ArtReview October 2020

Developing coping mechanisms since 1949

Me trying to cope with white supremacy and social distancing

PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH Le Monde à l’Envers

October 28 - December 19, 2020

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October 28 - December 19, 2020

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LONDON

Mary Corse Variations

ArtReview vol 72 no 6 October 2020

Gonna tell you right Strolling round Berlin’s gallery districts during the opening days of the Berlin Biennale, I kept running into people who were in the midst of seeing the show’s four venues. “How are you finding it?” I’d ask, since at this point I’d seen just a small fraction of it. Bad, they’d say – often having also just whizzed round one segment – and ask in turn what I thought. Oh, very bad, I’d agree happily, just as I had repeatedly on other, similar occasions. ‘Bad’, or variations thereof, is the pro-tip response because it usually requires no expansion, whereas if you say something’s good you probably have to argue for it; because it’s known that the strike rate for art is fairly low, then whatever you’ve just barely seen is guilty of being trash until proven innocent. And given that good art, and particularly good new art, doesn’t tend to release its full effects immediately, and given further that most of us dash about biennales too fast (at least to begin with, and especially if we’re not writing about them) for those effects to propagate, then no wonder viewers find kinship in reflex bitchery and peremptory dismissal.

This, perhaps, is the reason for one of the critic’s chief clichés, the formulation ‘At first glance…’ followed by ‘On closer inspection, however…’. Writers in galleries with a piece to file soon after are forever finding something they didn’t see initially, and one definition of an art critic might be someone who actually looks twice at a piece of art. This is a situation currently bedevilled by time slots: stories are starting to circulate of exhibitions whose slots are insufficient to view, say, the time-based media in the show. Being panicked for time is the last thing you want in an exhibition – it means, often, that you skid around looking only

Good morning, Britain

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at the things that shout loudest – but, particularly at a moment when institutions are keen to sell as many tickets as they possibly can to make up for this year’s losses, it’s perhaps to be expected. An irony amid all this, for me, is that my reaction when I see an exhibition that I really like is also to want to leave.

It hurts a bit. I start biting my lip and feeling anxiously overwhelmed, and have to pace myself, force myself to go slowly, remind myself that – if it’s a retrospective – there’ll likely be some comfortingly, amusingly shitty rooms ahead after the artist has peaked and stopped doing extraordinary things like the one I’m presently being discomfited by. Basically, I think I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century wanting to leave galleries, either because the work is seemingly bad or because the work is unquestionably good. In both cases it behoves me to stay, and to remember that looking at art should hurt a bit, because it’s changing you inwardly.

I can’t remember who it was, and I’m paraphrasing, but someone said that a good record teaches you how to listen to it. (They were probably talking about Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.) On the one hand, I know that most of the cultural products I like I didn’t much like when I first experienced them. But because I’d usually paid for them, I tried to amortise the costs for long enough that they’d get one hook in me, and then two, and then I was inside. A downside of art galleries being free (including institutions, if you have a press pass) is that the pecuniary relationship is gone, and if you write about art for a living and you’re not commissioned to write about that show, it’s easy to be derelict in your duties of looking. (I hugely admire critics who get out and see every show, but I’m really not one of them.) As a result, likely you see things but don’t really see them, and the interest under the surface remains there. What you see, most often, is a relationship to something else, such that it’s easy to dismiss art by saying what it reminds you of, rather than noting where it diverts from an aesthetic template.

So there’s a melancholy, a self-defeat, behind the ‘It’s bad’ conversation; many of the shows we see we’ll only see once, much of what was interesting in them we might miss, and what we get back for that is the cheap, cynical thrill of dismissal, behind which is an illusion of connoisseurship: I’ve seen a lot of art, son, enough to gauge really fast whether something is up to snuff, and this isn’t. Meanwhile, you’ve gone through an exhibition without getting hurt. Well played, but you should get hurt, a little, to the extent that it’s possible; bent a bit out of shape. See the show but then go back through it, see what you missed, try and crack the lid off it, ask yourself New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s question: ‘What would I like about this if I liked it?’ Then, and only then, go outside, meet your friends on the pavement and say, sincerely: oof, that was bad. Martin Herbert

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Waterlilies, 2020, oil and acrylic on linen, 82 11⁄16 × 59 1⁄16", 210 cm × 150 cm © Nigel Cooke

Nigel Cooke

September 2 – October 24, 2020

Seoul

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ANDREW GRASSIE STILL FRAME OCTOBER 30 — NOVEMBER 27, 2020 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN www.estherschipper.com

LONDON

ROME–MILAN

SPACE AND COLOUR, RHYTHM AND MATTER 1 OCTOBER – 28 NOVEMBER 2020

TORINO

FONTANA BAJ MANZONI 15 OCTOBER – 19 DECEMBER 2020

Art Previewed

The Interview Helen Marten

by Ross Simonini 26

Art Fairs Are Dead

by Martin Herbert 39

Political Art at Chapultepec Park

by Gaby Cepeda 36

page 26 Helen Marten, The cat from the bacon (detail), 2016 (installation view, Drunk Brown House, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 2016). Š the artist. Photo: Annik Wetter.

Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London, and Sadie Coles hq , London

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Art Featured

Dread October

by Martin Herbert 46

Shilpa Gupta Interviewed by Adeline Chia 70

Blak

by Destiny Deacon 52

Ollie Dook

by Chris Fite-Wassilak 78

Lotty Rosenfeld

by Alexia Tala & Oliver Basciano 62

Grada Kilomba Interviewed by Fi Churchman 84

page 78 Ollie Dook, Animal Stories (still), 2018, single-channel hd video, stereo sound, 11 min 23 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Ha Chong-Hyun

London October 6 – November 14, 2020

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction 17-58, 2017. Oil on hemp cloth, 162 x 130 cm, 63 3/4 x 51 1/8 in © Ha Chong-Hyun, courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech.

Art Reviewed

comment, exhibitions & books 94 Biennale 2020, reviewed by Rahel Aima Davina Semo, reviewed by Sam Korman Mildred Howard, reviewed by Cat Kron sumo Prague 2020, reviewed by Emily McDermott Klara Liden, reviewed by Eddy Frankel Not Without My Ghosts, reviewed by Nina Power 11th Berlin Biennale, reviewed by Mark Rappolt John Gerrard, reviewed by Joanne Laws Jan Svoboda, reviewed by Tom Denman Elizabeth Price, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth R.I.P. Germain, reviewed by Oliver Basciano

Tavares Strachan, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Studio Berlin, reviewed by John Quin Suppose a Sentence, by Brian Dillon, reviewed by Ben Eastham Girls Against God, by Jenny Hval, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization, by David Joselit, reviewed by Jonathan T.D. Neil Year of the Rabbit, by Tian Veasna, reviewed by Fi Churchman On Board, by John Tusa, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Museum of Whales You Will Never See,

by A. Kendra Greene, reviewed by Oliver Basciano back page 118

page 98 Ida Szigethy, gleichung mit zwei badewannen, 1971, oil on cardboard, silver leaf, 40 Ă— 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vin Vin, Vienna

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29.10.2020 - 31.01.2021 29.10.2020 -- 31.01.2021 31.01.2021 29.10.2020

Ai Weiwei Weiwei Ai

Ai Weiwei, 2012. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio.

Ai Weiwei, 2012. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio.

Ai Weiwei, 2012. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio.

Art Previewed

Si cominciavano a vedere 25

Moral clay (blind diagram), 2019, nylon paint on fabric, ash frame, aluminium, cast Jesmonite, 310 × 210 × 9 cm. Photo: Annik Wetter. © the artist. Courtesy König Galerie, Berlin, London & Tokyo

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ArtReview

The Interview

by Ross Simonini

Helen Marten

“I just love a winding story”

The titles of Helen Marten’s sculptures have long suggested a literary mind at work: Puddlefoot, digging, Limpet Apology (traffic tenses), Brood and Bitter Pass (all 2015). These portmanteaus and locational couplings stimulate the mind’s tongue. The British artist approaches language as she does material: lining up familiar signifiers, end to end, until their meanings negate themselves. Images form, momentarily, but refuse to solidify. What remains is a series of sounds.

Marten is well known for her distinct vocabulary of objects, which oscillate between

digital and handmade, sleek and unwieldy.

Recently, she took a break from her visual work to write her first novel, The Boiled in Between (2020). Its form shares the multifarious aesthetic of her visuals, nesting intimate and corporeal moments within the cold chassis of some kind of reference manual. Its sentences explode the dna of her titles into a swirling, unreal narrative, reminiscent of the Gordon Lish school of wordplay: ‘I dream of sleeping inside a hollowed-out white loaf with lots of same self, same sex, heartless passion and headless chase’.

Another: ‘There were no ordinary espressos,

October 2020

just everything blown up big enough to keep caffeine and virtue in one breath’.

I interviewed Marten over several days of emails. Since the pandemic began, she had been away from her home in the uk and was living in Holland. In her emails, she gave small glimpses into her life there, with anecdotes about her morning walks and the animals she observed, including ‘something long and red, low to the ground, like a hairy frankfurter with legs’. By the end of our exchange, the language of her fiction, correspondence and interview had conjoined to form a unified verbal world.

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A Critical Shredding ross simonini What kind of process did you use for writing this novel? Did it unfold in a straight line or, as the structure suggests, through a kind of collage? helen marten Well, there wasn’t really a process! I took a year out of the studio, physically removed from it. Partly because I was besieged with a mouse infestation I was pathologically tormented by, partly because I’d had a relentless year with virtually no critical dialogue and I was frustrated. I needed a conceptual rearrange.

The stubborn adhesive blobbing all the parts together in the work I make is often made from language, and I suppose I wanted a new, more visible relationship with it. I always write, but I’ve never fully given in to it before. Nothing I do is in a straight line! I like to find wandering concepts and beat them until something else inevitably falls out. The book was written in that strangely virtuous sitting-down-at-a-deskall-day-every-day kind of way. Something just kind of burst, and I loved it. It was never about encountering a single empirical problem, but allowing ideas to multiply at great speed until their mutual rhymes of both image and language arrived and found me somewhere else. I would comb away at sentences, smoothing them down, and then blow them out of place again, rumple them, violate them! I always tackle writing like a plotting of a diagram – holding individual abstractions in mind together, exercising them together, adding and subtracting until there is something algorithmic at work and everything has a place.

So yes, I suppose collage in a sense, but more staggering; something more like snooker – a knockingon of things but done within an envelope of distinct logic.

I’d thrashed out conversations about everything I was doing, there was just a great vacuum of silence. Of course I talk relentlessly to myself, making notes, pushing pieces around, but it was sad that, for whatever reason, the dynamic existence of these works outside my own space was so fleeting. rs Would you call it an indifferent response?

Did it affect how you feel about your work? hm I think indifference is wrong – there was great joy and satisfaction that unfolded with making the work public, sharing it with all the different people I work with. I just wanted something more hardcore! A critical response in the sense of unstitching or shredding – something volatile and elemental like finding the basic pattern, diagramming it, naming the parts, renaming the parts, making them feel uncomfortably scrutinised, all the better to understand why they are there. Of course you do this for yourself, and I don’t really expect someone to shepherd me neatly along with congratulations and tender questioning! This year has done something similar, and the feeling is something like: now I know nothing, I can begin to learn again. Under every rockbottom there is another infinitely long and dark descent!

rs What do you mean when you say a ‘year with virtually no critical dialogue’? hm Well, I had worked very intensely on several large exhibitions, and rather than feeling like

Census (detail), 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Annik Wetter. © the artist.

König Galerie, Berlin, London & Tokyo

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ArtReview

rs How do you generally use language or narrative to support the visual work? At what point does language contribute to the process?

Coming Undone hm I love when material is enabled and then undone. Logical, graphical relationships are embedded in sculpture, because a large part of the enigma is right in front of you, visually evident. The more formal elements of colour or texture or balance are conditional, generative parts that have their own semantic grammar. Language is part of this circuitry, but more in the way that electricity enters a house – it is part of the muscular, driving engine, but its invisibility renders it a more speculative, conceptual element. Linguistic habit means we inherently understand many visual things without having to think too hard about them – they are learned or social or innate. And this is where the strange tautology of material opens up, precisely because the known qualities of it – the clayness of clay, brickness of bricks – is part of an ancient vocabulary. Suddenly the clay becomes extra clay-y and slips beyond tactile recognition; language both holds it in and emancipates it simultaneously.

It is compositional, rhythmic, like music or speech. It’s a system of translation, and the wonderful thing about literature is that this twisting around in the mouth is how a picture emerges. You invent your own imagery and propel it forward.

And I love that linguistic strategies can fiddle so much with idioms and certain turns of phrase that common objects or systems of emotion are brutally anthropomorphised: self-satisfied or political milk; an empathic orange; wind that caresses, snacks, gurgles, yawns, beats about the head. You have to pay such close attention, or another wriggling metamorphic cycle happens, and there you are off-piste again.

Fixed Sky Situation, 2019 (installation view).

Photo: Annik Wetter. © the artist.

Courtesy König Galerie, Berlin, London & Tokyo

October 2020

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Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, 2017 (installation view).

Photo: Lewis Ronald. Š the artist.

Courtesy The Hepworth Wakefield and Sadie Coles hq , London

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ArtReview

rs Were you making any work outside of the novel during this period? hm I made some drawings and little sketches for bigger works, but other than that I made nothing else. And it was so liberating to momentarily extinguish the problems of logistics and gravity! rs What are your reading habits? hm Rabid and overambitious. My bookbuying vs reading-capacity ratio is sorely uneven, so I’m surrounded by pressing stacks.

I listen prolifically to audiobooks when I’m doing other things, and it feels like a miracle. rs What audiobooks in particular have you enjoyed?

Any trends or patterns in your listening? hm This is difficult... most recently: Crime and Punishment! I spent a very hot week drawing despicably hairy animals and a clogged U-bend with very soft pencils in constant need of resharpening. Boiling sun mashing my head and eyes, and that incredible story of ethical paralysis and egotism drumming in. Some penance for my sins, I’m certain. I’ve just been on a Cormac McCarthy binge. Right now Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed with some Diane Williams and Colson Whitehead alongside. Trends seem to be the dark triads of psychology: narcissism, manipulation and psychopathy! I also just love a winding story.

term novel around my book but relented due to the publisher’s request. What brought you to fiction?

What about the form of a novel interested you?

Pro-Dissonance hm There are narratives that project a careful language for their subjects, ones that proceed colloquially even lyrically with little difficulty.

And then there are narratives gleefully heavy with their own dissonance. I would much rather fall on the dissonance side, because I worry that with all writing there is an inertia that comes by trying too hard to explain. I don’t want to see too many flags hoisted that attempt to make you feel better as the reader by signalling out a more careful route through it all. I love the metaphorical struggle you might have with a gruesome text where you attempt and fail to peel away the glue keeping it all together and realise it is all over you – that image, language, all of it is stuck to you and you are part of the animationmachine making it happen! How wonderful that potatoes or the current of a river might be more alive than the characters themselves. The novel can be a newly disembodied agent of narrative in so many ways – it has so many names, so many

terms, so many alternating metrics of speed and storytelling that I suppose I feel unburdened by terminology. What I most love about a ‘novel’ is that it is a minute cosmos, and within that space is a loose scaffold upon which scraps of truth and imagination hang – you can choose to wallow in it, or chase it in another direction. rs What novels have functioned this way for you? hm A remarkable book is Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (1995). It’s a genius narrative built using a totally perverted set of technical terms for common taxonomical things: food, sleep, God, animals, society. It’s somehow like a recycled handbook that understands how our world is one where image is the meta-event. It defies physics and language but keeps its reader close because it is built precisely from things that we intimately understand. The great dark comedy of this book is that we are served, in various guises, steaming thematic lessons for existing within a democracy of space. This book realises that nature, television, the supermarket, even an estate agent’s ‘for sale’ sign offer macro templates for living. rs For you, do language and material express different aspects of yourself? Or do you consider them translations of a similar fundamental impulse? hm I think with both of them I have a compulsion to associate, to twist and wind things so obstinately and deliberately together that they have no choice but to become something else. As both producer and receiver, I feel like my only job is to turn on the tap and already that is a linguistically creative contribution! Perhaps you are filling, scrubbing, bathing, cleaning, rinsing, cooling – already that is so many different turns of translation for the water that is released. And then you only need to paddle a little further and suddenly you are thinking more theoretically about the greater system of economics and infrastructure to which tap-function

rs What was your writing practice like before the novel? hm Nonfiction! I’ve always written about substance and material, about other artists’ work, about ‘concepts’.

I love the long-form essay. I have two ongoing writing projects – one a grubby lexicon (rats, floor plans, shadows, blood) and another currently titled ‘collage vs inlay’.

One day perhaps they’ll become something. rs The history of novels is so weighty.

I personally had some resistance to the

The Lemon (detail), 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Annik Wetter. © the artist.

Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York, and Sadie Coles hq , London

October 2020

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facing page Untitled, 2020, watercolour on paper, 30 × 45 cm. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist.

Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

above Drunk Brown House, 2016 (installation view, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London). Photo: Annik Wetter. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

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ArtReview

is connected, the copper mined for plumbing, the problematic idea of even having a tap when considering the current drought in Zimbabwe or Southern Africa. And then there is the hyperbole of biblical rain. Or the surrealism of an architect suddenly explaining that there is a hidden swimming pool under your kitchen table. The translation impulse for both art and literature, for me, is very similar. And of course some things work and some don’t. Although somehow both still tell the truth, albeit against their will. rs Fiction is often a chronicle of passing time, which isn’t so glaringly true of sculpture. How do you think about the movement of time when you write narrative?

The Joy of Verdant Nowheres hm Time and love share a great deal – their wide arc that is full of incomprehensibility, with horror and hallucination! Good stories deal in that, I think. If I imagine time, I’d group it also with wind and dust. They are corroborating motifs. Dust appears again and again as a gruesome object, as a material that flecks its antique glaze over everything, that coats the body – that is of the body – that pitilessly falls on all manner of material stuff and cannot be removed. Both are everything and nothing, a kind of luminous nonmatter. Time is something like a collection of little flags that mark the direction or journey of language, except in this instance the intricate patterns of behaviour and action move the narrative within a very limited space. Time really rubs your face in it when all that has been achieved is a melancholy soliloquy on self-loathing, on the odd joyousness of having nipples, or the morbidity of

believing the mirror has poisoned the heart!

Language protects and wounds. Time does just the same. And there are so many different kinds of time: the time of rain, the time of God, of family, of domestic content or political malaise.

Time lures you in only to kick you in the mouth. rs The book is largely concerned with architectural spaces of homes. How would you describe your home?

What’s its personality? What effect does it have on you? hm I usually live in London, but for the last four-and-a-half months I’ve been in the Netherlands. I am by the sea, so that sense of everything gaping or luring you toward the coast is always there. This is the land of big sky, of cute cumulus clouds like merry dumplings, so domestic building seems almost secondary to that – houses are fashioned to accommodate light and sky in a way that London’s carbon dankness never was. My London life literally stinks. Trains rattle, I can hear my neighbours piss or open a can. Everything in the book revolves around this metaphoric obsession with ‘the home’ – the objects of it are let loose, even abstract processes feel part of the plot.

I work in bouts of fanatic tidiness and manic chaos, extremes that force me to deal with being a body in a predetermined space. I’m interested in this structural or physical violence that architecture performs on us, how it indexes or emancipates. I suppose that is the difference now, looking at my displacement: I’ve swapped a metropolitan somewhere for a verdant nowhere. rs Do you feel that architecture is always a force of violence? Obviously, shelter is also a kind of luxury.

Have you encountered buildings that manage to express antiviolence?

October 2020

hm I suppose anything that toys with an inside and an outside harbours potential for violence.

To be let in or shut out. Shelter, certainly, is a luxury. I suppose I mean violence as a kind of oppositional idea to protection – the moment of seeing through any camouflage and recognising a duality, that what keeps you dry and safe can also turn over and over in your mind to become something newly cold and unappealing. Something like letting the animal of language in through the back door and seeing suddenly how it renames everything! The beginning thoughts for the book were thinking of buildings as weapons or bodies, with all the same galvanic, liquid or atomic circuitry as a breathing figure. rs In the book you mention an ‘enlightened house’.

What is that? hm Haha! Perhaps the enlightened house is a parody of the conventions of any kind of heteronorm! That is to say, an enlightened house wears its shame on the outside and takes pride in its cracks. rs Do you have any interest in working in the field of architecture? hm Absolutely not! I will leave that to the kinder, more carefully processed citizens!

Helen Marten’s debut novel, The Boiled in Between, was published in September

by Prototype. A solo exhibition of new drawings is on view at Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London, through 17 October Ross Simonini is an artist and writer based in California

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On 2 April 2019, one of Mexico’s most celebrated living artists, Gabriel Orozco, joined Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (amlo) for the politician’s daily press conference. Orozco pointed at a map of Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park and spoke of his grandiose plans for the largest and most popular city park in the region, home to important and much-visited institutions like the National Anthropology Museum and Museo Tamayo. Aside from their constantly repeated goal of turning Chapultepec Park into one of the most important cultural circuits in the world, and that, for reasons that were left unspoken, Orozco had been anointed director of the project, the rest was left vague. At around that time, mass layoffs were ongoing as a consequence of that year’s 3.9 percent budget cut in the cultural public sector, and by October we learned that over 12 percent of the federal culture budget for the next year, 2020, would be allocated to the nebulously ambitious Chapultepec megaproject. A year later, the new coronavirus pandemic hit the country largely unrestrained by a state response that instead

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Parking Mad

Why is Mexico spending billions of pesos on an art park when state aid is being slashed asks Gaby Cepeda

Lago Menor, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

ArtReview

landed us with the fourth-largest death toll in the world, while amlo prioritised his most pharaonic projects – ‘Chapultepec Park: Nature and Culture’ included.

By summer, most cultural workers had hoped that given the ferocity of the pandemic and the misery it had brought – aided by state-mandated austerity cutting 75 percent in expenses for all federal agencies, leading to more layoffs and delayed payments for many museum employees – a poorly defined project as massive as Chapultepec would be called off. But on 9 August, Mexico City authorities unveiled two websites, a model and a schedule for the renovation and construction in the park.

For the totality of the project, to be completed by 2023, the price tag is over ten billion pesos (£368 million), and though they assured us that the main project would focus on the renovation of existing sites, it was the announcement of two new spaces that surprised the most: a new Contemporary Mexican Pavilion, in which, Orozco explained in an interview, international visitors could see his artworks and those of his

peers; and a National Art Warehouse for public collections and possibly, as an official document read, to make money on the side by charging for the storage of private collections.

That so many of us in the cultural sector are angry is best explained by groups currently organising to protect the park, and the funds assigned to its renovation. The Frente Ciudadano para la Defensa y Mejora de Chapultepec (Citizen Organisation for the Defence and Improvement of Chapultepec) decries the project as another attempt by colluding politicians and real-estate interests to privatise and profit off one of few public recreational spaces in a city dominated by malls. They also highlight the ecological consequences of a project that is already cutting down trees but publishing no environmentalimpact studies. As for Maleza Crítica (Critical Overgrowth), a workgroup of art workers – myself included – thinking critically about the project, we worry about the power structures being reinforced in a wealthy central location that is already oversupplied

top Chapultepec Castle above Chapultepec Park aerial view all images Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

October 2020

with galleries, theatres and museums, especially now, when many institutions along the periphery of the city and in the provinces are falling apart. I worry too about the absence of terms like coronavirus and pandemic conditions in all of the official documents made public.

The questions are many: why this, an intervention nobody asked for, right now, when so much less-flashy assistance is needed? Why was there no open, public bidding process for the project? What kind of contracts will the cultural workers be offered in the new spaces: the same ones as exist now in existing public arts spaces, with no benefits or labour security? What power do we have to hold Orozco accountable – as he holds no public office – for possible conflicts of interest when it comes to the pavilion and the warehouse? What ideas of culture, nature and progress are behind this push for an internationally positioned cultural circuit? Is all that money being wasted by wilfully ignoring our new, possibly permanent, viral reality?

Our so-called leftwing government seems eager to follow neoliberal logic by choosing megalomaniac antisolutions to deep-rooted problems.

Why fix what’s broken, the precarity and injustices within Mexican society made more evident by a global pandemic, when you can just put a billion-peso tarp over it?

The response so far from Orozco is that these queries are simply ‘fake news’.

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3 October 2020 – 24 January 2021

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as a Lute Player (detail), about 1615–17. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Charles H. Schwartz Endowment Fund (2014.4.1) © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

In the last week or so I’ve received two emails about art fairs: one inviting me to an onlineonly version of Frieze London and Frieze Masters – well, almost online-only, since the sculpture park is happening as usual and there’s a live-art strand in the West End – and another announcing that Art Basel Miami Beach was completely cancelled for 2020, plans for a digital surrogate tbc.

I may incline towards the curmudgeonly, but I nevertheless preferred the first email. I hope Virtual Frieze works out.

Specifically – and with sympathies to the victims of the fantasy I’m about to outline, namely smaller galleries that signed up to show in the big white tent this autumn – I would wish that what sold best there would be really expensive work by branded artists. That is, the kind of art that seemingly is selling best, where collectors are buying an investment rather than feeling the need to stand next to the artwork and sniff its aura: things like that ridiculous, cartoonish Alexander Calder sculpture that recently sold, through Hauser & Wirth’s website, for an eyewatering $15 million. Art Basel’s annulment might be the more persuasive sign of things to come. But in my reverie, once it’s demonstrated that lapis-lazuli-grade blue-chip is the only type of work that sells online, fairs stay intangible and become a home to ridiculously costly, alternative-currency stuff only: a near-invisible economy to the rest of us, like the boutique galleries currently popping up conveniently near to collectors’ homes in upstate New York.

If the tents folded, as it were, the artworld’s carbon footprint would reduce as a result, such that its denizens would finally be able collectively to point at something objectively good that contemporary art had achieved; we’d also be spared a fair bit of production-line eye pollution. But, additionally, I have nonecological reasons for wishing fairs away, the main one being that I don’t like them. A critic at a fair is an irrelevance in any case, and since I generally have no filtering agenda when I’m there (I’m not a collector, or anything more than a very

Fair Warning

Let’s not mourn the death of the art fair, says, Martin Herbert, why not allow the circus to move on?

top Promotional poster for the Barnum & Bailey circus above Art Basel in Basel, 2019

October 2020

occasional curator), I drift around trying to look at everything and succumb to fair blindness – being unable to focus on any single piece of work – within about an hour. After that, I’m only alert to notable examples of plastic surgery and the whereabouts of the champagne trays, occasionally taking a photo of something in order to feel like I’m working. Meanwhile, and not unrelated to the aforementioned beverage trays, the opportunities to make a social faux pas are legion, particularly if you’re as dreadful at remembering faces and names as I am.

When, last October, I swept my mind clear of such thoughts and set out for Frieze London, I didn’t even make it inside. Pregaming in an artist’s studio during the afternoon, I took, as The Strokes put it, ‘too many varieties’ – some legal, others not – and when they combined unhappily a bit later on, I spun out, hallucinating in Hyde Park for several hours and boring the kind-hearted friend who stayed to look after me with my theory that our taxi had crashed and we were both now dead. On another level, though, there are no accidents. My subconscious, smarter than I am, didn’t want to enter the tent. Fairs aren’t for me and my cohort and nor are they for artists:

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not the ones with work on the stand who, should they turn up, have to see how the sausage gets made, nor those without gallery representation who are hurtling around trying to get dealers to notice them at a moment when the only person the latter would less like to chat with is, well, an art critic. Yet some people do seem genuinely to enjoy the experience. The other day, an artist pal recalled a collector (of course) saying to him that what he really liked was the opportunity to see hundreds, if not thousands, of artworks in one day. To which I can only say, respectfully: what the fuck, dude.

In my multitiered fantasy this wouldn’t happen. Fairs would only exist for artworks over a certain price-point and wouldn’t exist offline, thus dissuading artists from overly commodifying their practice: once your work costs more than X, it disappears into a virtual netherworld of speculation. Meanwhile, if you wanted to buy, or see, work below that echelon, you’d have to schlep to physical galleries and experience the work in the nuanced manner that the artist intended, as used to be normal

until an easier if less satisfying option replaced it. (Also, if it needs saying, there’s no pandemic in my dream.)

The long-term result of this realignment, which admittedly could be a bumpy ride for a while, might be the end of art fairs in any sense, given that it’s not much harder to look at several gallery websites rather than one art-fair website.

Being old enough to remember the former paradigm, which seemed to work ok, I wouldn’t feel too much angst about that. Nothing is forever, even if after a couple of decades it can seem that way. In London, in the years prior to the first Frieze Art Fair – that is, before 2003 – there was just the London Art Fair, up in Islington. It was often terrible, stuffed with starchy work from the dodgier end of Cork Street (at best), but we’d usually go because there was nothing else, and have a laugh, and then we’d go back to seeing actual shows in galleries, leaving the moribund fair exhibitors to their parallel reality. Or we’d skip it entirely, and we wouldn’t have missed much. That was fine, and it could be fine again.

Frieze Sculpture park, London, 2019

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ArtReview

Artists: Lieven De Boeck, Elaine Byrne, John Byrne, Tony Cokes, Chto Delat, Dor Guez, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dragana Jurišić, Ari Marcopoulos, Raqs Media Collective, Dermot Seymour, Mark Wallinger Hugh Lane Gallery, Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, Dublin 1, D01 F2X9 | www.hughlane.ie

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Art Featured

Contadine per i campi 45

Dread October Is contemporary art frightened of fear?

by Martin Herbert

above Host (still), 2020, dir Rob Savage.

Courtesy Shudder

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facing page Huma Bhabha, Joan (detail), 2012, wood, metal, paint and clay, 89 Ă— 33 Ă— 28 cm. Courtesy the artist and Clearing, New York & Brussels

ArtReview

Midway through Ben Wheatley’s black-and-white horror film A Field so much diverge from the ongoing terrors of our moment as run on in England (2013), which is set during the English Civil War, an alche- a parallel expressive track. mist’s assistant is dragged into a tent by a vicious rival of his master.

The horror-movie genre has been booming anew awhile, helped We hear a succession of spine-freezing screams: the subordinate, along by flexible auteurs like Wheatley and Aster, and it’s not hard to we’ll discover, is being occultly tortured so as to serve as a human think of reasons why. Getting shocked is a way out of feeling numbed, divining rod on a quest for treasure. The victim emerges, plunging if you’re lucky – though it’s a circular process, since in the long term across the eponymous haunted field while attached, doglike, to a long the experience tends to numb you too – but at the same time, and rope. He now wears a grotesque grin that signals terminal lunacy. The even when it reverts to, say, the seventeenth century, cinema is clearly viewer’s stomach is likely to plunge somewhat, despite the fact that a seismograph of unshakeable contemporary anxieties. (One time this personality-wipe is something that horror wasn’t particularly big, of a genre trope. Wheatley’s film is in at least in the West, was during the Getting shocked is a way out of feeling an explicit lineage with folk-horror 1990s, when everything was peachy.) numbed, if you’re lucky – though it’s What’s ironic, or maybe just strange, movies including Piers Haggard’s The a circular process, since in the long term is that if I watch some kind of nerveBlood on Satan’s Claw (1971), in which you see the same kind of hideous ricshredding movie after a day of lookthe experience tends to numb you too tus on the face of a young woman who ing at contemporary art, I’ll rememhas just received an occult visitation in an attic bedroom. The reveal ber that hardly any art at all seems capable of, or willing to, engage shot that her hand has transformed into – yes – a huge claw is less with fear as an embodied quality, in an age and at a moment when it’s all around us. The existentialist era, reckoning with the horrors frightening than her visible yet opaque madness.

The emotional tenor aimed at and achieved in both cases is unbri- of the Second World War, had – in Britain – the sculptural movement dled dread. Something terrible has happened, or it is insinuated that known as ‘the geometry of fear’. Go to a gallery now, when arguably we something of this nature has happened; it signposts worse to come. In have rather more to be frightened of – nuclear threats, environmental the case of Wheatley’s film, the ‘worse’, rather later on, is a mushroom- meltdown, neofascism and now viruses – and the modern version of such productive quivering mostly isn’t there. Contemporary elecfuelled, hallucinatory, symmetrical phantasmagoria that all tronic music can access this murky realm: witness, or rather but defies description. I’m not sure I like being in that hear, Excavation (2013), by Aster’s preferred soundtrack state of extreme anxiety, but of late – since March, to artist The Haxan Cloak, the aural equivalent of the be precise – it’s felt a fairly honest place to visit, even noose swinging in darkness on its cover, or Boards if the given film’s narrative has nothing to do with of Canada’s inexorable Tomorrow’s Harvest (also pandemics and mass death. Better in fact if it doesn’t: I tried reading Stephen King’s 1978 2013). Art? Not so much, apparently. novel The Stand lately – in which a runaway Dread is rare enough in art, perhaps because superflu kills almost everybody in America, it might seem to require theatrical dynamics to achieve it, that it’s an event when it manifests. leading to the collapse of society and the rise of a totalitarian cult – and it felt a bit too close Last summer, at Berlin’s Chert Lüdde, a show

by German artist Heike Kabisch broached for comfort. (Host, Rob Savage’s covid-era the zone: it comprised sculptures of headless 2020 quickie in which a séance conducted via Zoom conjures a murderous demonic presence, bodies, mingled with plastic bags and shredded feels at first topical then makes you forget current paper, on filthy mattresses under reddish light – a sort of crepuscular, fearful makeout scene – events, which may be a testimony to its efficacy.) before segueing into a series of ill-omened photoDread is a pitch of feeling that’s subtler, collages of sculptures whose heads were obscured more elusive, more bodily than the rote dynamics by ceremonial bowls and giant hands. A viewer of most horror. It’s harder to achieve because it felt pressed up against murky ritualism. Casting has to commingle violence with an around for anything it reminded me of – indeed, aura of the numinously ominous anything with a similar charge – (different to suspense) and avoid being traceable to, say, the LigetiI could only think of Huma Bhabha’s like soundtracks that are the aural sculptures, which are nightmarishly lingua franca of contemporary frightfests. distorted, part human and part bestial, Dread can and often does manifest after some visible stateand seemingly tugged up from some change, as in the parallel endings of Robert Eggers’s The Witch dank, pained substratum of the mind, and conclude that the (2015), where a daughter joins a coven after the death of her dehumanising of the human body is a locus of terror. (Francis entire family, or the long, intermittently shocking runup to the Bacon, at his best, conveys the same insight.) crowning of a young male demon-king at the end of Ari Aster’s But such primal fear operates not only when you see a body Hereditary (2018). Both films, for all their intermittent explosivebut when you are the body, as in certain constructed environness, also deliver a dark, seeping afterburn – ending on the lip ments – as you’ll know if you’ve ever stepped inside a Gregor of a monstrous, pitch-black apprenticeship – and once they end, Schneider installation. Schneider is an outlier in contemor rather stop, you feel like you’ve been somewhere that doesn’t porary art for his sheer dedication to constructing sites of

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Heike Kabisch, frothing, you and I, 2019 (installation view, Chert LĂźdde, Berlin) Photo: Trevor Lloyd. Courtesy the artist and Chert LĂźdde, Berlin

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ArtReview

Gregor Schneider, u r 12, Total isoliertes Gästezimmer, 1995, room in Haus u r, Rheydt, Germany, dimensions variable. Š the artist / vg Bild-Kunst Bonn

October 2020

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above Gregor Schneider, Essen, 2014, life action, Odenkirchener Str. 202, Rheydt, Germany. © the artist / vg Bild-Kunst Bonn

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facing page Gregor Schneider, Interrogation Room, 2006 (installation view, Weisse Folter, 2007, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf). © the artist / vg Bild-Kunst Bonn

ArtReview

trauma: a Guantánamo Bay interrogation room, the birthplace of it turns out, means living in a constant, agitated anticipation of the Joseph Goebbels and most notoriously his own childhood home, worst happening: yourself or your family getting sick, perhaps fatally; which he’s subjected to endless, compulsive room-within-room re- a news cycle that comprises a rapidly or slowly rising death count; arrangement. The impression one has of Schneider as an artist is not a realisation, in some countries, that people you might expect to proof someone playing with thematics so much as working out, of neces- tect you have little interest in doing so, might even wish you dead. sity, his own psychological damage. In the process he latches onto Where once one might have turned to art, or culture generally, atmospheres that seemingly can’t be faked. Something similar might to be placed in a temporary state of affect, of heightened emotion, be said of Miroslaw Balka’s more kinaesthetic works, most famously the latter has become the daily norm, even monotonously so: How It Is (2009), the Polish artist’s 30-metre-long, ramped steel box a perpetual low, juddering psychic rumble. It remains to be seen how for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a walk artists will react to such a condition, from light into enclosing blackness whether upping the ante of anxiousDread is rare enough in art, perhaps in the company of invisible, shuffling ness, retreating into insularity or other because it might seem to require bodies, which perfects a Minimalism of approaches. Speaking only for myself, theatrical dynamics to achieve it terror in evoking both the Holocaust – I think this condition of ubiquitous the ramp entry to the Warsaw Ghetto, ambient fear is at the root of my current, or boxy vehicles destined for the death camps – and the existential near-involuntary gravitation to bracketed, self-authorised trepidation, whether cinematic, sonic or artistic. Whereas once the desired dimensions of the extinction waiting for even the luckier of us.

Bodily anxiety is often sparked by waiting, as it were, for the other state-change might have shifted from being jaded to being temposhoe to drop; it’s why the Paranormal Activity films (2007–), for all their rarily scared – a move surely traceable to the relatively stultifying economy, can work well; you spend most of them peering into the (until recently) safety of the modern world – in 2020 one might only corners of rooms on infrared cctv cameras, wondering if you just move from being scared to being scared differently, because escapism saw evidence of a malevolent presence. (As with many things, Bruce hurts more. ar Nauman got there first: his multiscreen, night-vision video Mapping the Studio 1: Fat Chance John Cage, 2001, is the Paranormal Activity aesthetic Gregor Schneider’s Tote Räum/Dead Spaces is on show at West Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands, through 6 December six years in advance, with spooks replaced by rodents.) A pandemic,

October 2020

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by Destiny Deacon

Blak and blue. A universal part of culture.

Always searching horizons for the perfect storm and waiting for good luck.

In trouble if we swear, so trying to shut up.

Never stop looking and thinking, whatever the choice, e.g. boiled water or bought water?

Me trying to cope with white supremacy and social distancing.

Life is hit and miss, but sounds okay if you wash your hands regularly.

Who is the one not pretty enough? And if they can face-off, can we?

Another tired argument and the government does nothing about it!

Abuse, neglect, trauma, etc., but what’s on the other side of the fence?

Luna Park in St. Kilda.

A place of indigenous wisdom, indulgence and tragedy.

I was scared taking this picture.

It’s not fair when things are happening and we can’t join in, to enjoy or help. And all we can do is look.

So what do we have to smile about today?

If you look close, Mickey is laying on the floor.

Growing up, white people called us ‘little black c…s’ and it still gets shouted at us today

I decided to take the ‘c’ out of black in 1990 for my titles. I’m glad that ‘Blak’ is now used for indigenous people and events in Australia

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Indigenous Australian multimedia artist Destiny Deacon (of K’ua K’ua/Kuku and Erub/Mer descent) is best known internationally for her photographs that depict friends, family and kitsch artefacts in unsettling and surreal scenarios that describe Indigenous trauma, memory, identity and cruelty via the artist’s characteristic visual language of ‘Blak humour’. Among the photographed objects, her collection of Aboriginalia (which she calls ‘Koori Kitsch’) and black dolls are her most frequent muse: “I feel sorry for those little dolls lying in trash and treasure markets… looking all forlorn and stuff.

I don’t know why – I just seem to rescue them,” Deacon once said during an artist talk (at the 1996 Asia Pacific Triennial Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art), before adding, “I like the dolls because it’s too much hard yakka getting people to pose… they start swearing at you to hurry up!”

But the toys often appear in her photographs (as well as installations and videos) in mutilated, incarcerated or trapped, manipulated and neglected forms. For example, in Axed (1994), Melancholy (2005) and Smile (2017), the dolls have been decapitated, the torso and head of one stuffed into separate halves of a watermelon, another a victim in a crime scene found alongside the murder weapon, and two heads placed side by side like eyes above a boomerang gazing out over the tool’s curve to set off a bland smile. The dolls in Arrears Windows (from the 2009 series It’s playblak time: A neighbourhood watch in 15 acts) hang out of stacked milkcrates that represent poor public housing projects: ‘We all know somebody who enjoys watching or spying on their neighbours,’ Deacon wrote in Artlink. ‘Peeping has perv connotations – someone with a kink in their head – but neighbourhood watching has more to do with sticky-beaking in a seemingly sociable way. Most of us Indigenous people are used to getting stared at and being looked at with suspicion and/or contempt and in my pictures I like to allude to the darker side of life.’ Deacon’s tone is as arch as it is acerbic. Escape (2017) speaks directly to the disproportionate incarceration rate of people born into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island

communities via the image of two dolls trapped behind and tangled in a wire frame. White dolls make an occasional appearance: in Daisy and Heather discuss race (2016) a black doll sits next to a white doll. It’s fun to imagine that their conversation has made Heather’s head explode in a moment of hand-wringing self-reflection – while Daisy chuckles alongside.

Deacon opens this visual project in ArtReview with one of her most recent photographs: Blak (2020). The term was coined by Deacon (and is also often traced to her photographic triptych Blak lik me, 1991) and continues to be used by Indigenous communities in Australia as a means of self-determination. Its specificity lies in the reclamation of the word ‘Black’, understood by Deacon to be a concept imposed on Indigenous people by the continent’s colonisers, where the omission of the letter ‘c’ transforms it into a term that is now used to describe contemporary Aboriginal culture, history, art and shared social experiences, rather than racial categorisation. Produced during Melbourne’s strict and now-more-than-five-month-long lockdown, this project pairs a selection of images and words chosen by Deacon to describe the continued racial violence towards and injustices faced

by Indigenous people while also dealing with a pandemic lockdown that calls to mind a history of being locked up. destiny, Deacon’s first major institutional show in over 15 years, at National Gallery Victoria, first opened in March and features specially commissioned work alongside works made throughout her 30-year career with artist and longtime collaborator Virginia Fraser, and early videoworks created with the late Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi photographer Michael Riley and West Australian performance artist Erin Hefferon.

Among the photography, video, sculpture and installation on show, the exhibition also includes a living room-like installation in which visitors can discover Deacon’s ‘Koori Kitsch’ collection. ar destiny is on view at National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, through January 2021

pages 52–53 Blak, 2020, lightjet print, 100 × 215 cm page 54, top Dolly eyes (h), 2020, lightjet print, 24 × 39 cm page 54, middle Man and doll (c), 2005, lightjet print from orthochromatic film negative, 81 × 111 cm page 54, bottom Dolly lips, 2017, lightjet print, 24 × 39 cm page 55 On reflection, 2019, 100 × 80 cm page 56, top and left Ebony and Ivy face race, 2016, lightjet print mounted to Dibond, 58 × 46 cm page 56, bottom and left Daisy and Heather discuss race, 2016, lightjet print mounted to Dibond, 124 × 99 cm page 56, top and right Me and Virginia’s doll (Me and Carol), 1997, lightjet print from Polaroid, 100 × 80 cm page 56, bottom and right Come on in my kitchen, 2009, inkjet print from digital image on archival paper, 80 × 60 cm page 57, top Over the fence, 2000, Lambda print from Polaroid original, 80 × 100 cm page 57, bottom Whitey’s watching, 1994, Lambda print from Polaroid original, 80 × 100 cm page 58, top Arrears windows, 2009, inkjet print from digital image on archival paper, 60 × 80 cm page 58, bottom Smile, 2017, lightjet print, 102 × 127 cm (framed) page 59 Where’s Mickey?, 2002, Lambda print from Polaroid original, 109 × 91 cm all images Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Lotty Rosenfeld Introduction by Oliver Basciano Interviewed by Alexia Tala

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In her final interview, the late Chilean artist speaks about her most famous work, an action that challenged power across the Americas and continues to resonate in her homeland today

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preceding pages Intervention on the approach to Observatorio El Tololo, La Serena, Chile, 1984. Photo: Paz Errรกzuriz

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above No + Miedo (No + Fear), undated action staged by activist group Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life)

ArtReview

The protests that spread across Chile last year, violently and often lethally suppressed by the police and army, were sparked by a rise in fares on Santiago public transport. This issue was a pretext for expressing long-simmering resentment towards a political system and constitution with roots in the dictatorship years of Augusto Pinochet, together with an underlying fury at a pervasive inequality that had allowed a tiny elite to control one third of the country’s wealth. One recurring symbol of the unrest, the plus sign, appeared in numerous settings: in November thousands protested violence against women under banners reading ‘No + violencia’; a month earlier a demonstration in solidarity with the indigenous Mapuche people united behind a banner reading ‘No + represión’. And on 25 October, among the millions attending the biggest demonstration in the country’s history, one protester was photographed on the Plaza de la Dignidad in Santiago holding the country’s flag aloft, a ‘No + abusos’ painted across the white canton and into the red. Whether or not the photographer or protester knew it, this image recalls a famous photograph from a protest held on the same spot on 5 October 1988, in which, celebrating the results of a referendum that would lead to Pinochet’s removal, someone straddled the central statue, of the nineteenth-century soldier and politician General Manuel Baquedano, holding a ‘No +’ sign aloft.

‘No +’, which when spoken aloud reads as no más – no more – is a shorthand Chileans have used to express their discontent for more than 40 years, a sort of political proto-meme adopted by successive generations and diverse groups. Like all memes, the origins of the ‘+’ might be obscure to those using it today, and indeed it has gone through a series of translations and mistranslations before appearing on protest banners and being graffitied on walls in twenty-firstcentury Chile.

It first proliferated in the work of Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (cada), a political art group formed in 1979 by artist Lotty Rosenfeld, with poet Raúl Zurita, sociologist Fernando Balcells, novelist Diamela Eltit and fellow artist Juan Castillo (Rosenfeld had previously worked with Castillo on Espacio Siglo xx, an artist-run gallery in Santiago).

Driving home from one of the first cada meetings, Rosenfeld noticed, as she kept her car to the right of the road markings, that the white dotted lines could be considered symbolic of the control the Pinochet regime held over the public. Shortly afterwards, she returned to the

same stretch of road to create what would become her most famous work: gluing stretches of white textile across each strip of white paint, she replaced a mile of traffic lines with a mile of crosses.

One of the easiest accusations to make about political art is that it lacks political power. Art, whatever the claims made by those championing its importance, is a niche interest. Yet occasionally a creative gesture seeps through into mainstream consciousness, providing a space in which resistance can coalesce. This was the case with Rosenfeld’s A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (1979). Turning the linear dashes into crosses provoked myriad readings, none of which, Rosenfeld says, she anticipated: the crosses turned a negative into a positive; they disrupted the path the country was heading down; they were markings of state murder, signs of martyrdom. cada recognised the power of the sign and adopted it in its subsequent political actions, using it on antiregime pamphlets they airdropped over poor districts in the country or placing them across politically sensitive sites as if to demarcate a target. In 1982 Rosenfeld taped a series of white crosses on the pavement outside the White House, and along one of the four lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the title An American Wound, a reference to the us backing of Pinochet.

Other, similar interventions were made: in the Cristo Redentor tunnel, which linked Chile and Argentina, and at the Santiago Stock Exchange, where, as the country slipped into serious recession in 1982, she broadcast images of her White House action on the stock monitors. The cross quickly gained a life of its own, appearing in places and situations unrelated to Rosenfeld and cada.

Rosenfeld died in July, though she lived long enough to see the continued influence of her action. Sensing his precarious standing, Sebastián Piñera, the billionaire Chilean president, has promised change, sacking cabinet members and announcing a referendum on replacing the country’s constitution – a relic of the Pinochet era implying continuity with it. That was supposed to happen in April, but because of the covid-19 pandemic it has been pushed back to October. The crosses will no doubt reappear, a legacy she is proud of, Rosenfeld says in her final interview, with curator Alexia Tala, in January this year. Here ArtReview publishes an excerpt from the conversation, published in Calendarios de Arte Contemporáneo – Lotty Rosenfeld, the first in a series of books featuring monthlong artist interviews conducted by Tala via daily correspondence.

Photo: John Englart/Flickr

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alexia tala In one of our first conversations, in 2008, you told me that it was only in 1978–79 that you felt comfortable in the artworld and with what you were doing. Tell me about that. lotty rosenfeld Exactly. I felt that something did not fit. I was uncomfortable during my time as a printmaker, being involved in resistance to the dictatorship in parallel with an artistic production that was decorative in style. Even though it was a manual, solitary and silent work that I loved doing, I felt I had to give it up. In 1977, when I began to participate in the Espacio Siglo xx, my antidictatorship activity began to catch up with my artistic one.

The next step was cada.

However, from a different perspective, now that I am seventy-six, I finally concluded that I have always found it difficult to feel comfortable in the artworld. In the context of our basically patriarchal culture, I have had to face all the foreseeable limitations, delays and obstacles.

However, I must admit that my work has sometimes overcome these obstacles on its own. at You had small children, how did you combine family life, art and political activism? lr Yes, I have two children, Ramón and Alejandra. The 17 years of dictatorship were difficult for me and my whole family. Trying to harmonise these three aspects was complicated. There was a lot of anger, fear and sorrow about what was happening in Chile every day.

It was essential to give everything one had to ending the horror, and of course maybe I neglected family life to be present in all

the resistance spaces where I could be. Working with cada took up a lot of time, we would meet to work every day sometimes on the edge of the curfew, we really didn’t have a timetable.

During the Popular Unity government [of Salvador Allende, 1970–73] and throughout the dictatorship [1973–90] I was a member of [political party] mapu. My cell consisted mainly of artists from different disciplines, and a party newspaper was mimeographed in my house.

In 1983 I was invited to join the multiparty group Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life),

lr In its beginnings, cada gave strength and meaning to my work. Very few dissident initiatives could be expressed openly, and in this context it became essential to me to reformulate my role as an artist and to work collectively on a common project. As an artist, I shared the imperative of cada, to establish a critical reflection about the mechanisms by which art is produced and circulated. From that point on, an interest in the political situation and the problems it raises has been a constant theme for me in all these years.

“I have always found it difficult to feel comfortable in the artworld. In the context of our basically patriarchal culture, I have had to face all the foreseeable limitations, delays and obstacles”

at I would like you to travel back in time and tell me what you felt when you were driving down Manquehue Avenue and you began to see the broken lines of the street go past the side window. What was it like and what did that moment of clarity hold when you decided to intervene?

where I designed posters, murals, leaflets and protest actions. I took photos and filmed on video the mobilisations as they happened. The greatest contribution was the work that Diamela Eltit and I did creating slogans used by the women’s groups. They took over these slogans in their mobilisations, such as: ‘we are +’; ‘no + because we are +’; ‘women vote no +’, emblems that were a sort of extension of the no + that cada worked on. at How do you remember cada today? What was the collective’s impact on your later work and your way of thinking about art?

An American Wound, 1982, intervention at the Stock Exchange, Santiago, Chile

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lr I clearly remember when I first perceived the segmented lines in the street. Until that moment I had merely obeyed their ‘mandate’ [as road markings] automatically. I remember going down a street at night without any car blocking my vision of the white lines in the middle of the street. As I told you before, I had come from a cada meeting. It was 1979 and at that stage I was itching to carry out my own art action, I was looking for a sign, a point to start from.

That night as I drove to my house and saw those segmented lines one by one, one succeeding another, dividing the route, the idea came to me of working with them. An imprecise idea, still to be defined. Crossing them? The next day

Lotty Rosenfeld at the action Not to Die of Hunger in Art, 1979, Santiago, Chile

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An American Wound, 1982, intervention at the White House, Washington, dc. Photo: Ana María López

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I told the cada members (somewhat unsurely) about my discovery, and they immediately encouraged me to study it further. at With your first intervention, that first cross, the consensual order of the traffic sign was altered by art, as an activity independent of life, independent of politics, but which at that moment merged and became inseparable from them. lr It is indisputable that at the beginning my work was ahead of me. It challenged me to face questions that I had no answers to. I was being presented with another language, a nonverbal one that was foreign to me, I was learning on the job.

It was clear that the action of constructing a plus sign from a minus sign that is present in all the streets and avenues along which one travels had extraordinary potential. Since my first intervention in 1979, due to the need to surpass the time limit of an art action, I felt I must look for a means of multiplying duration.

So video was used to document the action. I repeated the action, and projected the previous documentation in the same place. It was my first video installation. I didn’t know that these nightly projections would be called multichannel installations in the future. The use of video as an art medium progressively expanded the communicative potential of my work as it developed. at How has the passage of time affected the work if you compare the context in which it was carried out with that of Chile today?

lr Times change and one changes with them, and the passage of time proves the validity of my intervention of the sign. Globalisation and technological advances have expanded and democratised in favour of my work. The new times provide opportunities to interrogate the mandates and denounce the various ways in which ‘power’, the great ‘watchful eye’, operates, moulding us as it pleases with the sole purpose of making us economically profitable.

Having marked the White House in 1982, in An American Wound, and occupied the Stock

“I think we need to rethink the connection between art and politics, establishing a tension between what is internal to institutions and what is external to them” Exchange the same year (when Reagan was president and we were in the middle of the dictatorship here), my intention then was to connect places marked by different economies of power, of violence, of economic concentration. Seeing the images of those actions today, we run through the history of both sites of intervention: from Reagan to Trump (the empire), from Pinochet to Piñera (neoliberalism).

It is a work whose metaphorical potential goes beyond the context in which it was conceived.

In today’s Chile, after the ‘social explosion’ that started on 18 October 2019, my intervention

above A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement, 1979, Santiago, Chile.

Photo: Rony Goldschmith

and the cada slogans (‘no +’ and ‘we are +’) multiply, and their power to convene is indisputable. Today I received a photo of a block of + signs traced on an avenue in Valparaíso. This was not my intervention – it was right among the barricades. at If we think of representation as a shared area for art and politics, how do you see this sharing of the same space? Do you have something to say about the stability or instability of that space of art and politics? lr I think we need to rethink the connection between art and politics, starting with an innovation of languages based on economic, social and cultural policies, establishing a tension between what is internal to institutions and what is external to them. On the one hand, spaces that belong to an art tradition such as museums, galleries and closed spaces; on the other, the outside, the urban space, the space of citizenship, of the social and the political. As far as my work is concerned, it continues to interrogate social orders, from the Chilean dictatorship to, most categorically, the present, with works that show how the world order is sustained by an extensive and powerful speculative network.

The art–politics relationship does not mean that art thematises politics; the work of art compels us to rethink politics. ar Translated from the Spanish by Sebastian Brett Alexia Tala is curator of the 22nd Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala City

all images Courtesy the estate of the artist

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Shilpa Gupta Interviewed by Adeline Chia

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“I hadn’t realised that when an image you hold dear is broken, it could take a lifetime to pick up its pieces”

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preceding pages wearecloserthanyoueverimagined, 2020, motion flapboard, 35 min loop, 187 Ă— 22 Ă— 25 cm (each)

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In Chemnitz Hauptbahnhof, the main train station in Chemnitz, in former East Germany, a motion flapboard display appears to be announcing train delays. Whirring and clicking letter by letter, the flapboard informs us that the next train is delayed, and the next, leading to services being suspended, and then date with mum suspended, and finally, lcokdwon announced.

This, however, is no ordinary announcement board, but an artwork by Mumbai-based multidisciplinary artist Shilpa Gupta using one of her trademark media: the motion flapboard that conveys cryptic (and in this case prescient) prose-poetry, fed to the viewer, line by line, with the odd misspelling. Thirty-five minutes long, wearecloserthanyoueverimagined (2020) goes on a free-associative journey through intimations of mortality and meditations on digital surveillance, isolation, fake news and bigotry. Inaugurated on 15 August, the work was commissioned by Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz for the city’s first international public art project, Gegenwarten | Presences.

Gupta has said the work deals with ‘contagion, infiltration and seepage’ in a time when we are warned to distance ourselves from others and even from our own bodies (‘dont touch your self/dont touch your face’). In this sense, while it speaks directly to the current public health crisis, it also ties in with the broader themes in her work: the complicating of borders (national, cultural, interpersonal), revealing their fuzziness and slipperiness, while embracing a warmer, more porous and interconnected way of being in the world.

Gupta’s suspicion of boundaries has led her, in previous works, to superimpose 100 maps of India drawn by Indians from memory (100 hand drawn maps of my country, 2008) or wind a piece of thread 1/15th the length of the India–Pakistan border into the shape of an egg (1:14.9, 1188.5 miles of fenced border – West, North-West, 2011–12). Alongside these, her huge outdoor light installations – with titles such as WheredoIendandyoubegin (2012), wmyeiaosutr (My East is Your West) (2014), we change each other (2017) – are direct statements of her vision of diversity and inclusion.

ArtReview caught up with the artist in Mumbai, where she was working from home amid disrupted schedules, to find out more about her city in lockdown, its changes over the years and the challenges of artmaking during this time. artreview What’s the general situation like in Mumbai now, and how has it affected your dayto-day routine? shilpa gupta I remember turning on the tv (which I rarely do) on 24 March, as a special

prime ministerial address was expected.

By the time the 30-minute speech was finished, we found ourselves in a sudden nationwide lockdown. The 21-day lockdown has now been stretched into five months.

Before the lockdown, I was in the midst of a rather hectic schedule with two public commissions and three upcoming institutional solos, one of which was a survey show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, with a new production. Then suddenly everything went on hold.

Slowly, one by one, new dates of the shows have been set and I am working long-distance on the public commissions. The outdoor projects in Europe, after getting postponed, are now opening. ar Is work at your studio affected? sg Currently only essential workers are allowed on local trains, so my studio is closed.

Both people working in it stay far away, and only one is able to work online. However, as artists we are lucky. We can find new ways of working with little means.

“The actual moment of creation, when the work is coming together, which can sometimes stretch for years, can be rather elusive.

There is a bond of trust between you and the moment to accept the risk” ar Walk us through the thought process behind the creation of wearecloserthanyoueverimagined. Was it conceived before the covid-19 pandemic? If not, the themes of social distancing, paranoia and contagion seem very prescient. sg The flapboard comprises text written both pre- and postlockdown. However, since it was woven together now, the present moment lingers through. ar What is the writing process like for your textbased works? Do you know the form it will take ( flapboard, wall painting, audio or light installation, etc) at the moment of writing? sg I rarely know the form beforehand. For instance, the text for the interactive sound installation Speaking Wall [2010] was written around 2006. It was only two years later that facing page we change each other, 2017, animated outdoor light installation, site-specific. Photo: Prateek Patel

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I knew what I wanted to do with it. And it took another two years to work out the tech aspect.

After showing the work, which is four years since the text was written, it struck me that the work was triggered by a casual conversation in a car journey between the Wagah border [between India and Pakistan] and Lahore!

The actual moment of creation, when the work is coming together, which can sometimes stretch for years, can be rather elusive. There is a bond of trust between you and the moment to accept the risk. ar Given that a number of your works are text-based, I wonder if you’re a great reader? sg Yes. I am constantly reading a wide range of material, including history, fiction, cognitive science and technology. I am interested in all perspectives and curious to understand the processes that shape the way we understand the world. Works by [South Asian writer Saadat Hassan] Manto and [modern Indian writer Munshi] Premchand have been very close to me.

I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children when I was very young, and it revealed more than any history book. Other books which have stayed with me are The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Seventeen by Anita Agnihotri, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe or nonfiction like The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh and recently Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto.

A perfect holiday for me is to be somewhere far away with a book. ar Is there a biographical backdrop to your interest in national borders? What’s your family background?

How has your living environment shaped your work and its themes? sg There is no such family background. As a woman growing up in South Asia, I’m always negotiating with lines being drawn. I grew up in a very mixed neighbourhood with several churches, temples and mosques. Looking back, I realise that its cosmopolitan nature got etched onto me. But things changed as I grew older.

In my first year of art school, taking the train from the suburbs to the city centre, I would just turn around and go home, because the art school was closed. At that time, the city was in the grip of sectarian riots of 1993. In 1995 the name of my city changed from Bombay to Mumbai under a rightwing government. Then the name of my street changed. I still wonder which name works better for directions: the one printed on the street sign or the one people remember?

When the 2002 genocide took place in Gujarat, it was very disturbing how people’s attitudes around me changed. Majoritarianism was sinking in, appearing seductive and giving a fake sense of power. We had lost a whole lot more than Bombay.

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preceding pages Someone Else – A library of 100 books written anonymously or under pseudonyms (details), 2011, stainless steel etched books, dimensions variable. Photo: Anil Rane

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above and facing page For, in your tongue, I cannot fit, 2017–18, sound installation with 100 speakers, microphones, printed text and metal stands, site-specific.

Commissioned by yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, and Edinburgh Art Festival

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Chance took me to Kashmir, where I realised that the nation-state looks very different when seen from its edges.

I hadn’t realised that when an image you hold dear is broken, it could take a lifetime to pick up its pieces. ar Has Mumbai changed as a place to make art from when you started your career? we change each other [2017] is a beautiful piece of public art installed in Mumbai’s waterfront. Had it been initiated by you?

Why? sg Yes. I have initiated this and other outdoor art projects on the same stretch on Carter Road in Mumbai. I had previously shown Untitled, an interactive video projection in 2007 and the light installation I live under your sky too [2004] in 2013 Organising such projects involves getting permissions, fundraising and waiting and waiting. I am particularly drawn to the Carter Road promenade, which is not far from where I live, which is very lively, where people come for their evening walks with their families.

We don’t have any vibrant public art institutions and few people make it to private art galleries.

In this context, however hard it gets with chasing permissions, uncertainties and running into delays, the difficulties are worth it in the end.

ar Two works, For, in your tongue, I cannot fit [2017–18] and Someone Else – A library of 100 books, written anonymously or under pseudonyms [2011], deal with artists whose voices have been threatened or silenced. What possible roles can artists play in society?

“The name of my city changed from Bombay to Mumbai under a rightwing government. Then the name of my street changed. I still wonder which name works better for directions: the one printed on the street sign or the one people remember?” sg There is no one prescriptive role for artists.

Art is about freedom and there is space for many kinds of art and for many kinds of artists.

Art is for exploring form, telling stories, making experiments, taking risks, asking what can art be and so much more. ar In an interview you said you didn’t want to be called a political artist but an artist of the everyday.

Is art continuous with life for you?

sg Yes, and I like to avoid categories. ar What are you working on now? sg I am working long-distance on two permanent outdoor works, one at Bristol University and another in Sweden. There is an outdoor lightwork which will open in Boston later this year. However, my main concern now is how to find a way to restart the production, which has been stuck. It was meant to be part of the show in Antwerp and I hope a new way can be found to make it happen! ar Does covid-19 make you want to create more art, or less? sg I don’t think it makes one create more or less. As an artist, one is always passively or actively absorbing the moment. Some of this will materialise now, some later or some perhaps might just be left as notes and drawings. wearecloserthanyoueverimagined is installed at Chemnitz Hauptbahnhof, Germany, through October. Work by Shilpa Gupta is also in group exhibitions Push the Limit, at Fondazione Merz, Turin, through 31 January, and Voice Over, at Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, 18 October – 28 February

all images Courtesy the artist

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Monkey See, Dook Do

by Chris Fite-Wassilak

In Ollie Dook’s work, technology, nature and the odd furry friend are deployed to redefine what makes us ‘human’

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Animals have long acted as mascots for new technology: talking work, the party is over. These animated and meticulously digitally parrots helped define the new colour comics printed in newspapers rendered animals are here to tell us we’re not so special, or just plain at the turn of the twentieth century; a toy of Felix the Cat – a character delusional, and that all that makes us human is simply our insistence first made famous in the comics – was one of the first images broad- on being human, as something else, other, exceptional, more. That cast on television in 1928, the same year Mickey Mouse made his debut insistence has only led us down a path of isolation, walking with a selfin the sound animations that were new in cinemas; while cat memes exulting swagger into a deserted enclosure of our own making. marked the spread of the internet. Furry faces are apparently one way The young London-based artist’s work spans various forms of to get humans to accept change, entertaining distractions that render multimedia collage, drawing in photographs, found footage, videothe unfamiliar familiar (or at least cute) and that distance us from any games and cgi to create densely layered videos that are sometimes blame that might come about as a result of the upheavals that follow. situated within sculptural installations. In Of Landscape Immersion It seems, then, in the same tradition that British artist Ollie Dook’s (2018), viewers stand among see-through partitions, fake rocks and videos and installations of the past few years have been guided by cgi stunted tree trunks in order to watch the short video, a macabre monkeys, elephants and goats. But unlike the animal icons that came mood-piece filled with flickering lights and stones dangling from chains in an empty chamber. A cgi chimp appears occasionally, before, Dook’s menagerie isn’t very happy to be here.

“He’s just dancing! Doing that back and forth,” we hear a kid clutching at bamboo cage bars, but it seems, as the video goes on, that exclaim excitedly in one section it has broken free and we’re the of Animal Stories (2018), a five-part ones left abandoned in the dark A cgi chimp appears occasionally, clutching short cgi video that draws on viral at bamboo cage bars, but it seems, as the video enclosure. Dook’s most recent work, Proboscidea Rappings (2019), footage found online of animals goes on, that it has broken free and we’re the offers a séance with Jumbo, the behaving in ways that humans apelephant who became a Victorian parently find amusing. The scruffy, ones left abandoned in the dark enclosure media and branding sensation. baggy-eyed polar bear in front of us isn’t dancing, though; it’s just sitting on the ground, dejectedly A digital rendition of the celebrity pachyderm towers over us, in a staring at a phone it holds in one paw, scrolling with a claw from the video projected onto a monolithic, almost-four-metre-high vertical other, a single spotlight twirling about nearby. In another section of screen. The soundtrack swells with melodramatic cinematic strings, the video, a bored lanky monkey picks up a selfie stick with a phone while in a monotone voice Jumbo describes the upheavals and depresmounted at the end, coyly making faces for the camera before taking sion it suffered. “Yes, the days seemed golden, but the nights, the a snap. The same animated monkey appeared a year earlier, leading nights they were black,” it says, while swigging a bottle of red wine. us around London Zoo in the short video Reflections on a Visit V2 (2017). Jumbo’s tale offers a rare narrative thread in Dook’s work, but more There, he stands in front of a snake enclosure, speaking with a young often it’s as in Landscape Immersion: melancholic and claustrophobic boy’s voice, offering a tongue-in-cheek monologue on the benefits of explorations of entrapment, exploring the mock jungles and glaciers zoos: “If we concentrate all the animal world into one place, and fasten constructed in the pretence of an appropriate environment for whichthem into little enclosures like this… we can emerge from the zoo with ever animal is being held there. Mediating all this is a foregrounding a sense of human pride and a sense that we are something special”. The of barriers, screens and windows: everything seen in the videos is animal mascot might traditionally be a marker for how far humanity through cage bars, smudged glass, fallen trees and, most familiarly, has come, a celebratory embodiment of new possibilities. In Dook’s the thousands of minute scratches of an old screen, as if this is all just

preceding pages Animal Stories (still), 2018, single-channel hd video, stereo sound, 11 min 23 sec

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above Of Landscape Immersion, 2019, installation view at Zabludowicz Collection, London. Photo: Tim Bowditch

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top and above Reflection on a Visit v2 (stills), single-channel hd video, stereo sound, 4 min 7 sec. Courtesy the artist

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above and facing page Smashing Windows (stills), 2016, single-channel hd video, stereo sound, 9 min 47 sec

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all images Courtesy the artist

being watched on a phone. This is work obsessed with boundaries and as cheap cartoons. Cute cat memes, in this light, are more like sirens, limits – of what we can see, of what we know, and the paradox that the calling us into a room of wall-to-wall touchscreens and then locking technology that seems to enable us to look across those boundaries the door behind us. might actually create and perpetuate such limits.

Beyond the animated primates and cgi fur, the wider question Of course, the animals aren’t actually the point in Dook’s work; in Dook’s work might be what we can see from within this technoid like the other techno-mascots, they’re more a kind of mirror, reflecting horizon. Smashing Windows (2016) is a collaged video of what looks like our own aspirations and dreams. As academic E.J. White writes in her YouTube and computer game footage that indexes different methods, introduction to A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet (2020), cat memes as the title suggests, of breaking barriers. We see: a bathroom fill with are ‘a symbol of japoniste techno-modernity, youth-culture rebellion, water until the floor gives and the entire contents crash into the sitting cyberpunk aggression, and the weirdness and transgression that once room below; a first-person shooter in a videogame jumping through seemed to mark internet culture as an authentic space that was sepa- a window; a series of gorillas rushing and crashing into the glass rate from the mainstream’. Or as Robert Feild put it in his 1942 book, barriers that line their enclosures. It’s an anxious atmosphere, where The Art of Walt Disney: ‘What is Mickey anyway but an abstract idea in nothing happens but smashing and waiting for things to be smashed. the process of becoming?’

It might, on the surface, seem to advocate violence as necessary, but Esther Leslie mentions Feild’s question in Hollywood Flatlands water and light leak through the gaps made, and every breach and every hole made just seems to (2002), her study of the overlaps between the origins of animation and lead to another enclosure. There These animated animals aren’t so much avant-garde art during the first half is no escape. Smashing Windows receptacles for humanity, but constructed embodies much of the uneasy of the twentieth century. She goes embodiments of its techno-other, everything sensibility around Dook’s work, on to describe Walter Benjamin’s writings on Mickey Mouse, which and also points towards curhumanity wants to be but fears becoming portray the cartoon mouse as a figrent work-in-progress looking ure that both instructed viewers in the contradictions and alienations at memory loss and how what is recalled is defined by how we’ve of contemporary life, and offered a vision of an elastic, hybrid place in recorded it. Smashing Windows suggests that we’re constantly looking which technology and nature were already combined. The cartoons to break out, preoccupied with the fantasy of smashing free, but showed people that ‘the “human” is a lie’, as Leslie puts it. ‘Existence is that the dream of escape is a distraction, a constant existential leak. technoid.’ Life is already cross-fertilised, mutant and cybernetic, slip- Instead of considering ourselves separate, above, constantly looking ping beyond easy definition or distances whether we want to acknowl- to be elsewhere, the melancholic mascots and incessant dead ends in edge it or not. These animated animals, as in Dook’s work, aren’t so Dook’s work asks if humans might finally see the cartoons for what much receptacles for humanity, but constructed embodiments of its they are, and take our digital lives at face value. Stop, have a look techno-other, everything humanity wants to be but fears becoming around and admire the new uncanny flora and fauna on offer. Then – mechanical and malleable, spontaneous and immortal. Benjamin we might get over ourselves and see the world that is actually around, casts Mickey as a herald of sorts, beckoning towards an embrace of and beyond us. ar technology as the way to modernity. Now it seems like a warning we might have heeded, or instruction we might have better learned: the Chris Fite-Wassilak is a London-based critic and author of The Artist in Time (2020) keys to accepting a hybrid reality were in front of us, we just saw them

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Listen Up Grada Kilomba on mixing history, theory and performative practice to shine new light on old stories and reveal others that have been hidden Interviewed by Fi Churchman

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preceding pages Illusions Vol. ii, Oedipus (installation view, Berlin Biennale, 2018). Photo: Timo Ohler

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above A World of Illusions, 2019 (installation view, Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin)

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Berlin-based Portuguese interdisciplinary artist, psychologist and writer Grada Kilomba published Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism in 2008 for the International Literature Festival. Now reprinted in its sixth edition, the book examines, via a psychoanalytic lens, the methods used to dehumanise and oppress Black people throughout history. Tracing these roots and foundations from the Atlantic slave-tradeera (the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries) and opening with a statement on the ways in which Black people have been silenced, othered and ultimately rendered subhuman by the white ego, Kilomba takes as a starting point an 1818 engraving of a slave – believed to be the figure of Escrava Anastacia, who became a symbol of catholic devotion in Brazil, and who is depicted wearing a muzzlelike ‘mask of punishment’ – breaking down (in short subheaded sections) the ways in which the white-supremacist ideal established itself as universal thought.

Philosophers, psychiatrists, educators, activists, writers and poets (including Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Mecheril, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and many more) are introduced along the way, guiding the trajectory of Kilomba’s writings, which deftly slip between academic reference and theory, a more literary and poetic style of prose, and interviews with women who reveal their experiences with everyday racism and microaggressions in Germany, with a clarity that is as accessible to the layperson as it is lucid in its unpicking of the human psyche.

Ultimately, Kilomba lends a hand to the reader, patiently illuminating the way through the lasting impacts of colonial trauma and emerging on the other side, to present the possibility and hope of decolonising the Black subject.

The hybrid style in which Plantation Memories is delivered parallels Kilomba’s practice, which has seen her move from roles as a university lecturer and guest professor in the gender studies department at Berlin’s Humboldt Universität, to producing a theatre series titled kosmos2 (2015–17, for which Kilomba invited artists who were forced to leave home as refugees to engage in a performative intervention at the Maxim Gorki Theatre), before shifting into contemporary art, where she works primarily with film and installation – a platform to which she has

“The griot was a storyteller who was also a kind of living archive, who would tell stories that had been forgotten, or whose meanings had been forgotten. They also have a critical voice” been able to bring together her core interests in theory, performance and literature to engage in discourses around trauma, the history of colonialism, memory, gender and race.

Ideas explored in Plantation Memories appear in Kilomba’s artistic output. Her first exhibition, at the Bienal de São Paulo (2016), presented The Desire Project (2015–16) and the first iteration of the video and performance installation Illusions (later to become Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo, 2017). Illusions combines a chaptered video of the Greek mythological figures performed by a Black cast, alongside a live performance by

Kilomba, whose storytelling methods reframe the audience’s understanding of Greek classics.

Following this, Kilomba produced two more volumes – Oedipus and Antigone – forming a trilogy now known as A World of Illusions (2019) and from which a series of prints, titled Heroines, Birds and Monsters (2020) and depicting specific scenes and characters, have been made.

As Kilomba begins work on two new projects – The Boat, her first largescale installation, for which she is currently securing a venue, and an opera (also a first) that is being produced in collaboration with South African composer Neo Muyanga (who worked on the musical score for each volume of A World of Illusions) – ArtReview talks to the artist who refuses easy categorisation. artreview In academia, there is the research methodology of participant observation, where the researcher is not a distant observer, but is physically and psychologically invested in their subject. This seems to be an idea that developed from Plantation Memories – ‘I am the describer of my own history’, you write at the beginning of this book – into your performance lectures and A World of Illusions. grada kilomba This idea that the public participates, or feels involved, or decides how to engage with the work is an element I’m very interested in exploring. That’s why I like to work with storytelling – because it’s very active, and storytelling can come in the form of video installations but also in these largescale installations: you tell a story and people involve themselves – even physically in the case of my new work, The Boat. It creates a physical, almost biological, attachment between the audience and the work. They are part of the storytelling process. For instance, when I made

The Boat, 2020, installation model

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A World of Illusions, it was a gamble to assume that the audience would stay [in front of the video projection] for nearly one hour to hear the story from the beginning to end. This kind of involvement is something I find very important when creating a work. ar That has a lot to do with the tradition of storytelling – especially in the spoken form – the power to hold an audience in place, both in the bodily and imaginary sense. How do you keep an audience?

And how do you reconcile the videowork with your spoken performance? gk My role as a storyteller is based on the idea of a griot, a figure from West and Central Africa.

The griot was a storyteller who was also a kind of living archive, who would tell stories that had been forgotten, or whose meanings had been forgotten. They also have a critical voice: they can tell a story in the form of a song accompanied by music, and then suddenly change tone and reveal another meaning of the story. This is what I wanted to do. To have this critical voice that could travel from one place to another, from one village to another, from one people to another, to remind them of something that was forgotten.

To take narratives that we take for granted and to show that it might be more complex than we thought. So this role of the griot is also to show what is hidden behind each story.

For example, the story of Narcissus [who appears in the artist’s video installation Illusions Vol. I] is one we think we know, but actually if I place that story of Narcissus and Echo in the contemporary moment, I read it as a story about the politics of misrepresentation and invisibility.

Narcissus can be looked at from another perspective. The other Illusions videos behave in a similar way: Oedipus is a story about violence and Antigone is a story about resistance and justice.

Practically speaking, I needed almost one year to create each of the three volumes in A World of Illusions. There was a long research process into the Greek mythologies of Narcissus and Echo, Oedipus and Antigone, as well as psychoanalysis, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies and decolonial studies. I also dedicated some time to go to the opera, to explore the staging and imagery related to these Greek stories. In the videos, the costumes and props are very simple and few, which helps to create a naked space where the body and voice are prominent. My studio is round, and so the white background of the videos creates a sense of timelessness and infinite space. I also think it plays a bit with this idea of focusing on the narrative of a black woman. That the audience would enter this installation space and not be distracted by anything else; that they would be connected with these bodies, these faces, this narrative and the

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words that are spoken. It’s really a choreography between writing and the moving image. ar With your new work, The Boat, will you invite the public to engage in a similar way? gk The Boat is a largescale installation that was created and shortlisted for a proposed memorial for people who were enslaved in Lisbon. It wasn’t selected, but I really felt the urge to make

“These tragedies are delivered to us as universal stories, as stories of humanity. My perspective, my humanity, is not included in this universality. This is what I wanted to dismantle” it happen and produce it, so I started working on it in the studio, experimenting with a threedimensional form in clay, and collecting and writing poems. Now I’m adapting it for a gallery space. It’s composed of clay blocks that I will create with local communities. Each of these blocks represents a body that was lined up in the hull of these ships. We walk through European cities and see all these monuments and images that celebrate European expansion, and these boats are symbolic of that glory, greatness and adventure. The idea of the installation is to reveal the unconscious part of the boat – what is hidden in the hull – to reveal that story. It’s a very performative work: I will engrave poems on the clay blocks. People will be able to walk in between them, and read and show gratitude and respect to the ‘bodies’. I would like to make

“It’s exactly about going beyond each discipline to create new languages that are not loyal or obedient to one discipline or another” what The Boat represents visible in cities that were created and founded at the cost of slavery – where these narratives are not visible in public monuments or in gallery spaces.

And it’s not only about the past. The thing about The Boat is that the boat keeps returning.

These ships are returning to Europe, crossing the Mediterranean from South to North, and

facing page Heroines, Birds and Monsters (detail), 2020, series of prints from World of Illusions, 2019, here featuring King Creon and Haemon

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they are also coming back from South America.

It has become a triangular movement – people trying to migrate to Europe. I find these metaphors very strong, and they can be used as ways of telling stories anew – or revising the way we tell history. I think it can be very illuminating for the audience to be confronted by this sense of timelessness. We live with the past, present and future at the same time. For example, what Black Lives Matter is fighting for seems futuristic in a way – it’s something from the present, but we are claiming for an equality and humanity that does not yet exist; the present is not able to deal with such demands because they are seen as something for the future, and it is seen as something for the future because of what happened in the past. This timelessness is always there. The Boat is from the past, but is now in the present and reminds us of our future. ar Can you tell me more about the poems? gk They are very much linked with the research that I am doing. I’m looking back at the history of slavery and trying to reveal and connect stories and rituals that surround it – rituals of violence, of silencing, of genocide, but also rituals of healing. What’s at the centre of these poems is how to speak about humanity, to reveal how words and languages are not only poetic, but also very political, and can fix identities in one place.

Each word really defines who is inside or outside, and who can represent the human condition. ar You started developing The Boat at the end of last year, which seems particularly prescient given the events of this year, which have seen statues and memorials to figures who were complicit in colonialism and slavery being taken down… gk With The Boat I really wanted to occupy and interrupt the public sphere, or the gallery space, with another narrative that is usually hidden.

It’s difficult for us to understand today’s racism, to understand that it’s a restaging of that time when Black bodies were first dehumanised.

This history is a wound – a wound that was never treated, and always hurts, and sometimes gets infected. Sometimes it bleeds. It bleeds and gets infected because it never received the proper treatment. This idea of bodies that were not buried, or documented, or given a place for ritual ceremony or to be mourned – this isn’t inscribed in the monuments I walk past in the city. In Antigone, too, I worked with a pile of clothes that symbolically represented the dead body of her brother Polynices. King Creon would not allow her to bury her brother, and this reflects on the issue of who has human rights and who does not. Antigone challenges Creon, and chooses to follow the rule of the gods, which says that everybody needs to be and should be buried. Acknowledgment and respect

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in the act of burial is also present in Table of Goods [2017], a performance where I inter ingredients that were central to the slave trade – coffee, sugar and cacao – in soil. ar That critical voice of the griot can also be traced back to the tone you use in Plantation Memories – there’s a sense of continuity in your method of telling histories, be it written or spoken. Twelve years ago, you wrote not just about everyday racisms, but also about the invisibility, the physical and psychological violence towards, and the silencing of Black people – and we are still seeing this play out today. gk My work points at how narratives that place certain identities outside of humanity are created. How narratives are created to be universal, but do not take into account the reality of certain humans. So, when I look at these Greek tragedies, what is revealed to me?

How do I look at the metaphors, associations and images, and how do I experience them?

The story of Oedipus, in psychoanalytic studies, was seen as a story of desire. But I find that violence and the idea of genocide plays a stronger role in the story. It can explain so much about cyclical violence, about the repetition of violence and about the repetition of barbarity. Before he was even born, Oedipus was cursed to die because his father felt threatened by this child who was prophesised to kill him and marry his own mother. Oedipus cannot escape his own history.

This is also present in the figure of the Sphinx, who is sent to punish Thebes because something bad happened in that city in the past, which the people do not know about, or have forgotten. She asks a riddle, and those who cannot answer the riddle, she devours.

These metaphors show us that we cannot escape our history. We have to learn to tell our history properly, so that we know how to answer those questions. We have to know the answers, otherwise the Sphinx remains here, observing and devouring us. These Greek myths have all these beautiful metaphors that can be transported into the present time, with all these questions of race, gender and postcolonialism.

The poetry of mythologies allows you to do something dramatic with bodies and choreography, but also to bring political and very critical discourses into it. ar You’re also working with Greek mythologies, which became foundational to white European culture, as opposed to choosing to look at mythologies from different cultures. gk Other mythologies are not part of the canon of the European educational system. We grew up studying and learning about these mythologies and stories, which are absolutely beautiful, and I’m fascinated by them, because they speak

of human tragedies and human conflicts that we all face, and the questions and decisions we all have to reflect upon. But these tragedies are delivered to us as universal stories, as stories of humanity. My perspective, my humanity, is not included in this universality. This is what I wanted to dismantle: how these stories are given to us in a ‘neutral’ space, in these white cubes that are as neutral as these stories of humanity. The very fact that Illusions is performed in a white infinity is exactly a metaphor of that perceived neutrality. No space is neutral.

There’s an ‘ideal’ of what humanity is, and then there are biographies and realities that are considered subhuman or which are placed outside of humanity.

For instance, we have the Yoruba mythology that plays a very important role in religious activities, ceremonies and rituals – like the candomblé and capoeira, which I grew up with, and is celebrated in Brazil, Cuba and Angola – but that mythology was forbidden by the Portuguese in Brazil for a long time, and that lasted beyond their colonial rule until the 1920s.

“Vulnerability carries a sense of honesty. It’s the point where I feel there is nothing else I want to say now – that this is exactly what I want to say” We grew up with a politics of forgetting and of forbidden stories. It wasn’t just the Yoruba mythology, but many other rituals and practices were forbidden. And this relates back to The Boat too, as the transporter of these ideas. People were imprisoned if they were caught practising their own rituals and ceremonies. That’s why I also try to connect the storytelling in A World of Illusions to the ritual of arriving and sitting – and I find it fascinating that an audience would sit there for almost one hour. They look at these actors and listen to the music and the storyteller. They stay. This is the ritual of decolonisation for me. ar That your work is hybrid in nature also suggests a form of resistance – to categorisation, for example. gk This is also the basis of decolonisation – it’s exactly about going beyond each discipline to create new languages that are not loyal or obedient to one discipline or another. facing page, top The making of Table of Goods, 2017, at The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018 facing page, bottom Table of Goods, 2017 (installation view, maat, Lisbon, 2017). Photo: Bruno Lopes all images Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, London

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For example, if I am to tell my story, I cannot tell it with the language of disciplines that have colonised me: the language of the patriarchy and of the colonisers. We have to invent new languages. These hybridities, this confusion and fascination with not being able to place the work in one field or another, is necessary.

Decolonisation is when you cannot read things as you used to, when the language has become unfamiliar because new people are telling new stories. There is now a generation of people who are really searching for it. With The Boat, I hope people will come, enter the work and read, listen and look. It’s a minimal work, but this is how I try to create intensity. When I almost feel afraid of showing a work, of being fragile – that’s when I know the work is ready to be shown. ar Why is it important to make yourself vulnerable? gk Vulnerability carries a sense of honesty.

It’s the point where I feel there is nothing else I want to say now – that this is exactly what I want to say. Honesty makes it possible to connect with the audience. It can help the audience – who come from different generations, backgrounds and communities – to identify with the story you are telling independently of their own biography, because they are in a space where they can acknowledge their own fragility. And that’s the power of performance, the arts, of storytelling and dance. ar This ties in to the idea of listening and silencing – and the way you create a space where people want to listen to you and will sit for an hour because they want to hear what you have to say. gk I think the works create a space where people can actively decide to listen to those who are speaking. It’s fascinating because sometimes in the audience, people are sitting in front of seven black actors for the first time, and sitting for an hour listening to a story that they thought was familiar to them, only to find that other elements have been added, or another perspective they didn’t think about.

I think this is the moment where ‘universality’ and ‘humanity’ are questioned.

I put Black actors into Greek mythologies because we are talking about human tragedies.

All actors can perform these tragedies. In Antigone I worked with all women actors, apart from two men in one of the scenes, to play with the traditionally gendered roles: the women played King Creon, Haemon and the messenger. And still the audience sat and watched, because the story goes beyond these categories. That’s how I understood what the ‘politics of invisibility’ was – to turn yourself invisible in the sense that you can embody every story, occupy every space and go beyond what is expected of you… ar

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New launch date New agendas New list Everything you need to know about a year that taught us how powerless we really are The 2020 Power 100 Online and in print this December artreview.com/power100

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Biennale 2020 Bleeker Playground, New York 4 September A biennale, in this economy? A terrifying idea.

But there I am anyway one Friday evening as the city dissolves into dusk, waiting for the Superspreader Biennial to start. It’s not called that, of course. It doesn’t seem to have a name beyond the ominous ‘Biennale 2020’, which one can only hope doesn’t augur a repeat of this blighted year in 2022. Four artists are slated to perform, and a further six –including one duo – have installed work in a triangular scrap of a West Village park. The perfect cap to a day catching up on Chelsea shows, or so I had thought, entirely forgetting that it is still technically summer, never mind a global pandemic.

I hadn’t bother calling ahead and found Chelsea a ghost town with absolutely nothing up, as galleries installed the shows that would kick off the autumn season. Appetite duly whetted, I am ready to see some art.

We arrive at seven sharp, as the flyer beseeched. It materialised by Twitter dm and featured a grainy illustration of three people emerging from a rocky tunnel into some kind of pastoral scene. The one in front shields their eyes, perhaps blinded after having been trapped inside for so long. A fourth compadre has already climbed out and stands, back to the viewer, gazing at a pair of birds winging their way towards a nearby copse. Around it was scrawly text, outlined like puffy clouds, with artist names and details. I look forward to feeling similarly liberated, to coming together to stand, at a respectable distance apart, alone in collectivity exactly as inhabitants of cities ought to be.

I am told Chloë Sevigny is here with her baby, but I’m not sure I would be able pick her out of the crowd, which skews youngish, white, downtown. It’s full of people I haven’t seen since the dead of winter and with whom I dread making small talk – so far, then, biennial as usual. I long for the plausible deniability of a fully masked situation. Most people have them secreted somewhere about their person, but pushed out of the way to drink from the bottles

facing page, top Matt Hilvers, A phrase for the year (not un or less, but sincerely vulnerable), 2020, performance

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being passed around or out of paper bags – nyc’s relaxed public drinking laws don’t extend to parks. I wonder what it feels like to feel young and invincible, and also to have zero-percent body fat.

But why a biennale, and why now?

“It seemed obvious and necessary,” explains writer Dean Kissick, who loosely organised the show. “All I did was invite nine artists to do what they liked,” he later qualifies. Why this particular site? He likes to work in the park in the evenings, as the lanternlike streetlamps, so far from the usual high-curvers or nypd floodlights, remind him of London. After his brief introduction, I overhear two art-school types wondering if his (British) accent is real.

Looking around, I’m reminded that biennales have never been about the art so much as bringing people together: cheesy, but in that magic hour it feels special and true.

A hush, and then a cello scrapes out an opening familiar to anyone who came of age in the axis of American exceptionalism: an unplugged cover of Weezer’s Say it Ain’t So in the form of Matt Hilvers’s performance A phrase for the year (not un or less but sincerely vulnerable) (all works 2020). It is joined by a violin, with Hilvers singing, mostly offkey. The performers are masked, wearing some approximation of concert attire; I think it’s nice that they’ve dressed up for the occasion. Hilvers seems to catch the tune at the end of each phrase before losing it again, like a knitter perpetually dropping and picking up stitches. “Below average karaoke with an above average backing track,” is my boyfriend’s assessment, but I find it all terribly charming, and perhaps a bit nostalgic too. I’m viscerally transported back to high-school weekends practising with my third-wave ska band in Dubai.

The next performance jolts us right back to the present day. Amalia Ulman (maskless) reads a Marc Giró monologue in Spanish about a sexual encounter with a priest.

For those who don’t speak it, there’s a live

facing page, middle Campbell Carolan, Noblesse oblige, 2020, installation

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translation available, by going to her website and joining a Zoom call. It’s brilliant and perfect: an exciting use of technology, and one that seems so much a product of its particular time. It is followed by Jacky Flowers, reading poems in what I assume is a coronavirus costume replete with spiky headgear but which I am told is a mask of Rick from the popular-with-incels cartoon Rick and Morty. I am especially looking forward to seeing Precious Okoyomon, who ends up not performing.

The installed works are more of a mixed bag and include some forgettable prints and paintings from Paige K.B. and Sven Loven.

The latter is hung as a large scroll in the centre of the park and emblazoned kvltily with ‘♡vtopiae insvlae aeternvm♡’, and indeed the whole affair does have the air of a utopian island, albeit the kind you are systematically voted off. Duo Campbell Carolan have rented a silver Chevy, an interesting gesture, but then scrawled noblesse oblige on the front and back windshields, and stuffed it full of newspapers and woodcut-effect prints featuring the words ‘savior’ ‘persecutor’ and ‘victim.’ In the open boot is a sign saying private/privia; the total effect is neither here nor there.

Far more interesting is Torey Thornton’s I have no name, which involves a Swedish cycling sock, emblazoned with ‘poc’, slid onto the extended foot of a sculpture of a family in one corner of the park. Around the same figure’s torso are child-safety gun locks, fashioned into a kind of necklace or sling. Also compelling is Aria Dean’s I dug a hole where no one could see it and told two lies, apparently a hole dug somewhere in the park. I search for the hole, phone flashlight in hand in darker corners, but all of the earth and grass appear pristine. I love that.

Like Hilvers and Ulman’s performances, these works feel like a subtle gesture that does exactly what the evening asked for. No more and no less: the kind of economy at which all art events would do well to aim. Rahel Aima

facing page, bottom Amalia Ulman performs a monologue by Marc Giró, 2020

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Davina Semo Reverberation Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York 20 August – 18 April Davina Semo’s installation Reverberation overlooks Manhattan from an inviting stretch of Brooklyn Bridge Park, on the other side of the East River. There, the artist has installed five neon-orange bells, each one strung from a sturdy aluminium frame. Even on the overcast day I make my visit, they glisten beautifully against the backdrop of the harbour, the low light shining through the unique constellations of holes that perforate each one. Yet, in spite of their enticing exterior, it’s the chain attached to the clapper that eventually proves to be their most inviting feature. Jerking it back and forth works up a satisfying – and deafening – clamour.

It’s impossible not to read Semo’s project in relation to Lower Manhattan. Reverberation’s raucousness speaks to the tension between

the two boroughs – asking of the imperious skyline, ‘Oh, you think you’re better than me?’ But I’m not the only person with a message to send.

A guy in his late thirties raps the clapper for almost a minute, then proudly struts past me having clearly enjoyed himself. Later, a twentysomething yuppy tugs on the chains for a stroke or two before retreating to his girlfriend, who pats him on the back, knowing he’s got it out of his system. Unfortunately, I never see a woman ring a bell, though one particularly gothy teen circles the installation the whole time I’m there.

Nerves get the better of her. I truly hope she finds another way to let it out, whatever it may be.

Semo’s project comfortably inhabits postquarantine New York. On one hand, these participatory artworks stand in for the renaissance of public space New Yorkers are currently

enjoying (at least until winter arrives). With restaurants claiming parking spots for café seating, parks playing host to every birthday party and certain streets closed to traffic, life has been brought down to the level of the pedestrian. On the other hand, the bells are emblematic of the widespread upheavals overtaking the United States: they permit any passerby to disturb the peace. Yet Reverberation no more seeks to reconcile the public’s seemingly contradictory intentions for occupying public space – normalisation versus radicalisation, socialisation versus individual expression – than it predicts which one will predominate in American politics.

Rather, it speaks to the tension that pervades any public encounter, availing itself of the public platform to stoke the average person’s penchant for mischief. Sam Korman

Reverberation, 2020, patinated cast bronze bell, uv-protected 2-stage catalysed urethane automotive finish, galvanised steel chain and hardware, clapper, dimensions variable. Photo: Nicholas Knight.

Courtesy the artist, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, and Public Art Fund, New York

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Mildred Howard A Survey, 1978–2020 Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles 15 August – 26 September If the artworld’s current efforts to increase programming diversity at times appear to stem more from a concern for ‘optics’ than genuine self-correction, this survey evidences no such cynicism. Sifting through five decades of work, Bay Area artist Mildred Howard and gallerist Chris Heijnen selected 15 seminal pieces that showcase Howard’s astute commentaries on race and racism, and the role of language in enforcing subjugation and control – as well as her adroitness at complicating the dominant narrative.

The exhibition functions as a retrospective of a remarkable career, even with the vast majority of Howard’s oeuvre represented in absentia: thoughtfully arranged works allow the viewer to fill in the gaps between media and decades, tracing a conceptual throughline from Xeroxed self-portraits and collages incorporating familial history to assemblages that address the African-American experience

more broadly. But Howard reserves her biting political commentary for her installations. In Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine) (1991), near the gallery’s entrance, rows of copper glove moulds on a low plinth stand erect like hands raised for a school roll call. Behind them is a grid of small, wallmounted brass fixtures. Suggesting a conceptualist wall drawing from afar, it is made of bullet casings. The work is an homage to the Soweto schoolchildren gunned down in 1976 while peacefully protesting government policy that Black students be taught solely in Afrikaans, the language of apartheid-era South Africa’s then-ruling white minority.

An adjacent enlarged newspaper photograph depicts two Black teenagers with the body of a fallen classmate; its caption betrays its subtext, quoting the government’s description of rioting students ‘on a rampage’.

The dubious official account also cited two government officials ‘hacked to death’ by the children in an unprovoked attack. This version of events demonstrates language’s vulnerability and how insidiously it can be wielded to suit the oppressor.

Howard uses visual metaphor to capture moments of grace, often in the same works that intimate trauma and loss. The model-scaled You Are Welcome Here (2020), a house whose roof and windowpanes are composed of glued glass bottles, signals ‘fallen soldiers’ – an expression for empty bottles and an allusion to the sacrifices of African-American soldiers – as well as the spiritual practice of utilising bottles as spirit catchers to provide universal protection from evil.

Throughout the show, we witness the artist harnessing personal and absorbed histories to forge a fellowship with her viewer, here and now.

Cat Kron

Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine), 1991, mixed-media installation (brass bullet casings, copper glove moulds, photomural), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles

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sumo Prague 2020 The Odd Year Various venues, Prague 4–6 September You win some, you lose some, and 2020 seems to be a year full of the latter. With the gallerysharing programme sumo, Prague’s commercial galleries and artist-run spaces hoped to reverse that trend – or at least help stop the city’s art scene from slipping into the abyss. For the third year running (albeit under a new name), international curators, galleries and project spaces were invited to co-opt venues throughout the city with their local counterparts, under the apt theme The Odd Year. While some took the subtitle as a conceptual point of departure, others unfortunately interpreted it all too literally.

The exhibition text for Phaneron, curated

by Eva Skopalová at project space A.M. 180 (in cooperation with the Paris space 22,48 m2), for example, proposed our very real reality as ‘hallucinatory’ and ‘fantastic’: photographs of a cave by Cécile Beau illustrated the rather absurd idea that we are currently living in Plato’s cave, and Chloé Poizat’s small spongefossil-like sculptures carved from stone furthered this idea of cave-dwelling, wherein one might find artefacts from another era.

Her intricate, shadowy drawings were so precise that I initially mistook them for prints; seen on their own, or in the context of the artist’s wider work, they could have been impressive. But the accompanying idea that ‘the dreaminess of our post-apocalyptic age is a new hallucinatory cave’ rendered them artificial artefacts of the history we are currently living through.

Opposing Skopalová’s denial of our lived reality was Fantasy Finery, a forward-looking show curated by Monika Čejková at project space Berlínskej Model (with Berlin space Horse & Pony). Featuring works made in the last three years by Emma Pryde, Vanessa Conte and Yong Xiang Li, with drawings from the 1970s and 80s

by Mel Odom, it explored digisexuality, or the possibility of sophisticated technologies like ai replacing physical sexual partners altogether: a futuristic concept rooted in reality. During lockdown, many people would have welcomed a digisexual revolution with open legs – and if there’s a second wave, perhaps they will. As I was standing in the small, closed space among some 15 others, covid-19 cases in Prague were skyrocketing, no masks were in sight and a friend texted me a link to an article about a number of schools and doctors’ offices closing in Berlin because too many parents and doctors had attended a sex party.

Two galleries seemed to take things a little more seriously, in both their health precautions

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and exhibitions that strayed from the path of the pandemic. For their main space, Hunt Kastner cooperated with Berlin- and Karlsruhebased gallery Meyer Riegger to present the late Ján Mančuška’s film installation A Gap (2007), its first showing since its original site-specific presentation for Meyer Riegger’s Karlsruhe space. Listening to the four characters in the four videos, each of which was shown in a separate space, helped the viewer reconstruct a story about an accident resulting in the protagonist’s own memory loss. Since it was impossible to see all videos at once and with varying projection speeds, A Gap posed questions about memory, the construction of narratives and transformation of space.

The opening itself offered a reflection on memories as well, welcoming family and friends of the Czech artist, who died in 2011 aged thirty-nine. For Hunt Kastner’s smaller project space, the gallery worked with Reykjavík’s i8 to present images from Icelandic conceptual artist Sigurður Guðmundsson’s series Situations (the works documented here dating from 1970 to 1981). Though the works have been frequently exhibited internationally, this marked the artist’s first showing in Prague and only the second time in the Czech Republic. Around the corner, Lucie Drdova Gallery also collaborated with two galleries – Vienna’s Vin Vin and Croy Nielsen – to present The Unremarkableness of Disobedient Desire, a visual interpretation of Sapienza Goliarda’s epic novel The Art of Joy (written in 1976, published posthumously in 1996).

Curated by Laura Amann with work by Nina Beier, Romana Drdova, Kiki Kogelnik, Ida Szigethy, Kazuna Taguchi and Dino Zrnec, the works together suggested that female empowerment and freedom can be achieved through political, sexual and intellectual dissent.

At Lítost gallery, a show curated by Anca Poterasu (who runs her namesake gallery in Bucharest) brought us back to covid-19. In Midst of the Worst, the Best of Times presented works all made during the lockdown by ten Romanian artists and offering reflections on the domestic and familiar. Megan Dominescu’s hooked rug pieces, for instance, provided humorous critiques on contemporary aspects of society inspired by advertisements she saw near her studio. Botox is always an option (2020) depicts an older woman with wrinkled skin, grey hair and sagging breasts next to a woman with a clownishly large smile, a perky bosom and artificially blonde hair; the former

ArtReview

captioned ‘before’, the latter ‘after’, a giant syringe and the word ‘Botox’ emblazoned across the top. Aurora Kiraly’s Soft Drawings series of felt and cotton collages meanwhile established a mood of lonely isolation. In Soft Drawings: Subconscious Narratives, Days Passing By (2020), the silhouette of a woman is framed by curtains as she presumably looks out an unseen window, with an armchair, plant and cat in the foreground. No covid show would be complete without a reference to masks: Olivia Mihaltianu’s Unisex Underwear Mask, One Size Fits All (2020) presented brightly coloured and animal-print thongs marketed and packaged as masks – a reference to the viral video of a Ukrainian woman removing her underwear and placing them on her head after being refused service at a post office for not having a face covering. An amusing exhibition but a safe one, although this year I’d also argue it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Meanwhile, Polansky gallery had to cancel its hosted exhibition and instead hung Atilis Press, new works by Vladimír Houdek, each painting an oversize, fictional book cover bearing a title, an Op art-inspired black-andwhite graphic and the name of the eponymous fictional publishing house. Offered titles like Imagination within the System, Analogy of Causes and Restart (all 2020), viewers were invited to imagine their own storylines, but at a time when we’re constantly reimagining what the next week, month or year might bring, such prompts felt superfluous.

With this thought lingering in my head, I visited a private collection of modernist Czech art, partially housed in the top-floor office space of a seven-story Soviet-era shopping centre, where, again, upwards of 30 people sans masks milled about and ate from a buffet. But while we were technically playing by the rules, Prague had by now been added to certain travel-ban lists (Viennese gallerist Sophie Tappeiner, whose artists Julia Goodman and Anna Schachinger were showing paintings at the gallery Zahorian & Van Espen, purposefully didn’t get on her train) and would, in 72 hours, appear on Germany’s. As I sat at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof waiting for my own coronavirus test, I couldn’t help but wonder, in this odd year, if sumo itself was superfluous. But while the galleries could have easily cancelled and accepted defeat, instead they played a tough game and fought for the win, narrowly defending themselves against our new reality.

Emily McDermott

top Megan Dominescu, Botox is always an option, 2020, acrylic rug-hooking, 43 × 62 cm. Courtesy the artist

above Sigurdur Gudmundsson, A Picture, 1978.

Courtesy the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavík

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Klara Liden Turn Me On Sadie Coles hq, Davies Street, London 3 September – 24 October The last thing 2020 needed was for art parkour to become a thing, but here we are, with a video by Klara Liden that finds the Berlin-based artist climbing, shimmying and contorting over some scaffolding, the camera endlessly rotating around her, like a builder who’s dropped a hammer right after they’ve dropped acid.

It’s a repetitive, strained bunch of movements Liden puts herself through, an interminable scaling of the carapace of some unnamed city. And the urban environment, its hidden grimy bits especially, are the sooty stars of this show. You’re greeted downstairs by three enormous glowing, floating oil tanks: big, plastic, flesh-coloured containers with a hole right through the middle, like the bellybuttons of concrete giants.

Upstairs you find a row of dirt-encrusted, graffitied junction boxes, plastic housing for a city’s wires and fuses. This is urbanity’s electric pulse, its high voltage heartbeat. Each is covered with the symbols of the street it once lived on: football stickers, the rushed tags of local gangs, the mould of damp weather, the accumulated grey smudge of pollution. The pollution and mould are the best things about the works: all those years of cars chugging by, of buses and taxis and cigarette smoke, inscribed darkly on the once pristine plastic of the boxes. It’s urban history in filth.

These found objects – the junction boxes and oil tanks – are neat works of art if you can get over the whole Duchamp-does-street-art vibe. They’re the minimalist boxes that once helped keep our cityscapes ticking along, now

ripped out of their context and left as purely decorative objects, dragging the street into the gallery.

They represent how we’re kept warm over winter, how our lights stay on, how our phones keep ringing. They’re the grotty hidden truth behind the glossy shell of our urban lives. The video, though, is only memorable for its vague silliness, its stern-faced dedication to a faintly ridiculous task. It’s not quite humorous enough to be funny, not deadpan enough to work as a successful piece of performance art. It doesn’t deliver on its promises as well as the sculptures do.

At its worst, Liden’s exhibition is dirty street art and conceptual parkour, but at its best, it’s a little celebration of the grime, garbage and putrefaction of our cities. It’s a plea to find beauty wherever you can, even if things are pretty ugly out there. Eddy Frankel

You’re All Places That Leave Me Breathless (still), 2020.

Photo: Marco Bruzzone. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

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Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium Drawing Room, London 10 September – 1 November In such a resolutely disenchanted world, what role can the spirits play? Does art still have an open channel to the afterlife, to death, to unseen energies of all kinds? The contemporary artist, of necessity a hyperindividualised walking cv, is perhaps more used to filling in forms than channelling ancestral voices, but Not Without My Ghosts, a small collection of subconscious, occult and otherworldly visions, curated by Simon Grant, Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi, presents a different image of the creator – less imperious author than receptive mediator.

Sketches and small paintings by William Blake, Ithell Colquhoun, the novelist Victor Hugo, André Masson, Austin Osman Spare, Yves Tanguy and Grace Pailthorpe sit together, immediately opening up a tension between ‘what lies beyond’ and ‘what lies inside’. The mythic and dreamlike preoccupations of the nineteenth century – Blake’s ‘visionary heads’, Colquhoun’s balloon geometries, Spare’s libidinal

beasts – segue into early-twentieth-century Freudianism. Masson’s nipple-riddled portrait of Benjamin Péret and Pailthorpe’s delightful The Torment of Tantalus (1938), where a froglike baby-monster suckles at a teat-shaped building, point to the movement inwards of formerly astral spirits, requiring new forms of artistic exorcism.

While some artists knowingly use surrealist ‘techniques’ of automatism, other works are genuine products of spiritual practices. The question of the nature of art as such is thus indirectly raised: is art a spiritual practice? What room for ‘another world’ when this one presents itself as entirely rational and without illusion?

Outsider artists ‘commanded’ to make art make an appearance: Augustin Lesage, a French coal worker who, in the depths of the mines, heard a voice telling him that one day he would be a painter, is represented here by a large Composition Symbolique (Symbolic Composition, 1924), a deliriously crowded synthesis of doorways,

shopping malls and Christian and Egyptian imagery. Elsewhere the work of spiritualists Georgiana Houghton, Barbara Honywood and Anna Mary Howitt reveal an ecstatic fusion of nature and religious fervour, with Howitt’s untitled angel surrounded by fruit, and Houghton’s The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts from 1867 pointing to a luscious, channelled, bountiful religiosity.

Contemporary artists with an interest in all things esoteric – Anne Lislegaard, Suzanne Treister and the late Chiara Fumai among others – appear in the second room, alongside Ann Churchill’s Large Feather Scroll Drawing (2010), a massive upended explosion of feathers, waterfalls and planets. It should be noted that women dominate the show and the realm of the mediumistic more generally, in a kind of feminism of the ether. Not Without My Ghosts is a perfect psychedelic bubble, in stark opposition to the frequently unfree world outside. Nina Power

Ann Churchill, Octagonal Drawing, 1976, 56 × 56 cm.

Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy the artist

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11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art The Crack Begins Within Various venues, Berlin 5 September – 1 November Zehra Doğan’s graphic novel Xêzên Dizî (The Hidden Drawings, 2018–20) was written, in Kurmancî Kurdish, while the artist, activist and award-winning journalist was a political prisoner in Turkey’s Amed prison. She ended up there having been sentenced, in 2017, to two years, nine months and 22 days for ‘terrorist propaganda’ after having shared a painting depicting the destruction of Nusaybin in southeast Turkey on social media. Her story is a reminder of the real risks involved in telling some truths and a signal of the conjunction of activism and journalism (or research) that underpins and perhaps even defines much of the art on show in this latest edition of the Berlin Biennale.

Drawing its title from the work of Egyptian (now Canada-based) poet Iman Mersal (and in particular her work revolving around the theme of motherhood), The Crack Begins Within gathers participants who largely identify with the Global South and is styled as an ‘epilogue’ to the yearlong process of workshops, projects and exhibitions curated by an intergenerational group of curators, comprising María Berrios, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado and Agustín Pérez Rubio, who are from or connected to South America. But while this styling might

emphasise a process that came before (and that many visitors might not have witnessed other than via the archives collected at ExRotaprint, a former printworks in one of the poorest and most migrant-heavy districts of the city that now functions as one of the biennial’s four venues), the exhibition functions as a discrete entity in its own right. In a sense, shaping the biennial as a progress rather than an event emphasises that many of the themes around which the exhibition revolves – the ongoing postcolonial struggle, religious and political repression, environmental abuse, the struggle for lgbtq+ rights, the dethronement of patriarchal, categorical and power structures in general – are both live and have been present for some time. Despite their current high profile (or, more honestly, at this point fashionability) within the rarefied circles of arts institutions in recent times.

Doğan’s graphic novel intertwines the history of the Kurdish struggle, details of prison life, the stories of fellow inmates and the author’s own experiences, both in and prior to jail. Illustrated with images of protests, shootings, torture, demon vultures and crushed rabbits, it was created on the blank backs of letters she received from

a friend that were subsequently smuggled out again. The 103 pages that comprise the work are presented side by side at Kunst Werke (another of the venues) in a large vitrine, accompanied by a 17-page booklet of translations. It’s indicative of the kind of attention asked for in this 76-artist, collective and group edition of the Berlin Biennale. (But hey, despite what optimists tell you, we’re still in a pandemic period of slow time, right?) ‘In prison, the most difficult day is the first one,’ Doğan writes. ‘You feel totally disorientated. But, communal life solves this problem.’ While the experience of wandering around the biennial is by no means comparable, it’s nevertheless both comforting and ironic, given that you walk around this show masked, distanced from other potentially diseased bodies and carrying a personal set of headphones with disposable covers (to listen to the numerous videoworks on show), that so much of it concerns forms of solidarity. You feel atomised, isolated, at times bewildered, but are constantly reassured that so does everyone else. Mostly in far more extreme ways. And yes, there is something unavoidably kinky and voyeuristic about being one of the masked and to some degree anonymised visitors examining previously concealed histories

Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Four Months, Four Million Light Years, 2020 (installation view, 11th Berlin Biennale, kw Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Silke Briel. Courtesy Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)

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or the opening up of complex identities: we are visitors who avoid other bodies watching other bodies opening up.

Sara Sejin Chang’s video installation Four Months, Four Million Light Years (2020) describes a shamanic healing ritual in the context of the artist’s forced adoption (born in Busan, she grew up in The Netherlands) in the aftermath of the Korean War and the colonial attitudes that enabled it. Barcelona-based collective El Palomar’s delirious (and strangely erotic) two-channel video Schreber is a Woman (2020) deconstructs notions of binary identities by riffing off episodes from the memoirs (which also inspired Sigmund Freud) of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, who, describing experiences including feeling like a woman, was confined to a mental asylum in Saxony in 1894.

A series of complex, extraordinary works on paper by Brenda V. Fajardo fuse tarot cards, prophetic divinations, the plight and strength of Filipino women, and scenes and texts in Tagalog decrying the corruption that continues (after multiple colonisations) to dominate life in the Philippines, seemingly in conversation with the work of Doğan and offering something of a bridge between that and the by-turns surreal and fantastic paintings of Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona.

At the Gropius Bau, the most white-boxey and institutionally formal of the biennial venues, the display takes on a more indexical flow. It opens with Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s

The Museum of Ostracism (2018), trompe-l’oeil paintings of anthropomorphic pre-Inca and Inca ceramics that have landed in various Spanish museums through commerce or plunder. Their ‘captions’ come in the form of pejorative terms for the indigenous peoples of South America that the artist has scrawled on the painting’s backs. The work is a little obvious, a little clunky, but sets the tone for a display that seeks to undermine and complexify the relationship of collections and the structures that house them to the more-or-less basic but constantly shifting (or plain shifty) stories they seek to embody, propagate and tell. By contrast, Mapa Teatro (a Colombian duo of visual and performing artists) present a more complex ethnofiction in the form of an immersive installation (comprising scenography and video) that revolves around the story of a 1969 expedition (in the year of the Apollo 12 moon landing) – comprising a trader, a fur trafficker and a gold digger – and its encounter with a voluntarily isolated indigenous community, and its aftermath (only the gold digger survived, going on to create forgeries of pre-Columbian statues out of industrial debris). The biennial’s overall strategy of echoing continues in the photographs of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (No anitquário eu negociei o tempo, 2018), in which she poses bare-chested in a series of faked African masks found in an antiques shop (the work also echoes The Black Mamba’s Land of the

Breasted Woman, 2020, an hour-plus-long video at kw that revolves around a ‘breast tax’ in colonial India). Peppered among such works are a selection of archives, including paintings by psychiatric patients from the Museu de Arte Osório Cesar, Franco da Rocha in Brazil, and works from the reconstructed Chilean Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, originally assembled from donations by artists from around the world as an act of solidarity with the Chilean people, which was confiscated by the military, then rebuilt by the museum’s founders, who were by then political refugees following the military coup of 1973 (and introduced by a video, in French, featuring writer Julio Cortázar). While there’s a developing sense, as you walk though, of the potential of alternative arts institutions, built, as the Museo de la Solidaridad was, by the people for the people (on the premise that all art is political), there’s also a sense in which the process by which the voiceless are given a voice and the silenced speak loudly suggests a formula for biennials and similarly largescale art events that becomes both cyclical (potentially cynical) and self-sustaining: foregrounding the marginalised and excluded in one biennial leaves others marginalised and excluded for the next. Cracks, after all, tend to breed further cracks. For now, however, this edition of the Berlin Biennale feels like essential viewing and one of its most rich, intriguing iterations to date. Mark Rappolt

Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (mssa) (installation view, 11th Berlin Biennale, Gropius Bau).

Photo: Mathias Völzke

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John Gerrard Mirror Pavilion, Corn Work Galway International Arts Festival, Galway City 3–26 September A large, futuristic cube structure was recently installed on Galway’s Claddagh Quay – the site of one of Ireland’s earliest fishing villages, later associated with eighteenth-century industrialists, who harnessed the River Corrib (still thundering through the city) to power dozens of flour mills. However, rather than an incongruous presence, the shimmering, seven-metre-tall temporary pavilion feels strangely of this place. Designed by Irish artist John Gerrard to host his two new artworks – commissioned by Galway International Arts Festival for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture and presented consecutively in dual locations – three sides and the roof are clad in polished metal, seductively reflecting the surrounding landscape, while the front comprises a luminous, high-resolution led

screen. (A second work, Mirror Pavilion, Leaf Work, will be shown in October in a peat bog in Connemara, where the pavilion structure will be resited.) Gerrard uses real-time computer graphics (developed by the commercial gaming industry) for poetic ends, in this instance employing 3d scanning technology to create a ‘virtual portrait’ of Claddagh’s middle pier, upon which the structure is situated.

Mirror Pavilion, Corn Work presents four mysterious folk figures who perform within this simulation, perpetually moving in circular configurations to echo the water wheels that once fed this city. Clad in straw suits, these anonymous characters recall the rural Irish Wren tradition, whose ancient dances and rituals have druidic origins. Their facelessness conjures a supernatural presence –

an unsettling encounter further confounded by their giant stature, regal posture and hypnotic glide across the screen. The camera assumes a static position, while the land turns incrementally, achieving a 360-degree rotation of the site every hour. Sunrise is to be livestreamed from the pavilion on 22 September to mark the autumnal equinox – a sacred day in the pagan calendar, associated with harvesting crops for winter. Mirror Pavilion, Corn Work, then, laments an agricultural era, prior to the advent of petroleum-based conventional farming, described by the artist during the online launch as a “hyperviolent machine”. Here, a more sustainable past is channelled without nostalgia and pitched against that which is reflected on the mirrored walls: our present reality. Joanne Laws

Mirror Pavilion, Corn Work, 2020 (installation view, Claddagh Quay, Galway City).

Photo: Colm Hogan. Courtesy the artist and Galway International Arts Festival, Galway City

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Jan Svoboda Against the Light The Photographers’ Gallery, London 21 February – 20 September For the Czech photographer Jan Svoboda (1934–90), the materiality of the photograph was of far more interest than its conventional purpose as a means of visual documentation.

Commemorating the 30th anniversary of Svoboda’s death, this retrospective (the first in the uk since his 1982 solo show at the Photographers’ Gallery) does justice to his inclination to recognise the photograph’s status as an object by showing the 50-odd works (mostly dating from the mid-1950s to 1972, after which date, mysteriously, he all but stopped making photographs) in their original vintage editions. Moreover, most of them are displayed using a method developed by the artist himself: mounted on card, unframed and with a metal support behind the mount suspending them at a slight

distance from the wall (against which each photograph casts a thin shadow). One series of works, all of which depict the same table, is displayed inside a glass case perpendicular to the wall, allowing you to move round them and appreciate their ‘objecthood’.

Svoboda often revisited the same subjects: things of the home, such as the aforementioned table, treating them less in terms of their named purpose than as surfaces or forms; and windows and other pictures, many of which were photographs he had taken, which he would then (re)photograph, often from the reverse side or having torn them up and rearranged them in a seemingly haphazard pile. The constant experimentation and enigmatic, almost secretive interplay of concealment and exposure, randomness

and contrivance, compel the viewer to keep looking and look again. Knowing the context of their creation, though, makes it difficult to look at these (pictures of) shredded and reversed photographs without being reminded of the atmosphere of paranoia and uncertainty that permeated the surveillance state of postwar Czechoslovakia. While its interiority (metaphorical and actual) and emphasis on the coded and the hidden are suggestive of privacy or even solitude, also pervading Svoboda’s work is a sense of precariousness and distrust, as it seems to question the existence of the things photographed and the ‘truthfulness’ of photography itself. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to believe that in Communist Prague, under the invasive eye of the state, true solitude was hard to imagine. Tom Denman

An attempt at ideal proportion iii, 1971.

Collection of Miroslav Velfl, Prague. © the artist’s estate

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Elizabeth Price slow dans Artangel at The Assembly Room, London 4 September – 25 October That this is an age of shuttered nightclubs and banned gatherings adds a bleak note to viewing slow dans. Elizabeth Price’s videoworks of the last decade have often borrowed from pop music its sounds, tempo and visual glamour, as much as celebrating pop’s investment in the ecstasy of coming together in feeling rather than thinking. But Price’s works have balanced their critical fascination with the thrall of commodity culture with an increasingly research-driven attention to the social world of labour and industry, and the different register of solidarity and sociality embedded in labour and making. Seeing slow dans – an iteration of Price’s most recent trilogy of videos, cocommissioned by Artangel – glowing gaudily in the cavernous space of a nineteenth-century public assembly room in South London conjures ghosts: who assembled here, once? Suffragettes?

Union men? Ballroom-dancing enthusiasts?

Disco divas? Political groupings?

If that sense of collectivity recedes even further in the shadow of a pandemic, its vanishing distance was already inscribed in the videos on show here before covid-19 made its appearance. Each large, multiscreen projection contains a story narrated by various iterations of Price’s now-familiar disembodied voice-synthesisers and flickering animated captions. Quizzical, slightly catatonic in their halting reveries, they unspool fables of contemporary human life as if reconstituting these from the archaeological fragments and unreliable archives left to a perhaps distant future.

In kohl (2018), across four vertical screens occupied by the negative and inverted image of a coalmine’s pit-head tower and winch, a cursor blinks and an account is typed out ‘live’ of unexplained ‘visitants’ appearing in the

underground spaces of carparks, data centres and gyms, where once they appeared in the flooded underground networks of disused mines. Ghosts of deindustrialisation (the scripts mention the closure of English collieries) troubling the anodyne venues of service-sector capitalism? Then a waving tangle of cgi ferns take over the screens. Maybe a reference to how tree ferns are the organic origin of many British coalfields; they’re also cyphers of everything lost, subterranean or repressed.

Weirdly, though, their fronds appear to carry the designs of men’s neckties – a segue to felt tip (2018), projected opposite. Where kohl feels like a preamble, quietly setting the stage of this out-of-joint temporality, felt tip sucks us into a vortex of improbable associative leaps, linking the phallic associations of twentieth-century men’s business ties to the first digital weaving looms in a kind of hallucinatory PowerPoint presentation that charts the evolution of the necktie’s heraldic motifs and diagonal bands into what might appear as conduits, circuitry and microchips. This delirious but convincing exposition is spoken by an obscure cadre who operate in the “administrative core”; near-future middle-management, perhaps, who store data in the dna of their fingernails, and who seem jokily obsessed with corporate aesthetics and the links between ties, textile, tactility, index fingers and tongues, having taken to wearing ties as a kind of ironic gesture of their “own long memory”. What these pedants remember, or why they remember it, is hard to decrypt from their odd collective monologue, but “things haven’t gone our way”.

Underlying felt tip’s mannered humour is an intuition of the disintegrating relationship between material labour (the mine-head appears

as the ‘below’ to the office desk’s ‘above’), managerialism and gender – a pair of bare legs in high heels appear, dance-stepping, and it takes a moment to notice their hairiness.

If binaries have blurred, and patriarchy can’t get it up anymore, felt tip seems to suggest this has some hard-to-fathom relationship to the rise of information over production.

If felt tip and kohl frame the joylessly postindustrial and technocratic world as deeply disturbed (haunted, even) by the spectre of materiality and tactility, then administration, management, information – these hegemonic aspects of twenty-first-century capitalist life – find themselves the target of the teachers (2019), which is projected between them. Here Price’s stuttering digital orators tell of a legendary group of academics who became voluntarily mute, withdrawing from their language-driven professions, and replacing their speech with nonlinguistic utterances.

As the images of high-fashion dresses that resemble ceremonial robes warp and fade across the screens, the narrators offer the idea that the sibilant phonemes the ‘teachers’ utter are really renderings of the everyday noises of their abandoned day-jobs – mouse clicks, keyboard clatter, the shuffling of documents.

A protest, then, against the bureaucratisation of knowledge, as the stand-in for a sensual (female) human bodily presence unfurls before us. If Price’s playful, perverse mimicry of a moribund culture has an even sharper edge right now, it’s because it dramatises the often unacknowledged battle for power in our culture, which we experience every day – the attempted subordination of material, bodily, sensual contingency to administration, and of living sociability to lifeless systems. J.J. Charlesworth

facing page slow dans 2020, (installation view, Artangel at The Assembly Room, London).

Photo: Zeinab Batchelor

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R.I.P. Germain Dead Yard Cubitt Artists, London 3 September – 25 October Once you’ve been greeted at the door and given an exhibition text – reminiscent of an order of service, complete with photographs of seven people close to the artist who have died – you get 45 minutes to yourself with R.I.P. Germain’s exhibition. No other visitors are allowed.

There are two freestanding sculptures, both memorials: Lloyd (2020) is an upright tree trunk, studded with what look like spliffs.

It is an homage to the artist’s late uncle. The second is a doorlike structure, with several locks at the top and a hole apparently kicked in at the bottom, as if from frustration or anger.

This is titled after Imarl, a baby cousin who died. At a table covered in England football shirts is a set of dominoes, a reference to

another family member. On speakers secreted beneath, voices answer a set of questions on life, death and grief that the artist posed to friends and family. It is, in its simplicity, moving to listen to them work through their hopes and dreams, some dashed and some achieved.

At the gallery’s far end is a collection of over a hundred books, all addressing race and racism, which one is free to take down from the altarlike structure on which they sit. Normally, reading rooms in exhibitions are appendages, but it is here that the tension of the show hangs. Pat Parker’s 1978 poem ‘For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend’, which I found in a collection lodged between Harriet A. Washington’s 2007 study Medical Apartheid

Lloyd (detail), 2020.

Courtesy Cubitt Artists, London

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and an Adrian Piper reader published by moma, starts, ‘The first thing you do is to forget i’m Black. / Second, you must never forget i’m Black.’ It’s a line pertinent to Dead Yard. There are universal themes here – we all experience grief – but it is a reminder that death haunts Black people in a systemic way: through police violence, of course, but also via the inherent racism within Western health, social and economic structures. Here Germain’s personal grief is extrapolated into political anger, but it isn’t mawkish. The books, full of injustice, assembled together are a testament also to Black life and an ongoing, vibrant Black intellectual project, a context this important show becomes party to. Oliver Basciano

Tavares Strachan In Plain Sight Marian Goodman Gallery, London 8 September – 24 October The Bahamian artist’s new exhibition has as many plot twists as a good outing to the multiplex, so explaining it without spoilers is tricky. In a room to the right of the gallery’s entrance a big book stands on a small table.

It is titled the Encyclopedia of Invisibility, and copies of the book’s pages cover the walls, floor to ceiling. All the entries – the ones I’ve jotted down include Roland Moreno, the inventor of the smart card; the omer, an ancient Israelite unit of measure; Richey Edwards of Welsh band Manic Street Preachers – relate to a person or a thing that has in some way disappeared from view – either forgotten by history despite the ubiquity of their invention, or mysteriously vanished, as in the case of Edwards.

In another gallery a figure constructed of neon depicts (the title informs us) the late

Cuban ballet dancer Alicia Alonso. A series of mixed-media paintings collage together various figures that might be generalised as being Black heroes – footballer Viv Anderson, musician and activist Paul Robeson, Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie. A first-floor gallery continues the theme of recalling Black pioneers through 12 resin busts – including nurse Mary Seacole and singer Nina Simone – each face partially obscured by a series of found ceremonial African masks.

Contemplation of the sculptures is interrupted, however, by a man wandering into the space, his clothes of the late nineteenth century, who starts to sing. He and a couple of further performers proceed to lead visitors on a musical tour full of ‘secret’ rooms hidden among the exhibits. Which

is where I probably need to leave the description hanging.

In the musical that follows we learn this figure is Matthew Henson, the Black American polar explorer, who recounts his adventures to a younger performer, playing his child. Within this, Henson’s heroism is hedged: we learn the past is complicated, detail is needed, that there is little in the way of heroes and villains but all figures will “be confronted by the judgment of history”; their actions, language and views found wanting. What’s important is to learn from the errors. “Only will can construct a new us,” ‘Henson’ sings. Strachan’s theatrical outing is a nuanced – and riveting – intervention in the otherwise shrill debate surrounding how the present treats histories it finds problematic. Oliver Basciano

Distant Relatives (Mary J. Seacole), 2020, Fang Ngil mask (Central Africa), pigment, horsehair, plaster, brass, acrylic, 150 × 56 × 47 cm. Photo: Lewis Ronald. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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Studio Berlin Berghain, Berlin 9 September – December The portmanteau name ‘Berghain’, referring to the Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain neighbourhoods that Berlin’s most legendary nightclub straddles, could also be used as a shorthand for risky behaviour. The venue is notorious for furtive goings-on in its extensive dark rooms; here be chemsex and a heightened probability of going home with a dose of the clap. More recently, clubs like Berghain have been associated with flareups of covid-19; for now, techno marathons are on hold. Riskaverse reviewers of a certain age, then, might be forgiven for worrying when told the club has now become a gallery. Masks on…

First question: what will they do with all that space? Berghain is enormous. The former electrical power plant, with its stark concrete interior, is arguably an ideal venue for large sculptural works. Outside, a giant banner by Rirkrit Tiravanija hangs from the roof reading ‘Morgen ist die Frage’, a message super-pertinent to the moment that shouts: ‘Tomorrow is the Question’. A friend in the uk quips, ‘Yesterday is the answer’. Given Berlin’s recent history, let’s hope not. There’s no scary doorman now; no berserker Viking type with tattooed face and steel teeth threatening to rip your face off. Collectors Christian and Karen Boros (known for their private collection in a Mitte bunker) are behind the show. There are 117 artists exhibiting, all of whom are currently based in Berlin studios, hence the title.

The first challenge in reviewing is Berghain’s longstanding ban on photography. Small sticky coloured dots are stuck on the camera eye of laptops and mobile phones before you enter; a half-decent memory and a notebook is an asset. All the art, we are told, belongs to the artists and is, as yet, unsold (assuming the works are for sale here, which isn’t clear). The first work we see is a permanent fixture of the venue: a sequence of 20 or so canvases by Norbert Bisky

featuring boys falling out of a blue sky from an exploding plane. These chime with Die Mimik der Téthys (2019, all other works mentioned from 2020 unless stated), a massive sculpture by Julius von Bismarck found next door in the cavernous main hall: a huge buoy suspended from the ceiling by motorised wires. This bobs up and down, thus mimicking its earlier life on the sea, though it’s tempting to think of it as a coy samesex metaphor, a sly update of Rauschenberg’s naughty Monogram (1955–59).

The second obstacle is that the titles of the works were not available at the time of viewing; even the names of artists were a bit of a search.

In a sense Studio Berlin is an alternative Tate Modern, an anti-Tate, if you will: a site of similar dimensions and former purpose but denuded of naff information notices and shops selling tat. Disorientation, appropriate to the venue, is a not-uncommon theme. An Islamic clock

by Khaled Barakeh (One Hour is Sixty Minutes and Vice Versa) ticks disconcertingly backwards, perhaps implying we’re all out of time. Alicja Kwade shows Selbstporträt, 24 small glass vials each of which contains a chemical element, a representation of the amount of solid matter in the human body; the yellow of sulphur hints at these diabolical times, while being confronted by the minuscule quantities of stuff we’re made of underlines our general insignificance.

Up in the Panorama bar (a first for this viewer, having only been allowed in the building before to see postrock at tame times of an evening) is a sculpture of a girl posing provocatively – climber (Angel Kiss) by Anna Uddenberg.

Nearby, Jeremy Shaw frames what appears to be a found monochrome photograph taken in a revivalist church of a woman being blessed or healed – which he’s titled Towards Universal Pattern Recognition (Exorcism in Essex, 15-4-75) – in distorting acrylic and chrome, lending a suitably hallucinogenic effect; seeing it might

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Morgen ist die Frage, 2020 (installation view, Studio Berlin, Berghain, Berlin). © the artist. Photo: Noshe

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be seriously discombobulating on dance nights if it’s left in situ after the show closes.

Stepping carefully down another ill-lit corridor we dodge 1-32, a set of scattered giant teeth, molars and incisors made from salt by Michael Sailstorfer. Then there’s four suits of armour by Simon Fujiwara, chain-mail affairs studded with old packets of penicillin. These are called Syphilic Comrades, referring to artists (Gauguin, Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh) who may or may not have had syphilis, an increasingly common risk of anonymous sex. Some of Fujiwara’s works have an autobiographical dimension; whether this fact is relevant here is unclear, but the prescriptions look real enough. There’s more reconfigured detritus as Klara Liden lights one dark passage with Tank, an orange lamp resembling a cloud and made out of a large plastic container, while Monica Bonvicini contributes Pas de Deux, one of her trademark leather-and-chain affairs, a gesture that’s perhaps a tad too obvious in the context. Tacita Dean offers a postcard with a drawing of a turd flying out of a sky shaped like an arse. She labels 2020 an annus horribilis and, in a German/English mashup, calls this Shite Zeitgeist. Given the rumours that some artists have been paid only €150 to appear here, this feels like a doubly apt turn of phrase.

Countermanding prettiness arrives with a tall blue-and-yellow polyhedron stack by Angela Bulloch cryptically called Heavy Metal Stack of Six: Patrick, while Nina Canell fittingly – for a show in a former power plant – shows Creepage, a Juddlike affair made from a high-voltage disconnector and some rain guttering. On another wall Jonathan Monk frames covers of singles by the Smiths and, uh, a signed photo of Benny Hill: deadpan as usual, he calls this Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information ii. A louche Benny in Berghain feels entirely correct.

John Quin

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Books Suppose a Sentence

by Brian Dillon Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99 (softcover) ‘Every sentence’, says Brian Dillon, in the opening sentence of his book about sentences, ‘was once an animal, says Emerson.’ Dillon’s sentence is descended from Ben Marcus’s epigraph to The Age of Wire and String: ‘Every word was once an animal – emerson’. The reader might wonder if both ‘Emerson’ and ‘emerson’ were related to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1843 told a lecture hall including Walt Whitman that ‘Every word was once a poem’, two years before Simón Rodríguez declared that ‘Every word is an epitaph’. This intertextual in-joke illustrates the modifications by which literature evolves. Bad writers deface the sentences they inherit and good writers make them into something better, or at least something different, says T.S. Eliot, illustrating the point in his Four Quartets: ‘every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph’. The author dies ( – barthes) but the sentence persists. And is apt, as Dillon concludes, to ‘go skittering away’ from its maker.

Suppose a Sentence is composed of 27 short exegeses of sentences that Dillon has plucked from their contexts, has pressed like flowers into his notebooks and desires to show us.

Their sources range from John Donne (‘Wee have a winding sheete in our Mothers wombe…’) to Fleur Jaeggy (‘Paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust’) and they inspire feelings in the author running the spectrum

from chaste technical appreciation to amorous devotion. Ultimately, this is a book about love.

And if falling in love with a sentence is like marrying the Eiffel Tower, then bear in mind that no collector could love a work of art like a fetishist loves a sentence ( – bataille).

Each quotation is displayed at the top of each chapter like a shoe on a plinth or a body on a slab, to be tried on or taken apart. Gertrude Stein’s ‘concrete, plain and apprehensible’ constructions remind us that ‘words are also things’, and Dillon marvels over the means by which they are animated. Literary criticism is inherently ghoulish (schoolchildren daydream through Eng. Lit. safe in the knowledge that the answer is ‘death’), and the dissection of these sentences borders on the macabre. On the frequent occasions that Dillon is overtaken by enthusiasm for the prose machinery – ‘The inversion in those first five words!’ – he resembles a professor of anatomy falling into a cadaver in his enthusiasm for a beautiful medial colon. This is no bad thing.

Sentences are distinguished from things – shoes, corpses, clichés – by the way they unfold in time. And if reading a sentence is, as Dillon puts it, ‘like waiting for a photograph to develop’ (the lover is the one who waits – barthes), then this picture never fixes. That reading is a process of becoming is reinforced by the abstraction of these quotations from their contexts. To embark on a sentence by Thomas De Quincey with no

indication of what he’s talking about is to set off into the unknown. You don’t catch the byzantine patterns of his prose until you’re half-a-dozen clauses deep and must reorganise the memory of those that came before in order, at the end, to make fleeting sense of the whole. The reader is suspended between past and the future, looking backwards and forwards, constituting the meaning as they move through the writing.

Roland Barthes haunts this review because he’s all over Suppose a Sentence, and Dillon inherits from the French writer his intense attention to the moments in which ‘one substance becomes, or is revealed to be, another’. ‘If’, as Dillon says, ‘every sentence written is a sort of ghost’, then note that he takes for his first example the spooky ‘O, O, O, O’ that follows Hamlet’s famous last words (‘the rest is silence’) in the Folio edition, before circling back to end the book with Rousseau’s anecdote of a girl who gets no further in her writing practice than endlessly repeating the letter ‘O, O, O, O’. Against Rousseau’s argument that this illustrates the natural antipathy of women to education, Anne Boyer suggests the girl had invented and exhausted a language unique to her own experience: ‘every O could have been, also, every letter and every word for the little girl: each O also an opening, a planet, a ring, a word, a query, a grammar’.

These are the points at which sentences fail.

Ben Eastham

Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval Verso, £10.99 (softcover) ‘Blasphemy protects us from the moral fables we grew up with,’ writes Norwegian musician and author Jenny Hval in this genre-bending novel, ‘blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us the cracks in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place.’ Part feminist manifesto, part horror story, part film script, part coming-of-age tale, part recent Norwegian social history, Girls Against God documents its narrator’s rebellion against the moralities, orthodoxies and patriarchies of the Norwegian south, set between the twin poles of white (picket fences) and black (Norwegian metal – ‘self-expression for insecure men who want to return to a time when they

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could have been strong’). What begins with dressing as a goth and cursing at school morphs into witches’ covens and fantastic demonic, cannibalistic banquets. Along the way Hval segues into the role of language (Norwegian, but also English) as a tool of both suppression and liberation, and the role of digital technology in the same. And is haunted by Edvard Munch’s 1894–95 painting Puberty, which depicts a naked girl, her legs clenched, perched on the edge of a bed. When she first sees it, having struggled through a crowd of gawpers in Oslo’s National Museum, it’s a form of pornography, but on reflection that changes: ‘Maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all

ArtReview

paintings, are actually sitting there hating.

Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it.’ Over the course of the novel, the author kicks against the pricks of a male pantheon that includes Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace (and the perception of artmaking that they embody), and Little Boy, Fat Man and the Manhattan Project (‘a mushroomshaped erection fantasy’). ‘I want to be in a place where I don’t have anything to hate,’ the author writes. It’s never quite clear if she succeeds.

Or, for that matter, wants to. Mark Rappolt

October 2020

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Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization

by David Joselit mit (October Books), $40 (hardcover) What David Joselit offers in Heritage and Debt is a convincing description of the global and historical dynamics that produced ‘contemporary art’ as something distinct from what preceded it.

For most observers of art and its history today, that question would be answered with some combination of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘modernism’, which is not incorrect. But on Joselit’s account, that answer is both woefully incomplete and politically compromised.

Prior to 1989, the global economic order was divided into a hierarchy (as the West saw it) of three different worlds: the advanced capitalist economies of the first, the socialist economies of the second and the developing economies of the third. Joselit’s first innovation is to identify each of these worlds with its own aesthetic ‘idiom’: a ‘modern/postmodern’ idiom for the first world, a ‘realist/mass cultural’ idiom for the second world and a ‘popular/indigenous’ idiom for the third. The first world valued its own idiom above the others, whose products it collected, or dismissed, as artefacts, decoration or kitsch.

As a second innovation, Joselit proposes a ‘deregulation of images’ paralleling the economic deregulation that began in the West during the late 1970s, accelerated during the 1980s and went global after 1991 with the Soviet Union’s collapse and China’s rise. Joselit’s deregulation entailed postcolonial practices of indigenous artists, socialist realism from China and the ussr, and underground art from Soviet bloc countries

and South America claiming equal status with first-world fine art, in both exhibitions and sales.

What Joselit calls the ensuing ‘recalibration’ of aesthetic value and recognition is conducted through the marshalling of ‘heritage’: inherited cultural resources and properties that are available not just to those within a specific culture but to everyone. Importantly, Joselit describes ‘heritage’ as a ‘set of living traditions’ whose ‘invocations’ do not ‘inherently possess a specific political valence, either conservative or progressive’, but whose ‘potential lies in the negotiation… between heritage and perceived debts to “one’s own” cultures and those of others’. When cultural heritage is ‘synchronized’ in and with the present through strategies of ‘appropriation’, ‘pastiche’, ‘reframing’ and ‘curation’ – all definitive strategies of global contemporary artistic practice – it leads either to art’s ‘financialization’ (bad) or to new forms of ‘authorization’ (good). Either way, the dynamic of idiomatic deregulation and the synchronization of cultural heritage in the present is what produces the phenomenon, and our period, of ‘global contemporary art’.

This is surely right. As history it integrates and coordinates the geopolitics of ‘globalization’ with diverse practices: Joselit includes close readings of Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, Shahzia Sikander and Raqs Media Collective, among others. As theory it does for the ‘cultural logic’ of contemporary art what Fredric Jameson did for postmodernism. But as an

ethics and politics of art practice and history it is less convincing.

Putting aside Joselit’s hyperbolic demonisation of the market and art’s financialisation, his prescription for ‘art’s progressive politics’ ultimately turns on one favoured concept, ‘authorization’, which is too capacious to do the job meant for it: progressively minded subjects must ‘authorize’ themselves; every artwork must itself be ‘authorized’; the ‘meaning’ of images is determined by the ‘social and geopolitical conditions’ under which they are ‘authorized’ to appear; aesthetic strategies are ‘differently authorized in different parts of the world’, and so forth.

When Joselit does explicitly state what he means by ‘authorization’, he calls it ‘a provisional situational seizure of a quantum of meaning as legitimately one’s own’ (my emphasis). One could be forgiven for thinking Joselit was talking here about Twitter or Instagram rather than laying out the programme for a ‘responsible history of global contemporary art’. The question of course is, ‘Who decides what’s legitimate, and how?’

But this goes unaddressed in Joselit’s account.

‘Legitimacy’ is a problem not just for art history and criticism. It is the crisis faced by the global north today, politically (with neoliberal democracy threatened from both right and left), socially (with the reckoning of racism and colonisation) and economically (with the rise of authoritarian capitalism). But perhaps these are questions for Joselit’s next book Jonathan T.D. Neil

Year of the Rabbit

by Tian Veasna Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 (softcover) In his first graphic novel French-Cambodian illustrator and writer Tian Veasna, born in Cambodia just days after the Khmer Rouge seized power over the country in 1975, tells the story of his family’s struggle to escape, tracing their evacuation from Phnom Penh, through their forced relocation to labour camps, to their desperate attempts to reach a refugee camp on the border of Thailand.

Along the way, family members die or are ‘disappeared’. Maps, useful ‘tips’ for survival and statistics divide the chapters: from these we learn that the route to Thailand is long and treacherous, that you can trade one bar of soap for two kilograms of rice, that nearly a third of the country’s population died in four years.

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Told through detailed drawings, the images are skewed towards blue, green and sepia tones, the cool colours curiously offsetting the violence and horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. There are scenes in which Veasna’s uncles wade through a trench of human remains, their eyes wide with fear; a boatful of people are massacred, the river’s water turned red; and a man recalls the violence and torture he endured at a Khmer Rouge prison. There are grippingly tense moments where his parents look like they might be caught, arrested or killed in similar situations, but are saved at the last minute by small human kindnesses: an old peasant stops Khmer leaders from

ArtReview

forcing them onto that fateful boat, a Khmer chief who lets them live peacefully in the labour camp after Veasna’s father (a doctor) treats his gravely sick child, a poor villager who lets them shelter in his hut as they travel towards Thailand.

A comic book might not be the most obvious venue for an education in these human atrocities. However, the combination of powerful imagery, personal stories and few but carefully chosen words make for an affective and human-centred way of recording tragedies that the often dispassionate and objective prose of traditional history books struggles to achieve.

Fi Churchman

On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom

by John Tusa Bloomsbury Business, £20/$30 (hardcover) John Tusa has spent much of his professional life since the 1980s in the uk’s arts ‘establishment’, first as the head of the bbc’s World Service, then as managing director of London’s Barbican Arts Centre, and just as much time serving on the boards of others. What goes on behind the closed doors of the boardroom is rarely public. Yet governance (confirming that an organisation is doing what it’s supposed to) has played an increasingly crucial role in the life of arts organisations over the last 30 years. Galleries, concert halls and museums today depend on a mix of public funding and private giving to produce a public good that has little to do with ‘making money’.

Tusa, as one of his interviewees puts it, is a man with ‘the heart of a luvvie and the mind of a suit’. On Board is a unusual sort of career memoir in the guise of a study, or a how-to guide. Tusa’s reflections of serving on seven different boards (three of them as chairman) over 25 years are oddly captivating – even weirdly entertaining – for their accessible retelling of how personalities, institutional realities and ethical principles tangle in the otherwise obscure, apparently bureaucratic politicking of the ‘suits’, understood as the foundations of the ‘luvvies’’ outward success. From his initiation as trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (and its ambitious gallery expansion during the early 1990s), to the triumph of the British Museum’s gamechanging ‘Great Court’ transformation in 2004,

via the lows of trying to steer the financially troubled and chaotic English National Opera during the late 1990s, through to chairing the University of the Arts London (ual, the uk’s largest grouping of art and design colleges), Tusa’s is a story of good and bad combinations of chairman and chief executive, of well-selected trustees versus indifferent or disruptive ones, and of the meddlings of external forces, usually government departments and funding bodies.

As far as user’s guides go, Tusa’s advice is great wisdom born of long experience, and anyone finding themselves in the role of arts trustee should read it. In summary: take time to select a director; don’t let trustees meddle in running things; advocate for your organisation to the outside world, be diligent in scrutinising it internally; don’t lose sight of the accounts; don’t let trustees buy influence just because they’re donors. Above all, you’re there to serve.

But On Board is also, inadvertently, an account of the way cultural organisations have evolved over the past three decades, and how the mix of commercial and creative independence that characterises present-day organisations took shape as the state slowly retreated from direct supervision of cultural institutions.

In Britain that was kickstarted, as Tusa notes, by the conservative government’s drive to move national cultural institutions out of direct governmental control during the early 1990s.

As successive administrations insisted that

organisations run themselves professionally, and find more of their own funds, a whole culture of governance (and a whole class of trustees and patrons) burgeoned. Tusa writes mostly approvingly of this shift towards having business-minded people more part of the infrastructure; this, perhaps, was the price that Tusa’s generation decided to pay to secure greater creative and cultural autonomy for the arts sector. And yet…

In one of his end-of-chapter summaries (in the manner of a management guide), Tusa insists that ‘money should not buy privilege on a board’. But as the recent controversy over board interests in the uk and us has shown, the interests of monied trustees threaten to consume the culture of arts institutions. This is the endpoint of the marketisation and commercialisation that began during the 90s. Elsewhere, Tusa congratulates himself and his colleagues at ual for their job of expanding, unifying and centralising that disparate federation of once-independent art colleges. Many now watching the wheels come off the debt-driven, commodified and precarious culture of art education driven by well-remunerated ‘suits’ won’t share Tusa’s enthusiasm. But in a sense, it’s not his fault.

It is the forces of professionalisation and marketisation that have defined the evolution of the cultural sector, and even the best governance can do little to change that. J.J. Charlesworth

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums

by A. Kendra Greene Granta, £14 (hardcover) On the surface, this project from the American writer A. Kendra Greene – a tour of the niche museums of Iceland, be they the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft or the Herring Era Museum – is mere whimsy. Certainly her prose occasionally verges on the twee. In one chapter, on the Skógar Folk Museum in the south of the country, for example, Greene begins every other paragraph in a faux-saga style: ‘They say it’s 1950 when the old society ends…’, ‘They say she knows the place like the back of her hand…’

Yet among the chapter-long studies of offbeat institutions such as the penis museum (‘Capra hircus, the goat specimens, are notably hairy.

They look like animals unto themselves, like little opossums curled up and sleeping’), a museum

of sea monster tales (‘one in three people in Arnarfjörður can tell a story and aren’t ashamed to do so’) or Petra’s Stone Collection, a house museum dedicated to one woman’s half-century habit of picking up a rock on her daily walk (‘we kneel here at this museum of her commitment’), Greene raises timely questions pertaining to the purpose of museums (last year the International Council of Museums sought to redefine such institutions as being concerned with wellbeing and social justice as opposed to preservation).

‘When does a collection become a museum?’ she asks. ‘Collectors collect. We need them to do that.

But it’s something else that makes museums.’

Within each chapter Greene traces how these private obsessions came to be introduced to a

October 2020

wider public, and within that she rightly surmises that museums can only become museums when they express ‘collective determinations’. There is no state directive to these institutions, they are mostly family-run affairs (of a bird museum set up by a man called Sigurgeir, Greene writes ‘One suspects the next generation, Sigurgeir’s nieces and nephews, will take over when the time comes’) with little corporate spin or curatorial agenda. Organic in their composition, flexible to change, they possess instead ‘a kind of special sight for what is significant and meaningful and should be held on to’. For curators in bigger, grander institutions, those beyond Iceland, it seems there’s much to learn from these enthusiastic endeavours. Oliver Basciano

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Art credits

Text credits

on the cover Destiny Deacon, Ebony and Ivy face race, 2016, lightjet print mounted to Dibond, 58 × 46 cm (paper size).Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Words on the spine and on pages 25, 45 and 93 are from Cesare Pavese, La Casa in Collina, 1948

October 2020

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I think we can all agree that it’s about time this page was returned to a proper colonialist.

It’s all been becoming far too ‘woke’, as you people call it. Last month they even had some native insulting the Portuguese (a fine race, they invented the world, don’t you know) and warbling on about his tailoring while the grand narratives of history unfolded around him – tied up in the usual petty native concerns. That’s why we were needed, for goodness’ sake!

As I see it, this column isn’t about rewriting history from the point of view of your shamefuelled present, but about telling it like it is.

Or was. Truth told by the people who have earned the right to speak it! The other day I was perusing the Daily Mail (normally a great newspaper) when I came across this headline: ‘World famous Oxford museum removes shrunken heads made by Amazon headhunting tribe after bosses said exhibiting human remains “reinforces racist and stereotypical thinking”’. I nearly fell off my cloud! Like this was new!!!! I was the original civiliser! The banner of head displays! The censor of racial stereotypes! The sensitive one!

In fact, I banned the whole headhunting lark (or ngayau, as the Iban called it) when I ruled Sarawak. Except when I allowed it, when the Iban were going out on dedicated expeditions to crush rebellious types from other tribes.

Then it was unbanned.

I gave them tax breaks for that too. Fair’s fair, I say. And, you know, when the Japanese invaded Borneo (sometime after my demise), it totally paid off to have a little bit of headhunting expertise in the tribe. ‘Thank you, James,’ I venture to say. Because not enough people do (except that nice Errol Flynn, who wrote a film script about me – never understood why it didn’t get off the ground). In any case, I felt duty-bound to write to the editor (can’t remember if it was of the Mail or this rag – same difference, really) and demand that things be set straight.

Of course in some ways mine’s the usual story. Born in the colonies, joined the army, saw some action, got injured, missed some action, resigned, bought a boat (I called it The Royalist), did some trading (not my forte, I’m afraid), crushed someone else’s rebellion on behalf of a third party, restored the deposed third party to power, was given charge of what’s more or less a country and became the first White Rajah of Sarawak. That’s where it gets complex, you see. Woke types might think

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In an ongoing apologia by the great colonialists, James Brooke gives himself a big pat on the back

that I colonised Sarawak, but in reality Sarawak conquered and colonised me. And I don’t mean it in that soppy romantic way millennials do.

I mean they (the Sultan of Brunei, to be precise) literally changed my name. It was all I could do to get myself and the other White Rajahs (as we were known, although strictly speaking you should be addressing me as His Highness the Rajah of Sarawak – and yes, I prefer that, because the ‘White’ bit strikes me as being more than a little racist, it’s not like the other rajahs were marked by their skin colour) buried in Dartmoor, England. The subsequent Rajahs were my nephews, btw. I appointed them.

I wrote the whole dynastic succession thing

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into my will when I was disposing of my other possessions. It’s all about the ‘family touch’, as I learned from Queen Vic and the sultans I had restored to power in Borneo (although, ultimately, not in my bit of Borneo). Some things are the same, wherever you’re in charge.

Did I mention that my will became the constitution of Sarawak? In both senses! You see, I like a laugh as much as the next Rajah!

But you’ll probably be more familiar with me as a result of my campaigns against piracy and slavery. Back in the day I was a bit of a legend for that (although obviously I’m the real deal): bringing security and the rule of law to places where everyone was insecure and lawless.

The Sultan of Brunei made me a Rajah and the Queen of England made me a knight.

Naturally Rudyard Kipling (great, great writer) mentioned me in relation to his story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Joseph Conrad, who I understand achieved some distinction of his own as a novelist after I popped my clogs, based the second part of his novel Lord Jim on, well, me. I was a touchstone.

Although, whatever anyone tells you, touching was not my game.

Overall, everyone was happy.

And even when they weren’t, it turned out that they were. That Commission of Inquiry set up in 1854 to investigate claims initiated by namby-pamby Little Englanders that I’d been a little overenthusiastic in my suppression of the rebels and the pirates found me not guilty, sir! I’d like to see them square up to Liu Shan Bang, Sharif Masahor or Rentap with little more than a posse of head-hungry savages, a large cannon and the China Squadron (when necessary).

Jane Austen made me happy. I used to read her aloud to visitors at my court. Badruddin (he was a rather charming prince of Sarawak) made me happy. I loved that guy and didn’t care who knew. And the young grandson of the seventh Earl of Elgin. I was a one-man lgbt movement.

I had an unofficial son too, just to keep people guessing. Woke types today are always debating whether I was homosocial or homosexual.

Some of them even suggest that I was ‘carnally involved with the rough trade of Totnes’. Losers.

I was a king! Sultans, monarchs, writers and headhunters looked up to me, I didn’t have to wander round the back streets of Devon market towns looking for affection and whatnot. You think your age is new, righteous and revolutionary, but if you look closely, we did it all before your great-grandparents were even born.

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