ArtReview October 2017

The Situationists at 60 Cixin Liu Lucas Arruda Tal R

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

Alex Dordoy, The Moss is Dreaming (detail), 2017 Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Lodger

Lodger is a new series of exhibitions conceived by the writer and curator Tom Morton. Running concurrent to the exhibitions in the central space, Lodger expands Blain|Southern’s programme into new territories, often spotlighting a younger generation of artists.

Alex Dordoy The Moss is Dreaming 4 October — 11 November 2017

London | 4 Hanover Square

Sophie Jung November 2017 — January 2018

Jake & Dinos Chapman, The Disasters of Everyday Life (detail), 2017 Courtesy the artists and Blain|Southern Photo: Prudence Cuming

Jake & Dinos Chapman The Disasters of Everyday Life 4 October — 11 November 2017

London | 4 Hanover Square

ArtReview vol 69 no 7 October 2017

You gotta give to get back ArtReview is not known for looking backwards. Avanti! has always been its motto. At least since it learned to speak Italian. And not just because of its left-leaning proclivities. It’s always pushing itself to ride the crest of some wave labelled ‘contemporary’ and to be in the now, or perhaps to get slightly ahead of the curve and dip into ‘the next’: that’s what ArtReview’s publisher keeps saying ‘sells’ magazines. Dunno why he doesn’t just hire a professional surfer… or an astrologer… But Avanti! once more.

You don’t want to hear about ArtReview’s existential crises. You’ve got enough of your own to deal with.

For a while now, many of you have been whining on to ArtReview about how terrible it is to be living a modern life with so many ‘devices’ strapped to your persons and to be thus confronted with the constant threat of imminent and crushing information overload – which, btw, doesn’t stop those whiners among you from constantly emailing, texting and attempting to spam ArtReview in other ways with your pestering messages – and the extent to which every aspect of daily life is mediated, and in that process moderated, and what’s art going to do about it given that it needs to save us from ourselves in a way that we seem incapable of doing by or for ourselves because our lives are so mediated we don’t know how to get rid of all the filters and other stuff that stand between ourselves and actual lived life, assuming there is some sort of ‘actual’ life to be lived, which we wouldn’t know about anyway given the fact that everything we experience is so mediated and moderated, and thus we are kind of back to where

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we started in the first place, which is to say in a kind of sedated state in which things keep happening to us rather than ourselves effecting anything at all, and now we want to cry.

So – ignoring the fact that it is a mediator of sorts, which means also ignoring a certain amount of cannibalism in terms of what’s to come – ArtReview thought it would turn its head backwards (if only for the exercise and to prove that its neck still works, as well as for the sake of the usual guff about stretching its mind) and take a reverse look at the group for whom the notion of ‘the spectacle’ became an object of concern and investigation. It’s been 60 years since the theorist Guy Debord and a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals from around Europe formed the Situationist International, following a meeting at which they discussed the ways in which the oppression of everyday life – in the form of the alienation of the individual and the encouragement of heightened commodity fetishisation – engendered by the entrenchment of advanced capitalism might be combated.

(Whining people: your problems are not new.) And so ArtReview thought that it would take the opportunity of an anniversary to examine how the SI’s notions of how to combat ‘the spectacle’ have endured over the past 60 years, and to what extent, perhaps, they have become part of the spectacle – in the sense that the devices and techniques that they once used to critique mainstream culture have become part of that mainstream culture. Although you might say that the reference to the SI on the cover of this edition of ArtReview is a kind of ‘bingo!’ moment on that last subject. But ArtReview is quite used to chewing on its own tail by now, thank you very much. Welcome to self-help. ArtReview

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Shelf Life

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Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Développement durable Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain Sérignan Sérignan, France 01/07 – 22/10 2017

14 e Biennale de Lyon Lyon, France 20/09 2017 – 07/01 2018

Runo Lagomarsino

Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves Porto, Portugal 29/09 – 12/11 2017

Condemned To Be Modern Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery 10/09 2017 – 28/01 2018

Leticia Ramos

Solange Pessoa

Instituto Moreira Salles Paulista São Paulo, Brazil 21/09 – 19/11 2017

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Art Previewed

Previews

by Martin Herbert 39

Points of View

by Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind and J. J. Charlesworth 55

Under the Paving Stones: Manchester

by John Quin 47

Art Featured

The Situationists at 60

by McKenzie Wark 74

Lucas Arruda

by Oliver Basciano 92

Constant Interview by Mark Rappolt 80

Tal R

by Mark Rappolt 98

Cixin Liu

by Mingwei Song 86

page 74 Ali Dur and McKenzie Wark, New New Babylon: a Revisit to Constant’s New Babylon in New York (still), 2011, animation, 7 min 50 sec. Courtesy the artists

October 2017

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JEAN DUBUFFET Chevalier De Nuit, 1954 Estimate £1,200,000–1,800,000

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 110 Arthur Jafa, by J.J. Charlesworth Krzysztof Wodiczko, by Mark Rappolt Richard Deacon, by Robert Barry Michael E. Smith, by Sam Steverlynck Steps to Aeration, by Martin Herbert Christopher Wool, by Mark Prince Kara Walker, by Caroline Elbaor Fade in 2: Ext. Modernist Home – Night, by Fi Churchman Malin Gabriella Nordin, by Jacquelyn Davis Ungestalt, by Aoife Rosenmeyer In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes, by Gabriel Coxhead Jennifer Tee, by Ben Eastham Soul of a Nation, by Jeremy Atherton Lin True Faith, by John Quin Zarouhie Abdalian, by Jonathan Griffin

Theodora Allen, by Andrew Berardini Sam Davis and Paul Salveson, by Lindsay Preston Zappas Elaine, Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here, by Cat Kron Megan Marrin, by Ashton Cooper Frestas Trienal, by Tobi Maier Books 132 UFO Drawings from the National Archives, by David Clarke The Origin of Others, by Toni Morrison After Kathy Acker, by Chris Kraus Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy, by Dave Hickey THE STRIP 138 A CURATOR WRITES 142

page 122 Sam Gilliam, Carousel Change, 1970, acrylic paint on canvas and leather string, 300 × 234 cm. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

Cortesi Gallery London Curated by Francesca Pola 19 September 18 November 2017 Private view 2 October 2017

Ne ho solo 80…

Grazia Varisco

herman de vries. the return of beauty, 2003 (detail), artefacts mounted on paper, 18 parts, 36×26 cm each. Courtesy the artist

herman de vries the return of beauty

Cortesi Gallery Milano 26 October 15 December Private view 26 October

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Art Previewed

Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change 37

Previewed Since their formation in 1993, Danish collective themselves towards exposing economic conditions and redistributing the means of produc1 Superflex have, among other exploits, set up a manure-driven biogas system in Tanzania tion – even if it means legal trouble – Superflex (Supergas, 1997); collaborated with Brazilian are now the latest recipients of Tate Modern’s farmers to create a sustainable, caffeine-rich soft Hyundai Commission. drink (Guaraná Power, 2003); opened Copyshop Of course the artists are likely to do some(2005–), which queried copyright by offering thing new with the Turbine Hall’s vast, reverberant acreage, and as is traditional, Tate and various types of knockoff under the rubric of they are keeping totally shtum. If Superflex did art and morphed into several other projects; feel like revisiting an earlier work, though, we’d and tried to get Palestine entered into the be fine with it being the open-source intoxicant Eurovision Song Contest (Palestinian Eurovision, 2008). In 2010 they also did a deal with ArtReview: they developed with a group of University of Copenhagen students in 2004 (and later expanded for a year, we agreed never to mention them into workshops), the peerlessly titled Free Beer. by name; we failed (with a little help from our err… friends), with the result that Superflex Also riding high in the appellation stakes took control of the features section of an issue 2 is John Russell’s DOGGO, a word that, as the Twitter-habitué English artist doubtless knows, two years later, in May 2012. Generally angling

is Internet slang for dog (see also ‘pupper’) but also means to lie low. And since Russell, as a member of gadfly anti-YBA grouping BANK during the 1990s, has previously put together shows entitled Fuck Off and Cocaine Orgasm, maybe this is him lying low. Then again, his solo work since 2000 has been powered by fearlessly in-your-face ugliness and overkill, particularly his trademark computergenerated sci-fi ‘rendered paintings’, where unicorns and purple tentacles sport against fuchsia skies, and daunting books such as the 800-page textual compendium Frozen Tears (2003) and equally sprawling Frozen Tears II a year later. Underlying all of it, seemingly, is a desire to skirt capture by market forces or interpretative ones. The show at Kunsthalle

1 Superflex, I COPY therefore I am, 2009–11, photoprint on vinyl, 287 × 282 cm. Courtesy the artists

2 John Russell, DOGGO (still), 2017, video, 45 min.

Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Zürich

October 2017

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Zürich, featuring six ‘paintings’, nine sculptures, drawings and a feature-length film, is, we’re told, ‘not against or for something, it is not symbolic or realistic, it is not cynical, ironic or serious, it is not painting or sculpture… Whatever words you will choose to describe his works, they are the opposite as well.’ On reflection, we have nothing to add.

Genuinely lying low, though, is Juliette 3 Blightman. Rewind a few years, and a typical work of the Berlin-based British artist’s would be a pot plant and a film projection of very little happening somewhere indoors, mostly static camerawork, the projector only being very occasionally switched on, giving rhythm and pattern to the gallery’s own timeframe.

Blightman locates something weighty in quietude, in nothing moments; isolating

them, she gives midafternoon doldrums scale and even something like force, repudiating contemporary art’s ambient pressure to assay grand themes. (Her use of live plants surely tracks back, via time she spent as Cerith Wyn Evans’s assistant during the mid-2000s, to Marcel Broodthaers, another artist interested in refusal.) Latterly, while continuing to make films, she’s established a flexible, hybrid format, interleaving occasional text paintings, canvases and drawings that tend to gravitate to, again, where the action isn’t: an unassuming tree, someone’s back, domestic interiors, swimming baths – and, as if establishing that the absolutely normal can still transgress, not a few penises.

4 Since its inauguration in 1991 the Lyon Biennale has been one of the more dependable of its kind, afflicted neither by gigantism

or curatorial ego, vectoring manageably from a converted sugar factory on the city’s docks.

Last time it was Ralph Rugoff’s turn at the curatorial bat, his La vie moderne considering the current status of the modern. Now PompidouMetz director Emma Lavigne picks up the thematic baton, this being the second part of a trilogy of Lyon Biennales on the subject of the modern, brainchild of biennale director Thierry Raspail. So Lavigne’s Floating Worlds again asks what modernity means today, interpreting it – via Baudelaire and, the title suggests, Ukiyo-e, but facing the volatile present – as a kind of transience, liquidity, randomness, unfolding.

In any case, expect flesh to be put on those bones by a mix of old art and new: David Tudor’s 1968 walkthrough sound sculpture Rainforest, glimpses of the continuum of Tropical

3 Juliette Blightman, Loved an image (5th May) – Cactus, 2017, watercolour on paper, 38 × 28 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

4 Cildo Meireles, Babel, 2011, radios, lighting, sound, dimensions variable.

Photo: Agomstino Osio. © and courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

5 Rivane Neuenschwander, Infancy and History (WAR) (detail), 2017, 43 hand-sewn flags, 67 × 42 cm (each). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

6 Caroline Achaintre, A.D.O., 2017, hand-tufted wool, 310 × 190 cm. Photo: Philipp Hänger.

Courtesy the artist and Arcade Fine Arts, London

Modernism via Lygia Pape, Cildo Meireles, Ernesto Neto and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Shimabuku’s kites, Fontana’s slashes and contributions from younger artists including Jorinde Voigt, Ari Benjamin Meyers – themselves both focusing on the auditory – and Pratchaya Phinthong.

5 Also among the artists here is Rivane Neuenschwander, who has long used fragile materials, chance processes and vibrant colour in an exploration of distribution that updates Latin American Conceptualism, particularly the circulatory, participatory art of Meireles and Hélio Oiticica: takeaway postcards, ribbons printed with wishes and little models made from straws by bored barflies, collected after

hours. In Lyon she revisits A Watchword, a work begun in 2012 following protests (the so-called Bus Rebellion) in Brazil, when she started scouring the Internet for words related to protest and printing them on labels. These are pinned on bulletin boards: visitors are invited to take one and sew it onto their clothing, a conversation piece of sorts, making language and sentiment unpredictably mobile. Meanwhile, mobile herself, she’s opening her fifth exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, where we can expect ‘new site-specific installations, projections and paintings’.

In 2015 another artist represented by Friedman, Paul McDevitt, opened the art/sound project space Farbvision in his Prenzlauer

October 2017

Berg live/work space (having discovered, while renovating, a preserved tile-covered butcher’s shop under what had been a TV retailer). Apparently not daunted by the fact that he already runs a record label, Infinite Greyscale, with fellow artist Cornelius Quabeck, he kept the tiles and commenced an exhibition programme. The modestly scaled shopfront has since bloomed into one of Berlin’s more idiosyncratic venues, where artists and musicians you’d expect in bigger spaces – Paul Housley, electronica act Mouse on Mars’s Jan St Werner, Annika Ström, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier – are framed by retro ceramic walls and a general air of informality. The latest incum6 bent is Caroline Achaintre. One might broadly

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8 Pascal Hachem, Who Carries Whom?, 2017.

Courtesy the artist and The Mosaic Rooms, London

7 Alexander Apóstol, Le Corbusier y Diego Rivera se visitan 30 veces (still), 2008, 16mm film transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 8 min 56 sec. Courtesy the artist

anticipate what the French/German artist of modernist architecture in Latin America’: will do – she works, as is widely known, between here, figures including Jonathas de Andrade, tufty, trailing, wall-based textiles, ceramics Leonor Antunes, Renata Lucas and Melanie Smith look at the imposition of modernising and drawings, her art hovering on the edge of eerie figuration, infused with theatricality, processes and ideologies through the prism and melding all kinds of influences, from of buildings (new government buildings, modernist design to German Expressionism public housing, universities and even, – but you won’t have seen it anywhere like this. as in Brasilia, entire cities) in Brazil, Mexico, To return to Latin America and the continCuba, Venezuela and elsewhere. uing modern (which, despite what Bruno Latour 8 Pascal Hachem’s show at The Mosaic said, isn’t going anywhere), over in Los Angeles Rooms, the nonprofit showcase (in London’s Kensington) for art from the Arab world, 7 is Condemned To Be Modern at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, part of Pacific Standard comes wrapped in what might seem at first Time but worth considering in isolation. It brings blush like a glib, paradoxical, even non-title, together 21 artists from the past two decades The show has a long title that I don’t recall anymore. ‘who have responded critically to the history But there’s a pointed intent: the Lebanese

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artist wants to get at how the past can be held onto in his hometown of Beirut, which has frequently been a city of fragmentation and change.

Via a series of mechanised, readymade-based installations, Hachem – who’s in his late thirties and has also founded a design studio, 200grs – appears to be brusquely poeticising that condition. Trousers are suspended above mirrors, a stone where one foot should be, the weighted clothing striking the glass at intervals until it breaks. Elsewhere, wire brushes scrape the wall, revealing earlier layers of paint, and two irons tirelessly flatten a pile of flour, creating a fragile evenness – all of which, the organisers reckon, ‘hints at the impossibility of grasping meaning in the face of successive events’.

9

Mircea Cantor makes videos and sculptures that are heavy with allegorical import, and have been diversely interpreted, though they’re often centred – it seems – around the necessity of investiture in the present moment. (Cantor is Romanian, but there’s no way that his work is going to be reduced to that country’s difficult history.) In the three-hour Deeparture (2005), a video for which he placed a wolf and a deer together in a gallery, one might correctly assume that there isn’t a bloodbath, just a tautly stretched condition of anticipation and a reservoir of potential metaphor. In Tracking Happiness (2009), a group of women standing on sand constantly sweep away each other’s footsteps; this, for Cantor, relates to the idea that you can’t follow someone else’s path to find your own happiness.

Vertical Attempt (2009), a one-second video 10

featuring a child ‘cutting’ a flow of water with scissors, is endlessly looped, a Sisyphean act in which, nevertheless, the ‘attempt’ registers as optimistic. Cantor has said he’s interested in a condition of suspension because it’s ‘a place to speak about new possibilities’, whereas finishing something doesn’t necessarily bring about anything new. At Fondazione Giuliani, he wraps his show in a characteristically hopeful title: Your Ruins Are My Flag.

New York’s White Columns, particularly since expat Mancunian Matthew Higgs assumed command in 2004 and shifted the venue’s narrative away from emerging artists, has a long history of presenting artists overlooked by the mainstream artworld – not least those with developmental or mental disabilities.

In the case of Helen Rae, though, the seventy-

seven-year-old artist has already – just – become a known property. Rae, who’s lived in Claremont, California, all her life, was born deaf and is nonverbal, and learned to draw three decades or so ago at First Street Gallery, a local support programme. She’s lately had a couple of shows, and some art-fair presentations, of her vivid, fashion magazine-inspired paintings – defined by evocative figural distortions – and has been profiled, aptly enough, in Vogue. One might easily forget the backstory, though.

Rae’s paintings hew close to the original photos of dressed-up models in colour and form, but bend away from them in ways that feel profound yet ambiguous, limning all manner of uneasy new emotions on the models’ faces. If this is outsider art, the stress is on the second word, not the first. Martin Herbert

9 Mircea Cantor, Your Ruins Are My Flag, 2017. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome

10 Helen Rae, February 21 2017, 2017, coloured pencil and graphite on paper, 61 × 46 cm.

Courtesy The Goodluck Gallery, Los Angeles

1 Superflex Tate Modern, London 3 October – 2 April

4 Lyon Biennale various venues, Lyon through 7 January

8 Pascal Hachem The Mosaic Rooms, London through 2 December

2 John Russell Kunsthalle Zürich through 12 November

5 Rivane Neuenschwander Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 3 October – 4 November

9 Mircea Cantor Fondazione Giuliani, Rome 13 October – 16 December

3 Juliette Blightman Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam through 21 October

6 Caroline Achaintre Farbvision, Berlin 6 October – 11 November

10 Helen Rae White Columns, New York through 21 October

7 Condemned To Be Modern Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery through 28 January

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ArtReview

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Under the Paving Stones

Manchester’s iconoclasm endures

by John Quin

Real Life A yellow tram heading out of the centre for Eccles comically toot-toots like Popeye’s pipe as I carefully cross St Peter’s Square. Nearby, at the Opera House, a poster asks, ‘Do you remember what it was like to grow up with a boy band?’ Below this (an ad for a musical featuring tunes by local lads Take That), two homeless guys in sleeping bags kip so soundly that I look to see if they are still breathing. High above the dozing heads of the lost, many cranes are at work (‘we are registered with the Considerate Constructors Scheme’) constructing the monstrously magnified memory sticks that pass for highrise developments these days. With their architectural similitude, their sheen of shimmering blue glass, we might be staring at the kind of buildings that line Vancouver’s harbour. But the waterways here are narrow, dark and manmade. Welcome to Manchester, part of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ alliance of cities and towns boosting economic output in the region, site of the great Ship Canal, a 56km inland waterway connecting the city to the Irish Sea, and home to football clubs City and United, to Morrissey and Marr. Once known as filthy Cottonopolis, it is now the apparent model of a postindustrial city. With the investment of billions, has the city’s notorious gloom (typified by the music of the early Factory Records era) been superseded by a bright and shiny creative present? Artistically, is Manchester now a graveyard or a ballroom?

We head first to the Daniel Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North to see an exhibition on the life, work and influence of Wyndham Lewis, the crotchety leader of Vorticism, Britain’s contribution to the modernist movement, to get an initial flavour of the city’s celebrated contrariness. As one pub I pass proudly announces with a sign in its

An unknown artist’s statue of Friedrich Engels, appropriated by Phil Collins and installed at Home

Imperial War Museum North

window – quoting Factory head-honcho Tony Wilson – ‘This is Manchester, we do things differently here’. The Lewis story highlights his obvious talents as a draughtsman while not ignoring his oft-dubious political positions.

His disgusts and enthusiasms are projected in two parallel columns – what he blasts or blesses. Lewis, we learn, was comfortable with ambiguity, U-turns, challenge – which makes for a nuanced and adult show in an age that regularly demands a kind of puerile, unbending piety from artists.

About the Weather Outside again and the tempest arrives. As Trinculo has it, ‘Yon same black cloud, yon huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor.’

Time to hide heads at the Whitworth Art Gallery, where we immediately find treasure from the East. Here is a beautiful brocade shawl from India made sometime in the nineteenth century, also a curved tulwar – a useful-looking steel sabre from Kashmir. Amidst many other stunning artefacts from the subcontinent are four glamorous canvases by Raqib Shaw featuring a wealth of delirious colouring. I read this recently: It was soon clear that he was an exceptionally gifted painter, of a technical facility as great as Dalí’s… figurative in an age of conceptualism, his male and female figures, often nude, contained within, or containing, or surrounded by, or surrounding, the symbolist icons of his arcane studies, flowers, eyes, swords, cups, suns, stars, pentagrams, and male and female sexual organs.

It is an extract from Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Golden House (2017), in which one strongly suspects he is referencing Shaw, whose overstuffed canvases at the Whitworth confuse with their profusion of detail. As is often the case with Rushdie, there is no such thing as glut – Shaw piles everything in, arguably to the detriment of comprehension.

His painting The Adoration (After Jan Gossaert) (2015–16) is displayed unflatteringly (blast!) beside the exquisitely digestible Still Life: Flowers and Fruit (c. 1764–1808), by the Dutch master Jan van Os.

October 2017

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The Great Man’s Secrets Upstairs things get a tad earthy, rambunctiously Rabelaisian. Graham Eatough and Stephen Sutcliffe’s No End to Enderby (2015) references the great Mancunian writer (bless!) Anthony Burgess. A two-part film captures the action from the first chapter of the opening novel of Burgess’s Enderby quartet and the last chapter from the fourth. Enderby is the spikiest of fictional poets, more ribald than Jim Jarmusch’s gawky Paterson, or Nicholson Baker’s gentle Paul Chowder. Eatough and Sutcliffe’s video captures the rudely dyspeptic humour and all-too-human pathos of the poet’s labouring. The set design is also displayed as an installation complete with the toilet seat that Enderby famously sits on to compose.

Burgess was blasted soon after his death by a scabrous biography written by another self-regarding Lewis – one forenamed Roger. Eatough and Sutcliffe confer here a belated blessing on both Burgess and Enderby.

Their work is an entertaining paean to the pedagogical talent of one of England’s most inventive novelists.

Enderby’s toilet seat at the Whitworth

Cut-Out Shapes

above Men’s room, the Whitworth below Dexter Dalwood, Neverland, 1999, on view at the Whitworth

Elsewhere in the clearly thriving Whitworth there’s Cornelia Parker’s Verso (2016), referencing the city’s cotton industry. A grid of photographs reveals the patterns of needlework stitching on the back of button cards.

These then are accidental abstractions created by exploited women workers (blast!). Barbara Brown’s Op-art-lite fabric designs from the 1970s (bless!) take me back. These brightened many a living room of the British throughout that benighted decade. Some new acquisitions here have their own space. There’s a creepy Dexter Dalwood oil called Neverland (1999), an imagined image of Michael Jackson’s bedroom complete with cuddly toys. Much more reassuring is Laure Prouvost’s parody of museum panels, where one sees a panel as artwork on a wall that reads IDEALLY HERE A BEAUTIFUL LARGE FIREPLACE WHERE WE COULD ALL GATHER (2011).

Nearby, David Batchelor’s Plato’s Disco (2015), a mobile made from stainless steel and warming pastel-coloured plates of laminated glass, throws jazzily kaleidoscopic reflections on the white walls.

There is sadness at the Whitworth too – a support group called the Fabulous Forgetful Friends makes art about dementia. A list of one sufferer’s musical favourites – Phil’s Ultimate Playlist (2017) – reminds me of James Leyland Kirby, from nearby Stockport, and his spooky musical project The Caretaker, with its focus on lost memory, its sounds redolent of ghostly dancehalls from the 1930s.

What to make then of former director Maria Balshaw’s inheritance at the Whitworth now that she directs Tate? Aside from the above successes, two bottles of expensive Aesop handwash and one of hand rub in the gents (bless!) suggests that all’s been scrubbed up quite nicely, thank you very much.

I’m a Party Under railway arches we head down Jack Rosenthal Street. Manchester has an admirable tendency to celebrate its cult heroes this way, and soon we find Tony Wilson Place. Outside the arts centre Home stands a statue of Friedrich Engels, author of The Condition of the Working Class in England

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of what appears to be an advert, her long dark hair slowly billowing, a calming apparition selling – what exactly? Delusional visions of happiness for the former colony in a gleaming free market future run by the People’s Republic of China? Au Hoi Lam’s Unutterable Antecedents, Consequences and Coincidences (2017) are a group of delicate abstractions done in pencil and acrylics on canvas along with some inks on lined paper stamped with the coat of arms of British Hong Kong, thus referring to the handover in 1997.

One reads gnomically ‘AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. ARE YOU DOING WELL’.

Hong Kong, like Manchester, is a city caught now in flux and mutability.

Also at CFCCA is One of Two Stories, or Both (Field Bagatelles) (2017) by rising star Samson Young, a complex but rewarding work comprising an installation with photography, film and audio – a radio composition of storytelling inspired by the mythic tales of seventeenth-century Chinese travellers. The music is by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Olivier Messiaen and Young himself. As footsore as those globetrotters, I find it easy to sit and be lulled by the beguiling environment.

Raqib Shaw, The Adoration (After Jan Gossaert) (2015–16), on view at the Whitworth

(1845), a text based on observations made while living in Manchester.

This work by an unknown sculptor has been appropriated by artist Phil Collins and transported from its original site somewhere in Ukraine.

Engels’s name is carved in Cyrillic. The installation of this piece has not been without controversy – one article in the (previously known as Manchester!) Guardian by a resident of Stockport named Kevin Bolton was highly critical of Collins’s work, calling it propaganda. Bolton says he doesn’t have a problem with a statue of Engels in Manchester as such but he does have an issue with one specifically constructed in Ukraine promoting the Soviet cause. Bolton cites Stalinist crimes in Ukraine as part of his argument. The statue has blue and yellow paint daubed on it – a remnant of vandalism presumably by West Ukrainian nationalists protesting more recent events in their homeland. Collins couldn’t have picked a more pertinent time to deliver a work on the relevance of public statuary given the recent traumas of Charlottesville. Arguments today kicked off by historical reminders of yesterday. All solidity is melting – should we give a statue our salute or should we blow it up? Blast or bless?

Inside Home itself we find more Soviet allusions in a collaborative project called Strelnikov’s Glasses and Other Stories. A research collective calling itself (bless!) The Society of Spectacles shows work by 24 artists, designers and filmmakers. Wall-mounted images reference various myopic icons of popular culture such as Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965) or Hitchcock’s doomed Miriam from Strangers on a Train (1951).

The title of the show comes from David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago (1965) – we see a letter from the actor Tom Courtenay sharing his memories of wearing different specs reflecting the mutations of his character in the movie.

An Andy Warhol parody features a bespectacled Roger Moore as James Bond in a screenprint triptych called (blast!) Four Eyes Only.

Sweetheart Contract Over in the zappy Northern Quarter at the excellent CFCCA – the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art – there is a group show, From Ocean to Horizon, that features seven emerging Hong Kong artists, most of whom have never shown in the UK before. Sarah Lai’s video Let the night breeze send away yesterday’s dreams (2017) stars an actress in ambiguous slo-mo images

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top Samson Young, One of Two Stories, or Both (Field Bagatelles), 2017, on view at CFCCA above Article of faith in a pub window

BRAM BOGART LOUSY JANE FRIEZE MASTERS 5–8 OCTOBER 2017 ZONZUCHT VIGO GALLERY 11 OCTOBER–11 NOVEMBER 2017

Lousy Jane 1960 home made paint (pigment, oil, glue, watercolour) on canvas 126 × 155 cm 495⁄8 × 611⁄8 in

#vigogallery www.vigogallery.com

Back to Nature Meantime it’s still monsoon season; rain falls by the pailful. Sheltering at a bus stop I read a poem stencilled on a shop wall, the Gemini Take Away, by Lemn Sissay called ‘Rain’. Liverpudlians might run and hide their heads, but here…

When the rain falls They talk of Manchester But when the triumphant rain falls We think of rainbows It’s the Mancunian way The city’s bicycle programme is another blast-or-bless conundrum – some love the orange Mobikes as they sit necking in pairs, some chuck them in the canals. Staying with sporty matters, at the National Football Museum there’s more than a scintilla of Brazilian art influence – in an exhibition on Pelé, of course. This has Lorenzo Quinn’s bronze sculpture The Bicycle Kick (2015) and Russell Young’s Pelé Bicycle Kick Triptych (Atomic Silver) (2015) – the latter a screenprint with diamond dust à la Warhol.

And then there’s Andy’s own Pelé (1978) from his ‘Athletes’ series. Santiago Montoya’s Pelé 10 (1) (2015) recalls Cildo Meireles and Jac Leirner’s projects with used banknotes, his work being rolls of paper money mounted on stainless steel that spell out the great man’s shirt number.

top Poet Lemn Sissay’s wall-mounted ‘Rain’ above A brace of Mobikes

Time’s Up

above Russell Young, Pelé Bicycle Kick Triptych (Atomic Silver), 2015, on view at the National Football Museum below On the site of the former nightclub…

As for coming attractions: the Manchester Art Gallery, fresh from its hugely successful show on the Joy Division/New Order axis, is preparing to be part of a major programme on South Asian art and culture to mark the 70th anniversary of Partition. The former site of Granada Studios is to be revamped into a £110 million arts venue called the Factory. The Haçienda nightclub may have gone, demolished and replaced by another set of boring apartments, but in the city’s typically Situationist-quoting fashion, The Factory Must Be Built. Currently part of the site is home to the Artzu Gallery, showing paintings of heads as leaden as the sky above, by Dutch artist Alisa Lim A Po. Also upcoming are images by designer Malcolm Garrett at the Special Collections Gallery of the Metropolitan University. Expect startlingly sharp record-cover art done for those Mancunian legends Buzzcocks and Magazine.

I finish up with a pint at The Britons Protection staring at murals of the Peterloo Massacre, subject of an upcoming movie by Mike Leigh.

On the walls the peaceable demonstrators face the mounted dragoons angrily about to slash at them. Outside the Free Trade Hall there’s a red plaque commemorating the tragedy. Here too an incendiary gig by the Sex Pistols (bless!) sparked the whole Mancunian musical renaissance.

When it comes to iconoclasm, this city knows how to blast first.

John Quin is a writer based in Brighton and Berlin

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Points of View

Should we lament the demise of the midlist gallery? (I offer no criteria for definition here, only the presumption that readers of this magazine will immediately understand what I mean by ‘midlist’.) We should (lament, that is), but only if we believe that the spate of recent gallery closures, so breathlessly covered by the arts media, is a function of some ethical change in the marketplace. Note I say ethical here and not structural, because a structural change, which we may well be witnessing too, would have less to do with the agency of individuals in the marketplace than with external factors – such as technology, or demographics – which is to say, with history, and history isn’t ethical; it simply happens.

So an ethical change in the marketplace would entail some shift in how we believe things ought to be. The recent open letter written by Jean-Claude Freymond-Guth, on the occasion of the closing of FreymondGuth Fine Arts in Basel, Switzerland, at the end of this past summer, is a signal example of how an ethical change – we could also call it an ‘excuse’ – is blamed for a failed business venture.

In his letter, Freymond-Guth decries the ‘alienation’ produced by the ‘ever growing demand’ of ‘global participation, production, and competition’. This is the ‘commercial reality’ that Freymond-Guth admits he failed to confront, allowing his decisions instead to be guided by an ‘idealistic vision’ ‘based on the belief in the value of sensation and reflection, a belief in creation and contextualization, a belief in collaboration and community’. If we can accept that such values are not incompatible with commercial reality (in fact, on the evidence, one must accept it; for every failed Freymond-Guth there are a number of midlist galleries successfully managing their affairs), then we are left to ask: should they have been?

mirror, mirror, on the wall…

A lot of failing midlist galleries should take a closer look at themselves, says Jonathan T.D. Neil, cold-eyed capitalist One answer points to an ethics of the collectorate, essentially an ethics of the art consumer: how she should and should not conduct herself, what kinds of conversations she should have and what kinds of inquiries she should make (she should talk about intersectionalism, or how artists today are confronting the facts of migration; she should not talk about return on investment). Let’s call this buy-side ethics.

Another answer points to sell-side ethics.

The best-known ethical commitment on this side is ‘pay your artists’ (whose payments are often first to be missed when cash flow is strained; always a good sign that closure is around the corner). Less well known are all of those other ethical commitments that come with running a good business: honouring agreements; paying your bills and debts, and maintaining cash flow; serving well your customers, clients and partners; and reinvesting some of whatever might be left over into the people and infrastructure that ensure one can continue to do all of these things more than once, and maybe even do them better.

October 2017

‘Serving well your customers, clients, and partners’ may be justifiably called out as vague: what, after all, does it mean to serve these people well? The easiest answer is: ask them. What do your artists want and need? What do your collectors want and need? What do curators or critics or other advocates that are important to your business want and need? Then ask yourself how well can you balance the wants and needs of all these people with the mission of your business? Doing all of this may be difficult, but the doing is not mysterious, nor is it impossible – just look around; not every mid-list gallery around the world is closing – it’s just work.

Not balancing the needs of customers, clients and partners with the needs of one’s business lies at the core of why midlist galleries fail. This balancing act is commercial reality, and it does not, or, to use the ethical voice, should not oppose the values of ‘reflection’ and ‘creation’ and ‘community’ that, though ‘idealist’, may and often do serve the interests of commercial success.

When one digs a little deeper into stories of midlist closures, one rarely finds true buyside ethical failures. Sales cycles can ebb and flow. It may seem like ‘someone turned the faucet off’ or that there’s a ‘lack of connoisseurship’, two excuses offered by Lisa Cooley when she closed her gallery on New York City’s Lower East Side (and both buy-side excuses), but more often than not it’s the sell-side that got out of balance, which can easily happen when gallerists decide to hire hip designers to kit out a few thousand new square feet of gallery space.

To paraphrase Harold Geneen, the only ethical failure in business is to run out of cash.

Don’t lament the midlist closures that blame the buyers or the market. It’s just bad business.

Jonathan T.D. Neil is associate editor of ArtReview and director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Los Angeles

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The work of the human hand is firmly back at the forefront of visual art, as is testified by works appearing in countless exhibitions and studios. Artists are making objects themselves, learning crafts and digging up old techniques, whether wood carving, metal casting, printing or textile work. There is nothing surprising about this: the general outsourcing of professional and private tasks such as cooking and cleaning, a growing and more general sense of dislocation, and a life that is increasingly lived via the mediation of a screen are all contributing factors to the urge to make. Indeed, this shift to reclaim manual skills using more or less natural materials not only pertains to visual art but goes far beyond it, and neither is it automatically old-fashioned; on the contrary, it is often unexpectedly refreshing to experience the old in new translations.

A particular focus within this overall trend is weaving. The exhibition Textile Subtexts at Malmö Konstmuseum earlier this year, for example, contained woven work by artists such as Hannah Ryggen and Charlotte Johannesson. And there seem to be looms everywhere. During the last month I have come across them in contexts as varied as the fabulous Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, where a lady was making flax fabric once used for sails on a standing loom, and at Tensta Konsthall’s own Women’s Café, where women of all ages gather twice a week around textile handicraft activities. An artist who has made a point of contributing to the revival of old weaving techniques is Anne Low of Vancouver; as might be expected, her studio is dominated by a large weaving loom, inherited from an older weaver and used for making cloth the historical way – meticulously and very slowly.

It was an unassuming object presented earlier this year on the wall of the Vancouver Art Gallery during its local survey show Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures that sparked my curiosity about Low’s work.

There I saw a piece of slightly draped mustard-yellow cloth with small green embroideries speckling the surface. The cloth was contained in a wooden frame with a sheet of glass in front and the fabric spilling over the top.

It was hung at waist-height and so appeared like an apron in an unusual vitrine, peculiarly

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Looms Everywhere Weaving and artistic skill is making a comeback, and for Maria Lind that means a new subjectivity too

Anne Low, An ambitious pagan (II), 2016, cotton, glass, metallic thread, handwoven silk and wool dyed with Osage orange, red oak, 93 × 33 × 8 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

concrete and abstract, rough and smooth at the same time. Later I learned that the artist dyed the cloth herself using Osage orange, a plant-based dye used for hundreds of years on the American continent to produce orange and yellow, as well as khaki green used for army uniforms. The shapes of the embroidery were borrowed from a pattern used by Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763), a prominent rococo designer of floral patterns for silk woven by hand in London’s Spitalfields, lately celebrated as a pioneer within the field of fabric design.

Seemingly simple as a piece of work, Low’s An ambitious pagan (II) (2016) has something ethnographic to it; reviving a colonial weaving technique, clearly connected to the human body, with a devotion to the decorative. In Low’s hands cloth aspires to be an autonomous form. And yet, on display, it relies on the frame Low has designed.

Fabric in general benefits from some kind of support – it blossoms when it is attached to something: a piece of furniture, an architectural feature, a body, a hanger or a mannequin.

In this sense, cloth is quintessentially relational, going from modesty while folded or rolled to being stunning when activated. At the same time, for good or for bad, cloth has the capacity to appear authorless.

While weaving is a pervasive artform through history, the extremely time-consuming and female-dominated activity of making cloth rarely comes with the name of its fabricator attached.

In newer work, Low plays with the contrasts between organic and synthetic materials, and combines handmade objects and readymade parts like a sock darner from the nineteenth century, small eighteenth-century silver coins or a plastic fish used in angling.

These works approach the surreal.

Some of the surrealism is tied to the fact that she is translating, rather than simply appropriating objects or techniques; her work is not about claiming ownership but, rather like intangible cultural heritage, about temporarily activating knowledge through the demonstration of skill, in subjective ways. A continuous, freewheeling and poetic translation, by hand.

Maria Lind is director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm

A recent ArtReview Live event, the launch of the book Artists re:thinking the Blockchain, published in September by London’s Furtherfield gallery and independent publishers Torque, took on the complex subject of blockchain technology and its relevance to contemporary art. Blockchain computing is most associated with the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum, but the principles and implications of blockchain go beyond the growing attraction for currencies that aren’t dependent on governments or centralised financial systems.

Since blockchain computing allows a network of computers to run processes collectively that are encrypted to become an irrevocable record shared across all the computers running the process, all kinds of supposedly verifiable forms of exchanges, contracts and processes can be set up on the back of it.

Blockchain promises a possibly utopian solution to issues of transparency, trust and governance in the digital age. But the rise of interest in the blockchain closely tracks the development of an ever more financialised world economy since the 2008 crash. So it was perhaps only a matter of time before the art market got its own blockchain-based trading platform. Last month, an outfit called Maecenas announced its new art registry and trading platform – the first ‘decentralised art gallery’ – as well as the first public offering of its new ‘token’, called ART. Not simply a cryptocurrency, Maecenas touts itself as a blockchain platform that, according to its creators, will ‘democratise access to fine art’. ‘For the first time,’ the Maecenas website enthuses, ‘technology will allow investors, collectors and owners to exchange shares in paintings and sculptures instantly, akin to the way stocks of a company are traded today.’

A sceptic might wonder how one can really own a share of an artwork – after all, much of the point of art collecting is that collectors get to own something no one else has. But Maecenas is symptomatic of the relentless financialisation of the art market, in which artworks are bought and sold as ‘stores of value’. Artworks have become an ‘asset class’, in investment jargon, increasingly bought to be hidden away in warehouses in the peculiar nonzones known as freeports – tax- and customs-free spaces where objects are, legally, indefinitely ‘in transit’ between countries. Indeed, Maecenas promises to set up its own freeport ‘art vaults’ to store the works listed on its exchange. The site assures readers that multimillion-dollar ‘masterpieces’ will be listed on its platform – artworks valuable enough that even a fraction of their value is worth trading.

Over the last decade there have been many attempts by tech entrepreneurs to make the art market more transparent and the trading

art hacking Act now if you want a piece of this bubble, advises J.J. Charlesworth

Martín Nadal, Cesar Escudero Andaluz, Bittercoin – the worst miner ever, 2016, bitcoin miner made from an old calculator. Photo: Patricia Cadavid.

Courtesy Ars Electronica, Linz

October 2017

of artworks more ‘fluid’. First with auction-data websites, then with artwork-trading shopfront platforms like Artsy or Mutualart and auctioneering websites such as Paddle8. The Maecenas platform however represents something new, since its main innovation is the fragmentation of the values of relatively ‘illiquid’ assets into more tradeable financial objects. With fractions of the value of an artwork tradeable, Maecenas hopes to draw vastly bigger numbers of investors to the art market, those looking to ‘diversify their portfolios’. On the other side of the equation, owners of expensive artworks might list them on the platform in order to raise cash – to buy other artworks; while they retain the title to the work, they effectively sell bonds in its value, which they buy back if they remove the work from Maecenas’s register.

In this strange new future, art collectors and dealers will no longer worry about buying, selling, shipping and storing artworks. Instead, such works will all disappear into freeport vaults, while galleries and investors speculate on the rising value of a Jeff Koons or a Gerhard Richter, trading blockchain certificates with each other.

A scheme like Maecenas reveals the extent to which the art market is now part of the inexorable drive towards financialisation in the global economy. While the real economy stagnates, the financial economy has boomed since the 2008 crash – as productivity has stalled, low interest rates, quantitative easing by central banks and the hoarding of profits by corporations has created an economy awash with cash.

It has to go somewhere. And with schemes like Maecenas, now everyone can own a piece of that growing bubble. This column’s advice: buy now.

J.J. Charlesworth is associate editor of ArtReview

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Whitechapel Gallery Thomas Ruff

Photographs 1979–2017

Book now: 27 September 2017 – 21 January 2018 #ThomasRuff whitechapelgallery.org

Artangel & Miranda July present Norwood Jewish Charity Shop, London Buddhist Centre Charity Shop & Spitalfields Crypt Trust Charity Shop in solidarity with

Islamic Relief Charity Shop at Selfridges

#opentotheworld until 22 October 2017 Selfridges 400 Oxford Street , London W1A 1AB

El GrEco to Goya

27 September 2017 – 7 January 2018

Free admiSSion #elGrecotoGoya

Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) El Greco, The Tears of St Peter (detail), 1580-89 © The Bowes Museum, County Durham

SpaniSh MaStErpiEcES FroM thE BowES MuSEuM

A M S T E R DAM A R T.C O M

Amsterdam Art Weekend

r e v o disc y r a r o p m e cont art 23 – 26 Nov. 2017

What’s in store?

PHOTOGRAPHS Dafydd Jones PAINTINGS Danny Pockets 19 - 23 SEPTEMBER

the Hemming & marr show RECENT PAINTINGS Adrian Hemming Andrew Marr 3 - 14 OCTOBER

Gibraltar 5 ARTISTS Cosquieri Dalmedo Danino Floriano Ullger 17 - 28 OCTOBER

CANADA NOW Contemporary Canadian Art* 1 - 25 NOVEMBER

the Aborealists PAINTING The Art of Trees

dark Ages NEW LIGHT WORKS Kirsten Reynolds 12 DECEMBER - 13 JANUARY 2018

A NOT-FOR-PROFIT PLATFORM SUPPORTING THE FUSION OF ART, PHOTOGRAPHY & CULTURE TUESDAY-FRIDAY 11-6 SATURDAY 12-6 SUNDAY CLOSED

183-185 Bermondsey street (adjacent to White Cube) London se1 3UW telephone 0203 441 5152 abps@project-space.london www.project-space.london ARTISTIC DIRECTOR mIKe Von JoeL

GALLERY DIRECTOR sereneLLA mArtUFI

*In association with Art Mûr, Montreal

the tip of the Iceberg

DIGITAL MATTERS: THE EARTH BEHIND THE SCREEN

Exhibition 3 November 2017 - 4 February 2018 Symposium 3 November 2017

Lin Ke, Ellen Pau, Dani Ploeger, Yang Yongliang, MAP Office, Unknown Fields www.cfcca.org.uk

EXHIBITION SUP[PORTED BY:

ON-GOING SUPPORT FROM:

IMAGE: YANG YONGLIANG, THE DAY OF PERPETUAL NIGHT (DETAIL) COPYRIGHT © 2017 CENTRE FOR CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART THOMAS STREET, MANCHESTER, M4 1EU. REGISTERED CHARITY (UK) 518992 LIMITED COMPANY 2137427.

26 Sep 2017 - 7 Jan 2018 FERENS ART GALLERY, HULL

THE ART SCENE NEEDS a CHANGE OF SCENE Hurvin Anderson // Andrea Büttner // Lubaina Himid // Rosalind Nashashibi Discover more hull2017.co.uk/turnerprize

Join the conversation HOST CITY

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watch this space Gallery opening 7 October 2017

Free entry Mon - Sat, 10am - 5pm

hattongallery.org.uk King’s Road, Newcastle University Haymarket Interchange

sounds like her liNdA O ’ kEEffE

Gender, Sound Art & Sonic Cultures

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14 OCTOBER 2017 – 3 JANUARY 2018

AiN BAilEY sONiA BOYCE mBE RA ElsA m ’ BAlA

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CURATEd BY ChRisTiNE EYENE

New Art Exchange | Nottingham | www.nae.org.uk

23 September — 10 December 2017 Free entry for Friends of the RA Sponsored by

Jasper Johns, Fool’s House (detail), 1962. Oil on canvas with broom, sculptural towel, stretcher and cup. 182.9 x 11.4 cm.

Private collection, on loan to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns / VAGA, New York / DACS, London 2017.

Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with The Broad, Los Angeles.

313 ART PROJECT (SEOUL), PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY (MALDONADO), BAGINSKI GALERIA/ PROJECTOS (LISBON), ALBERT BARONIAN (BRUSSELS), BARTHA CONTEMPORARY (LONDON), GALERIE BASTIAN (BERLIN), BECK & EGGELING INTERNATIONAL FINE ART (DÜSSELDORF), GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD (COPENHAGEN), GALERIE BOISSERÉE (COLOGNE), CANADA (NEW YORK), CARLIER GEBAUER (BERLIN), CENTURY PICTURES (BROOKLYN), CHERT LÜDDE (BERLIN), CORTESI GALLERY (LUGANO), COSAR HMT (DÜSSELDORF), CROY NIELSEN (VIENNA), DIE GALERIE (FRANKFURT/MAIN), DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM (BERLIN), DREI (COLOGNE), DVIR GALLERY (TEL AVIV), DANIEL FARIA GALLERY (TORONTO), GALERIA FRANCISCO FINO (LISBON), GREEN ON RED GALLERY (DUBLIN), CRISTINA GUERRA CONTEMPORARY ART (LISBON), HAAS (ZURICH), GALERIE HEINZ HOLTMANN (COLOGNE), GALERIE RODOLPHE JANSSEN (BRUSSELS), KARMA (NEW YORK), GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN (ZURICH), GALERIE DOROTHEA VAN DER KOELEN (MAINZ), KOENIG & CLINTON (NEW YORK), KÖNIG GALERIE (BERLIN), KOW (BERLIN), KRINZINGER (VIENNA), TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY (ANTWERP), GALERIE CHRISTIAN LETHERT (COLOGNE), ALEXANDER LEVY (BERLIN), LEVY GALERIE (HAMBURG), LIANG GALLERY (TAIPEI CITY), GALERIE LÖHRL (MÖNCHENGLADBACH), LINN LÜHN (DÜSSELDORF), MARKUS LÜTTGEN (COLOGNE), EDOUARD MALINGUE GALLERY (HONG KONG), MAM MARIO MAURONER CONTEMPORARY ART VIENNA (VIENNA), RON MANDOS (AMSTERDAM), MARLBOROUGH CONTEMPORARY (NEW YORK), GALERIE HANS MAYER (DÜSSELDORF), GALERIE MAX MAYER (DÜSSELDORF), MEESSEN DE CLERCQ (BRUSSELS), MISAKO & ROSEN (TOKYO), MONTRASIO ARTE (MONZA), GALERIE NEU (BERLIN), CAROLINA NITSCH (NEW YORK), OV PROJECT (BRUSSELS), GALERIE PRISKA PASQUER (COLOGNE), POLANSKY GALLERY (PRAGUE), PSM GALLERY (BERLIN), THOMAS REHBEIN GALERIE (COLOGNE), PETRA RINCK GALERIE (DÜSSELDORF), GALERIE BRIGITTE SCHENK (COLOGNE), GALERIE ANKE SCHMIDT (COLOGNE), SCHÖNEWALD FINE ARTS (DÜSSELDORF), GALERIE SIES + HÖKE (DÜSSELDORF), SPERLING (MUNICH), GALERIE GREGOR STAIGER (ZURICH), GALERIE BENE TASCHEN (COLOGNE), GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON (PARIS), GALERIE UTERMANN (DORTMUND), VAN DOREN WAXTER (NEW YORK), VAN HORN (DÜSSELDORF), SOFIE VAN DE VELDE (ANTWERP), AXEL VERVOORDT Art Düsseldorf | Nov. 17–19, 2017 GALLERY (ANTWERP), MICHAEL WERNER Areal Böhler | www.art-dus.de KUNSTHANDEL (COLOGNE), SUZANNE Partner TARASIEVE (PARIS), GALERIE THOMAS ZANDER (COLOGNE), ZILBERMAN GALLERY (ISTANBUL), DAVID ZWIRNER (NEW YORK)

Palexpo / 01-04.02.2018 / artgeneve.ch

Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 28-29.04.2018 / artmontecarlo.ch

academy of

Horse in Pyjamas, 2017, mixed media, 206 × 250 × 50 cm, Paradis / Tal R – Copenhagen

14.10.2017 – 21.01.2018

mede mogelijk gemaakt door

boijmans.nl

van beuningen

museum boijmans

Art Featured

I should therefore consider myself defeated and admit that I now have left only a few minutes to live, unless in developing my hypothesis I can come upon some saving solution 73

60 Years of Recuperation Are the Situationists still relevant?

by McKenzie Wark

above 5th Conference of the Situationist International, Göteborg, August 1961. From left: J.V. Martin, Heimrad Prem, Ansgar Elde, Jacqueline de Jong, Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi, Raoul Vaneigem, Jørgen Nash, Dieter Kunzelmann and Gretel Stadler

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ArtReview

facing page, from top Guy Debord, Paris, 1961; Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, The Naked City, 1957, screenprint

The artist Tino Sehgal once asked me what I was working on. “A small book called 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International,” I said. “May there be 50 years more!” he replied. That’s the spirit, I thought. Perhaps, when the Situationists have been fully absorbed into the totality of the spectacle, the ground will be cleared for a renewal of the avant-garde ambition to remake the world.

I was in Las Vegas recently, so naturally I went for a walk. It turns out to be a hard city in which to practise the ancient situationist art of the dérive. I started on the Strip, and soon discovered how thoroughly weaponised the urge to wander is in this most advanced centre of industrialised play. There’s no turn you can take that does not fold you back towards the bars and the slots. I had more luck on the edge of town, where the desert dust blows over the fenced-off driveways of abandoned motels.

It’s getting hard to wander, and yet it’s become something of a mainstream art, in the writings of Will Self, for example. But I’m encouraged by those like Stewart Home, Laura Oldfield Ford, Tina Richardson, Phil Smith and many others who keep dérive alive at the edge between art and everyday life. But perhaps it’s an oldworld pursuit, not suited for the contemporary megalopolis. Non-Western cities might need another practice to unlock the secrets of another city for another life.

The practice of dérive is supposed to lead to the theory and practice of unitary urbanism, which would be a built form without private property, capitalist relations of production and the division of work and leisure. Rather than abolishing work, the current stage of commodification has abolished leisure. The cell phone is an instrument of extracting value not only from labour but also nonlabour.

Everywhere you go, everything you do with it generates data to be harvested and momentised by some corporation or other. The world we live in is the dialectical negation of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (1956–74), the highpoint of Marxist-Situationist urban utopianism. In models, maps and drawings, Constant imagined megacities for nomadic play. Only in fiction do I think you find work that dares to imagine a whole new built form at planetary scale, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1993–6), for example.

Guy Debord thought the diffuse spectacle had given way to an integrated spectacle by the 1970s, which folded the secrecy and industrialised corruption of the Soviet concentrated spectacle into its Western double. Now I think we would have to conceive of a spectacle of disintegration, in which the spectacle’s principle of the separation of being from having, and then of having from appearing, constructs a

Situationist International A group founded in 1957, from the merging of several smaller movements across Europe, including the Lettrist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.

Members included Michèle Bernstein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Attila Kotányi, Constant, Ralh Rumney, Alexander Trocchi and Raoul Vanigem.

Guy Debord (France, 1931–94): writer and filmmaker, author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and many of the early SI texts, and self-appointed ‘leader’ of the SI; sole founding member of the SI remaining after 1961. spectacle The all-consuming role and effect of mass media: ‘In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation…

The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.’ (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967)

dérive ‘A technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences.’ Literally, to drift; described as ‘one of the basic situationist practices’. ‘In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.’

(Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958)

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unitary urbanism the synthesis of art and technology into life. A no-less-vague attempt at a definition can be found in ‘The Amsterdam Declaration’ (Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958), authored largely by Constant, but cosigned by Debord: ‘the complex, ongoing activity which consciously recreates man’s environment according to the most advanced conceptions in every domain’. The declaration later states that unitary urbanism is ‘independent of any aesthetic considerations’ and ‘the fruit of a new type of collective creativity’.

René Viénet (France, 1944): writer and filmmaker.

His film Peking Duck Soup (in the original French, Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires; 1977) is made up of found footage edited to construct a critical documentary of Mao’s legacy in China.

Alice Becker-Ho (China, 1941): writer and poet, second wife of Debord, with whom she cowrote The Game of War (1987), and author of the study The Essence of Jargon (1993).

Asger Jorn

world in which even the ruling class can no longer know itself or the world it once conquered. Now it feeds on its own fragmentation and waste products.

For a while it looked like the situationist practice of détournement could break through separation and restore to creative labour the possibility of a communism of collective aesthetic self-making. One by one, media forms escaped from the grip of private property. But the ruling class regrouped at a higher level of abstraction. What was once the culture industry finds itself subsumed under the vulture industry, which no longer cares much who owns the content of the spectacle but rather who owns the vector along which information moves.

Once, we were all data punks: here’s three gigabytes, now form your radical media-art collective. Now we have to be meta-data punks. Our struggle is to socialise not the media content but the form, as my comrades at memoryoftheworld.org have grasped. Here it is worth remembering that the Situationists before us were also careful archivists, but in that domain their practice was very conventional, and gave up many hostages to the archive-industrial complex.

The medium in which all avant-gardes work is never really art. It is always media. The Situationist International may have been the last avant-garde whose media strategy included the production of forms of novelty that created visibility.

The Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists had all played this game before, as Fluxus did alongside them. But the Situationists were perhaps the first to appear by way of negation, by refusing to appear. It’s a tactic absorbed into the very name of entities like the anonymous collective known as The Invisible Committee of more recent times.

The later work of Debord and Alice Becker-Ho takes this a bit further, with what, to borrow a phrase from Debord, we might call the devil’s party. Perhaps the avant-garde of today would refuse any visibility, or appear only so as to convey coded messages to each other. Mediation might remain the consistent plane of attack of the avant-garde in the disintegrating spectacle, but no longer to appear in it, even in negative.

There’s no shortage of relatively neglected work by Situationists and former Situationists that bears working through in the current spectacle of disintegration. René Viénet stood aside from the fascination with Maoism on the French left.

His extraordinary film Peking Duck Soup (1977) tracks China’s Communist Party as a distinctive form of spectacular ruling class. Given how integral China became to the global spectacle of disintegration, it bears up rather well.

Asger Jorn and Jacqueline de Jong spent a considerable amount of time trying to find ways to diagram the possibilities of situations. Her journal The Situationist Times is a remarkable and multilingual attempt to imagine what forms of organisation might be after the decline of centralised and hierarchical forms, but without being too utopian about distributed forms of order.

That Michèle Bernstein’s détournement of the novel, All the Kings Horses (1960), was published in English by Semiotext(e) seems appropriate, given the way that

(Denmark, 1914–1973): painter, ceramicist, archivist; founder of CoBrA group of painters, cofounder of the SI, and later the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism.

Constant (Holland, 1920–2005): artist and musician, known by his first name only (full name Constant Nieuwenhuys); a former member of CoBrA (1948–51) and member of the SI (1958–61), his long-term project New Babylon (1956–74) envisioned a sprawling, flexible communal city of the future dedicated to inhabitants freed from labour.

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facing page, top Constant, New Babylon – The Hague, 1964, watercolour on paper on chipboard, 220 × 287 cm.

Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant / Fondation Constant c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2016.

Courtesy Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

facing page, bottom Constant, Large Yellow Sector, 1967, metal, perspex and wood, 38 × 131 × 155 cm.

Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant / Fondation Constant c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2016.

Courtesy Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

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above pages from Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s book Mémoires, 1959, Editions International Situationist

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above Constant, Construction in orange (detail), 1958, metal, Plexiglas, wood, 25 × 110 × 100 cm. Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant / Fondation Constant c/o Pictoright Amsterdam. Courtesy Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

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facing page, top The Situationist Times, issue 5, 1964, designed and edited by Jacqueline de Jong; Michèle Bernstein, Antwerp, November 1962; still from Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, 1973, dir René Viénet

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house became its own kind of diffuse, acephalic avant-garde, one finally prepared to speak frankly about certain domestic matters on which the Situationists were notoriously silent. Those who talk theory without copping to who and how they fuck, what and how they get paid, how the little art-and lit-world industries on which they depend really function, speak with a corpse in their mouth.

That the Situationist International mostly kept the institutions of art, media and academy at arm’s length, particularly during its ‘political’ phase, tends to mask the extent to which it always relied on patrons. But there is something contemporary in its ambiguous working of the margin between commodification and precarity. Many of those in the Parisian milieu from which the Situationists in part emerged were children of the war. They had already experienced the failure of middle-class family life before it had become a sanctified postwar ‘lifestyle’.

Some among them were fuckups, loafers, addicts, sex workers. They anticipate those who today live among the ruins of the neoliberal war against us, remote from any official artworld, but doing the most interesting things, never the less, and out of sheer necessity.

During the May ’68 events in Paris, the Situationists decamped to the Committee to Maintain the Occupations, and did their best to maintain communication between the students and striking factory workers. They had already identified the subjects of postwar mass higher-education as future proletarians, but of a novel kind: able to buy some consumer goods with their middle-class income should they be lucky enough to get jobs, but paid in the debased currency of mere things and separated from the capacity to act in and on the world.

Debord did not see May ’68 as a unique event but part of an endless cycle of irruptions of historical time into the fashion cycle of spectacular time. It would not have surprised him that these continue to happen, whether in the form of Tiananmen Square or Occupy or the so-called movements of the squares. Boredom breaks through the skin of the spectacle of disintegration as regularly now as cyclones. One of Debord’s texts from the 1970s diagnosed a sick planet: on the one hand shrouded in the clingfilm of spectacle; on the other hand unable to integrate into its false totality its two great externalities – pollution and the proletariat.

The historical impasse diagnosed by the Situationist International remains, even as their strategies against it pass into and are recuperated by that history. Avantgardes are made to die in the war of time. ar

Jacqueline de Jong (Holland, 1939): artist and graphic designer; head of the Dutch section of the SI; editor and publisher of The Situationist Times, 1962–64.

Michèle Bernstein (France, 1932): novelist, first wife of Debord; her 1960 book, All the King’s Horses, is an ironic repurposing of popular romance novels, drawing on the SI’s then members as a basis for sparsely fleshed out characters.

McKenzie Wark is professor of media and cultural studies at The New School, New York.

He is the author of The Hacker Manifesto (2006) and a number of books exploring the history and legacy of the Situationist International. His General Intellects: TwentyOne Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century was published earlier this year

détournement misappropriation or hijacking of media.

‘Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations… The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.’ (‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’, Les Lèvres Nues #8, 1956)

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Constant “Renewed art is not interesting for me.

Why always renew art?”

Interview by Mark Rappolt

Ode à l’Odéon (Tribute to the Odeon), 1969, oil and lacquer on canvas, 191 × 200 cm.

Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant / Fondation Constant / DACS 2017

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This interview took place in 2002, three years before Constant’s death, aged eighty-five.

Constant (his full name was Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, though he was known simply by his first name) was a founding member of the CoBrA group of painters, which was active between 1948 and 1951, and later, on the invitation of fellow CoBrA painter Asger Jorn, took part in the congress on Industry and Fine Arts, organised by the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus in Alba, Italy, in 1956.

The conference led, a year later, to the forming of the Situationist International (although Constant himself was not a founding member).

By that time Constant was beginning to work on a project that dealt largely with architecture and urbanism, titled New Babylon, which evolved in close collaboration with the French theorist Guy Debord. Constant left the Situationists in 1960 over concerns that the group was overly influenced by individual artists and their egos, but continued to work exclusively on the New Babylon project until 1974. In later years he painted figurative works inspired by the world around him, news and current affairs.

Mark Rappolt CoBrA, the first group of which you were a part, was very much about creating a kind of public art, or an art for the people.

Constant Yes, but I thought the people would celebrate making art in the future.

MR Are you quite pessimistic for the future of art?

C No, but I think we shouldn’t turn away from traditions and the past. I admire, still, the great painters of the past. Titian especially, and Delacroix, Cézanne. There are also some others, but I think there are great painters of the past about whom we cannot simply say, ‘They are old-fashioned and are not interesting any more’.

I can learn a lot by seeing. It started when I was in Venice about 15 years ago. All of a sudden in the Accademia I came across the Pietà [1575–76], the last unfinished painting by Titian. I had seen the whole museum, and I was not very much interested. In fact, I was a little annoyed. And then all of a sudden I turned in this large room and I saw the Pietà, and I was so much impressed. It was so much more beautiful than all the other things I saw there. Then I heard it was his last painting, made when he was very old. I was much younger than he was, perhaps not even seventy, sixty-five or so. Then I wanted to see all these late paintings, because the late paintings of Titian, they are not accepted by many people. There are also art historians who think that they are no good and they are made by pupils. The teacher was old and he couldn’t work any more, and he was helped by Palma il Giovane, who did the most of it and so on, but it’s impossible, I thought, that paintings of that quality are made by young people, pupils.

Young pupils of Titian are not possibly that good.

These paintings are much more beautiful than all Titian had made before.

Then I wanted to see them all and travelled to lots of the museums of Europe. There are not so many of his late works – I think there are not even ten I found. In Vienna there are a few.

There’s one particularly beautiful, Tarquin and Lucretia [an unfinished study, 1570–76], in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but also in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich; and in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum they have also some of his paintings. I saw many in churches in Venice. The most beautiful of all, and also one of his last, is The Flaying of Marsyas [1570–76].

This is difficult to see because it lives in the Czech Republic, in Kroměříž. There was an exhibition in Paris at the Grand Palais on Titian [in 1993], and back then I didn’t want to see the whole exhibition. I was only one day in Paris, and I went up, and immediately sat down before this Marsyas and I stayed the whole time – two hours or so – to study it thoroughly and didn’t see anything else to keep the memory fresh at the exhibition.

“I was always against a realisation of New Babylon in the present society. I’ve always said to realise a thing like New Babylon, society must be thoroughly changed, renewed, and especially the production means must be socialised. That is the base of all. Without that it is not possible” MR How does Titian influence your own work?

C Well, when he got old, Titian died, we are not sure, nobody knows exactly, but about when he was eighty-eight, eighty-nine, we think.

So, when I approached eighty, I was thinking, ‘Well, I should make good work, the best of my life,’ but not an avant-garde. Renewed art is not interesting for me. Why always renew art?

It’s beautiful like it was, and you can perhaps try to make better, but better than Titian would be rather difficult. Well, I decided to paint as a real painter, like I was always able in real life.

MR That’s very different from your work with the Situationist International.

C Then everybody says, ‘Constant has come back to traditional art’, and so on. I think I made the best paintings I have ever done since ten years or so.

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MR It seems that you had a very different relationship to the past than, say, your colleagues in the Situationist International and even CoBrA to an extent.

C Yes, the Situationists – that’s to say Debord and his writings originally – were not interested in visual art but in what he called ‘urbanisme unitaire’, not a collective art but a way of living, a creative way of living that was in connection with the surroundings of our living. And that means urbanism. Then he called it ‘unitaire’, unitarian urbanism, because all aspects of life are connected with the shapes and the form, so they change also in the same rhythm as our lives are constantly changing. But you read Debord, he didn’t work it out. He made a sketch of this idea in a small booklet called ‘Rapport sur la construction des situations’ [1957], and they gave a copy to me. I read it and then I thought he should go deeper into this. An interesting idea, that individual arts are coming to their ends. Then you have to think, ‘Oh, so what will come into the place of this art?’ Then I found the idea of an urbanisme unitaire connected with the behaviour in the cities, the comportement and the ambiance: the atmosphere of our lives.

Urbanism is very important to influence our way of living, our comportement, the atmosphere of life. That’s part of urbanism. There was a time I lived for two years in Paris and then I switched over to London and stayed for half a year. If you see the difference of atmosphere between these two cities, and then the other cities I had visited and seen: Amsterdam and the Spanish cities and the Italian cities, and Moscow, I’ve also been several times in Moscow and Leningrad, at the time it was still Leningrad.

I was studying the atmosphere, so I got interested in urbanism, not as a profession, but I thought I should illustrate my ideas. I’m an artist, I’m not a philosopher, I should not just think about it, like Debord does. I should visualise it. If Debord talks about ambiance and all these notions he invented, it is an abstract idea. My job, as I consider it, is to visualise and to make models, and from the models I had photos made, and I changed and I put people in it: the comportement. And, finally, paintings.

MR Why paintings?

C I thought I’ve made models, but what can I do next? I could make illustrations of New Babylon instead of making colour slides of the models, I could paint them, and it’s much more suggestive to me. I’m a painter, after all. So we started first with L’Odéon. In 1968 there was the occupation of Odéon theatre by artists, and I was living quite near there, in the rue de l’Odéon. So, I started to make it seem like a theatre occupied by a lot of people and so on, and a guide to moving inside the model, and I called it Ode à l’Odéon [1969].

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top Gezicht op New Babylonische sectoren (View of New Babylonian Sectors), 1971, watercolour and pencil on photomontage, 135 × 223 cm. Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant / Fondation Constant / DACS 2017

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above New Babylon, 1971, dry point needle etching, 15 × 24 cm.

Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant/Fondation Constant / DACS 2017

MR Do you think when you were doing that you were reacting to the things that were negative about the city and life around you?

Or were you thinking of something positive?

Because it seems that it works both ways.

under the title ‘Manifesto’. Some people say that it’s the wrong name, but I don’t know – it has been translated in all languages.

MR Why did you feel you had to write?

C At the moment, I don’t think there is so much wrong with the city, but the city cannot explore, cannot change.

C Because I was discussing these ideas with many friends – mainly with poets and writers and so on, not that many painters – but when we met Appel and Corneille, we almost from the beginning agreed about our view on painting.

MR Was Debord happy about you visualising your mutual ideas?

C Yes, in the beginning he was, because I’d also written an article, ‘Another city for another life’, that was already announcing what I was planning to do with Debord. We visited each other. He came often to Amsterdam.

We were good friends then. So when I made the first model, The Orange Sector [1958], I published a photo of it in Internationale Situationniste number two or three, wrote that article, ‘Une autre ville pour une autre vie’, and then ‘Description de la zone jaune’.

MR Yes, but you never thought of painting that, or trying to paint New Babylon, at the early stages?

C A philosophy is difficult to paint. You could illustrate it, but you should also know the text, illustration belongs to a text. When I was listening, or reading, the philosophy of the urbanisme unitaire by Debord, I saw, in my imagination, visual things happen. I saw a city life, kind of, an urban life, and I still think about what I was seeing then. I was walking in Paris and I was always thinking, ‘Well, in New Babylon this situation would have been different’, and then I was thinking, ‘How different?’ and ‘What would it be like?’ And more and more I convinced myself that I had still to visualise it, that I had to show this by the means of the painter I am.

MR When you went back to painting, you had also left the SI and were working alone.

C Oh, now I’m solitary. I don’t know anybody who would agree with what I’m doing or would work in the same terms. The mainstream is now to abolish anything of art, of painting, and people think, ‘Well, the new way is Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons, or things like that’. I don’t see it at all. I’m not impressed by these things.

MR So what was different when you joined CoBrA? C I didn’t join CoBrA. We made CoBrA. CoBrA is Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. I met Asger Jorn in 1946 in Paris, and he had already in Denmark a group of rather good artists – Egill Jacobsen, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Ejler Bille – they were all good artists, like Jorn himself, and all different. They called themselves ‘The Experimental Group’. We didn’t know [Christian] Dotremont yet. So Jorn told me, ‘You should also find people to make a group in Holland, and then we could perhaps join and make an international movement.’ He didn’t know any painters in Holland. So rather soon afterwards I got a visit from two young painters who had an exhibition somewhere in Amsterdam, and they were Karel Appel and Corneille. I told them about Jorn and the Danish group, Helhesten, and we were also invited later to Copenhagen. We were quite different from the Danish, but we were discussing and we met and we became friends. So, within a year we created this Dutch Experimental Group and we made also a review, Reflex.

MR You’ve always had an involvement with writing and theory as well as practice.

C I had also written my manifesto already at the time. I didn’t call it ‘manifesto’. I had written a text about the future and the development of art, of the classic arts. Then I published that in the first issue of Reflex [in September 1948]

Het laddertje (The Ladder), 1949, oil on canvas, 88 × 75 cm.

Photo: Tom Haartsen. © Constant / Fondation Constant / DACS 2017

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MR How did New Babylon start? Was it a natural flow from your earlier painting?

C I’ve always been interested in architecture.

My father wanted me to become an architect.

‘Anyhow, you want to do some artistic job: no painting, because you won’t be able to earn a living by painting.’ At that moment it was indeed rather difficult to earn your living by painting. In that period, when I was eighteen, it was 1938. There was such a crisis, economic crisis. As an architect he hoped I could make a living, but I didn’t want to be a professional architect. I’ve never been interested in building villas or living houses. [The architectural theorist] Mark Wigley describes me as an architect and I quarrel with him, because I’m not an architect, I’m a painter. ‘No, you’re an architect.’

‘No, I’m a painter.’ I concede myself to be a painter who made also projects for a city, a city planner, urbanist. That was because of the Internationale Situationniste.

MR How did it come that you started to work more on models rather than paintings? Was that accidental?

C No. I lost a little bit of my style of working.

I was hesitating and I was doubting about a period in which many artists stopped painting or made minimal paintings, Arte Povera, the poor painting and so on, and then it felt uncertain. I’ve always been interested in architecture. I’ve always been friends with architects, and I’ve written about architects and about the city, and then I thought, ‘Make special objects just for a while’. First I added colour, and later they were colourless.

MR Did you think of it as different to painting, or was it very much the same kind of work?

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facing page L’Otage, 1992, linen, oil paint, 99 × 80 cm.

Photo: Tom Haarsten. © Constant / Fondation Constant / DACS 2017

above Overreden hond, 1977, linen, oil paint, 101 × 105 cm.

Photo: Tom Haarsten. © Constant / Fondation Constant / DACS 2017

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C No, it was not the same kind of work.

MR And yet, when you just talked about it, you talked about colour.

C Yves Klein made these one-colour paintings in blue, and only painted such things. There were many artists who were looking in that direction. I didn’t agree with this way, but I felt I couldn’t stay all my life in this CoBrA style, like Asger Jorn did, like Karel Appel did. I felt that it had passed now, for me, that spontaneity, and it was Continental. I felt I must just find another path, another way.

MR Jorn was also very interested in architecture.

C Yes, that’s critical. He never made architecture himself. He was against fundamentalism.

C Now? Yes, but also spontaneously. I can explain how I’m working now, if you want.

Every time I start a painting, I start it in an abstract way. I don’t know the subject and never make a project or sketch and just – well, I start on an empty canvas, and this is with a little paint, very little, very thinly and a little colour, but I don’t know what it is. Just abstract or just beyond, there’s some colour, more and more, until there comes a certain moment that can last a few days or a few weeks, but at a certain moment I see in all these colours and all these dots, I see sometimes a thing. My fantasy sees a shape, a face or movement, or a car or a dog, say, an animal, or something else in it. Then it’s almost impossible not to give a little ‘extent’, which helps us to get it out. So, slowly, I see

MR When you joined the Situationists, did you still paint?

MR Social?

C No, I was always against a realisation of New Babylon in the present society. I’ve always said to realise a thing like New Babylon, society must be thoroughly changed, renewed, and especially the production means must be socialised. That is the base of all. Without that it is not possible.

MR Did you intend to build something?

C No, not build, but just technical drawings.

MR You’ve met the architect Rem Koolhaas before, he talks about New Babylon…

MR Do you think we’re closer now, or further away?

C I met him when he was not an architect, when he was a young man and he was a journalist, and he came a few times to visit me in my studio, and then he saw the models of New Babylon.

Later, years later, he became an architect, and he is all the time doing this as if he is realising New Babylon or something like this. I’m very much annoyed by it.

C Oh, yes. Abstract art represents nothing, and we want a painting that represents everything.

MR Yes, but now you work in a very different way.

MR What did you see as the relationship between your art and politics? Did you intend your art to have political effects?

C Political? No.

C No. I didn’t know, but I painted a little. More illustrations to New Babylon.

MR Do you think painting’s turned out how you thought it would at the time of CoBrA? Then you were saying that painting could mean everything, whereas it used to mean nothing. Do you think that’s true?

C I think I would have asked Roel van Duijn [one of the founders of Provo; he later sat on the Amsterdam City Council] to take my place.

MR Even with New Babylon?

MR Did you think you’d ever paint again?

C He gives only the forms; the contents of New Babylon are completely missing.

In a capitalist society with some little shapes very typically that he made for so-called museums in Las Vegas. That is what you call ‘ludique’, the ‘ludique’ way of living.

MR What would you have done if you were chosen somehow?

C No, I didn’t.

C At the time of the Situationists I didn’t paint at all.

MR What don’t you like about it?

so, well, I knew them and we had contact, but I didn’t actively take part in the publications or the movements. But I remember all of a sudden that I was on their list [of prospective city councillors] when they took part in the elections for the city council. I didn’t want to lose time just to support my adhesion with them, so they placed my name on the list, on a very low level, so I didn’t risk being chosen [as a representative].

more and more, and it comes to an idea or a representation, and from that moment I leave the abstract way of working, and now consciously I continue with the subject I discovered, and I’m now working it out.

The subject may change also, and then, slowly, it becomes a figurative painting.

MR Are you never yourself interested in the way certain political movements inspired by the Situationist International panned out? The Provo movement that launched during the mid-1960s in Amsterdam, for example?

C The Provos were inspired by my ideas and my publications. They were much younger than I was. They were students. I got much older,

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C I’ve always been Marxian. I don’t think ‘Marxist’, because that word is so much abused. [Henri] Lefebvre started this. It means somebody who is thinking philosophically on the base of the thinking of Marx, but not of all the people who changed Marx, like Lenin, Stalin or Mao and so on. Marx, the pure ideas, especially what they call the young Marx.

MR Do you think of your painting as Marxian?

C No, I don’t think any painting can be Marxian. But the way I’m thinking, it’s very based on the way Marx has explained society.

So while I don’t believe you can make Marxian painting, it must be possible to explain some characteristics of my paintings by my thinking, as you can do with religious paintings. I have already the choice of the subjects: always left, the suffering of the martyrs, things like this, you know. ar Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview

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Cixin Liu An unpublished work by one of China’s leading authors has become a key text for a new wave of science-fiction writers and the foundation for an exhibition of young Chinese contemporary art in London. So what’s so special about it?

by Mingwei Song

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illustration by Mick Brownfield

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In recent years, Chinese science-fiction writer Cixin Liu’s Remembrance terms, has made science fiction a distinctive literary genre that cuts of Earth’s Past trilogy has become an international sensation – both in sharply into the popular imagination and intellectual thinking of terms of its commercial success and in terms of its impact on popular those who are, even faintly, aware of the alterity. On its most radical culture. The trilogy comprises The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest side, the new wave of Chinese science fiction has been thriving on an (both published in 2008) and Death’s End (2010), English translations avant-garde cultural spirit that encourages one to think beyond the of which came out in 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively. A year after conventional ways of perceiving reality and challenge the commonly its publication, The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for Best accepted ideas about what constitutes the existence and identity of a Novel, becoming the first translated novel to receive international person surrounded by technologies of self, society and governance. science-fiction’s highest award. In the context of China, however, (In this respect Stanisław Lem, author of Solaris, 1961, among many Liu’s writing was already established as part of a new wave of science other works, many of those written under Poland’s Stalinist regime, fiction that had emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, devel- is an inspiration for the new wave of Chinese writers.) oping and changing the landscape of the nation’s literature.

I would identify 1989 as the year when a new paradigm of scienceAccordingly, Liu’s success should be contextualised by looking fictional imagination began to complicate the utopianism that had at it as one facet of the revival of the science fictional imagination dominated Chinese politics and intellectual culture for more than a in China over the past two to three decades. That imagination is in century. What served as the larger political and cultural backdrop for turn conditioned by various cultural and social elements, ranging the changes in Chinese science-fiction (and perhaps in all of Chinese from the free platform for new literature) was the collapse of idealA computer engineer crosses Tiananmen authors provided by the Internet ism and optimism, as well as a pervato the nation’s collective yearning Square. He scans Mao’s brain cells and turns sive disillusionment with a politfor social change. In a peculiar way, ical utopianism instituted by the the great man into a cybernetic existence Chinese science-fiction has simulstate after the tragic end of the 1989 taneously entered a golden age and generated a ‘new wave’ subversion democratic movement in Tiananmen Square. One unique science of the genre. This new wave has been generally marked by a dystopian fiction novel was written in the spring of that year, and it signalled the vision of China’s future, ambiguous moral dilemmas and a sophisti- arrival of a new wave in Chinese science-fiction, which is more sophiscated representation of the power of technology or the technology of ticated, reflective and subversive in terms of mixed representations of power. The poetics of the new wave point to the illumination of the hope and despair, utopianism and its dystopian reflection, and politinvisible, the unknown and the fantastic, which energise the genre as ical dictatorship and (cybernetic) popular uprising. This novel, China an imaginary realm opening up to infinite new possibilities beyond 2185, was written by Cixin Liu, then a young computer engineer. the conventional images of reality.

The work remains unpublished, and its text has only ever been Contemporary Chinese science fiction has arisen at a time when circulated on the Internet. According to the author, writing began the Chinese government dreams a ‘Chinese dream’ – but the new wave in February 1989. The novel begins with a scene in Tiananmen has unleashed a nightmarish unconscious. It has a dark and subversive Square, albeit without any straightforward reference to the student side that speaks either to the ‘invisible’ dimensions of the reality, or movement that would occupy it shortly after Liu began writing. simply to the impossibility of representing a certain ‘reality’ dictated In the novel, it’s 2185 and a young computer engineer crosses the by the discourse of the national ‘dream’. Representing these impos- deserted square on a dark night and approaches the still-extant Mao sibilities and uncertainties, as well as imagining a future history and Mausoleum. He manages to scan Mao’s dead brain cells and turns the larger space beyond the known and visible in scientific and political simulated consciousness of the great man into a cybernetic existence.

facing page, top Lu Yang, Power of Will – final shooting, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Uli Holz.

Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

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facing page, bottom Chen Zhe, The Bearable: Body/Wound #005, 2007, archival pigment print on German etching paper, 32 × 43 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ , London

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Chen Tianzhuo, Scapegoat 01, 2015, bronze gold plating, paint, Polyfoam, plastic sword, medical dummy. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Long March Space, Beijing, and Sadie Coles HQ , London

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Combining political fantasy with science fiction, China 2185 criticism at bay, and questions the technological constructs of politdescribes the resurrection of Mao and five other dead men’s conscious- ical consciousness, cybernetic subjectivities and revolutionary ethics ness in cyberspace, which triggers a cybernetic popular uprising that through the depiction of the splendid rise and fall of the Huaxia paralyses the authorities in the real world. The government of China Republic as a virtual community of intercybernetic subjectivities. in 2185 has no way out other than to shut down the entire Internet, China 2185 is the first political cyberpunk novel written in Chinese. so the cyber-republic, called the ‘Huaxia Republic’, quickly sees its Although largely unknown until Liu became a bestselling author own demise. It turns out that Mao’s cybernetic existence is not, as much later, it predicted a radically different future for Chinese one would have thought, the cause of the revolution; it was actu- science-fiction, one that was less idealistic and optimistic. A dark ally launched by the consciousness of an ordinary old man that had version of science fiction – a new wave – gradually came into existreplicated itself millions of times and quickly built a utopian society ence in the decades after 1989. China 2185 can be identified as the first that lasts for 850 years – in virtual reality, which here is equivalent work of the new wave of Chinese science-fiction that contains a selfto only two hours in reality. After the republic is wiped out, and all conscious effort to energise the utopian/dystopian variations rather the democratic outcries of the than a simple denial of utopianism The novel questions the technological conor a total embrace of the dystopian cybernetic uprising die down, the novel ends with a conversation structs of political consciousness, cybernetic disillusionment. Utopianism and its between Mao’s cybernetic spectre dystopian variety have rather been subjectivities and revolutionary ethics and the young female leader of presented in a complex entanglethe Chinese government. Mao’s ‘ghost’ honestly tells his future ment in the new wave, an entanglement that opens up to new possisuccessor that any attempt at immortality is futile, for ‘immor- bilities for restoring imagination in the cultural politics of contemtality is mortality’; he appears to be at ease with his own eventual porary China. Together with Han Song, Fei Dao, Chen Qiufan, Zhao farewell to revolution. More importantly, in this novel Liu does not Haihong, Xia Jia and dozens of other science-fiction writers, Cixin seem either to glorify the cybernetic uprising or to discredit Mao’s Liu has created the new wave of Chinese science-fiction that was first political legacy; rather he concentrates on experiments with ways of a national sensation, and then prevailed in China and beyond over the conceiving ‘alterity’ for the ‘post-Mao’ as well as ‘posthuman’ new next two to three decades. age, which is crystallised in the effects of cybernetic democracy and To this day, Liu has chosen to leave China 2185 unpublished (citing technologised governance. issues concerning the quality of this early work and the ease with China 2185 creates a dynamic utopian/dystopian variation reflect- which it might be politicised), but still, we may wonder what would ing on democracy, governance and revolution in new terms informed happen if it were. ar by cybernetic technology. Its distance from utopianism is obvious, but it is Mingwei Song is associate professor of not a dystopian novel, which, as deChinese at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, specialising in modern Chinese literature fined by the genre’s Western classics, and intellectual history, film studies, science such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), fiction and youth culture presents a pervasive criticism of totalitarianism. Liu’s novel does not portray an ideal society, and the future society Zhongguo 2185, an exhibition of work it depicts is actually split into two conby ten young artists from China, is on show at Sadie Coles HQ, London, through flicting parts: the ‘real’ world, and the 4 November ‘virtual’ nation. The novel holds social

Cixin Liu. Photo: Li Yibo

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Lucas Arruda

By Oliver Basciano

Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 30 × 34 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo

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Heavy weather and a light touch

Untitled, 2017, oil on canvas, 26 × 30 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, and David Zwirner, London

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Untitled, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 × 30 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, and David Zwirner, London

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ArtReview

Untitled, 2017, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, and David Zwirner, London

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The painting is dated 2017, oil on canvas, a tight, abstract mass of grey painting’s modest scale, of course) meanwhile allude to the Romantic and brown tones. Up close you can appreciate the small, sharp brush- Sublime. One could produce a decent comparative study between the strokes meticulously applied in all directions. The result is a gaseous, brooding greys of two untitled works by Arruda, shown at a solo exhicloudy kind of abstraction. Spots of light emerge down the middle bition at Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, in 2016, and J.M.W. Turner’s of the painting, radiating out so that the canvas’s top half is mark- Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). There’s a similar edly lighter than its lower half. That said, there’s little in the way of a turbulence to the brushwork, a similar invocation of the apparently single resting point for the eye. At the very bottom – just a centimetre infinite power of nature, a similar feeling of impotence provoked in from the edge of this 26 × 30 cm work – the most dramatic distinction the viewer by that thought. Yet Arruda’s scenes are lonelier than those in the composition is found: the nature of the brushstrokes changes, of the historical artists. Claude utilises people in his mythical landbecoming longer, perhaps more gestural, and running horizon- scapes to convey scale and narrative. Turner and Constable gradually tally from left to right, and back. This section could be identified as remove the figure in their work. Turner’s A Disaster at Sea (1835) derepresenting a landmass above which sits a hazy mist; though just picts a ship and its crew all but engulfed by stormy waters, with as likely, given the nature of the brushwork, the painting could de- later works by the artist increasingly depopulated, as are Constable’s swirling cloud studies, 1821–22. Arruda pict the ocean itself, the vast sky hangArruda’s scenes are altogether lonely; goes a step further. Apparently no one ing over water. lives in or ventures to the places he São Paulo-based Lucas Arruda, who apparently no one lives in or paints (except, in a way, us): in fact, the is in his mid-thirties, has been making ventures to the places he paints… materiality of Arruda’s landscape is all paintings like this since the early 2010s.

This one, like those before it and those likely to come for the fore- but discarded in favour of atmosphere. seeable future, is untitled, but belongs to a series monikered DesertoHis subjects are entirely imaginary, though they play on old coloModelo (Desert-Model, a title inspired by a poem by João Cabral de nial fantasies of an untouched, uninhabited land. This is not Brazil, Melo Neto, in which the idea of the ‘model’ is best understood as a or anywhere else for that matter, but that’s not to say we can’t bring ‘prototype’ or ‘concept’). The other works are roughly the same dimin- our own histories and memories to bear on the work. What draws me utive size. This one is on canvas, though some are on wood. For most, to the grey, gloomy painting described above is, more than anything, including this painting, the artist uses a process of sanding to achieve a familiarity with the palette from the weather in Britain (a favourite some of the tonal variation. ‘Landscape’ or ‘seascape’ could just as subject, incidentally, of Constable and Turner). When I saw some of easily describe these works, though Arruda also produces simpler these works on a visit to Arruda’s studio in São Paulo earlier this year, monochromes: plain canvases of brooding colour, uniform bar a it was winter in Brazil, the darkness falling in early evening even though the intense light characteristic of the Southern Hemisphere sanded-down edge.

Arruda’s union of light and dark – those almost luminous pockets remained during the day. At the time he was preparing for an exhiof near white, around which the gloomier brushstrokes dance – are bition in London, at David Zwirner in September; Arruda asked me reminiscent of the glowing sunsets and sunrises in the seventeenth- what I thought the weather would be like in the dying days of the century landscapes of Claude Lorrain; the vast skies (relative to the British summer, what the light conditions might be. He’d painted

Lucas Arruda and On Kawara: Days and Horizons, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, New York

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a section of the studio wall a slight off-white, a palette that would the gloom. The dark brown hues of another recent work are suggeseventually be replicated on the London gallery’s walls. When the tive of the very first moments of sunrise, when just the faintest orange grey painting was hung against this slightly dulled background, it glow on the horizon breaks the night. This is not a new development was striking how much the small, subtle change made the canvas in his painting: one can imagine the turbulent grey-blue skies in bloom, compared to those works on normal white walls elsewhere a 25 × 31 cm painting from 2014, for example, are about to burst, and in the workspace. Something similar occurred in 2015 when Arruda we, the viewers, are catching sight of the heavy sky just moments decided to shroud his hometown solo exhibition at Pivô in darkness, before the downpour. Time is an explicit component of a 2017 multieach painting spotlit. The paintings began to act as little portals for media work, a series of paintings made directly on slides – the brushlight, or perhaps even receptacles for it. And in that sense, the best work more gestural than those on canvas – presented on a rotary description of them might be one more commonly associated with projector over several minutes. The subject of time in Arruda’s work was also highlighted, via curatorial intervention, at an exhibition at the work of James Turrell: lightscapes.

Light is a preoccupation – perhaps the preoccupation – for Arruda, Mendes Wood DM, New York, in May this year. In Days and Horizons, as for so many painters before him. He takes his interest to extremes, each of Arruda’s paintings was paired with one of On Kawara’s, from the late New York-based conceptualist’s however, searching for a purity of light, ... which is not to say we can’t bring long-running Today (1966–2013) series, in an absolute light, in that it is not just a mode of representation, but is utilised which he painted the date of the work’s our own histories and memories production in white against a red, blue, by the artist to investigate themes of perto bear on the work grey or black background. For example, ception and optics. At his 2016 Mendes Wood DM exhibition, which was titled Deserto-Modelo as above so below, a golden vista by Arruda – as glowing as the grey painting is muted – he painted a series of rectangles, in almost indistinguishably pale hung next to a Kawara that simply states ‘28Dec.1981’ against a navycolours, directly onto the white walls. Above each was a rectangle of blue background; the exhibition brought to the fore the diaristic, as light emitted by a ceiling-mounted empty slide projector. Both were well as meditative, qualities of Arruda’s painting. hard to see with the gallery lights on, but a timer intermittently shut As in Kawara’s seminal series, Arruda paints the passing of days, them down, at which point the painted rectangle disappeared from months and years; the Brazilian’s daybreaks and sunsets, spring sight and the projected rectangle came into clear focus. After a few light and winter blues a reminder that time is essentially measured minutes, the projected light was cut too, leaving the gallery in dark- through shifts in light. We know another day has gone because the ness. Yet for the viewer, for a few moments at least, the squares of sun dips in the west, that autumn is upon us because the amount light seemingly remained, an afterimage temporarily burned onto of light lessens (whichever hemisphere we find ourselves in). As the the retina. These were then dispelled as the gallery lights flicked back work itself is a documentation of change, Arruda can keep painting roughly the same subject. The grey painting, as winter falls, marks on and the whole nine-minute cycle started afresh.

Although, again, light in general is Arruda’s subject, it is specifi- another year passing. ar cally a change of light, or cycles of light, that he’s documenting. In the grey painting, the sun seems to be at the point of breaking through Oliver Basciano is editor (international) of ArtReview

Deserto-Modelo as above so below, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo

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Tal R Guilty Pleasures

By Mark Rappolt

It’s not often that you hear ‘pleasure’ mentioned in the context of contemporary art these days. Somehow, in these times of refugee crises, the rise of various forms of radical nationalism, the discourse of politics degenerating into an exchange of insults, the natural environment becoming less and less natural, if not gradually destroyed, and the gulf between rich and poor ever increasing, the notion of contemporary art being a source of pleasure (rather than critique or reflection) seems unfashionable, untopical and, well, generally unrealistic in terms of the world we actually inhabit. And these days we want art to speak to that world. Listen to so-called learned sense about art today and you’ll find yourself pounded by the distinct opinion that finding pleasure in art is old-fashioned, even immoral. Anyone who visited this year’s Documenta learned that. And, to an extent, it’s probably the impression that you’re left with after reading magazines like this one too.

So it’s as much disconcerting as it is refreshing to witness ideas of pleasure playing a central role in Israel-born, Copenhagen-based painter Tal R’s ongoing Sexshop paintings. And what exactly is his idea of pleasure? A closed door. At least that’s the message you get when you stand in front of The pleasure (2017), which offers the viewer the aforementioned (firmly closed) double door – its four glowing, triangular hinges looking like a set of cartoon animal teeth – parked in the middle of a yellow wall.

That’s pretty much it for this vision of gratification. A line of fleshy pink rectangles below the wall, followed by green, blue and red stripes, might indicate the beginnings of a carpet or a garishly coloured pavement and street – at least they generally seem to suggest the intersection of one plane and another. Then there’s a stripe of

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green above the wall. It might indicate a roof on top of it or a garden behind: it’s impossible to divine which. And there’s a stripe of blue above the green. Sky. Perhaps. For as much as the painting as a whole invites you to extend its presence into a more plastic realm, every time you attempt to reconstruct it as a representation of an ‘actual’ space – to locate yourself in relation to it – that whole seems to resist, insisting instead that it is what it is: a series of flat planes of colour divided, occasionally, by vertical lines. As it settles back down, you realise that here is no ‘in front’, no ‘behind’, no ‘roof’ and no ‘floor’, merely pigment attached to canvas in a way that describes a series of geometric forms. Anything else is not so much on the canvas as in your head.

Indeed, despite the specific reference of their title, the Sexshop paintings – most of which describe building facades and shopfronts – are works that might sit reasonably comfortably in a world of geometric abstraction as practised by turn-of-the-century artists such as Piet Mondrian or Hilma af Klint. There are hints too of the Colour Field paintings of someone like Morris Louis. All in all, The pleasure, like most of the others in this series, is a bit of a tease: it offers you something, takes it away and then urges you to seek it out again.

Space is hinted at only so that its absence can be revealed, just as the conventional sexshop offering aims at accelerating libidos via various approximations – but never realisations – of the thing itself.

In that respect, it’s important that Tal R’s subjects – as captured in works such as Bar Farao, Paris Chic and Dirty Dick (all 2017) – are existing locations (over the last three years the artist claims to have executed 30 paintings and 100 drawings of sex shops). It’s possible to visit them and judge to what extent the artist has captured the detail or the spirit

ArtReview

facing page Venus, 2017, pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 122 × 88 cm

above The pleasure, 2017, pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 97 × 132 cm

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Allenby, 2017, pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 240 × 188 cm

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Paris Chic, 2017, pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 172 × 200 cm

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above Chez La Souris, 2017, pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 240 × 200 cm

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facing page Babylon, 2017, pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 200 × 244 cm

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all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

of their bricks, their mortar, their glass and their funky lettering. But or the mysteries of Ancient Egypt at the Luxor that’s offered up by the ultimately, to make the comparison between represented and repre- three metres or so of fantasy on their facades, inside they are all about sentation would be to miss the point. the same thing – getting you to spend money. Similarly, each Sexshop “You never really look into the sex shop, because what happens painting is a titillation of your imagination, making you think that inside is private,” the artist says when we meet in his Copenhagen you are someplace else. studio. I remark that it’s interesting that he should say that – posi‘The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery,’ the British tioning his subject matter as some sort of zone of privacy that’s hid- painter Francis Bacon once said, and to a degree this is what Tal den in plain sight – given the extent to which the interest in art these R’s Sexshop paintings seek to do. “Last year I started thinking about days ia caught up in associations with celebrity culture: about the the role of the artist and painting,” he says. “That there’s always, in every painting you could say, a kind of mystery: there’s something person and personality of the artist. not spoken. Something just left the He misunderstands me.

“I’ll be honest about something,” “I’ll be honest about something,” painting and you always think that the Tal R replies swiftly, “I never go into sex artist, he controls the cut, he knows he replies swiftly, “I never go into sex what just left the painting, he knows shops, I never go into strip joints. I never shops, I never go into strip joints…” the mystery, but actually it’s not like go into gay clubs, swinger clubs…”

I clarify that my remark was about the way in which people view art that. If you are working like that – thinking that you are the public in general, rather than the specifics of his own relationship to his subject master, controlling all the elements in a painting – it’s always going matter. And yet in a way, his quick denial proves the point. Private space to be a benign, stupid painting. I think the reason why you paint and is a hazy concept in an age of extreme mediation and equally extreme you do art in general is that there is also a mystery for you.” ar surveillance. What’s interesting about the Sexshop paintings is not that they represent a private space – they don’t – so much as they create it.

Tal R: Sexshops is on show at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London, through 20 December. Academy of Tal R can be seen from 14 October In a curious way, seeing the rainbow-coloured (literally, in the case through 21 January at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam of Babylon, 2017, which includes one such variegated arc) Sexshop works in a group is like seeing a lineup of the exteriors of all the themed Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview casinos in Las Vegas: beyond the promise of pirates at Treasure Island

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September 14 – November 5, 2017

Nicole Eisenman Toni Schmale Chadwick Rantanen November 17, 2017 – January 21, 2018

R. H. Quaytman Olga Chernysheva

secession www.secession.at Friedrichstraße 12 1010 Vienna, Austria

Krištof Kintera

Galerie Rudolfinum

NaturgeschichteN spureN des politischeN

MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 A -1070 Wien www.mumok.at

23.9.2017–14.1.2018

Candida Höfer, Zoologischer Garten Paris II (Detail), 1997, © Bildrecht Wien, 2017

7.9.— —26.11.

2017 100th exhibition of the gallery Admission free — thanks to the Avast Foundation www.galerierudolfinum.cz

Curated by Juan Bolivar and Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi Ralph Anderson Ben Cove John Greenwood Sigrid Holmwood Richard Kirwan Kittey Malarvie Ngarralja Tommy May

Mawukura Jimmy Nerrimah Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi John Stark Daniel Sturgis Freddie Timms Keturah Nangala Zimran

EARTH, WIND & FIRE

7 September – 20 October 2017

Griffin Gallery, 21 Evesham St London, W11 4AJ

+44 (0) 20 8424 3203 www.griffingallery.co.uk

General partner

The Sacred Sea

GALERIA

John Bellany

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

Limited Edition Portfolio Set – £1,125 14 de septiembre - 25 de noviembre de 2017

Ana Prada Perfección

Portfolio size: 39 x 44cm Unframed and unmounted.

30 de noviembre de 2017 - 10 de febrero de 2018

James Casebere Emotional Architecture

Edition of 30 signed

by John Bellany.

Includes seven etchings by John Bellany in response to seven of George Bruce’s best known poems.

Available online and in Modern One Shop nationalgalleries.org 0131 626 6494 National Galleries of Scotland Trading Company Limited. Registered in Scotland SC312797

CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIÓN HELGA DE ALVEAR

Jürgen Klauke Until February 2018

Idiosincrasia Curator - Chus Martínez Until November 2017 Cáceres, España

www.fundacionhelgadealvear.es/apps

The Working Artist The East London Group curated by Michael Rosen & Emma-Louise Williams

Delving into east London’s streets through the artists of its past 29 Sep – 17 Dec 2017

CGP LONDON // THE GALLERY & DILSTON GROVE, SOUTHWARK PARK 28 SEPTEMBER - 29 OCTOBER // THURSDAY - SUNDAY // 11AM - 5PM

Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road E3 2SJ bowarts.org/whats-on Image: Albert Turpin Salmon and Ball (detail) courtesy the artist’s family © A.E.Turpin Estate 2017

Art Reviewed

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Arthur Jafa A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London 8 June – 10 September There are black bodies everywhere in filmmaker Arthur Jafa’s exhibition-installation – bodies that are, on one hand, the objects of violence, and on the other the subjects of aesthetic performance. Jafa, whose recent rise to attention in contemporary art follows a long career in independent film, here presents a ‘mix’ of his own work with that of two other artists, Frida Orupabo and Kahlil Joseph; an installation that is as much a theoretical statement of Jafa’s inquiry into what might constitute a ‘black aesthetic’ as it is a retort to the politics of race in America. A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, then, shuttles between the celebration of black culture in the material form of the performing body, and the political character of being turned into an object by others: as Jafa put it in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘I think Black Americans, in particular, are preoccupied with things, because when we came here we were things.

We weren’t people. We weren’t human beings.

We were things of a very particular sort.’

Refusing to become an object of others is a motif of the show. Jafa’s lauded 2016 video Love is the Message, the Message is Death is absent, but the visual conflict the work sets up – sequences of black people subjected to official violence, shot and forced to the ground by police, and water-cannoned in riots contrast with the physical gesture of falling and reclaiming balance, witnessed in the ecstasy of black gospel culture as much as in hip-hop – is unpacked in much of what is presented here. So the visitor is greeted with a wall-size reproduction of a press photograph of the Marin County courthouse hostage siege, where on 7 August 1970 Jonathan Jackson, younger brother of activist George Jackson, took hostage a judge and others in an attempt to free three black inmates of Soledad State Prison, following a week of racially motivated violence by white prison officers. Gun-toting, young, nervous, Jackson appears as the embodiment of the angry demand of black Americans to be recognised as more than things.

Ghosts of the political past haunt Jafa’s show.

A large Confederate flag, dyed black, hangs ominously to one side – behind it, a smaller, similarly blackened Stars and Stripes hangs pathetically.

A nearby photograph shows a group of black schoolchildren in segregation-era Virginia saluting the flag of the Union, suggesting complicity.

In the context of the recent Charlottesville protests, the blunt implication is that this history still looms over the present.

But as the historical focus of the show shifts, political violence and anger towards it unravels into something more ambivalent, more individuated, performative, frustrated. A standup cutout image of the Incredible Hulk, his green skin colour drained to black, pounds his fists furiously into his little bit of earth (LeRage, 2017).

He’s the monster he doesn’t want to be – a trope Jafa recalls in his own ironic self-portrait-tocamera Monster (1989). A different kind of monster is present in the photo-collages of Orupabo, female figures formed from pinnedtogether fragments of what might be colonial ethnographic subjects, poised between subjection and self-invention.

Self-invention becomes a counter to objectification: on projection screens slanting across opposite corners of the circuit of rooms that make up the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, Jafa’s ‘mixes’ of video clips are running: we catch Jimi Hendrix in full flow at Woodstock; a sequence from the US TV dance show Soul Train, hugely popular with black American audiences during the 1970s and 80s; Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bootsy Collins, dressed in a spandex starman outfit, playfully teasing his audience that he’s going to make them come. Performance is escape.

Monster, however, throws down another challenge of Jafa’s aesthetics, that of the ‘objectifying’ power of the camera. You might take or leave Jafa’s rumination that ‘if you point a camera at a Black person, on a psychoanalytic level it functions as a White gaze’ – ‘the gaze’ is an overcirculated trope of contemporary theory – but here it leads the show to the work

facing page, top Arthur Jafa, Monster, 1989, digital c-print.

Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

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of photographer Ming Smith. Her photography of the 1970s and 80s, of black musicians onstage, of ordinary people in Harlem and elsewhere, throws out every convention of photodocumentary: low-light, motion-blurred yet not out of focus, Smith’s virtuoso looseness creates an atmospheric sense of place and intimacy, conjured by her rejection of the camera’s intrusive scrutiny.

Smith’s more sociable and societal vision, however, is hemmed in by Jafa’s narrower, almost existential attention to the body’s materiality. Along one wall, a shelf of ring binders stuffed with pages culled from magazines and books are the product of Jafa’s decades-long compiling of a kind of visual lexicon of a historical, diasporic blackness and a contrasting whiteness – fashion photography, celebrities, images from superhero magazines, contemporary architecture and design, ethnographic imagery, cosmetic surgery, tattoos, heavy-metal iconography alongside hip hop alongside traditional African art alongside insiderish contemporary art.

This relentless focus on the body and its performance seems paradoxically to essentialise blackness, draining away the historical contingencies of race. Maybe there’s a pessimism here, that race cannot be transcended, that it will always be with us. In one of the middle rooms, though, a showreel of other films opens some space around these questions – Joseph’s Wildcat (2013) offers an idealised vision of the residents of the all-black agricultural town of Grayson, Oklahoma, highlighting the rodeo, cowboy aesthetic, a brilliantly jarring dislocation of stereotypes. This, and an old documentary from the late 1960s, about the frustrations of poor black residents of Venice, California, contrasted with the complacent indifference of suburban middle-class whites, asserts that refusing to be an object means demanding social and economic power and identity, a dimension that Jafa’s aesthetic preoccupations struggle to embody.

J.J. Charlesworth

facing page, bottom Ming Smith, Mother and Child, Harlem, NY, 1977, 1997, vintage gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

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Krzysztof Wodiczko Instruments, Monuments, Projections National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul 5 July – 9 October Over the course of a five-decade career, public space – both in the sense of a space that assembles or constructs a public and in the sense of a space for making things (such as trauma, discrimination and political oppression) public – has become Polish-born, New Yorkbased Krzysztof Wodiczko’s medium. And to some extent the potential of public space, as both a revelatory and healing force for society, has become his message. While his largescale projects, often involving projections on monuments or the facades of public buildings, have taken place across Europe, Central and North America, Australia and Japan, he has never made such a work in South Korea. On the face of it, then, encountering a comprehensive retrospective of his work in Korea’s national museum might seem a little odd, in that it appears to speak about the problems of everywhere else except here: for example, that of the survivors of nuclear bombing in Hiroshima Projection (1999), and the status of female labourers in The Tijuana Projection (2001), both of which feature projections of local people voicing their personal experiences on iconic buildings rooted in specific geographies and histories.

Organised (as the title suggests) by medium, the exhibition itself documents Wodiczko’s career chronologically from early experiments in the definition of personal space, born out of

the artist’s work in industrial design in Poland and the country’s then totalitarian regime. One of the earliest of these, Personal Instrument (1969), designed to be used by the artist himself (in this case, as with many other works from this period, in the street rather than the gallery), comprises noiseproof headphones that transmit sound picked up by a microphone, isolated and filtered by hand movement through photo-receivers embedded in a pair of gloves – the artist carving out a space for himself. The exhibition display moves on through a series of awkward vehicles aimed at critiquing the easy linkage of technology and progress, before culminating in the series of epic projections (presented via video documentation of the events). Along the way there’s a clear interest in tracing how the psychological projections of individuals find their place within the collective psychology of a social whole.

Clearly, Wodiczko’s interest in what constitutes a democracy chimes with the demonstrations in Seoul that preceded the recent impeachment of Park Geun-hye. With that in mind, the exhibition culminates in a new work, My Wish (2017), which takes the form of a video projection of Koreans from various walks of life (among them the mother of a victim of the Sewol ferry disaster, a recently laid-off worker, and a North Korean defector) 3D-mapped onto

My Wish, 2017, multimedia installation.

Courtesy the artist and MMCA, Seoul

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a reconstruction of a seated statue of Kim Koo (who led the Korean independence movement against the Japanese and from whose writings the title of the work derives), as they talk about their hopes for the future of the country. That the work is in the museum rather than at the site of the monument, and consequently comes with a more heightened sense of artifice (and self-serving-ness – celebrating the emergence of the art museum as a generator for a ‘public’) than some of Wodiczko’s site-specific work, says something about how open South Korean society is. Moreover, the double simulacrum (of the monument and of the people projected onto it) brings to mind the fact that public space today might be as much virtual as it is physical.

In this respect some of Wodiczko’s techniques seem prescient: in terms, for example, of his work presenting the animated future cityscapes of movies such as Blade Runner (1982) or Ghost in the Shell (2017) made real, and in the way in which his projections offer a sense of community that might be a kind of analogue Facebook.

Other aspects of Wodiczko’s work can seem a little old-fashioned, however: in the museum, his instruments and vehicles seem too much like archaeological relics. But perhaps this type of art is always destined to belong as much to the domain of sociology as it is art history.

Mark Rappolt

Richard Deacon Some Time Middelheim Museum, Antwerp 27 May – 24 September When Sara Weyns returned from Tate Britain’s Richard Deacon exhibition in 2014, she felt frustrated. Recently appointed director at Antwerp’s Middelheim Museum, she knew her new home had an important Deacon sculpture in storage. But it was in horrifically bad shape.

The wood was cracked and rotting, the whole object wrapped in plastic like a corpse washed up on the shore. She determined then and there (as she told me when I visited) to contact the artist and set about restoring Never Mind, the great polished beech lozenge that had been acquired by the museum in the year it was made, 1993. Three years later, a reinvigorated Never Mind is the peroration – and the largest work by some stretch – in a solo show by the venerable British artist that focuses fittingly on sculptural representations of process, transformation and temporal extension.

Some Time spreads 31 of Deacon’s works throughout almost the entire expanse of the museum’s 30-hectare park. A path that croses the property leads past Henry Moore’s King and Queen (1952–3), newly crowned with birdshit, and Erwin Wurm’s Misconceivable (2010), a weirdly

plastic yacht, dangling precariously over the grand country house’s moat in an image of pathetic masculinity, before reaching the first of several works in the show from Deacon’s Infinity series (2001–06). Such series are an important part of the sculptor’s work, and they seem to represent less the safe bet of repeating a hit, more something like the way American minimalist composer Tom Johnson writes musical notes: eking out every possible combination through a mathematical process of combinatorics. These cream cracker-like forms in stainless steel, blown up to the size of family dining tables, tease at a quasi-painterly flatness, extending through sequences of interconnected cogs in a machine without end or purpose.

Means of production are drawn into the aesthetics of Deacon’s sculptures, with works like Body of Thought #2 (1988), a knot of twisted ventilation shafts, and Morning Assembly (2008), an Escher-like form in mottled green ceramic and steel, leaving their rivets and seams proudly on display as testament to their processes of construction. But temporal passage comes into other works in more metaphorical ways. I Remember (1)

(2012) and I Remember (3) (2013) consist of long wooden struts that seem to bend and twist impossibly, against the inclinations of the material, but for Deacon, as the title suggests, the way the configuration of beams alters from one end to the other represents the passage of memory, rearranging the same elements with time (to me, they are evocative of flight paths or, more prosaically, a fistful of undercooked linguine).

At the end of the park, the freshly minted Never Mind looks justly proud, gleaming in the sunlight. No longer wood-beamed like the hull of a ship, its new aluminium form gives it the air of a UFO – a retrofuturist gesture that would have been almost unthinkable in 1993 but seems perfectly germane to the mid-2010s.

But what’s nicest about Some Time as a show is the way it brings into its purview, through a film on display in one of the garden’s pavilions, a detailed book and other accompanying texts, what had previously been the dirty secret of sculpture parks the world over: the very fact that works do decay and need repairing, the reality of time passing – even for the supposedly ‘permanent’ world of sculpture. Robert Barry

Never Mind, 1993–2017, wood, stainless steel, epoxy, 310 × 765 × 300 cm. Courtesy the artist and Middelheim Museum, Antwerp

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Michael E. Smith S.M.A.K., Ghent 24 June – 1 October Unlike most exhibitions, Michael E. Smith’s solo show at S.M.A.K. is not indicated by big letters spelling out the artist’s name, let alone wall texts. Instead, after pushing a glass door – whose handles have been removed – one immediately enters a big room that has been darkened and for which the artist has dimmed the light. (In other rooms here, he removes the lighting completely.) The room has been almost completely left empty aside from an old couch – which on closer inspection seems to have been scratched by a cat and is blackly stained with dirt – positioned in the far end. Two red laser projections are dancing up and down around this object in a frantic way, sometimes approaching each other, then separating again, directing the gaze of the spectator. This unusual opening to the exhibition, and the uncanny atmosphere it breathes, gives a good idea upfront of what to expect. Smith is embracing absence – both in the spatial and contextual sense, as indicated by the lack of text – and wants to play with the infrastructure of the museum, which he’s altered for the occasion.

The artist does not simply drop a series of objects in the venue, but wants to make a truly site-specific show, turning the

building inside out and creating a specific choreography to express an atmosphere of decay and decline. Should it come as a surprise that Smith was born and bred in Detroit?

Hence one of the objects, consisting of stretched gym shorts pulled over dinner plates – and Untitled (2017), like all the works in this show – is positioned above a door leading to the museum’s storage that is normally not visible for the audience. Smith, throughout the show, installs his work in corners and other unusual spaces, challenging – and angling – our gaze as he did with the laser projections.

He plays with our expectations and habits of watching and walking through the museum.

Take a two-part video that seems to display CCTV footage of an empty classroom. It looks like a static image; besides a soft humming sound, nothing happens. It turns out Smith added a subsonic sound only audible to children, dogs and for some tones also adults, deliberately presenting a work that will be mostly lost on viewers. Another inclusion consists of an inverted bathtub from a trailer park juxtaposed with a 3D-printed scan from the body of a cancer-stricken dog (as we learn from the press release). The artist made

Michael E. Smith, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist

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a circular hole in the surface of the scan of the dog and the bathtub, creating a formal resemblance – alongside the shared feeling of decay this entire exhibition emanates. But the result still feels rather easy, a pure formal, associative game with hardly any content.

In other works, nevertheless, Smith proves quite daring in his use of material adhering to an idiosyncratic interpretation of the sculptural medium, blurring boundaries between organic and industrial materials. He piles a bunch of puffer fishes, taxidermied and stretched into the inflated shape they take when threatened, into a vertical form evoking a totem. Or he uses a bunch of flattened starlings, forming a star, presented above the door, almost evoking a ritual way of protection. At such moments, the unusual presentation of his work and daring use of the architectural space, which might otherwise come across as a pretentious gimmick, snaps into focus: it elevates the artworks – which sometimes flirt too much with a trendy hipster aesthetic without much meaning – to a higher level, creating an uncanny universe or miniature cosmos. Once you leave through the glass door, it feels like you just woke up from a dream.

Sam Steverlynck

Steps to Aeration Tanya Leighton, Berlin 8 July – 1 September Commercial-gallery summer shows have evolved in the past two decades from brainless displays of unsold inventory to counterintuitive, usually guest-curated, knowingly ‘dark’ affairs.

(Contemporary art, of course, doesn’t ‘do’ happy stuff like summer.) Steps to Aeration is a twist. It is indeed guest-curated, by Sarah McCrory, but the 12 artists’ works on display – ranging, without consistent concern for cool points, from relative unknowns to heavy hitters like Sterling Ruby and Rachel Harrison – are splashed with serotonin-boosting colour. And yet it’s quickly apparent that this merely sweetens the messaging, which has everything to do with things – often bodies – barely holding together.

Much of what’s here bends familiar formats to index 2017’s daily condition of dread and instability. Figurative painting, for instance: Vittorio Brodmann’s juicy oils star pained half-human figures whose arms dissolve into smears, or antlered and wrinkled wraiths locked in endless combat, all of this creepily half-comical. In Djordje Ozbolt’s canvas Promises, Promises (2017) a Pan-like creature, between whose hands a minirainbow arcs, is leading a tribe of followers; it’s hard not to map this onto contemporary demagoguery and the recognition

of what kind of values (or absence of same) people will now affirm. One thing Steps to Aeration poeticises, skirting obviousness as it does, is a becoming-less-human, a de-civilising.

Renaud Jerez’s gleefully mutant skeletal figurative sculptures are made from pipework, chains and scraps of material; a hollow groin holds miniature skeletons, a half-constructed metal head is daubed with what could be a Mexican wrestler’s mask. In the aforementioned Ruby’s pair of production-line stuffed-fabric reliefs, Peace Vampire (6308) (2016) and Peace Vampire (6398) (2017), the peace sign has drooped, as if via gravity, and extended into a variation on one of the American artist’s signature vampire mouths. Values are in freefall; history is disorderly junk, as in Ida Ekblad’s unwelcoming paintings appliquéd with swatches of canvas painted to look like ugly floral textiles and edged with bits of dated-looking graphic design or the throwback phrase ‘DANCE 1990’.

Yet the flipside is that while some things are falling apart, others are arduously falling together. The show takes its title from Elliot Dodd’s digital animation, from 2015, in which a rendered figure has a body like an airbag, blown up huge, sinking to flatness and flicking

between genders – pinched breasts, a witchy long head or just wobbly eyeballs on an island of skin – in an endless becoming: a work that appears to reflect a gender fluidity, but here, however uneasily, also turns loosely metaphoric for a state of between-ness that requires fortitude to push through. Hardeep Pandhal’s woollen jumpers, dangling from hangers and appliquéd with the cartoon faces of rappers (2Pac, Scarface), reflect how the artist – a British Sikh who doesn’t speak the same language as his Punjabi mother – forged a second grammar with her through art. Then there’s work that is outright dreamlike, such as Kris Lemsalu’s Old friends (2017), a deflated-looking ceramic figure with dreadlocks, lying in a bed-cum-manger, above which – anticipating the release of Stephen King’s IT remake – a scary, red-wigged clown hovers expectantly, the whole thing a kind of harbinger.

As an exhibition, then, Steps to Aeration is very much a barometer, a philosophical one. It adumbrates a step-change in what it means to be human – and one might think the other meaning (in British slang) of ‘aerated’, meaning angry, is also relevant here – but also asserts that when things are in pieces they might recompose in new, as-yet-unimagined ways. Martin Herbert

Steps to Aeration, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy Tanya Leighton, Berlin

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Christopher Wool Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin 9 June – 27 July Whereas contemporaries such as Richard Prince, or younger artists such as Wade Guyton, use printing techniques to grant their paintings access to imagery and information beyond the reach of postmodern abstraction, Christopher Wool’s fusions of printing and painting are distinguished by their hermeticism. This may be best illustrated where it would seem most contradicted. Published in conjunction with this exhibition are two books of black-and-white photographs of backwoods Americana (Road and Westtexaspsychosculpture, both 2017), picturing light-industrial detritus abandoned in storage lots, piles of old tyres, dirt tracks winding through wiry cottonwoods, a tornado looming on the horizon. They look out at the world, but something about the attention Wool pays to their tonal textures makes them seem more concerned with how they echo the patterning of his largely black-and-white abstract paintings than with documenting the badlands of Texas or upstate New York. They have no apparent investment in the histories, or even the myths, of the places they show. They are the residues of a process that limits itself to a perfectly judged surface.

Wool has always had the mysterious ability to convert this formalism into a statement of loss, the loss of meaning. The random-looking typographical signs printed onto a series of lithographs, a.k.a. (2016), are even less signifying than the words and phrases of his text paintings of the late 1980s; but even those ­– with their swaggering expletives and elliptical, situationist

quotes – were more about language as a pretext for abstract painting than a conveyor of meaning. The gesture towards communication served to highlight the limitation of the sign to its signifier. This introversion can end up as the self-indulgence of l’art pour l’art, as here in a series of works on paper (all Untitled, 2016), in which an image of stains and drips is a reproduced ground for doodled lines and erasures of painting. Process for process’s sake, avowing its futility, is overridden by an indolent air of generating gratuitous but collectable variants.

At best, however, in a series of five large paintings, each over 2.75 metres tall (all Untitled, 2016), Wool ekes grave drama out of phasing the image of painting into painting itself. Four silkscreen prints – images of paint spreading into an absorbent surface, to leave a curving, feathered edge – are applied to each canvas to form quarters of what resembles a large single blob of dark seepage. There is an ironic, Beckettian permutational logic – or illogic – at work in the shuffling, mirroring and inverting of these constituent prints to produce variations on these finely textured biomorphic shapes. One painting’s Rorschach image resembles a Darth Vader-ish mask. The broad dot-screen of the prints slips as it unevenly stencils the viscous enamel. Tautologically, these glitches are signs of an image becoming the kind of paint process it is at the same time picturing. The silkscreen’s radical enlargement of a relatively minute incident of facture leaves the silkscreens no detail on which their

Untitled, 2016, silkscreen ink on linen, 267 × 244 cm.

Photo: Tim Nighswander / IMAGING4ART. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin & Paris

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textures can be based. They are large shadows or silhouettes defaulting to the manual contingencies of the printing process for detail; but this paucity of image material is able to generate grand, looming paintings of astonishing surface complexity.

In Wool’s painstakingly extended exploration of painterly self-reflexivity – paintings made of prints of paintings made of prints, and so on, ad infinitum – the limitation to pattern and texture is a measure of the receding of the original in an ever more mediated world.

The static of reproduction replaces the details of sources too insignificant to preserve: drips and stains less real than the paint reproducing them. In a new departure, Wool’s new silkscreen paintings transform this emphasis on pattern into the singularity of images monolithic as Easter Island head sculptures. Fragmentation gels into the focus of plot. The paintings resemble vast silhouettes, concealing an identity they massively hint at, as if however much you strive to make painting exclusively about itself it will end up being about you.

The last room contains another departure: a concrete sculpture on a plinth (Untitled, 2017).

Teasingly figurelike, but not quite figurative, it narrowly withdraws from picturing the body that it powerfully intimates, and reverts to a statement of material and texture. But it is still out there, in real space, a radical defector from Wool’s consummately sealed pictorial world, tellingly unable to assume a legible form beyond its bounds. Mark Prince

Kara Walker Figa Deste Project Space Slaughterhouse, Hydra 20 June – 30 September With Figa (2017), Kara Walker brings to Greece the left hand of A Subtlety – her massive sphinxlike sculpture that made its debut in 2014 at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn – placing the new installation in the cliffsides of Hydra.

Walker’s repurposing of A Subtlety initially comes off as flat and easy: it is tempting to assess Figa solely in the context of the earlier sculpture, and thus it can at first feel like the latest installation functions merely as an extension instead of a standalone work. Yet if A Subtlety was mounted in New York City to symbolise the ‘new world’ found at the end of pilgrimages endured by slaves and immigrants alike, Figa instead shifts the focus back to that story’s origin: Greece, the cradle of Western civilisation. It is with this understanding that Figa begins to take shape as an independent work, ultimately establishing itself as a tribute to those traditionally marginalised throughout Western history: slaves, migrants and refugees.

Like A Subtlety before it, Figa is made of polystyrene and sugar, the latter being

a commodity derived from slave labour.

The sculpture is shaped into a fist with the thumb peeking through the index and middle fingers – a hand gesture known as ‘the fig sign’. While generally interpreted as rude (and arguably sexist), the sign can otherwise be translated to mean good luck, as it is closely associated with magical properties pertaining to fertility and protection from evil.

To emphasise this sentiment, Walker modified Figa by adding further sugar to its surface in an attempt to ‘sweeten’ the hardship experienced by refugees in contemporary circumstances. This is expounded upon by the fact that the project space is located just outside of Hydra’s port, with the Figa installation facing the many newcomers who pass into the island’s harbour seeking asylum.

For the exhibition, the Slaughterhouse has also deliberately left its doors and windows open, as Walker apparently hoped (so a docent told me) that some of the extra sugar might blow off into the sea and reach the downtrodden in their

voyages. Though the intention is honourable, this seems like a curatorial afterthought, seeing as the sculpture’s material would have been made of sugar regardless.

Perhaps the strongest aspect here is Figa’s correspondence to its context: one can naturally draw the line between the trauma of forced migration and the slaughterhouse’s violent history of chopping limbs, separating the part from the whole. What the work succeeds in overall is evoking a sense of hope and care with its lofty intentions. A Subtlety was indeed much darker in its theme and implications, whereas Figa seems to have shifted sometime during its separation, becoming something much lighter and filled with hope. It is saccharine in both its material and its purpose to spread well-wishes to the suffering – which, while topical, is a touch too rosy-coloured, unfortunately leaving one somewhat ignorant and doe-eyed to the atrocities occurring in the very seas it looks out to. Caroline Elbaor

Figa, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Fanis Vlastaras & Rebecca Constantopoulou.

Courtesy Deste Foundation, Hydra

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Fade In 2: Ext. Modernist Home – Night Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković, Belgrade 14 July – 21 August A woman’s glaring glass eye stares out from a portrait into the courtyard of the modernisthouse-turned-gallery. Part of a 1997 poster series for a fake film by Serbian artist Raša Todosijević, the image is repeated around the first-floor windows. Under each is the title, Murder. The posters’ accusatory tone here becomes contextual, this being the site of the 1998 assassination of a Serbian organised crime boss. Attempting to reframe the gallery’s dramatic history, Fade In 2: Ext. Modernist Home – Night takes as its starting point the representation of art in film and television.

Intentional or not, there’s an aggressive element to this exhibition. Standing on an island in the shallow pool of the courtyard, Tobias Spichtig’s Heiner Müller (2017), a metal creature with a piano-keyboard head, sporadically screeches flames into the air, evoking some kind of postapocalyptic Frankenstein’s monster. Indoors, Bojan Šarčević’s exhibition element (MA-SARCB-00075) (2016) – part of his Invagination series – is a Hulked-out desk made of stones and aluminium in a brutalist style that dominates the ground floor. Christian Marclay’s 24-minute Made to Be Destroyed (2016) cuts together scenes from movies that show art being burned, trashed, smashed, shot at or used as a weapon – think Herman Makkink’s penis sculpture Rocking Machine (1969), used

in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) to bludgeon a woman to death, or the clerics in Equilibrium (2002) who put a flamethrower to Mona Lisa’s face. I enjoyed Made to Be Destroyed, but by now I was seriously sideeyeing the blokey material on display.

There are, however, less shouty, more insidious examples of violence too: Dora Budor’s A woman passing on the street said, ‘a decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.’ (2016) is a lump of rock in a vitrine. Closer inspection reveals medical instruments embedded in it – a replica of the bespoke set used by the gynaecologists in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) – but as fossilised tools in a display case, Budor’s work offers some sensitivity towards the issue of violence against women, highlighting that it is rooted throughout human history. Then there’s Carissa Rodriguez’s La Collectionneuse (2016), a set of pastel-coloured ceramic cylinders, at once beautiful and frightening – the glossy smooth texture and inoffensive colouring implanted with razor blades.

While the exhibits mentioned here work together, it’s not clear whether they successfully convey the conceit of Fade In 2 (the sequel to a show held at the Swiss Institute in New York last year – including several of the same artists), which claims to investigate ‘the role that art

Fade In 2: Ext. Modernist Home – Night, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

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plays in narrative film and television’. The Balkan Projects was set up to promote artists from the Balkan region, bridging here and the West. The 21 artists presented in the Projects’ first exhibition (in collaboration with the Swiss Institute) are international, but only seven are from the Balkans – two based in Belgrade, the rest in Europe or America. It’s hard not to speculate on the seeming decision to include better-known artists at the expense of those lesser known but more local.

This said, the exhibition is saved by Brazilian artist Rodrigo Matheus’s Mute Scenes (2017), an installation using objects borrowed from a Belgrade prop house. Mute Scenes anchors the show (which is in danger of going violently awry) to its location, reflecting the city’s film, television and theatre cultures. Along the lighting tracks of the first floor hang gloved mannequin hands, each holding an item: a wedding veil, a pair of leather shoes, a film reel, a telephone, twisted pieces of metal, manacles, a length of rope, a gun. In trying to grasp at too much, Fade In 2 seems unable to reconcile with itself: the lack of Balkan artists doesn’t go unnoticed, the New York exhibition’s leftovers take over. And in light of this, Matheus’s work is also a metaphor: the last gloved hand hangs motionless and empty, waiting for something to clasp. Fi Churchman

Malin Gabriella Nordin Floating from Within Gallery Steinsland-Berliner, Stockholm 18 August – 16 September Stockholm-based artist Malin Gabriella Nordin is one of many Swedish women artists who resort to the basics – or perhaps the old ways, meaning they’re not particularly interested in the digital. These artists (another would be Alexandra Karpilovski) only peripherally integrate technology, video and film in their art, choosing instead to sketch, paint, draw and sculpt – to use their hands on a fundamental level. Their works are often the highlight of music events or film festivals, because they enjoy crossing boundaries into less institutionalised spheres; they even collude with Swedish pop stars or reputable fashion designers.

(For instance, Nordin’s vibrant paintings are interspersed in LIV’s music video for Wings of Love, 2016). Nordin works well within diverse mediums: painting, illustration, sculpture and installation; across them, her craft reflects a cultivated interest in abstraction and experimenting with form. Her signature works, though, are intricate collages, which come in two styles: bold and extreme, or subtle and pastel-shaded, highlighting the complexity of femininity and beauty. Yet this solo show highlights a new selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures that accentuate her motif.

Nordin has a playful spirit. Her work does not follow those traditional or ‘learned’ tracks of expression that are often the unfortunate byproduct of attending art schools with more conventional mentors. Even though she attended Bergen’s National Academy of the

Arts, she may be an anomaly. At the same time, her work possesses a timeless quality, and one might misidentify it as early-twentiethcentury modernism: a wavering blend of Expressionism, Orphism and Fauvism, tempered with a degree of abstraction. In the painting Szemes (all works 2017), two entrancing female figures lounge in a blissful intimate daze, hands meeting at the apex of a centrally located sculpture of three orbs. These women are untainted by pain or unavoidable circumstance, instead inhabiting some lush paradise.

They seem to have mastered escapism; the artist may be suggesting fantasy and utopia as attainable goals. The large-scale painting Veil of dreams is a strong presence here, its shapes resembling – depending on one’s perception – luxuriant flowers, a partial female silhouette or a multilayered landscape.

A collage can be perceived as a simple gesture, yet Nordin’s earlier collage work harbours an architectural quality where textures overlap, something to hold on to amid the works’ fragmented, asymmetrical compositions. Both those collages and the displayed works (paintings in Flashe, felt pen drawings, sculptures) share a quality of diffidence: neither domineering or authoritarian, they instead seduce with sensitivity – both on their own and collectively, as certain associations bounce around the space. Though Nordin is not known for landscapes, all of her work possesses a scenic quality that refers to the natural world, as in

the tessellated patterning of the painting It’s green silent peace, whose title reflects its dominant colour. The power and influence of alternative realms appears in Floating from within, where an intermingling of the secular and phantasmagorical feels to be occurring, the painting’s distorted figure caught up in meditative thought or prayer yet also immersed in the scene.

Throughout, Nordin expresses herself via a delicate interplay between shape, form and texture that leads her out of the realm of representation. The form supports her implicit content: here respective meaning and interpretation are neither fixed nor static, but rather transformational and spectral.

The artist, accordingly, cajoles viewers to reevaluate their position in relation to both the world and other entities, and emphasis seems to be placed on the continuous process of becoming via gathered knowledge and experience. Nordin’s work, in this regard, is not premeditated but intuitive, sensory, reactive.

If she gets too comfortable with a certain creative trajectory, she has been known to shift gears or simply abandon the notion altogether; and sure enough, that whimsical trait is evident here, as the show pivots to the curvilinear yet piecemeal compositions of her aluminium sculptures Figures 1–3. It’s the work of an artist who, for all her art’s aesthetic appeal, can’t live without discomfort and awkwardness.

Jacquelyn Davis

It’s green silent peace, 2017, Flashe on canvas, 145 × 185 × 3 cm. Photo: Olof Ringmar.

Courtesy GSB/Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm

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Ungestalt Kunsthalle Basel 19 May – 13 August The German word ungestalt translates as amorphous or unshapely, with a goodly negative connotation. Pull the word apart and there’s more potential inside: the ‘un-’ suggests something undone or opposing; ‘gestalt’ is not just form or shape but figure or likeness too.

The wonderful sleight of this exhibition is to apply these ideas literally and formally, in the process creating a show more of its time than many a recent socially or politically themed project.

Works by 16 artists – from Marcel Duchamp to the youngest participant, American artist Eric N. Mack (b. 1987) – tease out the potential of rejecting clear shape, of deforming materials or things and of refusing to fulfil the artist’s traditional form-giving role. Prominent positions are given to Joachim Bandau’s sculptures from the 1960s and 70s, with their functional and powerful vocabulary using lacquered fibreglass, metal and rubber; his large Fahrbare schwarze Sesselgruppe (Driveable Black Group of Chairs, 1971) sets up two shiny black armchairlike (though seatless) sculptural elements in a faceoff, the pair conjoined by ridged hosing extruded from metal fittings, while metal grips and castors indicate portability. Industrial materials are made redundant, looking utilitarian but good for nothing. Other pieces spill over the lines of a form, like Caroline Achaintre’s hand-tufted wool work MadCap (2017), which

hangs high up one wall, its muddled face seen through a tangle of loose-hanging yarn, as if claiming expressive painting’s gestures for a customarily tidy medium. The aforementioned Mack, too, resists traditional formats and categorisations, his collages of pop, fashion and broadsheet publications on found fabric backings dangling onto the floor or, in Parade (2016), outlining a dog-eared approximation of a US map, from the centre of which Prince eyes the viewer. The high-end production of Lucie Stahl’s aluminium-mounted scannerphotographed prints is countered by oozing or gravid subjects: Restrictions (Made in USA) (2016), for example, being an object wrapped in patriotic material that strains against the string binding it.

Installations that looked reasonably tidy for the press photographer decomposed as the exhibition proceeded, undoing themselves; Adrián Villar Rojas’s Untitled (2017, from the series Rinascimento) is a fridge into which a still life of lobster, champagne and much else is stuffed, rotting and stinking a little more each time a viewer opened the door. Olga Balema’s become a stranger to yourself (2017) is a collage in liquid that writes its own oblivion, because it shrinks each time it is exhibited, when the PVC pillow is filled with water, sealed, then cut open at the end of the show. Tomo Savić-Gecan’s Untitled (2005–17) also diminishes, the work

a notional value of itself registered on the Kunsthalle website that continually decreases till it vanishes entirely by exhibition’s close.

Still other pieces map the shape of ideas heading off on countless tangents, especially Nathalie Perrin’s diagrams of associations in cramped pencil on paper; play with expectations of texture; or work with negative impressions.

Shape and form are sometimes pending: Park McArthur’s two versions of Polyurethane Foam (2014) are two blocks of foam, their wrapping still attached, waiting to be made into the thing they might be.

The duo Pakui Hardware’s eerie installation Hesitant Hand (2017) is the show’s killer blow: in a sterile installation, plastic trays used for conveyor-belt processes covered in delicately vibrating printed gauze have been placed on a low steel shelving unit as a robot had positioned them in a previous installation of the work.

This work is aesthetically cool and chimes with contemporary concerns about who and what we cede authority to. Can we always tell who or what is forming an environment? For artistic experiments with authorship, agency, noncompliance and outsourced decision-making are not merely creative exercises in the isolated sphere of the aesthetic, but raise questions that can be applied elsewhere. Does modern life allow the unformed, or will that vacuum be filled? Aoife Rosenmeyer

Pakui Hardware, Hesitant Hand, 2017, UV print on silicone, stainless steel, plastic boxes, dimensions variable. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel.

Courtesy the artists and Exile Gallery, Berlin

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ArtReview

In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes Raven Row, London 30 June – 6 August There’s a strongly pedagogical flavour to this exhibition. Partly, of course, that’s the nature of a survey show about a performance-art group, where the format is pretty much bound to include archival material – especially as The Theatre of Mistakes (as the group was known from 1974 to their end in 1981), or The Ting (to use the name of a previous, looser incarnation), seem to have been particularly assiduous in documenting their activities. Much of the show, then, consists of vitrines of photographs, texts and ephemera, either representing specific pieces – such as The Street (1975), where a residential road in Kentish Town became for one evening a setting for various choreographed actions, or Ascent of The Stedelijk (1976), in which the floor of the Dutch museum was laboriously traversed as if climbing a vertical cliff face – or offering a more general glimpse into the close-knit art scene in England during the 1970s.

But beyond that, ideas of instructing and informing were central to the group’s own practice. The performances were typically intricate and meticulously planned, often following the logic of some organisational principle or system – a fact that clearly comes through in the serial, gridlike charts and abstract diagrams used to determine sequences of blocking and positioning, or to plot complex permutations of interactions between performers. There are

resemblances to various conceptual artworks from the period, perhaps most notably the drawings of Sol LeWitt. Indeed, the whole idea of The Theatre of Mistakes was to develop a similar sort of language, a conceptual, rulebased methodology, for performance art.

This strand of thinking extends to one of the two live components of the show: the daily workshops conducted by Anthony Howell, one of the group’s six core members, which derive from the book he coauthored in 1976, Elements of Performance Art – a primer-cummanifesto for performance art in Britain. The workshops are lessons, essentially, which anyone can sign up for and participate in. Though you can also just watch (during my visit, participants were doing entertaining exercises on stillness and interaction) – so they’re performances, too. Just like all teaching, to continue the pedagogical vein, is indeed a kind of performance.

The second live element is the nightly enactment of what’s often considered The Theatre of Mistakes’s signature work, Going (1977), directed by the group’s other main driving force, Fiona Templeton. The piece is a vaguely Beckettian play in five acts: an undefined, institutional scenario in which five office-suited performers progress through a sequence of spoken lines and gestures relat-

ing to an impending but perpetually deferred departure, continually rotating between characters and replicating each other’s actions in shifting combinations. The tone is dour and oppressive, as befits this cyclical, whitecollar purgatory; yet, especially for the mathematically inclined, it’s an absolute joy to watch.

The sense is of a rigidly mechanistic, clockwork universe, one in which occasional malfunctions or anomalies are the only way for the overall narrative to change track and progress; or perhaps a more up-to-date analogy would be some kind of glitchy, buggy computer program.

Indeed, one of the pleasures of the piece is how well it manages to adapt to a contemporary audience; how, by virtue of its adherence to a systemic, impersonal, rule-based structure, it manages to avoid the concerns around expression and authenticity that have attached to other recreated works of historical performance art in recent years. Also, once again, it’s fascinating to see the themes of knowledge and learning emerge – this time in the form of the play’s characters, who seem in some way to comprehend the system they inhabit, and who sometimes manage to step out of the action enough to make fractional adjustments, directing the course of events to ensure the play itself arrives at its rightful, liberating conclusion.

Gabriel Coxhead

The Theatre of Mistakes, Going, 1977, performance.

Photo: Lindsay Moran. Courtesy the artists

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Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power Tate Modern, London 12 July – 22 October ‘Soul is black’. This was reportedly Aretha Franklin’s response when entreated for a definition of soul. Tate Modern’s survey of African-American art – encompassing over 65 artists through two decades from 1963 – asks what is black? Artist Raymond Saunders provided a formalist answer with his 1967 pamphlet ‘Black is a Color’. Indeed, black is present in that literal sense. Martin Puryear’s Self (1978) is a simple biomorphic form made of hollow wood stained nearly obsidian. It’s a portrait, the artist described, of a secret self. In the chiaroscuro photography of Roy DeCarava, figures emerge from stygian cityscapes: saxophonist, chanteuse, mourners, Malcolm X. Within Jack Whitten’s triangular canvas Homage to Malcolm (1970), jet-black acrylic was raked with an Afro comb. The intervening tool, both totemic and quotidian, unearthed vivid hues, suggesting multivalence.

Ed Clark’s Yenom (#9), produced the same year, is an oval canvas of horizontal stripes in Mediterranean shades. Clark used a janitor’s broom as a wide brush, bringing along studio dirt and footprints to the surface. There’s no black evident, nor perhaps blackness. But it’s difficult to ignore the context: Clark was the first American painter known to experiment with irregularly shaped canvases, yet remains not quite canonical. It’s also possible to consider his technique in the terms of Frank Bowling, who in 1971 situated nonfigurative black artists that do not abstract current sociology, but rather absorb the diasporic traditions of black people rearranging and redirecting found things in whatever environment they’ve been ‘thrown, placed or trapped’.

Soul of a Nation begins with the formation of the New York collective Spiral, whose first group show featured works in black and white. Paintings by Norman Lewis represent marchers – both Klansmen and civil rights activists – through uncanny white strokes against a field of black. Spiral’s statement

began, ‘During the summer of 1963 at a time of critical metamorphosis just before the historic March on Washington, a group of Negro artists met to discuss their position in American society.’ The year was also indelibly marked by the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, that left four black girls dead. Through a period in which the position of African Americans was being articulated with blistering passion on the political stage, Soul of a Nation considers the multifarious, sometimes contentious ways in which black artists negotiated aesthetic considerations. ‘Is there a Negro image?’, enquired Lewis. This forms the crux of the show, the only consensus being that there are many.

As with ‘soul’, the ‘nation’ of the title can be read as having precise or indeterminate connotations. It suggests the indispensability of African-American contributions to American art, but could also bring to mind a separatist sect like the Nation of Islam or Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove. In his 1970 poem ‘It’s Nation Time’, Amiri Baraka posited nationhood as prospective. The many voices here are heterogeneous and often conflicting. Avantgarde practitioners found detractors in activists who prioritised direct community engagement.

Projects by the latter, documented in photographs, reveal further disagreements – over whether a mural, for instance, is only legible when depicting heroic phrases and figures, or has the potential to modulate its site via uplifting colourways. If such stances constitute nations of thought, there are whole other universes: the prismatic collage of Romare Bearden, the jumbled sculptures by Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar – tellurian yet otherworldly, they seem to result from new rituals.

There’s something peripatetic here, and exigent. This iteration (the exhibition next travels Stateside) has an erratic flow. It reflects the ethos of the Spiral group, so-monikered because a spiral ‘moves outward embracing

facing page, top Lorraine O’Grady, Art is (Girlfriends Times Two), 1983/2009, photograph, c-print. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York

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all directions, yet constantly forward’. Certain rooms are organised by region: the psychedelic vibe of Chicago, the California soul mined from arid deserts and fuliginous underpasses.

Others are dedicated to a particular medium or method. In one cramped space, propaganda posters jostle like a crowd, by turns emboldened or acrimonious. The final room is devoted to a single gallery, Just Above Midtown, and its ephemeral output. Here, winglike sculptures

by David Hammons comprise urban flotsam: greasy paper bags, hair tufts, shards of vinyl.

‘You’ve got tons of people’s spirits in your hands when you work with that stuff,’ the artist stated.

The exhibition climaxes with an expansive space of largescale works themed around improvisation and experimentation. In Joe Overstreet’s We Came from There to Get Here (1970), a vibrant canvas, detached from its stretcher, is hoisted through ropes and grommets like a suspended tent. It registers as ecstatic until one considers the allusion to lynching. This duality perplexes like a ritual in which an observer cannot decipher rapture from grief.

Next to it hangs Al Loving’s Untitled (1973), a loamy assemblage of variegated canvases, hide, leopard skin and braided cords. It conveys both extemporaneity and ineluctable thingness.

In 1969 Loving was the first African American to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum.

Vexed by the resistance of black colleagues who felt his work conformed to hegemonic criteria, Loving developed a visceral objection to formal geometries, prompting him to tear previous canvases apart. Subsequent works, some appropriating those scraps in the manner of quilting, are resolute yet loose. The artist has spoken of the ancient African religion of animism, in which ‘all objects in nature had a soul and those souls had their own independent integrity’. With such unshackled sculptural work, Loving may have arrived at his own autonomy. Jeremy Atherton Lin

facing page, bottom Emma Amos, Eva the Babysitter, 1973, oil on canvas, 127 × 87 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

ArtReview

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Jennifer Tee Structures of Recollection and Perseverance Kunstraum, London 1 July – 9 September At Camden Arts Centre, where an exhibition of Jennifer Tee’s work runs in parallel with her show at Kunstraum, a young man is reading a poem out loud. Two ribbed oval carpets are spread out on the floor in front of him like the patchwork wings of some handicraft flying machine, while the facing wall is lined with tulip petals arranged on paper to resemble a Sumatran textile design. The poem is by Mai Der Vang, whose collection Afterland (2016) brings to light the persecution of the Hmong people during the Secret War in Laos, and is included alongside works on the subject of resistance by Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin and Anne Carson in regular readings in the gallery.

The scene is a potted introduction to Tee’s practice, which combines an interest in esoteric knowledge with a lyrical sensibility in the production of works that critique dogmatic thinking. She has described her work as an exploration of ‘the soul in limbo’, which sounds alarmingly New Age but is in fact derived from André Breton’s illustrated novel Nadja (1928). As Breton portrays a woman whose perspective on the world is exhilarating because it defies reason,

so Tee proposes that we must learn to think and feel independently if we are to be liberated.

This two-part exhibition explores the possibility that liminal states – between life and death, waking and dreaming – might offer a means of resisting the repressions and unconscious biases embedded in the structures of our thought.

At Kunstraum, Tee has created an environmental installation inspired by the exhibition design of Hélio Oiticica, combining her own works with ethnographic objects, artefacts, books, plants and pieces by other artists. The gallery is painted in a basking orange, a tropical theme developed and complicated by the Upside down palm tree (Trachycarpus Fortunei) (2017) that hangs from the ceiling. The piece pays homage to installations such as Oiticica’s Tropicália (1967) at the same time as the theatricality of Tee’s gesture, and the obvious incongruity of a palm tree with the industrial architecture, draws attention to the violence inherent in removing objects and ideas from their original contexts.

Tempering playfulness with respect, Tee is careful to mark out the space between creative exchange and cultural appropriation.

Hanging on a painted fabric screen dividing the space in two, a framed photograph by Fritz Lemaire shows the CoBrA painter Eugène Brands wearing a primitivist mask of his own design, inviting the question of what it means to remove symbols from the systems of knowledge that legitimise them. The mask as agent of transformation between identities and states is a recurring motif, notably in the inclusion in the exhibition of a fin-de-siècle French death mask and Gillian Wearing’s wax Sleeping Mask (2004).

The most impressive of these props is a red and green cape, made by Oiticica in 1964, which hangs from the ceiling. Visitors are invited to wear and thus ‘activate’ the costume ‘through movement and dance’ (I didn’t dare). That is of a piece with the exhibition’s wider focus on preserving heterogeneous forms, beliefs and ideologies without segregating one from the other or preserving them in aspic. Tee aims to establish a space in which it is possible to make new connections across cultures and build relationships between communities.

Right now, that feels like an act of defiance.

Ben Eastham

Structures of Recollection and Perseverance, 2017 (installation view, Kunstraum, London).

Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

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ArtReview

True Faith Manchester Art Gallery 30 June – 3 September Joy Division (and their subsequent iteration as New Order) is the second-best band from Manchester. Their story inspired the art in this show, part-curated by Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming (1991), the definitive history of UK punk rock. We find two spaces that neatly mirror the evolution of the group – the still, sad, monochrome seriousness of Joy Division and the movement and pulsatingly colourful playfulness of New Order. The Joy Division room is dominated by Martin Boyce’s Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours (2002) – a darkened installation comprising fluorescent lights and chain dividers that gives a threatening and fittingly portentous air to the proceedings. Boyce’s stark work conjures up a troubling interzone that bluntly harmonises with the unwavering woe of their music.

The walls of this space are lined with works that explicitly reference the band’s doomed singer, Ian Curtis. There’s a swiftly executed Julian Schnabel oil on velvet created in the sad aftermath of Curtis’s suicide, Ornamental Despair (Painting for Ian Curtis) (1980), which references Peter Saville’s cover for the band’s second and final album, the deeply melancholic Closer.

Nearby is a predictable sequence of Saville’s album covers for the band. These are lit softly, with the dutifully worshipful air of a line of Russian icons. The ongoing fascination with Curtis is testified to in a grimly enigmatic

painting by Dexter Dalwood, Ian Curtis (2001), where one lightbulb glimmers into a void as another smashes. There’s also Glenn Brown’s alienated sci-fi appropriation Dark Angel ( for Ian Curtis) after Chris Foss (2002), and Factory Icon (2000/2017), a photograph by the artist Slater B. Bradley in which a putative doppelganger puffs moodily on a cigarette, a composition that intentionally recalls the famous Kevin Cummins shot of the singer.

If there is any doubt that, for other musicians and the artists here, Curtis’s suicide was the most intensely evocative gesture since Thomas Chatterton’s demise and its legacy, then many of the works in True Faith might register as exhibit one. A tragic Romantic pull persists in the sorrows of young Ian. The spinal frisson of his line from the song Atmosphere, “Don’t walk away, in silence”, haunts when you know he did exactly that. Curtis, like the fated poet Harry Crosby, created an irrevocable mythos of a creator perceived as a black sun setting, a negative transcendence. Psychiatrists warn against glamorising suicide, but for the artists in True Faith there is a commandingly persistent mystique in Curtis’s extreme action. Scott King’s screen print Joy Division, 2 May 1980, High Hall, University of Birmingham, England (1999) is a line of lonely dots that captures the isolation of the band. But it’s Mark Leckey’s video Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD (2015) that gets

closest to capturing Curtis’s time: a forbidding era characterised by deserted overpasses, space-race bleep transmissions, dread-laden electric pylons deadly to the trespasser, and long black overcoats.

In contrast, the breezy displays in the New Order room are a testament to Michael H. Shamberg’s influence. Shamberg, general manager of the Factory Records label (US), arrayed an impressive list of American artists to work with the group. There are Lawrence Weiner’s brash posters for the 1989 album Technique. Here too are adverts designed by John Baldessari, featuring appropriated photographs with faces obscured by coloured dots, and others by Barbara Kruger, with her trademark font. And there is an exhilarating sequence of pop videos, one done by Robert Longo for Bizarre Love Triangle (1986), featuring Longo’s falling men, and another by Robert Breer and William Wegman for Blue Monday (1988), starring Wegman’s dog Fay Ray – who didn’t they work with?

The Joy Division saga, you might argue, is an overfamiliar one, given the many books about their history, Anton Corbijn’s movie Control (2007) and the ubiquity of the Unknown Pleasures design on T-shirts. But what of Manchester’s number-one band? Well, a Certain Ratio of fellow music fans are bound to plump for your favourite. John Quin

Slater B. Bradley, Factory Icon, 2000/2017, c-print mounted on aluminium, 125 × 77 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Zarouhie Abdalian Work LAXART, Los Angeles 30 July – 2 September Where lies the distinction between the words ‘touch’ and ‘hit’? If you’re thinking that the difference is a question of impact, doesn’t it depend on the materials involved? Touching a butterfly’s wing with your finger is more damaging than hitting an elephant’s hide with your hand, for example. Are tactility and physical harm just two ends of a sliding sensorial scale?

It’s an unsavoury thought, and I’m not entirely sure where it leads us, but it’s one that occurred to me in Zarouhie Abdalian’s exhibition, thanks to her juxtaposition of steel toolheads and delicate Hydrocal casts taken from the surface of a chalk mine. The former – seven tarnished brown metal objects balanced on crisp white plinths – are titled brunt (i–vii), while the latter, from Chalk Mine Hollow (i–xii), consists of a series of small rectangular slabs mounted flush to the walls (all works 2017). The tenderness of these fine impressions of the chalk contrasted with the evidence of chisel blows that once hacked away at it. The exhibition is so outwardly airy and genteel that it was a while before my thoughts became embroiled in parsing scales of imagined violence. This is an effect that Abdalian cultivates throughout her work.

Abdalian, who typically kindles reflections on broad socioeconomic, political and environmental issues through deft, smallscale sculp-

tural interventions and soundworks, moves fluidly between the polarities of the micro and the macro. On a digital screen in a side room, black-and-white photographs show the craggy, lapidarian edge of a chisel, vastly magnified. Arranged in an adjacent space are steel and aluminium tools (pipes, beams, levers, bolts, etc) that have been bent out of shape and all usefulness by whatever colossal forces of nature they were once attempting to master.

Perhaps because of the recent visibility of mining as a political and environmental issue in the US news, perhaps because of Chalk Mine Hollow’s location in Mississippi and perhaps just because of the fraught times we’re living in, it seems appropriate to read these objects and images as signifiers of the brutal injustices of labour. A sound recording of stones knapping other stones made by Abdalian and Joseph Rosenzweig, titled threnody for the millions killed by silicosis (referring to the disease caused by inhalation of silica that led the Mississippi mine to be closed in 1912), appears to bear out this dynamic of victimhood.

In other circumstances, however, Work might primarily be read as an elegy on humankind’s assault on the natural world. The miners, perhaps, are actually the aggressors. More subtle is a third reading – one that I imagine Abdalian intends – that synthesises both of the above.

Work, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Courtesy the artist and LAXART, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

When Homo sapiens first took rocks and reimagined them as tools, an unstoppable process was set in motion through which the Earth was reconstituted as a raw material for its own exploitation at the hands of humans. Millennia on, the process had continued until humankind cannibalistically was using members of its own species as expendable, readymade tools.

Abdalian’s exhibition is most compelling when it complicates power dynamics rather than allegorises them. Everywhere, nature is pushing back: rock imprints itself on the steel edge of the chisel; gravity contorts metal implements into softly withered, amputated nubs; mined chalk sickens and kills those who attack it. Both the darkly rusted hammerheads and the wrinkled, blotched surfaces of the Hydrocal slabs are evocative of skin – in this context, plainly (perhaps even simplistically) racialised. Abdalian refrains from sermonising, however, and we never find out what she really thinks about those beleaguered coal miners in Trumpland. On the contrary, labour is romanticised and – for better or for worse – abstracted. Work is as much about the Duchampian readymade (‘works which are not works of “art”’) as it is the backbreaking job of toiling underground. The gallery becomes a comfortable and calming haven from which to reflect on disquieting ideas both big and small, near and very far away. Jonathan Griffin

Theodora Allen Vigil Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 24 June – 19 August These paintings are so dreamy, they’re almost kitsch. Gossamer spiritualist encounters in veiled twilight zones and astral tides. Wildflowers and psychotropic plants sprouting unkempt around arced portals that open onto cosmic vistas, full moons and eclipsed suns, spectral rings wrapping a Saturn so close you could almost finger its gaseous bod. The plants weed untended in this drifting spaceship, lilting with life in a perpetual evening.

The light’s like a bruise that just won’t heal, its tenderness permanent. A stringless guitar leans its curvy body against a post as the plants’ curled leaves unfurl around and under the curve of the archway and the gentle spherical bend of celestial bodies just beyond. Stilllifes for the ever-after and never-was, where all is softness, and the only right angles you might find clad the soundless fretboard of the abandoned instrument and the grounding corners of those archways.

These are the kind of windows some errant Romeo might sing a few lovelorn sonnets against, that poets at the end of the empires wax about as they lull the last readers into fantasies of what was lost, metaphysical windows borrowed from some sunset de Chirico. In her series (of two in the show, all works 2017) The Cosmic Garden, Los Angeles’s own Theodora Allen only just brushed oil paint pictures on smokeless, soundless linens. But stare long enough into them and you can almost smell some narcotic incense and the gentle thrum of a mysterious and hypnotic sound: the spaceship’s engine, a witch’s enchantment or maybe just the hum of the mystic’s first and last prayer, which according to some summoned the universe. Oooohhhhhmmmm…

In the next sentence, I might as well ask you to join a cult.

In the room over hangs a series of paintings titled The Candle, an otherworldly tarot

deck of luminous candles framed with esoteric shapes. Do they cite some philosophy of the New Age, the Rosicrucians or the Theosophists, Swedenborg or Blavatsky?

There are no such specific references, but the paintings allude to and shadow the occultic and spiritual, clearly made in a California where nearly everyone checks their horoscope and keeps a few crystals on hand, practises yoga and at least flirts with vegetarianism. A mystical Romanticism lives on in the Golden State, but thankfully I and it and Theodora Allen don’t take any of our moonage daydreams too seriously. Even so, Allen’s paintings don’t feel like the bright hopeful hues at the dawning of the Aquarian Age, but the twilit tones of something closing.

Both a space capsule and a time capsule, one last love letter to the cosmos at the end.

Andrew Berardini

The Cosmic Garden II, 2016, oil on linen, 198 × 152 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Sam Davis and Paul Salveson Tunnel 99 Awhrhwar, Los Angeles 22 July – 19 August Before entering Awhrhwar, in Highland Park, one of the gallery proprietors, artist Erik Frydenborg, warns me of a bee colony that lives in one of the gallery walls. Indeed, several were buzzing about the entrance trying to make it into their hive. The subtle noise made an appropriate backdrop for the staid presentation of works by Paul Salveson and Sam Davis.

Salveson’s minimal photographs make space for Davis’s active wall works, though both artists’ works are curious microcosms swarming with activity.

Reading like beat poetry, the title for Davis’s body of work, The Indifferent Egg-Crucible Entropy Motel (all works but one 2017) aptly sets the stage for the conceptual stew of these tight little pieces. Each cast plastic egglike orb protrudes off the wall with colour lines added to look like veins or capillaries. Plastic toys are embedded into the orbs’ surfaces, which create surrealist juxtapositions of representations of working professionals and actual domestic objects: in one a cigarette rests on a lily pad; in another a frog sits on a microchip; there’s a tiny man coming out of a manhole, a kitschy jack-o’lantern foregrounded by a woman on a cell

phone, and a man in a lab coat pouring liquid into a beaker. They are pictures of working-class society with the mundane air of public-access television. And while there are subtle elicitations of race, gender and class across the tableaux, each feels dignified and vital alongside the others: a million realities taking place simultaneously, all granted equal footing.

Operating at a slower, more languid pace, Salveson’s photographic diptych Capillary Trough looks like unassuming wallpaper swatches: white and grey vertical stripes hemmed in by a soft brown frame. On closer look, the detailing of toilet paper patterning comes through on the striping, and Salveson alters the lighting in each work to dramatise the demure florals.

In one image, the toilet paper’s embellishing feels faint and lacy, in the other it becomes sharp, dimensional and even menacing. Framing these works is an application of cornstarch and flour, a kind of thick wheat paste that is soft and visceral. On an opposing wall is the photograph Spiced Bulb, in which blue wandlike plastic objects rest on a bed of AstroTurf, diagonally framing two strange gooey and transparent spheres. The objects in the photograph are

vaguely familiar, but Salveson privileges abstraction over identity. Stripped of their apparent utility, each piece in the still life becomes colour and texture rather than familiar and usable tool.

Neither Salveson nor Davis presents viewers with the actual thing; only depictions of the thing (Davis with his working-class figurines, and Salveson with his photographs of his sculptural sets). Thus their subject matter – a vague celebration of life’s banality – feels two steps removed from the viewer. Still, through the elevation of banality and the blurring of function, the works poke at metaphysical truths that might be found in the everyday (unclear as these truths may be).

Later during my visit, Frydenborg used an Amanda Ross-Ho editioned work – a glass cup and a thick oversized postcard intended to catch and release bugs – to trap one of the bees and set it free outside. Frydenborg, in trapping the bee against a fluorescent light and struggling to coax it into the cup, could have been a figure in Davis’s works: the conductor of an everyday task in which utility somehow brushes up against the cosmic. Lindsay Preston Zappas

Paul Salveson, Spiced Bulb, 2017, pigment print, wood, wood glue, barley flour, chickpea flour, 36 × 51 cm.

Photo: Paul Salveson. Courtesy the artist and Awhrhwar, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

Elaine, Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York 29 June – 18 August What, if anything, of personal identity are minority and marginalised artists obligated to address in their work? This is the question that Elaine, Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here takes up.

The show’s title refers to a remark once made

by Joan Mitchell to her friend Elaine de Kooning, as recalled by the latter in 1971, in response to a male reveller’s address to them as ‘women artists’. The qualifier had clearly outstayed its welcome for Mitchell by that time in the mid-1960s, even as second-wave feminist artists around her began to push gender to the front and centre of their own work.

The pieces brought together for this exhibition, curated by Ashton Cooper, demonstrate subtler inflections of lived experience than those present in the identity-political artworks Mitchell would surely have disdained. Featuring 13 artists spanning the decades between Abstract Expressionism (represented by de Kooning and Mitchell as well as Grace Hartigan) and the present, Elaine… maps progressive attempts to grapple with identity by artists who alternately worked outside or slyly subverted the various signifiers of identity foregrounded in the works of their peers from 1960 onward.

Hartigan’s figurative oil Hollywood Interior (1993) is revelatory. A large canvas featuring a pink reclining silhouette with tasselled

slippers, surrounded by two outlined women, one on the phone, the other apparently admiring her nails, this witty painting presages by 20 years the recent spate of graphic, tongue-incheek takes on the odalisque by young figurative painters such as Mira Dancy. De Kooning’s Edwin Denby (1960), meanwhile, is notable less for its insouciant sensibility than for its sitter. This oil on canvas, imposing and svelte at 2m tall and only 1.2m wide, depicts the elegant, whippetthin poet and dance critic in a two-piece suit ever-so-slightly set off by a faint lavender halo echoing the hue of his fuchsia tie.

Al Loving’s Untitled (1976), made in the afterglow of the heyday of African-American abstraction, demonstrates an attempt to reconcile the artist’s increasing ambivalence regarding abstraction’s political efficacy with his abiding interest in abstract forms’ ability to captivate the eye. This vibrant paper collage, constructed from hundreds of multicolour squiggled strips, shows Loving’s departure from the hard-edge abstraction that had defined his early career. His use of humble collage brings modernist abstraction down to earth while pointedly stopping short of the direct address that defined many Black Arts Movement works.

Sheila Pepe takes a similar tack with her 2017 textile work On to the Hot Mess.

A jury-rigged tangle of nautical towline, rope and shoelaces draped over the divider wall that separates the exhibition from the gallery’s street-facing windows, the piece continues the artist’s investigations into what she has frequently described as ‘hot mess formalism’, in which industrial and domestic fibres are repurposed in the service of dramatic ephemeral installations.

For all of its exemplary selections, the show sometimes seems to lose its conceptual footing by painting its inclusions with the same broad brush that the makers patently eschewed.

After all, de Kooning’s decision to depict a gay acquaintance cannot be equated to Loving’s anxiety-borne embrace of collage. By bringing these works together under the auspices of the shared minority status of their makers, the show risks reinforcing the very labels Mitchell chafed against. Why remind the viewer of these labels at all? Because, one might reply, for better or for worse, they continue to inform both the production and reception of these and all artworks. By shining a spotlight on attempts, throughout the decades, to acknowledge personal identity without becoming engulfed by it, Elaine… inspires renewed respect for artists who persevere in full awareness of the uneven playing field. Cat Kron

Al Loving, Untitled, 1976, paper collage, 130 × 76 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

October 2017

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Megan Marrin Corps David Lewis 28 June – 20 August Each of the seven monumental paintings here feature the same species of giant potted flower – a leviathan with large petals of deep Bordeaux purple that enfold a sinewy, skyscraping stalk. Pictured in various stages of blooming and dying, they look like something Louise Bourgeois would have made in bronze – bodily and macabre.

While Megan Marrin has had a handful of two-person shows over the past five years, this marks her first solo exhibition and something of a departure in subject matter from her previous work. For Corps, the artist has painted seven iterations of the titan arum, a plant better known as the corpse flower, so called for the smell of rotting carcass it releases upon blooming. This bloom lasts 24 to 36 hours and, in cultivation, takes ten years to produce.

I’d somehow missed last summer’s furore over the New York Botanical Garden’s blooming corpse flower and I saw this show twice without knowing exactly what I was looking at. Subsequent research revealed

that much spectacle is made of this plant.

According to Wikipedia, it hails from the equatorial rainforests of Sumatra and is firmly part of the colonial tradition of exhibiting foreign things for Westerners to be repulsed and intrigued by. Indeed, the flowering of these jungle plants has become an event guaranteed to provoke an exoticising hubbub that draws crowds to botanical gardens across the US and Europe.

In a way, Marrin’s paintings are an extension of this phenomenon, as they are each copies of images of the plant found online – a cursory search turns up a handful of the photographs she’s chosen, all of which show the plant in greenhouses, or in captivity, so to speak. Some of the paintings include posing or gawking human figures, a feature that seems to emphasise the schoolboy joke of the plant’s name in Ancient Greek: Amorphophallus titanum, or ‘giant misshapen phallus’.

The strongest paintings are the ones that show the flowers on their own, perhaps because they seem more sincere. There is no

distraction from the care she has taken with lush pools of pastel pink, green and burgundy to form the fleshy body of the plant. While the composition of the painting is predetermined by its source material, the size feels purposeful.

The 2.4m-tall canvases are about the size of the actual flower, and they’re hung almost touching the ground, reinforcing a bodily encounter between plant and viewer.

The botanical gardens that house titan arums often christen them with women’s names, eg Trudy, Alice, Morticia – but Marrin’s titles are more libidinous. She has called them The Breed (2016), The Hunger (2016), The Invitation (2017). Marrin’s covetous titles don’t simply point to our desire to know the alien. In their references to corporeal craving, they emphasise that a specifically bodily desire (rather than neutral system-making) fuelled the Enlightenment era’s obsessive cataloguing – in greenhouses and otherwise. While I’m not sure these paintings totally transcend our cultural impulse to fetishise otherness, they certainly point it out to us. Ashton Cooper

The Invitation, 2017, oil on canvas on Styrofoam, 244 × 183 cm.

Photo: Max Yawney. Courtesy the artist and David Lewis, New York

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Frestas Triennial Entre Pós-Verdades e Acontecimentos SESC Sorocaba and other venues 12 August – 3 December While the biennials in São Paulo, Salvador da Bahia, Curitiba and Porto Alegre (inaugurated in 1951, 1966, 1996 and 1993, respectively) have been on the circuit for some years now, Sorocaba is hosting the Frestas Triennial for only the second time. An initiative of the nonprofit SESC (thriving on a 1.5 percent payroll tax on commerce workers), this year’s edition has been curated by Daniela Labra under the title Between Post-Truth and Events and features the work of 60 artists. Now a conservative industrial town, Sorocaba had been populated by indigenous Guarani populations until Baltasar Fernandes and the Bandeirantes ‘discoverers’ conquered the land in 1654 and enslaved its inhabitants. This narrative of the city’s ‘founding’ history is told on plaques that seem to have been semipermanently attached to the monastery and historical museum as well as through public monuments dedicated to the colonisers around town.

Two female Guarani activists, Poty Poran and Eunice Martims, who had been invited to give a public talk by artist Maria Thereza Alves on the triennial’s opening day, narrated the other side of the story, describing the families’ ejection from their lands and the hostile reality of Guarani life in today’s São Paulo state. Afterwards, the audience was led to see a number of traditional Guarani ceramic urns, produced by Alves in collaboration with Maximino Rodrigues, and placed in different locations around the city with the intent of

reinscribing Guarani history in the local imaginary. Alves’s subtle disturbances of the public space are boldly underpinned by Nunca’s mural Fundadores (Founders, 2017) on Praça Coronel Prestes, depicting three Guarani with traditional facepaint watching over the city. Below them the words ‘body’, ‘memory’, ‘land’, ‘history’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, ‘language’, ‘origin’ and ‘roots’ are painted in Portuguese and function as a reminder of the now disenfranchised ancestors.

Inside the main venue the smell of fat permeates the gallery. Miro Spinelli’s performance installation Gordura Trans (2017) features the artist and three other naked performers kneeling and resting between barrels of lard as well as occasionally sculpting the grease onto their bodies and surrounding walls. Asserting their own nonbinary gender, the artist’s work provokes discussion on essentialist discourse and fat-phobism dominant not only in the Brazilian province but also in the artworld. The Guerrilla Girls present a selection of four banners from their last 30 years of production, including Do Women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?

(1989–2017) and Dear Billionaire Collector (2015).

Although the issues raised in the banners are pertinent here, they seem to lack traction with exhibition visitors. The Guerrilla Girls Complaints Department (2017) blackboard on the other hand quickly fills up with visitor sentiments ranging from ecological to political demands (‘More Trees’ and ‘Stop homophobia in Sorocaba’).

O Nome do Boi protests the 2015 government takeover and the notorious kleptocrats currently reigning over corruption-ridden Brazil: the collective takes its name from a Brazilian saying that roughly translates as ‘by naming the ox one points out those responsible’. Mugshots of those implicated in the recent corruption scandal engulfing the conglomerate Odebrecht are wallpapered alongside codenames and placed adjacent to the mirrored logos of companies and agencies supporting the men in power. A lump of beef, its packing bearing the logo of Friboi, a meat company accused of bribing government inspectors, rots in a nearby glass vitrine.

While O Nome do Boi’s work functions as an audacious and straightforward disclosure act, André Komatsu develops the discourse with an analogy between abstract geometric traditions and sociopolitical perspectives.

Placed just outside the city’s bus terminal, Komatsu’s Autômatos (2017), an architectural installation that juxtaposes building materials such as mirrors, semitransparent Plexiglas and plasterboard, toys with ideas of transparency, permeability and enclosure that can be considered a paradigm for the exhibition’s title. These subjects concerning postcolonialism might not be new – institutions in São Paulo (and other artworld capitals) have long engaged in a critical discourse around such legacies – but largescale exhibitions such as this one prove an important apparatus to carry nonnormative narratives into the more remote regions. Tobi Maier

Miro Spinelli, Gordura Trans #16, 2017, performance. Photo: Adriano Sobral.

Courtesy the artist and SESC Sorocaba

October 2017

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Books UFO Drawings From the National Archives

by David Clarke Four Corners Books, £12 (hardcover) A UFO sighting might be considered a unique event, but according to the over 50 drawings, paintings, sketches, photographs and diagrams gathered here by journalism academic David Clarke from Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) UFO reports, it would seem most people generally see the same thing: that stereotypical squashed-oval vessel, hovering briefly by.

Clarke’s concise book starts as a cute joke, but as these documents pile up, it comes to seem that the abundance of alien-craft sightings could be cultural programming – we’ve all seen too many B-movie sci-fi images to shake them off now – or a form of collective hallucination. Or that what was seen was actually, truly unidentifiable.

Given access to declassified MoD documents from the UK’s National Archives, Clarke has gathered a set of idiosyncratic and entertaining visual testaments that shed a peculiar light on encounters of the third kind. Each is accompanied by a text describing its circumstances; what strikes you first upon reading over these is that the people reporting them aren’t rabid X-Files

fans. They are, for the most part, reluctant, even apologetic: ‘he did not’, as one report puts it, ‘think people would believe him’. What starts to come through the book more gradually is a portrait of the bureaucratic reality behind dealing with these reports. Most belief in alien life inspires the insistence that aliens arrived decades ago and successive governments have worked actively to cover it up. What seems more likely, given what’s presented here, is that some pencil pusher in the MoD would label a sighting as ‘not of military concern’ and file it away to be forgotten. The MoD’s ‘UFO desk’, which ran from 1958 to 2009, collected hundreds of reports but was deliberately useless: ‘we expect to be politely unhelpful’. Or, as it advised one citizen who complained of being abducted and probed by aliens: ‘Abduction is a criminal offence and as such is a matter for the civil police’.

The images here range from grainy photocopies with smudgy blobs hovering midair, to crude, hastily scrawled pencil drawings and a couple of well-composed paintings. Clarke dili-

gently works through each entry chronologically, though you get the sense that, with his journalist’s eye, his concern is more with a sense of what each image can prove to us, rather than the gestural or aesthetic qualities made available by the archives. As such, the facts of the reports become overbearing, when these images can speak wonderfully and bizarrely for themselves. A point that combines the most engaging imagery with the most compelling ‘evidence’ is a set of ten scratchy drawings made by ten-year-olds in Macclesfield in 1977; having told their teacher a flying saucer had landed in the schoolyard at lunchtime, they were split up and asked to each draw what they had seen. Yes, they all seem to have found a rough consensus around a silver blob with a ladder descending between two trees; but the joy and colour of the compositions are what make them worth seeing here, and remind us that it’s not just what you see, it’s what it inspires you to do.

Clarke’s visual filtering of the archive makes you wonder what other truths are out there, hidden away in files and boxes. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The Origin of Others

by Toni Morrison Harvard University Press, £18.95 (hardcover)

Derived from a lecture series delivered before the election that replaced a black president with an enabler of white supremacism, Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others considers the historical and cultural bases of racism in the United States.

Speaking in her unofficial capacity as conscience of the nation, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist employs literary criticism, history and memoir to illustrate how power imagines difference in order to legitimise oppression.

Contending that racism is learned ‘not by lecture or instruction but by example’, Morrison discusses how writers from H. Rider Haggard to Flannery O’Connor have participated in – or exposed – the process of ‘Othering’ on which inhumanity depends. The ideas on which these insights are premised will be familiar to anyone acquainted with postcolonial or feminist theory, but Morrison’s account is distinguished by the snippets of practical advice it offers to readers and writers (and, by analogy, artists and their audiences).

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Among the most timely of these is a broadside against the cheap racism of ‘colour fetishism’, according to which a character’s skin pigmentation serves as narrative shortcut for the white author seeking to elicit a specific emotion in her readers. To employ the black body as a straightforward allegorical symbol – whether for the erotic, as in Hemingway or Gauguin, or for the traumatic – is to appropriate and dehumanise it and is, as such, ‘reminiscent of slavery itself’.

Citing her own novels, she advocates for a literature that works the other way around, enumerating the different ways in which injustice is manifested – through economic and legislative persecution, for example – as a way of exposing systemic racism without reinforcing the discredited theories of race upon which they are based. Race, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in a sharp foreword, is ‘only tangentially about genes’. By ‘defanging’ and theatri-

ArtReview

calising race, Morrison argues, art can expose the absurdity of a construct based on quack nineteenth-century science and thus delegitimise the injustices predicated upon it.

At the time of their delivery in 2016, Morrison’s lectures might have seemed to their audience almost self-evident, built upon theories that had long ago penetrated the mainstream of cultural and political discourse. As Barack Obama completed a two-term presidency, and his attorneys general launched investigations into police brutality across the country, it seemed reasonable to assume that the United States was finally preparing to acknowledge and address the structural racism that underpins its society. The intervening year has exposed that as a dangerous assumption, and made required reading of a book that, in any sane version of the present, should have marked how much progress had recently been made and how far was yet to go. Ben Eastham

October 2017

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After Kathy Acker

by Chris Kraus The MIT Press, $24.95 (hardcover) After Kathy Acker draws together the work of two writers who carved out singular spaces for themselves in experimental literature. Chris Kraus, a star in the bright firmament of today’s autofiction writers, and best known for I Love Dick (1997), here writes a biography of her iconic forebear, the late Kathy Acker. A transgressive, postmodern figure, Acker is notorious for her piracy of others’ work; for her prose, by turns abrasive and girlish, which drew on her experiences of family psychodrama, sex work, BDSM and illness; and for her image – a downtown celebrity with tattoos, piercings and, later, a motorcycle. Importantly, in Kraus’s analysis, Acker is also the first woman to seek and attain the ‘iconic status of Great Writer as Counter Cultural Hero’ (in this sense, then, female writers in a certain tradition will always be ‘after Kathy Acker’). She did this, Kraus suggests, by writing from a nonnaturalistic, psychic space and by excluding all viewpoints aside from her own. In other words, it’s Acker’s formidable focus on herself that allows the reader to navigate a torrent of cutup and personal prose, and which also elevates ‘Kathy’ to stardom.

For the most part, Kraus maintains a careful even-handedness, reflected in a prose style that distances itself from her own works that have explored slippery disclosure and mutable selfhood. We read that Acker ‘enjoyed an affair’, or that friends are ‘keen to introduce her’ to people, a sometimes-formal tone that strikingly contrasts

with Acker’s batshit all-caps, erratic grammar and a committed approach to the word ‘cunt’. Kraus’s journalistic coolness also steadies a journey through some thrillingly salacious content involving a cast of figures from art, theory and literature.

We’re party to Acker’s hot pursuit of Dan Graham, to her affairs with Len Neufeld (partner of Martha Rosler), Peter Wollen (partner of Laura Mulvey) and a host of others, and to her dramatic fallings-out with friends and peers. It is a strategy that allows Kraus to extricate herself from the narrative, which includes a shared milieu (most prominently, both were involved with Sylvère Lotringer, though only Acker’s affair with him is discussed). It works beautifully, in any case: using tweezerlike precision in assembling her source material, Kraus builds a questioning picture of a life, necessary for a subject who treated her own biography as a work of fiction. While Kraus is largely sympathetic to this self-mythologising aspect of writing, there are clearly places she draws a line.

Summing up the queasy bargains that art made with celebrity during a particular period, for example, Kraus dissects the lasting impressions made by Acker as the subject of a 1984 episode of ITV’s The South Bank Show. Acker wears an ‘improbable long Comme des Garçons white linen tunic’ as she points to the poverty of a building in her Lower East Side neighbourhood, describing the ‘junk trade’, ‘murders’ and other scenes of squalor. This image, Kraus points out,

‘juxtaposes the aspirational glamour of mid-’80s alternative culture with scenes of the unreconstructed underclass misery that became a ubiquitous backdrop to the Bush/Thatcher years… holding a mirror to [Acker’s] mirrors’. In Kraus’s telling, it will be this period that consolidates her fame, and this particular brand of fame that will cause her work to suffer. She quotes Burroughs: ‘Involvement with his own image can be fatal to a writer.’

By the time I was studying literature in the UK during the early 2000s, Acker had been canonised within British academia, but the writing remains shocking today, particularly Acker’s ferocious use of the literary cutup in ways that often invoke sexual violence, incestuous narratives and the viscera of pregnancies, illnesses and abortions. Such shock tactics aside, it’s notable that Kraus’s closest and most admiring analysis of Acker’s writing relates to her inventive use of punctuation in Great Expectations (1982): ‘the colon functions as a slap, a jolt, an epinephrine shot that yanks the sentence – and by extension, us – from grief’s downward drift into the present time’. It’s a grammatical device that stands in for Acker’s pushy rawness, and her drive to enter uncharted territories. It’s also indicative of Kraus’s care with this book, in which she has paid attention to every way a writer’s life can be read, down to two dots. This is no small achievement, considering that Acker was quite the piece of work, in all senses. Laura McLean-Ferris

Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy

by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, $25 (hardcover) For a decade or so after publishing his essay collection Air Guitar (1997), Dave Hickey was among the most esteemed of American art critics. More recently, though, sexist outbursts, a bogus retirement and the general sense that his anti-institutional stance equates to promarket conservatism have threatened to undo his rep. Perfect Wave, the long-gestating sequel to Air Guitar, might then be seen as an attempt at restitution – particularly after the typically beautifully written but problematically predicated 25 Women: Essays on Their Art (2015) – though one suspects Hickey has another agenda. He’s published three books in four years compared to two in the preceding twenty, giving him, at seventy-six, the air of someone in a hurry. Perfect Wave, mostly examining his fascinations outside art, feels like a ritzy clearinghouse, maybe even a valediction.

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Once a music writer (and musician), Hickey reminds us he can still do that, launching into a rhapsodic bar-by-bar breakdown of The Carpenters’ 1972 ballad Goodbye to Love. He goes to Disneyland and stubbornly adores it, seeing in the animism of everything from teacups upwards a species of American paganism. Consistently he treats mainstream – or ‘democratic’ – experience as seriously as high art; and he brings high art down to gossip level, an essay on art fairs devolving into anecdotes about his good friend, Frieze’s Matthew Slotover. Elsewhere Hickey covers the waterfront, asserting he’s a cineaste (on Michelangelo Antonioni, pointing up the Italian director’s unique approach to framing), a literary critic (on scholars Terry Castle and Susan Sontag), even a political bloodhound, going on the campaign trail in Nevada – the results arid in comparison to similar assignments by David

ArtReview

Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson. Also, nobody wants to read about Bush-era politics given the current state of the US. You keep waiting for the chauvinism.

Instead the vexation factor comes from Hickey’s mentions of his ‘genius brain’, his God-given ability to understand this or that. He’s pleased with himself, for sure: for his smarts, his versatility and something else. While the book opens with a vivid memoir of his days as a preteen California surfer – ending with a rib-cracking wipeout – the ‘wave’ of the title refers, you might think, to something else: the fortunate arc of Hickey’s life, the ride he caught. He was around for jazz, rock-and-roll, Robert Mitchum, Antonioni and Andy Warhol, all gone now except for the writing-up; he’s probably getting out before the shit really hits the fan; and now he’s waving to us. Martin Herbert

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October 2017

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A Curator Writes October 2017 There is scuffling as the roast bone marrow is served. It is always the same at our quarterly curator salons. Civility reigns for the first hour, as the Welsh rarebit is divided and offered around; for these intellectual powerbrokers, posh cheese on toast is nothing. But an hour and three glasses of 2014 Bandol Rouge later, the bones are meted out and everything falls apart. I’ve banked on this and rise to my feet as Adriano Pedrosa and Thelma Golden get into a stand-up argument about who took the last bit of the accompanying parsley salad that cuts through the unctuous fat so well.

“Thelma, Adriano, please, please!” I start. Pedrosa puts down a hollowed-out bone that, for a moment, he seemed to be considering using as a weapon.

The other curators ignore me, but I continue. “My fellow and ‘fellee’ curators – for we are all nonbinary now!” – Carolyn ChristovBakargiev cheers heartily, although whether this is directed at me isn’t clear – “the world stands at an urgent moment. Personally I hadn’t realised this until seeing Adam’s powerful edition of Documenta.

I thought everything was totally fine, that we were all embracing café society, smoking bans and a healthy Mediterranean diet. However!

This is not the case at all! Europe stands on a knife edge. Refugees are everywhere…”

“Ooh la la la. It’s the way that we rock when we’re doing our thang!” sing Okwui Enwezor and newly appointed moma ps1 curator Ruba Katrib before collapsing in fits of laughter. “….and because of that I want to unveil, in front of you, my esteemed peers, my new show: Manifester! It’s like ‘Manifesta’ but different, in the way that ‘Manifesta’ is different from ‘manifesto’.

Also it has the word ‘fester’ in it, referencing all the terrible festering of things in the world today, and particularly Europe, primarily because I haven’t left the continent for 37 years now.”

There is stunned silence around the tables. Omar Kholeif drops his silver marrow scoop. A spot of parsley drops dramatically from the delicate lips of Tom Eccles.

“My subject is nothing less than Europe itself, and the exhibition shall be spread through the continent. Paris, London, Knokke, everywhere! Europe as a metaphor, as a prediction, as a lived reality and as an inspiration!”

Charles Esche clears his throat. “But that’s the line Vasif and I used about our Istanbul Biennial, except that you’ve changed the word ‘Istanbul’ for ‘Europe’.”

I ignore him.

“I shall include artists never seen in the so-called Manifestas, which are rooted in an outdated idea of Europe that has never factored in Boris Johnson.

Britain will get back its £350 million a week, and we shall use it to prop up the nhs! I will start with dear departed Harun Farocki…”

One of the members of Raqs Media Collective tries to interrupt: “But he was in the edition of Manifesta that we cocurated…” “…before segueing into Kutluğ Ataman, who will represent the 80 million Turks who might invade our dear Enlightenment stronghold…”

“But Kutluğ was in mine,” says Maria Lind unhelpfully. “…before another fine chap, Roman Ondák, because for me, Europe is the new Rome…”

“He was in ours!” interjects Andrew Renton.

“And mine!” says an angry Francesco Bonami.

“He was in yours?” asks a surprised Renton. “How could you do that? He’s ours! And our Manifesta was the first, so screw you, Francesco.” He gets up angrily and, with fellow first-edition-Manifesta curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rosa Martinez, advances on the still-handsome Italian.

“But my edition was the only Manifesta with a subtitle! Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence. Think about that!” says Bonami, picking up a whole baked hake to defend himself.

“But that makes no more sense than Dreams and Conflicts – the Dictatorship of the Viewer. Another subtitle of yours, I think?” says Obrist cattily.

“Well that didn’t stop you sticking your Utopia Station garden party in the middle of it, did it Hans Ulrich?” counters Bonami, smearing fennel and green sauce war-paint-style across his cheeks.

“Ooh la la la. It’s the natural la that the refugees bring!” Enwezor and Katrib unhelpfully start singing again.

It’s all degenerating. A poached salted duck leg flies across the table, a volley of aioli follows, Martinez’s face contorted in rage.

I extract the European flag I made earlier that day from my leather briefcase and start waving it around in an attempt to restore calm.

I start singing the words to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, both to illustrate my great theme and also to drown out Enwezor’s rich baritone: “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!”

Lind points at the flag. “But you have the wrong number of stars.”

“That’s to symbolise the danger we are facing. It is imminent.

It is more than imminent. It is a zone of urgency!”

With that, one by one most of the distinguished curators stop squabbling and join in. Even Katrib. Enwezor looks at her in disgust.

“Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!” we all sing.

I don’t tell them that I have neither the funding nor venues for Manifester. I look around the room and I see people who have access to money from the filthy European Union. I want my £350 million back now, and these people have the means to get it. Once I do, one thing is for sure: I have absolutely no intention of spending a penny of it on the bloody nhs.

I. Kurator

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03/10/2017 15:25

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