, which becomes just a position constituted by the structure form part of a network of relations where they function, which, so (contra the freedom of the bourgeois-existentialist subject). The long as it’s going along smoothly, is largely invisible to us. It is when subject returns in poststructuralism, but in different terms: as the something breaks or frustrates us that this world as such of relations subject of pathos in the Roland Barthes of Camera Lucida (1980); the is apprehended. This is the origin of the theoretical attitude. Theory practices of ethical self-fashioning in Michel Foucault’s The Care of the is a ‘gaze’ under which the invisible (in this case the world of relations) Self (1984); the subject as responsible to the other who comes first in becomes visible. It is continuous with the notion associating truth Jacques Derrida; as the subject who makes herself in the performa- with the greatest presence that goes back to the philosopher contemtive in Judith Butler; the subject of fidelity to a truth-event in Alain plating the ideas in Plato. By telling the story through breakdown, Badiou, and above all the subject of the unconscious of psycho Heidegger shows that what seemed to be fundamental, the theoretanalysis, which was crucial to feminist critique, and has to this day ical relation with the object, derives from a defect in readiness to hand. From this point of view, readiness to hand withdraws behind presence been largely hijacked by Slavoj Žižek. For myself, as a critic setting out in the late 1970s, the discourses at hand, with the primacy of presence taken to be ‘metaphysical’. that dominated were Frankfurt School critical theory and psycho In his book on Heidegger, Tool-Being (2002), from which much of analytically dominated theories of the image coupled at first with his philosophy devolves, Harman takes a different line: that it is the post-Althusserian Marxism: both were centred on the subject, even if being of objects such as they are that withdraws into concealment that subject was emptied out, displaced and critiqued, with the object in the world of human relations and purposes. So in order to think conceived almost entirely in relation to the subject. What we have objects as they are, we need to break with the idea of relations oriented witnessed over the past decade in philosophy goes contrary to the around the human subject, who Heidegger at once privileges and subjective and textual turns: the return of system building coupled decentres. Harman also departs from Heidegger in rejecting the ‘ontowith the turn to the object. logical difference’ between being as one and the many beings (entiWe are also living through a time when, for all sorts of reasons, ties, objects). Each object, in effect, has its own being, not linked by including climate change giving rise to the concept of an ‘anthropo- some common horizon such as time. Like many other philosophers cene’ epoch, economic crisis and the emergence of postdigital technol- since the 1960s, Harman wants to place the stress on multiplicity, but ogies (the Internet of things, 3d printers), we need to think more about in his case it is the multiplicity of objects, not some kind of nonobjectal objects, what they are and how we relate to them. And it is true that plurality of the ‘real’. When Harman ticks off Clement Greenberg for what the subject-oriented philosophies have to offer in this regard is finding one and the same flatness as the essence of painting ‘no matter quite limited. Hence, I think, the interest in SR, which emerged as an what content is deployed to hint in its direction’, it is as a version of the identifiable core grouping at a workshop at Goldsmiths College in metaphysical idea of the unity of being. 2007 (Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935–7), acknowlHarman), although it has greatly expanded its membership since then. edged as one of the most important twentieth-century texts on The emergence of SR seems to have coincided with – if not pre- aesthetics, was prompted by the realisation that the being of the work ceded – an interest by artists in new kinds of objects and ways of of art simply could not be accounted for by the ‘ready to hand’ and setting up relations between them, as well as a new interest in ways ‘present at hand’: it is neither consumed by its function and relations of presenting artists of the recent past who engaged with objects, in a world, nor does it submit to a theoretical attitude. So he invented and this in ways that don’t quite match the kinds of art based on the (with a nod to Nietzsche) a new structure, ‘the strife of world and readymade (whether in the direction of instiearth’. This does not mean (contra Harman) that tutional critique or ‘positive’ appropriation). the work of art is reduced to or fundamentally facing page Michael Newman
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directed towards ‘earth’ (which Harman I think misleadingly des- (If that isn’t a relation, I don’t know what is!) Harman’s approach in cribes as ‘background’), but rather the emphasis is on the ‘strife’. terms of qualities and what holds them together, in noncorellational Heidegger was working on this essay in the 1930s when he joined the terms, cannot by itself put its finger on what might make artworks a Nazi party, and it is marked by that, but we can interpret ‘strife’ in distinctive kind of object, if indeed it is a distinctive kind of object at less belligerent terms as ‘difference’, and ‘earth’ not as ‘blood and soil’ all. Heidegger at least tried, and in the course of his attempt he did but rather a principle of opacity that is nonworldly, nonhistorical, and ‘destroy’ the traditional opposition such as form and content that withdraws from relations, preventing transparency and closure. At Harman tries to apply, together with foreground and background, in least this draws attention to the fact that world and earth are not static the attempt to apprehend the depth of the object. Although I would categories, but each allows the other in a temporal and spatial process question whether the term ‘background’ captures what Heidegger of becoming, with the work of art not so much an object but rather in means by ‘earth’ in the ‘strife of world and earth’, Harman does make its being in relation to an event that, Heidegger says, ‘begins history the interesting point that Heidegger and Greenberg understand anew’. Art is a kind of instituting, but not in principle by a subject: ‘depth’ as unified; what remains in question is whether the many with ideas of originality and genius derive from a subject-centred falling which this unity might be replaced is the many objects at the level at away from this position. What Harman evades is the connection of which they are unrelated to each other, or a multiplicity that is not the artwork in Heidegger to both nothingness (as the condition for counted or unified into objects. creation and the new) and difference (as the condition for its manifesWhat seems to be missing here is the notion of some ‘thing’ that is tation). You can see why neo-Deleuzians, for whom things would be not included in or falls away from the unity of objects, whether they in movement as becomings in the plural, might have a problem with are counted, named, theorised, imagined, speculated on, that which the more fixed, atemporal uncorrelated objects of Harman’s ontology is sometimes called the ‘real’. For Harman, it seems, what there are, referred to unproblematically if not provocatively by nouns drawn fundamentally, are lots of objects, which therefore take the place of being. They don’t need to differentiate themselves to be what they from human languages. are, either from each other, or from another While Harman’s philosophy, in its insistWhile Harman’s philosophy modality of being, although they do act on ence on the primacy of the object, has been beneficial in encouraging approaches that has been beneficial in encouraging each other. Objects, including those made by humans as elements of their world, mainare helpful when they deal with new kinds approaches that are helpful of objects, the limitations of his position, tain their identities ‘as’ what they are, such when they deal with new kinds particularly concerning multiplicity, time, as knives and paper, independently of their of objects, the limitations of his modality, history and a too-simple conceprelations with humans and of language. So what we are left with are lists of entities tion of relation – let alone whether we can position become apparent do without the subject – become apparent in distinct from each other, where any difference in his foray into the terrain of art his foray into the terrain of art. Clearly it is is emptied of significance. For philosophy to impossible to make sense of the art criticism of Clement Greenberg deprivilege the human subject raises the question of the status of the and Michael Fried without the subject, since both have to do, at claims of philosophy itself, which is why there has been a turn to specubottom, with judgement, but this is what Harman attempts in his lative and philosophical fiction as genres. (Harman has written a rather article ‘Art Without Relations’. good book on H.P. Lovecraft called Weird Realism, 2012.) But then it is Greenberg and Fried may both draw on philosophy – Immanuel not the objects that write the stories (at least not yet…). Kant and G.W.F. Hegel for the former, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig In the end Harman acknowledges that art cannot do without the Wittgenstein and his friend Stanley Cavell for the latter – but they are subject. What makes an object an art object is that it is fascinating: not writing philosophies. Nonetheless their conceptions of the art- ‘nonfascinating art simply fails in a way nonfascinating science does work are underpinned by ontological assumptions about what kind not’, he writes. This serves to distinguish art as irreducibly human of thing an artwork is. Both write about artworks that take the form while knocking the human subject down from its privileged position of objects (without necessarily being reducible to their physical mate- of knower and free agent, dispossessing it of itself to almost fuse it riality), not things the aim of which could be conceived as reflexively with the object: ‘the human is less a spectator than a co-constituent of drawing attention to their contexts, or things that ‘disappear’ into social the artwork itself’. We could take the idea of fascination in a different practices. Both base their understanding of art on the idea of medium, direction: for psychoanalysis, the fascinans is the phallus. Is Harman although for neither does medium reduce to the material stuff of the saying that nonfetishistic (relational?) art fails? ‘Critique’, retaining object: for Greenberg, although for painting it does involve a reduc- the privileged human capacity for knowledge, has sought to counter tive flatness, it also called on the norms and conventions of the practice, art as object-fetish by defetishising art into relations. Another option and for Fried precisely the difference between the ‘literal’ object and would be to try to radicalise fetishism. How would one do this? By the painting or sculpture that compels conviction in its presentness. showing that it concerns not (only) disavowal of lack and (sexual) For both, the artwork is irreducibly ‘correlational’ not only in terms of difference, but an impossible relation to the real, to the thing that is judgement but also through the experience on which that judgement not an object. But for that we would need an account of relation as relation-without-relation and a more complex topography than that is based: through opticality for Greenberg, and beholding for Fried. Harman seems to suggest that ‘art’ is an alternative attitude of surface and depth. to objects to that of philosophy, in other words that they are both directed towards objects distinct from themselves. Indeed they Michael Newman is professor of art writing, Goldsmiths College, London, ‘are joined in a love of objects insofar as they cannot be paraphrased’. and cocurator of Revolver ii at Matt’s Gallery, London, through 14 December
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Barbara Hepworth, ‘Slim Forms’ BH379, 1965, slate, unique, 26.8 x 18.6 x 14.8 cm
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Liadin Cooke Nostos 26 September - 25 October 2014
noshowspace noshowspace.com 13 Gibraltar Walk, London E2 7LH
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Anna Oppermann Cotoneaster horizontalis Preview : Thursday 16 October 2014, 5.30 – 7.30pm Exhibition : 17 October – 13 December 2014
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QASIM RIZA SHAHEEN
The last known pose 20 Sept - 30 Nov 2014
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In Search of Lost Time The Little Madeleines of Latifa Echakhch by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Portrait and studio by Thomas Rousset
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above La Dépossession, 2014 (installation view, Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris, 2014), theatre canvas, paint, steel tube and straps, variable dimensions. Photo: Fabrice Seixas preceding pages, left For Each Stencil a Revolution, 2007 (installation view, Tate Modern, London, 2009), A4 carbon paper, glue, methylated alcohol, dimensions variable. Photo: the artist right Latifa Echakhch photographed in her studio, Martigny, Switzerland, September 2014
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“Suddenly I, Latifa Echakhch, first-generation immigrant, so to speak, versos and frameworks of 100 very thin wooden cutouts representing since I arrived so young in France, was nominated for the Prix Marcel clouds and suspended from the ceiling on almost invisible threads all Duchamp, rewarded and invited to exhibit in one of the most impor- the way to the floor that they will touch (in other words, the viewers tant cultural institutions, the Centre Pompidou. Though in the end it will come in from behind the scene). Each ‘cloud’ is approximately one is the ultimate recognition from the French art scene, the experience metre high, though all differ in shape and size, and will be arranged was really disturbing for me, because it reminded me of what I hated in small herds of five across the length of the room, which will force within sports – the competition – applied to the arts. Also I couldn’t visitors to slalom between them and, intentionally or not, make the ignore that somewhere in this process there was this little part of me airy props waver slightly. The parquet, meanwhile, will be thorthat was looked at as alien. With another name, I wouldn’t feel the oughly polished in order to reflect the entire decor: “I wanted to give the impression of a quiet lake mirroring the surrounding nature,” same pressure and I wouldn’t carry the same weight.” Only the fourth woman to win the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s Echakhch says. most prestigious award for contemporary art, since its creation in Reaching the far end of the room and finally being able to turn 2000, Latifa Echakhch was born in El Khnansa, Morocco, with a very around and see the sculptures from the front, their other side painted humble background, about which she has always remained very in light blue, grey and white, viewers will discover, previously hidden reserved. She was only three years old when her by the clouds and placed on the floor, about 15 parents moved to France and settled in Aix-lessmall, seemingly trivial objects that are just like Finally able to turn Bains on the shores of Lake Bourget. A Romantic some the artist remembers having owned in her around and see the landscape par excellence, this is where, in 1816, youth and which hold a personal significance to sculptures from her. Bought, gleaned or fabricated, they include, Alphonse de Lamartine met his muse Julie Charles, for example, a preschool marionette, a collecwho passed a year later, and which became the the front, viewers will scenery of his famous 1820 poem Le Lac, in rememtion of rocks and another of Bach records, the Que discover, previously brance of their love and flâneries: Sais-je? series of educational books, a Vallauris hidden by the clouds, ceramic fish lamp, a pétanque set and a perfume Thus ever drawn toward far shores uncharted, bottle of L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci. Each of about 15 small, Into eternal darkness borne away, these objects will have been plunged into brilMay we not ever on Time’s sea, unthwarted, seemingly trivial objects. liant black ink, giving the impression that they Cast anchor for a day? Each of these will might have just about survived a muddy tide in (translated by Wilfrid Thorley) have been plunged into a basement, a way for her to “reactivate, unify The Alpine region has had a deep impact in and transcend the memories they contain”– little brilliant black ink, giving madeleines in search of lost time and, sometimes, shaping the sensibility and aesthetics of Echakhch, the impression that a metaphorical springboard for a greater cultural who, after having been to Paris and Stockholm remembrance than her own history. for several years, has now returned ‘home’: she they might have just currently lives in Martigny in the Swiss Alps. She Take L’Air du Temps, for instance, which is about survived a muddy also the title of the exhibition (as well as a nod to describes herself as a Romantic at heart, and her tide in a basement Duchamp’s 1919 readymade Air de Paris): the scent works, halfway between Conceptualism and was created in 1948, during the immediate afterSurrealism, and often taking the form of installations and compositions of found objects, might indeed be abstracted math of the Second World War, and represents for Echakhch both as Romantic readymades, for they emphasise imagination, emotion a fresh breath after the horror of the events of recent history and a way to soothe the pain they left behind, like a balm. She filled the and introspection. When presented with the award in October 2013 and in consul- bottle with black ink and exhibited it for the first time this summer, tation with Bernard Blistène, who was just appointed director of in the Cabinet of Curiosities at the Cathedral Museum in Salzburg. Centre Pompidou, Echakhch faced two options for her upcoming When doing so, she told me that she couldn’t help but think about exhibition at the institution’s Espace 315. The first would have been Dvir Intrator, her gallerist in Tel Aviv, whose family, originally from the easy one: creating a single spectacular installation. But instead Austria, suffered deportations and spoliations: “I know that Dvir she opted for something more difficult and courageous, confronting would have a hard time going to Austria, so this perfume also evokes herself with her own history and childhood memories – what she to me this sentiment, the refusal to return to one’s native country,” describes, when we discuss her upcoming exhibition, as her “very she recalls. poor cultural heritage” – and in doing so, perhaps she somehow sets This anecdote brings me to the most essential trait of Echakhch’s the record straight in terms of the predictable clichés surrounding character: her raw, overwhelming, political sensibility, which engages her ‘origins’. After all, she confesses, she never owned anything and enlightens her entire practice. While I was interviewing her in that could be characterised in cultural terms as being ‘oriental’ and August, she told me about the time she was starting as a postgraduate speaks Arabic like a toddler, though she wishes to master it one day at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Lyons, between 2001 and 2002, during the height of the Second Intifada in the West through writing poetry. For us to travel back in time with her, Echakhch has conceived her Bank and Gaza: “It was really hard for me, as it is again since last July. show like a landscape, which will unfold as visitors stroll within the I don’t know how I can allow myself to make art, only art, while there vast, rectangular 315sqm exhibition space. Upon entering, the first are such huge political impasses,” she says. As long as she can remember, view will be of the reverse side of a theatrical set: the uneven black the artist has always aspired to be politically involved, even during
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L’Air du Temps, 2014 (installation view, Cabinet of Curiosities, Cathedral Museum of Salzburg). Photo: Josef Kral
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her schooltime career in sports, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, when Jesse Owens was a role model, “because he was even more than an African-American athlete, he ran and won at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he had a real political impact”. Later, as a freshman at the École Supérieure d’Art in Grenoble, she joined the Mouvement des Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF), a political youth organisation close to the French communist party, only to realise subsequently that it wasn’t open enough for her really to commit to it. Instead her true moment of discovery came in 1996, when Philippe Parreno, her professor in Grenoble, suggested that she investigate the work of the Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose posthumous exhibition Girlfriend in a Coma had been held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris that year. Recalling that moment, Echakhch states that “his balance between the political and the sensorial spoke to me so much that I felt everything was possible. I had found my way.” In these various respects, it doesn’t strike one as a surprise that the installation Echakhch has exhibited most often is titled For Each Stencil a Revolution (2007), after a quote from Yasser Arafat. Having been shown at the Tate Modern (Speakers’ Corner, 2007), Art Basel (Art Unlimited, 2010) and more recently the Hammer Museum (Hammer Projects, 2013) and the Palazzo Grassi (L’Illusion des Lumières, 2014), the work consists in covering the walls of an entire exhibition room with blue carbon paper. An aggressive solvent is then sprayed all over it, causing the colour to deliquesce onto the ground as if erasing all the hopes and rebellions of the protesters who made the stencil their means of communication, at least before its relative obsolescence in the digital era.
Other examples of how Echakhch infuses her political sensibility into her art include Saïd’s Tea (2010), a gutter installed inside an exhibition space and able to collect rainwater in a teapot, which was first shown at Dvir Gallery. The piece reproduces a gesture of Saïd, the artist’s uncle, which has always fascinated her. Because of limited access to water supply in Khouribga, Morocco, he has a habit of putting a teapot under the gutter of his house to (hopefully) fill it with rain and then prepare his ‘special tea’. Installing this in Tel Aviv was for Echakhch an obvious reference to the ‘War over Water’, the battle between Israel and its Arab neighbours from 1964 to 1967 over control of the Jordan River and its sources. A year later, during a visit to Beirut, the artist noticed how red the earth was over there, which reminded her of an episode of What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?, based on John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915). According to a legend mentioned in the cartoon, poppies were originally white, but were turned red by the blood spilled in the First World War. As an echo of this metaphor and in respect of the 2006 Lebanon War, the artist sculpted Charlie Brown’s Poppies (2011), fragile flowers in clay mixed with the red earth of Beirut, which was first exhibited at the Beirut Art Center (The Beirut Experience, 2011). It was also in Beirut that she had the idea for Fantôme (Jasmin) (2012): a ‘ghost’ with a white shirt suspended from a floor-standing hanger with a necklace of jasmine flowers as an allusion to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, in 2010–11, the first of the Arab Spring. She mounted it in Tkaf at Galerie Kamel Mennour in 2012, and again this year at Palazzo Grassi. If not screaming into the wind, at least figuratively whispering, on behalf of all the voices left unheard: yes, Latifa Echakhch’s Romantic art can stir up and inspire our political consciousness. ar
Charlie Brown’s Poppies, 2011 (installation view, Beirut Art Center, 2011), red soil and clay from Beirut, dimensions variable. Photo: Agop Kanledjian all works Courtesy the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris
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Richard Tuttle Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns by Sherman Sam
There are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2002
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Increasingly the proliferation of television and the Internet and also an opening up to more and more possibilities: little watercolours such media has led to the predominance of the image in our times. in home-constructed frames, drawings made with two pencils in one And despite the fact that this relentless march of pictures creates the hand, oddly shaped pieces of painted chipboard and long horizontal impression that we are apace of things via a constant bombardment pieces of dyed fabric are some examples of the experimental spirit of of information, it also feels increasingly fleeting. So perhaps Charles Tuttle’s enquiry. And it is not just a case of how a work comes into Baudelaire’s old idea about the nature of modern life (as laid out being: the installation of Tuttle’s artworks itself can offer as much of in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1859–60) still holds true: a challenge. In 1992 Tuttle famously installed tiny sculptures, paint‘Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the ings and drawings at Mary Boone’s newly renovated gallery, hung just half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.’ fractions off floor level, with a mere vertical pencil line on the wall With that in mind Richard Tuttle’s career, bridging the twentieth and to guide one’s eye – and hence body – downwards. ‘Where the wall twenty-first centuries, seems to both embrace a certain fleetingness meets the floor’, he said to Holman, ‘is a special kind of zone. It’s a deand yet also ignore our current situation, as if in search of permanence. militarized zone.’ According to the critic Barry Schwabsky, it meant First categorised as ‘postminimalist’ (Robert Pincus-Witten), that ‘for those willing to look – which meant squatting or getting down on all fours for a toddler’s-eye ‘antiform’ or ‘eccentric abstraction’ view – the delights were myriad, and (Lucy Lippard), Tuttle’s earliest works all the more so thanks to the artist’s (produced during the early to midway of conveying that sculpture can 1960s) were, as those attempts at cateloom large in the mind without being gorisation suggest, spare, organic and abstract, but unlike his minimalist monumental’. On the other hand a (this predecessors, the qualities of Tuttle’s time) very complimentary review by Holland Cotter in The New York Times artworks were not rooted in mathemathad one small criticism: ‘in bringing ical rhythms or reductive logic. Rather, viewers literally to their knees in front the rationality of cut-paper octagons of his art [Tuttle] reveals a passiveattached directly to the wall, or a line aggressive streak that makes humility drawn on the wall and then extended into space using wire and its shadow, itself look like little more than a pose’. just served to underline the wobbly, This autumn, London offers two poetic difference between himself and opportunities to see the septuagenarhis more austere predecessors. Back in ian’s art: a retrospective of his work 1992, Tuttle told Bob Holman (in an with fabric at the Whitechapel and a new commission for Tate Modern’s interview published in Bomb magaTurbine Hall. ‘Since the hippie days’, zine) that the Wire Pieces (1971–2) ‘are as as he tells Ashton Cooper in Blouin close as I’ve ever gotten to pure creative Media, Tuttle has been a collector of energy’, because ‘time and time again, the intellect robs the creative… The crefabric, and came very close to curating ative is pure and separate and as high a show of ancient ritual textiles at the intensity as possible.’ In the context of Victoria and Albert Museum this year – their times, these works were humble an ‘infiltration’, to paraphrase Tate and witty compared to the minimalist Modern director Chris Dercon. As the artist-in-residence at the Getty last sensibility, but also inventively playful in their own matter-of-fact way. Howyear, Tuttle developed fabrics that have ever, the conservative Hilton Kramer now been manufactured in quantity in infamously critiqued Tuttle’s 1975 India – that itself he says is a feat. This Whitney Museum exhibition, stating material will form the basis of his Tate in The New York Times that ‘less is unmiscommission, I Don’t Know or The Weave takeably less. It is indeed remorselessly and irredeemably less… One of Textile Language. Clues to how these fabrics might be deployed, and is tempted to say that, so far as art is concerned, less has never been his thinking, were on view in New York at Tuttle’s Pace show, Looking as less as this.’ And with that, Tuttle’s first museum show famously for the Map, earlier this year. The catalogue includes instructions on resulted in Marcia Tucker, the exhibition’s curator, leaving her posi- the installation for each work; for example, one reads: ‘4) unroll 16” tion a year later, and founding the New Museum of Contemporary of muslin from roll, 5) drop loose end over top of box unevenly’. Art a year after that. But to see this Whitney show as reductive, even The work Looking for the Map 5 (2013–4) consists of a roll of creamy then, was to entirely miss the complexity of its nature. As history and muslin with one edge draped over a bulbous white-purple cloth structure. The latter is held to the wall with several museum retrospectives later proved, facing page Hello, The Roses 19, 2012, a brace of wood forming a T-shape. “How it in Tuttle’s case less has inevitably led to more. wood, paint, 18 × 10 cm is deployed”, he says of the coming instal If those simple forms were regarded above Space-is-Concrete (5), 2005, lation, “is something we are all waiting to as less, then his art since then has been, if acrylic and graphite on spun plastic with Golden anything, a move towards the additive and see, me most of all.” black gesso, 91 × 51 cm. Photo: G.R. Christmas
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Fiction Fish I, 7, 1992, graphite and ribbon on cardboard, graphite line, 11 × 3 cm. Photo: G.R. Christmas
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The late great abstractionist Agnes Martin, a close friend since meeting Tuttle in his youth, described her own paintings as ‘a perfectly non-attached space’. By contrast Tuttle prefers ‘non-originary space’. ‘The structures of society to me,’ he said in a 2010 interview with Laura Lake Smith for The Brock Review, ‘are very much built on originary space, like the case of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Mesopotamians and so on. You know – in the beginning was the word and the word was God. Who’s not going to accept that? If you accept that then you can talk to each other, you can do things like build bridges. As an artist, for me, my greatest moments of my life have been when I have experienced non-originary space… I feel my job really is, through my work, to give people my excitement, my thrill, my happiness of experiencing non-originary space.’ “Because”, he says today, “‘originary’ seems to be a spatial concept in our minds, I had to find non-originary space through the back door, so to speak, ie, people have very little trouble with non-originary time, time and space are equal, therefore, there must be non-originary space.” Take that how you will. Gnomic, witty, silly or deep, perhaps even spiritual. This space suggests a preverbal experience or at least a place where not everyone agrees on what word to use for ‘god’. It seems to be an attempt to put forward things or organise matter for an experience with as little verbal baggage or linguistic symbolism as possible – an ambition that seems rare among artists today. A work by Tuttle presents very few overt links or representational hooks to the world. There is not even a theoretical narrative; instead it seems closest to say that the
work is of the world. That is, Tuttle does not create pictures, and this is what makes his work a challenge for today’s image-oriented, narrative-biased global viewers; rather, he presents works that engage on a purely visual level. Unlike Martin’s self-contained space of nonattachment, Tuttle’s work could be construed as a series of events – as demonstrated by his instructions – to create an encounter as best he can. Hence every element that constitutes the work is generally in view, and in theory every moment of its creation is there to be seen. In that regard Kramer was not wrong: what confronts you is mostly devoid of the metaphysical or metaphorical; it is – in Tuttle’s explanation – just what it is, which would make it an experience at once childlike and sophisticated. Perhaps it is a space for new attachment. The former American politician Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the experience of art itself sometimes requires one to unknow something to know it better. Likewise Tuttle himself has said that he views ‘the textile as profoundly unknown, and perhaps unknowable; extremely useful, therefore, to separate what you know from what you don’t’. Yet the result of encountering a Richard Tuttle artwork, like much of what we meet in the world, can be both fleeting and permanent. That is, if given a chance, it can stay with us or, just like how we edit out the world, be something entirely fleeting. It is a big ask. ar Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know or The Weave of Textile Language. opens in London at the Whitechapel Gallery and in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on 14 October
Systems, VI, 2011, powdered tyre rubber mixed with acrylic, vinyl-coated steel cable, nails, wire, white electrical cord, 254 × 290 × 290 cm. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate all works © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, and Pace, New York, London & Beijing
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Trisha Donnelly The San Francisco-born artist is a virtuoso strategist, finessing the slow reveal (or, indeed, no reveal) to deliver work that is portentous, charged and enigmatic by Martin Herbert
systemic units and conjectures about shaped Late in 2007, I went repeatedly to Tate reality, the fungible nature of space and Modern’s exhibition The World as a Stage, time, and the strictures of art reception is primarily to see one small black-and-white more fruitful. Hers is a chess-playing art, photograph – or, rather, a series of 31 small one of timing and artfully mobilised viewer black-and-white photographs presented one psychology; or at least that’s where it starts. at a time and, as per the artist’s instructions, In her New York solo debut at Casey Kaplan rotated daily: Trisha Donnelly’s The Redwood in 2002, Donnelly rode into the opening on a and the Raven (2004). The experience of this staggered, witchy display, which docuwhite horse, dressed in Napoleonic garb, and, ments the headscarf-wearing dancer Frances acting as ersatz courier, delivered the oration Flannery performing, against a tree in a forest, that the French emperor supposedly should have given at the Battle of Waterloo: ‘If it a dance called ‘The Raven’, choreographed to Edgar Allen Poe’s eponymous 1845 poem, was borderline perverse: need be termed surrender, then let it be so, for he has surrendered in you couldn’t grasp the moves, hear the poem or precisely remember word, not will. He has said, “My fall will be great but it will be useful.” the previous images you saw, so that the additive melded continu- The emperor has fallen and he rests his weight upon your mind and ally with the subtractive. (The raven in the poem famously answers mine and with this I am electric. I am electric.’ (Eyewitness critic Jerry queries with ‘nevermore’.) You wanted more, aware that the more Saltz wrote that here Donnelly ‘stole my aesthetic heart’, while reckyou got would equate to less. This, I already knew, was the American oning that the performance rather outweighed the show itself.) artist’s conceptual wheelhouse: earlier that year, in Manchester, By 2005, Donnelly didn’t even require a real horse; stage-managed I’d seen her deliver a drum-pounding, soprano-screaming, incan- rumour was enough. At the opening of a show at the Kölnischer tatory performance, The Second Saint, at Hans Ulrich Obrist’s and Kunstverein celebrating a major artist’s prize she’d won, word ‘got Philippe Parreno’s performance-art extravaganza Il Tempo del Postino, around’ that another steed was waiting somewhere in the institua fully confident yet, for all its noise, muted display, ending with the tion, that Donnelly would perform – and the artist, curator Beatrix fall of four black obelisks, that resides in my memory as a roaring Ruf remembers, left the preview dinner a few times to reinforce the idea. It never happened, but the very possibility coloured the event. blank abstraction. But then methodically parsing the actions, objects and images This, in microcosm, is what Suzanne Cotter has called Donnelly’s proffered by the forty-year-old, San Francisco-born Donnelly, who ideal of the ‘uncontrived encounter’, something Donnelly herself calls ‘natural use’ and which is the carefully has now returned to London with a solo exhiThe Redwood and the Raven (detail), 2004, bition at the Serpentine Galleries, is not really 31 silver gelatin prints, 18 × 13 cm each, edition 1 of 3. controlled outcome of so much of her work (which, in a gesture of imperial defeat that is the point. Thinking about them as interacting Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
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© 2014 the artist
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© 2014 the artist
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also a gift, then abdicates control): a process that, though the descrip- apparently most often featured the response ‘pass’, with Donnelly tion may sound hyperbolic, comes closer to a suggestion of opening playing tracks from her iPod in lieu of other answers – while her cataup space and time, with visibly disproportionate means, than almost logues don’t usually feature essays and her press releases can veer any of Donnelly’s contemporaries. See, for example, Hand That Holds strongly away from the interpretative. When a visitor attending her the Desert Down (2002), in which a black-and-white detail of one of 2002 Kaplan show requested more info, he or she would be played the paws of the Great Sphinx at Giza flips, via titling, into a vertigi- some electronic beats. The PR handout for her poised, codified-feeling nous recasting of gravitational reality, though a proposition whose 2010 exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, with its sequence of leaning supporting wires are blatantly evident. incised marble reliefs, drawings and video, purports to be a press text Donnelly’s art has prowled, avoiding resolution, around stormy but is a list of titles and media. transcendence from the outset: the first work of hers I remember This matters: one might wish it to be exemplary, except that it seeing (and not being particularly struck by: her work has to accrete is turf that Donnelly almost owns and that, to mix metaphors, would in the mind) was Untitled (Jumping) (1999), made before she graduated become hackneyed fast. So much art today, as we’re all aware, comes from Yale in 2000, in which she imitates, while moving in and out of with an accompanying explanation that actively disarms the viewthe video frame, a variety of musicians in states of musical rapture. ing experience, rationalises it, and rationalising appears to be the Her art since, which encompasses soundworks, actions, lectures, last thing Donnelly wants: her art, in its myriad margin-directed drawings, sculpture, photography and more video, continually speculations, says there’s too much of that already, and not enough stresses the possibility of – to quote the Bard – there being more that, to paraphrase that horseriding ensign, really rests its weight in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Or in our upon your mind and mine. Think for a second about how few artists artworld, which has a schizoid relationship nowadays to the eso- actually sustain this quality of tactical, shape-changing surprise teric and occult, liking it when and risk. David Hammons would historical – Hilma af Klint, say – be one, Lutz Bacher another; but not so much when offered there are not that many others. without irony or a sense that cerMeanwhile galleries and fairs clog with frictionless productain ancient fires haven’t yet gone tion lines. Donnelly operates, out. The thematic framework conversely, a continual transitive Donnelly has set up charges even her most outwardly slim works process, new works adjusting old with electricity and expansive ones, the full picture held back: Black Wave, a 2002 photograph of portent. The Napoleon theme, for a wave about to crest, feels like example, continued in The Vortex it might be metonymic both in (2003), which featured a recordits minimal ominousness and its ing of the Slavyanka Russian Men’s Chorus singing Lermonforceful incompletion. tov’s poem ‘Borodino’ (1837), The last time Trisha Donnelly named after a gruesome battle of stole this viewer’s aesthetic heart the Napoleonic wars. What this was in Berlin, at KW Institute’s added was perhaps just another 2012–3 exhibition One on One, in Black Wave, 2002, silver gelatin print, 127 × 152 cm, edition 1 of 3. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York line of code, though it also aimed which viewers were permitted at an experience of synaesthesia solo encounters with works of art. (see the anticipatory text ‘The Vortex Notes’, 2002, which advised Commandeering a high floor, Donnelly presented a suspended following the highest male voice and feeling it ‘compress like a photo- sculpture, a big, steel-framed, partly cracked tray held up with aerograph’) and dragged a vast historical event into the artwork’s orbit, plane cables, like a perpetual enigmatic experiment. I remember low resituating it in the twenty-first century as a question that is partic- lighting, I remember the variable tilting of the oblique tray and water ular and also diffuse. Her sculptures involving carving into quartzite, in it, but mostly I remember that characteristic quality of insistent she’s said, relate to ‘the enacting of processes of loss in geological wordless proposition: disbelief suspended, the author as artist erased time’: entertain that, and millennia fall away as you look. and replaced, prospectively, with someone or something arcane and Or, rather, they might. Again, it’s characteristic of Donnelly’s art anxiety-making, and then the figure of Donnelly, manipulating the that one simultaneously falls under the spell and has a sense, related murky theatrics, returning to mind. As I write, several weeks before to critique, of how the spell is cast. What’s likely is that no spell at all, the Serpentine show’s opening, the gallery website is displaying or at best a pale shadow of a spell, is cast if this art is received second- a press release for the forthcoming show that features, unsurprisingly, hand, and here her work twists uncharacteristically polemical. no mention of any work; the press office informs us that Donnelly In an age where so much art is experienced – if that’s even the word – ‘will transform the Serpentine’s spaces through the use of objects and through online aggregators and through documentation, Donnelly’s interventions, with newly conceived sculptural and performative art insists on being taken in real time and real space, so that it can pieces’. More than that? Pass. Nevermore. Cue beats. ar ask what those things even are. It’s presumably to this end that she has given up doing interviews – we asked, and were politely rebuffed; An exhibition of work by Trisha Donnelly is on view at the Serpentine Gallery, London, through 9 November a 2010 in-gallery interview she did with Anthony Huberman
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Jacob Hashimoto by Erik Morse
Air is the absolute teacher… It never speaks, but it brings everything together and makes everything possible. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Foreword to the Theory of Spheres’ (2004)
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In Jacob Hashimoto’s most recent environmental installation, on neo-gesamtkunstwerks – or what critic Jerry Saltz would refer to as Gas Giant (2014), a tiered plafond consisting of hundreds of tessel- ‘clusterfuck aesthetics’. Equally significant were the object-oriented lated ricepaper kites descends upon MOCA’s Pacific Design Center designs of Jorge Pardo and Pae White, whose focus on the domestic in a marvellous simulacrum of a cloudbank. Fabricated in the kinds potentialities of the museum space created more subdued, even habitof electric hues typical of high-definition videogames and mantled able, environments. Evidence of this tension between grandiosity and by recessed LED light, Gas Giant’s Wii-inspired constellation evokes austerity was apparent in the scale modelling of Hashimoto’s first the so-called ‘Flammarion engraving’ that accompanies Camille major solo exhibition, Infinite Expanse of Sky (1998) – shown simultaFlammarion’s text L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (c. 1888) – in neously at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Patricia which a traveller locates the edge of the earth’s horizon and pokes his Faure Gallery, Santa Monica – which transformed the serial reprohead beneath its firmament. In this pluralist cosmogony, according duction of 3,000 bamboo and vellum kites into an intricate indoor to Flammarion, all men were, by nature, ‘citizens of the sky’, upraised canopy. Each piece of rectangular fabric was coloured with the azure by the forces of heaven and piloted by the technologies of astronomy. background and caricatured, white tufts often seen scuttling across Likewise, Hashimoto’s two-decade oeuvre of aerial formations and the walls of an infant’s nursery, then hung in varying orientations and weather installations, informed by templates both mechanical and heights from six metres above to nearly floor-level as they advanced digital, reimagines popular conceits of man’s kinship to atmosphere. the length of the room. At higher altitudes, the installation’s negative Most closely associated with the serial space was composed of shafts of light slivkite structures and parafoils that often fill ering between kites, while the lower echelon “Large-scale environmental his ceiling-based canopies and layered, wallrevealed a dense helix of wire that resembled installation is the only static based tapestries, Hashimoto’s environmental the stringed interior of a piano’s soundboard. form of artmaking to explore pieces are rooted in a hobbyist – rather than The supple texture of the vellum allowed it strictly artistic or ethnographic – practice. to reflect the artificial and natural light of the the changes that digital As the Japanese-American artist described in gallery, all the while billowing gently against environments are making to previous interviews, the integration of these the currents of interior air-conditioning. Like the way we see and function objects into his aerial landscapes resulted a re-materialised version of James Turrell’s from a leisure pursuit in model aeroplanes Skyspace series (1986–2013), every perceptual in the world. The new landscape and kitemaking quite separate from his gradient of Infinite Expanse… revealed differhas a multipoint perspective, conceptual work as a painting and drawing ent interactions between object and eye – so constantly shifting student at the School of the Art Institute of that the spectator was constantly transfixed Chicago during the late 1990s. Unlike the by a type of ‘virtual landscape’. and transforming relative more elaborate and nationally significant In seeking to define precisely how this to your own experience… Tako-Kichi (‘kite crazy’) tradition of Japan – virtual landscape manifests in many of The architecture of nature, Hashimoto’s installations, it is necessary to including formations like the Rokkaku dako, qualify the term outside its narrow referthe Edo dako and Sode dako – Hashimoto’s of bubbles, of systems, of ence to an exclusively computer-generated Americanised creations are in the bowed, clouds is built solidly into optic. Rather, it encompasses the artificial diamond design associated with the folkloric the foundations” screens of trompe l’oeils, panoramas, phanscience of Benjamin Franklin and the subsequent celebration of the cult of the child. tasmagorias and other historical forms of “Everyone wants to tie some nostalgic postcolonial narrative onto the theatrical installation whose allusions to reality implied a practice kites,” Hashimoto writes as part of a round of email exchanges during of world-making. In his essay ‘Intangibles and Virtualities’ (2006), which he deftly describes his technique in terms both experiential urban geographer Rob Shields describes virtuality as ‘appearing in and conceptual. “[They were] really a product of practicality rather various forms throughout history… The unwritten history of “virtual than any reference to my Japanese relatives. [This] hobby morphed worlds”… includes simulacral technologies in architecture and visuback into my art-making process and I found myself actually consid- alicity…[and] anticipates the use of information and communications ering how to integrate these objects into my established art-making technologies to make present what is both absent and imaginary vocabulary.” Using these and other baubles to tease the line between through visualization and simulation.’ For Hashimoto, this aspirapopular imaginaries of science and the desultory dreamscapes of tion to the virtual landscape lay within the material interventions youth is, as with the aeriform works of Alexander Calder or Man Ray, of Land art and the synthetic (re)productions of Light and Space. Both Infinite Expanse… and Superabundant Atmosphere (2005) are, for a dominant trope in all of Hashimoto’s installations. Following his education at SAIC, Hashimoto relocated and example, indebted to Land art’s interpretation of macroscopic quickly became a part of Los Angeles’s Eastside art community, a terrains through the lenses of architecture and sculpture; yet they then burgeoning foil to the upmarket La Cienega/West LA circuit, also incorporate the approach of Light and Space to stage perceptual where, in Hashimoto’s words, “a culture of experimentation and of phenomena by embedding them in the artificial space of the gallery. undefined expectation [was] exceptionally fertile for a young artist… Both genres play in a middle space between the antipodes of nature space [was] cheap, so you [could] work big.” Angeleno painters and and artifice. For his part, Hashimoto is as much a set designer as he is multimedia artists like Laura Owens, Jason an environmentalist – and his virtual medifacing page Superabundant Atmosphere, 2005. Rhoades, Doug Aitken and Jennifer Pastor tations on the natural world are always seen Photo: Hélène de Franchise. were labouring in the shadow of Mike Kelley through a prism of interiority. Courtesy the artist
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This virtual landscape is further elaborated in Watertable (2000), spectator, simulated a miniature alpine range, represented the teccommissioned as part of an interactive children’s exhibit at LACMALab tonic obverse of Hashimoto’s sky installations – though its scale and called Made in California: NOW. If Hashimoto’s fledgling style already sense of volumetric artifice was no less impressive. betrayed a predilection for childhood chimera, his work alongside For much of the last decade, the fabrication of digitally inspired coexhibitors Martin Kersels, Michael Asher and Allan Kaprow estab- environments through the employment of conventional material lished him among a lineage of multimedia artists who embraced a and light sources came to dominate Hashimoto’s installations. conceptual environmentality that was both intellectual and wantonly Evoking the kinds of computerised wallpapers and HD-formatted mischievous. Watertable, one of the artist’s few installations to orig- screens so prevalent in millennial living-rooms, these works’ progresinate at ground level, appeared like Richard Serra’s ‘torqued’ sculp- sive uses of pixelation, colour and bricolaging blended the so-called ture reimagined as a Universal Studios theme ride, in which a green clusterfuck aesthetic with vibrant, almost hyperreal, resolution. turf was contoured and humped into a treacherous obstacle-course of The colourful, kite-based Super-Elastic Collisions (Origins, and Distant perforated anthills. The holes in question led to a plexus of wooden Derivations) (2011) appeared like vegetal formations translated by boxes beneath and contained vitrines of flowing water, rocks, flowers Nintendo designer Kenichiro Ashida into a 1080p worldscape. As and other ephemera. These virtual spaces, concealed from sight part and parcel of Hashimoto’s ongoing digital cosmogony, its by the felt skin, became the tactile cynosure inside an elaborate sense of romantic Futurism extolled those very plexiform spectawunderkammer – to be splashed, palpated and plucked by the viewer cles censured by artists like Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid. Indeed, (ie, child) as part of Watertable’s subterranean fantasy. With far more traditional political narratives play an incidental (or perhaps subexaggerated amplitudes between crests and troughs, as well as a more structural) role in much of Hashimoto’s work; rather, the artist’s curvilinear floor plan, Big Mountain (2001) was Watertable’s ‘serious- architectures often feel more akin to the utopian aesthetics of El Lissitzky (eg, Wolkenbügel project, 1923–5), minded’ sibling. Swelling nearly to the ceiling Big Mountain, 2001. at points, the carpeted platform, which, R. Buckminster Fuller (eg, Montreal Biosphère, Photo: Curtis Steinback. when climbed across and over by the braver 1967) or Bruno Taut (eg, The Glass Pavilion, Courtesy the artist
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1914), for whom questions of ideological allegiance or sociocultural heat-energy or encrypted data. That the installation might be interimplication were predicated on a fantasist, or religious, pursuit of preted as the inner workings of a server room, human body or cloudtechnological and formal innovations. bank is due to the increasing influence digital frameworks assert Echoing the language in Fuller’s manifesto, Universal Architecture over language, the flesh and the air in the popular imagination. (1932), Hashimoto explains the lexicon of his oeuvre as phenome Similarly, the multifloor, multiroom Gas Giant, Hashimoto’s most nological as well as architectural: “Large-scale environmental instal- enterprising work to date, recreated the atmosphere on a planetary lation is the only static form of artmaking to explore the changes scale, mimicking thunderheads and thickets of green, plumes of fire that digital environments are making to the way we see and func- and aquamarine froths. Clusters of box kites, rhombuses and simple tion in the world. The new landscape has a multipoint perspective, circles, on whose surfaces were printed all manner of polka dots, constantly shifting and transforming relative to your own experi- stripes, bubbles, squiggles and fluorescents, composed a high-definience… The architecture of nature, of bubbles, of systems, of clouds is tion, three-dimensional environment that often defied the simplistic built solidly into the foundations.” distinctions between analogue and digital interface. Is this a landscape In Microbursting Thunderhead (2003) and the aforementioned Gas of materials or screens? the viewer is forced to ask. How do I understand a Giant, Hashimoto’s virtual landscapes explored such themes of digi- sky more blue than blue? How do I interact with the ever-expanding dimentalised phenomenology. The former’s roomful of plastic spheres, sions of simulative technology? At its most profound moments, Gas Giant which, when illuminated by numerous internal LED fixtures resem- does nothing less than reformat visuality in the era of the digital bled foam chambers, molecules and data clusters, signalled the alien divide. Like Flammarion before him, Hashimoto continues to set his microscopy of a world on the edge of the visible spectrum. Hung gaze on the horizon and urges the viewer to peek beneath its veil. ar at different heights and presented alongside a digital recording of thunderstorms, each globular cluster An exhibition of Jacob Hashimoto’s work, Gas Giant, 2014 (installation view, MOCA Pacific Design was sequenced to brighten and darken as Skyfarm Fortress, is on show at Mary Boone Center, West Hollywood). Photo: Brian Forrest. though transmitting through the ether its Gallery, New York, through 25 October Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles
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Art in Context A yearlong survey (in monthly instalments) in which artists, curators and cultural commentators explore the question of what African art (of the contemporary flavour) does or can do within various local contexts across the continent
I Gabi Ngcobo independent curator and cofounder of the Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR), Johannesburg
Sabelo Mlangeni’s No Problem Do you love me Alexandra, or what are you doing to me? 1 For three years Sabelo Mlangeni lived in Alexandra, Johannesburg, during which time he began his photographic series No Problem (2011–3). Alexandra, or ‘Alex’ for short, is known and often described as an urban problem ‘too close’ in location to Sandton, a wealthy suburb. In his 1972 poem ‘Alexandra’, Mongane Wally Serote likens this township to a mother whose breasts ooze dirty waters diluted with blood. Often, Serote’s story of Alex is narrated with a mixture of repulsion and attraction, characteristics that pull and push each other, without ever snapping: I have gone from you, many times, I come back. Alexandra, I love you; I know Mlangeni’s No Problem is a body of work in search of an ordinary image. Seen in its totality, the series appears to be a very personal portrait, not necessarily of a place, but an individual straying and becoming familiar with a place historically known, experienced and monumentalised in literary and popular cultures by millions since its founding in 1912. [Alexandra was founded a year before the passing of the Native Land Act of 1913. It was proclaimed a ‘Native Township’ and is one of the few urban areas where black Africans could own land under a freehold title.] Every now and then, Mlangeni strays outside the borders of Alex and enters Sandton. At this point the picture is delivered in colour; it is perhaps the first time Mlangeni photographs in colour. His Sandton however is far from colourful. The two neighbourhoods are spilling
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into each other in minute details, where one cuts from the other and pastes to their own. The ‘cut up’ features are less about affluence entering Alex or poverty infiltrating Sandton. It is the flow of historical time and space and the place of objects within a larger continuum, a future leaking out. Serote again: When all these worlds became funny to me I silently waded back to you And amid the rubble I lay, Simple and black. Sabelo Mlangeni was born in Driefontein near Wakkerstroom in Mpumalanga. He moved to Johannesburg in 2001, where he joined the Market Photo Workshop, a pioneering photography school, studio and project space that has played a formative role in the career of artists such as Zanele Muholi. Since Mlangeni’s graduation, in 2004, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in South Africa and the US, and has been exhibited in major international shows including the Lubumbashi Biennale (2013), the Liverpool Biennial (2012) and Public Intimacy: Art and Social Life in South Africa, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014). The 2009 recipient of the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, he has published three books, Men Only (2009), Country Girls (2010) and At Home/Ghost Towns (2011), which focus, respectively on a hostel for male migrant workers in Johannesburg, gay communities in the rural districts of his home province and small towns in South Africa that have either been half-emptied by migration or abandoned altogether as the country transforms. ar 1 Mongane Wally Serote, ‘Alexandra’, in Yakhal’inkomo: Poems (1972)
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Sabelo Mlangeni, Let’s Talk, 2009
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Sabelo Mlangeni, Alex Home of the ANC, 2013
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Sabelo Mlangeni, Ikway’kwayi, 2013 all works courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town & Johannesburg
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The horse tooth and the kudu horn: A visit to the site of Michelle Monareng’s Removal to Radium It is the morning of Saturday 14 December 2013. Nelson Mandela was a pink elephant – for the future of our intoxicated memories. Grey is declared dead nine days ago. Tomorrow he will be laid to rest in his the colour of history; pink is the future. There are seven stars in white homeland Qunu in the Eastern Cape province. Kenneth Kaunda and the acronym CHR is in black and grey. has arrived for the funeral. Last night the Center for Historical People came and crowded the small office. We ate and we drank. Reenactments (CHR) staged a small event titled The 2nd Coming in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His our office at the Wits School of Arts. The event was planned before Past Lives (2010) played on a LG (‘Life’s Good’) TV monitor. No one was Mandela’s death; it is not his second coming we were anticipating. really watching. Our intern was there still trying to fix the website. The 2nd Coming happened a year to the day after we staged our own The story of the fake sign language interpreter at Mandela’s memorial institutional death with the event We are absolutely ending this. Last is dominating the conversations. There is laughter and disbelief. We night was in fact a launch of a website that, up to this day, refuses are at the centre of the world yet again. Even Slavoj Žižek will write to come to life. Our new well-articulated tongue-in-cheek logo was a commentary about the sign language interpreter, dull but written ready. We stuck it over a beer bottle label, obliterating the beer’s nonetheless. A recording of a performance from 2012 is playing on recognisable association with blackness. The logo a computer monitor. It is a scripted but silent Michelle Monareng, resembles logos of other official institutions but dialogue set in the future. Two sets of hands discuss Removal to Radium (video still), 2013. instead of an eagle or a kudu, on our shield stands the ever-anticipated death of Mandela, which never Courtesy the artist
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happens. In 2081 Mandela is a twenty-five-year-old man and long un- and then continues to dig as the herd strolls in the foggy background. remembered. Instead of dying in 2012 he became younger each year. One bull cow approaches and lingers very close behind the growing Our head of department gives us a gift of a small woven carpet with the mound, inspecting the digging activity. portrait of Chris Hani (leader of the SA Communist party, 1991–3). We The video is shot on the piece of land from which the community hang it on our notice board. A mask of Margaret Thatcher is also there. of Rietspruit Farm no. 417 I.R. was forcibly removed to make space We are driving, five of us in one car, all women. Michelle Monareng for white farming. They were moved to Radium, a barren land where is directing; we are headed to her ancestral land one hour out of nothing grew. The extent of the trauma experienced by the people Johannesburg. We reach the district of Heidelberg just before lunch. of Rietspruit (Tswinyane is the local name) is told through archival On reaching the Suikerbosrand River, Monareng instructs us to stop materials gathered over a period of 20 years by Shikwane. In a timethe car and report our arrival by throwing a few coins in the river. We line dating from 1837, the year Rev Alexander Merensky was born in are to do the same when we leave tomorrow. Mandela’s body would be Germany, the story of dispossession is summarised. Shikwane also six feet under but his spirit and image will haunt for longer, forever. notes that in 1965 ‘some people died because of climatic changes. We drive towards Rietspruit Farm no. 417 I.R. and arrive on a plot of Radium was too small for the community (⅕ of the original land of land with built property: houses, a hall, a warehouse and an empty removal).’ Now a custodian of her grandfather’s archive, Monareng swimming pool. We are welcomed by Monareng’s relatives, who hug has been studying it: documents, video testimonies, photographs us warmly, and their dogs, who bark, jump around, smell and lick, and timelines, and creating work that stands as counterarchival responses to the collection. The video, however, is a result of interand then quickly get bored. Led by Monareng, we gather our cameras and other recording views the artist conducted with community members in which a story equipment and begin to walk. We reach a pond. There’s a skull of a not documented by her grandfather starts to emerge. People told of dead horse. I pull a tooth out of it and start how Botha, the farmer who took over from the It is rumoured that those polishing it with a stone. The tooth endows Berlin Mission, would walk around the land me with special powers. We have fun skipping with a black farmworker carrying a sack full of who have tried to retrieve stones onto the dam. There are more skulls of money. He would then ask them to dig a hole the money buried with dead animals, cows, kudus and… The feeling of big enough to fit an adult human after which walking through Monareng’s artwork, recoghe would ask the worker if he would guard the the farmworkers would, money with his own life. At the confirmation nising where certain images were made, is during the act of digging, of this, he would then throw the worker in the both exhilarating and unsettling. Eventually start to hallucinate. It is said hole, shoot and bury him with the sack. we reach the spot where her video Removal to Radium (2013) was shot. She stands at the exact they would start to see a wild This may explain the unmarked graves spot where she placed her camera and narrates scattered around the land. It is also rumoured animal, usually a lion, and how it happened. that those who have tried to retrieve the money lose normal perception for buried with the farmworkers would, during the ‘Haunting’ is the appropriate word to describe the video; after all, it was shot on haunted the remainder of their lives act of digging, start to hallucinate. It is said they land. The landscape appears empty save for would start to see a wild animal, usually a lion, some houses; we will sleep in one of them tonight. There are other and lose normal perception for the remainder of their lives. This story, houses and buildings in ruins; an old deserted church building, a which sits somewhere between contemporary legend and historical house built by the Berlin Missionaries, a mission school, scattered fact, sums up the absurdity of the oppressive regime of apartheid and and unmarked graves, a small graveyard for white people (marked) its laws. Many more narratives are yet to be uncovered, and a lot more and another for black people, where Monareng’s grandfather will forever remain buried in history’s shallow graves. Monareng’s Sonnyboy Abram Shikwane rests. Shikwane’s battle for the return of ongoing research project aims to uncover and ‘imagine the prothe land is documented in an extensive archive generated as evidence duction of a different kind of knowledge and historical narrative’. submitted to the Land Claims court in 1995. That evening we experience a violent thunderstorm and heavy Farm no. 417 I.R. is one of many places whose story of forced rain. We sit in the kitchen listening to stories of this emptied land. removals does not feature in the official narrative of our history. Were Monareng’s uncle gives us each a horn of a kudu. My special powers it not for Monareng’s ongoing research project, also titled Removal become doubled. In the morning we are glued to the TV watching to Radium, we would still be ignorant, not only of the history of this the funeral unfold. It is just past noon and the casket is about to place but of all other historical blind spots… Were it not for her be lowered when the camera suddenly focuses on the Qunu landgrandfather’s obsessive documentation and collection of materials, scape, respecting the family’s wishes that this moment not be broadcast. We feel cheated and drive back to Johannesburg sulking. the archive would not exist. Shot in black and white on a misty spring morning, this less-than- Monareng remains behind. Passing the Suikerbosrand River we stop two-minute-long video captures a fragment of a legend known to to throw in a few coins and report our departure. Johannesburg is some community members who remain haunted by the 1965 forced not welcoming; in fact the city is hostile. That evening my sleep is removal from their fertile farmland. In the video, a man, Monareng’s restless and my dreams haunted by unfamiliar ghosts. I blame it on uncle, is seen digging in front of a sand mound almost his shoulder the horse tooth and the kudu horn. In the morning I leave the city height, suggesting that the digging has been going on outside of the for a two-week holiday. Passing the Suikerbosrand River I stop to frame for some time. He is suddenly confronted by a handful of cows throw the tooth and the horn into it. No more special powers. I feel and their murrring sounds. Taken aback, the man stops momentarily lighter and happier. ar
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II Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Cameroonian curator and critic, founder and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal, founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
The Tenses in Theo Eshetu’s The Return of the Axum Obelisk In her paper ‘National Mythology: Past and Present’ (2000), the EstoRewind… Forty years after Italy had lost the war against the nian cultural theorist Epp Annus, in reference to Benedict Anderson’s empire of Ethiopia in its unsuccessful colonial adventure at the concept of the nation, describes nations as being in a seesaw between Battle of Adwa, the second Italo-Abyssinian war, in 1935–6, saw Italy Past Perfect and Future Perfect tenses. The Past Perfect she is talking as a victor. To reward itself for this victory, Italy took with it in 1937, about is the national myth, the epics from which all nations and as a trophy of war, the 1,700-year-old Obelisk of Axum, which was peoples are born, tales of brave men and gods, narrations of heroes and later mounted in Rome (as was Ethiopia’s other imperial symbol, battles won, sculpted to contain a national identity. Annus proceeds the bronze Lion of Judah that had been unveiled for the coronato explain that this mythological Past Perfect is needed to establish or tion of Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1930). The dispute between Italy and Ethiopia regarding the repatriation of this symbol of Ethiopia’s simulate a possible Present Perfect of the future. In the case of Ethiopia, this Past Perfect is the legend of Queen national identity only came to an end in 2005, when the obelisk was Makeda of Ethiopia, the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon of sent back to Ethiopia, then mounted in 2008. Israel as detailed in the Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings, c. 1314–22). As the irony of destiny shaped it, Theo Eshetu – who was commisThis tenth-century BC (as claimed by some historians) legend vividly sioned by UNESCO, the facilitator of the repatriation, to document recounts the biblical encounter of the Queen of Sheba with King the return and the reinstallation – had had a long relationship with the obelisk. Not only because of his Ethiopian Solomon. The story of their offspring Menelik I, What happens if one is origin but also because he grew up in Rome, who grew up in Ethiopia but went back to Israel to visit his father, and is also said to have where his father worked in the United Nations’ robbed of the Past Perfect, brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia to the myth in which nations Food and Agriculture Organization office the holy kingdom of Axum, is now known and in front of the obelisk at the Porta Capena and peoples find their has been paraphrased time and again through square, and also because, before UNESCO ever all mediums of narration. Axum is also known foundations…? And ‘robbed’ contacted him, he had been looking for possifor its great civilisation, culture, architecture bilities to do a film on the return of the obelisk here is not meant to stand of Axum. and also its tradition of engineering, which can as a metaphor for anything, be seen in the many fascinating obelisks/steles The Return of the Axum Obelisk portrays in a nondocumentary manner the national myth that were carved and erected by the Axumites to but a synonym for stealing of Ethiopia, the technical and social chalindicate special underground burial chambers, especially for some of those heroes mentioned in the national myth. lenges around the return and reinstallation of the obelisk, the celeBut what happens if one is robbed of this Past Perfect, this myth brations and regaining of a national pride that came along with this in which nations and peoples find their foundations…? And ‘robbed’ endeavour, but also moments of reconciliation between Italians and here is not meant to stand as a metaphor for anything, but a synonym Ethiopians. The video installation thus chronicles the heights of for stealing, sequestrating, taking captive, etc. If Annus’s theory colonial conflicts, but also the emancipation of a people. It questions should hold its ground, how can a people imagine a Future Perfect the role of monuments as spaces of portrayal or projections of public without this Past Perfect to seesaw to? memory. Symbolism plays an important role in the piece, as the The multimedia artist Theo Eshetu seems to have been concerned varying meanings and epistemologies that are given to, or that such with this reality too. The Return of the Axum Obelisk (2009), a complexly public monuments, such historical objects, such national fetishes stratified multiscreen video piece, not only in form but also in con- assume become evident. The obelisk of Axum itself is lucky to have tent, brings together mythological, religious, political and aesthetic had various connotations ranging from religious, phallic, war booty issues. Using a visual language reminiscent of traditional Ethiopian and more attached to it. icon paintings, Eshetu narrates the reestablishment of an equilibNations and peoples need their myths, their Past Perfects, to be rium, which could be likened to the seesaw of the Past Perfect and able to extrapolate from them possibilities of Present Perfects and, the Future Perfect. even more so, Future Perfects. ar
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Theo Eshetu, The Return of the Axum Obelisk, 2009, video installation. Courtesy the artist
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III Cristina De Middel artist, London
This is what hatred did
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Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1964) is the story of a five-year-old Nigerian boy who escapes into the bush when his village is attacked by soldiers. The bush is a magical territory where no humans are allowed and where the Yoruba spirits live and fight. The story is told by the boy himself in a very basic, direct, naive and repetitive style that manages to convey the magical and absurd reality that war and religion added to Nigerian life. The series This is what hatred did (the mysterious last sentence of Tutuola’s book) aims to provide an illustrated contemporary version of this story, adapting the characters, the space and the environment to the Nigeria of today. The bush is now the Lagosian neighbourhood of Makoko, a floating slum with its own rules, commanded by kings and community leaders: a place where no logic seems to prevail and that is equally forbidden for those who do not belong. Cristina De Middel This is what hatred did will be shown at Lagos Photo Festival, 25 October through 26 November
preceding pages and above Cristina De Middel, This is what hatred did, 2014
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16 – 19 October 2014
Somerset House Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.1-54.com
wearegoat.com
London Collared Dove
Regent’s Park 15–18 October 2014 Preview Day Tuesday 14 October friezelondon.com
Participating Galleries 303 Gallery, New York Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid Helga de Alvear, Madrid Ancient & Modern, London The Approach, London Laura Bartlett, London Catherine Bastide, Brussels Elba Benítez, Madrid Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Marianne Boesky, New York Tanya Bonakdar, New York The Box, Los Angeles BQ, Berlin Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York Buchholz, Cologne Cabinet, London Campoli Presti, London Canada, New York Gisela Capitain, Cologne Casas Riegner, Bogota Sadie Coles HQ, London Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Pilar Corrias, London Corvi-Mora, London Chantal Crousel, Paris Thomas Dane, London Massimo De Carlo, Milan Eigen + Art, Berlin Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf Foksal Foundation, Warsaw Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo Marc Foxx, Los Angeles Carl Freedman, London Stephen Friedman, London Frith Street, London Gagosian, London Annet Gelink, Amsterdam A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro Goodman, Johannesburg Marian Goodman, London Greene Naftali, New York greengrassi, London Karin Guenther, Hamburg Hauser & Wirth, London Herald St, London Max Hetzler, Berlin
Hollybush Gardens, London Taka Ishii, Tokyo Alison Jacques, London Martin Janda, Vienna Casey Kaplan, New York Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna Anton Kern, New York Peter Kilchmann, Zurich Tina Kim, New York David Kordansky, Los Angeles Andrew Kreps, New York Krinzinger, Vienna Kukje, Seoul kurimanzutto, Mexico City Lehmann Maupin, New York Lisson, London Kate MacGarry, London Mai 36, Zurich Gió Marconi, Milan Mary Mary, Glasgow Greta Meert, Brussels Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo Meyer Kainer, Vienna Meyer Riegger, Berlin Victoria Miro, London Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London The Modern Institute, Glasgow MOT International, London mother’s tankstation, Dublin Taro Nasu, Tokyo Franco Noero, Turin Nordenhake, Berlin Office Baroque, Brussels Overduin & Co., Los Angeles Pace, London Maureen Paley, London Peres Projects, Berlin Perrotin, Paris Francesca Pia, Zurich Plan B, Berlin Gregor Podnar, Berlin Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Project 88, Mumbai Rampa, Istanbul Raucci/Santamaria, Naples Almine Rech, Brussels Anthony Reynolds, London Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Salon 94, New York
Esther Schipper, Berlin Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich Sfeir-Semler, Beirut Shanghart, Shanghai Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Sprüth Magers, Berlin Standard (Oslo), Oslo Stevenson, Cape Town Luisa Strina, São Paulo T293, Rome Take Ninagawa, Tokyo Timothy Taylor, London The Third Line, Dubai Vermelho, São Paulo Vilma Gold, London Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Wallspace, New York Michael Werner, New York White Cube, London Wien Lukatsch, Berlin Wilkinson, London Workplace, Gateshead Zeno X, Antwerp David Zwirner, New York
Focus Christian Andersen, Copenhagen Arcade, London Bureau, New York Callicoon Fine Arts, New York Carlos/Ishikawa, London Clifton Benevento, New York Croy Nielsen, Berlin dépendance, Brussels Essex Street, New York Experimenter, Kolkata Fluxia, Milan Fonti, Naples Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles Freymond-Guth, Zurich Frutta, Rome François Ghebaly, Los Angeles Dan Gunn, Berlin Kendall Koppe, Glasgow Emanuel Layr, Vienna Antoine Levi, Paris Limoncello, London Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo
Mathew, Berlin Misako & Rosen, Tokyo P!, New York Raster, Warsaw Real Fine Arts, New York Micky Schubert, Berlin Barbara Seiler, Zurich Société, Berlin Gregor Staiger, Zurich Stereo, Warsaw Simone Subal, New York Sultana, Paris Supportico Lopez, Berlin Tempo Rubato, Tel Aviv Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai
Live gb agency, Paris Robert Breer Green Tea, Iwaki United Brothers Project Native Informant, London Shanzhai Biennial Rodeo, Istanbul Tamara Henderson Silberkuppe, Berlin Adam Linder Jocelyn Wolff, Paris Franz Erhard Walther
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Beverly Pepper Small Sculptures Marlborough Fine Art, London 2–31 July Beverly Pepper is an unabashed modernist – hardly surprising, given she was born in 1922 and studied in Paris under the likes of Fernand Léger. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is that, in a career spanning more than 60 years and numerous commissions for public sculptures across the world, this is her first solo exhibition in the UK. Certainly, she’s better known in her native New York and also in Italy, where she’s resided since the 1950s, and where she pioneered the use of Corten steel in art – an alloy that weathers to a beautiful, durable rust-red, and which was later taken up by fellow monumentalists like Richard Serra. Pepper’s own monumental structures, then, made in metal or stone, are grand statements of belief in the power of abstraction and geometric form – yet none of these large-scale works are actually on display here. Instead, the show consists of 12 small-scale, curved sculptures (Pepper calls the series Curvae, all 2014, though they are additionally individually titled) – sheets of Corten that have been bowed and welded into distended C-shapes, U-shapes and tubular ellipses – situated on white plinths. And while this initially seems slightly disappointing, almost like viewing a show of
maquettes or prototypes, the reduced scale and greater number of works soon creates an intensifying, exhilarating effect. In fact, by the end of the exhibition, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s these ostensibly humbler sculptures that actually best convey the essence of Pepper’s practice, conjuring up forms that seem at once incredibly simple yet also irreducibly complex. The simplicity comes from the elemental nature of the works: their supple, primeval curves, the almost mathematical grace of their torques and parabolas. It’s as if a series of equations has been drawn up – with the nestled horseshoe shapes of Pompea, say, or the segmented ovoid of Drusilla, being presented to the viewer as the material results. And indeed, the sculptures seem constantly to allude to their own materiality, to reiterate their formalist creed: the notion that their physical forms, right there before you, contain the entirety of their meaning, without any recourse to pesky postmodern ideas of language or culture. In other words, it’s the modernist notion of the autonomy of the artwork – but, crucially, given greater emphasis here because of the works’ smaller size. Only this way, runs the implicit promise, can the sculptures be properly
Small Sculptures, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Francis Ware. Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art, London
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delineated and scrutinised, can they be truly reckoned with – without any of the distracting gravitas, the theatrics, of works made on a more colossal scale. And yet, for all that, there’s frequently some thing unsettled, something mutable about Pepper’s small pieces. Objects appear strikingly different from different angles – the furling, dive-bombing swoosh of Livia, for example, revealing itself, when reversed, as perched in an oddly halting, precarious position; or the chunky C-shape of Octavia, whose edges, all extending along marginally differing trajectories, create a drunkenly fluctuating, out-of-sync feel. It’s a dynamic that defines the exhibition – with the works seemingly inviting close scrutiny, only to rebuff attempts to fully apprehend them. And the concept extends to what’s a novel development for Pepper, featured in about half of the sculptures: a patch of metal that’s been deliberately melted and pitted. It’s a subtle, yet telling paradox – an area that functions as a kind of interference pattern, threatening to disrupt the works’ pristine curvatures, yet simultaneously as a focal point, the only aspect of each sculpture it’s possible to describe in any definitive detail. Gabriel Coxhead
Inventory More Pre-War Art from Inventory! Rob Tufnell, London 26 June – 26 July A 1997 poster by Inventory features a black-andwhite wildlife photograph of a tapir, reared up on its hind legs, its forelegs spread defiantly. ‘I want more life fucker’, reads the slogan. Humour, anger and pathos, and an anti-institutional, politicised erudition are characteristics of the artist collective Inventory, which in the London art scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s was one of the more articulate and inventive agitators on the volatile border between art, culture and politics. Through exhibitions, actions and publications – notably the 14 issues of their eponymous journal, which ran from 1995 to 2005 – Inventory reworked earlier traditions of cultural dissent to rail against the banality of everyday life under capitalism, fusing the Baudelairian culture of the flaneur with the cultural analysis of Bataille and the politics of the Situationists, against the shifting context of the new cultures of anticapitalist protest and agitation of the time. If Inventory has slipped from view in the UK since 2005, this show at Rob Tufnell offers a review of earlier work, and a sense that the group’s project might continue. Earlier works reveal a diverse range of approaches and interests, essayistic and reflective one moment, agitationist the next. Excerpts from videos of their public action Coagulum (2000), in which a group of individuals suddenly assemble into
a sort of rugby scrum formation, inside a big Oxford Street retail store, remind you of the once-edgy origins of the flash mob, before it turned into an excuse for spontaneous dancing in the street and similar puke-making hipster urban sentimentalism. Borrowing its title from one of Bataille’s books, The Absence of Myth (2004), meanwhile, highlights Inventory’s knack for wresting a hidden poetics from the surface of ordinary life, as the camera cuts slowly through shots of consumer foodstuffs and household products in which the forgotten mythical names of antiquity survive – Ariel, Nike and so on. Alongside videos and publications, the show presents objects that distil the group’s interest in redundant and destitute material forms: Three Episodes in the Relentless Process of Decay (2003) comprises three battered old fridge doors, the first bearing a rendering of motifs from ancient cave paintings (men hunting bison), a second reversed to show a panel of food icons, and a third adorned with long-faded album stickers of forgotten footballers and Baywatch stars. The Terminal Division (2002) is a grim antisquatter steel security shutter, decorated with an image of a big fish gobbling a smaller one, more resonant now than ever, during a housing crisis in which everyone is fast becoming either a landlord or a tenant.
These readymades aren’t exactly subtle, but then Inventory weren’t ever pandering to the interior decoration requirements of polite collectors – Inventory’s practice has always been too wayward, too awkward to make for smoothly art-institutional professionalism. A new series of works form a sort of narrative for the group’s current predicament; Inner Emigration (2014) juxtaposes the indolent British cartoon character Andy Capp alongside an odd composite of Elizabethan travellers wandering inside a heavily armed fortress – an allegory for staying true to one’s principles by withdrawal from public (‘inner emigration’ was a phrase coined in the 1930s, describing those German writers who, opposed to the Nazis, nevertheless withdrew into public silence). I Myself Am War (2014), meanwhile, is a horrific image of a scarred and prosthetic-encased human head, perhaps a casualty of the First World War; but in this year of centenary commemoration, it’s a work that points, anxiously, to wars yet to come. ‘If we must be designated as artists at all then we are pre-war artists!’ declare Inventory in the press text. Reenergised, perhaps, by the pervasive atmosphere of crisis that has come to replace the complacency of the noughties, Inventory might still have it in them to return to the fray. J.J. Charlesworth
Inner Emigration, 2014, screenprint. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy Rob Tufnell, London
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Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem) White Cube Masons Yard, London 16 July – 27 September Parker Cheeto is Los Angeles-based Parker Ito. This show is attributed to a ton of names on White Cube’s website (which I assume are real; Cheeto / Ito is known to play with these things, though), including his assistants, various friends and an art logistics company in LA. I’m guessing however that this is mainly a Cheeto/Ito affair, because it is his face that is plastered floorto-ceiling in the lower gallery. Back to those portraits shortly. Cheeto / Ito who is in his latetwenties, has various other hip guises, including a Twitter account under the name of Joe Vex (@CreamyDreamy), from which he posts such bon mots as ‘i will never admit ive met someone before unless they admit it first :(’ and ‘i cant fuck you tonight cause im fucking you tonight’. I thought about trying to decipher all this. I looked at the press release, but it was just some story about going to a party in Miami and not recognising New York Yankees baseball star Alex Rodriguez. I looked online, but all I found were interviews in which our man said things like, ‘Harmony Korine is my good friend. He’s a real artist.’ In the end I came to the conclusion that I really couldn’t give a shit. Which is where I thought initially I’d leave this review. Then I became annoyed that I wasn’t giving a shit, because that’s the kind of Valley Girl attitude, signposted in interviews, those tweets and the party-boy persona displayed in the self-portraits, that Cheeto / Ito’s practice is a knowing expression of, and what is so
infuriating about Maid in Heaven/En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem). On the ground floor of the gallery there are six paintings (which mix UV paint, oil, acrylic and screenprinting on each canvas), together with some garish wilting flowers in ceramic vases on the floor; chains hanging down from the ceiling; and a widescreen monitor, also floor-based. I have no idea what the flower and chain motifs (reiterated in a couple of the paintings) are there for. They evoke, respectively, works by Jeff Koons and Kanye West, figures to whom Cheeto / Ito nods in the show’s title. It is hard to determine the reasons for these references, other than their cool cultural cachet (incidently, Cheeto / Ito can perhaps be seen to perform a similar role for brand White Cube). The paintings are kitsch when looked at through the lens of any painterly critique, stylistically closer to tattoo or skate iconography than anything else. It appears, however, that the intention for them is to be looked at less in the terms of painting and more as advertisements for or signifiers of the Cheeto / Ito brand: scrawled across a couple are even the title and dates of this exhibition. Can you guess what the video that was being shown on the monitor is like? A thoughtful meditation on neoliberal politics and the dispossessed. No, just kidding. You were correct first time: giflike animated characters, phone pics of Cheeto / Ito and his mates having a good time, the music videos of Kanye’s Bound 2 (2013),
Robyn’s piss-poor Dancing On My Own (2010), all interrupted occasionally by an industrialnoise track neither I nor Shazam recognised. Downstairs: red carpet; more chains; more flowers; more paintings, this time hanging from the ceiling at angles; and those floor-toceiling photographic portraits of the man himself looking cool / kind of hot and definitely being aware of both these things. Over the latter images are various lengthy handwritten notes, including a list of ‘Things not likely to be seen in a P.I. Painting’ (Candy Crush, outdoor gear and ‘Jewish Shit’ among them apparently). Aside from being immensely boring, the problem with all this is that it’s Teflon-coated. There’s so much layered irony, self-awareness and knowing hints to ideas of vacuity (the artist as brand, from the show title’s evocation of Kanye and Koons onwards); so much celebrated meaninglessness, so much self-publicised lack of a shit given; that to critically hit it with those things just elicits a shrug. To play devil’s advocate, the artist may just be honestly reflecting the generational and cultural environment that surrounds him (poor chap); but if he’s just holding a mirror, with no commentary, with nothing at stake, just a mire of Gen-Y nihilism (and when the artist literally won’t put his name behind the work), it leaves the critic stuck, art criticism stuck and this critic wanting to hit the eject button. Oliver Basciano
Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem), 2014 (installation view). Photo: Jack Hems. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London & São Paulo
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Eustachy Kossakowski and Goshka Macuga Report from the Exhibition Kate McGarry, London 6 June – 19 July Eustachy Kossakowski (1925–2001) and Goshka Macuga are the two title artists, but this exhibition includes the work of a third, Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), whose current touring retrospective, in its third and final incarnation at Tate Modern, provides the perfect tie-in. In 1989 press photographer and artist Kossakowski documented the first Malevich retrospective at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, creating in the process a series of photographs, shown here, that concentrate on cropped details of selected Malevich paintings. Kossakowski’s careful framing of sections of the paintings not only shifts the focus of the images and alters perceptions of scale but also highlights the striking gradated colour pairings and stylised geometric forms that make up the compositions of these works. The process accentuates Malevich’s highly individual combination of geometric abstraction and figuration, especially when used, as in these examples, to depict traditional subjects: toiling Russian peasants – Girls in the Field (1928–9), Head of a Peasant (1928–9); landscape – Landscape with
Five Houses (1928–9); and portraiture – Portrait of Ivan Vasilevich (1913). To these are added Macuga’s own reflections on Malevich (in more ways than one), in the form of a pair of mirrors, dated ‘(1922), 2003’, which are sandblasted with designs based on Malevich’s geometric diagrams. Adding another dimension to the way Kossakowski’s photographs are viewed, the mirrors’ etched reflections visually overlay the diagrams onto the fragmented views of the exhibition seen within them. The visual effect this creates is one aspect of the exhibition, but equally significant are nuances in the backstories to these artists. Kossakowski often documented other artists’ work. His Malevich photographs, part of an archive comprising 14,000 images, were first exhibited in 2010 in Warsaw’s Polonia Palace Hotel, former home of the Polish Arts Club but more significantly also the location of Malevich’s first exhibition outside of Russia, in 1927. Malevich was also aware of the effects of methods of exhibition display, launching Suprematism in the 1915 exhibition titled
The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero-Ten) with a carefully arranged display of works that placed his famous Black Square (1915) painting in an upper corner of the room, the position in which an icon would traditionally be hung. Kossakowski is the name on the majority of the works and Malevich the strongest visual presence in the gallery, but it’s the least visible Macuga who has orchestrated the display, collapsing definitions of authorship, representation and documentation to bring these multiple viewpoints and layers together. These are all recurring elements in Macuga’s practice – archival research, methods of museum and exhibition display, creating ‘collaborations’ between artists across geographies and time – and as an exhibition this may be one of the more minimal examples, but the lines of connection revealed that are triangulating these particular artists are no less layered or complex, maybe even mirroring the geometric lines in the formulas and ratios of Malevich himself. Helen Sumpter
Goshka Macuga, Drawing no. 5 ‘System of Organizing a First and Second Category Point in Time’ after Malevich (1922), 2003, sandblasted mirror, 122 × 183 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London
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GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland Scottish National Gallery & Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 28 June – 25 January GENERATION, for those of you who missed the extensive publicity campaign that accompanied it, is a nationwide programme of exhibitions looking back at 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland. Organised by the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Life, the umbrella under which the city’s cultural activities are funded and coordinated, it was timed to open during the Commonwealth Games, while inevitably forming an equivocal cultural prelude to Scotland’s September vote on independence. GENERATION (and it’s always written like that – in capital letters – so that it’s the main thing you see when you look at a page) runs across over 60 venues throughout the country and features work by over 100 artists. For those unfamiliar with the Scottish contemporary art scene, the headline quality of GENERATION must be something of a gift – an exhibition-based index of the work of Scotland’s most recognised artists. But for those who, on a daily basis, contribute their creative labour to this scene, the precursory sense of editorial truncation has long been troubling. The retrospective tenor of the project has fostered exhibitions that focus on a canonical selection of established artists with a predictable bias towards those emerging from Glasgow during the early 1990s. The Guardian’s art blogger Jonathan Jones’s comment that ‘for the purposes of such a behemoth event… all Scotland is
Glasgow’ indicates in geographic terms what is in fact a broader conceptual curtailment implicit within the project from its inception. Rather than reflect the subversive, uncertain, open, interdisciplinary, social, transformative energy that has been a hallmark of the best creative work from this period by rethinking the breadth, scope and nature of creative practice, the project seems beholden to what can best be described as ‘stable assets’. With over 60 venues taking part in GENERATION, that last statement will naturally prove to be a generalisation; there are participating galleries and organisations that are pushing new commissions and live arts. However, focusing specifically on the National Galleries of Scotland exhibitions, it does largely stick. You’ll probably recognise a good portion of the work at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art (where each artist is given his or her own gallery space), because you will either have seen it very recently somewhere else or it’ll be one of those neoconceptual works you know from the mythology of the ‘Scotia Nostra’. Either way, it’s weary. The latter includes Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which is installed in the central hall. I don’t contend its status as a seminal piece of work, but it is surely important to understand what its creative impact has been in Scotland. Where are the young artists who have responded to and been influenced
Ross Sinclair, Real Life, Rocky Mountain, 1996. Courtesy the artist
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by Gordon’s practice? Ross Sinclair’s Real Life, Rocky Mountain, from 1996, a kitsch, stagelike hillock covered with stuffed animals and fake grass, a work about reenacting cultural identities to the point of losing the sense of their reality (or fiction), seems haunted by the limbo of GENERATION itself. What other account of the last 25 years could there be when this one can be restaged so well? There are some parts of the exhibitions that break this limbo. Lucy McKenzie’s room stands out because of the work’s incredible dexterity in bringing together different modes of visual representation, while referencing McKenzie’s collaborative Atelier E.B. design agency, run since 2007, which opens out into such a refreshing terrain of fashion, interior architecture and local industry. Torsten Lauschmann’s At the Heart of Everything a Row of Holes (2011) has great vitality. His orchestration of new and old technologies within single installations – falling between automata and theatre – are elusive, whimsical and humorous in equal measure. The recreation of Steven Campbell’s Form and Fiction exhibition from 1990 is worthwhile too. Most people under forty will have only seen photographs of it, at best; in the flesh it’s as idiosyncratic as you’d hope. Campbell’s narrative elements and figures seem to be in commune with modes of art that seem arcane and mysterious within this select context. James Clegg
Hayley Tompkins Digital Light Pools The Common Guild, Glasgow 21 June – 2 August The first thing you notice is a plastic sandwich on the floor: a summer sandwich of white bread and lettuce, unnaturally stiff and bright. The sandwich, along with a fake baguette and some vivid meaty chops, are touches Hayley Tompkins has added for the Glasgow iteration of her exhibition, first presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale and here shown as part of GENERATION, the nationwide showcase of contemporary Scottish art. In the grand Victorian townhouse (owned by Douglas Gordon) where the Common Guild bases its operations, Tompkins’s groupings of painted plastic trays, water bottles, framed stock photographs and artificial foodstuffs are further animated by the summer sunlight that falls through the bay windows and is reflected in silver-backed mirrors. Tompkins, who emerged during the 1990s alongside local peers such as Cathy Wilkes and Tony Swain, has often made paintings on inexpensive paper and directly onto walls, but she also applies her characteristic palette of
muted greens, ochre tones and sherbet brights to quotidian objects such as mobile phones, twigs and simple wooden chairs. Her vocabulary of painted forms further includes plastic bottles, either empty or filled with coloured water, and a new body of works she began producing in 2013, called Digital Light Pools, rendered by pouring acrylic paint into shallow clear-plastic trays that are then left to dry. Tompkins, in an interview for the exhibition publication with Studio Voltaire director Joe Scotland, described these recent works as ‘events of colour in a space’ that emerge not through brushwork but through exposure to air. In this exhibition there are trays of single colours: a blue, a fawn and one the exact lemon-yellow of a vintage chiffon dress once worn by Kate Moss. There are also combinations of two or more complementary colours that have settled and dried into shapes like cells viewed through a microscope or slices of agate: orange emerging from sepia, white rising from a surround of taupe,
blue out of mauve, a dried pool of cream bordered by grey. Tompkins’s constellations of images and objects recall the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, specifically an exhibition of his painterly photographs staged in this space two years ago, which evidenced (as he recently put it) how ‘pictures are replacing words as messages’. However, the boxframed photographs that form part of Tompkins’s arrangements were ordered from online printon-demand suppliers with names such as ‘Visuals Unlimited’. Her selection of grainy images includes rainbows, a seascape, a stretch of chalky rubble, an aerial view of an unidentified city, a starry sky, slow moving traffic on a misty motorway and a closeup of an American three-pin plug. Her choices throw up associations with all kinds of mediated looking, such as window shopping, scrolling through Instagram or leafing through a magazine. But here we look with renewed concentration, reendowing each image with the quality of a real event. Sarah Lowndes
Hayley Tompkins, Digital Light Pool (Earthed), 2013–4, acrylic on plastic trays, stock photographs, wooden boxes, glass, plastic bottle, watercolour, artificial food. Photo: Ruth Clark. Courtesy the artist
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Douglas Gordon Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now Glasgow Museum of Modern Art 27 June – 29 September I once heard an apocryphal story about a murder in Glasgow back in the early 1990s. The police raided a room on Hill Street. Inside they found piles of VHS tapes and several recording machines and old televisions. And so they watched some films. Fingers fucking clenched fists. Dead flies, a dead head. The Law wrongly, but not unreasonably, thought it had its man. Twenty years later, their ‘suspect’, Douglas Gordon, is now feted internationally, and a presentation of his ‘collected work’ is one of the centrepieces of GENERATION, a series of exhibits throughout Scotland celebrating the nation’s contemporary arts. Gordon’s current show is only the latest iteration of a compilation piece that is a work in progress as well as being a conceptual index in its own right. In this sense it can be seen as a riff on John Baldessari’s A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation (1966–). The 82 videos on 101 television sets in the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art are now more clustered than those seen in
earlier versions, the supporting video-recorders and wiring more hidden. The Hayward Gallery, London, version in 2002 and the Berlin remake of 2012, at the Akademie der Künste, were relatively well illuminated. Here we confront the mountain range of sets in darkness. A curling finger beckons you in; your eyes adjust to this first screen, showing Scratch Hither (2002), featuring the inviting digit. Then you see a slo-mo Janet Leigh in an office, a quick acknowledgement of what remains Gordon’s best-known work, 24 Hour Psycho (1993). But that flash of recognition is immediately challenged by the realisation that this is on a small screen. Previous viewings of the video were projected onto huge twin screens, and what you are looking at now is not that original conception but a return to the source material as seen on TV. The sound from the sets is deafening, a hellish cacophony of bird-screeching and violin-scraping. You walk around the mound and tick off the Hitchcock quotes; Gordon has
gone on record saying he feels ‘more confident to say that I am a good editor rather than a good artist’. Like David Bowie’s Thomas Jerome Newton in a TV showroom, your attention flicks and flitters like the legs on that dying fly. Art referencing abounds; we see human legs descending a staircase, the Empire State Building (New Colour Empire, 2010), some Caligari eyes watching. And then there are the hands. Gordon loves hands. We see them being painted, washed and shaved, gloved, waving as they conduct; we see them clench, unclench and make those aforementioned obscene gestures. They conceal scorpions and end tightly bound with tourniquets. Gordon wanted this work to have a feel of the old Paddy’s Market in Glasgow, once termed a ‘crime-ridden midden’, the press blurb tells us. Like that fleapit of abandonment, he gives us a pileup of twentieth century imagery both horrific and joyful, a mirror reflection of his schismatic home of Orange walks and Orange Juice. John Quin
Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, 2002–14 (installation view, Glasgow Museum of Modern Art), multichannel video installation with sound, dimensions variable. Photo: Alan McAteer. Courtesy Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums) and Studio Lost But Found, Berlin
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Mood Is Made / Temperature Is Taken Glasgow Sculpture Studios 5 July – 6 September The weather was, in local parlance, distinctly ‘taps aff’ on the day I visited Mood Is Made/ Temperature Is Taken. With my own top firmly in place (just a loosened collar as steam vent), I hoped for some respite from the glare of light on flesh and the searing heat in the canalside space of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios. But curator Quinn Latimer’s stated intention for this show was to ramp up the temperature, to ‘make mood’ through the gathering of work by 12 artists working in a range of sculptural practices encompassing video, print, object and scent. Latimer’s curatorial rationale was achieved with varying degrees of success here – the barometer oscillated wildly in different areas of the gallery in terms of adherence to the broad themes of the exhibition. As such, some works seem ill at ease, misplaced or disjointed within the space, while others fitted neatly into the (sometimes) overheated claims made for them in the press release and accompanying publication. For Latimer, the artists operate in ‘this ambiguous, laconic place of mood, temperature, tone’. The exhibition is, apparently, ‘the world, only with its atmosphere heightened, drawn out, lucid, languorous’ and other alliterative phrases. Certainly, the interest in
how appearance, surface and craft of things might evoke heat or take temperature can be seen in Zoe Williams’s hot objects in Crème Constellation (2014) in which bird-of-paradise and anthurium blooms lie across a slick, glamorous coral lacquer plinth holding a hand-glazed porcelain dish of all-over body cream. The wet finish and pulsating humidity of Latimer’s text can also find its parallel in the undulating silken sheets of Williams’s video Movements in Love (2014). Rachel Adams’s Long Reach (2014), a low modernist-style daybed with digitally printed smoke or steam billowing across the textile design, might be the place that the implied but absent figure of Williams’s installation flops down after bathing, undressing or sleeping. But while the temperature may be there, the mood and tone are disobedient. There’s none of Latimer’s ironic ‘totally, whatever’ Valley Girl vibe in Williams’s or Adams’s artwork or in that of Clara Ursitti, whose work in scent, Invader (2014), permeates the gallery at timed intervals with slow-burning notes that disorientate and unsettle. The tone of works by Lorna Macintyre, Tessa Lynch, Jennifer Bailey and Sarah Forrest are cool, composed and pared down across their prints, sculptures and video – there is no leakage or excess in their approach to making, and it is
this composure and sense of stillness of their works that captures the attention. Latimer’s mannered text reflects some of the qualities she identifies in the artworks brought together here, concerned as she is with surface, artifice and laconicism, but the tone or vibe of the writing doesn’t always synthesise with what we’re seeing. As an exhibition, the hoped-for languor can sometimes emanate from the visitor rather than the works, and at worst, the effect (or affect – Latimer fluctuates between the two interchangeably) is more ‘mood: bored’ than ‘mood board’. Some of the works simply don’t work in the context set for them, but this is perhaps less a failure of the works themselves and more a symptom of an awkward attempt to marry the intentions of curator and artist. For all its languidness, the show tries too hard. Where it does succeed is in presenting a compelling overview of the range and quality of current sculptural practices in Scotland today, regardless of any curatorial recipe. By setting the writing alongside rather than in front of the work, Latimer’s contribution may have worked more effectively as part of the show than as an attempt to encompass and package a multitudinous set of concerns and pratices. Susannah Thompson
Mood Is Made / Temperature Is Taken, 2014 (installation view). © Ruth Clark. Courtesy Glasgow Sculpture Studios
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Another, Once Again, Many Times More Martos Gallery, East Marion, New York 12 July – 1 September The annual contemporary art commune at Martos Gallery’s summer space moved last year from the fussy confines of Bridgehampton to the wilder environs of East Marion, near the quiet fishing hamlet of Orient on the North Fork of Long Island. The larger, nearly 4.5-hectare space and looser campground vibe suits this year’s show, which includes 110 works arrayed within and around gallery owner Jose Martos’s offbeat Victorian home. What lends this exhibition both quirk and intimacy is the fact that Martos, his wife, the artist Servane Mary, and their children live within the show, quite exuberantly, all summer. Several artists took up residency on the property during an improvisational installation; others have bunked up there during the show’s run. Assemblages of toy trains, pinned-up doodles and the usual summer melange of beach buckets, barbecue paraphernalia and garden gear intermingle with the art, some of which belongs to the house, but much of which was gathered by organiser Bob Nickas and the ‘artist-curators’ to whom he gave responsibility for discrete sections of the property.
Kelley Walker and Walead Beshty have filled the house’s first floor with pieces from their personal collections, including John Miller’s punk rock painting Welcome to My World (1999). Carol Bove kept the second floor, including the family bedrooms, appropriately beachy and personal while well within her natural sculptural lexicon, working with myriad seashells owned by art adviser Barry Rosen. Exceptional examples are those Bove embellished or encased with characteristic lightness and elegance. Ryan Foerster oversaw the basement and garage, keeping it in the family with a stingray-shaped, boho tapestry, Labyrinth (2014), by his mother, Janice Turner. The exhibition’s sine qua non is its outdoor area, a pseudo-secret sculpture park co-organised by Nickas and artist Virginia Overton. Several artists who don’t typically create open-air work were encouraged to branch out, literally at times. Wayne Gonzales’s epic untitled grisaille of tangled branches, executed on 180cm-high panels, is brilliantly sited on the side of an outbuilding that serves as a ramshackle playhouse for Martos and Mary’s toddler. In a show that tends toward
Jason Metcalf, Flag of the Kingdom of Deseret, 2014, nylon, 152 × 290 cm. Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist
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the conceptual, Gonzales, with his command of materials and quiet confidence, reminds viewers of the considerable aesthetic capacities of painting. Other standout contributions include Greely Myatt’s floating sculpture Pie in the Sky (2008–14), Ugo Rondinone’s biomorphic bluestone-and-steel totem The Foolish (2014) and Mary’s duality-rich Shaved Women, Collaborators (2014), a vintage photographic print on Plexiglas that all but encloses one end of an otherwise open porch. It’s reflective, transparent and opaque all at once, and filled with verdant colours that interact with the landscape, producing an effect not unlike stained glass. The image is historical, women shamed and shaved for collaborating after the Second World War, as is its placement: Martos and Mary bought the house from a local historical society, and early photos show the porch was once enclosed in glass. Jason Metcalf’s Flag of the Kingdom of Deseret (2014) flies out front, as the show’s standard. Like that onetime Mormon state, the exhibition is plucky, ambitious and provisional. Tracy Zwick
Carl Andre Sculpture as Place, 1958 – 2010 Dia: Beacon, New York 5 May – 2 March It’s astounding that there has not been a major American museum survey of Carl Andre’s work since 1979, for, in this luminously beautiful retrospective, he proves a foundational figure not only of Minimalism but also of a post-1960 artistic mindset informed by politics and performativity. The oversight may be due less to the infamous death of his wife Ana Mendieta (in 1985), for which he was charged, tried and acquitted, than to a divergence between recent market fashions and his work. Despite similar interests in geometric articulation and industrial materials, he rarely made self-contained, easily consumable objects like fellow sculptors Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt. At Dia, his signature arrangements of readymade modular wooden lengths, metal plates and limestone blocks are installed in three corridorlike spaces in ways that play the contrasts of their materials – such as the iron, copper and zinc of the metal pieces – off one another and create geometric relationships between the artworks and the place. They effect
an immediate and visceral understanding of scale and arrangement based on the viewer’s presence: what is sculpted – as it is in architecture – is space and our experience of it. Several long cases contain examples of Andre’s ‘poems’, typed arrangements of words and phrases, many taken from nineteenthcentury American literature or histories of the artist’s native Massachusetts. Like his sculpture, the poetry reduces language to its constituent parts: words, phrases, punctuation and spacing. Repetitions and lists of words create odd, poetically resonant combinations and suggest that thought is produced, structured and experienced over and through time, much as the various scuffs, tinges of rust and occasional marks of industrial process on the sculptures suggest their history of production and use. A set of postcards of tartan fabrics sent to the artist Marjorie Strider in 1970 indicates that Andre’s is an aesthetic of ordering, and that he understands the world in systems of distribution and production, right down to the network of exchange that is the US mail.
A few works from the late 1950s hint at Andre’s thinking before he hit upon the flat floor pieces. There’s a hand-drilled acrylic block, a carved pine beam that resembles a Brancusi and a couple of pyramid-shaped stacks, one painted red. They presage Andre’s modular aesthetic (by 1964 he was arranging small magnets into grids) and his interest in preexisting, industrially produced units, but they look fussy compared to the rigorous maturity he reached by the mid-1960s. The show does not fully articulate the connections and divergences between the early and the mature work, nor, thus, the fundamental leap from standalone, artist-produced object to spatially engaging arrangements in which the artistic gesture is practically evacuated (although the catalogue contains several highly perceptive texts on the development of his art and his ideas). It’s what is behind this shift that renders Andre’s work critical in terms of current understandings of performance and conceptual gesture, which is why this show, despite its authority, begs a follow-up investigation. Joshua Mack
Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 (installation view). Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © the artist / Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York
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Robert Melee A Dozen Roses Higher Pictures, New York 26 June – 1 August I feel the need to confess. The first time I encountered Robert Melee’s photographs of his mother – drunk, seminaked and in theatrically sexualised poses – I felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was in a major contemporary art museum, part of a larger Melee installation, and I found myself very aware of not wanting to make eye contact with the female guard. A Dozen Roses, Melee’s first exhibition to stage the photographs alone, is a forbidden love song. But presented as straight photography, it’s somehow easier to see. It’s not as if photographs of eroticised trans gression are new in the artworld. In fact Melee belongs to a lineage that extends from Larry Clark and Nan Goldin to Richard Billingham and Leigh Ledare, among others. Unlike the Lolitas scrutinised by an ageing Clark (male and female alike) and the access to a kind of class voyeurism that catapulted Billingham to his own juvenile success, Melee makes us prurient witness to an Oedipal revenge plot with Jocasta centre stage. In this selection of works shot between 1997 and 2004, the first photograph as you enter the
show, Facelift (1997), is a particularly nasty one. It shows Melee squatting over his prone mother, holding a sheet of glass that is pulling upward against her distorted, makeup-smeared face. The only studio shot in the whole exhibition (although of snapshot, not studio-print quality), it is the sole example to directly implicate the photographer. He peers with a measured gaze over the rims of his chic glasses in front of an ugly acid-yellow backdrop. Knowingly camp, the artist’s stage wink is as heavyhanded as his mother’s pancake makeup. The all-too-obvious dig at an industry that preys on women’s fears of ageing seems like an alibi for the Melee family romance. This theatricality, with a heavy dose of dark body humour, defines most of the remaining works on show, which feature mother Melee like a demented drag queen who never makes it out of the bedroom (or toilet) and is too drunk to apply her makeup effectively. The best images look like scenes from Old World fairy tales. As a monstrous sprite
Facelift, 1997, pigment print, 41 × 61 cm. Courtesy the artist, Higher Pictures, New York, and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
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in Winter Solstice (2002), with black wig and a masklike face, she peers out from a snowcovered wood as if at the edge of an enchanted land. In Red Wig (2001), naked except for a beige-coloured back brace, she towers on straining tiptoes (like she’s wearing magically invisible stiletto heels) in a shabby, semiderelict room. The aged ghost of Francesca Woodman lurks in these rundown urban shadows, but this is a different kind of mythic creature, one with less nymphlike femininity, and the setting is lower rent. A harsh gash carved into the woodchip ceiling just above her head makes for a disturbing echo – Woodman-style – with the mother’s swollen labia central in the frame. Instead of fecund fruits, Melee gives us a hacked-out wound in a crass interpretation of pop-culture Freudianism. Although Melee’s mother is the star here, she remains strangely elusive. It is the imagination of boyhood sexuality that comes through most vividly in both the magic and the horror of Melee’s photographs. Siona Wilson
Here and Elsewhere New Museum, New York 16 July – 28 September The New Museum’s summer survey show is many things. At times dizzyingly provocative, bombastic and perplexing, it also verges on the overwhelming. Focusing on the contemporary Arab world and beyond, the exhibition’s curators, among them Massimiliano Gioni, aim at reconsidering a region synonymous in the popular imagination with political strife and perpetual uprising. What the show is not is cohesive. Nor does it succeed in identifying what exactly the ‘Arab world’ is that the show sets out to present. And yet, paradoxically, the disparate nature of the exhibition and the resulting eschewal of a unifying narrative is exactly the curatorial aim of Here and Elsewhere. If there is a leitmotif to be found underlying the show, beyond recurrent depictions of violence, persecution, geopolitics and war, it’s one of personal dislocation, both in a physical and cultural sense. As with Moroccan-born Bouchra Khalili’s eight-screen video installation, The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), such themes come across in the narratives of migration. While Khalili films the hands of immigrants retracing their travels across the surface of a map, voiceovers recall harrowing, often epically circuitous journeys begun in equal measure out of hope and desperation.
In the 151 watercolours and the single-channel video installation that comprise UAE-based artist Abdullah Al Saadi’s series Camar Cande’s Journey (2010–11), fraught migration is replaced with wistful wayfaring. Al Saadi’s naive watercolour landscapes, painted during a 20-day sojourn across the northern UAE by foot, are meditative reflections upon territory at a time when borders are cause for bloodshed. Ramallah-based artist Wafa Hourani revisits the exodus of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and their subsequent dispersion along the West Bank in 1949. In his large-scale installation Qalandia 2087 (2009), Hourani recreates a detailed miniature replica of the titular refugee city, imagined a hundred years after the First Intifada, in 1987. For Hourani, the fate of Palestinians, real or otherwise, is to be found in the very architecture of their displacement. If Hourani focuses upon the world within the walls of refugee settlements, Khaled Jarrar’s documentary film, Infiltrators (2012), follows Palestinians as they look to move beyond them. Recording multiple attempts to breach the network of walls and barricades separating Israel from the occupied West Bank, Jarrar’s film bears witness to the fraught, often futile forays Palestinians embark upon in pursuit of the most basic necessities.
For other artists in the exhibition, a more intimate dislocation arises out of the conflict between identity and cultural imposition. The 12 black-and-white self-portraits of ArmenianEgyptian photographer Van Leo, reprinted from their 1947 originals, depict the artist secretly experimenting with themes of drag and sexuality, while the black-and-white photographs of Lebanese artist Hashem El Madani, as with Tarho and el Masri, Studio Shehrazade, Saïda, Lebanon (1958), capture two men in a posed embrace, a byproduct of the strict prohibition banning displays of affection between members of the opposite sex. Borrowing its title from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1976 film Ici et Ailleurs, a project originally intended by the director as a pro-Palestine tract that instead became an examination of the role images play in the production of history, the New Museum’s exhibition underscores the creative process of self-affirmation that can arise out of deeply felt instability. Indeed, the show’s timing could not been more prescient. With photographs of Hamas raining rockets down on Tel Aviv and broadcasts of Israeli artillery strikes in Gaza, Here and Elsewhere reminds us that, in the fog of war, art can be a guiding light. Joseph Akel
Khaled Jarrar, Infiltrators, 2012 (still), video, colour, sound, 70 min. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris
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Fixed Unknowns Taymour Grahne, New York 14 July – 6 September The title of the summer group exhibition at Taymour Grahne, Fixed Unknowns, curated by artist Ava Ansari and Molly Kleiman, deputy editor at the online magazine and nonprofit media organisation Triple Canopy, provides a framework for understanding the show, which features the work of three very different artists: Kamrooz Aram, Shirana Shahbazi and Hannah Whitaker. Each offers a clear lens through which to view their works – nods to art history or references to the physical world, for example – while at the same time denying any understanding of how they are made or what they signify. In essence they are matter-of-fact curiosities that ask you to puzzle over them. Shirana Shahbazi stands out for [Komposition-40-2011] (2011), a c-print on aluminium that looks like a portal into a world in which gigantic colourful spheres have replaced planets in the dark vacuum of space. Although the image looks digitally manipulated, it was created using an analogue camera. Shahbazi turned the spheres between exposures to create rounded edges. She plays with the viewer’s
perception in other works to lesser effect. [Komposition-03-2011] (2011), a monochrome gelatin silver print on aluminium that appears to be a collage of geometric strips of paper, would look at home in the sterile boardroom of a hedge fund. And [Diver-02-2011] (2011) is a print that hangs high up on the wall as if to trick the eye into believing it’s something more than a straightforward documentary photograph of a diver midflight. Iranian-born Kamrooz Aram has lived in the United States for most of his life but remains fascinated by iconography plucked from Persian and Arab culture and used in modern contexts. The wall-based sculpture Ancient Through Modern: Monument to the Sick Man of Europe (2014) looks like a cenotaph – three small urns are placed on a platform in front of an abstract canvas that recalls both Constructivism and the pattern on a Persian carpet. Stuck into this canvas are two gold, filigreed Persian earrings. The work suggests more than it reveals. Just who the ‘sick man of Europe’ is today remains a mystery, but the association of the urns and jewellery
with funerary rites would be familiar to school children learning about ancient cultures. Hannah Whitaker creates her photographs by inserting paper cutouts into the body of a 4×5 view camera and using them to create optical puzzles. Blue Paper (Albers) (2014) looks like an image of an Anni Albers textile printed on a piece of paper and collaged on top of a piece of wood – it takes staring at from the side to be convinced that this is a flat photograph. Ship of Theseus (2014) consists of 16 black-and-white framed prints that resemble the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy. The title refers to the conservation paradox posed by Plutarch in the first century: if all of the parts of a ship are replaced, he asked, is it still the same ship? It’s not clear what exactly these photographs are replacing – arguing ‘reality’ would be pat – but even just puzzling over how Whitaker created the layered surfaces in a single print provides enough food for thought. Her works are the highpoint in an exhibition that enlivens the slick, sterile interior of Taymour Grahne with artworks rich enough to inspire more than just cursory contemplation. Brienne Walsh
Shirana Shahbazi, [Komposition-40-2011], 2011, c-print on aluminium, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Taymour Grahne, New York
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Morag Keil Would You Eat Your Friends? Real Fine Arts, New York 28 June – 27 July ‘Would you eat your friends?’ is the question spelled out on the wall – in a ‘ransom demand’ – styled font resembling letters cut from newspaper headlines – at the entrance to Morag Keil’s exhibition. Inside is a suite of Piss Paintings (all works 2014) – copper paint that has been ‘oxidised’ by a stream of urine in the style of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (1977–8). These are accompanied by a group of Tabloids: lo-fi, lo-res prints of images dragged off the Internet and unceremoniously hung in two rows. Elsewhere in the space is a single painting – a cartoonish pair of flirtatious feminine eyes executed in violet paint on white canvas, hung overlooking a plastic mock-Tudor doll’s house streaked with paint on the exterior, and a screengrab print of the artist’s Mac desktop, which has as its wallpaper the classic Oliviero Toscani 1989 Benetton ad of a white baby being fed from the breast of a black woman. But let’s deal with that opening question. Would I eat my friends? Sure. I eat friends all the time, and they eat me too. I’ve got no problem with it. Neither did the German Romantic Novalis: ‘It is a genuine trope to substitute the body for the spirit – and, at a commemorative dinner for a friend, to enjoy, with bold, supersensual imagination, his flesh in every bite, and his blood in every gulp.’ I do have a problem with ‘greasy motherfuckers’, though (invoked in this show’s memorable press-release text, written by
critic and curator Kari Rittenbach), strangers, corporations and distant acquaintances drawing me into relationships I never asked for, gulping down my data and records of my behaviour to be sliced and diced by algorithms and fed back to me. I end up eating and being eaten by these when I’m not paying enough attention. It seems cannibalism is back on the agenda: the postapocalyptic ‘big-idea’ blockbuster this summer was Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2014 – see ArtReview Asia, vol 2 no 1, May 2014). This zero-irony allegory for the capitalist labour system in death spiral is set on a train housing humanity’s only survivors, 99 percent of whom are forced into cannibalism by the conditions imposed on them by the privileged 1 percent. The heroic protagonist confesses in a melodramatic denouement – spoiler alert – that ‘babies taste the best’. Keil’s nightmarish cannibalistic picturing of capitalism in the present moment is not set on a train, but in the intercourse between online spaces and real estate. Several of the Tabloid printouts on the wall appear to feature images taken from badly lit, decrepit, depressingly depicted rooms offered for rent on sites like Gumtree and Craigslist. Others include a cappuccino-brandishing digital ad for a high-end London estate agent, Felicity J. Lord; and a photograph of a billboard ad featuring a bikini-clad model, as newly built apartment
blocks reach up into grey London skies. There’s a jarring clash between airbrushed ads and pixelated realities that circulates around living spaces. What I take Keil’s installation to be getting at – the repeated motifs of ads and grim homes, those pretty violet eyes watching gracefully over the doll’s house like yet another billboard (and perhaps bringing to mind the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg), the invocation of cannibalism and friendship – is the cannibalistic economies of online relationships, now wide-open to monetisation, branding and enabling outlandish levels of intimacy with corporations, strangers, the NSA. Benetton’s suckling baby was born into a world in which it has become common practice to perform ‘friendship’ – in order to earn jobs or good grace, or to plunder friends’ connections. The driving fiction of this behaviour is that you are an ad for yourself; if you’re lucky it will put a roof over your head, but in reality it probably won’t. Keil’s Piss Paintings (perhaps featuring the urine of friends) look less like a satirical take on big-dick painters such as Jackson Pollock (as Warhol’s apparently were) and more like a defiant, ineffectual show of bodily retaliation by someone who knows they’re in a losing game. Pissed off, pissing in the wind. Following Warhol, there’s no question that the piss here can be easily monetised, but we’re hungry, so whatever. Laura McLean-Ferris
Eyes, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist and Real Fine Arts, New York
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Daniel von Sturmer Focus & Field Young Projects, Los Angeles 23 May – 22 August Upstairs in the polished, air-conditioned and usually deserted corridors of West Hollywood’s huge Pacific Design Center, time seems to move at a slower pace than on the noisy summertime streets outside. Where better, then, for an extensive survey of the patient studio experiments of Melbourne-based video artist Daniel von Sturmer? The exhibition, Focus & Field, is curated by Paul Young, who has for several years been staging ambitious shows of moving-image work in the capacious showroom that he occupies in the building. The 20-odd works, dating from the past five years, necessitated Young annexing an additional empty space nearby. The exhibition divides naturally into two sections: a selection of older works made between 2008 and 2013, then across the hall a new body of work, Camera Ready Actions, from 2014. For those less familiar with von Sturmer’s art, it makes sense to start with the earlier work. The Cinema Complex (2010) is a series of short videos, five of which are shown here backprojected onto translucent screens no bigger
than a flat-screen monitor. (This is worth noting because von Sturmer proves acutely sensitive to his videos’ sculptural and painterly qualities; he rarely projects them at immersive scale onto walls.) In The Cinema Complex, von Sturmer contrives simple material effects in front of the camera that nod, in a noncommittal abstract way, to the structural conventions of cinema. In one video, offset coloured discs of paper revolve on a turntable, like one of Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (1935). In another, we see the artist’s hand placing objects – a rubber band, a cork ball, a Styrofoam cone – on top of one another, where they balance in defiance of gravity. As far as I know, von Sturmer’s magical effects are not achieved with postproduction trickery but with a steady hand and perhaps a dab of glue here or there. Broadly speaking, The Cinema Complex videos are about illusionism, and are themselves illusions that often give themselves away. More affecting is an earlier video, Set Piece (Sequence 4) (2009), in which the artist’s unseen hand uses a stick to prod groups of objects, like a ball of Blu-Tack, an orange
pompom and a hexagonal column, into precar iously balanced arrangements. It is excruciating, then elating, to watch this mini-epic of failure, perseverance and triumph. Von Sturmer’s most recent works, Camera Ready Actions, forego such romantic reflections on the frailty of the body and the pathos of gravity. Instead, they deal with empirical measurement; they are demonstrations rather than experiments. In one video the artist proffers a sequence of test cards and rulers. Elsewhere he tapes a black frame onto a white background, continuing until the screen is entirely black. Frames and supports certainly seem to be on von Sturmer’s mind here; he has recruited Hollywood carpenters to build freestanding scenery flats against which he leans monitors and throws projections. While his output may be growing more conceptually determined over time, it is the quixotic earlier work that keeps me rapt – those videos that feel like von Sturmer has time to kill, and nothing particular to say. Jonathan Griffin
Camera Ready Actions (Handover), 2014, single-channel HD-video, colour, silent, 1 min 8 sec (loop). Photo: the artist and Young Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist
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Andrew Cameron and Emilie Halpern Standard Candles Samuel Freeman, Los Angeles 19 July – 23 August Watch your step. Three hundred and fifty otherworldly eggs, coloured the deepest flecked serpentine green, speckle the polished blonde wood of the gallery’s floor and the grey concrete of its courtyard. Emptied out by a single piercing in the bottom of each, these scattered, sizeable eggs and their suggestive curves dreamily interrupt the spare space of this two-artist exhibition. The strange eggs (Emu, 2012–14) make thoughtless feet cautious, movement slow, awareness subtly heightened. Lacking their viscous ova, the shells transform from exotic breakfast or future emu into pure visual artefact. Plucked from their nests, they never lose their origin and preserve in their shapely, richly hued form that state of grace that nature so artlessly possesses. All of Emilie Halpern’s work is like this. A pair of long copper lightning rods, almost seamlessly spliced end-to-end and verdigris with exposure, pokes from the ceiling, its single sharp point hovering a few feet from the ground. Washing over the scene, a two-disc recording
plays the sound of waves from either the Atlantic or the Pacific. Some expert might be able to apprehend the difference, but the question of which ocean’s swells crest and ebb beguiles. The unknowability allows for a mysterious thrill, the epic power of either ocean lost in the lull of waves crashing. By a simple reframing, Halpern refreshes an obviously beautiful thing that has grown almost ignorable. At its best, her work extends the ethereal purity of James Lee Byars’s late constructions, though with a distinct bend towards natural phenomena. With their chromed c-stands holding one or another part of his drawing’s framing devices, Andrew Cameron’s works stand like futuristic insects amid Halpern’s splay of eggs. The two etchings on inked steel in Bouquet (2014) reveal a supple wrist. One a standard fistful of flowers in a vase (lest we forget, the press release reminds us that flowers are the sex organs of plants), the other an undulating abstraction with more than a few cocklike protuberances. The drawing in
detail on Husbands (2014) shows just two cloths hanging erectly in each other’s direction. A subtle, sexy gay poem worthy to share air with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), where two identical clocks hang next to each other in exact synchronisation. Nearby, a small framed photograph by Cameron captures a single perfect bangle standing precariously amid a crush of red velvet. On the other side of the wall the artist has carved a squarish hole the same size as the photo, haphazardly dressed with silver electrical tape, and with another bangle, rusted and snaggly, sitting inside – the framed photograph’s back glass reflects back just so behind the rough ring, and the refined beauty of the photographed tableau offsets the rough realness of its doppelgänger. Quietly at play here are sameness and difference, how things coalesce and divide, and how a simple reframing can make hushed tensions lively, an apt theme for this subtle pairing. Andrew Berardini
Standard Candles, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy Samuel Freeman, Los Angeles
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Allora & Calzadilla Redcat, Los Angeles 27 June – 24 August Allora & Calzadilla’s recent video Apotomē (2013) takes a fair amount of work to understand. One must know, for instance, that in May 1798 a concert was performed in Paris for two elephants, Hans and Parkie, who had arrived two months earlier as spoils of war. The concert was part spectacle, part science experiment seeking to elicit a response from the animals. This history is the backdrop for Apotomē, where 216 years later, Allora & Calzadilla again play music for Hans and Parkie, now skeletons in a large storage facility called the Zoothèque, at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The video slowly pans past rows of taxidermy animals as the most bizarre sounds begin. It does not sound like music. Instead, it recalls a slowing or only partially choked lawnmower. It’s extremely loud, and the notes dip as low as eight octaves below the lowest G on a piano. A uniquely gifted singer, Tim Storms, goes through renditions of arias from Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), by Christoph Willibald Gluck;
Ô Ma Tendre Musette (c. 1777), by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny; and the Revolutionary anthem Ça Ira (c. 1790), though to the listener these songs will be unrecognisable. The notes go so low that they can be heard by elephants but not by humans. The crescendo of both the video and of this strange music comes with the view of the bones of Hans and Parkie sitting on a metal shelf. Allora & Calzadilla are singing to elephants that stood witness in their own way to Napoleon’s extended attempt to conquer the world and to how the French Revolution became the Napoleonic Empire. The elephants, once wild and then captured, travelled widely and became mere exhibits. Allora & Calzadilla want to elicit a story that they know they are never going to hear, from subjects they know will never speak. In a strange way, the elephants in the video come to stand in for all the voiceless dead, all the victims of empire and colonial oppression who are lost to history. The video is jarring, and at long stretches quite boring, but it delivers interesting
opportunities for observation if one rides along with the camera and Tim Storms a while. One notices, for instance, the curious fact that most taxidermy animals are frozen in time with their mouths open, as if humans harbour some unconscious desire that animals speak. Furthermore, Storms’s voice, as strange as it is, perhaps is a good indication of how other animals hear our voices or music, something foreign and otherworldly. Poet W.S. Merwin once wrote of his sleeping dog, remarking that there is ‘so little that is tamed’ yet so much his dog would find deeply familiar. There is a romance in projecting knowledge onto animals, yet we probably have more in common with them than we are different from them. Allora & Calzadilla, despite a presentation that can be unbearably precious, want this primal truth. So much sophistication in animals remains unknown, yet humans continue to shock in their capacity for wildness. Ed Schad
Apotomē, 2013, Super 16 mm film transferred to HD, sound, 23 min 5 sec. Photo: Marc Domage. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
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João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva Papagaio Hangar Bicocca, Milan 12 June – 26 October Gonçalo Pena Viagem Macaca Galleria Zero, Milan 10–20 June ‘If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you,’ wrote Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In 2009, Lisbon-based João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, together with some pataphysical acquaintances (their own definition), founded the Sociedade Internacional de Abissologia (International Society of Abissology) as a ‘platform for production, edition and promotion of Abissological research and associates’. The Sociedade structures the physical/philosophical investigations of the duo, who are spellbound by the obscure paradoxes of reality and its perpetual indiscernibility, in the form of artist books, writings and brief 16mm and 35mm silent films, akin to records of scientific experiments. Gusmão and Paiva often shoot with a high-speed camera (3,000 frames per second), so that the infinitesimal and imperceptible become visible, even if never entirely: everyday objects (eggs, wheels, mirrors, food) become stupefying nanoworlds ruled by movement and entropy, like the infinite atoms and particles that constitute the universe and its black holes – at least, according to the present state of our imperfect knowledge. The artists’ rich retrospective at Hangar Bicocca (curated by Vicente Todolí), including almost 40 works from 2005 onwards, with 11 new works produced for the occasion, is a hallucinatory walk among shadows, where nature and
matter stare back into us, the evidently candid viewers – not much smarter than the family of monkeys trying to figure out how to fish potatoes from a boiling pan (The Soup, 2009) in one of the first films to be encountered. The windowless Hangar is a cavernous postindustrial space naturally plunged into darkness – Milton coming to mind whenever one crosses its threshold: ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!’ – so that cinema feels at home in here. There are no sounds besides that of the purring projectors: the flapping of a parrot’s wings (Glossolalia (‘Good Morning’), 2014), sinking of things into water (Experiment on the Effluvium, 2009), bouncing of ping-pong balls (Cross Eyed Table Tennis, 2014) and chainsawing of a giant tree (Falling Trees, 2014) have to be reconstructed by memory and imagination, like phantom limbs. Perception is limited to enhanced vision. The itinerary is marked by three camera obscuras, whose floating images are reflected on the walls: the ghost of a train (Before Falling Asleep, a Pre-cortical Image Inside a Moving Train, 2014), a choreography of bicycle wheels turning (Motion of Astronomical Bodies, 2010), a window overlooking the landscape (Camera Inside Camera, 2010). Papagaio (Parrot, 2014), Gusmão and Paiva’s last film – uncommonly lengthy at 43 minutes
and shot in the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, in the Gulf of Guinea – depicts a D’Jambi ritual: people drink, smoke, shiver and shake on the ground when healed and possessed by the spirits of the dead. Black bodies emerge from the night, while the context remains impenetrable: the artists deal with the impossibility of recording any ‘truth’, as well as with the heart of darkness of (Portuguese) colonialism. Gusmão and Paiva’s Milanese act also generated another apparition, at the new venue of Galleria Zero: the short-lived exhibition Viagem Macaca (Monkey Trip) by painter, draughtsman and illustrator Gonçalo Pena, a close friend of the two artists, who recently edited his eponymous book, released by the Sociedade in collaboration with Mousse. Rhythmically arranged along the walls, Pena’s expressionist sketches on a4 paper called again the senses into play. The pervasiveness of naked bodies having sex, coupled with high and low satiric references to literature, philosophy and politics – Karl Marx mixed with Carl Barks, the cartoonist who invented Scrooge McDuck, for instance – spell out a drastic revolt of the imagination against the order of things. ‘I fuck while you speak,’ proclaims the drawing chosen for the book’s cover. The underbelly of Abissology (as much as that of Père Ubu) seems full of dark humour. Barbara Casavecchia
Gonçalo Pena, Untitled, 2006. Photo: Filippo Armellin. Courtesy the artist
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Wilfredo Prieto Speaking Badly About Stones S.M.A.K., Ghent 21 June – 21 September In the last few years, there has been a trend in artistic practice towards work that displays the rather ponderous body of a narrative in a minimal cloak. Childhood memories, illness or reflections on consumerism – themes that can, in themselves, quickly come across as unclean, wearying and self-pitying – undergo a type of beauty treatment and present themselves in an elegant outfit that at first glance exudes delicacy and meekness before the moment of surprise strikes. In many cases this leads to an aesthetic that implicitly combines ‘smooth’ and ‘art’ in a casual design coup: smart. This is also how Wilfredo Prieto’s exhibition appears in S.M.A.K., Belgium’s most exciting museum for art post-1945. Prieto, born in Cuba in 1978 (where he still lives), starts by leaving a huge room empty except for two very light parallel lines on the wall: one drawn with a Montblanc pen, the other with a no-name fountain pen. One can only guess whether the clean line is from the more expensive pen, and one can meanwhile view the wall as an enormous canvas on which a horizon, and therefore a landscape, now exists. The delicate poetry that stems from this formal
gesture lasts, however, no longer than the blink of an eye – Prieto’s mischievous conceptual wink deters any deeper immersion. In subsequent rooms, everyday materials serve as nonchalant short commentaries on the global goings-on of the (art) consumer society: a smartphone is fastened to a mango with a rubber band, a diamond the size of a grain of dust is placed unprotected on the floor like an anti-Land art statement and a huge ball of plastic wrap sits in the room as if Sisyphus had forgotten it. The idea that less can also be more is quickly understood when a dollar bill is presented between two mirrors. (Necessary background information: the endless reflection warrants an insurance value of one million dollars.) The puddle formed by a drip from the ceiling also has an unofficial story: the murky water was blessed by a priest. Prieto’s ‘Baroque minimalism’, according to an accompanying text, means first reducing materiality to the banal and then loading it with narrative – and in this regard Prieto relies also on the trompe l’oeil effect. Similar to how sixteenthcentury artists reached into the bag of perspective tricks and painted fake windows on the ceiling, Prieto plays with our perception: see the
Much Ado About Nothing, 2003. Courtesy Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona & Madrid
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small houseplant that, it turns out, is supplied, drop by drop, with water from an enormous hose that leads through the entire building to a huge container outside. The rough vocabulary of classic conceptual art is naturally, and above all freely and in a tongue-in-cheek manner, carried over into a cunning grammar that, at times, feels inescapable. In a playful and symbolic way, Prieto’s compositions update the institutional critique of old conceptual art for the global age, where they make fun of the tools of the art scene and the upper class. In the early 1990s Prieto’s fellow countryman Felix Gonzalez-Torres drew on the reductive aesthetics of the 1960s in order to fill them with stories about love and death; this is now the native language of a generation used to speaking laconically. In Prieto’s better moments it sounds witty, but it can often also be pretty trivial. Hiding the problematic areas of prosaic narration in an elegant form does not ultimately mean that they disappear. Perhaps the minimal cloak is like the hipster beard: in the end it’s not simply how smart something looks, but also how one wears it. Gesine Borcherdt Translated from the German by Emily Terényi
Carsten Höller Leben TBA21–Augarten, Vienna 10 July – 23 November Carsten Höller belongs to the 1990s generation of relational aesthetics artists, who now have to deal with the problem of the museification of their often emphatically useable works. The exhibition Leben attempts to solve this problem, and succeeds in doing so, by combining an exhibition based on works collected by the institution with a conceptually themed one. The visitor is greeted by the video installation Vienna Twins (2014): two female identical twins are each visible on a monitor and look each other stoically in the eyes, as the monitors are situated opposite each other. Each one says to the other, “I always say the same thing that you say.” Identity and its duplication is the exhibition’s guiding theme. The next room also deals with doubling, namely in the form of two Congolese singers who are preparing for a song battle in Kinshasa. The video installation Fara Fara (2014), which Höller conceived in collaboration with Måns Månsson, presents the visitor – via two video projections – with a double offer of music from which he can choose, reflecting his own identity as he does, while also deciding which of the two simultaneously playing projections he wants to watch.
Then there is the well-known Elevator Bed (2010/14) – which was originally built in 2010 for the artist’s exhibition Soma in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin – mounted on a 3.5m-high hydraulic platform. It can be booked for one night by up to two visitors for €120–€490 depending on the night of the week and availability; in the Hamburger Bahnhof it cost €1,000. Here the bed commissioned by the TBA21 collection can be positioned at various heights by the user for the first time, so Elevator Bed is something like a restaging. Two differently sized birdcages hang in the next room, in each of which a pair of bullfinches live, and who have learned to whistle the song Longing for Lullabies (2008) by Kleerup and Titiyo. The pairs of birds come from different habitats; the question is then, is this difference audible in the birds’ trilling? Bullfinch Scale (2014), is again about the theme of duplication, but now the focus is on differences. In the last room waits the High Psycho Tank (2014), a small useable tank that is filled with 35.5°C warm water saturated with Epsom salts. Up to two people can float here on the
brine without touching the bottom of the basin. This creates a unique body experience that can assume ecstatic properties. The theme of ecstasy, which Höller has explored since the beginning of his career, is also symbolised in the Giant Multiple Mushrooms (Small and Large) (2014) in the park in front of the exhibition space. These two sculptures are composed of different sized fragments of resin replicas of various mushroom species whose consumption can have hallucinatory effects. The herein briefly described collection succeeds in – and this constitutes its quality – solving the aforementioned problem of museification particularly through two strategies: firstly, the presented works are useable despite their surely high insurance value. (This was, for example, no longer the case in Tobias Rehberger’s recent retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.) And secondly, new productions and reworkings of established works are shown as well. Exactly this keeps this oeuvre extremely alive. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Emily Terényi
Elevator Bed, 2010 (installation view, TBA21–Augarten, Vienna). Photo: Attilio Maranzano. © the artist / Bildrecht Wien 2014. Courtesy the artist
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Le Mouvement Various venues, Biel 30 August – 2 November Le Mouvement, as the 12th staging since 1954 of the outdoor Biel Sculpture Exhibition is called, transitions traditional characteristics of sculpture, such as volume, mass and materiality, to the human body, which this time becomes the material for works by a diverse group of international artists. Invited by cocurators Gianni Jetzer and Chris Sharp (contributing editor to ArtReview), they thus create gestures, performance and what some would call live sculpture in various open-air locations within the Swiss city. I use the term ‘open-air’ instead of ‘public space’ here as the latter has become fraught with contestation. Spaces we once cherished as public – city plazas and squares, streets and parks – have become in recent years privatised and surveilled, increasingly limiting the public’s presence and ability to dissent. And yet at the root of this exhibition is a questioning of the very nature of this contested public space in a democracy, which theorist Rosalyn Deutsche writes, in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (1996), ‘is produced and structured by conflicts’ (not consensus). By presenting performances in the main plaza, train station, shopping street and numerous other locales normally full of people going about their daily business, it becomes possible to have unscripted confrontations between the public and the art, and this is where ‘a democratic spatial politics
begins’, as Deutsche states. This confrontation is nowhere more evident than in Trisha Brown’s Drift (1974), featuring five black-clad performers walking in a line down the street for a period of five minutes, disrupting the flow of the everyday. This disruption elicited a reaction from a passerby who placed himself in front of the walking group, as if to block their path. Art lovers were shocked; but to me that encounter was what completed the performance – that raw, unmediated clash of positions in the public sphere. The struggle between different publics in public space is also placed under discussion with Alexandra Pirici’s Tilted Arc (2014), a recreation of Richard Serra’s public sculpture of 1981, this time formed of human bodies rather than steel. Her work, like Serra’s, is imposing and demanding on the space, and monumental in the same way. In 1981, the locals working and residing around Serra’s sculpture requested that it be taken down precisely because the sculpture was so imposing. In a strange twist on that situation, Pirici decided to cancel the work’s manifestation on Saturday because other public events were sharing the same area and she felt that her work would not have had the same impact and presence. On Sunday, when the public events were gone, so were the majority of passersby and ‘public’, but her piece was there in all its monumentality.
Marko Lulic, Proposal for a Workers’ Monument in Biel, 2014, performance still. Photo: Alex Kangangi. Courtesy the artist
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Private experience in public space is treated by Myriam Lefkowitz, among others, whose work Walk, Hand, Eyes (2007–) is an intimate, sensual encounter with the urban setting. The artist takes one individual at a time on a blind walk, leading them by the hand or elbow, slowly and gently changing her hold while the subject’s senses become increasingly attuned to an environment they can now only experience through smell, hearing and touch. The pace of the walk sometimes increases abruptly and without clear reason, eliciting our own associations with the absurd, fastpaced city. At certain moments the subject is told to open his eyes as his head is positioned in front of a detail, then close them again after seconds of a branch, window, passerby’s face. These moments are priceless – framed details of life that continues and changes without us, but that we can hold on to as images in our memory. The exhibition creates opportunities for exchange, interaction and even conflict, resulting in surprising social, political, and spatial relations. And like in Lefkowitz’s piece, these ephemeral works become still images ingrained in our memory, taking on characteristics of sculptural works not only because the human form has sculptural qualities, but because human experience itself is spatial in nature. Olga Stefan
Paul Chan Selected Works Schaulager, Basel 12 April – 19 October One leaves this sprawling retrospective of the – evidently prolific – artist and activist Paul Chan feeling that he’s better at aggregating ideas than producing visual art. His engagements have consistently queried the ways that culture and language conform to, and reinforce, social and political control, leavened with a strong critique of the neoliberal present. Here they’re organised into grand thematic clusters that address, according to a tendentious exhibition guide, ontological unknowns like the meaning of a thing, the tension between chaos and order, and the possibility of utopia. Presented under the rubric ‘Other Republics, Other Laws’, for example, Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier) (2000–3), the video that first put Chan on the artistic map, melds iconography from Darger’s drawings – painted secretly in his Chicago apartment – of hermaphroditic schoolgirls in apocalyptic combat, with Fourier’s vision of an orgiastic end-time. Looping through cycles of bliss and carnage, the piece interrogates
the affects of social structures and our often conflicting natural urges. Sections set to Jay Z’s Big Pimpin’ (2001) and the appearance of men in business suits indict corporatised culture. In other works, images of suicide bombers and portraits of George W. Bush reference recent American political malfeasance. There’s a strong, perhaps unintentional, dose of Dada in how the plethora of imagery, ideas and works on view short-circuits easy interpretation, as well as in the fonts Chan designed, which replace letters with symbols and sexualised phrases. A number of printed and framed texts demonstrate their jumbling effects, and were also available for download on his website, nationalphilistine.com (now offline). The scrambling of meaning, and the general tone of obfuscation challenges viewers to engage with Chan’s ideas in ways appropriate to a show structured as a philosophical dialogue (the obvious reference to Plato’s Republic above) and reflects the artist’s interest in individual agency. But it often devolves into an informational babble comparative
to clicking on web link after web link, a precedent for Chan’s agglutinative method. Ultimately, the show constitutes a picaresque intellectual biography – likened to the Odyssey in the explanatory text. But evidence of Chan’s intelligence fails to obscure how aesthetically flat much of the work is – drawings of George Bush and Saddam Hussein taken from news images, for example – or how clichéd his take on contemporary politics. In My Laws Are My Whores (2008) he inverts portraits of the Supreme Court Justices, as if to imply that in the US, justice is saleable. Grace notes such as the series The 7 Lights (2005–7), shadowy projections of rising objects like cars and cell phones punctuated by plunging bodies, or a drawing based on a silent film of Joan of Arc, which evoke the entropy of post-9/11 America as a metaphor for the human condition or the exquisite lunacy of virtue in a venal age, are eclipsed by a curatorial project that puts concept before art. They suggest Chan could be better than this. Joshua Mack
3rd Light, 2006, digital video projection, table. Photo: Tom Bisig. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
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Isola Utopia: Fragments and Moments for New Utopias Isola Art Center with CreativeOlive, San Mauro Cilento 5 August – 7 September As the annual Italian summer holiday has been cut, for many, from the entire month of August to just a few days due to dwindling savings and high unemployment, one might be forgiven for asking: what happened to la bella vita? Or indeed to the utopic vision of a country founded upon the right to work? Utopia – and particularly its elusiveness – was the theme of an exhibition held recently in the town of San Mauro Cilento, in Salerno. The show, organised by Milan’s Isola Art Center in collaboration with local arts association CreativeOlive, marks the beginning of ongoing research by the former group into a political notion that was once the motor of change – for both good and bad – but that has now become an ideological relic. The question asked here is what might be gained by looking back from our forlorn times to a time when people looked forward to utopia. More than 50 artists, activists and theorists were involved, alongside the general public, in the exhibition – which spanned the hillside town looking onto Salerno’s idyllic beaches – and its five days of opening events, which included debates, performances and a ‘Solar Cloud’. This last work, by Serbian artist Nikola
Uzunovski, comprised an amorphous, near elliptical three-dimensional form made of plastic sheeting, see-through on top, to let the sun in, and black in its interior, to capture the rays. When placed in the midday sun, tethered to the ground by ropes upon a rooftop, the heat generated inflated the form, thereby creating a sun-fuelled flying inflatable object. One can imagine endless uses for such technology, though as ‘art’ it perfectly defines our historical relationship with utopia as a phenomenon sustained by its own hype. Like a folly, or indeed like art itself, its actual promise is never delivered upon. Other artists and collectives involved included BAD Museum, Zanny Begg, Angelo Castucci, Gruppo Etcetera, Maddalena Fragnito, MACAO, Nikolay Oleynikov and Steve Piccolo, Edith Poirier and Camilla Topuntoli. Contributions ranged from painting, video and installation to print and musical laboratories and a museum dedicated to Situationism located in a disused olive oil press. The latter work, curated by BAD Museum – an independent space dedicated to social art on the periphery of Naples – placed this project in a historical context. The history of utopia – or the lack thereof – is a history of a costly failure to
Nikola Uzunovski, Isola Solar Cloud, 2014. Courtesy the artist
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monopolise on the promise of a brighter future. Art’s most incendiary political moment was in Paris in 1968, when the Situationist International threatened to blend their anarchic rhetoric with the power of the Communist International. In the end the Situationists were just too far from public sentiment, and the movement fragmented. In this light Isola Utopia has done well to involve the public in the start of a slow process of investigation into what might be if we could turn dreams into political reality. Zanny Begg’s painting (one of three mounted on a terrace house, with permission of its inhabitants), depicting Vladimir Tatlin’s famous model for a Monument to the Third International (1919), clearly expressed the difficult task for the Isola Art Center as it prepared to take the project to Riga in September. In Begg’s Monument to the III International (2014) the viewer can see two small stick figures depicted in conversation at the top of Tatlin’s never-realised spiralling monument. One says, ‘What a pity: What a pity a deadend: It’s such a long way down’. The other replies, ‘We could just jump’. It remains to be seen if such cynicism can find a convincing counterbalance within the artworld. Mike Watson
Bunny Rogers Columbine Library Société, Berlin 2 July – 21 September The Columbine High School massacre happened a little over 15 years ago, on 20 April 1999. Having killed 13 people and injured 23, and planted dozens of explosive devices throughout the Colorado high school campus, shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have been historicised – and sometimes idolised – as the progenitors of now-commonplace high school mass shootings. The actions of the pair, who were reported to have identified with goth music, ignited a nationwide moral panic condemning goth culture, all of these events taking place amid the gestation of the social web. Formed in the years following are online communities of people who identify with Harris and Klebold’s perceived struggles and ultimate action against their social alienation. These communities, unthinkable in their depersonalisation of the massacre’s victims, fawn over the shooters, obsessing about their actions and the intimate details of that day – right down to the design of the school’s furniture. Bunny Rogers’s exhibition Columbine Library takes the massacre and its reception as its subject, using Y2K-era cartoon characters as surrogates for the identities of Harris and Klebold, as well as for the artist herself. The videos Poetry Reading in Columbine Library with Joan of Arc and Poetry Reading in Columbine Library with Gaz (all works 2014) feature cartoon characters reading
rather morbid poetry written by the artist, Joan of Arc of Clone High representing Dylan Klebold and Gaz of Invader Zim representing Eric Harris. In their respective cartoon shows, Joan of Arc and Gaz play intelligent, antisocial female goths – characters usually but not always tagged to a male gender. Within Rogers’s video, Joan of Arc reads, “I want a fine arts valentine / One that’s steady and that’s true/I want a fine arts valentine / I spend so much time in school / When I look around me / All I see is kids / Kids I’d like to spend the day with / Kids I’d like to eat a meal with / It’s hard in school / To know your boundaries…” That two female characters from cancelled mid-noughties cartoons stand in for Harris and Klebold is obviously a stretch. Yet Rogers connects them by an uncanny, implicit logic: both are subjects upon which many project glorifications or condemnations of teenage angst and social alienation that we so often experience through the screen. Rogers’s exhibition illustrates the collectively shared, personal desire to connect with others who suffer from social alienation – how it is massproduced in society, and felt personally. Further works in Columbine Library include Clone State Bookcase, a lifesize replica of a Columbine High School library bookcase filled with custom-produced plush toys recalling an item found on the gaming website Neopets,
festooned with what Rogers terms mourning ribbons and appropriately titled Elliott Smith after the deceased singer. In an adjacent room lie replicas of massacre-era and revamped versions of Columbine High School chairs, draped with either custom-produced backpacks sporting velour roses and hand-beaded patches of Gaz’s and Joan of Arc’s faces or duffel bags inspired by those in which Harris and Klebold hid bombs. These saccharine-looking duffel bags are also strewn ominously throughout the gallery, including under the viewing benches (also produced in this institutional Columbine style) in Société’s screening rooms. Less remarkable are a series of framed, 3D-rendered self-portraits as Clone High’s Joan of Arc in various poses. While angst and social alienation are certainly not new topics of artistic inquiry, one can hand it to Rogers for coming up with a new way in which to understand how we seek to communalise psychological suffering in our formative years, and how this has been amplified by the emergence of online communities. However, it does come off as a missed opportunity that Rogers has rooted this exhibition’s aesthetic in the relatively slick mass-produced object, whereas her past, handmade, awkward and haptic works more accurately depict the earnestly felt personal grief of these massproduced mournings. Karen Archey
Clone State Bookcase, 2014, wood, metal, limited-edition Elliott Smith plush dolls, 246 × 309 × 61 cm. Photo: Uli Holz. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin
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Roni Horn Everything Was Sleeping as If the Universe Were a Mistake Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona 20 June – 28 September While one applauds the correct use of the subjunctive in the exhibition title, as with much of Roni Horn’s work this turns out to be a quotation. And while such acts of appropriation can often be revealing, in the American artist’s work there is a pervasive sense of masking, an evasiveness, which, while not detracting from her art’s effect, is unsettling. With the artist choosing to withhold herself, the persona behind the mask is never clear. This arises partly from her use of radically varied artistic idioms, but as she herself admits, there is also a conscious camouflaging of identity. In a.k.a. (2008–9), Horn presents a series of diptychs, pairing photographs of herself at different ages. Not only is it difficult to recognise them as the same person, the androgynous latter-day self, like her own name, slips between genders, proving impossible to map onto the frizzy-haired adolescent or innocent, wide-eyed infant. Elsewhere Horn uses an alter ego, as in the series You Are the Weather, Part 2 (2011), in which she returns to the same model after 15 years, with the model still, it seems, immersed to her chin in an Icelandic thermal pool. Horn maintains that facial expressions communicate a sense of place, itself a quasi-Romantic idea.
But in reality the confrontational gaze of the subject is giving nothing away. And neither is the artist. At times Horn plays the voyeur, as in Her, Her, Her, and Her (2002), 64 black-and-white stills candidly taken in the labyrinthine changing rooms of an anonymous establishment in Reykjavík, where the occupants of the tiled cubicles are furtively glimpsed through peepholes and half-closed doors. The geology and human history of Iceland holds a particular fascination for this New York-based artist, as does water. Untitled (2012–13), the complete 89-word title of which reads like a pitch for a gothic horror movie, is a series of ice-green pools, roughly cast in solid glass and seemingly filled to the brim with water. With Barcelona temperatures in the thirties, they should be inviting, but there is something sinister and brooding about this obsession with water. Taking this work together with the photo series Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), we are again returned to the elusive and in many ways absent figure of the artist. The Thames pictures are accompanied by footnotes, but not only is the main text itself missing, the anecdotal notes tease us with
statements such as: ‘Water is sexy… the Thames is black… turgid… the Thames is us.’ Or the tale of a woman in a yellow Ford Fiesta who deliberately drives into a watery grave accompanied by her Irish setter. These stark intrusions read like hidden depths that can be glimpsed but are never given context and so never laid to rest. Horn likes to quote from the American poet Emily Dickinson and the Brazilian writer Clarise Lispector, a Jewish emigré from Eastern Europe whose family history mirrors Horn’s own. But whether this reading is intended remains opaque, for the words of both writers are treated as sculptural objects, cast in aluminium and encased in plastic like Blackpool rock or incised into rubber floor tiles thereafter to be walked upon. Is this a deliberate act of negation, a warning to keep our distance? Has Elvis – sorry, Roni – already left the building? This touring exhibition (it opens at CaixaForum, Madrid, on 13 November) celebrates Horn’s receipt of the prestigious Joan Miró Award with its prize of €70,000. The criteria of the award and the deliberations of the jury remain something of a mystery; but then again, so does Roni Horn. Keith Patrick
Her, Her, Her, and Her, 2002, 64 black-and-white photographs on rag paper coated with light-sensitive emulsion, 244 × 235 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist
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Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 MUDAM, Luxembourg 12 July – 12 October Might it be a coincidence or is it the result of the marketing frenzy currently revolving around the centenary of the First World War that several exhibitions on art and destruction have recently taken place? First there was Art Under Attack (2013) at Tate Britain, a survey of iconoclasm in Britain from the sixteenth century until the present day. Then there was Ravage (2014) in Belgium’s M-Museum Leuven, which did not show destroyed artworks but depicted the process of destruction in times of conflict, both past and present. And now MUDAM in Luxembourg presents Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950, an exhibition that was first on view in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and will afterwards travel to Kunsthaus Graz. Though the three shows are related, the scope of Damage Control is larger than the aforementioned ones, while at the same time encompassing elements of both. It is not without reason that the exhibition, which features some 90 works by over 40 artists, commences in the period after the Second World War, when the rise of Cold War paranoia around the nuclear threat reached its peak, as addressed in the first and strongest section of the show. The opening works, by Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton (commissioned by the US Atomic Energy
Commission), set the tone: a series of images of atomic explosions from the 1950s depict impressive cloud formations and hues. In its mesmerising beauty, this body of work perfectly captures the aestheticisation of destruction. It is within this sociopolitical context of the postwar climate that Jean Tinguely’s selfdestructive machines are presented, next to Harold Liversidge’s video Auto-Destructive Art – the Activities of G. Metzger (1963), in which Gustav Metzger, known for his ‘Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto’ (1959), is shown wearing a gas mask while spray-gunning canvases with acid until they are almost completely eaten away. This appetite for destruction later also inspired others. Some destroyed existing works by other artists (like Ai Weiwei smashing a precious Chinese vase to smithereens, in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995; or the Chapman Brothers ‘improving’ a set of original Goya Disasters of War etchings, 1810–20, for Injury to Insult to Injury, 2004, by adding new elements – the latter work being also included in Art Under Attack). Others applied the process of destruction as a principle in their own practice. John Baldessari, for example, bade farewell to his previous production by burning all his paintings from 1953 to 1966 in his Cremation
Project (1970), while Michael Landy went a step further for Break Down (2001) by not only annihilating his entire archive, but also all his personal belongings, including passport, with a team of operatives that ran as smoothly as an assembly line in a factory, as shown in video documentation. The artists in the show not only smash, trash and annihilate things, they also portray all kinds of violence, destruction and catastrophe, including train and aeroplane crashes (Juan Muñoz’s Derailment 2000–1, Larry Johnson’s Black Box, 1987), hurricanes (Monica Bonvicini’s Hurricanes and Other Catastrophes 1, 2008), riots (Roy Arden’s Supernatural, 2005) and war (Luc Delahaye’s Jenin Refugee Camp, 2002). Instead of focusing on one specific aspect, like the two other shows before it, Damage Control aims to present an overview of destruction in all its forms. This is done in a thorough way, including iconic works that cannot be left out in such a context. Because of that, on the other hand, the exhibition sometimes becomes slightly predictable (Landy: check, Baldessari: check, Gordon Matta-Clark: check) and lacks surprises. This, however, is a minor flaw in a show founded on plenty of important works and a fascinating subject. Sam Steverlynck
Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–8, oil paint on canvas, 136 × 339 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
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Yokohama Triennale 2014 ART Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion Yokohama Museum of Art, Shinko Pier Exhibition Hall and various other venues 1 August – 3 November Despite its apocalyptic title, this year’s Yokohama Triennale is anything but an exploration of a depressing endgame for art. Although some of that is there (in, for example, Gregor Schneider’s moist and musty basement-style room filled with mud). Nor is it a simple echo of Ray Bradbury’s cry against censorship in the celebrated novel from which part of that title is borrowed (despite the rather clunky inclusion of Dora García’s Fahrenheit 451 (1957), 2002, an edition of 2,000 copies of the novel printed as a mirror image). Rather, it embraces forgetting, destruction and failure as essential components of the creative process, and a productive inspiration for the creation of artworks. Curated by Yasumasa Morimura, who is best known for a particular style of appropriation art in which he blends his own face and body into iconic images from art history and popular culture, the Triennale distinguishes itself for its apparent focus on the art that he simply likes (not least in a section of the Triennale titled ‘Monologues by Enfants Terribles’, which collects works by Joseph Cornell, Alina Szapocznikow and Andy Warhol, along with the seductive inks and watercolours of Chiyuki Sakagami – about whom this reviewer knows little, but intends to find out a lot more (a feeling that’s one of the pleasures of attending these kinds of exhibition) – as well as an ambition to gather a collection of works under an overarching conceptual umbrella. The result might be best termed a productive confusion. While Morimura’s construction of the show in 11 ‘chapters’ indicates a strong sense of narrative, within that is an equally strong sense of his arguing that decisions relating to art’s value lie as much in an individual as they do in a social consciousness (and unspoken within that are issues relating to market, popular
and ideological values). Indeed, as if to emphasise all this and, in particular, the curator’s apparent disdain for the kind of loudmouthed, monomaniacal and evangelistic tone that seems to characterise many biennials and other such art jamborees these days, the opening chapter is titled ‘Listening to Silence and Whispers’ and features reductive works by the likes of Kazimir Malevich, John Cage, the excellent Stanley Brouwn and others. As well as the first of what will, as you travel through the exhibition, become a series of bizarrely poetic, yet refreshingly personal and almost antipedagogical introductory wall texts, this one beginning: ‘When we see an overwhelmingly beautiful landscape or when an unbearably sad thing happens to us, we lose our words and become speechless…’ It’s a bit of a contradiction, then, that the works that take centre stage at the Triennale’s two main venues are both brash and almost excessively theatrical. Michael Landy’s Art Bin (a gigantic transparent tub, originally installed at the South London Gallery in 2010, into which people are invited to climb a staircase and then dramatically dispose of unwanted or unsuccessful artworks) stands at the centre of the first, the Yokohama Museum of Art. While Miwa Yanagi’s Mobile Stage Truck (2014), a Taiwaninspired and fabricated, gaudily decorated trailer created as a set for Yanagi’s production of her play based on Kenji Nakagami’s 1984 roadtrip novel, Nichirin No Tsubasa (Wings of the Sun), which transforms (not too unlike a Transformer toy) into an even more garishly decorated and illuminated dancefloor and performance stage (complete with bobbing disco ball), provides an attention-hogging counterpoint at the Shinko Pier Exhibition Hall. And although there’s an overwhelming
facing page, top Shinro Ohtake, Retinamnesia Filtration Shed, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo
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sensation that these works are included to cover the fact that a big show like this one (which contains over 400 artworks) needs to garner an equally large amount of public attention, the works are not entirely off-message. Indeed, perhaps they demonstrate, more than anything else, precisely the kind of contradictory and idiosyncratic selections that give a sense of openness to the Triennale as a whole. Located between the extremes of Landy’s and Yanagi’s contributions are works such as Yuko Mohri’s I / O – Chamber of a Musical Composer (2014), in which the artist takes a band organ bequeathed to her by the late musician Victor C. Searle (who moved to Japan in the 1950s) and reconfigures it into a system that generates a score by detecting the dust particles brought into the gallery by visitors (and is exhibited next to, as much in competition as in sympathy with, three relatively silent paintings of ordinary objects – among them ropes and sacks – by Zhang Enli), as well as the more familiar (at least to a Western visitor) videos of Bas Jan Ader and Jack Goldstein transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary (attempting to fall from a tree branch and banging a table until a stack of coins falls off it, respectively), or a couple of fragments of Danh Vo’s We The People (2010–13), a copper replica of the Statue of Liberty broken down into around 250 pieces. Visiting the whole lot in a day can make it seem like something of a blur, and the sheer volume of work shown in some of the exhibition spaces might suggest that this is deliberate, but ultimately you go away with a sense that this exhibition has served to articulate a notion of oblivion as a space of unpredictable (and occasionally utterly random) potential as much as it is a space of overwhelming emptiness. Mark Rappolt
facing page, bottom Gregor Schneider, German Angst, 2014. Courtesy the artist
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Defying Stability: Artistic Process in Mexico 1952–1967 MUAC, Mexico City 27 March – 3 August Defying Stability: Artistic Process in Mexico 1952–1967 is divided into six thematic rooms and reflects a period in time that is not necessarily well known abroad, yet begins to pique people’s interest: Mexico’s late Modernism, specifically in Mexico City. At that time, as is well portrayed here through numerous aspects and media – from small poetry publications, to large-scale architectural models – there was a tension between a blossoming ‘new’ and modern, perhaps more international culture along with a tight interrelationship between all the arts and the darker side of the economic period politically called ‘stabilising development’, with its conservative, repressive and/or traditional aspects. For brevity’s sake I only highlight what felt like small revelations: several short and not-soshort films dealing with parties, some ironically and some in a more straightforward way of documenting a ‘scene’: for instance, the film that opens the show depicts a party full of artists and intellectuals to celebrate Carlos Fuentes’s birthday; or conversely, social gatherings and relationships take an ironic or bizarre turn in Juan José Gurrola’s 1965 Tajimara (based on a short story by Juan García Ponce), or in José Luis Ibáñez’s Un Alma Pura (1965, script by Carlos Fuentes and photographed by the legendary Gabriel Figueroa), both of which become a critique of modernity and/or bourgeois ideals. Perhaps the presence of so many excellent and sometimes unknown films in this exhibition
is due to the fact that in 1961, several young cinephiles, filmmakers and critics formed the group Nuevo Cine (‘New Cinema’), which helped refresh and develop an experimental film scene at a time when Mexico’s ‘golden’ film era had fallen into decadence. A similar kind of radical need to shock the bourgeoisie and shake people out of their comfort and complacency can be seen in the many filmed and photographed documents of early Alejandro Jodorowsky plays and ephemeral performances such as Melodrama Sacramental (1965), featuring naked men and women moving about as if possessed, wearing masks and paint, and the 1962 La Ópera del Orden, which was censored even before it opened, and featured panic transgressions and parodies of religion and good manners as well as set design by painters of the period (also included in the show) such as Alberto Gironella, and Manuel Felguérez, whose stunning abstract mural for the Diana Cinema (1962), which calls to mind some of Lee Bontecou’s works – on steroids – is featured in the same room. But a critique of the status quo was not the only raison d’être behind these avant-garde works of a period that has come to be known as ‘La Ruptura’; there was also a very specific push towards a linkage of life and art and amongst the many arts, embodied at its best by Mathias Goeritz. His works are present in most all of the rooms in the show, as his range spans from concrete poetry-murals (Pocos Cocodrilos Locos,
1965), to many sculptures, geometric paintings and architecture, notably his 1953 building El Eco, inspired by the Bauhaus notion of a ‘total art’. At the same time, there was a strong suburban expansion in Mexico City, as well as numerous large-scale architecture projects – from the university campus of the UNAM, to the housing projects of Tlatelolco or the Torre Latinoamericana skyscraper (all featured in photographs by Armando Salas Portugal and Nacho López). There are several films here that both reflect upon, sometimes to celebrate, others to critique, this industrial-mechanicarchitectural minirevolution of the time, most notably Gelsen Gas’s Anticlímax (1969), where the desertlike suburbs and their paranoid architecture finally turn into imaginary psychedelic moments to the tune of Wild Thing. And in keeping with this last aspect, there is also a good measure of psychedelia, as in Carlos Velo’s almost music video-like 5 de Chocolate y 1 de Fresa (1967), or in works such as Pedro Friedeberg’s detailed paintings and drawings of kabalistic follies. Of this giant buffet I have only given you a small sampling. I close by mentioning the small jewel of a 16mm less-than-a-minute absurd Beckettian short film by Archibaldo Burns, Un Agujero en la Niebla (1967), where two men, one obese the other skinny, walk in a posturban wasteland. I hope to have whet your appetite. Gabriela Jauregui
Defying Stability: Artistic Process in Mexico 1952–1967, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Oliver Santana. Courtesy MUAC, Mexico City
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ArtReview
Os Gêmeos A Ópera da Lua Galpão Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo 29 June – 16 August Scene of a thousand selfies a day, the latest hometown show by São Paulo’s Os Gêmeos (aka twin brothers Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo) has gathered such traction in the media, both social and mass, that the out-of-the-way gallery is regularly besieged by queues round the block. In the first space, not a sliver of wall is left bare. Thirty or so cartoonish paintings are hung as part of an intense immersive installation, interspersed with a riot of colourful doors and wood panels, culminating in a vortex of panels at one end of the room. Crystallike sculptures with multicoloured stripes protrude from the floor, and countless little paintings and small votive shrines are scattered across the walls. These include a mirrored box, which when peered into reflects your face back in the guise of one of Os Gêmeos’s signature characters: a boy with his head swathed in cloth, eyes revealed, but his identity concealed like a ninja or a Black Bloc protester. What visitors hopefully don’t see looking back at them is the sense of placid, sad-eyed despair in the gaze of the figures in Os Gêmeos’s
paintings, the former seeming somehow trapped inside the canvases, looking out impassively with just the hint of an appeal for help behind their deadpan eyes. Because all the BFF Facebook portraits and all the sensual selfies in the world can’t mask the melancholy at the heart of this work. It’s encapsulated in the worried stares of the yellow-skinned humanoids that populate every painting, and in the oddly joyless technicolour of the dreamworlds that are the subjects of the bulk of the pair’s works. Smart in beautifully patterned shirts and trousers, a cast of lost men and anxious boys are sucked into spinning, hallucinogenic patterns; cast adrift in the dusty sertão (backlands) that underpin the Brazilian folkloric imagery in Os Gêmeos’s art; or encounter vacant, angel-faced goddesses and mermaids in strange, mutating landscapes. That there’s a journey of some kind under way is the most that can be discerned in terms of interpreting the ‘opera’ comprised by the paintings, and it’s into a world of dreams – a journey that’s internalised in an immense zoetropic installation in the second space in the exhibition, in
the person of an unidentified giant who pulls open his shirt, and his chest, to reveal a scene inside that sparks into life at sporadic intervals. In it, a naked man springs into a backwards somersault, animated by the strobe-lit spinning of the carousel on which he is fixed, while at his feet, another man rows into the jaws of a blue whale, and behind him a disembodied hand bounces a man’s head like a basketball. In the third and final space – mocked up as the interior of a tiny one-room house, complete with bed, fridge, sofa, piano – a video installation sets more heads spinning across the wall, and visitors are invited to touch the interactive screen to halt the heads in their tracks before flinging them away in new directions. ‘One of the exhibits is visually disturbing’, says a notice to visitors at the entrance to the show. It refers to the strobe of the zoetrope; but it might just as well be the strained, uneasy expressions on the faces of the characters, and the forlorn, almost nightmarish nostalgia that pervades this absorbing work, even in its lightest moments. Claire Rigby
A Ópera da Lua, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy the artists and Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo
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Books
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ArtReview
33 Artists in 3 Acts by Sarah Thornton Granta, £14.99 (softcover) Towards the middle of 33 Artists in 3 Acts, Sarah Thornton recounts Francesco Bonami’s classi fication of artists around four poles: real or fake, good or bad. So for Bonami, Nauman is a good real artist, Jasper Johns a ‘real artist but his work is shit’, Francis Alÿs is a good fake artist and Ai Weiwei a bad fake artist. Alÿs and Ai have their own chapters in Thornton’s book, which takes the form of a series of interviews with artists that circle back to the question, ‘What is an artist?’ Thornton, who trained in part as an anthropologist, divides the book into three ‘Acts’; ‘Politics’, ‘Kinship’ and ‘Craft’; and within these devotes individual ‘Scenes’ to interviews with 33 artists plus two curators, one critic and two family members of artists. Each section uses particular artists as focal points – in ‘Politics’ these are Jeff Koons and Ai Weiwei, who Thornton returns to after interviews that range from Eugenio Dittborn to Martha Rosler. The second section is loosely structured around the artist-couple Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons (with cameos from their daughters Grace and Lena Dunham). The third section circles round the perhaps surprising juxtaposi tion of Andrea Fraser and Damien Hirst. Despite Thornton’s nod to anthropology, the main strength of this book is that it reveals
that when Thornton drops the ethnographerto-the-artworld pose she is in fact a rather good reporter who is willing to let her subjects do the talking. There are surprisingly few books on the contemporary artworld that give artists centre stage and do not presume to speak for them via catalogue essays or only allow them to answer questions that are over loaded by curator-speak. Thornton wisely keeps herself out of picture (and the weaker sections are when she overly intrudes) and rarely tries to rise above a Sunday newspaper magazine level of interrogation. But by giving her subjects free rein, the artists she writes about come over as having actual personalities. Cattelan is a horny yet nervy chancer who is prone to name-dropping; Fraser is so intense about her practice that she’s on the verge of bursting into tears at any moment; Dunham and Simmons seem decent and committed in different yet complementary ways; Hirst comes over as distinctly unpleasant and insists on addressing Thornton in what she describes as a ‘puzzling “gay” voice’ that might have homophobic overtones. A further strength of the book is that Bonami’s shaky system of classification is about as concrete as anyone interviewed gets to conclusive answers about
what it is to be an artist. Views which are proffered by one artist are contradicted by others. Statements that have been carefully constructed by artists to bolster their own position are hijacked pages later by throwaway comments by other artists. Thornton’s first book on contemporary art, Seven Days in the Art World (2008) was commercially successful but seemed curiously vacuous, perhaps in part because it somewhat breathlessly detailed the structures around art production – the prizes, auctions, art fairs and so on, rather than artists or art. This is a far better book because the subjects Thornton has chosen are much more interesting, and she seems less star-struck by artworld players than in her previous book. As to the answers to what an artist is and does, the two curators come up with typically neat if ultimately empty responses. The artists, on the other hand, tend to prevari cate and get embarrassed when Thornton finally cajoles something out of them. Dittborn’s observation about making works that would confuse censors of his country’s oppressive regime – ‘The most interesting artwork was incomprehensible to the army anyway’ – is an unflashy testament to what artists can do that the rest of us can’t. Niru Ratnam
A man in a room spray-painting a fly… (or at least trying to…) by Francesco Pedraglio Book Works £12 (softcover) Ostensibly A man in a room spay-painting a fly… (or at least trying to…) is a collection of Londonbased artist (and co-founder of the off-space FormContent) Francesco Pedraglio’s writings, readings and experimental artist responses. Yet these meander and flow into each other without discrete titles; some narratives are left to hang, and others recur throughout the 350page text. No particular fictional arc is adopted – indeed, Pedraglio plays with the structures of fiction as much as he does that of the ‘collected writings’ format. Instead the book acts as a wayward fiction-producing machine, spewing out delightfully evocative sentences left, right and centre. The title is exemplary
of this. See also ‘And that’s when they see the hanged sparrow for this first time,’ in which those twelve words spin off possible stories like a Catherine wheel. Or: ‘So there I am in such a dreadful restaurant – the heat, the vodka, the loud voices – with my non-acquaintance looking at me dispassionately.’ Similar to the work of theatre company Forced Entertainment (particularly their first durational performance 12 am: Awake & Looking Down, 1993), questioning ideas of how we produce fiction, or indeed any narrative discourse (and one could include the life story or the arc of history in this) proves to be Pedraglio’s project, most apparent in the recurring characters of
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Bruno and Martha. Martha is an old woman who dies repeatedly. A radical destruction of the linear narrative of life, this gains her a small but cult following that religiously attends her funerals, ad infinitum. Bruno is her housekeeper, and destroys the idea of the singular story in another manner, by ‘becoming’ various heteronyms, from Arturo, the Italian film critic exiled to Mexico, to Enrique, the boy who decides he wants to be a chair. Utilising these brilliantly painted characters Pedraglio’s dissection and theorising of storytelling is handled with such humour and verve that A man in a room… springs along at a sprightly pace, seemingly unencumbered by this ‘meta-’ baggage. Oliver Basciano
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Lives of the Orange Men: A Biographical History of the Polish Orange Alternative Movement by Major Waldemar Fydrych Minor Compositions £18 / $28 (softcover) It is something of a cliché to say the Spanish experienced what the rest of Western Europe went through in the 1960s in the 1980s, after being freed from the yoke of Franco’s fascist dictatorship. The same might be said of Eastern Europe as it extricated itself from the clutches of Bolshevism. That’s certainly the impression created by this eyewitness account of the Orange Alternative by one of its prominent activists, Major Waldemar Fydrych. The Orange Alternative practised what it dubbed ‘social Surrealism’ to parody the state capitalist dictatorship in Poland and its socialist realist art. This loose group of activists restaged the storming of the Winter Palace (a key incident in the Bolshevik seizure of power) using cardboard tanks and ships that the actors wore as costumes; likewise they handed out toilet paper in the streets when there was a shortage of this commodity. Fydrych explains his involvement in these actions in this way: ‘I make dialectical art… in other words I act upon consciousness and treat everything as a work of art.’ Many of the Orange Alternative’s actions echo neo-dadaist and related activity in the West in the 1960s. For example: ‘The day of the happening…was an evening full of surprises… the militia tried to arrest the Santa Clauses. The Santas were protected against easy arrest
by being tied together with a rope. While the militiamen were untying them, the crowd sang Sto Lat (A traditional Polish song, similar to For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow)… the crowd… sometimes chased the militiamen… chanting, “What are we to think? Santa’s in the clink!” and “Release Santa!”... Since it was St. Nicholas Day, the militiamen also arrested professional Santa Clauses coming out of department stores with presents.’ This brings to mind the Black Mask intervention at Macy’s in the late 1960s where one member of the group dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out free toys to children. The kids were then treated to the edifying spectacle of seeing Santa arrested and having their toys snatched back from them by the cops. The stunt was repeated at Selfridges in London by the King Mob group. The Orange Alternative also made much use of imagery involving what David French translates as dwarves (but might have been better served by English terms such as gnomes, elves or leprechauns) both in their happenings and as graffiti. This imagery appears to be inspired by the Kabouters (gnomes in English), a Dutch anarchist group of the early 1970s, which was in turn an offshoot of the 1960s Provo movement. This use of the term dwarves brings up the issue of the somewhat clumsy
translation. For example: ‘Only the undercover agents raised their hands and waved. They smiled friendlily.’ Fortunately such clunky language doesn’t obscure the humour at work both in Fydrych’s text and the Orange Alternative’s street actions. Talking about graffiti in public toilets, our deliberately unreliable eyewitness writes: ‘At that time, toilets were the only Speakers’ Corner; where there was democracy and opposition to the authorities. In a toilet, you could be free.’ At the core of this book are biographies of various Orange Alternative ‘leaders’ written in a style parodying state propaganda of the Bolshevik era; and with Fydrych devoting about 170 pages to himself (written in the third person of course) and only a dozen or so pages apiece to seven others. The publication also includes translations of original manifestos from the 1980s, alongside a host of graphics and black and white photographs documenting street actions. After Fydrych’s endless joking and humorous distortions, the text concludes with what appears to be a reliable timeline of the street happenings he organised with his friends. Lives Of The Orangemen looks set to spread the word about the Orange Alternative in the same way that Chris Gray’s Leaving The 20th Century (1974) popularised the Situationist International in the mid 1970s. Stewart Home
Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography by Elias Redstone Phaidon £49.95 (hardcover) When editing an art magazine, one can get tangled up in distinctions between photog raphy and art – whether to identify someone at the journeyman-photographer end of the spectrum, or as an artist who uses photography in his or her work. Shooting Space, featuring recent photography of architecture and the built environment, flirts with such distinctions (architectural photographer? art photog rapher of architecture?) and then brushes past them, focusing instead on the broader question of what photography and architecture are getting from each other, and the still broader
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question of what the rest of us are getting from them. New ways of experiencing and thinking about the world is surely part of it, from the unease engendered by looking at vast housing blocks in Michael Wolf’s work to the pleasure of seeing Alex Hartley hang off the edge of a Pierre Koenig Case Study House in order to better understand its uses. Works by 50 contemporary artists, both established and emerging, are divided into five categories – Manufacturing Iconography, Cityscapes of Change, Man-Altered Landscapes, Excavating Modernism and After Architecture – and
ArtReview
prefaced with short texts by Elias Redstone (who is cocurating the similarly themed, though more historical Constructing Worlds exhibition, currently at the Barbican, London). Not all names, projects and locations will be familiar to everyone, but highly informative entries for each artist and longer essays by curators Kate Bush (tracing the lineage of art photography’s engagement with architec ture) and Pedro Gadanho (on the history of the relationship between architect and photographer) add up to an engaging survey that flatters as it informs. David Terrien
Latifa Echakhch, Martigny, Switzerland, September 2014. Photo: Thomas Rousset
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Strip text translated from the Polish by Ewa Lipinska
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For more on Maciej Sienczyk, see overleaf
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Contributors
Sherman Sam is an artist and writer based in London and Singapore. He has exhibited his paintings and drawings internationally, most recently at Equator Art Projects, Singapore. He was contributing editor at kultureflash.com and has written for The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum and numerous online publications. From 2006 to 2008 he was the Inspire Curatorial Fellow at the Hayward Gallery in London. This month he surveys the works of Richard Tuttle. For further reference, Sam recommends Chris Martin’s January 2005 interview with Tuttle for The Brooklyn Rail, Michael Auping’s Agnes Martin: Richard Tuttle (1998) and the video documentation of Tuttle’s conversation with Chris Dercon at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012. Thirty-five minutes in, the artist talks about his fashion sense. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a Cameroonian Berlin-based curator, writer and biotechnologist. He is the founder and artistic director of the nonprofit art space SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, and editor-in-chief of the SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He recently curated the exhibition Giving Contours to Shadows in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, and satellite projects in Marrakesh, Nairobi, Dakar, Johannesburg and Lagos. As further reading on African art in context, he recommends Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (1995), Ann Laura Stoler’s Imperial Debris (2013) and Cheikh Anta Diop’s Precolonial Black Africa (1960).
Violaine Boutet de Monvel
Erik Morse
is a freelance writer based in Paris. Among other magazines she has been contributing to ArtReview since 2008. She is the author of a monograph on Bill Viola’s video art and coauthor of a book on Grégory Chatonsky’s digital art. Having researched the history of media arts at Brown University, Emory University and the Sorbonne, where she taught modern and contemporary art, she realised that she was even more exhilarated by in situ practices, found art, contemporary expressions of Conceptualism and Minimalism, and above all the broad art of nonsense. The wittier, the better. This month she profiles Latifa Echakhch. For further reading, she suggests the poem ‘The Lake’ (1820) by Alphonse de Lamartine, the collection of poems Paris Spleen (1869) by Charles Baudelaire and the essay ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) by Walter Benjamin.
is the author of Dreamweapon (2005) and Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South (2012). He lives in Los Angeles and is an adjunct lecturer at SCI-Arc. This month he surveys the works of Jacob Hashimoto. For further reading he suggests the artist’s monograph Superabundant Atmospheres (2013), Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles: Spheres I – Microspherology (2011) and, for historic context, Camille Flammarion’s L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (1888).
Thomas Rousset is a photographer based between Lausanne and Paris. His images overlap representations and realities, a mixture that flirts with the limits of everyday life and imagination. The result is a staged representation that plays with the codes of both fairytales and realism. His work has been exhibited at various venues in Europe, and published in Foam Talent, Washington Post, Libération and Wired.
Contributing Writers Joseph Akel, Karen Archey, Andrew Berardini, Gesine Borcherdt, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, James Clegg, Matthew Collings, Gabriel Coxhead, Tom Eccles, Gallery Girl, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stewart Home, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Maria Lind, Sarah Lowndes, Erik Morse, Michael Newman, Keith Patrick, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Sherman Sam, Ed Schad, Mark Sladen, Raimar Stange, Olga Stefan, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Siona Wilson, Tracy Zwick Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Maciej Sienczyk, Thomas Rousset
Maciej Sienczyk (preceding pages)
When an admiring woman dares to touch a man with extremely active glands, she finds that he sweats pure fat. Female corpses rise from their graves because they have been buried without their bras. Once a century, the ‘Bread Man’ walks the earth to shame those who fail to kiss a dropped crust. Tall tales from a found journal recording Adventures on a Desert Island (2012) are among some two dozen stories that fill Polish writer-artist Maciej Sienczyk’s graphic novel of the same name. His main protagonist sets off on a liner to Johannesburg but ends up shipwrecked on a mysterious island. Sienczyk explains, “I like the idea of the ‘inner journey’, when a character’s journey is a pretext for the presentation of his spiritual world.” Born in 1972, Sienczyk studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, his base to this day. However absurd the ambience of his comics, his drawings retain a certain formality and skewed stiffness, echoing the deadpan, diagrammatic designs in old East
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European illustrated instructions, educational books and posters. While Sienczyk stands apart from Poland’s more conventional strip production, he has found a receptive audience in the literary and art worlds. A collector of artificial legs and other items, he exhibited what he called his “somewhat troublesome objects” and his original pages at the Warsaw art space Raster and the ON Gallery in Poznan, while the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art this year displayed Agron (2014), his quietly bizarre farming yarn in a horizontal sequence of ten oil-painted panels. Sienczyk is a long-term contributor to the literary magazine Lampa, creating short strips that he has remixed and expanded into three collections since 2005. His work is finally available in English this year in a translation by Ewa Lipinska of Adventures on a Desert Island. This was the first graphic novel to be nominated and shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Award, Poland’s most important literature prize.
ArtReview
Inspired by Pre-Romantic and Romantic German authors among others, Sienczyk writes in a distinct voice, mainly in copious, capitalised captions. These accompany his borderless panels coloured in an unusually restricted palette. He writes in speech balloons too, but may also place images inside them, as they emerge sometimes as tales told from a book or as memories or reveries of the mind. Reading Sienczyk’s work is like waking from one dream only to find yourself drifting into another and yet another, never waking up. Sienczyk nests multiple narrators and their narratives inside his books, one sparking the next from the slightest prompt. With each fresh association, often an unusually heightened sensory trigger, one story after another fascinates the reader into losing any need for linearity, logic or resolution, and finally into losing oneself to being transported by his hypnotic, hypnagogic unravelling. Paul Gravett
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Photo credits on the cover and on pages 99 and 165 Latifa Echakhch, photographed by Thomas Rousset
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on pages 162 and 170 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam Text credits Phrases on the spine and on pages 33, 97 and 131 are marketing slogans from airport duty-free stores
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Off the Record October 2014 July’s unseasonable warmth has faded into an early Autumn. I have swapped the Oscar de la Renta iris-printed silk-twill kaftan that I favoured in the warm weeks for a more sober Alexander McQueen grey wool-blend minidress. Proust’s words drift through my mind as I stroll down Chatsworth Road: ‘A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.’ Four years have passed since the handsome yet increasingly insane editor of ArtReview plucked me from the obscurity of Max Wigram’s front desk to become the magazine’s leading columnist, but I am starting to feel restless. Suddenly I notice a shift in the environs and the unmistakable odour of pure evil. Instead of friendly bearded hipsters and trendy mums pushing Bugaboos, I am surrounded by a bunch of middleclass girls wearing those ghastly cos dresses with slanted pleats. “Who the hell are you? Have you never heard of the Outnet?” I yell in disgust. “Get in the van please,” one of them replies in a timorous voice. Before I can say another word, she hits me over the head with a rolledup Liverpool Biennial catalogue. I must have passed out with the horror of it all, because when I awake I find myself in a stark dining room with plain wooden furniture. A man in an African mask is sitting opposite me, surrounded by what looks like a pile of self-help books. I can feel his beauty and sadness. “My voice is digitised to sound like Klaus Biesenbach. You have no idea who I am, do you, Gallery Girl?” “Isn’t that a Tabwa mask?” I reply. “The type that Mark Grotjahn has been paired with in an unlikely combination at Anton Kern’s booth at the upcoming Frieze Art Fair? And hold on, I recognise those cute earlobes from the cover of Fantastic Man issue 15. You’re Matthew–” Before I can complete the sentence, the man springs up with surprising agility for a chap wearing a heavy wooden mask and cups a hand firmly but softly over my mouth. I notice that his palm smells of Le Labo Rose 31 perfume oil. “Look, gg, forget who I am. I need to talk to you despite the fact that you work for a different team. There’s no one I can talk to here. I mean, they all wear Zara…” “cos.” “Coz? Because? I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not advertising our jobs in the right places.” He pauses, the sadness flooding back into his voice. “All I wanted was for this to be an empire.” He gestures vaguely around him. Suddenly he snaps out of his reverie, the sadness replaced by anger. “I just want the respect that Frieze Art Fair is owed. Why do people keep slagging it off ? It’s too crowded, it’s too hot, they don’t like the floors, it’s not cool, it’s too cool. It’s ridiculous. Why don’t people
see Frieze for what it is – a great fair that should make the London artworld proud! Be a doer, not a critic! I can only go one way, I’ve not got a reverse gear!” “Hold on, didn’t Tony Blair say those things?” “Tough on crime! Tough on the causes of crime!” “Look, whoever you are, you need to drop the Blair impersonation. The only thing you’ve got in common with him is the big tent. And let’s face it, people are bored of the big tent.” “People are bored of the big tent?” shouts the man, his African mask quivering. “Erm, look, people love Frieze week. The Tate opening, the dinners, the socialising, you know. Frieze Masters is ace. But Frieze, well, it’s a bit samey, isn’t it? Walking up that strange tenty corridor with the Lisson looming at the top of it with its annual shiny Kapoor wonky mirrors…” “What are you talking about?” he yells. “We’ve really mixed things up! Last year we shuffled the booths around so you didn’t have to see ‘Big Loggers’ first up, and this year we’re closing a day early! We’ve scrapped Frame! Or Focus! Who knew the difference? But they both began with ‘F’. Like Frieze! Get it? Erm, we have ‘live art’ this year! What more change do you want?” “Big Loggers?” Silence descends. “Come over to the other side, gg. I need your out-of-the-box thinking,” the man in the mask finally whispers. I pause. I feel more than the frisson of desire for this saddened Achilles, this mighty art warrior who might be the same chap that languished four places behind Biesenbach in last year’s Power 100. I reach my hand out and stroke his mask. Is that a tear I felt seeping out from the eye-socket bit? “If I said I was madly in love with you, you’d know I was lying,” I finally reply. “Now, any chance you could bung me a couple of vip passes, I seem to have fallen off your list.” Gallery Girl
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