ArtReview October 2016 by ArtReview

Siobhán Hapaska Wael Shawky Art in Chiang Mai

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Neïl Beloufa K11, Shanghai

Lucas Arruda Indipendenza, Rome

Michael Dean Tate Britain, London

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October 5 - November 12, 2016

Das Angebot, 2016 (detail) Oil on canvas 98 1/2 × 78 3/4 inches (250 × 200 cm)

David Zwirner London

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Alexander Calder / Untitled. c. 1942. Sheet metal, wire, and paint. 13 1/2" x 8" x 6". © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pablo Picasso / Portrait of a Bearded Man, Mougins, 5 December 1964. Oil on canvas. 18 1/8" x 15". Zervos XXIV - 299 (Tête d’homme) © 2016 Succession Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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ArtReview vol 68 no 7 October 2016

Balls! That’s what ArtReview has been busy with this past month – what it’s been busy making when it’s not been busy making the latest issue of your favourite magazine. You’ll be getting the impression that ArtReview’s been busy, then, but it’s sure that’s what you expect – ArtReview’s not complaining or anything. It enjoys nothing more than to beaver away for your delight and pleasure. But sometimes it’s busy making things other than the stuff that appears on its pages. Like balls. Now that that’s cleared up, we can move on. The balls came courtesy of Korean artist kimsooja, although ArtReview’s not so certain what it’s thanking her for, given that, as it said, it had to make its balls itself. Sitting with a bunch of strangers at a ridiculously large oval table, itself filled with other people’s balls. As part of the artist’s Archive of Mind exhibition at MMCA Seoul. ArtReview rolled and rolled a lump of clay that it had savagely torn from a communal block at the front desk (and then felt, staring at the misshapen, slightly smaller than expected blob, that it had not been quite savage enough – particularly given the gargantuan grab the child after it turned out to have made), and it felt unexpectedly relaxed. Normally in these participatory art events it expects to undergo some mild form of abuse – artists might talk to it, or look it in the eye or, worse still, hire a child to do the same. And no one likes that kind of monkey business – that’s why Tate Modern keeps its performance programme in the dungeons under its main galleries. Where the important stuff happens. Anyhow – back to the ball. Check it out! See how round it is. Check out the way the light catches its shiny brown surface (ArtReview’s sweaty palms gave it that shine). Almost perfect bar a few signs of

ArtReview’s ball

the hands that made it. That’s important. Makes it seem authentic. It’s easy being an artist. ArtReview doesn’t know why it doesn’t make all the works it covers. So in this issue… Only joking! Even ArtReview realises you might get a bit bored if every page of the magazine went on and on about one of its balls. One of the reasons it does keep busy making this magazine is because of the diverse forms, thoughts and emotions art can embody. Sometimes, in ArtReview’s humble opinion, these might be rather silly, sometimes rather good. What it tries to do is to help you along with editing things out, to point you in the direction of what’s interesting and to steer you away from what’s not. You’ve only got so much time, after all. And some of you will be running around art fairs across almost every continent over the next few weeks. And you’re going to need all the help you can get. So in this issue ArtReview decided to make its writers look at artists who take up a range of different positions with regard to making art. We look at how sculptor Siobhán Hapaska moulds emotion even while she’s appearing to mould form; and at how Wael Shawky examines the way in which history and identity are often sculpted on our behalf, seeming to suggest that the process of interrogating and questioning the construction of works of art might well provide an example of how we could interrogate the artificial means by which our own cultural and sociological identities are forged. History is also something Robert Longo, profiled here as well this month, has been thinking about of late, including his own role in it. But it’s not all about lone rangers: networks play a big part in this issue, what with Shadi Habib Allah’s dreamy portraits of humans working together (be they smugglers or car mechanics), examined alongside our survey of the grass-roots art scene in the Thai city of Chiang Mai. So, all that and more, plus the therapeutic tip about the benefits of shaping balls. Sometimes ArtReview spoils you too much… ArtReview

Coffee ball

Michal Rovner Night

510 West 25th Street, New York September 16 – October 22, 2016

CHARLES GAINES OCTOBER 2016 WWW.VIELMETTER.COM

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 41

David Bowie on his art collection Interview by Matthew Collings 56

Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Daniel McClean, Heather Phillipson, Jonathan Grossmalerman 48

Maria Lind Interview by Mark Rappolt 60

page 42 Cecily Brown, Untitled (After Bosch and Boldini), 2015, watercolour and pastel on paper, 201 × 131 cm. Courtesy the artist

October 2016

Art Featured

Siobhán Hapaska by Helen Sumpter 76

Shadi Habib Allah by Oliver Basciano 94

Wael Shawky by Mark Rappolt 82

Chiang Mai by Adeline Chia 100

Robert Longo by Jonathan T.D. Neil 88

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski 107

page 94 Shadi Habib Allah, Daga’a (video still), 2015. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Peter Alexander, by Larry Wilcox Alex Da Corte, by Andrew Berardini The Propeller Group, by Sara Cluggish Alma Thomas, by Joshua Mack Leslie Thornton, by Wendy Vogel Vivian Suter & Elisabeth Wild, by Laura A.L. Wellen Beyond Lawn and Order, by Kim Córdova alma: Acervo Gentil, by Claire Rigby Apichatpong Weerasethakul, by Adeline Chia

Exhibitions 118 Mamma Andersson & Tal R, by Oliver Basciano Mario García Torres, by Kimberly Bradley Luc Tuymans, by Sam Steverlynck Mika Rottenberg, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Great Animal Orchestra, by Orit Gat Thomas Struth, by Mark Prince Ryan Gander, by Louisa Elderton A World Not Ours, by Louise Darblay Che il vero possa confutare il falso (That the True Might Refute the False), by Mike Watson Nástio Mosquito, by Mike Watson Daniel Gordon, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Wolfgang Tillmans, by Dan Udy Joseph Grigely, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Hiraki Sawa, by Dean Kissick Mona Hatoum, by Gabriel Coxhead Armen Eloyan, by Helen Sumpter Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys, by Susannah Thompson Theaster Gates, by Bill Clarke Kenneth Tam, by Ciara Moloney

Books 152 Known and Strange Things, by Teju Cole Publication, by David Lamelas How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art, by David Salle Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men, by Hal Fischer THE STRIP 158 A CURATOR WRITES 162

page 118 Tal R, Svaner om natten, 2016, pigment and rabbit glue on canvas, 175 × 131 cm. Courtesy Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, and Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm

ArtReview

ALBERT OEHLEN Untitled, 2007 Estimate £200,000–300,000

Contemporary Art Evening Auction Auction London 7 October 2016

Viewing 1 – 7 October 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5744 SOTHEBYS.COM/LONDONCONTEMPORARYEVENING

Art Previewed

serviceable time The total time during which a machine is in a state where it can operate normally, including time when the machine is idle, but not time when it is unattended 39

Previewed Bruce Nauman Blain/Southern, London 5 October – 12 November Copenhagen Contemporary through 22 December Cecily Brown The Drawing Center, New York 7 October – 18 December Take care, amigo Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp 13 October – 19 November

Faisons de l’Inconnu un Allié Lafayette Anticipation – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris 11–23 October Ed Atkins Castello di Rivoli, Turin 27 September – 29 January Bedwyr Williams The Curve, Barbican Centre, London 29 September – 8 January

Insomnia Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm 24 September – 22 January Walid Raad Museo Jumex, Mexico City 13 October – 8 January La Biennale de Montréal various venues 19 October – 15 January

Wim T. Schippers Bonner Kunstverein through 30 October

4 Studio Brynjar & Veronika, The Circle Flute, 2016, performance. Photo: Emile Barret

October 2016

1 Bruce Nauman’s art, he famously said, is ‘like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or, better, like getting hit in the back of the neck.’ That gets old, though. How about the retinas? The existential Indianan’s Natural Light, Blue Light Room, receiving its first showing since premiering at Vancouver’s Ace Gallery in 1971, is a work of kinaesthetic minimalism, blue lighting mingled with natural light to screw royally with vision by sending afterimages scattering. The work, originally concurrent with the Light and Space experiments of Robert Irwin et al and the generalised evacuations of Minimalism and Conceptualism, is nevertheless characteristically keyed to bodily anxiety: artificial light’s effects augmented, particularly in England, by unpredictable shifts in natural illumination. Meanwhile, at Copenhagen Contemporary, Nauman is graced with his first

Scandinavian overview. Expect bracing blue vibes – a claustrophobic corridor installation, neons, films and carousels strung with misshapen animal bodies – and watch your neck. Cecily Brown’s Drawing Center show 2 Rehearsal is her institutional solo debut in New York, despite the London-born artist having resided there for years. It’s also one of her first exhibitions since leaving Gagosian – showing, lately, at Maccarone instead – and downshifting her wristy neo-abstract-expressionist paintings in scale. (Could this be due to anything other than her joining Instagram, concerning which she said in 2015, ‘The [painting] is teeny-tiny… The scary thing is it often looks better’?) Anyway, these 80-plus small works, sources and sketchbooks, inevitably focusing on the backstage act of drawing, pinpoint both reference material (including Hogarth, animal encyclopaedias

and the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 Electric Ladyland) and how her compositional bacchanals – orchestrations of body bits into flowing nearabstract wholes – transform it. All art is contemporary when it’s made, a concept the artworld’s infrastructure has enthusiastically echoed over the last decade, whether via modern museums abandoning timelines, the Metropolitan Museum tilting towards contemporary art or fairs juxtaposing the antiquated and box-fresh. So Tim van Laere’s 3 time-traversing group show Take care, amigo, whose theme otherwise appears to be ‘figuration’, is very much an artefact of its time; nevertheless, we’re stoked to see Otto Dix hanging next to Armen Eloyan (excited to see Dix anywhere, actually); the latterly reclusive A.R. Penck, industrious Romanian Adrian Ghenie and, perhaps unsurprisingly, works by three of

2 Cecily Brown, Untitled (Paradise), 2014, watercolour, ink and ballpoint pen on paper, 36 × 51 cm. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy the artist

1 Jack Fulton, Portrait of the Artist as Bruce Nauman V2, no date. © the artist / ARS, New York, and DACS, London, 2016

ArtReview

5 Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014, three-channel HD video 4:3 in 16:9 with three 4.1 channel surround sound, 13 min 19 sec. Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London

3 Peter Rogiers, Figurine (Couple), 2016, patinated bronze, 32 × 11 × 15 cm. Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

6 Bedwyr Williams, Century Egg, 2015, HD video still. Courtesy the artist and Limoncello, London

the gallery’s Belgian artists: Peter Rogiers’s sculptural phantasmagorias, Ben Sledsens’s brightly domestic paintings and Rinus Van de Velde’s elaborate black-and-white episodes from the life of an imaginary artist. Meanwhile, who knows what Take care, amigo refers to: last line of dialogue in a Mexican arthouse epic, Spanish edition of a Drake album? We’re not asking. We’re joining forces with the unknown. And those last five words, by total coinci4 dence, are the English translation of Faisons de l’Inconnu un Allié. Part of the four-year lead-up to the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette’s reopening in a Rem Koolhaas/OMArenovated building in 2017, this 15-practitioner group show – in a temporary Marais bolthole – mingles art, design, fashion: artists such as Camille Blatrix, Yngve Holen, Tyler Coburn and Cally Spooner, Icelandic designers/creatives

Studio Brynjar and Veronika, and Australian fashion designers Perks And Mini. Anyone who thinks these worlds are incompatible needs to peruse more galleries (or fashion, or design), but here they’re gathered under ‘a commitment to change, whether social or cultural, tangible or symbolic’, and an interest in production processes. Which meshes neatly, natch, with the foundation developing a new space. Call this a red carpet spun from crosscultural practices. Artists who tunnel into a single medium are exceptions these days. Witness, in the UK, and allied to the fact that we are all writing (online) more of late, the latter-day rise of 5 loquacious artist/writer centaurs such as Ed 6 Atkins and Bedwyr Williams. Atkins, enough of a scribe that Fitzcarraldo Editions has just published a book of his writings, A Primer for

October 2016

Cadavers, takes five rooms of the Castello di Rivoli to demonstrate, using new works and earlier ones from 2013 onwards, his prodigious entwining of digital video and abundant language. In these, lately accompanied by sculptural elements, his glowering near-human avatars spill emotions in a testing of how feelings might persist – or be lost, or misread – within the intensities and simulations of technology. Williams, meanwhile, offers countermanding humour (Atkins does humour too, only of a pitch-black variety). In previous works, frequently projecting into absurd futures, the Welshman either referred mordantly back to his own biography (a piece from 2006, Walk a Mile in My Shoes, involved multiple iterations of his size-13 footwear) or played characters including a one-eyed preacher, the Grim Reaper and, in Century Egg (2015), an uncovered fossil – in this

case, sitting in the ground while a juxtaposed cocktail party is imagined as the site of a future archaeological dig. At the Barbican, in The Gulch, a succession of surreal and theatrically staged scenes that guides us along the stretch of the venue’s Curve gallery, we’re promised more footwear in the shape of a pair of singing running shoes, a depressed hypnotist and a talking 7 goat. The career of Wim T. Schippers encompasses art, absurdist radio and TV shows, and a stint as voice actor for Ernie, Kermit et al in the Dutch version of Sesame Street. He occasioned the first nudity on Netherlands TV (not, we might note, as part of the aforementioned kids programme, but cue joke about nether regions) and has also been a composer, playwright and director. The whole thing, Bonner Kunstverein director Michelle Cotton avers, could be seen as a parody-laced Fluxus project, though 8

Schippers equally has roots in Pop. Calling on loans for what is his first retrospective in nearly 20 years and apparently Schippers’s first ever solo outside the Netherlands (where he’s a celebrity), the institution brings together the various angles, from examples of his TV work to artworks including his most famous piece, Peanut Butter Floor (1969), a sculpture made from 750kg of peanut butter, and, standing outside the gallery from the beginning of autumn, the fully decorated Indian Summer Christmas Tree (1969). That year, the Guggenheim Museum invited him to do a show; Schippers apparently never responded. Now seventy-four, international recognition might beckon – if he wants it. From Bonners to Bonniers: there’ll be a test on this later, don’t snooze. Don’t snooze anyway, because Bonniers Konsthall is currently kicking the covers off Insomnia, a group exhibition

curated by institution director and ArtReview contributor Sara Arrhenius, and dedicated to that eponymous syndrome. Or rather, sleeplessness and how sleep itself has mutated in recent times, due to interrelated shifts in technology and ideology. (We didn’t, for example, use to sleep eight hours a night; we had a couple of shorter sleeps and got up in the middle. Now many of us sleep with our smartphones on our pillows, always available. Maybe it’s not better.) Anyway, following a 12-hour opening on 24 September, expect to encounter Carsten Höller’s roaming, mechanised beds – in which one can spend an uneasy night – alongside new works by Leif Elggren, Kate Cooper and Rafaël Rozendaal (whose billboard project extends into the surrounding area), and historical somnolence-related art by Mladen Stilinović, Maya Deren and Andy Warhol.

7 Wim T. Schippers, Going to the dogs, Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam, 1986. Photo: André Beekman/Theatre Collection Special Collection UvA. © the artist

8 Rafaël Rozendaal, Cross Divisions .com, 2016, dimensions variable, duration infinite. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

AFRICA NOW: CONTEMPORARY AFRICA Thursday 6 October 2016 at 2pm New Bond Street, London

WILLIAM JOSEPH KENTRIDGE (SOUTH AFRICAN, BORN 1955) A study for Felix in Exile: Lovers in a Pond charcoal and pastel on paper 45 x 50cm (17 11/16 x 19 11/16in). £30,000 – 50,000

bonhams.com

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7468 5881 africanow@bonhams.com

From his work crypto-authored by fictional evidently, Raad is going to track and query it: in part via his directly activist work as part collective the Atlas Group between 1989 and of Gulf Labor, in part via artworks. Either way, 9 2004 to his ‘own’ projects, Walid Raad’s art has as this 25-year survey (his first retrospective in dealt with the possibility of veracity: initially in regard to his native Lebanon and particularly Latin America) of photography, video, sculpture the impossibility of reproducing the truth of and the intermittent lecture-performance its civil wars between 1975 and 1991 from archiWalkthrough ought to demonstrate, the Atlas val materials, but increasingly with reference Group clearly won’t overshadow him. to the changing art scene in the Middle East Montreal! Most populous city in Quebec, home of the Just for Laughs festival! And as a whole. In his cornerstone project since, a big jazz festival! ‘Canada’s Cultural Capital’ Scratching on things I could disavow (2007), Raad uses freestanding walls incised with holes according to Monocle magazine! (Closes Wikiwhere the shadows of absent artworks would 10 pedia.) It also, since 1998, hosts La Biennale de Montréal. This time the event is subtitled be: a poetic suggestion of how these venues The Grand Balcony, after Jean Genet’s play Le Balcon interfere with the larger histories behind the works they show, how their ‘shadows’ might be (1955), in which the titular place is a brothel, symbolically erased. As the infrastructure of a house-of-mirrors for perverse acts and the the Middle East artworld evolves and expands, acting out of power, while a revolution takes

place in the city outside. The venue, in Philippe Pirotte’s show, will apparently become a metaphoric staging ground to rethink issues such as the ruined ecology, ‘the accelerating dematerialisation of the economy and the evolution towards a global prophetic community turned against itself’. Whatever that last bit means, there’s a professed gravitation towards imagedriven art and the sensual, with some fashionable and upscale galleries getting their lists filleted along the way. Artists include Moyra Davey, Luc Tuymans, Anne Imhof, Frances Stark and Thomas Bayrle, and later in his statement Pirotte invokes the Marquis de Sade. So if this isn’t the first sadistic biennale ever mounted – and we have the scars to prove it – it might be the first self-confessed one. Martin Herbert

10 Anne Imhof, Angst, 2016 (installation view, Kunsthalle Basel). Photo: Philipp Hänger. Courtesy the artist

9 Walid Raad, Preface to the third edition_Acknowledgement (Element ii), 2015, 3D-printed plaster composite object, paint, 41 × 20 × 8 cm. Photo: Thomas Griesel. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

ArtReview

e h S t ixti m o e r s f

E Games o f AT M

C H w o E CK N o t

41 & 43 Maddox St. W1S 2PD London United Kingdom +44 20 74 93 6009

national A ter r t In

Alberto Biasi · Alighiero Boetti · Agostino Bonalumi · Enrico Castellani · Tony Cragg · Piero Dorazio · Tano Festa · Lucio Fontana · Joseph Kosuth · Heinz Mack · Giulio Paolini · Jesús-Rafael Soto · Grazia Varisco Curated by Ilaria Bignotti

21.09 — 30.11 2016

Points of View

In a recent profile piece in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, international art star, art activist and current resident of Berlin Ai Weiwei is found criticising the ‘mental sluggishness’ of the German cultural scene while having a go at what he describes as the ‘Leftist Establishment’. The object of Ai’s annoyance? Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre, where his ‘old friend’ former Tate Modern director Chris Dercon has been appointed artistic director, set to take over in 2017. And why? Well, back in June, employees and supporters of the Volksbühne (or ‘People’s Theatre’) had penned an open letter to the Berlin Senate protesting Dercon’s appointment. This followed the first presentation of his vision for the theatre, one known for its historically avant-garde and politicised approach, particularly under its current artistic director, the intransigent and often controversial Frank Castorf. In their letter, the signatories warn against the dissolution of the Volksbühne’s core artistic commitment to theatre as an artform. While it could uncharitably be seen as a defensive attempt by its employees to keep things just as they are, resisting the bracing winds of contemporary cultural change, the Volksbühne’s open letter pinpoints a shift in artistic culture that is reflected by the appointment of a figure such as Dercon. As the letter argues, ‘This change represents a historical levelling and razing of identity.’ Why? Because the ‘artistic processing of social conflict is displaced in favour of a globally extended consensus culture with uniform presentation and sales patterns’. For the Volksbühne’s supporters, an artistic institution has a commitment to both an artistic tradition and artform – in this case theatre – and the culture and society in which it operates. But commitment to any single artform or artistic genre is something that is becoming increasingly unfashionable among contemporary cultural institutions, particularly in the public institutions of contemporary art, where, as with Dercon’s former employer Tate Modern, the genre boundaries are being constantly absorbed and dissolved – live music, performance,

macht dem volk! J.J. Charlesworth investigates the arrogance of the global artistic elite contemporary dance, film and, yes, theatre all finding their way into the programmes. But what is missing in this assimilation is exactly the commitment to continuity that an artform-specific institution such as the Volksbühne represents. And one marked tendency of global contemporary art programmes in big institutions is that their commitment to different genres is temporary and passing, often appropriated by contemporary artists who borrow particular artforms while not being part of the artistic and institutional communities and economies that maintain them – artists ‘doing’ opera, for example. It is this fragmentation of artistic commitments, and the emergence of a new form of casualised, temporary programming – driven principally by the global success of the format of the contemporary art museum (as led by figures such as Dercon) – of which the Volksbühne’s supporters are rightly afraid. Such resistance is futile, however, to the new class of global art-culture managers; in an open letter in response to the Volksbühne, a fearsome array of the global artworld’s senior management, including curators Okwui Enwezor, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, Adam Szymczyk and Christine Macel, art museum architects Jacques Herzog and David Chipperfield, designer Peter Saville and others, all laid into the Volksbühne’s supporters, in terms dripping with outraged contempt for those who might upset the smooth professional

October 2016

functioning and circulation of high-level cultural appointments. Accusing the opponents of Dercon’s appointment of attempting ‘a narrow-minded and self-interested coup d’etat’, it warns the City of Berlin for failing ‘to defend the professional basis upon which Mr. Dercon was appointed’. Berlin, scolds the letter, ‘will also relinquish all claims to being an open city, a cosmopolitan place where professionals can accept an appointment in good faith with the freedom to think adventurously and create beyond the conventional bounds of institutional structures’. In other words, we will not tolerate your interference if you dare get in the way of us ‘professionals’, as we bulldoze our model of the temporary, casualised, consumer-oriented, genre-indifferent, globalised contemporary art programme over your local, artform-specific, socially embedded cultural institution, or upset our smoothly-private employment negotiations with all your silly quibbling. Yet for all its shrill invective about a ‘miscarriage of justice’ and its characterisation of the Volksbühne’s open letter as ‘about power, and the abuse of the privilege conferred by public employment to defeat an individual’s vision’, in their open letter the art-managers reveal the staggering level of arrogance, selfregard and entitlement that comes with being a member of the small clique of privileged art-institution power-brokers. In their most risible moment of preening self-mythologising, the curators declare that ‘to bring excellence and vitality to culture we must constantly dare to appoint new stewards of institutions, who are charged to challenge and reimagine their place in our cultural, political, and moral reality’. The idea that such ‘visionary individuals’ should ever be challenged by a local artistic community, or that their artistic vision should ever be publicly questioned as part of their appointment, only serves to remind us of how opaque and unaccountable the circuits of art-power are today, and how fearful they are of public criticism. Faced with such an unsavoury display of global art privilege, one can only declare: ‘Power to the Volk!’… Or at least to the Volksbühne.

The internationally renowned Scottish painter Peter Doig has recently been vindicated as a defendant in what must be one of the most bizarre legal trials involving the authentication of an artwork. This past August, Doig was forced to give evidence in the United States District Court for Northern Illinois in order to prove a negative – that he had not created a painting from over four decades ago attributed to him by the plaintiffs. At issue was authorship of a desert-landscape acrylic painting executed in a slightly naive, surrealist style, signed and dated, ‘Pete Doige 1976’. Federal Judge Gary Feinerman has now ruled that Doig is not the author of the disputed artwork. Improbably, Doig was sued by the painting’s owner, Robert Fletcher (a former parole officer) and a Chicago gallery, Bartlow Ltd, for a sum close to $8 million in damages (all figures here are US currency). They claimed that by falsely refusing to positively authenticate the painting in 2013 when requested to do so by a Chicago auction house, Doig had frustrated its sale, thus causing them economic loss. Doig’s paintings have sold at their highest for $26m at auction – and an early authenticated painting might be worth between $5m and $10m. To support the claim, Fletcher alleged that he first met the teenage Doig when the artist was attending Lakehead University, Ontario, during the mid-1970s. Fletcher claimed that he was later Doig’s parole officer at the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre (close to Toronto), where he said Doig was serving a brief sentence for LSD possession. It was while Doig was at the centre, Fletcher claimed, that he watched the artist create the painting, later purchasing it from him for $100 (as well as encouraging Doig to become an artist). Fletcher claimed that he only became aware of the painting’s significance five years ago, when a friend saw it hanging on his wall and identified it as being by a famous artist. Fletcher then began working with Peter Bartlow (the gallery owner from Chicago) to sell it. Doig denied having met Fletcher or having been incarcerated at Thunder Bay at all (Doig provided painstaking evidence to show that he was living with his parents in Toronto and was not in prison during this period). Doig also maintained that he did not start painting until 1979, three years later than the date of the disputed work. In a further strange twist, in order to affirm Doig’s innocence, his lawyers uncovered evidence that a person named Pete Doige did actually serve time at Thunder Bay in 1976; and that he was a painter and most likely painted the disputed work. This argument was supported by testimony from Doige’s sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard (Pete Doige died in 2012), who said that she believed the painting to have been made by her deceased brother,

It’s Not mine Lawyer Daniel McClean looks at why we need to pay attention to the forces that brought Pete Doige’s painting to court, where by a series of coincidences and absurdities the artist Peter Doig found himself having to prove that he was not in prison in 1976, hadn’t begun painting until 1979 and had had nothing to do with the creation of the work in question

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and furthermore to depict a landscape in Arizona where her mother had moved with her and her brother after their parents’ divorce. A former art teacher at Thunder Bay also testified that he saw Doige paint the painting. In stark contrast, the plaintiffs provided no independent evidence to corroborate Fletcher’s story, which makes the fact that their claim was not dismissed by the court at an early stage surprising. The plaintiffs’ main method during the trial to prove that Peter Doig was the author of the disputed painting was to focus on alleged visual affinities between it and well-known paintings by Doig, for example the supposed visual similarity between the line of a skier’s right arm found in Doig’s Chopper (oil on canvas, 1994) and the ridge of a rock formation in the painting. Yet this formal analysis, aside from being highly idiosyncratic, was provided not by an independent art expert, but by Bartlow, one of the plaintiffs in the case! By contrast, Doig’s team provided testimony by independent experts, including the distinguished art historian Richard Shiff, who concluded that not only was the disputed painting not by Doig, but it was in his opinion (based on stylistic analysis of other works by Pete Doige) most likely by Doige. It is rare for living artists to have to testify in court to the authorship of their artworks – authentication is usually a matter concerning the deceased. Those rare disputes in which this has been the case have typically concerned artists pitted against collectors after the former have withdrawn authorship of works that they once acknowledged that they had created. Between 2012 and 2013, for example, Cady Noland was involved in a high-profile case brought against her and Sotheby’s, New York, by the collector Marc Jancou. Noland had repudiated her authorship of Cowboys Milking (1990) following damage to the corners of its once pristine aluminium surface, asserting that because the work was damaged, it no longer accorded with her authorship, thus causing Sotheby’s to withdraw it from its 2011 New York sale. In the end, the litigation was settled out of court, though Noland and Sotheby’s won in its early rounds. In the art market, the denial of authorship of an artwork can have severe repercussions for its owner, causing it to lose its symbolic and, above all, economic value, making it effectively unsaleable. While one can sympathise with owners whose artworks lose value through the wrongful or arbitrary denial of authenticity, the flipside is that artists, estates and art experts can be bullied through the threat of litigation into authenticating works the artist didn’t create or which have been so disfigured that they no longer accord with the artist’s original intentions. This is particularly a problem in the US,

where legal costs can be astronomical and are generally not recoupable by the successful party, thereby creating an even greater incentive for an artist or others to concede and settle. Here, the choice that Peter Doig had either to prove under the threat of a lawsuit that he did not paint the disputed painting or concede its authorship (which he consistently denied) seems perverse and unfair. At the heart of Doig’s trial lies the unresolved legal tension between artists’ authorial rights and the commercial rights of collectors – a tension that is becoming increasingly important as artworks circulate as high-value commodities. When the authenticity of an artwork is denied, owners often rely upon the legal action of goods disparagement or other types of economic harm to the value of the

artwork (Fletcher and Bartlow Ltd alleged here that by denying his authorship of the artwork, Doig had wrongly and unlawfully interfered with their prospective economic advantage). Yet these commercial legal rights clearly conflict with the moral rights of authorship of artists, protected in the United States under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (‘VARA’), which includes artists’ right to be publicly attributed as the author of the artwork and to deny false attribution. They also conflict with the artists’ and others’ right to freedom of expression, as protected in the United States under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. What Doig’s trial illustrates is that the conflict between these legal rights still needs to be resolved by the courts. It might be desirable for artists, estates and experts to be granted

greater protection by the law; for example, collectors could have the burden to prove first that a work is authentic and second that there has been bad faith or malice on the part of the artist or person making the false statement. In a welcome decision in 2014, the Supreme Court in France held that a leading art expert, Bozena Nikiel, was entitled to decline in good faith to positively authenticate a painting attributed to the cubist Jean Metzinger as part of her right of freedom of expression and could not be forced to do this on the threat of damages. The outcome of Peter Doig’s trial has been a victory of sorts for artists, but many unresolved questions remain, and this will be an area that will likely continue to be litigated. In the meantime, artists will be wary of authenticating their early artworks and may also decide to hold on to them for longer.

The disputed painting, signed ‘Pete Doige 76’, acrylic on linen-weave canvas or muslin, 87 × 106 cm. Courtesy Peter Bartlow Gallery, Chicago

October 2016

William Kentridge, Untitled (Colonial Landscape), 1996, charcoal and pastel, signed and dated, 56.5 x 75.5 cm

www.aspireart.net | enquiries@aspireart.net | +27 71 675 2991

Photograph Nina Lieska

Now the results are in, what am I going to do with myself? Now I am all out of spark. Just when now is the time – for the drudge, for the pooling of gumption, when we need to smash down whatever stands looming. Not in a big meathead way, but with big hands of love. I’ve been craving a being to lay my hands on, in love. Ideally, not a human being. Not someone mind-deep in borders. I realised, terminally – I NEED A DOG – while I was up to my thighs in tears. Tears, sliding out of me like oil swimming around an over-oiled egg. Days, dripping. News from home, news from Syria, news from Turkey, Germany, Belgium, family bereavement, too much future. Sometimes a catastrophe bleeds life. So I sought out Marj. On the Internet, a true one-sided eros, and me an online dating virgin. Nights spent scrolling through profile pictures, hooked up to waggy vids, the needing and needed, dreaming. And finally a single image. Her wavy hair, a real looker. Blue-black as an aubergine, buoyant as the whining sea. A blanched-almond-like smoothness of nose. An apparition from Chipping Sodbury. That expression. Flopped-out and enquiring. She came to me by another name, but ‘Marjorie’ was my grandmother, dead ten years – ten years since she sat, observant and rascally – and this later life-force, with her dark, self-cleaning collie coat, arrived materialised, attentive, emboldened, her tail respondent, flexing, brushing against my skin. And so she was Marj, renewed. Suppose you had to live your life over, knowing what a dog knows? To come back mute, with ulterior wisdom, the wisdom of just running to catch up with what’s going on? A dog has a way of living unproductively, triggered by stimuli or repose, remaining vulnerable to the unknown, gleaming in pure feeling, which is all very well, and similar to love. As bell hooks tells me (mercifully), ‘The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible.’ Maybe the dog comes back to yank our sensibilities to the doorway and say: ‘There!’

Woebegone

Courtesy the artist

Of course, the dog doesn’t ‘say’ anything. Sometimes, she sings – freaked forth with a morning stretch. With a dog, the day gets quickly started. Quick with different modes of being-with – being after, being ahead, being alongside, being near. Now I make my days with another breathing body in the room. (Yes, yes, sometimes I check.) Humans and dogs, we mainly live together in the flesh – in ways that, as Donna Haraway says, are not exhausted by our ideologies: ‘We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand.’ That’s what we have around here, ‘culture’ running rampant, a communications-ruckus, but not enough training, not enough new ways of hearing. Face-to-face. Breath-to-breath. I don’t care if every evening of every day your mouth smells of kibbles and stagnant drainwater. Marj, you are an ever-ready resource. You are excellent and I could be better. I remember reading James Schuyler in my late-twenties: ‘What is, is by its nature, on display.’ With a dog, I am before even introducing myself. With dogs, I am ripped of my masks. I am not so much seen or heard as tasted. Airborne. I am leaking into our suspended moment – not only between bodies but also between intersecting worlds – our dog-human cavity. Right now, always now, the task is to remember ‘how to live like that at every scale, with all partners’ (again, Haraway). Until I had pot plants, I never really knew looking after a pot plant could be so much hard work. We’re alive in a world of physical dependencies. Caring for lives is a big job. Being implicated in lives that are not our own. It is sometimes hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of getting-on-with-it. There is even more of a challenge in caring for dogs, but not much. It’s like being at a party with your favourite friend. She refuses her own importance, sashays her body around, is full of interest in and for you. And when someone makes you feel good, you want to feel more of it (them). Because, let’s face it, we play havoc with each other. And if we don’t, who knows what we’re losing.

October 2016

Artist Heather Phillipson on love and havoc

Who do I thank? What have I, Jonathan Grossmalerman, done in my little life that fortune should smile so warmly upon me and from her broad and glistening shoulders deliver this trinity of excessive delights!? K2 Brexit Formalist abstraction Firstly, who could have imagined that a new drug would happen upon the scene… one so fresh, so liberating! How is it that there could even be a new drug? I mean, I thought drugs were like contemporary art. I thought everything had been done, each depth plumbed, every height scaled and nothing to look forward to but a thousand new marketing angles! But no! Someone actually came up with a new drug!! A NEW FUCKING DRUG!!! I wouldn’t have believed it myself were it not for the mendacious Dominican Johnny Guitiarez pawning it off on me. I’ll never forget it, there, under the rumble of the J train at the Myrtle-Broadway stop. My usual pot deliveryservice wasn’t answering my texts and so there I was in the wilds of Brooklyn. Johnny wheeled over and handed me a colourful packet of what I believed to be run-of-the-mill, workaday marijuana but was in fact K2 aka Spice aka AK-47 aka Scooby Snax aka synthetic marijuana. Oh to be so splendidly deceived!

impossibly high His usual source a no-show, Jonathan Grossmalerman discovers a wondrous new drug at Myrtle and Broadway

Grossmalerman’s K2-inspired painting

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Later that day I discovered that when high on K2 (if you can call it high as opposed to wondrously unhinged) I shed the constraints of image-making totally. TOTALLY! High on K2 I thrilled to simply pushing paint around! Just a big mush of paint! ALSO, all on the same day, I get news that my arch nemesis and ex-gallerist Maximilian Bingeweary, whose genial incompetence and genuinely offensive Yorkshire accent held my career back for so many years, has, due to the Brexit vote, somehow, and I’m not entirely clear on the details, lost his gallery to a mob action. Apparently he was showing a Belgian artist. Anyway, someone posted a pic of him weeping in front of the burned-out shell of his gallery with a pokeman standing beside him. Oh revenge is so sweet! All this on the same day! Coincidence? Quite possibly. ALSO, my slowwitted assistant Neal finally found my missing tube of Dioxazine Purple (it had fallen out of his pocket and was behind the toilet… that complete idiot!). But since that would make it a quaternity of excessive delights on one auspicious day, I shall speak no more of it. There I stood, having more fun than I’d had in years. Not since crack had I experienced such a violent rush of creativity! And we all remember the astonishing work I created in that golden era. But while crack admittedly had its drawbacks, K2 has none that I can discern… only the heightened desire to paint! To move viscous pigment around in a highly considered, compositionally sophisticated, albeit muddy, arcadia of primal markmaking! That and to listen to the rushing and somewhat irregular patter of my heart! I am free! Free to accept my glorious limitations! Liberated from the shackles of purpose! Why had I been so beholden to vaginas when all I ever wanted was an excuse to paint? And how is it that vaginas gave me that excuse? Was it a specific vagina I was searching for? Was I chasing some vagina dragon? These are all questions I might ask myself if I wasn’t high on K2. Who cares about vaginas anyway? Certainly not me! Vaginas are a dime a dozen these days. All I care about is K2 and process-oriented formal abstraction! A wonderful muddy reddish, sort of browny and greyish mess! No more vibrant colours! No more pretentious subtexts! Is it kosher to include K2 as part of my painting process in the press release? Or is that something I want to keep to myself lest some other artists get hip to its muselike properties? Just me and K2 and paint and an unbelievable thoughtlessness. So take that, Maximilian Bingeweary! This is one body of work you won’t be showing in your gallery’s charred remains! As soon as I regain the use of my legs I was thinking of maybe going to buy some more K2… Ghost vaginas!

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 50

David Bowie on his art collection Interview by

Matthew Collings

David Bowie’s art collection, which he began acquiring in the 1970s, consists mostly of paintings in the category known by auction houses as Modern British, but also sculpture, design and furniture. It goes on sale at Sotheby’s London in November. The most financially valuable item is a 1984 Basquiat estimated at over £3 million. A preview display was shown in July and then toured LA, New York and Hong Kong.

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ARTREVIEW So does God exist? DAVID BOWIE To tell the truth I haven’t been thinking about that, Matthew. I’ve been wishing someone would write a book about painting. AR You mean with quotes, footnotes and accurate dates? DB God no, that would just be for academics and used by auction houses for selling stuff. No, I mean a book that told you what really goes on. What could a starting point be for thinking about whether a painting is worth bothering with or not? AR I was fortunate that you published several books by me, including my first one, Blimey! DB It was a pleasure, Matt. Why don’t you do another one now, 20 years on, all about painting? AR It’s a good idea. You collected a lot of paintings yourself, didn’t you? DB Yes, Memphis furniture, too, stacks of it. AR How many paintings did you have? DB Oh, innumerable, I don’t know, I never thought about the quantity. AR Iman’s held a few back, but most of the collection is on sale now at Sotheby’s. DB Yes. Now I’ve been in heaven for a while, mixing with the greatest minds that ever lived, I’m not sure I would still identify with some of the works. I really just bought what I liked. I wasn’t a trophy collector or a social-climbing one. There was a small display put on earlier this year for the press. A Basquiat, a Hirst spin painting, an interior by Harold Gilman and an abstract by Peter Lanyon. It was a good selection because although you might think of them as being all very different, they all have a turbulent surface. There’s a visual order to each one, an organisation, arrived at through free spontaneous play with materials. Jazzy meanings in Basquiat and Hirst felt right, to me, with Gilman’s quiet interior with its postImpressionist palette of muted complementaries, and Lanyon’s bold tonality and broad handling, which cause different configurations to appear and disappear as you look. AR Do you have any guiding ideas about art? And when did you do the most collecting? DB I sometimes said things in interviews like, you know, Lucian Freud’s no good, that come from earnest study of comments in Blimey! But unfortunately for any claim you might have as an influence, I also said other things, about 1960s deconstruction, for example, that weren’t wholly uninformed, as a matter of fact. Anyway, my big buying period was the 1990s, when I was

bored and isolated, and for tax reasons lived first in Switzerland and then Bermuda. My main source was the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London. I also attempted to launch a career as a painter myself. I put on a show at a self-hire gallery round the corner from Bernie’s and had a couple of sales to Charles Saatchi. After my music got going again at the end of the 90s, I drifted off collecting so intensely. AR You sound as though you’re interested in the sensual impact of a painting. DB More and more since January: that’s when I began my existence outside time and space. Technique is content. I could relate this idea to the success of the TV series Mad Men. We were all fascinated, if you remember, by its themes of morality and restraint. It was precisely because it’s a common feeling that we don’t have these any more. So when I see paintings now, whatever period they’re from, I’m fascinated by the tangibility of their technique.

Now I’ve been in heaven for a while, mixing with the greatest minds that ever lived, I’m not sure I would still identify with some of the works in the collection. I really just bought what I liked. I wasn’t a trophy collector or a social-climbing one Not so much by the kind of meaning that is brought into being by the viewer’s wishful thinking or interpretation. AR That might sound authoritarian, as if there’s only ever one meaning, and you know what it is. DB But that’s not what I’m saying. There is only one meaning in the sense that there’s a particular way any individual painting has been made, and that making is inescapable, you can’t avoid seeing it, even though, oddly, we do tend to try and avoid it. We tell ourselves we’re seeing all sorts of other things. That’s not a crime, of course. But I’m interested in effects resulting from what’s actually there. AR What do you mean by technique? DB By technique I mean making. The painter experiments with causing the medium, and the visual tradition the painter is working in, to seem lively and not boring. facing page David Bowie. Photo: Jimmy King. Courtesy Sotheby’s, London

October 2016

AR Paintings are full of things besides making. DB Are they? Mostly we’ll do anything rather than see that a painting of a rhino by, say, Pietro Longhi, isn’t actually a rhino. Or a painting of a cow by Mondrian, before he went abstract, isn’t a cow. It isn’t life. It’s a construction: the illusion of a rhino is a painted construction. AR But surely Renaissance artists painted Christianity? DB There’s a pietà I like by Bellini in the Uffizi, in Florence. The amount of blue sky, and the particular shape of the area of it, are his invention, not Jesus and Mary – I mean the constructed Jesus and Mary in the painting are his invention, not the Jesus and Mary in Christian mythology. The sky above us isn’t his invention. The sky in the painting is. Jesus’s arm in the painting is not a real arm. It’s a painterly construction. In 1500 Bellini was trying to make a painting of an arm not be boring – part of that attempt is in the decision about how much of the painting should be blue sky. The arm’s wrong foreshortening is an inaccuracy that doesn’t have anything to do with whether the painting as a whole is boring or not. In fact it's contributing to it not being boring. AR People love Francis Bacon because of the technique – throwing paint, I mean. They think it’s more exciting than a Renaissance painting. The pain in Bacon is great for the audience. It’s more like the viewer’s own feelings. Bacon electrifies the viewer. Religion gets in the way with Bellini, doesn’t it? It makes the whole thing a bit dead. De Kooning – people love him. He’s at the Royal Academy at the moment. They love his passionate painting style. It’s a whole Abstract Expressionist exhibition. Can you see it now from where you are? DB Yes, I can see everything. And I can tell you de Kooning doesn’t make a painting by Abstract Expressionism-ing it into being. In painting, how something is done is what the meaning is. Of course there are loads of meanings, but ones other than how the painting is done are up in the air compared to the one that is tangibly present in the making. Someone that didn’t know about de Kooning or Abstract Expressionism – who had maybe vaguely heard of it – might see Woman II in the RA show, or Dark Pond, and ask themselves a question that they wouldn’t necessarily ask out loud: why does he make those wobbly marks? AR Why does he? DB I don’t think the answer is literary existentialism, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas, although that’s a meaning of de Kooning’s times. But every person making a painting has a visual language they choose to work with. And every mark has an answering mark. There’s an internal

logic to the painting, and if you’re the viewer looking at the painting, you’re looking at that logic: a mark, an answering one – until the painting works out. If you’re cooking with certain ingredients, then there are limitations to your cooking process precisely because of the use of these ingredients.

DB Good for him. Yes, a genius capable of great thoughts. With that fact in mind we search the Mona Lisa for magic content, trying as hard as we can not to see the curves in it, which he took a long time balancing, but instead hidden images and magic symbols, which of course aren’t there.

AR Is it really like cooking?

AR So why is a there a wobbly line in de Kooning, again?

DB Say if you chose to cook fish. You could just boil it. But if you use shallots and butter, then there are things you have to do. They’re partly to do with the times you live in, how traditions of the past are now inflected. But principally these things you have to do with the butter and shallots to cook the fish are about an internal logic of making. It’s a process. AR How does this fit with painting again?

DB Everything’s in a dialectical relationship with other things. There had been a lot of straight lines – rational-seeming measurement. What does it mean? He’s experimenting to answer that question. He doesn’t know the answer. If he did it would be boring to experiment. It wouldn’t really be an experiment but a sterile demonstration of a principle or law

AR But what if it’s Art & Language’s paintings of the 1980s, where they use Jackson Pollock’s drip style to paint a sort of hidden portrait of Lenin?

AR So when you say ‘technique is content’, you could have said ‘making is thinking’ or ‘thought is making’? DB You’re very wise, Matthew. Write that book! What we’re conditioned to think of as content in historic art is mostly – or usually – thoughts someone other than the maker had. We’re conditioned not to think about content – thoughts the artist worked with that were actually the artist’s own. AR Leonardo was a genius who had lots of ideas about science and the world.

AR What’s the experimenting for? DB Whether it’s historic or present-day painting, I think it’s always about how to stop it being a boring medium. With Albert Marquet for example – there was a retrospective just now at a museum in Paris – he very quickly makes it seem boring. AR You didn’t say anything about Bacon’s technique. DB We’re told his meanings are thoroughly based on it. But I think all that signifies is that it’s assumed to be more visible than Bellini’s. Of course in reality Bellini’s technique cannot be invisible. It’s just that we don’t register it. We don’t look at it but through it, or so we believe. We don’t know we’re seeing technique. We think we’re seeing life, or reality or something, real limbs. Christian meaning is not Bellini’s invention, but all the inventions of the making of the painting are. He works in a particular visual tradition, but in each painting he’s experimenting with testing that tradition; he comes up with new sets of proposals about it.

DB There’s always an internal logic. The only time this isn’t so with a painting is when the logics are entirely borrowed; that is, when the artist doesn’t know what he or she is doing, and they’ve outsourced wholesale a thinking process, one that an artist of an earlier period employed.

DB That’s a deliberate displacement. They’re pastiching Pollock. But even so, they’re very made works; I mean they’re shaped, they’re wrought; they’re not just programmed into being. There’s a process that was embarked on and seen through to a conclusion, so there’s some readability. The joke they’re making about abstraction versus realism in that series is about readability, as it happens. But they can only efficiently make the joke if the stylistic process they’re working with actually ends up readable.

This is what he’s intensely involved with. This experiment from one painting to another with placement is different to Matisse’s experimenting. It’s a critical process, both painters make something via a series of critical decisions. The result is what you’re looking at, just as with Modersohn-Becker, with her gnarly surfaces resulting from her particular manipulation of the medium of distemper.

AR Gilbert and George say in Blimey! that they couldn’t care less about Bacon’s painting but they love his screams. he already knew. A Mondrian and a de Kooning are each as intense as each other, it’s not that one’s intense and one’s careless. AR Matisse is about pleasure, but Paula ModersohnBecker is about suffering. Anyone can learn this in basic art appreciation. DB But it’s up for grabs if Modersohn-Becker really is about suffering. It’s up for grabs, too, if Van Gogh’s paintings are about it. A face in a Van Gogh painting is constructed, it’s a matter of rhythms throughout the painting – where the wallpaper is as much as where the eyebrows are, where the edges of the painting are – where’s he putting everything? Jean-Michel Basquiat, Air Power, 1984, acrylic and oilstick on canvas. Courtesy Sotheby’s, London

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DB It’s part of their game with popular or simple meaning in art, which they always play well. But Bacon’s screams are theatrics available in the particular literary tradition he draws on, which, for him, is the equivalent of Bellini’s Christian iconography. Bacon’s inventions in this realm are what we’re told to think of as his true content, even though they’re just generalised old nonsense about existential pain, which is why it’s often hard to take him seriously. It’s not him or the paintings that become repellent, but the inanity of these notions of pain – which, to his credit, he hardly ever goes along with in his own statements. AR OK, thanks – cheerio. See you in a few years, I guess. Next month Eva Hesse on knotting and binding

Other People and Their Ideas No 32

Maria Lind The artistic director of this year’s Gwangju Biennale on what makes a good biennial, the importance of indeterminacy, teamwork, thorough thinking without utilitarianism, creating contact surfaces, recognising that doing nothing is actually doing something, and her own methodology for getting all this biennial-organising business done… Interview by

Mark Rappolt A curator and critic based in Sweden, Maria Lind is director of the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale (GB11), which is titled The Eighth Climate (What does art do)? and runs from 2 September to 6 November. She was previously director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2008–10), director of IASPIS in Stockholm (2005–7) and director of the Kunstverein München (2002–4). In 1998 she was cocurator of Manifesta 2 and in 2009 she won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In addition, she has a regular column in ArtReview and contributes articles to a number of other newspapers and magazines. Her Selected Maria Lind Writing (2010) was published by Sternberg Press, and she is the editor of Abstraction (2013).

ArtReview

ArtReview What do you think is the purpose of an art biennial? Is there some general purpose or does it differ from place to place and biennial to biennial? Maria Lind It differs from biennial to biennial, and over time. Among my highlights are the different editions of the Perifieric in Iasi in the early 2000s, the 2013 Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre and last year’s Ural Industrial Biennial in Ekaterinburg. The Perifieric because it grew out of artist circles, had good timing with the artists they invited and managed to make a difference in the city. The Bienal do Mercosul was carefully curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy with a gentle process leading to excellent commissions and a beautifully installed show pertaining to contemporary concerns around the climate. The biennial in Ekaterinburg, with its embeddedness through, for example, production with local factories and grounding in the historical context. Among the big biennials, São Paulo stands out as one with a rich legacy both in terms of the exhibitions and how it connects to the city through a solid engagement with mediation. AR Are there things about the history and location of Gwangju that affect how you approach the biennial? Or the context of Korea perhaps? How do you keep a sense of a particular place and time in an event that is international and forward-looking? ML The Gwangju Biennale was partly founded as a living memorial to the 1980 May 18 uprising, when the citizens of Gwangju demonstrated for

democratisation and against martial law. With US blessing, the military dictator [Major General Chun Doo-hwan] sent in the paratroops, who cracked down on civilians in extremely brutal ways, only to be pushed back by the citizens, who then held the city for several days until the final, excessively violent takeover by the military. During those days the city selforganised and functioned as an 1871 Paris Commune in miniature, giving rise to notions such as ‘absolute community’ and ‘the Eros effect’. This legacy is not only extremely interesting, but also humbling, connecting the biennale to the location in a special way. The city has gone through something remarkable, in addition to what has happened in general in the country, with the long period of dictatorship and struggles for labour rights in the midst of rapid economic development. Wanting to make a more ‘embedded’ biennial is related to this particular history of the biennale, which in turn grew directly out of the city’s past. Not through a theme or the like, but a methodology. The fact that Korea generally speaking is hierarchical, patriarchal and very formal has been motivational in terms of bringing in other above Anicka Yi, Fontenelle, 2015, vinyl, steel pipes, motorcycle helmet, scent diffuser, glass container, water, kombucha scoby leather, nylon string, worklight, 310 × 198 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York facing page Bernd Krauss, PigmaML, 2015. Courtesy the artist

October 2016

approaches and methods, which I and the curatorial team usually stand for and employ. Just one example: to have everybody on the curatorial team speak at the first press conference this year required a long and hard discussion with the Gwangju Biennale Foundation; now it is accepted that this is the way we do it. I was fortunate enough to be able to invite curator Binna Choi and assistant curators Azar Mahmoudian, Margarida Mendes and Michelle Wong, and we eventually asked the local art collective MiteUgro to join us as local curatorial associates. As well as differences, we share experiences from self-organisation and mediation. AR Could you briefly go over the concept for the biennial and how the artists were selected? What do you mean by The Eighth Climate? And given that there is an implicit connection with an issue such as climate change here, what can art do about that? ML The Eighth Climate (What does art do?) is not a ‘theme’ or a ‘concept’, but rather indicates a set of parameters for GB11. It is about placing art centre-stage, art’s capacity to always say something about the future, connect dots over small and big distances, its embeddedness in particular situations, and their mediation. What happens if we try to tease out more of the artworks in this eclectic, kaleidoscopic and puzzling adventure? What happens if we accept their invitation to engage, and take their interpellation more at face value? One of the things that we might end up doing is to enter a dance

of futurity where the past is neither completely forgotten nor a guiding light. In this sense, GB11 is a temperature check of art today. A number of works in GB11 pertain to the dire conditions of the planet, including temperature change and other factors affecting the climate, as well as natural resources and land rights. Take for example Alma Heikkilä’s seductive series of large paintings, Things that are massively distributed in time and space (2016), where, in these airy closeups of molecular matter, all material agents (water, pigment, etc) are quoted as coauthors, echoing disputes over visibility and the metabolism of everyday life. Or Pratchaya Phinthong’s modest photo series of a small dark puddle that is burning – it is gas hydrate, which is a potential future replacement for oil. Fernando GarcíaDory is making a new work in and around the last rice field in Gwangju, developing a play, The Lament of the Newt, about the location and its past and future, food production and rapid gentrification, together with inhabitants in the nearby area. The play will be performed at the rice field. The curatorial team went on a first site visit in September of 2015, together with a dozen artists – strong and relevant practices – who were invited to make new work. We encouraged them to think about local production in terms of materials, techniques, skills, etc, rather than making straightforward site-specific or contextsensitive work. Another dozen were invited in a similar manner during the winter, and the oeuvres, practices and methodologies of the first group of invited artists indicated the direction of the exhibition. Eventually several methodological and thematic strands were noticed and developed. Subsequently, another 70-odd artists have been invited to show existing work, which emphasises and complicates the various strands. Many of the art projects pertain to more than one strand, which hints at possible readings of works rather than aiming at firmly framing them. The strands include ‘above and below ground’, ‘right to opacity’, ‘the image people’ and ‘new subjectivities’. For example, siren eun young jung’s intriguing video Act of Affect (2013) pertains to ‘new subjectivities’ as well as ‘the right to opacity’, in terms of how gender is performed beyond norms and how the condition of illegibility is necessary for certain kinds of self-determination. The video is part of her long-term research on the Korean theatre tradition of gukgeuk, a type of vaudeville performance in which all roles are played by women actors, who consequently formed tightly knit communities. Gukgeuk was particularly popular during the Korean War, and siren’s project highlights how the tradition is carried on from generation to generation, until today. GB11 can also be seen as a constellation of many parts happening over one year, starting

in January 2016. Thinking thoroughly about what art does – without necessarily implying a utilitarian approach – how it lands in different contexts, and how it sits in society and creates ripples on the water, GB11 comprises ‘Monthly Gatherings’, or Wol-rae-hoe, made together with Mite-Ugro; an ‘Infra-School’ in Gwangju, Seoul and beyond; around 100 national and international biennale fellows; a forum with the fellows; two publications; a blog; and an exhibition that stretches from the Gwangju Biennale building to other venues and places in the city, including Asia Culture Center and the 5.18 Archives, and online. The new commission by Metahaven, Information Skies, can only be viewed online. AR How will the Infra-School work within the framework of the biennale? And what role do you think education plays in the mission of a curator (in general)? ML Together with the Monthly Gatherings, Infra-School is about using what is already there. Instead of setting up an education arm of GB11, we opted for collaborating with existing educational institutions, where we plug in GB11

‘Any project needs to have a certain indeterminacy, ending up being somehow different from what you anticipated – otherwise it is a desk product. Everything does something – a stone, a book, a star and an artwork – and I am interested in what art does’ artists and the curatorial team, doing lectures, seminars, workshops, crits, etc. Our partners range from Seoul National University and the self-organised RAT school of art in Seoul to Gwangju’s Chosun University and the Gwangju International Center. It is a very simple and rewarding way of setting up situations of exchange between residents and visitors. A common denominator for those moments of exchange is to talk about art, about specific works and practices. Both the Monthly Gatherings and the Infra-School are integral and seminal to GB11, being intensive moments of interaction about artworks, creating contact surfaces with people who have shared concerns. In and of itself, this gets the biennale outside its usual confinements, and helps create a sense of embeddedness. There are certainly limits to embeddedness, as Hito Steyerl has pointed out: the closer the embedded journalists got to the actual fighting in the Iraq War, the blurrier the images became. You can lose sharpness by being too close, but I don’t think we have reached that point with GB11!

ArtReview

It is hard to talk for other curators. I have practised a kind of triangulation since the early 1990s: curating, writing and teaching. None of them can survive without the other. This being said, within my work as director of Tensta Konsthall, what you mention as ‘education’ goes under the rubric of mediation. This implies trying to identify and create contact surfaces, based on shared concerns, between particular artworks and projects and people, whether individuals or groups. It is an art-centric approach, which has turned out to work really well in Tensta. We are borrowing some of this for the mediation activities of GB11 too. AR Do you approach the biennial with an idea about what art can do or is the biennial a testing ground for the question? And, perhaps more fundamentally, why should it do anything? How is art defined in this context? ML We do both: there is an idea that is there to be revised and reformulated through the process of making the biennale. Any project needs to have a certain indeterminacy, ending up being somehow different from what you anticipated – otherwise it is a desk product. Everything does something – a stone, a book, a star and an artwork – and I am interested in what art does. In this case it is molecular in the sense that it is about the individual artworks, and what happens when they sit next to each other in physical space, more than the category of art. Seemingly doing nothing is also doing something. Think of the work of Bernd Krauss, who is showing in a small private museum near the Gwangju landmark the Mudeungsan Mountain. His practice is a great example of an ingenious avoidance of given categories and frameworks, always teasing out something unexpected and yet pertaining to what artistic work is, ranging from the amateur to the professional. He has also made it part of his practice to use what exists in his immediate surroundings, quite literally, and often to spend a lot of time in the exhibition space continuing working after the opening. It is the institutional model that is at play here: art is that which is made within the framework of the sphere of art and by people identified as artists. AR Is there a message that you want people to take away from a visit to the biennial? ML That spending time with art can be incredibly exciting, mind-blowing. And that artworks do these things in radically different ways. It is not about art for art’s sake but about art itself. And that it is possible to make a major art event with limited presence of the commercial art market. A minority of the artists in GB11 operate within that circuit.

AR As I understand it, the biennial theme has one aim of investigating art’s potential agency in terms of imagining a future in a manner that’s perhaps less cloistered by prevailing ideologies. Is there a risk that such speculation, taking place in the context of an art biennial, has a diminished agency because of the structures of both ‘art’ (in the sense of a relatively free and ‘unreal’ zone) and a ‘biennial’ (in the sense of a festival that occurs over a fixed period of time and then expires – and is safe because of that)? ML Sure, the resonance is very limited, if you compare it to using other formats and media, and certainly very temporary, with the exception of certain works that might live on after the closing of GB11. However, strong and relevant art tends to be agile and slow-burning, and dispersed, so there are other modus operandi and criteria of assessment. And the artworks will have lives after GB11, in many different parts of

the world. The risk of the perpetual indeterminacy of contemporary art is there too, but I believe that the works in question here convey their own commitment. For me, this biennial is a giant amplifier weighed against what is usually at my disposal – I have primarily worked with small structures in relative peripheries. It actually feels ‘big’! To do this in Gwangju, where many inhabitants have a feeling of ownership of the biennale, is exciting.

AR There’s a sense in both the artists selected and the theme itself of gathering together disparate themes and ideas. Do you think that there’s a strength in the sense that art can draw a little from every trade or culture, while not necessarily being expert or embedded in any? That it can allow for a mobility of thinking because of this, that other structures or disciplines eschew? ML Art can do both: be deeply entrenched in something and use the smorgasbord model. Its ultimate strength comes from it being a metacategory, encompassing everything else: philosophy, science, politics, psychology, the other arts, etc. You describe it as mobility of thinking – I don’t know anything in contemporary life and existence that has this capacity, to this degree. Art is unruly, and undisciplined, at the same time as it can be sharp and precise.

Ann Lislegaard, Oracles, Owls... Some Animals Never Sleep (still), 2012–13, two-channel 3D animation, sound, 12 min 48 sec. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam; and Murray Guy Gallery, New York

October 2016

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Siobhán Hapaska How do works imbued with a complex mix of materiality, emotion, unease and resilience evolve over time? How much does the space in which they’re created matter? ArtReview meets the London-based artist on a train to Eastbourne by Helen Sumpter

Approaching Siobhán Hapaska’s work Intifada (shaking off), 2015–16, one’s initial awareness of it is through the ears; a consistent roar like the gushing of a waterfall. Its installation at a seaside location, in Eastbourne’s Towner Art Gallery (on England’s South Coast), as part of the group show Some Are Nights Others Stars (2016), could be one reason for the association. When the work comes into view, it’s apparent that it’s not water but the combined rustling leaves of 11 young olive trees. It’s the latest in a series of related installations by the artist using this particular species of tree. Each 18-year-old sapling has been uprooted, rotated to a horizontal position and suspended in the gallery by a crisscross of webbing bolted onto the walls and ceiling. Encasing the middle of each trunk is an electronic motor, the movement of which aggressively shakes the tree it’s attached to. Beneath, a pile of soil, twigs and dead leaves slowly accumulates. Once the entrancement of the visual spectacle subsides, the sense of horror sinks in; living things torn out of their habitat, trussed up and subjected to a slow death by relentless violence, seven hours a day, six days a week. The work’s title – the Arabic word intifada and its literal translation as ‘shaking off’ – describes the action but not its effect. At just over a month into the exhibition’s two-month run, plenty of leaves, twigs and soil have fallen to the floor, but just as much is still clinging on. The resilience is as powerful as the violence. It’s a complex emotional response that often results from the artist’s work. In an artworld that still tends to favour an analytical over an emotional approach, it’s precisely this focus on how a combination of forms and materials can make one feel as well as think that makes Hapaska’s work stand out. When I travel to Eastbourne with the artist, at the beginning of September, to see this piece, one of the subjects we talk about is her

current lack of a suitable London workspace. After renting the same southwest London studio for over 20 years, an 85sqm disused former Gas Board storage shed, which she renovated herself, she was recently forced to leave, as the site is being sold for redevelopment. It’s an alltoo-frequent experience for London’s artists in recent years. Even though, as a temporary measure, she has negotiated the use of a much smaller space on the same site, into which all her studio contents have been crammed, it’s a situation that has not only left her feeling like “a pharaoh buried alive, entombed in my own history”, but one that will have a wider impact on her work. Since the mid-1990s Hapaska has been predominantly making sculptures and installations, many of them largescale, and always constructs and installs as much as possible of her work herself. “I love the physical process,” she says. “It dictates what I make, because I’m restricted by what my height and size allow me to do, but it’s also a way of getting to know the work. It’s a bit like travelling before the invention of aircraft; there was more time to contemplate the journey.” For these reasons her studio has been integral to her career, the physical traces of which built up there over the years. She mentions that her sculpture Here (1995), an interactive 4-by-2m moulded fibreglass bed structure, created for her first major solo exhibition, at the ICA in London the same year, couldn’t have been made anywhere else. “The outline of where the fibreglass was spraypainted was still there on the floor when I moved out,” she says. In this work visitors are invited to lay on top of the bed’s sheepskin blankets, strap themselves in and listen to babbling water while breathing through an oxygen mask. In doing so the individual’s sensory focus is not on the object but is channelled back onto the awareness of their own presence. Slickness

ArtReview

Intifada (shaking off ), 2015–16, olive trees, aluminium, electronic motors, electrical cable, dimensions variable (installation view, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne). Photo: Alison Bettles

October 2016

Repressed Apple, 2015, aluminium, artificial snakeskin, fibreglass, two-pack acrylic paint, lacquer, 250 × 65 × 77 cm

ArtReview

and hardness combined with the soft and seductive: it’s a work that at certainty and absurdity and always coming back to the emotional first appears inert but is accompanied by a provocation to engage that responses that the work can elicit. “It’s not what it is, it’s how it makes is anything but. Along with the olive trees, Hapaska often also uses you feel,” she reaffirms. real and artificial skin and fur as her materials, often from hunted Hapaska’s cultural background is rich and complex. Born in and marginal animals, including deer, coyote and wolf; the animal, Belfast in Northern Ireland in 1963 to an Irish mother and Parsi father like the arboreal, evoking strength as well as violence, separation (her surname is an amalgam of those of her parents – Harrison and Kapadia), the artist was brought up in the city at the height of the and loss. Exhibited internationally, including at Venice in 2001, where she sectarian troubles, before coming to London to study art at Middlesex represented Ireland, and held in collections such as the Hirshhorn Polytechnic and then Goldsmiths. Graduating from Goldsmiths in in Washington, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Tate in London, 1992, a few years later than Damien Hirst and the other Young British Hapaska’s meticulously constructed Artists (YBAs) who helped give the coltactile sculptures and installations lege its reputation, Hapaska was part “The value lies in not knowing the of the expanding London art scene of verge on being fetishistic without ever meaning. I increasingly feel that the the 1990s, but her work, multilayered going there, but always create unease most powerful thing about art as much as they seduce. Repressed Apple and more nuanced, avoided being asso(2015), for example, in which a bright is its resistance to meaning anything…” ciated with the brasher values of the art green shiny ball bulges out from beand artists that fronted it. tween the four fake-snakeskin-covered aluminium columns of a Similarly Hapaska’s sculptures and installations may draw on 3m-tall cage, is texturally and structurally sensual, while at the same a number of references – historical, personal, political – but always time suggesting a captured and constricted object, lung or lifeform, manages to elude being pinned down to a fixed explanation or having the life squeezed out of it. The artist’s use of the organic meaning. In her use of olive trees, there is an acknowledgement combined with the synthetic is often picked up on by critics – objects by the artist of the socioeconomic value of the olive and its oil, its and materials she has worked with include moss, wheat, aluminium, importance in cooking and healing, and the symbolic significance of Jesmonite, magnets, coconuts, polyester, tumbleweed, leather, political incidents of trees being ripped out and sold or deliberately perlite, LED lights and acupuncture needles. But it’s not this contrast damaged because of their worth, none of which is what the works are about. “The value lies in not knowing the that most interests the artist – as she points out, Love, 2016, concrete cloth, fibreglass, meaning,” she says. “I increasingly feel that the “All materials are natural unless they have come two-pack acrylic paint and lacquer, oak, most powerful thing about art is its resistance from outer space” – but the contrast between 4 elements, 141 × 233 × 102 cm

October 2016

to meaning anything. But it’s also about holding it at a point where describing one or two objects that seems entirely appropriate. Grey there are just enough crumbs to attract the pigeons but not too few and hunched and looking somewhat weary and patched up, these to allow them to fly away.” I’m struck by Hapaska’s poetic use of notional individuals could equally be candidates for one of the shelmetaphor and wonder whether she writes creatively. She doesn’t but ters for which the concrete cloth was intended. accompanies her reply with an unexpected anecdote about how her The artist has plans to make more of these works for a solo exhimother was once an introduction away from potentially becoming bition at Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery in December. She also has work the wife of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney – a lightness of included in a forthcoming three-person show opening at London’s Bloomberg Space at the end of September, which leads the converhumour that also inflects her work. Sculptures usually begin with the idea or feeling rather than sation back to the difficulty of acquiring a new studio in which to the material. It’s been the opposite process for the artist, however, continue making. “To find another large, affordable building now in a recent group of works made with would probably mean moving out of “…But it’s also about holding it at canvas impregnated with concrete, a London,” she acknowledges, which she fabric that is malleable until set hard doesn’t want to have to do. “It would a point where there are just enough with water. It is used by both the milifeel like giving in to leave on those crumbs to attract the pigeons” terms,” she says. With a partner based tary and relief agencies to create rapid shelters in times of conflict or natural disaster. Going into the studio in Rotterdam, where space is cheaper, moving her studio there and with a roll of the material and no fixed idea, Hapaska twisted lengths splitting her time between the two cities would, for her, be a more of the cloth and combined it with fibreglass and wood to make sculp- viable option. I keep thinking back to the ability of Hapaska’s work to tures that include Love (2016). In this work a pair of draped concrete insert itself into the consciousness on so many levels, and that in any shapes, suggestive of figures, are riveted together by a fibreglass form. climate of uncertainty, work that can engage the eyes, the emotions Around the centre of this form runs a fluorescent red strip. There and the intellect is more vital than ever. ar is both a push and a pull, a folding and a fighting, a tension and a connectedness to the sculpture that perfectly encapsulates the feeling Work by Siobhán Hapaska is included in Some Are Nights Others of what being in a mature relationship, either in terms of duration or Stars, at Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, through 25 September. Hapaska will also be showing work in The Mobility of Facts, at Bloomberg Space, the ages of the couple, can be like. The function of the glowing line at the heart of this work is, in Hapaska’s words, London, from 30 September to 17 December. Her solo Here, 1995, fibreglass, opalescent paint, to “generate just enough brilliance between exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, runs from acrylic lacquer, lambswool, harness, piped water, itself”, a contradictory turn of phrase between 17 December through 4 February oxygen, 100 × 400 × 186 cm

ArtReview

The artist in her former London studio, 2016. Photo: Huub Wijnen. Courtesy the artist all images but above Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

October 2016

Wael Shawky by Mark Rappolt

In linking fiction to fact across two sprawling film trilogies and many related works, the Egyptian artist is making his case for history to be treated as a work of art 82

ArtReview

above and facing page Al Araba Al Madfuna III (stills), 2016, 4k video, 25 min. Courtesy the artist

October 2016

Right now he’s nominated for the 2016 Hugo Boss art prize and one of compare them.’ So this is exactly what is happening. You have one the most celebrated contemporary artists from the Middle East, but story that is happening with the kids, but you hear the voice from if, for some reason, the artmaking business doesn’t work out for him, adults, not coming from the kids. They are telling a story of someWael Shawky might find himself well suited to an alternative career as thing completely different from the visual.” Although as a viewer, the a director of horror films. Take his latest filmwork, Al Araba Al Madfuna experience of watching the film and (if you don’t understand Arabic) III (2016), a first edit of which premiered at the Kunsthaus Zürich this reading the subtitles is one in which you are constantly trying to past summer. The final instalment of a trilogy, begun in 2012, that match the sense of one to the other, in order to synthesise a coherent will be exhibited in its entirety (together with a series of related draw- whole. And in a way it’s exactly this kind of synthetic process, perhaps ings and installations) at Turin’s Fondazione Merz this November in itself a human instinct, that forms one of the primary subject (last year, Shawky won the inaugural edition of the biennial Mario matters of Shawky’s work to date. Merz Prize), the film, eerily presented in negative, features a group Certainly it lies at the heart of his much-praised and written-about of children going down into the ruins of the Osirion temple, part of Cabaret Crusades, which, in addition to The Horror Show File, comprises the limestone funeral complex of Seti The Path to Cairo (2012) and The Secrets ‘I was thinking, “I need to create two I in Abydos, Egypt (near which the of Karbala (2015), and is inspired by different systems that are really village of Al Araba Al Madfuna now Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf’s The sits), to witness an enigmatic, shamanCrusades Through Arab Eyes (1983). Drawhappening at the same time, but you istic ritual. Along the way, the children ing on Maalouf, Shawky’s films use a can’t even compare them”’ script based on a variety of Arab hisnarrate a tale in Arabic about the rise and fall of a village’s economy once local farmers discover the finan- torians and writers in an attempt to provide an Arab perspective on cial rewards of growing sunflower seeds: ‘Sunflowers’ by Mohamed the Crusades (from 1095 to 1204) with all the complexity of infighting Mustagab (whose stories – all from the 1983 collection Dayrout Al Sharif and betrayals that surrounded them, and more importantly to expose – also form the basis of the two previous films in the series). But they and deconstruct how their history is put together. All the characters do it, as is again the case in the previous instalments, in the voices of are played by marionettes. adults. It’s as if they were possessed by both the past (the voices of an “I think the concept of the historian is part of the propaganda for older generation) and the future (the voices of the adults they will the system, for the king or the sultan,” Shawky explains. “For example, become), while their present status is squeezed away. We see children one of the characters that I used in Cabaret Crusades is someone called in the picture in front of us, but that childhood is denied through their Usama ibn Munqidh [1095–1188]. Usama ibn Munqidh is a histoarticulation of the words of another (Mustagab’s) in the voices of yet rian, he wrote about the Crusades’ history. So I made him one of others (the adults who read Mustagab’s words). Our eyes reveal a fact the marionettes who was playing a role inside the film, because he and our ears reveal it to be a fiction. Or perhaps that’s the other way noticed things. But he was not only a historian, he was also the foreign round. Like many of the best artworks, Al Araba Al Madfuna III teases ambassador of Damascus during this time. So imagine he is part of the mind through acts of sensory manipulation. Which is, when the regime, he’s the foreign ambassador, he’s the minister of someone you’re the one experiencing the manipulation, a slightly uncanny or called Mu’in ad-Din Unur; Unur is the governor of Damascus at this plain creepy experience. The feeling is even more intense when you’re time. So can we know if Mu’in ad-Din Unur is someone similar to watching children enacting something they presumably don’t really Bashar al-Assad or not? I mean, how will we measure this? Since the understand. Perhaps it’s no accident that the first instalment of the writer is part of the regime already.” work for which Shawky is best known, the Cabaret Crusades film trilogy The narrative of Cabaret Crusades starts with the 1095 speech by Pope (2010–15), is titled The Horror Show File. Urban II (undocumented except in five wildly differing after-the-fact Yet the Al Araba Al Madfuna trilogy wasn’t born as a tribute to some- accounts) that initiated the First Crusade (1095–99) and ends with the thing like The Exorcist; rather it was Fourth Crusade (1202–04), which led to ‘It’s like trying to see human desires. You the sack of Constantinople, by which inspired by a visit Shawky made to the don’t see it as good people, bad people, time much of the crusading enterprise village in the early 2000s, where the Egyptian artist encountered tunnels evil, I think. It’s really more like human had become a quest for cash rather that local people had dug (somethan anything to do with Christians or desires that are trying to survive’ times from under their homes) in an Muslims. That last bit sound familiar? attempt to access the pharaonic treasures they believed to be buried The contemporary resonances of this history are certainly evident. on the ancient site – these villagers relying on sources that operate on Besides their obvious evincing of the sense that the protagonists a metaphysical level (magic, artworks, Biblical tales) to guide them in in Cabaret Crusades, just as the children in Al Araba Al Madfuna, are their quest for physical objects (gold). Fictions are linked to fact (even being manipulated (of Urban’s speech, the artist says, “In the end we if the existence of treasure in this case may only be a notional fact), don’t know exactly what he said, but we know more about the result. in a manner that questions the nature of both. “I thought, ‘OK, how We expect that this guy had amazing charisma to convince people can I translate this entire experience into a film?’” Shawky explains to walk first from Germany until they reached Constantinople”), when we meet in Doha (Al Araba Al Madfuna III was commissioned by the marionettes, with their sometimes grotesque features and jerky the Qatar Museums), where the Alexandria-based artist is currently actions, also foreground the sense that the history they enact is handconducting research that will lead to a new project on the establish- crafted and shaped. That the first film uses marionettes from a historment of the Gulf States. “I was thinking, ‘I need to create two different ical collection in Turin, the second marionettes made by ceramic systems that are really happening at the same time, but you can’t even craftsmen in the South of France and the last marionettes made out

ArtReview

top Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015, HD video, colour, sound, English subtitles, 120 min above Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010, HD video, colour, sound, English subtitles, 31 min 49 sec both images © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

October 2016

of Murano glass, locating this Arabic story in the European terrain from which the Crusades originated, further complicates any stable notions of identity or ownership. At the heart of all this lies a sense of history as being the product of human creation rather than an accumulation of facts. Perhaps it exposes the more terrifying implications of Joseph Beuys’s famous dictum ‘Jeder Mensch ein Künstler’. While for the German artist this meant a call for a type of social sculpture in which ‘every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism’, for Shawky there’s a sense that every account of history or even contemporary decision-making (on a sociopolitical and economic level in particular) exists as something manufactured or manipulated. As if it were a work of art. And we can clearly see that at work in the rhetoric that surrounds everything from the US presidential elections and Brexit to the conflict in Syria and current disputes in the South and East China Seas. Is Shawky then advocating a distrust of all accounts of historical and current conflict? Should we distrust everything people say? “I think it’s like trying to see human desires,” he says. “You don’t see it as good people, bad people, evil, I think. It’s really more like human desires that are trying to survive, and really running after authority, this is really the main issue for everyone. Using religion for authority and for political-economic reasons also. This is from both sides: whether the Crusaders or the Muslims, our leaders are the same. I believe it’s really about this, about the propaganda. And not only the propaganda: the authenticity and the legitimisation that is given to written history as if it’s a fact, just because we have it.” Shawky is not shy either of tackling the propaganda, received wisdom and obfuscation that frequently dominate artworld discourse. Dictums (2013) was a live performance at that year’s Sharjah Biennial for which the artist gathered 30 workers, primarily of Pakistani origin,

to chant a song made up from words derived from the event’s curatorial statement, translated into Urdu and accompanied by musicians trained in Sufi ballads. Given the nature of Shawky’s work and the fact that we’re sitting in a large studio in Doha’s Fire Station residency complex that is almost entirely empty save for some sofas and chairs, and a few drawings on a table, with the artist pointing out that everybody has left town because of the heat (it was already 30 degrees when I landed, shortly before 6am), it might be easy to assume that a logical consequence of living in a propaganda-saturated world would be to resort to some sort of ascetic, perhaps even solipsistic withdrawal from it. In an early videowork, Cave (2004), the artist strolls around a supermarket reciting the Arabic verses from Surah 18 of the Qu’ran from memory. The Surah concerns a group of youths who retreat to a cave to escape persecution for maintaining their faith in God in a kingdom enforcing idolatry. They return to society after 300 (solar) years. “I don’t think it was even about the contradiction between a religious text and the supermarket,” the artist recalls. “It was more about the idea that as a human being anyone can be that isolated, living his or her entire world in a supermarket.” He continues quietly, “But you cannot isolate forever. You have to isolate to gain the wisdom, then you have to go back to the society to correct it or to make good. I think this is amazing.” He’s off to the library and I’m off to catch a plane. ar The complete trilogy Al Arabia Al Madfuna will be on show at the Fondazione Merz, Turin, from 3 November to 5 February. The artist will also be the subject of a concurrent retrospective at the Castello di Rivoli, also in Turin, and an exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Milan, from 10 November to 7 January. He is nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize 2016, the winner of which will be announced 20 October

Al Araba Al Madfuna I (still), 2012, HD video, b/w, sound, 21 min. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

ArtReview

Eva Rothschild

Alternative to Power

The New Art Gallery Walsall Until 15 January 2017

Maggi Hambling Touch works on paper 8 September 2016 – 29 January 2017 #MaggiHambling

Free Maggi Hambling (b. 1945), Sebastian in a Hermès scarf. Charcoal, 2004, 152.4 x 101.6cm. © Maggi Hambling. Reproduced by permission of the artist. From the artist’s collection.

Atmospheres of the Image by Jonathan T.D. Neil

The Haunting, 2005, charcoal on mounted paper, 3 panels, 226 × 366 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf

ArtReview

The Napoleonic Wars, the Russian Revolution and the contemporary climate of terror: a new exhibition seeks to link Robert Longo’s post-9/11 work with masterpieces by Goya and Eisenstein. Is it successful?

Untitled (Mike Test/Head of Goya), 2003, charcoal on mounted paper, 183 × 244 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

October 2016

Untitled (Hellion), 2011, charcoal on mounted paper, 176 × 303 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

ArtReview

Do Goya, Eisenstein and Longo share a political imaginary, a common approach to conceiving images that channel the acute historical conflicts of their ages? This is the question put forward by the Garage Museum of Art’s autumn exhibition, Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo, curated by the estimable Kate Fowle in collaboration with Longo himself, and which brings together a handful of Goya’s and Eisenstein’s most salient works (select etchings from Goya’s famed print series; Eisenstein’s seven major films, each projected at 1 percent of their original speed) with selections from Longo’s prodigious output of the past 15 years. It hardly seems necessary today to note how Longo was one of the original five artists included in Douglas Crimp’s now epochal 1977 Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in New York, or that he was joined there by Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine and Philip Smith. Cindy Sherman was added to the roster via Crimp’s followup 1979 essay, also titled ‘Pictures’, which was published in the then relatively new journal October. Crimp self-consciously set out to identify the ‘predominant sensibility among the current generation of younger artists’ working at the time, and that ‘sensibility’ was ‘postmodernist’. These artists, Crimp pointed out, embraced the photographic and filmic image for its performativity, ambiguity and heterogeneity. The ‘Pictures Generation’ was born of this postmodernist critique of representation, and vice versa. Proof would seem to be something of a riposte to the ease with which Longo continues to be so easily identified with the Pictures Generation. The idea of ‘proof’ is to a great extent exactly what ‘pictures’ opposed: the notion that images might offer transparent access to some singular truth, beyond ambiguity, beyond doubt. And the joining of Longo with two artists of unquestioned historical significance whose major works are themselves divided by a century of time does away with the generational affiliation and proposes a different genealogy for Longo’s now nearly 40-year project. But then what is that genealogy? What political imaginary is at work in all three artists? We know, for example, that the Napoleonic

Wars induced Goya to consider the horrors that transpire off the battlefield, the tortures, executions, humiliations and privations of human beings caught up in the follies of military adventurism. We also know that Goya witnessed none of these things himself, that his Disasters of War (1810–20), for example, were inventions, informed by others’ accounts. For all of Eisenstein’s groundbreaking use and theorisation of montage – from the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925) to the milk-separator sequence in The General Line (1929) – his was a definitively retrospective and so historical, dare one say nostalgic, view – a filmic imagining and reimagining, often in allegorical form, of the one revolution that would change the course of world history. Longo’s allegorical imagery is of a different sort entirely. Drawn from photographs (today mostly found online), Longo’s major painting- and mural-size charcoal drawings invest their popular (and sometimes populist) imagery with an impossible scale and substance, as if to suggest that each and every image he treats is of world-historical importance. In some instances the equation is direct, as with his series of atomic explosions; in others it is more oblique, at turns ecclesiastical, in Untitled (Gabriel’s Wing) (2015), and fantastical, in Untitled (Pentecost) (2016). If not the image, then politics: every work of Longo’s selected for Proof was made after September 11, 2001. Though the terrorism of that day only appears as the explicit subject of one work, The Hunting (Triptych) (2005), other instances of terror are rendered both explicitly, as with the Charlie Hebdo murders in Untitled (Bullet Hole in Window, January 7, 2015) (2015–16), and implicitly, as with the line of riot police in Untitled (Baltimore Cops No. 3) (2016). But not every work would seem to address our contemporary climate of terror so directly. How to understand, for example, Untitled (Wall of Ice) (2016) or Untitled (Rippling Water) (2015)? ‘Atmosphere’ is the key term here. Writing on the first militarised use of poison gas in 1915, Peter Sloterdijk observes that ‘The 20th century will be remembered as the age whose essential thought

Untitled (Guernica Redacted, After Picasso’s Guernica, 1937), 2014, charcoal on mounted paper, 4 panels, 283 × 620 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris & Salzburg

October 2016

consisted in targeting no longer the body but the enemy’s environ- 1815 and 1823, and imagine an even darker kaleidoscope of human ment. This is the basic idea of terrorism in the more explicit sense.’ derangements, ones that Goya would carry forward into the late Black The use of gas involved ‘bringing the climatic and atmospheric condi- Paintings (c. 1819–23), one of which Longo commemorates in Untitled tions pertaining to human life to a new level of explication’, a new (After Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819) B (2016). In Los Disparates, importantly, faces and figures emerge from, or sometimes merge level of explicitness, a new actuality. Longo’s work of the past 15 years is nothing if not an ‘explication’ with, the etched ground. While never the main focus of the compoof this more general sense of terror, now understood as a new kind sition, these late images show Goya’s early attention to how graphic of pervasive and impinging background, an explicitly atmospheric atmospherics can effectively channel political and social unease, condition. Begin with Longo’s earliest work in Proof, Untitled (View of even dread. Study Room with Books, Desk and Window, 1938) (2002), which is part of For Eisenstein, a similar attention to the atmospherics of the the artist’s Freud Drawings (2000–03), and in which the illumination image emerges from his own evolving understanding of montage of the title’s books, desk and window is countered by the deep black itself. From a basic juxtaposition of images that implies moveof a physical space that we cannot see or ment or emotion (what he called access – a metaphor for the unconscious ‘montage according to the foreground’), and its troublesome weather, no doubt, Eisenstein articulated a theory of monbut then 1938 was a dark year as well. tage as ‘overtones’ in his 1929 essay ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’. Through In 2003 Longo produced Mike Test (Head what the filmmaker called the ‘visual of Goya), a drawing of a nuclear mushovertonal complex of the shot’, one is room cloud that takes atmospheric confronted with a host of ‘collateral dynamics (turbulence, convection, etc) vibrations’ and ‘secondary stimuli’, as its explicit subject matter, just as a constellation of connotative visual much as it acknowledges how the dawn material that does not fully resolve into of the bomb introduced a whole new the denotative content of the image. front to geopolitics. As an example, one could point to the Over and over again – subtly in climax of the milk-separator sequence Untitled (May 23, No. 2, Brooklyn) (2013), in The General Line, which is anticipated overtly in Untitled (Leaving Iraq) (2012) by a liquid shimmer reflected on the – Longo’s air is rendered uncanny and faces of the machine’s attending peasmenacing. In the monster wave curl ants. Then there is the ensuing spray of Untitled (Hellion) (2011), or the wall of of milk itself, which echoes the spray ice in Untitled (Iceberg for C. D. F) (2015–16), of sparks that Longo depicts in Untitled the atmosphere is condensed, quite literally, but also reduced in an attempt (After Eisenstein, Strike, 1925) (2016). to capture its inhuman force. When The curatorial decision in Proof to that force is given technological form, slow the projection speed of Eisenstein’s as it is in Untitled (F-22 Raptor) (2016) films privileges this ‘overtonal complex’, and Untitled (Russian SU-30 Jet Fighter) foregrounding viewers’ access to the (2012) (but where, one might ask, are ‘physiological’ dimension (Eisenstein’s the drones?), its condition of possibility term) of each shot, of each image, which is present in the clouds below (wings he intended as accompaniment to the don’t work in the vacuum of space). films’ narrative lessons in revolution, And when that technology is brought sacrifice and class consciousness. back down to earth, as it is in Untitled Goya, Eisenstein, Longo. On the (Pentecost), that movie’s science-fictional evidence, or at least on this reading, all robot ‘Jaeger’ is transformed, by the three artists share a similar atmospherics Untitled (After Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819) B, 2016, graphite and charcoal on paper, 18 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artist drawing’s background solar corona, of the image, a distinctly modern politfrom techno-saviour into an acephalic ical imaginary that attempts to make monstrosity, an AI minotaur wandering the labyrinth of a decimated manifest, or rather explicit, the background conditions of their, and our, contemporary experience. From Goya’s nightmares, to urban maze. Longo’s Jaeger stands as a twenty-first-century update of Goya’s Eisenstein’s overtones, to Longo’s air – each renders explicit the ‘The dream of reason produces monsters’ from Los Caprichos (1797– climate of our time. ar 98). Though that series was aimed at the Spanish clergy and nobility, a satirical political commentary fuelled by the more liberal consciousProof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo is at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, on view ness that had emerged with the Bourbons in eighteenth-century through 5 February; Longo’s work is also included in Good Dreams, Spain, it has come down to us as a talisman of the Enlightenment’s Bad Dreams: American Mythologies, curated by Massimiliano more profane illuminations. Goya’s caprices pale in comparison to Gioni at the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, through April his Los Disparates (The Follies), however. These were etched between

ArtReview

Untitled (View of Study Room with Books, Desk and Window, 1938), 2002, charcoal on mounted paper, 168 × 274 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf

October 2016

Shadi Habib Allah by Oliver Basciano

In videos, soundworks and installations that range in subject from conflict and statehood in the Middle East to the workplace of a Miami auto mechanic, the artist is consistently unsensational in his empathetic presentation of diverse social ecologies 94

ArtReview

Night shrouds Jerusalem in a blue gloom. Opening with estab- artist tells me, been forced to live nocturnally because of antagonism lishing shots of the city after dusk, Shadi Habib Allah’s eight-minute from her neighbours. The electricity fails frequently in Jerusalem’s video 30kg Shine (2015) interweaves three stories linked by their literal Old City area, so she often lives in molelike sufferance. In the guttering darkness. Among the artist’s images in this nonlinear work are ones candlelight we see the woman’s ornaments and framed photographs of the subterranean construction of the catacombs Israel is currently of loved ones as the camera follows her carefully feeling her way building (an infrastructure project that will eventually consist of through the cluttered, but under normal circumstances possibly 22,000 crypts for the holy city’s dead). Between the occasional over- quite cosy, home. The accompanying sculptures at the London show heard moments of builders’ conversations, Habib Allah provides were furniturelike in appearance: one, for example, approximates close-cropped footage of an oozing mass. While in all probability a cabinet or Welsh dresser, yet in the shadows of the gallery space we we’re watching sewage, in the artist’s hands it seems sentient as it might equally have been looking at a coffin. moves lavalike through the tunnels, eventually exiting through an Taken as a whole, there’s a commentary on the State of Israel (and the state of Israel) present in 30kg Shine – on a country where politics is outflow pipe into the city. Sitting in his Chinatown flat under the Brooklyn Bridge in New bound up in fear, and questions of ownership abound; where to bury York, the Israel-born Palestinian artist, now in his late thirties, makes the dead is to make something akin to an eternal claim to the land, sense of this unearthly phenomenon by telling me a ghost story, one as it might be argued that if the bodies of one’s ancestors rest here, that apparently circulated through Jerusalem in 1936, about a malev- there can be no ambiguity concerning to whom this place belongs. olent amorphous ‘thing’ that haunted the fortified city after dark. Conversely the lady’s relationship in the film to her possessions is As a Manhattan-bound train rattles overhead, Habib Allah adds that uncertain: she hardly gets to see any of them properly; her home this tale was spread to scare citizens into staying inside at night, is something only felt. allowing grave robbers to go about their crimes undisturbed. Yet Habib Allah’s work does not solely concentrate on the territoeven without this background information – and like much of the rial issues of the Middle East. His 26-minute film The King & the Jester artist’s work, 30kg Shine is informed by multiple stories and histories (2010), for example, a part-scripted, part-observational documentary, that might remain opaque to the casual viewer – we can feel a sense took a Miami body-repair shop as its subject. While there is some chat of underlying terror to the shadowy video, with its ominous droning between the mechanics on life in Afghanistan and other, unnamed, cultures (“Wonder how they fuck in their country?”), the mainstay soundtrack and near silence. When the video was first shown at London gallery Rodeo in 2015, is otherwise innocuous bickering and jokes about the job, women only a minimum of light illuminated the space, most of it coming and bear attacks over the steady hum of car repairs and paintjobs. from two chandeliers, both tipped on their sides, one on the ground The work takes shape as a portrait of a particular social ecology at a and the other on a desk. Two further sculptures, untitled, also occu- given moment, one where notions of masculinity, class and race are pied the space, barely perceivable in the gloom. These resonate with carefully teased out. Yet elsewhere Habib Allah returns more explicthe third narrative strand to Habib Allah’s video, intertwining with itly to questions of conflict and statehood: Marat Bathtub (2013) was the portrait of the catacomb construction and a sculptural reproduction of the bath that Jeanabove The King & the Jester (still), 2010. Paul Marat, one of the most radical voices of the the references to the ghost story, in which we see Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai French Revolution, wrote his articles in and an elderly lady moving about her home in the facing page 30kg Shine, 2015 (installation view, which was, in 1793, the site of his assassination dark. This is a Palestinian woman who has, the Rodeo, London). Courtesy Rodeo, London

October 2016

at the hands of the more moderate antimonarchist Charlotte Corday. (Marat’s constant use of the boot-shaped bath was due to his chronic eczema, a condition he partly suffered as a consequence of having to live in Paris’s sewers for two years as the revolution unfolded.) Evacuated Containers (2013), meanwhile, is a series of large-scale pencil drawings that depict an administrative room in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. This is the room in which a sculpture by Habib Allah – a cast of a leg he made in Palestine – was destroyed by security staff, having been confiscated from the artist as he attempted to travel with it to New York. Habib Allah based his drawings on those of a police sketch artist who had, in turn, been given a description of the space by an airport security guard who had been persuaded to help the artist. Perhaps Habib Allah’s most ambitious and affecting work to date, however, is Daga’a (2015). Over 18 minutes, the artist documents his travels across the Sinai Peninsula with the Bedouins who control this area. ‘Travels’, though, gives a false sense of control on the artist’s part. The area is a lawless one; the Egyptian authorities, whose land this ostensibly is, have throughout history found it a difficult place to police, and the Bedouins’ income is now mainly derived from the smuggling trade, which partly helps Islamist militants to operate in the area. Habib Allah is just one of the many (unseen) loads to pass through the hands of these occasionally gun-brandishing men. It must have been a dangerous work to make, but the outcome is not at all sensational: Habib Allah imbues his edit with a kind of wistfulness – the men are shown as having a quiet sense of perseverance in what otherwise seems a desperate existence – and perhaps even a hint of magical realism. Imagery of snakes and fires abounds in the film. The Bedouins are wrapped in headscarves that cover all but their eyes, and as they drive Habib Allah in their pickup trucks and 4×4s across the uniform landscape of scrubby desert, we never get a clear view of the smugglers or what else they’re transporting. (At one point we see a man collect an assault rifle from under a tarpaulin in the middle of a vast desolate plain, but this might be a personal possession rather than loot.) Through snippets of conversation, moments of prayer and snatched instances of bravado, we gain only the barest of

portraits of the individual men and their activities. Taken as a whole, however, the video documents the economic and trade networks they have built across this inhospitable terrain, networks that seek to evade the Egyptian authorities and other outsider eyes. In New York, Habib Allah tells me of two new works he is developing. The first is for his solo show at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, his American gallery, in which he has cultivated and will exhibit kudzu plants, the invasive species that can be found all over the southern states of America, especially prevalent on roadsides. The second is a project for Green Art Gallery in Dubai, to be shown on their booth at this year’s Frieze London, which uses further material collected during the artist’s time on the Sinai Peninsula. In this proposed installation, the conversations Habib Allah recorded between the Bedouins will be played on old 2G mobile phones – these, linked through the existing phone network, will connect with each other in a predetermined pattern, and visitors to the booth will be given the opportunity to eavesdrop on the smugglers’ exchanges. This is perhaps the most formal manifestation of the primary motif in Habib Allah’s work. Whether it’s the necropolis that lies below the living city, the nocturnal population that operates separately from the diurnal one, factions of revolutionary France or the Bedouins of today, the artist seeks to shine a light on the radical possibilities of the parallel networks that run concurrent with, or counter to, official infrastructure. Perhaps this is a natural subject for a Palestinian artist – one returned to in recognition of the country’s ambiguous status in the eyes of international officialdom and of a nation of people living within the military and political confines of another. Yet perhaps there is also a more universal, philosophical and perhaps in some ways less political reason for Habib Allah’s frequent revisiting of the idea of an independently operating network. Uniting his work is a mood of resilience in its subjects and the groups they bond with; a sense of strength and humour in the face of life’s often bleak circumstances. ar

ArtReview

Shadi Habib Allah: Biscuits and Green Sox Maaike is on view at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, through 16 October

above Daga’a (video still), 2015. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai facing page Marat Bathtub, 2013, steel sheets, fibreglass, 127 × 90 × 64 cm. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

October 2016

9-13NOV.2016

Hu Xiangqian Gold Rush In Huge Wave, 2016

Aike-Dellarco Arario Gallery BANK Beijing Art Now Gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts Boers-Li Gallery Canton Gallery Sadie Coles HQ Pilar Corrias Massimo De Carlo Gladstone Gallery Hauser & Wirth INK Studio Pearl Lam Galleries Long March Space Edouard Malingue Gallery Galerie Urs Meile Ota Fine Arts Pace Beijing Galerie Perrotin Platform China Esther Schipper Gallery Shanghai Gallery of Art ShanghART Gallery Timothy Taylor TKG+ White Cube White Space Beijing Leo Xu Projects David Zwirner

ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng, a new initiative, brings special projects by leading artists from around the world to locations inside and outside the West Bund Art Center, 9–13 November Curated by ArtReview Asia for West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center 2555 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai www.westbundshanghai.com

f00% BLACK

Chiang Mai Thailand’s colder, wetter, buzzier answer to Bangkok is where all the artists go. Until now the only thing missing from this ancient city (whose name in fact means ‘new city’) was a high-profile contemporary art institution. Is Maiiam the answer? by Adeline Chia

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October 2016

101

Dynamic, hectic Bangkok, with its network of private galleries and his show is advertised with a much-Instagrammed two-storey-high public institutions, is often seen as the nexus of Thailand’s art scene, vinyl poster of a man wearing a demon’s mask, one of the key stills in but the recent opening of Thailand’s first private museum, Maiiam Primitive, some aspects of which appear in his most famous film, Uncle Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chiang Mai, has drawn attention Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). The show is put together to the quieter, wetter city up north. Never mind that the museum’s by his longtime friend Gridthiya ‘Jeab’ Gaweewong, who is one of location isn’t even in the city centre, but half an hour’s drive away, in Thailand’s most influential curators and the museum’s consultant. the Sankampaeng district, which is better known for therapeutic hot And Weerasethakul devotees take note: The Serenity of Madness is travsprings than contemporary art; or that little information about the elling to Hong Kong’s Para Site next. new arrival was out there until a press release that came only a few The combination of a reticent A-lister’s retrospective and the weeks before the official opening on 3 July: hundreds still scrambled open-door showcase of an expensive private collection has galvanised the local art scene. “This museum has a huge impact in Thailand, not for an invite and flocked to its opening party. There are two major shows in the 3,000sqm premises, which is just Chiang Mai. It is the first museum with a permanent showcase fronted by a disco-ball facade that refracts the busy roadside traffic of of Thai contemporary art,” says art dealer Lyla Phimanrat. She owns trucks and tuk-tuks into slivers of colour. The first exhibition is semi- Lyla Gallery in Chiang Mai, which closed in July due to landlord permanent, showing the collection of contemporary Thai art owned disputes, though she plans to reopen the gallery in Bangkok next year. by a genteel family comprising the late Patsri Bunnag, her son Eric In Thailand, private initiative trumps government involvement in Bunnag Booth and her French husband, Jean-Michel Beurdeley, who the arts, and Maiiam is the most glamorous and significant example have decided to share their collection with the wider public. Bunnag of the former. Its cofounder Jean-Michel Beurdeley says the family was from an aristocratic Thai-Persian family whose ancestors played spent a seven-figure sum in US dollars on acquiring and renovating important roles in Siamese politics and public life. Her son is the assis- the warehouse in which it is housed. “If we can break even, we will tant managing director of Jim Thompson – The Thai Silk Company, a be the happiest people in the world,” he says. The museum charges historic Thai textiles firm. He is also a trustee of the nonprofit James a 150-baht entry fee (about £3). HW Thompson Foundation, which among several things oversees Thailand has no national collection of contemporary art, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, an important contempo- most of the country’s most important artworks are in private hands rary art space. About 70 works from the Bunnag family collection, – in the holdings of banks and local and regional collectors, as well as amassed over 30 years, are on show on overseas museums. Besides Maiiam, Maiiam’s second floor. They include the only domestic public space to The combination of a reticent A-lister’s works from pioneers such as Montien retrospective and the open-door showcase see a permanent show of Thai art is Boonma, Kamin Lertchaiprasert and the Museum of Contemporary Art in of an expensive private collection Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, as well as Bangkok, which as Thai artists note the top rung of the country’s contemisn’t really contemporary but more has galvanised the local art scene modern in focus. In Phimanrat’s charporary practitioners, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pinaree Sanpitak and Navin Rawanchaikul. acterisation, “It’s all neo-Buddhist, neo-Thai stuff.” The second show – buzzier – is the first major Thai retrospective of Why choose Chiang Mai as the location for such an important video installations and short films by the Palme d’Or-winning director, museum? Beurdeley points out that the city, Thailand’s second largest, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is based in Chiang Mai. Lauded has a rich and long cultural heritage. The palindromic Maiiam means abroad, the international arthouse film hero and artist has been histor- ‘brand new’ in Thai, and also refers to Chiang Mai’s name, which ically averse to showing in his home country due to censorship. His means ‘new city’. And yet Chiang Mai is actually old – older indeed previous feature films, such as Blissfully Yours (2002) and Syndromes and than Bangkok, which rose up during the eighteenth century. Chiang a Century (2006), had cuts; the former for explicit sex, and the latter Mai was built in 1296 as the capital city of the Lanna Kingdom, an for scenes of ‘improper’ conduct by monks, such as playing with a ancient empire that covered most of what we now know as northern Frisbee and guitar. Little surprise that he has point-blank refused to Thailand. Historic moats and walls surrounding this old capital still submit his latest work, Cemetery of Splendour (2015), to the censor board, survive in the city. After centuries of fighting, the Lanna Kingdom which resulted in the film having no domestic release. It has been was dissolved and condensed into a 20,000sqkm area centred around warmly received overseas. In England, Weerasethakul is also having Chiang Mai. It was only in 1932 that the Chiang Mai area became a moment: Tate Modern is showing his eight-channel video installa- a province of Siam, which became known as Thailand in 1949. tion Primitive (2009) in the Tanks’ display, and also honoured him with More than that, Chiang Mai, cooler in climate, rich in artistry dating an all-night miniretrospective showing of his films. Back in Chiang back to the temples, textiles and woodworking of the ancient Lanna Mai, his latest exhibition, The Serenity of Madness, is a full-scale career years, cheaper to live (and play) in, is also home to many Thai artists, survey and a glorious homecoming, and it has accordingly provoked who, according to Serenity of Madness curator Gaweewong, are also “the the kind of hyperventilation that only the return of a glamorous most interesting ones”. Proud Chiang Mai-ers include Weerasethakul, prodigal son can excite (see the exhibition review in the Art Reviewed who settled here from Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand. Others are section of this issue). The exhibition features early experimental Rawanchaikul, whose Bollywood billboard-influenced works explore shorts from his student days in the School of the his Thai-Indian identity; New York-based relapreceding pages Facade of Maiiam Contemporary Art Institute of Chicago, scripts, video diaries, as tional aesthetics king Tiravanija, probably best Art Museum, designed by Allzone, Bangkok, well as newer, ghostly hologrammic video instalknown for converting a gallery into a kitchen and and inspired by mirror-mosaic temple walls lations projected on glass screens. In Maiiam, giving away rice and Thai curry for free (Untitled in Chiang Mai. Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai

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top Enlighten in the dark, a printing collection by various artists at C.A.P Studio, on view during Galleries Night Chiang Mai, January 2016. Courtesy Thailand Creative and Design Center, Chiang Mai above Structures at the Land Foundation, Chiang Mai. Courtesy the Land Foundation

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(Free), 1993); and Lertchaiprasert, an established artist and art teacher Small, wall-less houses built by visiting artists and architects form a who creates Buddhist-inflected sculpture and painting in a repetitive, shabby, mismatched eco-resort, but over the years most of these strucritualistic mode. He is next in line for the solo treatment in Maiiam. tures have been overtaken by termites, and only a very intrepid artist What Chiang Mai has lacked, Gaweewong adds, is an institution, would consider serious residence in any of them. Other props of past and Maiiam is the answer. “That’s why Maiiam is important. It’s a place projects include an undulating steel structure from Philippe Parreno’s for them [Chiang Mai artists] to show at home before they go abroad.” 11-minute video filmed in Chiang Mai called The Boy from Mars (2003), The city itself is filled with artist studios and small galleries, many now functioning as a shed, as well as Danish collective SUPERFLEX’s of which are hybrid hipster hangouts with cutesy cafés and shops Supergas structure, designed to convert cow dung into cooking gas, attached. A landmark is the six-year-old Gallery Seescape, owned by which broke down after one year. The Land Foundation is still going artist Torlarp Larpjaroensook. His gallery, situated in the fashionable strong, though: at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, it organised a fundNimman neighbourhood, sells his own work and shows local and raiser to support the next ten years of activities. And artists who want to international artists, and includes a shop and café. Last year he also look for inspiration, meditate and/or work with local farming commuopened Hern Gallery, which focuses on more affordable and accessible nities are always welcome to apply to stay on the premises. “We almost never say no,” says the manager, Sephapong Kirativonokamchon. pieces aimed at the new collector. Disaphol Chansiri, a Bangkok-based law professor and one of Whether the opening of Maiiam will unify Chiang Mai’s scattered Thailand’s most important private collectors, finds Chiang Mai’s art energies remains to be seen. But it has given some other private collecscene “very interesting, very charming”, despite its lack of big-name tors an incentive to build their own museums, says Chiang Mai-borngalleries. “When I go, I visit the student shows, artist studios and local and-bred artist Sutthirat Supaparinya. Together with three other galleries. You won’t be able to find these works in Bangkok. Personally artists, she runs Chiang Mai Art Conversation (CAC), a three-year-old I love it.” Most of the art students come from Chiang Mai University’s collective that aims to consolidate information about the city’s art fine arts faculty, and the university also has its own art museum. The spaces into a central database. Besides operating a website, the voluncurrent show is a retrospective of painter Udomsak Krisanamis, who teer-run CAC issued the first Chiang Mai Art Map and coordinated the is known for dense, abstract canvases that recall twinkling cityscapes first gallery crawl, Galleries Night Chiang Mai, in January this year. at night, and mixed-media collages that utilise anything from Thai Supaparinya says that a Thai hotelier wants to build a museum to noodles to bubble wrap. Based in New York during the 1990s, the showcase his print collection, and a Thai-American couple based in Bangkok-born artist had attained a degree of international recog- Bangkok is constructing a museum in the mountains to feature their nition, and this is yet another homeThai and Southeast Asian art collection. Details remain sketchy, and coming show, as it is the artist’s first ‘When I go, I visit the student shows, artexhibition in Thailand in ten years. ist studios and local galleries. You won’t both parties are reticent on contact. Chansiri, who has been collecting for By Supaparinya’s count, the numbe able to find these works in Bangkok’ 20 years, owns two private boutique art ber of art spaces, including residency spaces in Bangkok and Chiang Mai to showcase parts of his collection; programmes, has grown over the years, despite a few closures, and these are open by appointment only. The Chiang Mai space, called DC totals about 60 today. “Even two or three of the hotels have galleries Collection Chiang Mai, is housed in a former royal residence – the inside now. In Chiang Mai, this never used to happen.” most recent show was of work by Rawanchaikul. Recently Chansiri Maiiam may have provided a shot of adrenaline to the private has bought up some shop-houses in front of his current property, and museum scene, but what about its impact on artists? Artist Paphonsak is in discussions to turn the ground-floor area of these houses, where La-or, who is the vice-chairman of the Land Foundation, says the musethe ceilings are high, into a sculpture space. um’s future direction is unclear. “Will it focus on established Thai Besides local galleries, Chiang Mai has an organic though skittish artists only, or will the younger generation have a chance?” he asks. history of nonprofit community projects that have come and gone, Maiiam’s other cofounder, Booth, says that beyond the led by several senior influencer artists. In the early 1990s, there was Lertchaiprasert show, there are no plans, although several interthe Chiang Mai Social Installation Project, led by Montien Boonma, national curators have approached him during the opening with Uthit Atimana and Mit Jai Inn. With the help of art students at Chiang enquiries. He wants to dedicate the temporary gallery downstairs Mai University (among them most notably Rawanchaikul and Kosit to Thai and international artists, while the showcase of his private Juntaratip), the group initiated many outdoor projects in unconven- collection upstairs will remain semipermanent. He adds that Maiiam tional spaces as a response to the lack of proper gallery infrastructure. will not hire an in-house curator or programme director, but will They held talks, performances and events in temples, in cemeteries work with different parties on a project-by-project basis. and on streets along canals. During the early 2000s, key figures were But the mood is definitely sanguine so far. The museum is, without Lertchaiprasert and Tiravanija. Lertchaiprasert ran the experimental doing much PR, receiving interest from a wide spectrum of parties. art space Umong Sippadhamma from 2002 to 2005, and for five years, “I just hosted a team from a magazine called Honeymoon + Travel,” until 2015, he ran the 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit, Booth says with a chuckle. a gallery featuring his own work and his art collection housed in Supaparinya says she saw another unexpected visitor: a monk. seven shipping containers. In 2004, together with Tiravanija and “He bought a ticket! I was so excited, I had to take a picture.” ar Uthit Atimana, he also founded the Land Foundation, a 12,800sqm utopic rural retreat for artists 20 minutes outside of Chiang Mai. Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness, When ArtReview visited, the idyllic spot, filled with rice fields, vegethe inaugural exhibition of Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, is on view at Para Site, Hong Kong, through 27 November table farms and several ponds, was peaceful and mostly deserted.

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20 — An Exhibition in Three Acts Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Celebration ? Realife Revisited (detail), 1972–2000, Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Foto: Stefan Altenburger, Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London

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October 15, 2016 until February 5, 2017 Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zürich migrosmuseum.ch www.migros-culture-percentage.ch

AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE

Roy Lichtenstein

This Must Be the Place

GALERIA

HELGA DE ALVEAR

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

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Screenprint on lanaquarelle watercolour paper. Numbered in pencil, blind stamp (Roy Lichtenstein 1965 / Roy Lichtenstein Foundation reprint 2002).

Santiago Sierra 25 Veteranos. 2205 Crímenes de Estado

17 de noviembre de 2016 — 4 de febrero de 2017

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Edition of 300. Size 62.9cm x 45.2cm. Print is unframed and unmounted. £2,250 from the National Galleries of Scotland online shop

CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIÓN HELGA DE ALVEAR Idiosincrasia Las anchoas sueñan con panteón de aceituna

Un proyecto de Chus Martínez 29 de abril de 2016 — 9 de abril de 2017

Jean-Marc Bustamante Espacios transitorios 22 de enero de 2016 — 14 de febrero de 2017 Cáceres, España Courtesy of Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein National Galleries of Scotland Charity No. SC003728

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Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski

With lyrics from their band Das Hund and photography from before and after this year’s Glastonbury Festival – during which Britain voted to leave the EU – Levack and Lewandowski capture the sweep from summer solstice and a strawberry moon to the widespread despondence and gloom among festivalgoers returning home to Brexit October 2016

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15 Sept –— 27 Nov 2016

#TomEllis FREE EXHIBITION

THE MIDDLE

Tom Ellis at the Wallace Collection

Image courtesy The Estate of Charlotte Posenenske and Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin

Giuseppe Gabellone Siobhán Hapaska Charlotte Posenenske The Mobility of Facts 30th September – 17th December

John Akomfrah Neïl Beloufa Amy Franceschini / Futurefarmers Lamia Joreige Nástio Mosquito Bedwyr Williams #ArtesMundi7 Mynediad am ddim | Admission free

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21/10/2016 – 26/02/2017 Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd a Chapter National Museum Cardiff & Chapter

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Art Reviewed

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Tal R and Mamma Andersson Svanesang Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen 24 August – 22 October ‘Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.’ Let us also apply Lord Byron’s aphorism to the present collaboration between Mamma Andersson and Tal R. Instead of letters, however, the painters exchanged source imagery – Polaroids and magazine cuttings – that each collects to aid their work. Initially this back-and-forth was accomplished through studio visits; later they corresponded by post, swapping further images. The solitude of the studio thus invaded, the act of painting expanded to become one of collaboration. The result of this artistic parlour-game is an exhibition in which visual motifs appear and reappear across a room of figurative and semifigurative sketches, a further two galleries of paintings and a corridorlike space in which four vitrines contain some of the source images and accompanying letters (a second show, with the same title, Svanesang, or ‘Swansong’, but composed only of paintings, runs concurrently at Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm). Yet while the motifs are shared, Andersson and Tal R’s styles are very different, both in terms of painterly technique and, let us say, ‘emotional temperament’. Take, for example, a scene featuring a desk. A pair of reading glasses lies prominently next to a sketchpad and fine brush; a vase rests on the furthest edge between a pile of books and an image, a postcard perhaps, of Mary and her companions lamenting a crucified Christ. This is Andersson’s Påsk / Easter (all works 2016). Her use of pale colours in depicting the deskbound papers contrasts with the jet-black background, from which the dark green of the foliage in the vase is almost indis-

tinguishable. In each quarter of the canvas, there’s a small flash of vibrancy amid this otherwise monochromatic wash: the tortoiseshell-framed spectacles at bottom left, the red-handled brush to bottom right, the blue and red books above, the red dress of one of the biblical figures. The same scene – almost – is painted by Tal R. His rusty autumnal palette, tinting the artist’s characteristically hard, well-defined and blocky forms, shows the desk, the glasses, the vase. The latter, however, contains a much brighter floral arrangement; moreover, Andersson’s sketchbook and fine brush morphs, in Tal R’s hands, into a notepad and pencil. And there’s no photograph of the Holy Mother and her son, though perhaps there is a smartphone in the bottom-right corner. Swans are a recurring motif in both artists’ work (hence the exhibition title). The two waterbirds in Andersson’s Weekend face away from each other in a green lagoon: it’s a romantic scene – more black sky and murkiness – inviting melancholia while in front of it. In contrast Tal R eschews the immersive detailing of Andersson’s mode of painting. Consequently a work such as Svaner om natten (Swans at Night), almost ideogramlike in its figurative simplicity, is far quicker for the viewer to process. A dozen swan silhouettes, layered below what might be a group of out-of-proportion bulrushes and a row of boxy buildings to the top of the image, are deployed for Matissean patterning (which might either go towards figuration or abstraction) rather than realistic scene setting. All of this is a lesson in the nuts and bolts of painting, and in how both artists use real

facing page, top Tal R, Glassögon, 2016, pigment and rabbit glue on canvas, 175 × 203 cm. Courtesy Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, and Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm

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life as a starting point for something more beguiling. If this was all that was in play, however, the show might be a tad self-indulgent. In bringing each other into their studios, Andersson and Tal R have invited us along to see, and compare, the mechanisms of their artmaking. Founded on the assumption that we’re interested in seeing more than the finished works, this might be likened to an episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio (1994–), in which some Hollywood type waffles on about their ‘craft’ (when all we want, as director D.W. Griffith once noted, is a girl and a gun). Happily, however, Andersson and Tal R don’t let the image-exchange routine occupy the whole show: the duo leave the conceit in the vitrines and sketches, and move on from there. Each artist tackles images that the other doesn’t (or, as they noted in an accompanying catalogue interview, can’t: some imagery that worked for one was impossible for the other to do justice to, and duly abandoned). Tal R’s Deaf Institute, for example, a garden with tables in front of a municipal building, contains a floating eye in the middle of the work: a stroke of weirdness that Andersson, one feels, would never have made. Likewise, one of the best, and simplest, works in the show is the latter’s Vintergatan / Blind Alley. It’s of a brooding empty urban space. A long shadow is cast across it from the tall buildings on the left. A series of doors with brick arches line this weedy street. Here is a painting that doesn’t need any conceptual embellishment: beautiful and sad, it just invites you to sit and look. Oliver Basciano

facing page, bottom Mamma Andersson, Påsk / Easter, 2016, oil and acrylic on panel, 99 × 125 cm. Courtesy Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, and Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm

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Mario García Torres An Arrival Tale TBA21, Vienna 16 June – 20 November I’ve always found it a bad idea to read exhibition materials before seeing work, but the introductory wall signage at Mario García Torres’s An Arrival Tale at TBA21 in Vienna is large, trilingual and almost impossible to overlook. Viewers immediately learn that the show was ‘conceived in light of’ TBA21’s yearlong commitment to issues of migration and displacement (which kicked off with Olafur Eliasson’s Green Light refugee-workshop project earlier this year and explains the Arabic translation here). The institution apparently conducted dialogues with refugees in Vienna in developing the exhibition, which ‘detaches’ works by García Torres already present in TBA21’s collection from their original contexts, and, adding a recently commissioned work, offers the whole up for ‘reinscription’. The Mexico-born artist’s oeuvre is perhaps especially conducive to reframing. García Torres has long played with histories: immersions in the works and minds of creative predecessors – like Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti, German maverick Martin Kippenberger or eccentric player-piano composer Conlon Nancarrow – in bodies of research that may take years to unfold: various work series address memory and nostalgia; they create and overwrite narratives. The low-lit exhibition’s first hall fittingly begins with Share-e Nau Wanderings (A Film Treatment) (2006), 19 short faxes from García Torres to a deceased Boetti, describing the former’s fictional journey to Afghanistan in late 2001 (Boetti, during the 1970s, lived

in Kabul, where he became a hotelier). In them, García Torres outlines not only (fictional) logistical details but also the (real) heated post-9/11 political situation. Projected onto a large screen nearby is the new commission, The Way They Looked at Each Other (2016) – a narrated slideshow of photographs that attempts to deconstruct the events of 8 April 2003, when an American strike killed two journalists standing on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (the piece is a visual extension of a 2012 essay by García Torres). The hypnotic, dispassionate narration (in English, with Arabic subtitles) – a fascinating 38 minutes for someone like me, who straddles mainstream journalism and art – traces the events of 2003 based on images taken by investigators in 2011, illuminating the impossibility of reenacting the past, but also musing on photography’s ability, or inability, to portray reality. The next hall features the expansive installation Sounds Like Isolation to Me; commissioned in 2014 for the 8th Berlin Biennale, it traces Nancarrow’s solo creative production through musical scores, letters and artefacts in vitrines, as well as an eerily clicking sculptural sound piece by composer Nils Frahm. Nancarrow, a communist, emigrated from the US to Mexico in 1940 to escape his home country’s hostility to his political affiliations, his self-imposed exile punctuated by communication with contemporaries like John Cage. And in the final black-box space, the film Tea (2012) shows García Torres’s actual trip to

An Arrival Tale, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Anders Sune Berg / T BA21, Vienna. Courtesy the artist

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Afghanistan in 2011 (a decade after the fictional one). A culmination of the artist’s research on Boetti as well as a commission for Documenta 13, the film documents how, with the help of locals, he reconstructed Boetti’s One Hotel. A fictionalised trip becomes overlaid with reality. Curators and institutions often (maybe even always) open artworks to reinscription; recontextualisation is central to Conceptualism and Postmodernism. But while the individual works in An Arrival Tale are all more or less intriguing explorations of displacement and cultural translations, so many stories, locations and narrative threads weave through this show that the primary notion of ‘arrival’ gets lost in a tangle. The handily explained connection to the current refugee crisis also seems forced or imposed (as it did in the Green Light exhibition, but that’s another story) – the ‘performers’ walking through the show and lying on the floor on my first visit were, apparently, migrants and asylum seekers acting as guides, narrators and interlocutors; these roles were lost on me. As García Torres himself states: ‘An Arrival Tale… pretends to use a number of my works from the TBA21 collection to argue that the space of arrival, the space where one can reinvent oneself, could be an interesting one, and one that has historically been a space to thrive.’ Pretends? Connecting the artist’s abstractions and fictions to a concrete reality that’s far from thriving in the name of institutional social consciousness feels, at this juncture, misguided. Kimberly Bradley

Luc Tuymans Glasses Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp 13 May –18 September When Luc Tuymans was invited to make a selection of his portraits for a show in the Menil Collection in Houston in 2013, he realised that three-quarters of these paintings depict people with spectacles. Hence, the Belgian painter writes in a foreword to this show’s visitor’s guide, he proposed an exhibition on that subject to the collection’s then-director, Josef Helfenstein, who was apparently unexcited by the idea and set it aside. Indeed, it is a rather surprising proposal – on a subject that is both banal and anecdotal – from an artist who uses painting as a vehicle to explore his subject matter in coherent conceptual series – whether tackling Belgian colonialism (Mwana Kitoko, 2000), Flemish nationalism (Heimat, 1995), the Bush administration (Proper, 2005) or the financial crisis (Corporate, 2010). But never one to give up, Tuymans decided to realise this idea when the city museum in his hometown invited him to put on a solo show (one that will travel, in reduced form, to London’s National Portrait Gallery) to celebrate the MAS’s fifth birthday. And the apparently humdrum theme turns out to be an interesting angle to deliver a restricted

– 19 paintings (and two video clips) – yet coherent overview of the artist’s practice of almost four decades. With Glasses, Tuymans once again proves that he is, better than anyone, a master in curating his own work, combining paintings from various series in order to create new associations and meanings. Take Portrait (2000), which depicts an older woman wearing (of course) glasses, their dark frames strongly contrasting with her pale skin, which almost seems to disappear into the white background, characteristic of Tuymans’s subdued, anaemic palette. As is often the case, the work was based on found imagery, in this case a mourning-card photograph found on the street. Both paintings next to it, portraits of older bespectacled men, seem to come from the same series, forming a kind of triptych. The friendly smiling man in The Heritage VI (1996), the third painting, is not a deceased neighbour or uncle, however, but Joseph Milteer, a KKK chapter president. With this work, as with many others in his oeuvre, Tuymans illustrates the treachery of images, a crucial aspect of his practice and one he further reinforces through his hanging.

Sometimes Tuymans also evokes a portrait without actually portraying people. Pink Glasses (2001), more a still life than a portrait, depicts an abandoned pair of girl’s glasses, evoking the chilly feeling of unease and foreboding that the artist manages to suggest so well in his work in general. Rear Mirror (1986), Window (2004) and Idol (after work by Carla Arocha) (2005) deal with the notion of vision, the gaze or – the exact opposite – not seeing. Window displays a curtain with barely distinguishable shapes behind it, Idol a pictorial rendering of an art installation with Plexiglas discs whose lenses have a reflecting quality, like glasses themselves. One of the final works in the show is Iphone (2008), a blurred selfie of the artist, expressing a pixelated abstraction or Pointillism of the digital epoch. Though the painting fits within this ensemble, the idea is better than its pictorial rendering, indicating that Tuymans’s method also has its risks: that while some pieces might be conceptually convincing and necessary within a series, they are less strong in their own right; or that the whole is indeed sometimes greater than its parts. Sam Steverlynck

Portrait, 2000, 67 × 39 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London

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Mika Rottenberg Palais de Tokyo, Paris 23 June – 11 September In the middle of Mika Rottenberg’s meandering show at Palais de Tokyo, Ponytail (Black) (2016), a long, mechanically flipping, raven-coloured lock of human hair, springs from a mysterious hole that pierces a wall at head height. While this view is about as racy as a horse’s tail swatting flies, the notion of a female jogger frantically bouncing in some secret room constructed behind it naturally comes to mind. Around the corner adjacent to the wall sculpture, the four rectangular windows of Ceiling Fan Composition #2 (2016) open onto the hitherto hidden space. It is empty and split in half by a dropped ceiling, two spinning fans in the section above and two below. Too low and intricate for anybody to stand inside, this inaccessible installation makes the idea of an immured runner all the more twisted. She’d risk getting chopped by the motored blades. Rottenberg’s surrealistic works abound with partitioned-off spaces, which accommodate absurd human tasks that spiral into uncanny chains of events. Indeed, the Argentine video artist’s characters – often played by people who do similar jobs in real life – contribute to the most ludicrous assembly lines, within which physical exertion almost never produces tangible goods, instead seeming to end in smoke. For example, the peephole of the video installation Fried Sweat (2008) lets prying viewers witness an evanescent grotesquery, staging a fiery trio’s unusual attempt to produce human

steam. Next to a bodybuilder, whose dripping sweat boils over a hot frying pan, a martial artist breaks a thick pile of wooden boards bare-handed and a contortionist suddenly vanishes into thin air. Work-related accidents, the tragic vaporous conclusion of this video reminds us, happen in the realm of art too. In the installation Seven (Sculpture Variant) (2011–16), realised in collaboration with Jon Kessler, the sweat of seven performers is collected inside a glass sauna, the latter heated by the pedalling of a stationary bicycle once a month during the show’s run. Next to the equipment, two monitors document the fantastic production of ‘chakra juice’, supposedly out of the performers’ perspiration. The first presents a mad scientist distilling the bodily essence, which is then sent to Botswana, where the members of a rural community – as portrayed in the second video – cautiously pour it into the arid ground of a desert. The Disneyesque cartoon spectacle of a splashy rainbow arising and two singing birds ensues. The human body isn’t the only matter that deliquesces in Rottenberg’s bizarre aesthetics. Architecture melts too, in the video Bowls Balls Souls Holes (2014), which orchestrates a liquefied-snowball effect. Under a full moon, water from an air conditioner in a gloomy hotel room leaks through a crumbling ceiling tile onto a dozy woman sitting in a bingo hall, which awakens her abruptly. Frowning to signal her

displeasure, she clenches her fists tight, gathers psychokinetic superpowers and triggers global warming. Glimpses of thawing sea ice superimpose over her angry face before she nods off again. During the exhibition, the three air-conditioning units of AC Trio (2016) also drip onto burning stoves, next to which tiny houseplants are slowly doomed to wither right under the viewers’ noses. In the video NoNoseKnows (2015), a blue-collar Amazon doesn’t bother watering the wilting plants decorating the interminable mazelike entryway of a factory, whereas once she reaches her office she is prompted to spray two feet curiously emerging from a basin. The pair belongs to one of many Chinese women sorting pearls on an assembly line below, while the former’s labour consists of inhaling pollen from bouquets to trigger an allergic reaction. Spasmodic sneezes eventually make her expel an entire menu of noodle dishes, which pile up on her desk. Finally, in the video Squeeze (2010), the conjoined effort of Mexican farmers, Indian pickers and Chinese masseuses produces a sculpture out of mashed-up lettuces, natural rubber and cosmetic tins. A shipping order, taped on a wall further into the exhibition, indicates that Rottenberg had this object consigned offshore, ‘to be stored in perpetuity’, thus protecting the real hard work that went into it from conceptual speculation. Isn’t art the most invaluable human production? Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Mika Rottenberg in collaboration with Jon Kessler, Seven (Sculpture Variant), 2011–16 (installation view). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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The Great Animal Orchestra Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris 2 July – 8 January The Great Animal Orchestra (2016), the work that gives this exhibition its name, is a series of soundscapes of animal habitats recorded by American musician and ecologist Bernie Krause, accompanied by a visual installation constructed by London-based collaborative artist practice United Visual Artists. It’s high in production value (UVA has produced visuals for the likes of the band Massive Attack and Paris’s Opéra Garnier), with immersive videos by filmmakers Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret that span three walls and measure the different frequencies in megahertz of animal sounds recorded by Krause in different locations, from the Amazon to the oceans and the Yukon Delta. The colourful representation looks like the heartbeat of the ecosystems, but does nothing beyond illustrating the data collected by Krause over 40 years, an impressive yet unobtrusive visual to keep the viewer’s eyes interested while they listen. The rest of the show is curated around this piece. Upstairs, the glass-encased galleries have been handed over to architects Gabriela Carrillo + Mauricio Rocha, who built a set for the presentation of nine artists’ works, while in the level below is a series of videos of plankton accompanied by music from composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. The selection criterion for the pieces populating the upper galleries follows a simplistic thematic: animals. There are anthropomorphic animals playing music in nature in

the paintings of Pierre Bodo (Concert de la sape, 2006) and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos of wolves and condors from 1994. There are also recordings produced at Cornell University’s lab for ornithology, called ‘The Artistic Birds’. At the entrance to the exhibition is White Tone, a 2016 work by Cai Guo-Qiang, whose recurrent method of painting using gunpowder (Cartier shows it alongside a video documenting the work’s making) is well placed in this exhibition: his massive paper drawing mounted on the wall brings to mind the cave paintings of Lascaux, a historical instance of human beings trying to understand the world of animals. Another exception is the installation by Agnès Varda, who presents a shack in the museum’s garden (itself a conservation project and an amazing resource that, in an exhibition about the natural world, could have been used more). Titled La Cabane du chat (The Cat’s Cabin, 2006), it is a memorial to a family cat, and serves also as a viewing spot for a video about said pet, Le Tombeau de Zgougou (Zgougou’s Grave, 2016). Varda’s video installation is in the Cartier Foundation collection, which, along with the two commissions – Cai’s work, and Adriana Varejão’s series of acrylic tiles with hand-painted images of birds – are successful examples of the foundation’s work with artists, yet The Great Animal Orchestra brings up a simple question: why does a contemporary art foundation put

on an exhibition with so few artworks among the exhibits? Yes, videos of plankton are quite beautiful. Yes, the animal orchestra installation is full of exhibitiongoers (I would argue that its popularity relates to the fact that we’ve commodified these sounds as sound-based sleeping aids that replicate white noise in the form of sounds of birds or the forest). There is a rich visual language to nature, but art isn’t there just to show that something is naturally beautiful, or needs protection or attention. Yes, the world is magical and beautiful, and bioluminescence is amazing, but art could do more than draw attention to, than simply illustrate something, and here that ‘more’ is sorely missing: new inquiries and ideas, the complexity that is built into the process of us, human beings, looking into the animal world as part of a construct – the orchestra – that is associated with modernity. What does it mean for us to look at these separate ecosystems and analyse them in human terms? The plankton videos, the animal orchestra, the paintings of animals playing music in nature, do not discuss these questions: they just put them on view. Maybe the many kids in this exhibition – which is pegged as a ‘family-friendly experience’ on the foundation’s website – don’t know what is missing. Maybe they don’t know they deserve more. Orit Gat

The Great Animal Orchestra, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris

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Thomas Struth Nature & Politics Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 11 June – 18 September Thomas Struth’s lists of works read like litanies of exotic, farflung locations. Recently, the farflung has shaded into the farfetched as he has focused on the more outlandish end of the spectrum of human ingenuity: space shuttles, particle accelerators, plasma labs, vacuum chambers, as well as equally formidable structures associated with less abstruse endeavours, such as the edifices of twentieth-century industrial manufacture (shades here of the work of Struth’s mentors, Bernd and Hilla Becher) and Disneyland’s simulacra of ‘wonders of the world’. The first wave of this series, exhibited at the end of Struth’s retrospective at K20 in Düsseldorf in 2011, looked like an artist succumbing to his inner nerd. But viewed in greater depth and contextualised by earlier work – the exhibition consists of 38 photographs from as far back as the late 1970s – the true subject appears to be how human inventions have attained the complexity, and the threat, of natural phenomena. Cinema, Anaheim, California (2013) tracks the foreshortened ellipse of what I take to be a screen, angled to a cliff face of chrome benches. The vertiginous angles, crystalline detail – Struth uses exceptionally large-format film – and total man-madeness of the subject is consistent with the urban canyons of his early black-and-white cityscapes. Struth can turn a design particular into a compositional pivot.

The most distant highrise in Shinju-ku, Tokyo (1986) curves towards earth as if nature were asserting itself among strict horizontals. Ulsan 1, Ulsan (2010) plots a concatenation of peppermint roofs, co-opting this contingent detail as a pictorial key, with the proviso that nothing artificial is truly contingent. But these are scene setters. Recent pictures register a staggered incomprehension at what they depict. The titles are locationally precise but technologically ambiguous. Measuring, HelmholtzZentrum, Berlin (2012) scans a tangle of cables, tanks, foil seals and plug-in units, as if a sci-fi set designer had spiralled out of control. That I have no idea of the correct names of any of this stuff is the point. The scale (242 × 337 cm) and foregrounded detail, overwhelming and impenetrable, are consistent with Struth’s Paradise pictures of dense rainforest undergrowth from the 1990s and 2000s. The common factor is an excess of detail resolving as abstraction. We are confronted with so much inscrutable information that it cancels itself out, consolidating a structuralist sign for our distance from an image and, by extension, from the world it depicts. Everything signifies, but we cannot break it down into comprehensible units. Like the earlier forest thickets, the streams of cables recall the enamel skeins of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Pictures of Disneyland associate the perplexity of this perceptual overload with the

Research Vehicle, Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, 2014, inkjet print, 146 × 197 cm. © and courtesy the artist

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deceptiveness of artifice – both that of the spectacle and the spectacular image recording it. I reflexively assumed that the trees on the banks of a lifesize mountain, rising out of a blue lagoon, must also be fake in order to stabilise a sliding scale between artifice and nature by which to read the image; but the terms ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ have lost their usual meaning here. Again, that blurring doubles as a commentary on photography; how its evidential power can make the artificial real. Struth’s large formats are never gratuitous. They enable a back-and-forth between human detail – such as the graffiti on a lab partition – and a dauntingly inorganic broader view. Although they record the results of human industry, these are largely unpeopled shots. But in the final room, mortality enters the picture in remorseless studies of an operating theatre. There is a Cronenbergian edge to the interface between hard apparatus and vulnerable flesh. The rocky seascape of Seestück, Donghae City (2007) is like a letting-out of breath, but as a symbolic inverse of the huis clos of a steel mill’s dungeon in the German Ruhrgebiet or a halogen-lit NASA hangar, it is also merely a sign for the other, which shows, by contrast, how the obscure complexities of the exhibition’s detail escape the conventional function of photography as a conveyor of the already-signified, which we name and thereby dispose of. Mark Prince

Ryan Gander The Connectivity Suite (and Other Places) Esther Schipper, Berlin 3 June – 27 August What is it about inaccessibility? Our intrigue is piqued by elusiveness: having to peer around a billowing grey curtain at what lies behind; not quite being able to place that smell (woody, sweet?); desperately craning our necks to catch a glimpse of the artist’s face, which – other than a mountain-peak beanie hat – is perpetually obscured by those damn flowers. These scenarios, among others, occur in Ryan Gander’s exhibition The Connectivity Suite (and Other Places), enigmatic works willing the viewer to interject their own imagination (fi_l in th_ g_ps). Gander uses narrative devices to create stories, places and characters that materialise in the mind of the viewer. Here, with a deeppile, pebble-grey carpet in one room, and curtains covering the entire walls and column of another, a sterile conference centre is conjured. Blending perfectly with the miseen-scène is the exhibition’s eponymous piece, a four-metre-long, wall-mounted black-andwhite lightbox reminiscent of a slick business directory. But instead of listing floors and their occupants, the backlit writing reproduces subjects and ideas from the artist’s notebook, phrases including ‘money as a measure of success’ appearing in corporate aesthetics. Art and business, Gander suggests, are indivisible – the gallery as corporate firm, art as lucrative product – with the art market remaining a billion-dollar bubble that can sidestep even global economic downturns.

On the opposite wall, the curtains part theatrically to reveal Elevator to Culturefield (all works 2016), comprising a bronze lift door and calling button. Gander’s imaginary art school ‘Culturefield’ is engraved upon the doors, depicted as a Panopticon building surrounded by paradisiacal trees, clouds and balloons – it seems that the Willy Wonka-style elevator might propel you towards this haven. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham originally devised the Panopticon for a prison with a central observation tower; not being able to look into this turret’s tiny windows, inmates could not witness their surveillance and, therefore, self-policed through the impression of constantly being watched. So why apply this model to an art school, supposedly a place unshackled, proffering creativity and freedom? Perhaps because in Culturefield, being watched is not about power or control, but togetherness, sharing and encouragement? Because there, unlike in Tory Britain, we really are ‘all in this together’? Sadly, Gander’s subversive idea is intended to remain imaginary, and therefore, standing at the lift door becomes akin to waiting for Godot, its political agency purely conceptual. Elsewhere, a giant bronze keyring is shaped like a digital number eight, embellished with embossed rectangular cells and lengthily titled The Day To Day Accumulation of Hope, Failure And Ecstasy – Better a Productive Failure Than an Unproductive Success (The Fairfield International).

Also hinting at a fictional space, this relates to Gander’s imaginary character Ernest Hawker (named after Oscar Wilde’s ‘earnest Ernest’), a formerly successful artist who now frequents art events, uninvited, to hawk keychains as a means of remaining connected and relevant. Once holding the ‘keys to success’, Hawker allegorises the fleetingness of popularity and the disposability of people within our capitalist system. Moreover, this is a portrait of the contemporary art scene today as individuals move (are moved?) in and out of the limelight, their hopes, failures and ecstasies the fodder of next day’s gossip. A recurrent theme throughout this exhibition is that of trying to watch something indiscernible or withheld. Gander’s video Portrait Of A Colour Blind Artist Obscured By Flowers epitomises this tendency, continually hiding his face, followed by a sound recording of his daughter recounting what she sees. She wonders whether it’s lonely being an artist, musing that it’s sad that they are ‘most famous after they are dead’. Gander’s brilliance is in his art’s echo of everyday life, the recognisable becoming once removed or estranged as a means of provoking us to reconsider the status quo. Just when you think you’ve got it all worked out, the lift never arrives and you’re left waiting in a lifeless lobby. Surely there’s another way? Gander tempts us to pull back the curtain and try the air vent instead. Louisa Elderton

The Connectivity Suite (and Other Places), 2016 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Johnen Galerie, Berlin

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A World Not Ours Art Space Pythagorion, Samos 5 August – 15 October Many will remember Ai Weiwei’s controversial stunt last January, when, freshly arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos, he published a photograph of himself posing as Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy who washed up on the Turkish shore a few months before. The widely circulated original photo of Kurdi’s death resulted in unprecedented financial and humanitarian support for those caught up in the European refugee crisis, but Ai’s provocative appropriation was seen by many as exploitative, a move to boost his international activist image. Over on Samos, another Greek island that became a refugee ‘hotspot’ in 2015, A World Not Ours takes a significantly different stance. The curatorial statement points to the ‘opportunism’ of some artists, who ‘profess their engagement by producing facile one-liners and generating publicity for their own sake’. Featuring rather unusual suspects – six off-the-radar artists and a collective, two photojournalists and a group of designers, architects and statisticians – the show borrows its title from a brilliant 2012 documentary by Mahdi Fleifel (a personal and moving tale of life in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon) and offers a more low-key and nuanced perspective on the migrant crisis. There’s an emphasis on personal stories, starting with Marina Gioti’s intimate Agia Marina / Saint Marina (2016), a short film centred on an icon of Saint Marina, salvaged by the artist’s grandparents in their exodus from

Greece during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22). The conflict, which played out during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, caused forced deportations that resulted in one of the largest refugee population movements of the early twentieth century, a history that resonates fairly strongly with the situation on the island today. Elsewhere, activist and self-taught artist Sallie Latch presents sound recordings of interviews she made with refugees and volunteers during her time on the island, which feel more akin to documentary than to art. The stories are poignant, but the individual voices the recordings seek to highlight get lost in a milieu of ‘them’ from being played in a room that also features the work of Yannis Behrakis, a photojournalist who has been reporting on the crisis for Reuters over the past year. Projected as slides in the dark room, and in press clippings from print and online media in a vitrine display, the images seem all too familiar to the viewer, and their inclusion feels somehow like admitting a lack of confidence in art to address the issue. Seductive in its minimalism and resourcefulness is Syrian-Hungarian artist Róza El-Hassan’s Adobe House (Samos) (2016), a costeffective and ecofriendly igloo-shaped house inspired by traditional Syrian architecture, proposed in response to the refugee housing crisis (on my visit I was told more than once by volunteers that while Samos’s refugee camp was designed to house 700 people, more than

Tanja Boukal, Memories of Travels and Dreams, 2016, print on Alu-Dibond, padded fabric on plywood, rubber bands, postcards, 140 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist

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1,300 live there). El-Hassan, like many artists here, has been personally involved in the crisis through working with Syrian refugees, and these personal experiences lend an in-depth quality to the show. Another artist-activist is Austrian Tanja Boukal, who spent several months travelling between Samos and Turkey, retracing the steps of the refugees and underlining the industry that emerged from the crisis: Concrete Izmir (2016), a series of photographs taken in the streets of the Turkish city (and main crossing point to Greece) and printed onto concrete blocks, pictures displays outside tourist shops with mannequins sporting life vests and warm clothes, next to inflatable rafts and buoys. The best work here, though, may well be Exit (2008–16), a data-visualisation chef-d’oeuvre by interdisciplinary design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with architect-artist Laura Kurgan and statistician-artist Mark Hansen, as well as a core team of artists and scientists. Exit is a hypnotic 20-minute watch, featuring sequences of animated maps generated from multiple sources of data, and illustrating the ins and outs of global migration and population displacement, that conveys a very real sense of urgency – one otherwise largely missing from the exhibition. While Ai Weiwei’s ‘raising awareness’ campaign may indeed feel opportunistic, without such punch, A World Not Ours unwittingly points to the limits of what art-as-activism can accomplish within the gallery space. Louise Darblay

Nástio Mosquito T.T.T.–Template Temples of Tenacity Fondazione Prada, Milan 7 July – 25 September Nástio Mosquito’s T.T.T.–Template Temples of Tenacity sees the Angolan artist collaborating once again with fellow artist Vic Pereiró under the name Nastivicious. The duo, founded in 2008 and here working alongside illustrator Ada Diez, have produced a multimedia installation for the ground floor of Fondazione Prada’s Podium. The work, titled WEorNOT (Nativicious’ Temple #01) (2016), turns the space into a kind of secular sanctuary, primarily via large-scale stained-glass windows depicting scenes influenced by proverbs chosen from Spain, Kenya and Angola, alongside more general universal sayings. These proverbs and sayings are written on two sets of long black wooden benches that evoke the aesthetic of modern pews and include, among others, the phrase (apparently by the gay Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos): ‘They tried to bury us – they did not know we were seeds.’ Among the images making up the stainedglass window, the viewer can see a man, a woman and a child standing wearing life jackets and facing a firing squad. The trio, which read as a family, stand on top of two books: Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Other books surrounding them (and the soldiers poised to fire upon them)

include Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BC), Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320). Aside from narrative depictions such as this, other references within the stained glass window include Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, situated above the entrance to the ‘temple’), a figure wearing a virtual reality mask, Viagra pills and a number of boxers, one of whom bears the face of Ronald McDonald. When I spoke to Mosquito, the artist strongly emphasised the personal aspect of the show, as viewers were asked to reflect for themselves on the imagery and its possible meanings. The work, he said, is intended to represent some fundamental behavioural traits of humanity, albeit without passing judgement. Continuing in this vein, visitors are invited to don headphone sets, placed around a podium area (consisting of three steps descending into a central square), and featuring a looped voice recording by Mosquito. The audio starts: “I begin by asking you what is wisdom, what is knowledge, whose wisdom? Whose knowledge? Life, are you contemplating? Are you honouring?” Later, the recording invites the visitor to draw, in books placed alongside the headsets, “whatever you feel this moment celebrates”.

WEorNOT (Nativicious’ Temple #01) appears, perhaps like the religious venues it appropriates, to tread a fine line between a celebration of humanity in all its facets and a condemnation of its worst excesses (seen reflected in images of violence). The flipside of the amoral approach expressed by Mosquito in interviews is of course a condoning of all aspects of human behaviour. During the show’s run, Mosquito collaborated with musician Dijf Sanders and the Golden Guys choir on the performance I Make Love To You. You Make Love To Me. Let Love Have Sex With The Both Of Us (Part 1 – The Gregorian Gospel Vomit) (2016). The performance consisted of two groups of choir singers dressed in white T-shirts, jeans and pumps, converging from opposite sides of the Fondazione Prada’s grounds and singing “Jesus loves me, of this I know / Jesus loves me for the Bible tells me so.” The appropriation of Christian songs within a secular contemporary art context demonstrates Mosquito’s capacity to ask open and genuinely thoughtprovoking questions about the human state in both contradictory and confrontational ways, and without passing specific judgement. Such an approach invites failure, in that it seems impossible to avoid judgement in reality. However, the attempt is bold. Mike Watson

Nastivicious in collaboration with Ada Diez, WEorNOT (Nastivicious’ Temple #01) (detail), 2016, site-specific, mixed-media installation. Courtesy the artists

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Che il vero possa confutare il falso (That the True Might Refute the False) Various venues, Siena 25 June – 16 October In recent years, claims regarding art’s political capacity (or lack thereof) have been made with such frequency that it is all too easy to forget the simple civilising potential of art as a discipline that, like science, aims to unveil the truth. It is in this light that Che il vero possa confutare il falso (That the True Might Refute the False) has brought together several cultural entities and spaces in the Tuscan city of Siena. (The exhibition is an initiative conceived and directed by the Associazione Fuoricampo and the Associazione Culturing in collaboration with the Municipality of Siena.) The show’s title derives from the study De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), by first-century BC poet and philosopher Lucretius, which greatly influenced Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The show occupies three spaces within the historic centre of Siena – a city so betrothed to its past that contemporary art is often overlooked – and showcases works by more than 40 artists from the AGI Verona Collection in the Accademia dei Fisiocritici (Academy of Physiocrats), the Palazzo Pubblico and Santa Maria della Scala. The first of these sites was founded as a centre for the study of physiocracy in 1691 and is now a museum dedicated to natural history, featuring a permanent display of taxidermy models, species of fungi and a whale skeleton, among other curiosities. Within this

context, 18 works by 17 artists position contemporary art alongside the relics of early modern scientific enquiry, which can be seen as representations of the search for truth via positivism. Paolo Inverni’s Feedback #1 (2012) features a specific species of plant reproduced in triplicate on a piece of paper as ink drawing, pigment print and slide projection. These three types of representation throw into question the notion of artistic ‘truth’ (by pointing out what is not true), as they are joined by an example of the plant itself, which, via lighting, casts a literal shadow among the artist-made representations. In an adjacent room, Nico Vascellari’s sculpture Bastard of Disguise (2006) features a long wooden club, sharpened at one end to a fine point and attached at its other to a plaster cast of a gnarled tree branch inlaid with metal studs. The work, which is laid on top of a vitrine, indicates discomfort in the relationship between rationality and nature. The fourteenth-century Palazzo Pubblico, situated on Siena’s famed Piazza del Campo, is the former seat of the republican government of Siena and is now open to tourists who can admire its many frescoes by famous Sienese artists of the epoch (eg Simone Martini), some depicting the virtues of rationality as applied to governance. In this context, Christian Manuel Zanon displays the musical score to Serenata Ines (2015), a piece conceived by the artist with cellist

Mariano Bulligan and performed on the exhibition’s opening night; the score is readable and reproducible only by Bulligan. This work demonstrates the subjective nature of musical recital, which is comparable to the subjective nature of even the most ostensibly objective juridical and political processes. Finally, Santa Maria della Scala features works by 25 artists and two artist duos. The expansive space, now open to the public as a museum, operated from the eleventh to twentieth centuries as a hospital with the philanthropic mission of caring for abandoned children and pilgrims. Its Sala del Pellegrinaio (Room of the Pilgrims), for tired and sick travellers, is now host to – among other works – Adrian Paci’s sculpture Home to go (2001), which features a lifesize stooped man carrying a wooden roof on his back. The figure, realised in resin and covered in marble dust, serves as one of the show’s numerous timely reminders of the importance of the rationalist values that underpin our culture, including a basic tendency towards hospitality and the preservation of life, as here promoted by the medieval Church. Today, as we search high and low for some kind of tangible veracity, this reflection on scientific positivism, the idealised city-state and institutionalised religion serves as a reminder of the long and hard-won heritage of ‘truth’. Mike Watson

Christian Manuel Zanon, Serenata Ines, 2015 (performance view in Cortile del Podestà, Siena, by Mariano Bulligan). Photo: Michele Alberto Sereni. Courtesy the artist

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Daniel Gordon Hand, Select & Invert Layer BolteLang, Zürich 27 August – 8 October The American artist Daniel Gordon, born in 1980, is a little too old to be a digital native; nevertheless, his photographic practice has expanded as the potential of online image sourcing has grown. Now that a Google image search has become an easy reflex, Gordon’s exhibition at BolteLang has an old-fashioned subject, dominated as it is by four large photographic still lifes, as well as two wallpaper installations and nine smaller framed Screen Selections (all works 2016), all generated by processes of digital research, sampling and collage. The largest work, Still Life with Fruit and Ficus, is 151cm tall and 188cm wide, while the other three are in portrait format, all 126cm tall and 101cm wide. Each is the sole document of a set pieced together only for the camera’s eye, in which block colours and graphic scribbles brightly frame traditional still-life subjects the artist found online – emblematic ancient clay vessels and symbolically laden perishable fruit, fish and plants. In the background of the aforementioned work, for example, a jagged pattern frames the upper section of the picture, and similar patterns are printed onto paper wrapped around blocks on which sit various jugs, amphora, two pots holding bouquets, gourds

and fruit. The still lifes offer a lexicon of image presentation and reproduction: some of the objects are propped, cutout flat images; other flat printed things are overshadowed by duplicate prints just behind, destabilising the edges of the object; while some forms – pears or rotting bananas, say – are reconstructed in three dimensions from taped-together prints of pears and bananas. Some shadows fall naturally, confirming the real depth in the staging; others are reworked and reprinted silhouettes – appearing, for example, in Still Life with Oranges, Vessels, and House Plant, as if the shadow were burning through the back of the tableau. The 20 × 25 cm camera print clarifies the imperfections of other graphic manipulation at previous stages of the image’s construction, such as a pixelated Photoshop selection or the lined grain produced by a defec-tive printhead reproduced on paper props. Two gallery walls are covered by repeatpattern wallpaper, Zig-Zag in Black and Zig-Zag in Blue respectively. The blocky broken lines, like a cartoon of disrupted transmission, generate movement behind the superficially calm portrait still lifes. Similar jagged forms are found in Screen Selection 11, in which added

striations of layers picked up by the computer colour selection make the print – while in entirely different media – even more reminiscent of poor television reception. All the Screen Selections, 50 by 40 cm in size, are composed of elements digitally culled during Gordon’s process of photograph construction and are equally nostalgic, albeit tuning in to the early to mid-twentieth century, with cheery, blunt rhythmic shapes being printed onto canvas, then crisply mounted on aluminium. Gordon’s still lifes dominate the show, thanks to their detail and the labour evidently involved in their creation. He does not force comparisons to the umpteen precursors in the genre; he is also clearly indebted to Warhol’s generation and artists such as John Baldessari and John Stezaker who are incisive with scissors and selection. Yet in his construction, dissection and reconstruction of subjects, and the creation of enclosed, fractured and immersive scenes, he makes one think also of the anatomy illustrators of the Renaissance who combined science and memento mori when they flayed and revealed their human subjects. Just as they did, Gordon is peeling back an anatomy that is both familiar and strange. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Still Life with Fish and Oysters, 2016, pigment print on luster paper, 126 × 101 cm. Photo: Thomas Strub. Courtesy the artist and BolteLang, Zürich

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Wolfgang Tillmans Maureen Paley, London 9 June – 7 August Just past the entrance to Maureen Paley, posters bearing the slogans of pro-EU lobby groups spread up the walls. At the end of the corridor ahead, the gallery has opened its backdoor into a courtyard where Wolfgang Tillmans’s own prereferendum poster campaign is on display. In blocky typeface occasionally underlaid with photographs, he reminds us to register and vote; and if we visit the accompanying website, we learn that posters can be ordered as T-shirts or downloaded to print at home. When Tillmans’s exhibition opened, just before Britain voted to leave the EU, the gamble, clearly, was on a show that would become a paean to sloganeering. His slick designs would have testified to the power of art as a marketing tool, but instead they’re now a grim reminder of what happens when rightwing populism takes hold. Yet though Brexit casts a gloomy shadow, the posters are only a peripheral element of this wide-ranging show: across the gallery’s two floors Tillmans oscillates between a range of photography formats,

and deftly moves across size, subject and medium. Downstairs, a giant seascape of the Atlantic Ocean (The State We’re In, A, 2015) sits alongside large-format interior shots of observatories (not yet titled, 2012/2014) and a series of smaller photographs documenting airport security controls (Wako Book 5 / Border Installation, 2016). The latter, featuring pages culled from a limited-edition book of the artist’s photographs, signals the continual process of revisitation that characterises his work; upstairs, he also includes pages from a 2015 special edition of Arena HOMME+ magazine devoted to his photographs of London during the 1980s. Indeed, throughout the exhibition, Tillmans’s carefully constructed installations appear as if they are visual attempts to arrange and take stock of his thoughts, often through their temporary modes of display: in the upper gallery’s backroom, for example, a cluster of 30 photo portraits (portrait grid, 2016) are installed with tape, and feature the occasional famous face – Boy George, Frank Ocean – among anonymous

sitters; alongside them, two large still lifes of plants hang from clips (Utilplanto a, 2011, and Palm tree, sun burst, 2015). In the adjacent room, however, Tillmans moves away from photography in the installation I refuse to be your enemy, 2 (2016). Sheets of blank paper are displayed on glass-topped wooden tables, and these, the press release informs us, are standard office paper sizes from Europe and North America. When considered alongside the rest of the show, I refuse to be your enemy, 2 marks Tillmans’s shift from identity politics to that of borders and nationhood. His focus is drawn outward – to international waters, observatories and airports – but also, simultaneously, he homes in on specific locations: Fire Island (Fire Island, 2015), for example, or Bethnal Green (shit buildings going up left, right and centre, 2014). Here, the internationalism that characterises his work – and the life of the artist himself – emerges as the central subject. Through his macro and micro approach to place, Tillmans now provides an elaborate ode to the ‘glocal’. Dan Udy

The State We’re In, A, 2015, unframed inkjet print, 273 × 410 cm, edition of 1 + 1 AP. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

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Joseph Grigely The Gregory Battcock Archive Marian Goodman Gallery, London 21 June – 29 July In any visit to an exhibition there’s always something of the shifty air of dumpster-diving: sifting through someone else’s stuff, trying to piece together what kind of person, or persona, has moved on from the things that have been left behind. We’re only temporary trespassers, haunted by the absent spectres we conjure from the remains. The Gregory Battcock Archive is doubly haunted, a small room of seven elegant vitrines filled with photographs, letters, scripts, zines, postcards and other ephemera, accompanied by several posters and one small, moody painting on the wall; the ghosts in this room are not only Battcock, a writer and critic who was active in the heyday of 1960s and 70s New York City and was found murdered in 1980, but also Joseph Grigely, the artist who accidentally stumbled upon Battcock’s papers during the 1990s after a storage company closed, and left its clients’ possessions strewn across a floor of Grigely’s studio building. Grigely’s resulting artwork, The Gregory Battcock Archive (2009–16), isn’t so much an archive as a subjective selection from Battcock’s papers – or, more specifically, some stuff that Grigely held on to before the rest was donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art – that has been shown in various places over the past seven years, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and now here in the UK for the first time.

Admittedly, before visiting this show I was familiar with neither figure; Grigely’s work is apparently usually based upon formal arrangements of personal notes, observations and doodles on scraps of paper that have resulted from the deaf artist’s written conversations. This is a different kind of ordering, Grigely piecing together a portrait of a man he never knew directly from salvaged bits and bobs. Unlike most other archivists, Grigely gets his name on the door as the author of the work, but once we’re inside, he is completely eclipsed by the ebullient Battcock, who we first meet, wearing only a white T-shirt and a jock strap, clutching a baseball bat and staring cheerfully over his shoulder out from a photograph. The sense gleaned from the remains presented is that Battcock was almost manically energetic; if he wasn’t writing about the incipient Minimalism, Conceptualism or video art of the time, or writing letters to his local post office to complain about the service, he was taking cruise ships around the world, or cruising in the parks of New York – activities he still also found the time to document in meticulously explicit diaries. In between sombre exhibition leaflets, art-history lecture notes and pictures of a technicolour tanned Battcock in dapper suits, it seems that whether it was art,

food or sex, he was always chasing a new fix with a bright-eyed intensity. An unexpected highlight is simply the mundanity of it, such as a 1972 letter to Lawrence Weiner in which Battcock expresses his interest in writing a feature on the artist, while also asking for the money to do so from Weiner’s gallerist. Weiner’s reply is a cool and unhelpful no, but it’s both depressing and oddly comforting to know that even in the hallowed days of art dematerialising it was still the same old wrangling, finagling artworld. Battcock’s way of dealing with this is evidenced in copies of Trylon & Perisphere, the zine he edited, as well as his contributions to Gay magazine and The New York Review of Sex and Politics, with a personal, candid style of art criticism: catty and social, his own way of exposing the mechanisms of the artworld. It’s both excessive and touching, and a potent reminder of potentials that criticism has yet to fully explore. ‘Do not upstage Professor Battcock!’ it says at the top of one set of typed notes for a talk; Grigely took this to heart, perhaps too much so. But if this archive does bring Battcock back into the present, it is in a manner that is staid and settled – exactly what, as much as I can tell from this far distance, Battcock wouldn’t want to be. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The Gregory Battcock Archive (detail), 2009–16, various inscribed and printed documents from Gregory Battcock's personal archive, printed captions, seven vitrines, five framed posters and one painting, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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Hiraki Sawa Man in Camera Parafin, London 15 July – 17 September Hiraki Sawa’s film Man in Camera (2015–16) comprises footage of a nondescript room, in which the artist can at times be observed working, and onto which have been superimposed animations: ink drawings of ladders spin around on the walls and sticks fall from the ceiling and down between the floorboards. There is a minimal, repetitive soundtrack too: a sparse percussive melody that sounds as though it’s coming from a music box. All in all, one could go a little mad listening to these notes chiming over and over again and watching these visualisations floating around the otherwise unremarkable domestic space of the film. ‘In camera’ means ‘in private’ in Latin legalese, and this work, and the exhibition as a whole, evokes the slight mania and obsession that comes with spending far too much time indoors and on your own, mulling things over. An animated figure attempts to climb a wooden ladder but, though he goes through all the motions, never moves any higher; his line-drawn body is unable to connect with the solid rungs and is caught, like the soundtrack, in a loop that’s going nowhere. Perhaps he is the ‘man in camera’ of the exhibition’s title,

his plight suggesting the difficulty of climbing the ladder to success, the sometimes-illusory nature of progress and the passing of time. Or perhaps the man in camera is the artist, interfering with its workings by drawing onto the images it produces. The 17 works on display from Sawa’s IOTA series (2016) comprise old family photographs as well as found photographs, scanned and reprinted in the size and format of stamps, with perforated edges, then worked over obsessively and meticulously with white ink. Some of the figures from these scenes of everyday life in the past have had their faces crosshatched or their silhouettes filled in with dots; others have been left untouched. Stamps are linked to their places of origin and, for stamp collectors, to particular times, and in these works Sawa returns to former places and times and inks out parts of them. These gestures seem intended to visualise the operation of memory: how we have forgotten the faces and stories of people from our past, or how we can no longer access them because we have lost touch or they are no longer with us. Grasping hands, and more ladders, are sketched over some of these

Man in Camera, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy Parafin, London

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photographs, suggesting the desire to reach towards the past or climb back down into it. It is hard to move backward as well as forward; maybe the animated figure in Man in Camera is trying to climb down the ladder rather than up it. Some of Sawa’s older works are exhibited downstairs – where another percussive melody cycles around to the point of distraction – such as the films Sleeping Machine I and II (2011), which show, respectively, a machine counting numbers down and nighttime footage of East London’s Ridley Road Market. Superimposed onto the latter are animations of cogs rotating and goats trotting along the poles of the market stands, referencing the goat meat sold at the market but, presumably, also operating as stand-ins for the sheep we count to calm our whirring minds and fall asleep. Here, again using loops of music and animation, the artist evokes the feeling of falling asleep and dreaming, just as upstairs he evokes the feeling of daydreaming at work or trying to recollect the past, and suggests how these activities seem to take us to another time and place but then return us right back where we began. Dean Kissick

Mona Hatoum Tate Modern, London 4 May – 21 August In 1975, while Mona Hatoum was briefly visiting London from her native Beirut, the Lebanese Civil War broke out, preventing her from returning home for several years. This is the oft-repeated foundational myth of Hatoum’s career (she now lives and works in London and Berlin), the spur for the core concerns that recur throughout her mostly impressive body of work: ideas to do with violence and displacement, borders and contested territories, and the problematic notion of homeland (a concept from which, being from a Palestinian family exiled in Lebanon, she was, after all, doubly distant). The dominant mood of Hatoum’s works, accordingly, is one of unease, dislocation, danger. Domestic objects appear sinisterly transformed – as in the paired works Paravent (French for ‘folding screen’) and Daybed (both 2008), which take the form of nightmarishly enlarged, horribly sharp-looking cheesegraters; or the scores of metal household-goods, in the installation Homebound (2000), through which an electric current passes, powering bare lightbulbs and emitting a malevolent crackling sound. In Light Sentence (1992), meanwhile, another naked bulb dangles amidst an enclosure of metal-mesh lockers, its mechanical pivoting sending grids of shadows skittering and stretching about the gallery walls, creating

a disorientating, vaguely sickening effect. Such works must be among the most instantly familiar in recent British art, but are no less thrillingly effective for that. Less well known, though, and where this retrospective really comes into its own, are Hatoum’s early performance pieces. Documented through text, photographs and occasional video, and scattered throughout the nonchronological display, these show Hatoum developing her focus on the body – typically her own – as a metaphor for political oppression and isolation: whether trapped inside a transparent container, slathered and slipping in liquid clay (Under Siege, 1982) or lying motionless for hours on a table, wrapped in plastic sheeting and smeared with bloody viscera, as a soundtrack plays politicians’ facile statements about the Lebanese peace process (The Negotiating Table, 1983). Yet perhaps most interesting, in view of her subsequent work, are a pair of film/performance pieces from 1980, made while she was a student, in which live footage of herself and audience members is mixed with prerecorded segments of naked body parts or X-ray imagery, as if the roving camera was somehow capable of seeing through layers of clothing and skin. These themes of surveillance and trespass would culminate in what is arguably Hatoum’s

most captivating work, Corps Étranger (1994). Filmed using an endoscopic camera, it makes for almost literally absorbing viewing, as you peer down into footage projected as a circle on the floor, scanning across her body’s seemingly gigantic surface before plunging deep into glistening, peristaltically pulsing cavities. The mixed sense of invasion and invitation is both discomfiting and compelling, as Hatoum’s figure is portrayed as a kind of hinterland, a liminal territory between known externalities and alien-looking, interior zones. Her work of recent years, unfortunately, mostly doesn’t have the same impact. She still has a great way with small, cogent, ephemeral pieces: little weavings made from hair, or altered paper maps. But on a larger scale, the visual metaphors often tend to come off as rather heavy-handed. Hot Spot III (2009), a giant globe with the country outlines drawn in blazing neon, is a comment on the globalised nature of political conflict. Cellules (2012–13) is an array of prison containers with amoebalike glass globules trapped inside – both are forms of cells, geddit? The same essential ideas, it seems, are being recycled, but to diminishing effect, as Hatoum apparently settles into exploring what for her is that most ironic of concepts – familiar territory. Gabriel Coxhead

Corps Étranger, 1994, video installation with cylindrical wooden structure, 350 × 300 × 300 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. © and courtesy the artist

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Armen Eloyen Garden Timothy Taylor Gallery, London 8 July – 3 September There is no obvious relationship between the works in this exhibition and its horticultural title, but that doesn’t prevent the mind wondering how the three large paintings and seven bronze sculptures might be described if they were an actual garden. A pleasing showcase? A bit on the wild side with some tangled undergrowth at its edges? Definitely a place in which a lot of cross-pollination occurs. In style, the paintings are very different from each other, yet all feature Armenian-born Eloyan’s familiar cast of dark, cartoonish characters – hybrids of half-remembered creatures from cartoon strips and Disney films, mixed with visual nods to Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and the artist’s own imagination. They work as a result of the tension they create, both within themselves and as a group, between playfulness, humour and an underlying potential for violence. A bust-length portrait of a man with a large golden planetoid head, Portrait 1 (all works 2016) is made sinister not only by the long scar that splits the face from forehead, through empty right eye socket,

down to the neck, but also by the just-visible fascistic military-style shirt that supports the over-large skull. Untitled depicts a folksy woodland scene. Painted in small black curving brushstrokes on raw canvas, the ‘cartoon’ element here is more reminiscent of a preparatory sketch in the Renaissance sense. A jolly, gnomish, pipe-smoking man is depicted sitting outside a crooked wooden cottage, being greeted by a smiling wolf walking up on its hind legs. Are these characters friends or foes? It’s hard to tell behind the smiles, but as with many fairytale creatures, I wouldn’t trust either of them. In the third painting, Daily Strips, a text-andimage comic strip, Eloyan’s cartoon figures are more recognisable. Roughly painted versions of the disembodied heads of Micky Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck occupy a dystopian landscape that appears to have descended into chaos around them. A line of text scrawled across the work – ‘If The World End’s Toomorrow It’s All Your Fault’ – sums up the mood. Eloyan’s bronzes, a collection of crudely crafted forms with bulging eyes and grinning

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mouths stuck on, and his first foray into the medium, could have stepped straight out of his canvases. The largest, Statue, a human-scale armless elongated column ending in a single foot, sports a wide smile and two big front teeth. There are visual echoes of the work of David Shrigley and the mascot for Unilever’s Peperami pork-sausage snack. Like some of its fellow sculptures, it appears to be wearing a bow tie, as if these works are keen to look their best in the smart gallery setting. Like the Joker in DC Comics’ Batman, their smiles feel more evil-clown than cute-goofball. The smaller boggle-eyed bronzes sit on plinths, with the exception of one wallwork, Key, a very rough anthropomorphic cross-eyed key shape. The key to unlock what? The psyche perhaps, or one of the recurring motifs that appear in earlier paintings by Eloyan (not exhibited here), as well as in Daily Strips: a padlocked heavy wooden door. Again I think back to the idea of a garden, populated by Eloyan’s fixed-smile creations. It might be a fun place to hang out during the day, but I’m not sure I’d want to go there after dark. Helen Sumpter

Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys A Unique Partnership Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 29 July − 16 October The art critic Cordelia Oliver once described her friend the polymathic artist, gallerist, curator and facilitator Richard Demarco as ‘Napoleon in a Scottish pond’, such was his influence on the cultural life of Scotland in the late twentieth century. A divisive figure, Demarco was almost solely responsible for bringing avant-garde European art to Scotland, introducing artists such as Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Marina Abramović and countless others via exhibitions, summer schools and events held at his own gallery and other sites. In stark contrast to the insularity of much Scottish art during the 1960s and 70s, Demarco’s pioneering projects, which continue today, sought, as he states in a letter shown in this exhibition, ‘to internationalise the world of art in Scotland’. Objects, photographs, films, personal correspondence and other ephemera examine the art produced and exhibited by Joseph Beuys in Scotland up to his death in 1986 and acknowledge Demarco’s seminal role in commissioning many of these happenings, works and events. Strategy: Get Arts, the landmark Demarco-curated exhibition of 35 artists from Düsseldorf held at Edinburgh College of Art in 1970 included three major works by Beuys, and much of this archival exhibition centres on it. Alongside detailed photographic and written documentation, and filmed footage of actions and performances, the Strategy:

Get Arts works are represented here through Fluxus multiples, including a 1974 replica of Green Violin from Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony (1970), an action performed by Beuys and Danish composer Henning Christiansen; and an edition of Schlitten (Sled, 1969), a recreation of one of the wooden sledges used in The Pack (1969), an installation formed by rows of sledges, each with a survival kit of a roll of felt, a lump of fat and a torch, pouring from the back of a VW bus. Felt Suit (1970), a two-piece man’s suit made from coarse grey felt, is also on display, one of 100 identical suits produced by Beuys in 1970, along with images from the first iteration of Arena (1973), a major project of panels containing hundreds of photographs of Beuys over the course of his career. At Demarco’s invitation, Beuys made frequent visits to Edinburgh from 1970 onwards, contributing to Demarco’s art and activist summer school Edinburgh Arts and performing actions such as Three Pots for the Poorhouse (1974). The ‘action-object’ integral to and resulting from this work is shown here – two blackboards with chalk drawings and three cast-iron pots linked by a cord. Beuys returned to Edinburgh’s Forrest Hill Poorhouse for further works, including New Beginnings are in the Offing (1981), in which the huge doors of the Poorhouse became Beuys’s sculpture, later exhibited at Inverleith House, Edinburgh.

The relationship between Demarco and Beuys was reciprocal in influence: Beuys’s reputation helped consolidate Demarco’s profile as a curator while Demarco, in turn, brokered deals and opportunities in Britain for Beuys, as shown in the correspondence between galleries, curators and museums included in this exhibition. But the connection was undoubtedly creative too, and this can be seen clearly in much of the material included here. In almost every city, every year, there is a solo show of Beuys work, so why one more? Beyond a study of friendship, and a portrait of art in Scotland in the 1970s, this archival exhibition could be read as a case study in the power of social capital, the value of internationalism. It offers an often-touching narrative of some of the most interesting projects undertaken by Demarco, with Beuys firmly and frequently centre stage. And not least, Demarco has too often been dismissed or maligned in Scotland. He has been deemed too enthusiastic, too loud, too chaotic, too ‘out there’, especially amidst the gentility of Edinburgh’s Royal Academicians. For a younger generation of artists, though, Demarco’s lifelong work as a gallerist and curator reveals a lineage of avant-garde practice largely absent from canonical accounts of art in Scotland, encounters which are now brought into focus in A Unique Partnership. Susannah Thompson

Palindrome text works by Andre Thomkins laid out for installation in the exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, 1970, Edinburgh College of Art. Photo: George Oliver. Courtesy the Demarco European Art Foundation, Edinburgh

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Theaster Gates How to Build a House Museum Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 21 July – 30 October For his first solo exhibition in Canada, Chicagobased Theaster Gates draws inspiration from three culturally significant African Americans: DJ Francis Nicholls (aka Frankie Knuckles), blues musician Muddy Waters and the brickmaker George H. Black. How to Build a House Museum is predicated upon the idea of the ‘house museum’, notable people’s homes that have been converted into museums commemorating their lives. The exhibition considers three themes: how legacies are preserved, how race informs who gets remembered and the progress of black people within the arts and society. Gates also uses the term ‘house’ to give titles to the exhibition’s spaces. The first room, House of House, examines what is required to preserve legacies in a museum context. The words ‘FOUNDERS’, ‘TRUSTEES’ and ‘PATRONS’ are painted separately on three canvases, identifying the people who need to be engaged. A fourth text-based painting, headed ‘MISSION’, justifies why Gates is recognising the musical legacies of Waters and Knuckles: ‘Song has been the sustaining apparatus that has mitigated the trauma of slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights and other moments of repression.’ Visitors can also peruse a binder of thought-provoking letters

from Gates’s artworld colleagues who have responded to his request for their views on ‘Black advancement’. A tone of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ dominates; for example, Carrie Mae Weems writes that, despite winning the 2016 National Artist Award and having a Guggenheim retrospective, her sales have declined in the past year. Reel House features a shrine dedicated to Knuckles (1955–2014). It contains some of his DJ equipment and a memorial plaque naming him the ‘Godfather of House Music’. A series of abstract paintings by Gates line the walls, their patterns derived from posters displayed in another gallery space here, titled the House of Negro Progress. Illustrating research conducted during the late-1800s by sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, the posters chart the social and economic advancements of African Americans from Emancipation to 1900. In the House of Muddy Waters space, the precarious legacy of Waters (1913–1983) is embodied by a sculpture of a dilapidated house resting on a rickety-looking plinth, which echoes Waters’s currently derelict home on Chicago’s South Side. The George Black House room features two sculptures made of bricks from the brickyard that Black (1879–1980) founded in North

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Carolina in 1940, a site protected under the US’s National Register of Historic Places. The exhibition ends in the dance-club inspired Progress Palace: large projections of a group of people practising a dance routine and a gospel singer repeating the phrase “There is a house” fill two walls. A thumping house remix of Free Man, a minor 1975 disco hit by the South Shore Commission, gradually fills the space. After contemplating the Black spaces of the previous galleries, everyone can come together and move to the music. Canada is often seen as a bastion of tolerance and liberal thinking, but Gates’s work resonates strongly here. In her response to Gates, also contained in the binder, curator Sally Frater notes that Canada’s large institutions have poor records of mounting shows by nonwhite artists. During the run of House Museum, the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter faced blowback after staging an antipolice protest during the city’s Pride parade, and a Toronto police officer was sentenced to six years in prison for unloading eight bullets into a troubled SyrianCanadian teenager who wasn’t an imminent threat. This exhibition reminds us that, no matter where we are, there are always houses in need of repair. Bill Clarke

Kenneth Tam The Loving Cup Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles 30 July – 10 September Countless scientists have spent their hardearned research grants on demonstrating the lengths to which men will go to protect their sense of masculinity. From guys who throw punches harder after being induced to braid hair, to fellows who exaggerate their height, sexual prowess and athletic ability after scoring low on a handgrip strength test, male identity has been shown to be a fragile thing. The extent to which masculinity is socially determined forms the subject of much of Kenneth Tam’s work. Tam, who was also included in the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in LA this summer, has been inviting strangers found through Craigslist to perform unusual activities in his videos for almost a decade now. Tam’s subjects do all sorts of things in exchange for a modest fee, including shaving the artist, offering a massage from the confines of a cardboard box and binding themselves to Tam’s body using cling film. Of late, however, the artist has moved from these absurd provocations to a more subtle investigation of social norms. For his solo exhibition at Commonwealth & Council, Tam has made The Loving Cup (2016), a three-channel video in which the artist and three middle-aged men play out a series of actions, such as blowing up balloons and slowdancing together. The camera focuses closely on the men’s hands as they delicately tie ribbons

around multicoloured parcels. One bald man exhorts the others to try and tickle him; this gentle play is accompanied by much giggling. In the second video, which is silent, the same men pull poses ranging from the quasi-yogic to the positively balletic. The activities here seem to demand greater concentration, each participant focusing deeply on finding his balance. Tam participates in these movements like everyone else and never appears to orchestrate the proceedings, despite surely instigating them. The absence of any instruction from him softens the potentially authoritarian construct at work here. Instead, each situation appears to possess its own internal logic, one that the participants understand but we outsiders can only gawp at in befuddlement. The viewer is offered what looks like a corporate team-building exercise gone awry. No introductory voiceover or subtitles explain these bizarre scenarios. One striking quality of these situations is how easily the male participants appear infantilised to us. Dressed in pastel polo-shirts, socks and slack leisurewear, at home among soft furnishings, they seem vulnerable and devoid of aggression. Sequestered in Tam’s dance space, governed by an alternate set of rules, where touching and play becomes permissible, the men collaborate and offer reassurance to one another. The competitive

edge that our society encourages men to cultivate is entirely absent here, indicating the degree to which our behaviour is conditioned by context. The viewer’s own amusement or embarrassment indicates the narrow expectations we have of appropriate male behaviour. The videos are accompanied by tickle tackle (2016), a small aluminium sculpture cast from a rubber bucket, the top of which has been forced shut. The symbolism of this vessel, full of weight but denied the chance to be open, feels a little heavy-handed. Also on display are photographs in which the artist and another man are seen embracing while showering one another with bottles of champagne. Locked in an ecstatic clinch and drenched in foaming fizz, the images ape the emotional celebrations of macho sports stars while also insinuating the homoerotic undertones at play. Mildly humorous, the photographs feel a little too overt – particularly in comparison to the weirdly captivating quality of the videos. While Tam’s work adeptly points out the malleability of male identity, what proves most compelling is its voyeuristic aspect. The videos satisfy much the same desire as does reality TV, ie the pleasure in watching human beings behaving in all their endearing and peculiar majesty as well as the reassurance that we are not the strange ones after all. Ciara Moloney

The Loving Cup (detail), 2016, 3 single-channel HD videos, colour, sound, 6 min / 6 min / 5 min 30 sec. Photo: Ruben Diaz. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles

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Peter Alexander Sculpture 1966–2016: A Career Survey Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles 9 July – 10 September Even when his works extend over two metres high, as his monolithic wedges do, Peter Alexander’s sculptures always have a jewel-box quality. He is an object-maker of the highest order, and one often finds oneself entranced by the effects he produces using resin and urethane. A work like 5/6/16 (Lime Green Box) (2016) glows to the point of losing its edges. It is unbelievably and totally green, a colour buzzing so intensely that it takes over the room. Right next to it is Rose Window (1969), pale and translucent, bringing the light in and gathering it up. What emanated in the green box now becomes absorptive in the pink one. An Alexander exhibition always affords these perceptual movements, and his small survey at Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles is no different. Focusing on sculpture, the exhibition offers the most well-known slice of Alexander’s work. It is a series of small encounters, beautifully installed and just enough of Alexander’s work to give an insight into the whole of his career. One need not see Alexander’s paintings

of landscapes (which he made for decades) to know he is going for sky and air. It is all there in the plastic. Like so many others in Southern California during the 1960s, Alexander found his voice in polyester resin. It is common to read interviews from that period with artists being surprised to discover that others were doing what they were doing – casting resin and working with its fascinating properties. Resin was commonly used for surfboards, but artists found it a pliable material for exploring a range of metaphors about California. Light and Space artists, as a group, represent the many facets of California during the 1960s. With one foot in hedonism and the other in industry, resin casters are as easily scientists as hippies; they can speak to aerospace engineering as well as hot rods. In Alexander’s work one sees a range of resin’s properties. Pink Block (1967) seems to encapsulate perfectly its fascinating properties. A cube base topped with a wedge, it is a marine-

5/6/16 (Lime Green Box), 2016, urethane, 18 × 21 × 21 cm. Courtesy Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles

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layer Santa Monica morning contained in plastic, paradoxically hazy and crisp at once. Both liquid and solid, it is atmospheric, born of weather and sky and mist and rain, and early light on a surfboard. It is also unapologetically consumable, certain of its pleasures and unashamed by delight. LA-based art critic Christopher Knight once wrote that Alexander helped originate ‘the Pop wing of Light and Space art’, and this observation proves astute over time. Over the run of his 50-year career, Alexander never seemed interested in finding a philosophical grounding for his work like Bob Irwin. He did not look to science and engineering like Larry Bell or DeWain Valentine. Nor did he seek to channel mysticism like John McCracken. Instead, he is a self-described Romantic, ready to fold the splendour of the Southern California atmosphere into sculpture and painting. There is certainly a Pop-like affirmation to Alexander; he follows his pleasures and his pleasures are colour and light. Larry Wilcox

Alex Da Corte A Season in He’ll Hammer Museum at Art + Practice, Los Angeles 9 July – 17 September Rimbaud in wonderland: cartoonish fantasy beaded and bent with the bitter beauty of decadent poetry, B-horror flicks and corny jokes wrought with sensual materiality. Alex Da Corte cuts all the above into carnie colours for an opium disco called (punnily) A Season in He’ll. A neon sign scripts ‘Night’, alongside a scatter of stars; near the door, daylight is softened by a stained-glass rose drawn from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991); spooky music plays over drawling narcotic videos; coloured lights shimmer over the intricately cut linoleum floor, on which sits a giant witch hat like a goth tepee. You’re torn between getting high and woozily dancing, or getting high and forgetting your troubles on the back room’s cheeseburgershaped beanbags, all while watching a video of a flaming mummy fall over and over again in slow motion, the theatrical drapes behind him barely shifting as he plummets. The drugs on offer aren’t the common chemical cocktails, simple booze and refined

poppy you might find at your average nightclub. A trio of grainy, slowed-down videos, shot with the deadpan single camera of a kid’s how-to science show (think Mr. Wizard), portray a young gentleman, clean-cut and buttoned up, snorting egg yolks that drip gooey from his nose, injecting soda pop into his veins via hypodermic and sucking a red liquid from a crystal carafe into his mouth, only to punch himself and it all out in a faux-bloody splatter using a brass-knuckle knife yanked from a split watermelon. The items that lie in front of him in these half-speed videos are certainly strange crosses of still lifes and odd science experiments, a few of which rest on a plinth behind the viewing bench: a bouquet of metal roses, for example, hold a piece of fake toast smeared with fake peanut butter, in which rests the injecting needle alongside a long black candle. There is also a bottle of soda that erupts from a broken teapot, vomiting tinfoil and a short wave of undulating wires.

In the back, the bead curtains, patterned with a brief scene from Fantasia (1940), draw you to that purple-lit den of burger pillows and the perpetually falling mummy. All of it, I’m told, diffused with perfumes, but the scent was too subtle to sense, or it simply permeated my unconscious. Da Corte illustrates with this work an odd passage of Rimbaud’s 1873 book: ‘the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable. What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature…’ Da Corte ravages this iconic work of literature with ersatz theatricality and yet still finds something meaningful. There’s something raw and cut-rate, just a little irreverent, but still curiously heartfelt. Rimbaud writes in that same passage, ‘I used to believe in every kind of magic’, and somehow you feel that Da Corte still does. Andrew Berardini

A Season in He’ll, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Brian Forrest/Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

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The Propeller Group Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 4 June – 13 November Based between Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles, The Propeller Group is both a threeperson art collective and production company who use their dual status to investigate the porous boundaries between advertising and art. While the group’s hybrid contemporaries the Bernadette Corporation and K-Hole focus on individual, marketable versions of identity by incorporating high-end fashion or trend forecasting into their art practice, The Propeller Group harnesses the language of advertising to explore its effect on large political projects and nation building. Specifically, their work unpacks Vietnam’s dominant sociopolitical narratives in the transformational decades following the Vietnam-American War. The Propeller Group at MCA Chicago is the collective’s first museum survey, showcasing work from the past five years. The exhibition includes seven moving-image works and a variety of related sculptures, all of which also appear on screen. The show opens with Television Commercial for Communism (2011), in which actors dressed head to toe in white, nondescript clothes are cast as the protagonists of amicable, everyday scenarios – a family sharing a meal, workers on a construction site or young creatives playing music together. A soothing voiceover reads lines from Manifesto for the New Communism (2011–16), a wall-mounted bolt of silk and hand-

embroidered text that offers the affable invitation to ‘live as one and speak the language of smiles’. This utopic yet unsettling series of tableaux is a collaboration between The Propeller Group and the Vietnamese branch of TBWA, an advertising agency most widely known for its 1984 Super Bowl commercial that introduced Apple’s Macintosh computer. Television Commercial for Communism ironically employs a capitalist strategy to deliver a communist message, succinctly highlighting the complexities of present day Vietnam’s coexisting ideologies. Vietnam was one of the last countries to pivot towards global capitalism, and yet in the years since its 2007 entrance into the World Trade Organization (one year after the formation of The Propeller Group), it has become a fast-growing emergent economy, experiencing an influx of foreign brands. This East–West ideological clash is underscored in AK-47 vs. M16 (2015–), an ongoing body of research into the Soviet AK-47 and Americanmade M16, two nearly identical rifles that first saw battle in the Vietnam-American War. The AK-47 vs. the M16: Gel Blocks (2015) is a visuallystunning series of six cubed gelatin sculptures, each the size of an elongated cinderblock, displayed within six custom-built chest-height vitrines. To create the sculptures, opposing rifles were each fired into either end of a gelatin

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block, a material that mimics the density of human tissue and is commonly used to study wound ballistics. The ammunition meets at a central collision point creating a radiating cloud of flaked shrapnel and bullet paths preserved like jagged cracks splitting ice. Despite their forensic and clinical appearance, the sculptures serve as visceral memorials to those wounded and killed during the Cold War. The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) is a vivid moving-image work that likens South Vietnamese funerary processions to the celebratory jazz funerals of New Orleans. The camera floats seamlessly through Vietnam’s wooded forests, tight urban passageways and the Mekong Delta, a landscape conflated with the Mississippi River Delta. Set to the bright, mellow sounds of a brass band, the film reaches its peak in a series of death-defying performances by a sword swallower, fire breather and snake charmer. Borrowing its slick overcrank camera technique from music videos, the work captures an ecstatic funeral in celebratory slow-motion. The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music takes its title from a Vietnamese Buddhist proverb calling for the playing of music for the dead. It depicts death not as an endpoint but a joyful transition – an act of reincarnation in a society that venerates its ancestors and the afterlife. Sara Cluggish

Alma Thomas The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York 14 July – 30 October This small, luminously beautiful show – 20 paintings and a few dozen watercolours – suggests that Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was an American master whose work should initiate a broader understanding of abstract painting and the implicit politics of Modernism. Born in Columbus, Georgia, Thomas moved to Washington, DC, as a teenager to pursue an education not available to African Americans in the South. In 1924, she graduated from Howard University – one of the few institutions of higher learning then serving students of colour – became active in the vibrant local community of African-American artists and taught junior high school until her retirement in 1960. She apparently painted floral still lifes for much of her life (none are exhibited) but embraced abstraction when she retired, creating, on the scant evidence of the two paintings shown here, generically Ab Ex compositions that juxtapose rough-edged and deeply hued forms. Breakthrough to her signature ‘Alma Stripes’, pulsing vertical registers of intense colours

laid down in uneven strokes on white ground, came late in the decade. By the early 1970s she was using a simpler palette of, for example, white or radiant pink on blue and green grounds, and achieving a sophisticated and gorgeously coherent effect. In addition to participating in the local avant-garde, Thomas was widely read and had visited Paris. The influence of Matisse, whose cutouts she’d seen at MoMA in 1961, is evident in the visual rhythms and lushness she created through her own play with figure and ground. During the 1960s she was associated with the Washington Colorists, among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Unlike them, her work was not driven by formalism but by a deeply spiritual response to nature. In an artist’s statement from 1972 she wrote that ‘light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors’. She choose titles such as White Roses Sing and Sing (1976) and Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1968), which suggest a wish to translate and evoke lived experiences and feelings.

In part because of its poetic and abstract nature, Thomas’s painting seems resolutely apolitical, and she pointedly asserted in a 1979 interview with Eleanor Munro that she was an American not a black artist. But she also described her life as one lived in a segregated society and attributed racism to ignorance. She held up culture as humanity’s highest state and believed that through it ‘we would have no wars or disturbance’. She taught her students that education would be ‘their only weapon’. She pursued it avidly throughout her life. Many analyses of Thomas’s work tend towards the formal and literal, and the current show and catalogue, divided into sections such as ‘Mosaic’ and ‘Earth’, are no exception. Lost are a broad analysis of the poetic that would enrich our understanding of American abstraction of the 1960s and 70s, and an examination of the implicit politics of Thomas’s refusal to be classed as a ‘black’ artist, and of her belief in art as a universal human good. Joshua Mack

Arboretum Presents White Dogwood, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 173 × 140 cm. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

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Leslie Thornton Of Necessity I Became an Instrument Southfirst, Brooklyn 8 July – 25 September In her ongoing experimental film Peggy and Fred in Hell (1984–), for which she is best known, visual and media artist Leslie Thornton makes light use of her being the daughter and granddaughter of nuclear scientists as inspiration for the work’s apocalyptic narrative. Described by the artist as a life’s project that has been shot and reedited intermittently for over 30 years, the film stars real-life siblings in a world devoid of people, who live in a makeshift environment where they nonetheless receive media transmissions. Thornton’s exhibition at Southfirst takes a fully biographical turn. The show’s title, Of Necessity I Become an Instrument, derives from a line in her groundbreaking 16mm short film X-TRACTS (1975). Made when Thornton was in her mid-twenties, this nonlinear black-andwhite work shares conventions with both her structuralist film predecessors (such as Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits, with whom she studied at SUNY Buffalo) and contemporaneous feminist filmmakers, as it splices images and audio into a multimedia cutup. Her precise, mathematical editing style, along with her spinning camerawork, hearkens to techniques pioneered in experimental films of the 1960s such as Michael Snow’s Back and Forth (1969). It also foreshadows the slowly-rotating panning shots of Laura Mulvey’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and the canny images point to the way that the female body is often fetishised,

packaged and consumed through advertising and media. This critique is laid bare in the film’s introduction, in which Thornton’s collaborator Desmond Horsfield counts to six – followed by six closeup frames of Thornton’s own naked body. Thornton becomes an instrument here: at once subject to the male gaze but also an implement for analysing the world and its systems of power. The core of Of Necessity… is formed by a digital projection of X-TRACTS, along with a series of films on cathode-ray monitors. These include All Right You Guys (1976), a rhythmic structural film tracing the perception of two women (and one woman’s husband) about the women’s bodies. This nontraditional 15-minute ‘documentary’, starring Thornton’s sister and a close friend, led to Thornton’s polite dismissal from MIT’s graduate film programme before it was even completed. Jennifer, Where Are You? (1981) centres on a little girl playing with matches and smearing red lipstick across her face. The title phrase, hollered by an unseen man, is repeated throughout the video. The lush colour images echo the threatening, erotic undercurrent of Jack Goldstein’s freeze-frame-like films of the late 1970s and early 80s, yet also capture the pure thrill of young girls’ subversive play. The video Minus 9 (2011) brings together archival images from the Second World War and aerial footage shot by Thornton of Manhattan, over which

she superimposes a blue disc at the screen’s centre. When the viewer focuses on the blue dot, the images behind it can seem like ghostly apparitions. A voiceover, sourced from an unlabelled audiotape in the National Archive of Washington, DC, adds to the confusion: in it a Russian woman delivers her eyewitness account of the Hiroshima bombing in 1944 to the US Army. She is unable to tell the interviewers why “white people weren’t affected” or whether a dark spot after the bomb flash was due to the intensity of the flash or dust in her eyes. Alongside these works, Thornton adds ephemera related to male family members who worked on the Manhattan Project: her grandfather Jens Thornton’s impressionistic paintings of the Hiroshima atomic blast (mid-1950s) and a folksy surrealist rendering of a smiling house blown into the air (1943), as well as scientific books written by her father, Gunnar. Handwritten notes from Thornton’s film classes line a vitrine, above which hangs her incongruous painting, from 1999, of a budding flower. Its delicate pink form resembles a breast or zeppelin. These artefacts are unexpected, even sentimental, complicating the perception of a filmmaker heralded for her forward-thinking critique of media and her science fiction-oriented Peggy and Fred. The props from the film, including Peggy’s tiny dress hung in a photo frame, possess this same homespun quality. Wendy Vogel

Jennifer, Where Are You?, 1981, digital transfer of the original 16mm film, 10 min 41 sec. Courtesy the artist and Southfirst, Brooklyn

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Vivian Suter & Elisabeth Wild Monstera Deliciosa Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City 4 June – 20 August Pairing abstract forms with images of skyscrapers, or layering geometric shapes over seeming-moonscapes, Elisabeth Wild’s paper collages might be fantastical imaginings of an architectural futurism. There are magical spaces within these strange scenes: ladders leading to the sky, rainbow-striped spaceships inside Guggenheim-like corridors. In their low-tech imagining of fantastical urban futures, they resonate with the cityscape Fritz Lang imagined in his film Metropolis (1927). Lang’s city was magical, always in movement, a symphony of concrete and steel; but underneath it, the roots of a revolution threatened to topple the metropolis. For Monstera Deliciosa, Wild’s collages are paired with paintings by Vivian Suter, stretched and unstretched canvases in which brushstrokes and watery trails of pigment are blotted, at times, with dirt and leaves. Here, washy swathes of paint are corporeal, organic in their dissimilarities, abrupt movements and undulations. If Wild gives us tight constructions of future-spaces, Suter’s canvases explore the life within the gesture and privilege the natural world. In Monstera Deliciosa, the urban jungle we imagine springing from Wild’s collages is in tension with the natural world; it is an exhibition in which the creeping plant life is real as much as depicted, the foliage of which presses in, around and underneath Suter’s canvases.

Proyectos Ultravioleta is in its third location in Guatemala City, none of which have been white cubes. In 2015, the gallery moved to a still-functional sawmill at the heart of a bustling working-class neighbourhood in Zone 1. There, Monstera Deliciosa (the exhibition takes its name from a large, leafy plant native to the region) spills out from the dedicated exhibition space to the surrounding workspaces and into the small garden that divides the two. Suter’s unframed paintings move with the breeze, their edges making ever-changing visual relationships with the walls and windows. In an outdoor sitting area, two canvases hang overlapping one another, covering a row of windows. A collage, Untitled (2016), by Wild peers out a nearby window, hanging on an interior wall. That is to say, the visual conversations between the paintings and the collages are deeply intertwined with the surrounding spaces and how the viewer moves through them. It is the rainy season in Guatemala; the light is always changing here, and the sounds of the city filter in through the building’s walls and windows. The tension between industry and the natural world, then, is mediated by the life of the neighbourhood, and heightened by the visible workings of the sawmill. A flaglike canvas of blue and maroon hangs against an interior brick wall beneath a skylight: an untitled and undated work by Suter (as is the

case with all her works in the show). Metal barrels and a row of crude ladders on the workshop’s wide-planed wood floors – complete with a heavy smell of oil and sawdust – lend the paintings exhibited in this space a sentient and urban quality. Suter’s blocks of abstract colour hint at the shapes we identify with apartment buildings, the rust-coloured rectangles becoming windowlike apertures. The brushy edges of the colour blocks, a gaping white teardrop in the middle of one reddish panel, also invite a messy materiality to the abstraction. There is life in the edges; there are quiet, dark places to be explored in the shadows. Indeed, some of Wild’s collages are tucked away in corners of the space, to be discovered by the attentive visitor. Perhaps the tension between the works is heightened by the knowledge that Wild (b. 1922, Vienna) and Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires) are mother and daughter. Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer writes, ‘Metropolis was rich in subterranean content that, like contraband, had crossed the borders of consciousness without being questioned.’ These sensitive works also touch on those dark, unconscious places. Seen together, they mine the psychological balance we try to find as we navigate the spaces between nature and industry, human and machine, landscape and factory. Delicious monsters, indeed. Laura A.L. Wellen

Monstera Deliciosa, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Alan Benchoam. Courtesy the artists and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City

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Beyond Lawn and Order José García, Mexico City 25 June – 30 August How much room to wander should be granted to a show that defines itself as an ‘exploration’? In the gallery text, Beyond Lawn and Order, curated by independent curator and Guayaba Press director Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio, presents itself as ‘an exhibition that explores two films, which revolve around the theme of conflict, by TV director, documentary maker and screenwriter Jef Cornelis’. The exhibition leans heavily however on the legacy of Ian Hamilton Finlay, one of Cornelis’s subjects, and the former’s practice as gardener, poet and printmaker, one who widely sampled military imagery in his multidisciplinary work. However, none of the Hamilton Finlay pieces in Beyond Lawn and Order are exemplary of his frequent use of Nazi symbolism, save the confrontation at the end of Cornelis’s LITTLE SPARTA, et in Arcadia ego (1988). After 70 minutes of Hamilton Finlay touring the camera through his Scottish garden, Cornelis directs interviewer Chris Dercon to candidly question the artist about his work’s frequent references to the Third Reich, provoking Hamilton Finlay to expel the entire film crew from Little Sparta. Similarly, in Daniel Buren (1971) Cornelis grills the French artist about his work, using thinly veiled reference to Buren’s expulsion from the Guggenheim’s Sixth International Exhibition

(1971) – an incident that was publicly attributed to curator Diane Waldman’s sympathy to fellow exhibitors Dan Flavin and Donald Judd’s assertion that Buren’s piece aesthetically interfered with theirs. Likewise the Cornelis-directed Belgian television broadcast of James Lee Byars’s performance The World Question Center (1968) also has a confrontational approach. During the work, in which Byars and a circle of robed participants telephone ‘100 of the world’s greatest thinkers’ to ask for their most pressing questions, 70 percent of those rung hang up in annoyance. Strictly speaking there are only four contemporary works in Beyond Lawn and Order, all of which owe more to Hamilton Finlay’s legacy than Cornelis. Özlem Altin’s Untitled (Apollo of Gaza 1) (2016): a double-exposure photograph of a statue of Apollo at Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta; Francesco Pedraglio’s Ideal Space for a Performance (2016), which echoes Hamilton Finlay’s practice, using printmaking and accompanying poems to consider battle as performance of and for the land upon which it transpires; Tania Pérez Córdova’s Live Streaming Minute 1, a photogram of a volcanic eruption, and Proposal for a Garden in Mexico (both 2016), a site-specific painting using gold dust and ash from the Popocatépetl volcano made on

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Selected cards, 1972–98 (installation view, Beyond Lawn and Order). Photo: Diego Barruecos. Courtesy José García, Mexico City

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a self-adhesive transparent vinyl which is in turn stuck directly to the wall. Mario García Torres’s Leftover from Daniel Buren’s Stalactic/Stalagmitic. A Drawing in situ and Three Dimensions (1979) provides the only reference to Buren beyond the Cornelis film. Perhaps the most curious presence in the show however are the ten slides labelled ‘Sonsbeek 1971’. Exhibited near the floor without explanation, the anonymous slides are easy to overlook. They depict the eighteenth-century manicured Dutch parkland as it hosts the 1971 edition of the Land art biennial of the same name, which was the subject of a Cornelis-directed documentary not included here, but whose title has been appropriated for the show. Cornelis may be billed as the thematic axis of Beyond Lawn and Order, but it’s an axis offcentre, as the show proves to be essentially two exhibitions competing for the same space: one of contemporary work based on Hamilton Finlay’s legacy and his idea of the garden as site of exile and retreat, and the other an archival investigation of Cornelis’s confrontational oeuvre. As an ‘exploration’, Beyond Lawn and Order takes a tangential wander through the walled gardens of art history, ultimately leaving a handful of contemporary works set against a jumble of art-historical references. Kim Córdova

ALMA: Acervo Gentil A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro 18 July – 20 August ALMA: Acervo Gentil is framed as a showcase for the gallery’s talent – 19 of its 26 artists are represented here – and an expression, according to co-owner Márcio Botner, of its soul (alma, in Portuguese). But the exhibition, whose name translates as ‘SOUL: Gentil Inventory’, also serves as a chance to reflect on Rio de Janeiro’s own soul at one of the most compelling moments, post-Olympic Games, in its 451-year history. There are dashes of the beauty and drama of the carioca spirit (the Brazilian word for a Rio native, and an adjective used to describe anything from Rio). In Thiago Rocha Pitta’s The Secret Sharer (2008), four prints from his video of the same name, something metallic and mysterious glints out to sea, flashing between the navy-blue waves as Rio’s mountains frame the view. Evoking the locale in equal measure is Opavivará’s Fonte de Refrescos (2015), an installation of the ‘Croydon’-brand drinks dispensers that sit behind the counters at Rio street-corner diners, dispensing cheap cups of generic soft drinks to the passing carioca crowds.

Here in the gallery, the machines are filled with coloured water and arranged in a circle, their tanks gushing and splashing cheerfully. There is more carioca joie de vivre in the vivid, psychedelic geometry of Rafael Alonso’s Pintura de Memória (Memory Painting, 2016); and in Laura Lima’s series A Fuga (The Escape, 2011), pen and ink drawings of imaginary birds that, individually framed and hung at angles, swoop across the gallery wall as if in flight. Poc Poc Poc (2012), a wall hanging by Jarbas Lopes, delivers an evocative scrap of Rio’s urban landscape in the form of promotional street banners, printed on plastic with the onomatopoeic word of its title, and in this case, shredded into long, fine ribbons that shiver in the breeze. Rio’s bleeding heart, on the other hand, is hinted at in a 2008 work by Guga Ferraz, Roma de Nero (Nero’s Rome), which plots out Rio’s ‘zones of conflict’ in stickers placed on a city map. Because for all Rio’s loveliness and its magnetic pull on visitors, the profound violence that grips the city halts for nothing. In the 16 days of the

Games, 34 people were killed and 58 injured in gunfire incidents in the Greater Rio area. And yet, as is ever the case in Rio, resilience is key to the city’s survival. This is perhaps reflected in the ingenuity powering Paulo Nenflidio’s kinetic sculptures: in the woodand-metal White Noise (2013), in which a cog turns a bike chain as wooden keys tap a terse staccato on top; and in Máquina do Trovão (Thunder Machine, 2014), in which a copper sheet quivers thunderously inside a tall wooden cabinet as light flashes across a small screen mounted inside. A small carriage rises shakily up the cabinet with a creepy clak-clak-clak to complete the stormy effects. The rickety, precarious kinetics of Nenflidio’s works blend apparent instability with the insectlike relentlessness of machines, unexpectedly persistent and unstoppably functional, even as their function remains uncertain. Like Rio de Janeiro itself, despite the structural vulnerabilities at their core, they just work, pushing ever onward and unceasingly forward. Claire Rigby

Paulo Nenflidio, Máquina do Trovão, 2014, wood, electronic circuit, solenoid, copper, steel, printer rail, 150 × 50 × 30 cm. Photo: Pedro Agilson. Courtesy A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro

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Apichatpong Weerasethakul The Serenity of Madness Maiiam Museum of Contemporary Art, Chiang Mai 4 July – 10 September If anyone can make you lose your mind in a relaxing way, it’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Memories, ghosts, reincarnation, Thai history and a reality-loosening, faculty-scrambling sense of joy and wonderment come together so sweetly in this midcareer survey of the critically acclaimed filmmaker’s short films and video installations that the experience is, as the title suggests, a kind of safe letting go. Cynics would look at the content and say that it’s more of the same, but when the same’s so good, can you bring yourself to complain? The Serenity of Madness brings together the ‘gallery work’ of the Thai auteur best known for the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Over the years, he’s built up a reputation on both the film-festival and biennial circuits, but his output for the latter remains scattered and unconsolidated, and often portrayed as the interesting but poorer cousin of his movie career. Hopefully, this exhibition will provide some corrective reimagining of the relationship between the two halves of his life. Another artist-filmmaker, Steve McQueen, once said his work was ‘all one thing, as if film was the novel and visual art is poetry’; Weerasethakul’s pieces have a similar kinship. The shorter ones are koans.

Made before, during and after his films, his videos and installations may be spinoffs, sketches or one-off commissions, but most of them stand alone quite proudly. Curator Gridthiya Gaweewong designed the exhibition to show the breadth of Weerasethakul’s practice, and so there is a necessary amount of excerpting and chronological jumps, which creates an easygoing environment consistent with the genial, free-flowing genealogy of his methods. Primitive (2009), originally a sevenvideo installation at Haus der Kunst, Munich, receives three video extracts here, spread out across the exhibition grounds as recurrent, free-associative echoes. A ‘lite’ version of the infrared dogs in Taipei’s National Palace Museum’s 2007 installation The Palace (Pipittapan Tee Taipei) appears too. The projections have been released from their original glass cases and left to pace the walls like the ghostly guards of another video, Sakda (Rousseau) (2012), in the same room. There are a couple of patchy spots. Some of Weerasethakul’s photography is up on the walls, but the still images, after you have savoured the richness of his moving ones, are weak tea. They are either formal experiments with prettified technical effects, such as the digitally painted explosion in Mr Electrico (For Ray

The Serenity of Madness, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai

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Bradbury) (2014), or thin collectable stand-ins for larger projects, such as the stills for those in the sprawling multidisciplinary For Tomorrow For Tonight (2011), first shown in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Thankfully, the meat of the exhibition is in the short films and video installations. Many of them incubate tropes that would be seeded into feature-length work. Seen in isolation, they have the punch of the single image or idea. For example, the six-minute, haiku-esque Sakda (Rousseau) (2012) could well have been a deleted scene from the doodly and meandering hourlong feature Mekong Hotel (2012). Standing alone, the short film has a sharper, more decisive outline. This has something to do with the brief: the short was commissioned for the centennial celebrations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, and Weerasethakul, with a mix of practicality and wryness, has made his regular gay Thai actor a reincarnation of the French philosopher. “I used to be a man called Rousseau,” Sakda Kaewbuadee says while a guitar strums tenderly in the background, “but today my name is Sakda.” He goes on to talk about his boyfriend Laurent, and about his body not belonging to anyone, not even him. Abrupt cut to a riverside veranda, from which a radio broadcasts the same recorded

message to the dusky pink of the Mekong River. “Will I remember the freedom?” the fuzzy voice asks. The melancholy resignation of this piece, combined with its keen attentiveness to beauty, seems to float, in the gentlest of ways, a challenge to Rousseau: could man be everywhere in chains and free? It is notable that this is Weerasethakul’s first major retrospective in his homeland. His long tussle with the authorities has culminated in his refusal to submit his latest film, Cemetery of Splendour (2015) to the censor board, and the film has had no domestic release as a result. Why did he put this show on? Do censors close one eye to art exhibitions? Who knows? Judging by Serenity…, politics runs through Weerasethakul’s nervous system, either as a kind of muscle memory or surfacing like hives. The exhibition is not so much a critique of Thai politics as a description of a state of mind under the regime, a negative-capability zone between submission and rebellion, between Sakda and Rousseau. For example, in Ashes (2012), gently diaristic images of daily life – friends walking a dog, Weerasethakul calling his lover for dinner – are interrupted by a sequence showing protesters outside Thailand’s political prisons. The film then circles back to the everyday, with a dislocating sequence showing the funeral pyre of a monk in a temple. Two videoworks in the exhibition, though, suggest a growing sense of urgency and subversion. One of Weerasethakul’s central

preoccupations is light in all its forms: the sun, fire, lightning, fluorescent tubes – not to mention that witness, mediator and reproducer of all the photo phenomena, the bright eye of the film projector. Light is often associated with joy and life, but increasingly, Weerasethakul is paying attention to its other face: that of terror and death. This tension can be traced back to Phantoms of Nabua (2009). The 11-minute video was part of the larger Primitive project, for which he collaborated with teenagers in Nabua, a village in the north of Thailand where the massacre of a generation of farmers accused of being communists was buried and forgotten. Weerasethakul took a mildly interventionist approach with the sons of these dead farmers: making them roleplay their elders, write songs and tell stories. From these activities, he made short films and installations. Phantoms is the strongest of the lot. It has a pyromaniac’s sense of liberation. In the video, the boys kick a burning ball around a dark field. At the back of the field is a white screen, showing a film about a simulated lightning strike. After several passes, the ball hits the screen. For a while we are uncertain if the screen is showing flames, or actually on fire, until the cloth burns away to nothing, and reveals a sputtering, spitting ball of light. It is the projector still going strong. This is the kind of totalitarian culminating shot he has deployed before, in Syndromes and a Century (2006). There, the camera lingered on a ventilator slowly inhaling smoke into its cavernous mouth;

but here, calm suction turns to feverish repulsion, a black hole into a death star. The tension between life- and death-giving forces of light reappears in another retina-burn of an installation, called Fireworks (Archive) (2014). In flares of light accompanied by sharp cracks of gunfire, the camera strobes images of a temple’s stone statues: a monkey with a gun, a pack of dogs on scooters and human skeletons embracing on a bench. Through the pyrotechnics, a pair of spectral lovers stroll. One of them is regular actress Jenjira Pongpas on crutches, dragging her bad leg, once memorably described by Thai critic Kong Rithdee as ‘the saddest leg in all cinema’. On one level, you could read this as a film about political persecution and resistance. There is the militarised bestiary, the explosive soundtrack and the location: the video was filmed in a temple in Nong Khai, built by a Thai mystic-cum-sculptor who, accused of being a communist during the Cold War, fled to Laos. But as with all of Weerasethakul’s works, the political reading is just one of its many lives. The man himself calls Fireworks a ‘hallucinatory memory machine’. If so, its technology is so alien and advanced that I can only describe it in the most ‘primitive’ of vocabularies: visitations by ghosts and gods. For I found it more like a powerful haunting, a jolt of lucid sympathy I imagine a medium would get at a scene of a violent event. And for a long time after leaving the room, I was still blinking the blaze out of my eyes. Adeline Chia

Phantoms Of Nabua, 2009, single-channel video, colour, sound, 10 min 43 sec. Photo: Soopakorn Srisakul. Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai

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James N Hutchinson Rumours of a New Planet Part of Constellations Programme, a series of research based, off-site artist commissions that aim to bring people together to develop ideas and partnerships.

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ArtReview

Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole Faber & Faber, £17.99/$17 Writing about the work of the late Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer in Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole notes that they ‘give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves’ – a phrase that undeniably applies to the 55 illuminating essays here. While some describe a face-to-face encounter, as with V.S. Naipaul (‘Natives on the Boat’), most tell of Cole’s engagement with a place, like Selma (‘In Alabama’), or an object, such as the photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé (‘Portrait of a Lady’). Currently working on a PhD in art history at Columbia University and a writer-in-residence at Bard College, Cole is revealed here to be an astute art critic as well as a perceptive commentator on reading, seeing and being. Cole is also a photographer (with a forthcoming book of photographs), and perhaps this is why the details both of what he sees and what he’s thinking make the essays in the book’s middle section, ‘Seeing Things’, so informative. All of the essays in Known and Strange Things have been previously published, and many in this section come from his monthly column in The New York Times Magazine, ‘On Photography’. Cole’s associative approach melds a diverse set of issues: in ‘A True Picture of Black Skin’, for example, he explores Roy DeCarava’s practice

of not brightening blackness, but darkening it further. This went not just against societal expectations of the time, but also racial bias within photographic technology, which ‘had limited sensitivity to brown, red, or yellow skin tones’. He goes on to tie DeCarava’s work to philosopher Édouard Glissant’s investigation of ‘opacity’ as a right to refuse being fully exposed, a rejection of the pressure placed on blacks to be understood on others’ terms. Cole finds DeCarava’s sensitive approach to taking back blackness influencing younger black photographers, including cinematographer Bradford Young, whose work in films such as Selma (2014) keeps ‘faith with the power of shadows’. Cole’s essays on photography reveal his keen eye, but he is even better known for his acclaimed novel Open City. It is often very telling to see how a writer discusses other writers, and the essays in the book’s first section, ‘Reading Things’, where Cole considers literary figures, do not disappoint. Tranströmer, Derek Walcott and W.G. Sebald receive close, considered attention, as does James Baldwin, whose essay on racism ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953) influences one of Cole’s many pieces that touch on the subject, ‘Black Body.’ Cole, a Nigerian-American, brings a global spotlight to racism by situating it not

only in his chosen home of America, as he does in ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex’, but also in other parts of the world, as in ‘Brazilian Earth’, where the division of black and white he experiences in Rio de Janeiro doesn’t fit with the city’s melting-pot image. This latter essay is in the book’s third section, ‘Being There’, which contains travel writings or relates the experience of a place in a way that frequently shows Cole as both outsider and insider. ‘Home Strange Home’ tells us how Cole returned to the city of his birth, Kalamazoo, Michigan, for university. Having moved to Nigeria as an infant, he didn’t fully understand the accelerated version of English spoken in the Midwest, much less The Cosby Show, MTV and other American cultural peculiarities. Nevertheless, it felt like a ‘journey of return’, to the place his parents married, to a place of memories invented from afar. He was at home and not at home – a feeling many of us have even if we’ve never left the place we were born. Across his diverse subjects, Cole envelops the reader in intellectually insightful and often forthright essays that reveal how he sees, reads and is in the world. Through their mixture of inner, private thought and the presence of the external, lived world, these writings help us to reflect on who we truly are. Aaron Bogart

Publication by David Lamelas Primary Information, $16 (softcover) David Lamelas’s September 1970 exhibition at London gallery Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd consisted of a table with a 48-page book on it. The eponymous Publication, just reprinted by Primary Information, consists of 13 written responses to the statements: ‘1) Use of oral and written language as an Artform; 2) Language can be considered as an Artform; 3) Language cannot be considered as an Artform.’ Most of the replies are on the same bland register. ‘I think artists will be using language to make their art for a long time,’ Robert Barry states flatly. Yep. Something about filling pages with text at that time seemed to provide an artistic stance that could, at least originally, be thought of as multiple againsts: antiaesthetic, anticommodification; a way, some artists thought, of dealing with reality directly through the means of reality itself. Lamelas’s exhibition took place at a point when conceptual practices were becoming, if not publicly accepted, then at least more widely

known in the UK: June of that year had seen Idea Structures, one of the first conceptual-art group shows in London; while the July/August issue of Studio International was presented as a printed exhibition, with Seth Siegelaub inviting six critics to in turn invite artists to use pages as they saw fit. Most, unsurprisingly, did text works, while Daniel Buren filled eight pages with broad yellow downward stripes. It was that autumn as well that Italian critic Germano Celant published his first list of ‘Books as Artworks’, which would go on to become another exhibition at Greenwood’s space in 1972 and a book in itself (mostly correspondence, and a massive list). Lamelas’s Publication is a handy, concise expression of this scene, with most of the same suspects (including a verbose mini-essay from Victor Burgin, Lawrence Weiner pulling out one of his favourite statements on how ‘the piece need not be built’, and some blank pages from conversationalist Ian Wilson). As such, Publication is just

October 2016

as useful as the SI issue or Celant’s tome in capturing the flavour of the time: dry and literal, showing up the small group of conceptual practitioners as logicians more than anything else: if art is A, then it most certainly can be B, too. OK, then what? The most accurate and entertaining response in the book is from art historian Barbara Reise: ‘Oral and written language can be used as an Artform. (Whoopee, Eureka, So What?) So can tins of soup, cold-rolled steel, shit, muzak, marble, marketing procedure, parking lots, and just about anything else.’ Lamelas’s table in the exhibition was meant to be a setting for discussion, but I wonder how many people were inspired to sit down and chat by his Mr Spock sense of humour. It feels instead like passing the buck, attempting to chair a talk about talking, or the equivalent of me writing: I hereby declare this review an artwork. Discuss. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art by David Salle W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, $29.95 (hardcover) ‘The idea for this book’, pronounces David Salle by way of introduction to his collection of writings, ‘is to write about contemporary art in the language that artists use when they talk among themselves.’ Many of the artists profiled here are those that Salle has talked with, sometimes on a regular basis: he’s had ‘hundreds’ of conversations with fellow painter Alex Katz, for example. Indeed there are times when the author seems to have become so used to conversing with his fellows that he ends up adopting their voices. (In an essay on Katz, Salle does a passable impression of the former’s pugnacious catchphrase-style of speech, in a series of one-twos on ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ of art. On the impact of regularly seeing the version of his friend Jeff Koons’s flower Puppy (1992) in Bilbao: ‘I was so grateful for its being there; it was such a gift. I never tired of seeing it; just was happy that it existed’.) I imagine Salle is a pretty good impressionist. He’s certainly pretty good at making his subjects feel present. He’s also pretty good at a jarringly catchy turn of phrase, particularly when it comes to describing painting: Christopher Wool, a master of the ‘pleasantly confusing smushed-up feeling’ also ‘makes bravely shaped rectangles’. ‘The veils’ in Albert Oehlen’s work ‘give the paintings the feel of being seen through a sock’. Sigmar Polke can make you ‘feel that he took the

painting apart with a screwdriver, looked at the pieces lying on the floor and got bored before he could put them back together’. Gerhard Richter ‘takes himself so seriously that you sometimes feel beaten over the head by his work’. Salle began writing about art to pay the rent when he moved from California to New York in the mid-1970s, picking it up again in the 2000s. Beyond his obvious facility for it, writing, Salle says, is something that helps him understand what he is thinking. And while he makes it clear from the off that he’s habitually thinking about his own medium above others (‘one way to look at a painting – and I use that word as shorthand for visual art in general…’, he writes in the introduction), the rest still get a look in. Although this often occurs in a manner that suggests that Salle is a little less comfortable with the material: discussing the emergence of performance art, he notes that ‘the fact that it wasn’t theatre gave it a protective cloak’; while ‘Vito Acconci was known as a pioneering body artist. What does that even mean? Someone who is in his own test tube.’ Still, none of that detracts from Salle’s delicious breakdown of the work of sculptor Thomas Houseago, which begins with a comparison of the artist to a character from The Sopranos who can’t stop killing people because he’s ‘too far in’, and ends with the statement that Houseago’s work, ‘with its

heroic scale and existential themes, its repetition and insistence on its own humanistic exceptionalism, mostly just wears me out’. While the ostensible subjects of this collection of reviews, profiles, speeches and polemics are a mix of Salle’s contemporaries, historic figures in art and those who constitute its next generation, all of the texts – as the author self-consciously notes – reflect what he values in art. In that sense How to See is an at times wonderfully articulate protest against a world in which an artist’s intent (the declared ‘ideas’ the artist wants their work to signify or embody) is given more weight than what they actually produce (and that which can be gleaned simply from looking at a work of art). Indeed, given the extent to which every sector of the artworld (from the wall texts, catalogues and exhibition guides produced by museums and galleries, to the art criticism that sometimes appears in a magazine such as the one you are holding now) is complicit in promoting the idea that intrinsic value of artworks lies in the extrinsic business of artistic intent, you can’t help thinking Salle may have a point. Which makes this attempt to promote ‘an authentic rather than a conditioned response’ to art something that anyone who loves the stuff should read. You’ll feel gently harangued yet strangely entertained. Mark Rappolt

Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men by Hal Fischer Cherry and Martin, $25 (softcover) Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics, originally published in 1977, might be described as an attempt to use structuralism to interpret the way homosexual men in San Francisco dressed and indicated their sexual preferences, and to also offer a pithy overview of images of men in the gay press. However, this description would rather miss many of the more subtle points of Fischer’s project, which was brought back into the spotlight by Los Angeles gallery Cherry and Martin’s exhibition of Fischer’s photographs and their republishing of his book last year. Gay Semiotics is often described as one of the key publications associated with West Coast conceptual photography because of its use of text-embedded images and its attempts to decode the system of signification in the clothing and accessories of the gay community.

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Image-text layouts explain what a blue handkerchief in the left hip pocket of a gay man’s jeans signifies (‘the wearer will assume the active or traditional male role’) or what keys worn on the right side of the body mean (‘the wearer desires to play a passive role’). However, each description comes with a warning that these signifiers might not signify anything at all: ‘Keys are also worn by janitors, laborers, and other worker with no sexual signification intended.’ This useful piece of text is on the lefthand side of a double-page spread. The righthand side features a photo of two gay or perhaps not gay men, shot at hip level, each dangling keys from their jeans. The accompanying caption simply says: ‘KEYS’. Fischer’s statements about the project frame it in an academic way. In the addendum, he writes, ‘The images evolved out of my

ArtReview

attempts to integrate the phenomena I observed in my neighborhood… with my readings on structuralism.’ Yet these readings on structuralism seem to boil down to the conclusion that a system of signs might mean something quite specific, but there’s a very good chance that it might not. After a rumination on what a red handkerchief might signify about the wearer’s desire for ‘hand insertion’, there comes the reflection, ‘Red handkerchiefs are also employed in the treatment of nasal discharge and in some cases may have no significance in regard to sexual contact.’ In short, there is no advice as to how to distinguish between a chap who has a cold and one who wants a good, hard fisting, suggesting that Fischer knew that neither structuralism nor conventional Art & Languagetype Conceptualism could really explain the quandaries of everyday life. Niru Ratnam

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For more on Chantal Montellier, see overleaf

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Contributors

Adeline Chia is an arts writer and critic based in Singapore. Before she was associate editor of ArtReview Asia, she was the southeast Asian bureau chief of Artinfo and the arts correspondent of The Straits Times, the largest English-language daily in Singapore. In this issue she surveys the art scene of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Louisa Elderton is a contemporary art curator and writer based in Berlin and London. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute in curating the art museum and was the first writer-in-residence at London’s Jerwood Visual Arts. This month she reviews Ryan Gander at Esther Schipper, Berlin. Helen Sumpter is editor (digital/special projects) at ArtReview and ArtReview Asia. She studied fine art and writing, and publishing and has written for numerous publications, including Time Out, where she was deputy visual arts editor. This month she profiles Siobhán Hapaska.

Heather Phillipson is an artist and poet. In 2016 her work was included in the Images Festival, Toronto; Frieze Projects New York; and the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. Recent solo exhibitions include the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Schirn Frankfurt; Dundee Contemporary Arts; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; and a video commission for Random Acts, Channel 4. She has published three collections of poetry: a pamphlet with Faber & Faber in 2009; NOT AN ESSAY (2012); and Instant-flex 718 (2013). This month she starts a three-part column. She is shortlisted for the 2016 Jarman Award. Laura A.L. Wellen is a writer and curator based in Guatemala City and Houston. She cofounded both Yvonne, an apartment gallery and residency in Guatemala, and the Houston-based curatorial project Francine. She is a 2016 writing fellow at the Core Critical Studies Program of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She received her PhD from the University of Texas, Austin. This month she reviews Vivian Sutter & Elisabeth Wild at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.

Contributing Writers Andrew Berardini, Aaron Bogart, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Adeline Chia, Bill Clarke, Matthew Collings, Kim Córdova, Gabriel Coxhead, Louisa Elderton, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Dean Kissick, I. Kurator, Daniel McClean, Ciara Moloney, Heather Phillipson, Mark Prince, Claire Rigby, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Dan Udy, Wendy Vogel, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Laura A.L. Wellen, Larry Wilcox Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, Benjamin McMahon, Chantal Montellier, Anna Vickery

Chantal Montellier (preceding pages)

For over four turbulent decades, Chantal Montellier has been on the frontlines of French comics – bande dessinée. With an epileptic mother and mostly absent father, Montellier was raised by her maternal grandfather. In this environment, drawing became “an escape, a protection, an antidote”; it also got her a place at the Saint-Étienne art school studying painting, where her art developed amid the politics of post-May 1968: “I have a weakness for a certain realism, sometimes political and social, sometimes poetic, sometimes fantastic. Abstract art mostly bored me. I need body, figure, whether in the style of Bacon or Caravaggio, Picasso or Bosch…” In 1971 Montellier renounced painting and teaching art to pursue a living drawing for leftwing periodicals, quickly becoming France’s most prominent woman political cartoonist. “Almost right away I began to get complaints,” she recalls. “A woman’s viewpoint and images in this field were disturbing, and I had no one on my side.” Women creators weren’t highly visible in bande dessinée either, but by 1976 the adult magazine Métal Hurlant had spun off a shortlived all-women’s title, Ah! Nana. A founding contributor, Montellier here tackled darkly topical cases of police corruption in the serial Andy Gang, later joining Métal, where she imagined Orwellian dystopias in 1996, Shelter and Wonder City. Neither crime nor science fiction were genres much handled by female comics authors

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before her. Montellier’s style was also distinctive, in crisp Rotring pen lines often from photographic references: “I would call it objective, analytical. I was dissecting.” The specialist bande dessinée milieu was nothing like the leftwing political press, she discovered: “In French comics, there was an egotism and narcissism, and also a pent-up sexism that persists today.” In 1985, she and three other women cartoonists signed a manifesto published in the French daily Le Monde decrying the ‘so-called new medium’ as ‘crippled by the oldest and dirtiest macho fantasies’. More opportunities for women’s self-expression would come, as the publication of comics directly in book form came to replace serialisation in magazines, with the annual total of graphic novels quadrupling between 2000 and 2012. The ratio of women to men working in bande dessinée today has grown to about one in eight, still paltry, but an improvement on 30 years ago. In 2008 Montellier established the Prix Artémisia, named after the seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, to honour each year’s best graphic novel by a woman. And Montellier has added her own, from docudramas about the Chernobyl disaster or the 1994 Paris shootout by ‘anarchist bandits’ Florence Rey and Audry Maupin, to an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial and the first of a twovolume memoir, La Reconstitution (2015).

ArtReview

The lack of recognition for women flared again earlier this year, when the 43rd Angoulême International Comics Festival in France announced a shortlist of 30 international creators for its lifetime-achievement Grand Prix, and not one was a woman. Disgusted male nominees and French feminist organisations called for a boycott. Too late, the festival tried adding a few female candidates, only to abandon this and resort to totally open polls of the profession. Worse still, its director, Franck Bondoux, justified the all-male shortlist to Le Monde thusly: ‘Unfortunately there are few women in the history of comics. If you go to the Louvre, you will also find very few female artists.’ (Ironically, at the time, the Centre Pompidou in Paris was honouring French cartoonist Claire Bretécher with an in-depth retrospective.) Montellier’s two new Strips for ArtReview appropriate comics characters including Hergé’s Captain Haddock and José Cabrero Arnal’s Pif le chien to satirise how recommendations that the festival appoint juries equally constituted of men and women might escalate. So what does she think of the festival’s future? “Often, the inertia is such that everything seems to change, but then nothing really changes. So rather than saying let’s wait and see, I say we should fight and see.” Sceptical and resolute, Montellier has never left the frontlines. Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

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on the cover and on page 156 photography by Benjamin McMahon

Phrases on the spine and on pages 39, 75 and 117 are from A Dictionary of Computers by Anthony Chandor with John Graham and Robin Williamson (Penguin, 1970)

on page 152 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 162 illustration by Anna Vickery

October 2016

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A Curator Writes October 2016 “What do you mean you write a column for ArtReview?” I poke my spoon around the nettle soup and snails, usually one of my favourite items on the Rochelle Canteen menu. “Well, look…” I say apologetically. “When I took up your offer to curate Frieze Talks, I wasn’t writing the column. It’s a recent thing.” I pop a snail into my mouth. “You’ve put us in a very difficult position. Matthew is very upset. Very, very upset. He couldn’t finish his mushroom quiche in here yesterday when I told him.” “Do you lunch in here every day? Au contraire des escarbilles qui sont les hôtes des cendres chaudes, les escargots aiment la terre humide!” She ignores my provocative citation of Francis Ponge’s marvellous prose-poem ‘Escargot’. “But what about the speakers I’ve lined up?” I ask. “We can’t be associated with you. Not if you insist on continuing to write this column for them,” she replies. “Matthew has spoken. We shall not actively market your talks programme. Furthermore, your programme shall not be called Frieze Talks any more. You are forbidden from broadcasting them. No social media. And we’re housing you offsite. Believe me, Ivan, there won’t be any restaurants serving foraged leaves in their soup where you’re going…” And so a few weeks later I enter the doorway next to Jack’s Tattoo Studio on the High Street in Romford and climb the stairs. I have picked up the keys from a sullen-looking assistant at the nearby Havering Museum, who apparently is a former Frieze intern. I realise no one is going to turn up here on the day of the Frieze preview, so I stick up a handwritten sign. ‘Torno subito’, it says, a nod to Cattelan’s first exhibition, when he simply closed Galleria Neon. “You von’t be needing that.” A hand reaches out from over my shoulder and grabs the paper. “Ah, yes, Cattelan!” he continues. “He thought he vas funny. I’ll tell

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you something funny! Why couldn’t the art handlers move the painting? Because they didn’t have enough Monet for Degas to make the Van Gogh! Ha! Ha!” “Good lord, Hans Ulrich, what are you doing here? How did you find me? They didn’t allow me to tell my speakers the venue.” “Don’t be silly. Ve followed you. It is incredibly exciting to be working with Yana, and you know she is a much better driver than Julia ever was.” I look around nervously. “Don’t worry, I left her in the Shanghai round the corner. There is an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Right, let’s begin.” He marches into the room, a small office that has been emptied of its furniture, aside from five plastic chairs and 24 bottles of Highland Spring water. “Look, Hans Ulrich,” I hastily explain. “There’s no audience. There’s no live-streaming. You’re not allowed to Instagram this. There’s no structure to the talks, no time limits, no Q&As—” “This is exactly the talks programme I have always dreamt of!” Hans Ulrich excitedly interrupts. “We will explore the unconsciousness structured by language! Enough of your modest preamble, I vill begin!” I choose a chair and sit down. He turns to the empty room. “Ladies and gentlemen, velcome! Velcome to the Romford Seminar!” Seven hours later, Hans Ulrich and I stumble down the stairs. My head is reeling from his monologue on the possibility of cultural exchange without homogenisation, with a few interruptions for the bathroom and for me to shout “Brexit means Brexit!” at him. We open the door, and to my surprise a crowd is shouting wildly. I spot Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev pushing Massimiliano Gioni out of the way. Beatrix Ruf is waving her arms in the air. Curators from Tate Modern are holding copies of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating and begging us to autograph them. “Get back in, boys. They’re going nuts out there.” It’s Yana. She shoves us through the building’s door and rams it shut. “Here, take this.” She pushes three plastic bags of Chinese food at us. “Word’s spread like crazy about this thing. Curators, collectors – they’re all out there. They love the closed session, with no idea of what you two are saying or when you’ll stop. Szymczyk’s trying to persuade the guys in the chicken shop next door to let him install the listening devices he scored from Paglen.” “But how did people find out?” I ask. “Serota spotted me in the Shanghai. Who would have known he loves all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurants in Essex? He put two and two together and then tortured the former intern at Havering Museum by talking about Tate’s new extension and the power of performance art until he cracked. Get back in there, I’ll hold them off. Have you got more to talk about?” “It’s OK, Yana,” says Hans Ulrich. “I’ve only just moved on from talking about Édouard Glissant.” Yana looks at me concerned, and I smile back weakly. She bolts out the door. As I follow the great man back upstairs, I realise this might well restore my somewhat jaded reputation, but that it will come at an almighty price. I. Kurator

FAISONS DE L’INCONNU UN ALLIÉ *

11-23 0CTOBER 2016

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