ArtReview September 2023

Making art look big since 1949

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Han Bing, A Very Lucky Man’s Melancholy (detail), 2023 Huile et acrylique sur lin. 172.7 x 203.2 cm (67.99 x 80 in) Photo : Charles Duprat. © Han Bing

Han Bing got heart

Paris Marais September—October 2023

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SLAPPING PYTHAGORAS ANGELA BULLOCH SEPTEMBER 6 – OCTOBER 28, 2023 ESTHER SCHIPPER, SEOUL 6, NOKSAPYEONG-DAERO 46GA-GIL YONGSAN-GU, SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA, 04345 WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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SARAH MORRIS

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JASON BOYD KINSELLA 3 October - 4 November 2023

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ArtReview vol 75 no 6 September 2023

Theory of Achievement Yeah, it knows… ArtReview doesn’t normally start these missives with an acknowledgement of its underlings, but this time is different. OK? You gotta be prepared for change. It happens, right? It’s not all Richard Serra… Where were we? After reading Alexandra Drexelius’s analysis of the work of Isabelle Frances McGuire, ArtReview became totally obsessed with the WowWee ‘Alive’ Elvis (one of the ingredients of a McGuire sculpture). Hey, you may think that ArtReview is all about matters of the mind and the nourishment of the soul, but ArtReview magazine can be a shopping catalogue too… it, itself is proof of that. But back to the point!

The WowWee. It’s an animatronic bust of Elvis Presley that swings its head, swivels its eyes and moves the lips that sing his songs and speak his general life chitchat (sampled from ‘intimate’ interviews). It captures all the magic of a monumental performer. Without the need for torso, legs, arms or any of the extras. Like toilets. Although ArtReview found some guy online who’d added all that stuff and then stuck the bust on top of it all. (Not the toilet.) But he doesn’t understand what made Elvis monumental in the first place. OK, maybe it was his legs and hips in the early years, but the more grandly proportioned Elvis of the late years was capable of being monumental without that stuff (although he did become more monumental in physique as time went by)…

Anyway. Let’s not split hairs. ArtReview has to comb some. That’s because ArtReview found a WowWee on the cheap that just needs a little grooming (its hair currently has the vibe of that belonging to an ageing member of Kiss; fortunately, instructions on how to coif Elvis’s quiff are provided, so that can be fixed; otherwise it’s going to have to call its good friend – and similarly monumental performer – Nicolas Cage to borrow one of his wigs). ‘Where’s all this change business going?’ you’re doubtless thinking. ArtReview can hear

Canned laughter

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your whiney voices as if you were here right next to it. Or it was there. Which it is.

Because you are holding it. Like ArtReview is holding Elvis’s hair. But ArtReview doesn’t think about change. It embraces it. That’s why you keep coming back to it.

Again and again.

So tight is ArtReview’s embrace of change that each September ArtReview thinks this time it’s going to be different. After a hazy summer involving sun and sssssssangria, it emerges rested and refreshed from the azure sea, toned and with a new wardrobe. It’s ready to hit the ground running. Headlong, into the artworld’s autumn ‘season’, rising in front of it like a great blue wave, which ArtReview (having been to see Barbie over the summer, sat between an outing of young gay guys having a fantastic time and two nine-year-old girls who sat quietly through it looking perplexed) will expertly ride. Surfing the curl of gallery openings and art fairs, surfing to its peak (somewhere around December and end-of-year parties), then arcing into the lip and tube of the new year before diving ecstatically into the whitewater of yet more art fairs and whatever biennials and triennials happen to have drifted sunnily into ArtReview’s impact zone.

Mostly this never happens. Most times ArtReview loses its footing, crashing into what turns out not to be a majestic cresting liquid event-wave of positivity and achievement, but is, on closer inspection, an ever-growing garbage mountain – of gallery openings, art fairs, end-of-year parties, biennials and triennials – being bulldozed into the present from the future, ArtReview’s acid-pink-and-lime-motif surfing shorts by now lost and carried away, snagged on the oncoming wreckage…

That’s why it needs people like Matthew Barney. So it can deal with things like failure and defeat. That’s why it needs David Wojnarowicz. So it can deal with repression and being dehumanised. And that’s why it needs an animatronic Elvis.

Because it’s a memento mori that’s creepy but fun. ArtReview

Canned car

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Scan here to see our exhibitions

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8/8/23 10:55 AM 15/08/2023 15:05

16 Sept 2023 – 25 Feb 2024

With the support of

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Exhibition presented in partnership with Palais Galliera, Fashion Museum of the City of Paris, Paris Musées

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Art Observed

The Interview Diego Marcon

by Chris Fite-Wassilak 30 In a Dark Wood

by Martin Herbert 41

Mutant Media

by Jamie Sutcliffe 43 Class Cannibals

by Amber Husain 46

Diego Marcon, The Parents’ Room (still), 2021, digital video transferred from 35mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound, 6 min 23 sec, looped. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ , London

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Art Featured

Matthew Barney

by Ross Simonini 50

David Wojnarowicz

by Kashayar J. Khabushani 72

Isabelle Frances McGuire

by Alexandra Drexelius 60

Southern Discomfort

by Oliver Basciano 78

Casey Reas interview by J.J. Charlesworth 66

page 50 Matthew Barney, DELAY OF GAME (manual) B, 1991, gelatin silver print in prosthetic plastic frame. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 88 O Quilombismo, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Rosha Yaghmai, by Jenny Wu Roberto Jacoby, by Gaby Cepeda Before Tomorrow, by Mark Rappolt Doris Salcedo, by Mariacarla Molè RECLAMATION (NXTHVN), by Cassie Packard Tarek Lakhrissi, by Benoît Loiseau Tova Mozard, by Nathaniel Budzinski Art Encounters Biennial, by Oliver Basciano Doug Aitken, by Mark Rappolt Chris Ofili, by Tom Morton We Are They, by Jenny Wu James Chronister, by Claudia Ross we are a group of people composed of who we are,

by John-Baptiste Oduor Hamishi Farah, by Tom Morton Moki Cherry, by Tom Denman Sara Barker, by Greg Thomas The more things change…, by Salena Barry

Drag: A British History, by Jacob Bloomfield, reviewed by Phoebe Blatton Magma, edited by Paul Olivennes, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The Slip, by Prudence Peiffer, reviewed by Martin Herbert Sleepless, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed by David Terrien Bad Infinity, by Aria Dean, reviewed by Mitch Speed Juliette: Or, the Ghosts Return in the Spring,

by Camille Jourdy, reviewed by Madeleine Jacob Jon Arbuckle ’s Amazing adventures in Art land 122

page 100 Carlos Amorales, The Eye Me Not / El No Me Mires (still), 2015, HD film, colour, sound, 40 min. © courtesy the artist

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32, MAGOKJUNGANG 8-RO, GANGSEO-GU, SEOUL, 07802, REPUBLIC OF KOREA

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T R I C K S T E R ’ M O N G R E L ’ B E A S T

N Z I A N D E I E T A X I A L E D T A L L T A L E S

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Art Observed

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Photo: Chiara Fossati

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ArtReview

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The Interview

by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Diego Marcon

“In general when I work, it’s not like I’m looking for something and I find moles, it’s more like moles find me, they pop up. I don’t know why, I just try to remain open to these kinds of visit”

I first met Diego Marcon on an island. We were on a residency at Lake Vassivière, in France, and he had begun to film clouds on Super 8 and to hand-develop the film in his residency apartment’s shower. The resulting silent short loop, Pour vos beaux yeux (For Your Beautiful Eyes, 2013), is a futile attempt to capture shapeshifting clouds, but also a brief meditation on seeing and film, on how light can be filtered and held for a moment, to be passed on. While on the island, Marcon introduced me to his earlier SPOOL series (2007–12), where in exchange for transferring someone’s homevideo recordings from their tangle of Hi8, MiniDV and VHS formats to digital, the Italian artist was given permission to use the footage to create his own videos. The resulting edited shorts were shaped around what type of film genre Marcon determined the principal cameraperson – often a listless or doting dad – had subconsciously drawn on to direct their footage: one becomes a roving road movie; another a tense horror film. Cinema’s influence, Marcon suggests, is something beyond the direct experience of watching, but imbibed and distributed into how we imagine the world around us.

Marcon has since developed a series of striking short-films that make further use of the mechanics of cinema and the histories of cinematic effects, such as animatronics and CGI, as well as the narratives and tropes that have been produced by them. Imagine a brief aside in a Disney feature-film stretched to an eternal loop, drawn out so that we might fully appreciate its textures – but in being asked to stay with and dwell in that moment, we might also start to recognise an existential unease that has always been there. Ludwig (2018) is a short CGI musical, in which a young boy sings a lament about his ambiguous predicament: seemingly trapped in a ship’s dark hold, he is pitched about by the storm outside, the camera veering wildly from side to side. He lights a match, the accompanying piano keeping a tense and persistent rhythm as the match burns to his fingers and he’s left again in the dark. It’s high melodrama, and patently ridiculous that this poor blond boy can only convey his worry through such an elaborate and sonorous means; but it’s also a loop barely a minute long, and so we return to his woes again and again, with no way out. The Parents’ Room (2021), a ten-minute film shown as part of Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk

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of Dreams, at the 2022 Venice Biennale, is also a musical, although this time song is used to tell the story of a father murdering his family and then dying by suicide. Each of the characters is a lifesize puppet of sorts, the actors wearing slumping, silicone masks and prosthetic hands as they sing sweetly of their own deaths.

Such dark twists are typical of Marcon’s work, a black, dramatic irony that draws on our longestablished expectations of what films can and should do. These subversions are usually paired with a very physical directness: whether that be the warmth of celluloid film used for most of his moving-image works, or, in his short film Monelle (2017), a stark blackness that is punctuated by unexpectedly loud pops and bright flashes that briefly illuminate disturbing scenes of lurking figures and dragged bodies. These effects impact viewers on an immediately somatic level, but Marcon seems to be seeking a place where both our bodily and emotional memories are stored, creating films that restlessly circle around the dread and desire that sit at the heart of the contemporary mythmachine that is film. Fresh from completing a new work using animatronics, Marcon spoke with me about genre, film memory and moles.

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Inviting Projection ARTREVIEW The place, or the feeling, of youth recurs across your films. What are your first film memories?

DIEGO MARCON I had what I would later realise was a very strong childhood cinema experience. My parents divorced when I was five years old – when I was starting to form memories – and going to the cinema was very connected to my father coming to pick me up and take me with him for a few days, and cinema was something we started to do every weekend. It was at the beginning of the 1990s.

I have a strong memory of going to see Batman Returns and my father taking me out of the cinema when the Penguin bites the nose of the journalist, probably because he found it too violent for a kid. Most Sundays were at the cinema, to see mainstream US films like Jurassic Park, and we were also huge clients of Blockbuster, with that particular voyage of going in to choose a VHS. I remember my father coming home with a few movies, like Cool Runnings, while I was on the sofa with a strong flu. In Italy, summer is a low season for cinema, we go more in fall and winter, when it’s bad weather outside. So it also feels very connected to a kind of literal darkness, melding long,

cold winter days, feeling slightly feverish, with these type of blockbuster movies.

Recently I went back to some of the animation stuff I watched when I was a kid, Don Bluth films like The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, All Dogs Go to Heaven – it was always Bluth’s films that really stuck in my head. Bluth – and I wasn’t aware of this at the time – was a Disney animator who had dropped out of the studio to make his own work. Despite the seeming all-encompassing galaxy of Disney, there are some feature films that don’t circulate in the same way now, or aren’t as well remembered, and move in their own realm.

AR There are recurring child protagonists and child archetypes in your films – the orphan, and echoes of myths like Pinocchio, in Ludwig or Il malatino.

In your untitled animated works, characters are often faceless or only partially sketched out. Are these hollow vessels for the audience to fill?

DM It’s like the ‘Blacky Pictures’ from the 1940s, a set of pictures designed as a psychoanalytic tool, but the dog is just a kind of black spot – it’s less characterised, so less of a character and easier to fill. I do use – and ‘using’ is a kind of violent term, I know – them as a trigger for the audience. It can be sinister, but I like this ambiguity, with children as a hook, where people watching might enter a more empathetic and sentimental

space. I’m interested in the work retaining a vulnerable position, with a strong emotional dimension. But this also has to do with spectacle, with the use of emotions by things like politics, propaganda, marketing and so forth. The sentimental and emotional level is where everything moves somehow, so that’s where art has to be engaged.

A Paranoid Beat AR The sentiment in your work often includes a sense of missing something, a reverie. The works seem to long for something that remains unfulfilled, gesturing towards what’s missing without ever finding it.

DM It has a lot to do with melancholy, which is not like a missing where you know the object that has been lost, such as when in mourning.

It’s more that something is missing but you don’t know what. In Italian there are many shades to the term mancare, where you can miss seeing someone or even use it for something like ‘I missed myself’ when you faint or pass out.

AR Your recent film Dolle [2023] has a rhythmic aspect to it, the hypnotic recitation of numbers. You enter a space where you’re unsure if what you’re seeing is being repeated over and over, but then small details

Dramoletti, 2023 (installation view, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan).

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

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– a child’s noisy breathing or a hooting owl – break that illusion. Repetition and structure seem to be important to this sense of restless searching, circling around a pattern.

DM During the last month I have been listening almost only to Glenn Gould. I think part of the attraction is the sharpness of a cold, analytical execution of the score – which is a structure that can be worked through and manipulated.

I’m influenced by techno, hardcore and gabber, which I was into when I was a teenager: the kick, the repetition and this very square, repetitive pattern, the structure of a four-four rhythm, with the samples and the looping that go in and out. The internal, solipsistic, wrapped-arounditself sort of vibe is an influence – that repetition of a single element, very paranoid, very fast, which I can see in Dolle.

AR In The Parents’ Room a bird appears at the window and starts to sing, a recognisable trope from Disney musicals. Monelle, as another example, draws strongly on the suspense and sound design of horror films. Are film genres a form of collective memory that you then play off?

DM Working with cinema means not only working with the medium, with moving images, film formats, narratives and so forth. It also means working with the cultural impact

of cinema on society. That’s probably why I’m interested in mainstream entertainment, which shapes our shared psychological, emotional and visual landscape. I remember the one time I went to Los Angeles: everything looked so incredibly strange and at the same time so familiar, because I’d seen it in hundreds of films since I was a kid. It was incredibly melancholic, and like being in a neverending credits scene.

Working with the cinema genre incorporates this entire background of archetypes, references for our psychoemotional states. Cinema itself is also a very bodily experience: both the darkness and the big projection that surrounds you, the venue, the volume of it. Working with Federico Chiari, the composer with whom I collaborate on the films, we like to move within a very precisely structured genre: like the pop-jazz Sinatra kind of song, the German lied, a treatment of the sound typical of horror movies and so on; we like to work inside certain codes and try to pervert them from the inside.

Technique AR You’ve mentioned that the journey to make Monelle began with an invitation to work with The Museum of Industry and Labour in Brescia, where

you found a camera that was used in making some of the first animation in Italy. Your works more generally perform aspects of film and animation history, like hand-developed film or cel-by-cel animation, drawing us into a performed archaeology of cinema techniques...

DM My first works were videos with a documentary approach, filming reality and then editing. The scriptwriting then structured what had been recorded, even if it might slowly abstract from a real situation towards something more fictional. Then making the cloud film, Pour vos beaux yeux, I thought about how a cloud is basically an outline of a shape, like a cartoon, and so I began to approach animation. When I started my first animations, drawing straight onto film, I began to understand that it was important to me that every work feature a technique or a process that – for me, and the crew of people I work with – is experimental, to have that sense of wonder and the marvellous.

Moving towards different techniques is a way for us to keep expanding, and to put us in the condition to be amazed or surprised. But it also makes us think about the question of what can you, as a spectator, feel when exposed to these different techniques?

In Dolle we used animatronics, like those in The Neverending Story or Jurassic Park, where there is something different in the physical

Monelle (still), 2017, digital video transferred from 35mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound, 13 min 53 sec (looped)

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movements of the material. The set was completely automatised. With the animatronics we attempted to work with studios doing such work – these are studios that do a lot of advertising and commercial stuff, an attitude which is no fun, and that tends to reflect in the form at the end. In each film, for myself and my collaborators, it’s important to have a challenge, to see where we can take a discipline. So basically we set up our own animatronics lab in Tuscany and designed everything ourselves. This allowed us to find our own way.

AR Is there a nostalgia for these older techniques, or are you interested in what can be invoked in using them?

DM Many horror movies are going back to traditional special effects, because digital seems to scare people less. It’s complicated, because, of course, a certain use of the digital can be really scary, but there is something in the reality of the materiality that you can see in the image that somehow creates a very uncanny feeling. I like to structure and design everything precisely, and CGI gives you this opportunity: everything must be planned and decided on a computer.

Working with animatronics and prosthetics, you can design everything, but at a certain moment the reality comes in and tells you: this

stuff takes this space, takes these shapes, reacts this way to this and that. This process of making is very interesting for me, where the reality enters in the project and forces you to shape around it or think about, be exposed to something external that is not 100 percent under your control. In The Parents’ Room it’s important that you can see some issues with the prosthetics, that you see some of the silicone at the nose’s end or around the mouth aren’t cut exactly right or aren’t made up very well – the material, thingness, is a third force that comes into the film, it’s like an unconscious, a level of uncanniness that is brought in by the material.

AR ‘Uncanny’ is one of those words that I feel wears itself down in certain ways or can drift into meaninglessness. What does it mean to you?

DM With The Parents’ Room there’s the feeling you have with the characters: you see their faces, faces you might see every day, the eyes are human, but at the same time there is something that makes them not human. For me the uncanny is this feeling of being seduced but at the same time disturbed, a kind of fascination and repulsion. Like my experience of Los Angeles, where you’ve dealt with something from another situation – you know what it is, you recognise it, but at the same time you can’t

focus on it. That makes it very alien or different from what you thought it might be.

AR Dolle involves a mole family’s evening scene – where two fastidious parents attempt to do some sort of accounting, while their children sleep nearby – which acts as a 30-minute loop. Where does such a structure start to take shape for you? Why moles, why doing calculations?

DM The idea came when I was working on The Parents’ Room, while colouring in the prosthetic silicone masks used in the film, working in the Tuscany countryside. I thought: ‘It would be nice to do something with a mole just counting.’

The film draws on the classic tradition of anthropomorphic animals. But in general when I work, it’s not like I’m looking for something and I find moles, it’s more like moles find me, they pop up. I don’t know why, I just try to remain open to these kinds of visit. Maybe there are certain aspects of the mind that take an unexpected shape, and in this case it’s the shape of a mole.

Glassa, a solo exhibition of work by Diego Marcon, can be seen at Centro Pecci, Prato (Tuscany), from 30 September to 4 February; Marcon’s solo show Have You Checked the Children will be on view at Kunsthalle Basel from 27 October to 24 January

above and preceding pages The Parents’ Room (stills), 2021, digital video transferred from 35mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound, 6 min 23 sec (looped)

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above Dolle (production still), 2023 all images apart from opening portrait © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ , London

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AN EXPERT’S GUIDE TO THE MYSTERIOUS WORKINGS OF THE GLOBAL ART WORLD

‘A tell-all book’ The Art Newspaper

OUT N OW t

hames andhu dson.c om and al l good bookse llers

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A friend of mine told me some years ago that, in his opinion, the worst thing about getting older was that “you become invisible to women”.

He’s approximately fifteen years older than me and thus, where I am concerned, something of an oracle. Catching up with him recently, though, he waxed nostalgic for his invisibility era, having discovered something worse still. He was visible again – but mortifyingly so, because people on public transport were offering him, a perceived codger, their seat. Seen when young, unseen in middle age, seen again as you get older: does that sound familiar? If so, you may be an artist. During the last decade or so, the contemporary artworld has done some very public atoning for former exclusions: it has belatedly spotlighted, if sometimes self-servingly, artists of colour, LGBTQ+ artists, women artists – particularly old or deceased ones – and artists in general who don’t hail from Europe or the United States. Superficially at least, the artworld now looks inclusive, everyone welcome. But – and I hear about and witness it regularly, because it’s my age group and a lot of my friends are artists – there’s a missing demographic.

When you’re young, attractive, frothing with ideas that appear at least somewhat new, and perhaps posting multiple studio selfies daily to Instagram, the artworld is potentially your oyster. When you’re wrinkly and decrepit, haven’t had a show since the early 1980s but have perhaps been a respected teacher whose students now namecheck you, or your old work looks uncannily like other people’s new work and there’s a lot of it mothballed away, galleries are more likely to come knocking in hopes of snagging your estate when you take your soon-to-come dirt nap. Today’s financialised artworld, in this respect, is a cross between Logan’s Run – that 1970s sci-fi flick wherein the hippie edict that you shouldn’t trust anyone over thirty gets allegorised in a society that offs its citizens at that age – and a predatory pseudo-gerontocracy.

But in between there’s a big trench with a lot of artists from their late forties up to their sixties lying dazedly in it.

What hit them? Answers aren’t hard to fathom. Many artists map out an aesthetic, or a conceptual territory, in their earlier years, and then proceed to make minor variations on it.

Or they make bold stylistic changes, following their instincts and their restlessness, but the market – which today prizes brand recognition – doesn’t really want that. Whichever way they go, anyway, at their heels is another generation

Midcareerism

What’s an artist to do when no longer dewy and not yet long in the tooth?

Martin Herbert surveys the options, none of them pretty

Titian, An Allegory of Prudence, c. 1550, oil on canvas, 76 × 69 cm.

Courtesy National Gallery, London

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or two with ideas that seem more culturally relevant, sporting the glittering crown of youth.

And the artist who’s merely producing variations on ten years ago – or, perhaps, is making what to them feel like large leaps, but to others might look like microscopic advances, such changes being typically more visible to the artist than to others – looks a bit predictable and inert.

For the art market – and this part has been true for decades; even now-revered figures like Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman had midlife reputational dips – such artists’ work is both a bit too recent and familiar, and paradoxically not old enough to look fresh again. If they have shows, they’re often not written about. A major but lengthily occluded artist, your Phyllida Barlow, say, needs to be lucky or highly determined to survive this phase, not least if they’ve also picked up a professorship that leaves them less time to innovate in the studio. So many midcareer artists end up being just teachers, at best. Others fall out of the system altogether. This process is particularly hard on women, as they age, due to residual artworld sexism and because looks have become part of the package of being an artist, an element in the selfmarketing that’s come to define twenty-first-century work culture. ’Twas not always thus, of course.

Look at the Ab-Ex bros: Willem de Kooning had his first solo show when he was forty-four, Barnett Newman when he was forty-five. (Franz Kline rocketed out of the gates by comparison, debuting at a mere forty.) That is, they were admired in their prime after a hard-won process of arriving at something original, and not before.

While susceptible to romanticisation – there’s probably a reason they were all alcoholics – this seems a bit healthier than what we have, not that it’s likely to come back in a hurry.

A few substantial, antimeritocratic conditions would have to transform, including the wider cultural obsession with youth and the artworld’s obsession with novelty, short-term signature styles, etc. Or simply one thing: that we run out of worthwhile geriatric-or-dead artists to bring back, every last person included in a yellowing pre-1990s Documenta or Whitney Biennial catalogue having been dragged screaming into the brightly lit white cube, reassessed, reified, prices hiked. Then who’s left? Who’s still invisible? All these people whose work you might remember from 20 years ago, still determinedly working, and at least some of them making better art than in their salad days.

Bold tastemakers, the trench is this way.

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HAN YUCHEN

Zonate Gallery Hong Kong zonategallery@maygroup.cn

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In his farsighted 2003 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction’, US academic W.J.T. Mitchell donned a critical hazmat suit to dissect a newly intrusive dynamic of capitalist extraction. Like Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, upon which its title fondly riffed, Mitchell’s text questioned ideas of ‘aura’ and ‘reproducibility’ but crucially redirected them towards a moment in which the codes of biological matter had been cracked, replicated and financialised. Here, reproduction was no longer tethered to representation but corporeally entwined with the reconstitution of living matter through techniques of genome sequencing, tissue cloning and gene editing.

Given the lab-bound, cellular scale of these innovations, Mitchell wondered, how might the molecular evolutions of genomic capital be communicated in the public domain? What’s more, how could a work of art find discursive purchase in an age characterised by the very mutability of life, where each modified cell might itself be considered a living work of art?

Despite his spirited prognoses, Mitchell’s proposed examples were deader than dodos: cloyingly humanist works by Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley provided inert symbols of the human as an environmentally conditioned subject, but they did little to capture the vertiginous spirit of recombinant genetic data. Beyond the remit of studio-art practice however, Mitchell did sense the stirrings of a vital correlate for the biocybernetic era within the animated fantasies of popular culture.

It’s one that we might, with hindsight, suggest illustrated a more fundamentally (and perhaps unsettlingly) productive relationship between life and image than any static assemblage of vitrines, pills or generously endowed body casts.

Mutant Media

Animation and gaming design studios aren’t just for entertainment, claims Jamie Sutcliffe, they’re a geneticist’s lab for producing our spliced biocybernetic future

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, A Terrible Fiction (still), 2019, 4K UHD colour video with sound, 11 min 51 sec. © the artists

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From the retro-engineered dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) to the cybernetics of Kon Satoshi’s anime Paprika (2006), from the plasmatic pliability of Nickelodeon’s anarchic cartoon Ren & Stimpy (1991–96) to the genetic deviances of Shinji Mikami’s videogame Resident Evil (1996), a pop-cultural index of the biocybernetic imaginary was being metabolised in the decades flanking the millennium. These were novel forms of animation in which biological matter was recharacterised by the exhilarating metastases of mutation.

More importantly however, these animated imaginings betrayed the shared toolsets of commercial animation and the genetic sciences, both of which employed the interrelated media of analogue drawing and digital code as fundamental building blocks of their industries.

As Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante suggest in their recent book Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital (2022), highlighting this affinity in a way that describes the animator’s studio as the geneticist’s lab, ‘mutant forms of life were planned in the abstract, their genome designed on paper, and tentatively realised in practice’.

This entanglement of life and image in a techno-political scenario characterised by the ubiquity of animation – from graphically rendered feature-films and the animated interfaces of health-tracking apps, to motion capture, augmented-reality videogames and genetic-data simulation – has been beautifully conceptualised by media theorist Deborah Levitt as the ‘animatic apparatus’. For Levitt, the dual senses of ‘animation’ as both the production of life’s representation and the very condition of ‘aliveness’ have converged at a protean life–screen nexus in which ‘life

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becomes not a property that one has, or doesn’t, but a site for intervention, production, poiesis’.

Like a conceptual canker sprouting from Mitchell’s essay, the animatic apparatus situates animation and vitality along the same coconstitutive continuum: while life is increasingly produced and conditioned by images, images are progressively positioned to call new life into being.

The animatic apparatus provides a neat cipher to Genetic Automata, a series of four striking essay-films by British artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy currently on display at London’s Wellcome Collection that map the interrelation of bodily matter with digital interfaces, troubling lineages of racial representation and the dynamics of computational power. The exhibition echoes the Wellcome’s own displays by distributing its artworks among idiosyncratic museological exhibits, grouping ephemera from the uncomfortable histories of scientific racism alongside fragments of speculative culture, including Afrofuturist comic books by Nnedi Okorafor, Hideo Kojima’s cultic riff on weaponised cloning, Metal Gear Solid (1998), and even that infamously hollow clarion-call for racial equity, the ‘morphing’ sequence from Michael Jackson’s 1991 music video Black or White. In one vitrine, late-nineteenth-century photographic studies of Jewish children created by eugenic fabulist Francis Galton are layered to demonstrate supposed racial differences in a manner not too dissimilar from the multiplanar cel-animation techniques developed by Walt Disney.

Achiampong and Blandy’s films are calmly provocative, questioning the assumed authority and unacknowledged biases of scientific speculation and its pop-cultural residues. A Terrible Fiction (2019) recounts the unacknowledged importance of John Edmonstone, an enslaved Black man who taught Charles Darwin the art of taxidermy, while simultaneously exploring the discriminations of evolutionary biology, the deceptions of popular genetic ancestry tests

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and the foundational genocide that gave rise to modern Homo sapiens, while A Lament for Power (2020) reanimates the voice of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cancer cells were posthumously subject to cultivation and testing by the biomedical industries without her consent due to their remarkable propensity for self-replication. The film hauntingly evokes the cellular afterlives of Lacks alongside footage from the controversial videogame Resident Evil 5 (2009), in which a bioterrorism incident casts African victims as undead adversaries caught in terminal gameplay loops.

top Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, _GOD_MODE_ (still), 2023, 4K UHD colour video with sound, 12 min 25 sec. © the artists above Genetic Automata, 2023 (installation view, Wellcome Collection, London).

Photo: Steve Pocock

While foregrounding the ongoing traumas of ‘race science’ and epidermal prejudice through narration that is, by turns, accusatory and wearied, Achiampong and Blandy never fail to intuit unifying possibilities in pop culture’s shared spaces, rallying dialogue from cult media to suggest opportunities for historical revision and communal understanding. “Can’t we shapeshift too, work together to undermine these fantasies?” the artists ask via pointed narration in the concluding film of the series, _GOD_MODE_ (2023), figuring racial capitalism as a game that might be rebooted, a fiction that could be rewritten by a newly generated character. Might a new operating system be assembled from the resources the artists draw upon, Genetic Automata seems to suggest, one that exploits the animatic possibilities of protean identities forged from more equitable sciences and entertainments? Perhaps this mutant media is the latent postscript to Mitchell’s essay, its distressing oversights and liberating possibilities the messy inheritance of a biocybernetic age within which we’re still working to orientate ourselves? Following Levitt, we could suggest that we’ve never been at a more critically intimate vantage point from which to assess animation’s enduring appeal.

Jamie Sutcliffe is a London-based writer, codirector of Strange Attractor Press and editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic (2021)

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How do you like your rich?

Shrouded in a marshmallow mantle ready to be toasted, flamboyantly, alive? Or simply dressed, freshly caught and about to be bludgeoned with a rock?

This past year a parade of ‘eat the rich’ films has served Anglo-American audiences a healthy selection of gastronomic styles through which to wreak revenge on money.

While less literal than the class-inflected spectacles of actual cannibalism we saw in the era of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the bloodthirsty attitudes of black comedies Triangle of Sadness (2022) and The Menu (2022) are still culinarily packaged and capital-critical in name.

Supply of this kind of cultural product would seem to follow current demand, at least on a superficial level. For weren’t the years of high pandemic a social-media feeding-frenzy for wealth-hating Gen Z? Weren’t influencers on the left and further-left staging threats to ‘vore’ the Forbes richlist and stab Jeff Bezos with forks?

The haste with which producers served the people what they wanted has gifted us a flurry of fabulous scenes. Who wouldn’t delight, just a little, in witnessing the wealthy guzzled by those who have been eaten away by financial hardship? And yet, if we attend more closely to the influential burghers of TikTok, we will find this is not quite what they ordered.

“Bay-bee,” cooed activist YouTuber Kristina Maione in a viral video in 2021, “when we say ‘eat the rich’… it’s not because we’re jealous…

We’re mad about the way that rich people exploit, use, abuse and manipulate the working class in order to gain that level of wealth. We’re not mad at David down the street with the big house… We’re mad about the unethical ways that people become billionaires.” It is hardly surprising, the same year that an Institute of Economic Affairs report found that 67 percent of young people in Britain wanted to live under socialism, that the generation most immiserated by capitalist dynamics would take issue with the mechanics of inordinate richness. It is sadly no more surprising that instead mainstream culture’s response should be to revert our attention to ‘David’ and his mansion.

What do high-budget blockbusters show us when they offer us the rich for delectation?

Not a class, it would seem, but a species. Not the product of social processes, but an evolutionary fact. As the grisly carnival of luxury yachters in Triangle of Sadness are shown vomiting the contents of their greed across the keening ship, their captain, played by Woody Harrelson,

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Fine Young Cannibals

A spate of recent glitzy films have asked us to eat the rich.

But what, asks Amber Husain, are we really swallowing?

Triangle of Sadness (still), 2022, dir Ruben Östlund

disgorges the drunken wisdom that very few people see themselves as monsters, even if monsters they are. (As he speaks, a billionaire woman, slippery with her own sweat and vomit, flops across the toilet floor like a new-born seal pup. She hurls into the bowl with animal shrieks before an alien shade of brown begins to erupt from the overburdened drains.) Instead, he suggests, “they make up a construction that justifies what they do”, and what they do is determined by their ontological status as rich. United not by their stake in a system that produces inequality, but simply by their instinct for tax avoidance, these creatures’ only possible redemption is to be eaten in return. No wonder, when the yacht is shipwrecked and the power of money dissolved, that the threat they will be mauled by disgruntled crew becomes the movie’s narrative propeller.

A similarly archetypal brood of odious snobs are the butt of The Menu’s joke. The film’s antagonist, Ralph Fiennes’s homicidal masterchef Julian Slowik, can at least admit his own monstrosity among them. Yet by subjecting his dinner guests to an evening of gastronomic gore, he believes he can cleanse himself of any such association. When his one rogue working-class dinner guest calls the cops on the maniacal cook, he declares her a species traitor – “an eater like the rest”.

The representation of rich and poor as eaters versus eaten is a deft ideological move.

Its achievement, wrote John Berger in his 1976 essay ‘The Eaters and the Eaten’, is to suggest ‘that overproduction and infinite increase are natural’; to ‘prove the naturalness of wealth’.

If movie cannibals were once portrayed as starving slaughterhouse workers feeding on the affluent youth, poverty is now reduced to an immovable condition, as with the ‘eaters’ in Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romantic comedy Bones and All (2022). How does something so processual as class get reduced to biological breed? Perhaps we should take instruction from the human/animal class divide we already hold so dear. If I eat a pig, I render it other; if I render pigs other, it’s so that I might eat. ‘Generation Left’ has called for a radical critique of power – the power that others and brutalises pigs and pig-ifies the poor. Budget-holding directors invite us simply to make pigs of the rich instead.

Amber Husain, a writer based in London, is the author of two book-length essays, Meat Love (2023) and Replace Me (2021)

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No pain, no gain?

What’s primary about Matthew Barney’s Secondary

by Ross Simonini

When I first became addicted to aspiration, I began to fear failure. This haunted atmosphere of a crime scene. What I felt there, and what was especially true for making art. When I started aiming for great- I continue to feel in Barney’s work 17 years later, is the seedy, embarness, I wanted a direct path to my goal and considered any deviation a rassing desire of ambition, followed closely by its shadow: the mistake. This desire made for a painful process, but it’s the game you ominous threat of defeat. In the work, I could also see that Barney was play when you play with ambition; suffer in the face of this chaotic willing to destroy his art as he made it. He was rough, even violent, reality or find energy within the failure that is inevitably, relentlessly forcing the work to be robust, unlike so much art that insists on its to come. own preciousness to demonstrate its value.

I heard about Matthew Barney’s work before I saw it in person.

I often think about Barney’s work through writer Nassim Among young artists I knew, he was spoken of as a symbol of great- Nicholas Taleb’s philosophy of antifragility, within which stress ness, who made big sculpture, epic films and athletic performances. improves a system, a person or even an artwork. Or perhaps a more I saw him on a 2001 episode of Art21 (2001–), an American documentary relevant concept is hormesis, through which small damages to a series on contemporary art. There, Barney’s father talked about his body improves its function. Weightlifting, for example, is a process son’s early interest in becoming a plastic surgeon. He said, “[Matthew] of creating tears in muscles so that the tissue will grow stronger just goes out and does things. I don’t know what it is… he doesn’t seem when it heals. This is known as hypertrophy, a concept that Barney to have the fears that the rest of us do. He just seems to go straight at began working with in his DRAWING RESTRAINT works, made while it and find a way to do it.” a student at Yale.

My first physical encounter came a few years later, with DRAWING And just as a bodybuilder pushes their calves to point of fatigue, RESTRAINT 14 (2006) at my hometown museum, the San Francisco many of Barney’s sculptures push materials – lead, bentonite, zinc, Museum of Modern Art. This was part of a retrospective of Barney’s self-lubricating plastic – to point of failure. Occidental Restraint (2005– multimedia DRAWING RESTRAINT series (1987–), many of the compo- 09), a roomsize installation of collapsed industrial plastic, is the result nents of which involve him pulling, leaping, lifting or dragging of Barney’s attempt to make a cast of a purposely excessive amount while attempting to draw. The finished product is usually tentative, of an unstable material. smeared and strained marks. Like many goal-addicted artists, Barney SECONDARY takes on failure at the thematic level. It is a cinematic seemed to be inventing absurd obstacles for himself, to manufacture tone-poem on the crisis of American football, told through dance, chamber music and true horror. (‘Secondary’ refers to a defensive the pleasure of achievement.

In the silo-size stairwell at SFMOMA, he had climbed the side of the position group on a football team.) The film considers the game of building’s fifth storey to make a faint technical diagram, surrounded football’s wilful destruction of human bodies for capital and enterby the scuffs of his loafers and centred on his ‘field’ symbol – a pill or tainment, a problem that has become increasingly glaring in recent stadium shape with a line across it. This is Barney’s logo, which he has years, as the long-term effects of repetitive concussions become applied to everything he makes, from his earliest works to his newest more apparent. film, SECONDARY (2023). For him, this altered crucifix represents a The film runs at an hour (same as a football game), which is signifbody (pill) against a restraint (line) – an illustration of the fundamen- icantly shorter than Barney’s past work. It’s also more modest in its tal situation of his work. production (sets, costumes, locations) than SECONDARY (production still), 2023. his previous films, which have, for the most The remains of this ‘action’ – a term that Photo: Jonathan O’Sullivan. © the artist. recalls Joseph Beuys, film directing and part, grown in ambition over the past three Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Arnold Schwarzenegger – hummed with the decades. Rather than take on the mythological Hetzler, Regen Projects and Sadie Coles HQ

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scale of most of that work – with characters and stories from Egyptian, image that was also repeated multiple times throughout the film and Greek and Japanese myths – the entire film is the investigation of a studio, echoing DRAWING RESTRAINT. single historic moment.

Throughout SECONDARY Barney recapitulates ideas from his Where DRAWING RESTRAINT focuses our attention on overcoming previous work. In my single viewing I picked up on elements of the physical challenges, SECONDARY is an expression of pain without tran- video-sculptural works The Jim Otto Suite (1991), The Cremaster Cycle scendence. It retells an American tragedy: in 1978 Jack Tatum, a safety (1994–2002) and River of Fundament (2014) – titles that gleam with the (part of the ‘secondary’), slammed so forcefully into Darryl Stingley sharp vocabulary of death metal. One of my favourite self-references on the field that he snapped Stingley’s spinal cord, paralysing him at is the oversize game clock that Barney installed for the film on the facade of the studio, hanging above the East River. Throughout the age twenty-six.

Barney viewed this event on television as a young man but went film, the clock counts down until it begins relentlessly flashing ‘00:00’ on to play football anyway, first in high school and then at Yale. But with the apocalyptic finality of broken time. While these numbers in college he quickly turned to art instead. (Recently, Barney has said refer to the end of the game, they also recall the double zeros worn by football player Jim Otto, who he’s glad he stopped playing when endured famous levels of sporthe did, for the sake of his body.) Yet What I felt there, and what I continue to feel induced damage and prosthetic football remained on his mind, and in Barney’s work 17 years later, is the seedy, he returned to it often in his work. repair – supposedly 78 operations. embarrassing desire of ambition, followed by During the 1990s, when Barney Sometimes this was direct – the setting of a stadium, the use of players employed Otto as a character in his its shadow: the ominous threat of defeat as characters – and sometimes it work OTTOshaft (1992), he considwas indirect, such as his sculptures made with the polymers used in ered these ‘0’s as a ‘twin roving rectum’ on the field. This knowledge protective football equipment and the petroleum jelly slathered on transforms those clock digits into a quartet of anuses blinking onto the surface of the faeces-infected river – which was, incidentally, the athlete’s body.

While many professions negotiate failure and success, few are a central character in River of Fundament. more explicit about it than the professional athlete – every game is an From 2012 to 2013, I spent many of my days on the set of River of unequivocal win or loss. ‘I came of age on the football field,’ Barney Fundament, a vast operatic project that included a five-hour film, live told Art News in 1993. ‘That’s where I started to construct meaning performances and a fleet of automobile-scaled sculptures. It is by in my life, as an athlete. I think athletes are people who understand many measures his most ambitious work so far – in length, production value, personnel. I was working on an essay about the project’s things through their bodies.’

Like his early videowork REPRESSIA (decline) (1991), SECONDARY was music (composed by Barney’s longtime collaborator Jonathan screened in the same place it was shot – in this case, Barney’s Long Bepler), which would appear in the River of Fundament monograph.

Island City warehouse-studio, right before he closed it down and I also planned to write a book on the making of the film and spent moved to another location. To experience the five-screen, surround- hours interviewing and notetaking to this end. sound installation, hung like a Jumbotron, I sat on the same Astroturf The project was an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s big historical saga Ancient Evenings (1983), a surreal, on which the actors and dancers had DRAWING RESTRAINT 14, 2006, video (colour, no sound), performed. On it was printed a beam of light modernist retelling of Egyptian mythology 28 min 20 sec. Video still: Peter Strietmann. refracting through Barney’s field symbol, an that seemed to resist any traditional approach © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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SECONDARY, 2023, five-channel 4K colour video installation with immersive sound, 60 min. Photo: Dario Lasagni. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Regen Projects and Sadie Coles HQ

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SECONDARY, 2023. Video still: Soren Nielsen. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Regen Projects and Sadie Coles HQ

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OTTOshaft (OTTOdrone channel), 1992. Video stills: Peter Strietmann. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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above SECONDARY, 2023. Production still: Julieta Cervantes. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Regen Projects and Sadie Coles HQ preceding pages River of Fundament, 2014, 4k video with 7.1 sound, 5 hr 11 min. Production still: Hugo Glendinning. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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adaptation. Mailer had asked Barney to adapt the book shortly before the self-imposed kind of pain. The two recurring figures in his early his death, probably because he knew it was a towering challenge that work – Harry Houdini and Otto – were extreme examples of people no one but Barney would consider. The film included Hollywood who chose a life rubbing against their body’s limitations. actors (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ellen Burstyn), musicians (Debbie Harry, In SECONDARY Barney plays the character of Oakland Raiders Milford Graves) and other cultural luminaries (Fran Lebowitz, Dick quarterback (Barney’s position in school) Ken Stabler, who was diagCavett). It was shot at several locations around the United States, nosed after death (he died, aged sixty-nine, in 2015) with chronic including Barney’s studio, where the artist rebuilt Mailer’s three- traumatic encephalopathy from the many hits he had endured. In storey apartment. Unlike previous films, which had been made in this role Barney’s body becomes the site of suffering and humiliaprivate, Barney created a series of largescale, semipublic performances tion, as it often is in his films. While other characters dance gracefully, as sequences in the film. At one of these he performed what he said Barney straps the inside guts of the football helmet to his head, willingly allows his coach to pour molten metal onto his skull and tries was ‘the largest nonindustrial iron pour that’s ever been attempted’.

I attended several of these performances (and appear as a bystander but repeatedly fails to run his plays. in one of them) and ended up pubOver and over he falls, smacklishing several essays on the whole ing down hard onto concrete, flat Over and over he falls, smacking down hard production for various art magaon his back, actively damaging his onto concrete, flat on his back, actively zines. But I failed to reach my inbody on camera. (Barney trained to damaging his body on camera. It’s tragic, but tention to write something longer. avoid serious injury.) It’s tragic, but Though I found the work to be a also funny in a Chaplin-slapstick also funny. This is a black comedy of errors striking success – as music, film, way. This is a black comedy of errors. performance and sculpture – I just couldn’t seem to get my head Nothing good comes from the events in this film. around it. The whole thing was too multifarious, too ambitious in And yet, it’s when the terrible act of violence happens in scope to be compressed into explanation.

SECONDARY that something strikingly beautiful does comes into This is true of many Barney narratives, which fail to come together being. Barney’s work always, in some way, tells the story of making in any reducible way. For me, this is often the work’s purpose. I love sculpture, and in SECONDARY this occurs when Stingley and Tatum how the films refuse clear forms. As a story they don’t seem to require collide. In this moment, they produce castings between their chests, cause and effect to be pleasurable, even at long stretches of silent like two hands pressing together clay, capturing the force in a physaction. This is true for many works of art, but Barney’s use of cinema ical object. Initially, these alien forms appear from nowhere and and myth seems to encourage viewers to look for a kind of cohesion fall from between the two men, bouncing and jiggling like fat that, thankfully, never arrives. For me, the work remains a mystery, tissue, but the final casting, made of terracotta, hits the floor and and I would like to keep it that way. shatters like Stingley’s vertebrae. In this single gesture, Barney transWhat often ties Barney’s work together is an atmosphere of pain. forms a great and terrible accident into a source of creation. Nothing Bepler’s music plays an important role in stimulating this dread – has been redeemed, but in that moment something new was irrepahoarse winds, extended vocal techniques, unexpected arrangements. rably conceived. ar As in horror films, this is the sound when RADIAL DRILL, 1991. someone is about to get hurt. Pain is a kind of Ross Simonini is a Los Angeles-based writer, Video still: Peter Strietmann. artist, musician and dialogist physical failure, and Barney often focuses on © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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Isabelle Frances McGuire

by Alexandra Drexelius

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above Bust2{“Assassins Creed NPC”, “Normandy”, “New United States Flag”}, 2023, wax, resin, cotton, chainmail, leather, motion-triggered sound device, wood, 168 × 38 × 36 cm. Photo: Kevin Weil facing page Bust1{“Elvis”, “Modern WarFare II NVG”}, 2023, animatronic Elvis bust, night-vision goggles, wood, 168 × 43 × 51 cm. Photo: Kevin Weil

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Chicago-based artist Isabelle Frances McGuire reworks readymade long-running franchises that regurgitate the same old story arcs, offer objects to examine the ways in which the body itself is worked on, a particularly fruitful arena for McGuire to examine the flattening influenced and displaced by technology. Yes, as that implies, the of visual culture amid an excess of sequels and reboots. real-life body is no longer the primary reference for recognising and Interrogating the false equivalencies between real-life combat and modelling human form; instead, the contemporary experience of the first-person shooting games – as well as the cyclical feedback between body – the way it looks, moves and behaves – is mediated, in the devel- game development and military technology – LOOP presented narraoped world, by screen culture. Appropriating both recognisable and tive cycles and repetitions as a manifestation of human behaviour esoteric content – from religious icons and minor videogame charac- interfacing with machines. Bust2{“Assassins Creed NPC”, “Normandy”, ters to prehistoric monuments and high-tech weapons – McGuire’s “New United States Flag”} (2023) comprises a wax bust cloaked by a flag sculptures are supplemented by motors, sensors and electronics as a and chainmail headdress. A motion sensor embedded in the sculpture physical stand-in for digitally circulated forms. Models of ships and triggers a cacophonous stream of battle bombs and cries, sourced from bombs that have been 3D-printed dangle limply from the restric- a Call of Duty: WWII (2017) scene depicting the US military storming tive knots of lightbulb cords; recycled animatronics convulse repet- Omaha Beach on D-Day. Elsewhere, a worn-down animatronic itively like malfunctioning machines; and dolls and mannequins WowWee Alive Elvis bust performs on a ten-minute looped cycle. stand paralysed, overburdened by the heft of their cultural references. The head of Bust1{“Elvis”, “Modern WarFare II NVG”}, (2023), accessorised Deftly consolidating an ever-widening with night-vision goggles, twerks back Videogames, noted for their lifelike stream of open-source and secondand forth. His mouth widens and conhand content, McGuire’s work realtracts as he recites canned quips in a visuals and long-running franchises, lush drawl dampened by the squeak ises a profound sense of consternation offer a fruitful arena in which to of ageing internal motors: “Are you as bodily agency for many is displaced looking for trouble? You came to the through increasingly dispersed and examine the flattening of visual culture right place.” McGuire’s assemblages advanced technological means.

The works assembled for McGuire’s recent solo exhibition LOOP, resemble ‘kitbashing’ – a method of combining open-source kits – at Manhattan gallery King’s Leap Fine Art, employ the readymade as real or digital – to create new forms. However, rather than propose a physical means of parodying the act of repetition inherent to mass something wholly new, McGuire’s mashups emphasise their dispamedia culture; like an ‘original audio’ refrain on a social media reel rate, recycled source materials. A lack of continuity – epitomised by divorced from its native source, online images are cropped, distorted Elvis’s iconic face obstructed by clunky toy goggles – is mirrored in and circulated, no longer bearing a resemblance to the real thing, but the artwork titles, which bracket various references from gaming the image of that thing. Digital media flattens even as it multiplies. accessories to character names to geographic locations. These sculpThe contemporary readymade emerges in content that has already tures repeat what’s already been done, an attitude mirrored in the been doubled. Whether parodying the revered likeness of Elvis repetitive sounds and movements performed by the sculptures as – whose real-life persona has been filtered through recycled video and they cycle through predetermined protocols. image content in magazines, on the silver screen, in merchandise and In the gallery’s basement, McGuire envisions a scene in which now on social channels – or imaginary nonplayer characters (NPCs) content is still loading. A shimmering partition (RoomDivider1{“Loading who reappear across virtual gaming campaigns, McGuire’s sculp- Zone”, “Jasmine”}, 2023) creates a barrier between two sculptures. tures accentuate the physicality of bodies that are manipulated on Referencing the interstitial zones in videogames where visual assets screens. Videogames, noted for their increasingly lifelike visuals and are still being rendered – picture a frozen or glitching screen due to

SelfPortrait2 {“Ghost”}, 2023, PLA plastic, fabric, children’s tactical vest, cord, leather boots, metal, children’s knee and elbow pads, 124 × 74 × 61 cm. Photo: Stefany Lazar

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11/08/2023 15:44

SelfPortrait2 {“Ghost”}, 2023, PLA plastic, fabric, children’s tactical vest, cord, leather boots, metal, children’s knee and elbow pads, 124 × 74 × 61 cm. Photo: Stefany Lazar

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Digesting Duck Entry Level Position, 2020, cardboard, foam, silicone, synthetic hair, resin, liquids variable, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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poor internet connection – the flimsy barrier demands that the viewer slow down and pause. It’s a simple gesture in space that inserts a palpable moment of anticipation and disconnect in lieu of instant gratification. On one side of the divider, a diminutive, childsize model of Call of Duty operative Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley (SelfPortrait2{“Ghost”}, 2023) camps behind a column. Motionless, he faces the foil curtain, armed and ready to mark an unwitting target. On the other side, slumped on the floor, a feeble baby Yoda doll (SuperBaby2(Unmanned) {“The Child”, “Reborn”}, 2023) cries for help. Augmented by motionresponsive robotic components, the creature’s head shifts erratically, scanning its surroundings for something to respond to. These puerile figures stall for time, awaiting a sense of purpose or duty that may never come. One imagines a circle endlessly buffering.

McGuire’s sensitivity to the spatial and temporal dynamics of sculpture can be traced to their studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they focused on the history of new media, technology and performance. Hindered by stage fright but eager to move beyond a practice mediated by screens, McGuire turned to tangible objects that could be animated in real time, developing a practice supported by technology but not defined by it. Earlier works made use of unstable materials like stale dough and preserved bugs that suggested imperceptibly slow processes of decay. Installations consisting of handmade miniature dolls implied the potential for action, even as the figures lay flaccid or stood frozen in a dynamic gesture.

Mechanical parts began to appear in 2020: Digesting Duck Entry Level Position is an abject drinking-fountain in the form of a vomiting figure, a silicone lifesize doll with pallid flesh and stringy black hair, crouching inside a beat-up cardboard box as it expels liquids. Inspired by an eighteenth-century French automaton of a gold-plated duck that would appear to consume, metabolise and excrete kernels, McGuire’s work animates the body’s basest functions. As liquid leaks from the figure’s mouth into cups or bowls, you get the uneasy sense that the work is dying. Notably, this body doesn’t move – it’s merely a receptacle through which fluids pass. The down-on-its-luck figure rehearses the icky discontents of the passive work required to keep the body alive.

Emblems of progress – propelled by technological advancements – obscure underlying narratives of failure. McGuire’s latest

work, to be shown in a two-person exhibition at Detroit gallery What Pipeline, engages a kind of zombie media, putting into motion relics that are all but obsolete. Robot Donkey 2 (2023) is an animatronic donkey on a stage. Deaccessioned from Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the pneumatically powered burro originally starred in an interactive museum display that walked visitors through the history of the Pioneer Zephyr, a highspeed, steel-clad streamliner famed for its dusk-to-dawn commute between Denver and Chicago from 1934 to 1960. At the museum, the automaton narrated the story of the train in a cartoonish, dopey voice; the animatronic references the real-life donkey, Zeph, that rode aboard the train as a mascot. The donkey and the train, the latter displacing the former with the expansion of the railroads to the West, are by now both out of work, artefacts fit for a museum.

McGuire has further stifled the donkey by removing its voice box; the animal is silent, save for the twitching of its neck, mouth and eyes. In an ironic turn, the donkey now carries a set of amplifiers on its back, a displacement of sound from the inside to the outside.

A nod to its heyday as a cargo-carrying tool, the animal now supports sound rather than makes it.

McGuire is scheduled to play alongside the donkey during an opening performance on 2 September with their band Suicide Moi. For McGuire, the donkey still has a use – something can still be eked out of it – but as a symbol, it resoundingly imparts a failure to keep up.

Rather than model the future of society’s discontents, McGuire looks to an excess of past associations that stick briefly only to peel away.

In McGuire’s art, one thing is always being superseded by another, rehearsing a sense of fatigue and obsession as the latest invention depreciates as quickly as it is dreamt up. The compulsion to repeat is perhaps the greatest defence against the inevitability of loss. McGuire clings to the humanity of failures and flops, conjuring clichés before they are ever uttered. ar Work by Isabelle Frances McGuire is on show at What Pipeline, Detroit, from 2 September - 14 October Alexandra Drexelius is a writer based in Chicago

SuperBaby2(Unmanned) {“The Child”, “Reborn”}, 2023, vinyl doll, acrylic paint, robotic components, 33 × 15 × 24 cm. Photo: Stefany Lazar all images Courtesy the artist and King’s Leap Fine Arts, New York

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Casey Reas Crypto has crashed and burned, but NFT visual culture is the better for it, and here’s why, says the pioneering artist and programmer Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

Casey Reas. Photo: Christopher O’Leary.

Courtesy the artist

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17/08/2023 14:02

Feral File, launched in 2020, is one of the more inventive projects to come out of the recent convergence of digital art with Blockchain and NFT platforms. Founded by programmer and artist Casey Reas, Feral File is an online gallery, in which NFT artworks – by digital artists including Auriea Harvey, Mario Klingemann, Lu Yang and Sarah Friend – are brought together by changing guest curators. While the NFT explosion put the focus on high prices and star names (think Beeple), Feral File experimented with how the relationship between artists, curators and the market for digital works might support artists more equitably, while showcasing artists and projects that reach beyond the NFT hype. In the wake of the crypto crash, J.J. Charlesworth spoke with Reas about the origins of Feral File and the recent launch of the platform’s second iteration, Feral File 2.0.

‘we are doing this together, we’re an ad hoc collective for the show, we’re going to be helping each other and supporting each other’ – those are the shows we’ve been most excited about.

We’re trying to create a culture where if you’re up for supporting and sharing with other artists, then this is a really good place for you. But if you want to argue that your market value is higher than that of other artists, and therefore you should be making more from sales, this is not the right environment for producing the work.

ArtReview Feral File came out of your 2019 project a2p – ‘artist to peer’.

That platform was very convivial – allowing artists to share and ‘trade’ their works with each other. But with Feral File you’ve been dealing more actively with the other relationships that go on in an art ‘scene’, which are both economic and institutional relationships: you have the artist, the curator and the collector; relationships that are potentially ones of unequal influence.

So it seems that with the shift from a2p to Feral File, you’re dealing with the different pressures that come to bear on that more ideal model of artists sharing a community, before a market gets involved.

Casey Reas I think that’s right. a2p was people coming together in a very convivial, social way. It was only artists to artists. A tension in a2p was that there were, say, 75 artists and only ten editions for each artist. There was this trading and bartering that was meant to be lighthearted and in good fun, and I think for most artists it really was that. But it wasn’t good for everybody.

I think of Feral File as a2p, where the artists still trade with every other artist, but we make additional editions where collectors can come in. So if there are ten artists in the show, each artist gets a work from the other nine artists, and then collectors can buy from the rest of the series. We’re trying to make healthy relationships between the artists and the curators, the gallery and the collector. I think this is a part of the new Feral File 2.0.

The shows on Feral File, where the artists have come with that same mindset – thinking

AR You mentioned Feral File 2.0’s shift away from serial editions of a single work to works that are unique variations on a particular theme. Does that reflect how generative art and code-based art has become quite an important strand within NFT artistic culture? above Refik Anadol, Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA Generative Study 1, 2021.

Courtesy the artist

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CR A lot of things about Feral File are very personal and biographical to me. One of the primary reasons we created Feral File was to support generative artwork. I’ve worked with companies like Sedition and Niio and Electric Objects for a very long time. Everybody’s interested in working with code, with generative work, but in the end it never happens. That was one of the primary reasons Feral File came about: I needed to have a place for software work, for code-based generative work, to be distributed. The first show on Feral File, Social Codes [March 2021], was generative art. The first show on 2.0, N=12, is also a show of generative art.

And at the same time, I believe in the widest definition for digital art: video, text, 3D models, synthetic photography, and I want Feral File to be a home for all the diverse media and formats of digital media. I have to give Art Blocks credit for being the first platform to explore the potential of generative art. I’ve been showing software in galleries for over 20 years now, and whenever I would do that, I would have one piece of software that could do a million different things. One piece of code doing a million different things going to one collector. The thing that Art Blocks did was split one piece of software into 10,000 different things, or use one piece of software that split into 1,000 different instances. Each instance of software in the series has its own thumbprint, has its own icon or features that make it unique from every other one. I think that’s something really essential to digital media and something that Erick Calderon, in developing Art Blocks, has really made a strong statement and definitely influenced a lot of the thinking around Feral File 2.0.

AR What’s interesting about Art Blocks and the generative art paradigm is that it’s very focused on the parameters of the relationship between code and what it produces artistically. There are also different discussions around moving image, which relate to CGI, live and generated CGI, which may have nonlinear aspects to it.

Is there also an element of seeing how that kind of generative artwork may bleed into different imagemaking paradigms?

CR These ideas have been flowing for such a long time, and I’m excited to see them merging.

The generative art and code-based art community was once isolated from the larger art

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community. I think of generative work as relating to the history of performance, like Fluxus, as well as to the history of video art.

When generative work is operating, it is a performance – I don’t know what’s going to happen one minute to the next, I’m often surprised. For example, Harm van den Dorpel’s Mutant Garden Seeder [2021] is a work where you can look at it one day, and it might be different than it was the day before. And you never really know when it’s going to ‘mutate’, to use that biological metaphor. I think Matt Kane’s Gazers [2021] is a really interesting work; it cycles with the moon and its phases, so it’s active in different ways when different celestial events are happening. This ‘liveness’ is the whole reason I’m excited about generative art. The aesthetics of change, the aesthetics and nonlinearity, are where I get really interested and excited about how that can play through, that’s why I got engaged in code in the first place.

These are things that really have this decadeslong history that are now connecting through the idea of the generative series applied to more traditional media.

AR But just as many Feral File works aren’t in that field. In the works you’ve exhibited on Feral File, there’s also a lot of iconography and narrative; there are cultural themes that emerge. Do you think that you’ve gathered a community that deals with certain ideas and questions in particular?

CR I have pretty specific interests within my own work, but the mission of Feral File is not to explore just one small area, it’s really this idea

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of inviting a curator to follow their vision. One of my roles is as an educator. I’ve been teaching at UCLA for 20 years, where I work with students with all different kinds of interests, and I want Feral File to support that as well. For example, issues around bias in AI, like the In/Visible show that Linda Dounia Rebeiz curated in June 2023.

The Gray Matter [2022] solo exhibition of Auriea Harvey is a standout – she is working with

“I think of generative work as relating to the history of performance, like Fluxus, as well as to the history of video art. When generative work is operating, it is a performance – I don’t know what’s going to happen one minute to the next” scanning and modelling herself, moving back and forth from software to material to explore ideas around physicality in the virtual. I hope that every show can go deep and significantly into something that is culturally relevant.

That’s the idea of bringing in different curators for different shows, so that we can really cover a wide terrain, rather than being like a gallery with a set programme.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Speculative Fetish (Vive Controller), 2023. Courtesy the artist

AR The reaction from the established artworld to the NFT boom was often incredibly snobbish; for many commentators it was portrayed like an incursion of degraded mass-culture. I wonder how Feral File might create a public for more subtle and considered thematics that come out of that culture, but which aren’t easily dismissed as just hype, or as ‘pop culture gone mad’?

CR One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that if there’s an opening, for example, at Bitforms Gallery [a gallery focused on digital art] in New York, it’s a really exciting, high-energy event.

There are hundreds of people there, very engaged with the work; a lot of students coming in from Parsons and NYU and all sorts of other people from the community. And I think one idea for Feral File is to have that energy, but to have it be more global and more accessible – not everybody can be in New York…

To the larger question of NFTs, I think everything got grouped together, and so NFT just became a toxic acronym, and serious artists who were working and releasing things as NFTs got grouped in with all the other insanity that was happening, the gross commercialisation and the scamming. One concern I have is that the digital art community has been working for decades to establish itself and to create new institutions, but also to establish itself in more traditional institutions – like, for example, the good work curator Christiane Paul has been doing at the Whitney Museum. I’m concerned that all the backlash and negative energy around NFTs did a lot of damage to the work that curators and artists had been doing in good faith.

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Auriea Harvey, Haristory, 2022, 3D model in interactive environment, from the Feral File exhibition Gray Matter, November 2022. Courtesy the artist

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Adaeze Okaro, Planet Hibiscus #16, 2023, colour image, 1024 × 1024 pixels, from the Feral File exhibition In/Visible, June 2023.Courtesy the artist

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AR There have been a few attempts to create a digital viewing and collecting platform, which predate the NFT boom. But a question, with tokenised or blockchain art, is whether it might ever turn into an experience that isn’t restricted to a PC screen. You’ve also launched the Autonomy app, how does this address that issue?

CR With Autonomy, the primary motivation was that when you are collecting ‘tokenised art’ – though I could use many different terms there – you’re effectively viewing your work in a financial application, like a Ledger wallet or other cryptocurrency application. Autonomy was made to be a place where, outside of all that financial data and information, you’re just looking at your art collection. Another important part about Autonomy is the ‘casting’ – getting it off your phone, off your laptop, onto a display that you may have in your home or your office, or archive or whatever. That’s still like a missing piece for digital art. Being able to view it on your browser on your phone has finally worked – that was a piece that was missing for a very long time.

I’m of a generation where we were releasing work on CD-ROM, that was our distribution mechanism – and even floppy disks before that! So being able to release things through the web, being able to view them on personal devices, is great. I think a lot of the pieces that we show on Feral File actually would work best in a gallery installation, would work best in a ‘black box’, with specific projection at a specific scale. We’re still working on conveying this as our vision for how the work should be treated and installed.

AR Feral File has worked with Bitmark blockchain from the outset, and now you’re extending that to Ethereum and Tezos?

CR When Feral File started we were excited about blockchains, but we were very sceptical about cryptocurrency. So when we first launched, we were blockchain-based as a way of doing certificates of authenticity (COAs) and as a way of securing the rights to the work. But we weren’t working in cryptocurrency. Feral File

“The aesthetics and nonlinearity of change are where I get really interested and excited. These are things that have this decades-long history that are now connecting through the idea of the generative series applied to more traditional media” was cofounded by Bitmark, who had their own blockchain that predates Ethereum, and we used Bitmark to record the artworks. But we learned, in the process of experimenting, that Bitmark wasn’t really where the collectors were, where the energy was. We’re sunsetting the Bitmark blockchain, and our idea is to follow the lead of artists where they want to mint their work, Casey Kauffmann, Drive Time #14 (still), 2023, from the Feral File exhibition In Media Res, August 2023. Courtesy the artist

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on whichever blockchain they feel is most representative of their collector base. We’ve been migrating to Ethereum for a long time. And for the last nine months we’ve been minting works on either Ethereum or Tezos, based on the artists’ preferences.

AR Do you see the crypto and blockchain ecosystem stabilising in a way that allows for a bit more planning and longevity?

CR I do. When Feral File started, it was a rare animal, there were very few online galleries working in this area. And over the last few years, more and more people have come to experiment.

Another reason for the 2.0 launch is to use those two years to figure out who we think we are and then focus on that in relationship to everything else that’s going on.

There is still a lot of energy and excitement around generative art. What Art Blocks is doing, what fxhash is doing on the Tezos blockchain, what Bright Moments is doing; I think the community is still really strong. While the market for NFTs at large has collapsed, there’s still a lot of momentum there in the wider digital art community. There’s not the energy that was there in fall 2021, following the NFT boom of late 2020 and early 2021. That was just unprecedented. But by just adjusting expectations a little bit, there’s a strong foundation for many artists and many collectors and many creators to move forward together. ar Feral File’s programme continues with SOURCE, curated by Operator, 0xDEAFBEEF and Casey Reas, from 14 September, feralfile.com

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“One day this boy…”

How David Wojnarowicz gave me life

by Khashayar J. Khabushani

Several summers ago, when I first met David – our introduction made through Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (2017), David being one of four male artists Laing chose to hover her loneliness around – I didn’t know it then but two years later he’d become my closest friend. We’d even travel together, David and I – his memoir, Close to the Knives (1991), clutched in my hands – through Vienna, then Frankfurt, then back to New York City.

But I couldn’t have anticipated how much time we’d end up spending together.

He is dead, after all; died the year I was born, 1992.

David was thirty-seven years old, was killed by a diseased society, as he called it, that failed to recognise, failed to treat the virus that was killing him and his friends and lovers, his fellow artists and activists.

In 2018, my first summer living in New York City, I encountered David again, this time at the Whitney Museum, where his stunning and devastating body of work ran for a short nine weeks. I went several times; I should have gone every day.

It was David Wojnarowicz, on the fifth floor at the Whitney, who summoned buried memories of a queer boyhood – mine – where fear burned within the walls of my past; up until then, up until encountering David’s paintings and films and photography and writing, I never had the chance, as an adult, to live inside my own queerness. But by showing me his, David invited me back inside, and I haven’t left since, and I never will again.

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When I first arrived at the museum, when the elevator doors slid open to the fifth floor, what you see below is what I saw, staring at me. I couldn’t look away.

The portrait may not take you through the same tornado of want, but that’s OK. As long as you see it, I think that’s enough.

He’s beautiful, isn’t he?

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But, for me, that’s not how it began. In that moment I didn’t see David’s beauty; I couldn’t. At twenty-six years old I was filled with such shame, and hurt, the conversations from the playground of my boyhood still playing in my head. Don’t be a faggot, I was told, and I listened, so that as David’s eyes caught mine I wanted to yell at him. It came sliding up my throat, that same ugly epithet so many have used, I wanted to lob it at this vivid and daring self-portrait of this queer artist.

I was so fucking angry – angry at the years of rampant abuse, at the adolescence and early adulthood I spent pretending, and hiding, snuffing my queerness in order to survive in the sprawling and stifling Los Angeles suburb where I came of age, where I tried over and again to belong, where nobody told me that although I was destroying myself, that didn’t mean I wasn’t beautiful.

As I travelled through each hushed corridor and corner and room – stepping through my shame, stepping into David’s work – I saw them in their togetherness, seared right before my eyes: beauty informing and enriching destruction, destruction heightening and highlighting beauty, all while speaking to each other’s fiery, fierce nature; his fiery, fierce nature.

Here was David on fire with everything the older boys, and my father, told me not to be; only David wasn’t burning down, or silenced, in the way which I was told would happen to those who dared to come out; as you can see, David was a part of our world, front and centre: he was on fire with love, and life, on fire with queer artistry. * That summer in New York City, where I had just arrived from Los Angeles, where I left my father behind, for good, I didn’t dare expect to be given the chance to reclaim what had been taken from me, but I was. I was given back queerness, I was given back language, both of which came because of David Wojnarowicz.

The former through his self-portrait as a man, the latter through a picture of David as a prepubescent boy. I saw him, and he saw me; I read his words – One day this kid… – and then, back at home in the Uptown room I lived in on the fifth floor of a brownstone walkup, I gave David mine, writing certain things I had never before written, never said aloud. I didn’t know it then, but what I wrote would become the birthplace for the novel I’d soon begin, and publish, I Will Greet the Sun Again (2023), a novel about queer identity, and belonging, about a family torn between Los Angeles and Iran, about existing as a Muslim in America on the heels of 9/11. One day this boy became a kind of mantra for me, allowing me to go wherever my soon-to-be-formed narrator wanted to take me.

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One day this boy will grow taller, taller than his father, his older brothers.

One day this boy will hear something inside himself so quiet that if the rest of his life were lived without acting on that something-quiet, nobody – not even him – would have noticed.

One day this boy will remember the stolen afternoon, pre-dusk hours spent in his childhood room with a boyhood friend, peeling down his shorts and putting his skin on his tongue, his tip deep into his mouth and he’ll remember the ricochet of the pop as the boy removed his sex, the sound soaking up the splashes of the setting sun, his bedroom spotlighted by heat and filled with the quiet pause that these boys were never taught how to fill, at least not with language so turning to laughter instead, more and more ha ha has until it helps them forget their gayness.

One day this boy will remember the night his father told him, “Well,” looking straight into his youngest son’s eyes, “you can put it inside of my mouth.”

One day this boy will recall the heartbreak of his father’s vivid eyes, the shimmering thin blue line circling melted-brown irises. This boy will remember how bad he became for not giving his father what he wanted, because he could never, fully and completely, give to his father what his father demanded.

One day this boy will grow taller and taller and he will remember the dampness of his father’s palms, the smooth white edges of a tub, the darkness of a room.

He will ask, and nobody will answer, How early did it begin?

One day this boy will look for it, a way to make it go away, searching and seeking just like so many other boys before turning to sex and drugs to sedate, he’ll forget more but still not enough and so then food, bingeing until he forgets to remember, purging, only to become addicted to forgetting and so again sex, more booze and then food, this time restricting, this time withholding, waiting for the memories to become ash as the walls of an empty stomach sizzle and burn the film of his father’s wet eyes, the tip of his pink tongue sticking out as he whispered to his boy, “Can I watch you do it?”

One day this boy will arrive to that solution that so many more will try.

Where the next day, waking in a hospital bed, his eldest brother will say, “I just don’t get why”.

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Until one day instead of trying again that last solution, this boy will decide instead to pick up a pen – he will pick up a pen because it was meant for him to talk and the talking will begin two decades after he discovers the spark that comes from placing his naked words on the naked page of another world, certainly not the world from which he came.

But these words of mine, will they be enough, David? Were yours enough for you? ar Khashayar J. Khabushani’s first novel, I Will Greet the Sun Again (2023), is published by Penguin

images (in order of appearance) David Wojnarowicz, Fuck You Faggot Fucker, 1984, four black-and-white photographs, acrylic and collaged paper on Masonite, 122 × 122 cm. © Estate of David Wojnarowicz.

Courtesy Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz, 1983–84, acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 152 × 102 cm. © Tom Warren and the Estate of David Wojnarowicz.

Courtesy Tom Warren, Estate of David Wojnarowicz, and P.P.O.W., New York David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid…), 1990–91, photostat and silkscreened text, 76 × 102 cm. © Estate of David Wojnarowicz.

Courtesy Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York Khashayar J. Khabushani in an undated yearbook photograph.

Courtesy the author David Wojnarowicz in May 1991. © and courtesy Marion Scemama

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Southern Discomfort A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the ‘Global South’. But what does that mean?

And is the term of any practical use?

by Oliver Basciano

The first Bienal de São Paulo, in 1951, was the product of the USA’s then Frantz Fanon argued that the pan-continental extractivism and dominance in the postwar world. It was organised by the Museum violence of European imperialism needed a continental response, of Art São Paulo (MASP), the institution itself founded just five years offering négritude – an expression of revolutionary Blackness, earlier by industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo in close conversation with a ‘colossal mass’ of people power that ignored borders but shared his friend Nelson Rockefeller. The latter, by then heading a cultural a political consciousness – as an answer. Moving forward, in the division of the American government, and with close ties to the midst of the Cold War, the 1955 Bandung Conference of mostly newly CIA, had already helped fill MASP with work by artists labelled ‘new independent Asian and African countries, as well as the subsequent Americans’ and ‘Europeans in Exile’. The biennial was Matarazzo and formation of the Non-Aligned Movement three years later, ignited Rockefeller’s next big soft-power project aimed squarely against the by postcolonial nationalism, imagined cooperation beyond racial spectre of communism. lines in the face of encroaching imperialism from both the US and the Over 70 years later, the 35th edition of the Bienal promises to be Soviet Union. The more contemporary image of the Global South – an altogether different affair, looking instead, the curators say, to with a cartography that features Africa; South and Central America artists from the ‘Global South’. In that, the Bienal curators are not and the Caribbean; Asia without Israel, Japan and South Korea; and alone: Videobrasil, a biennial survey Oceania without Australia and New Raphael Fonseca, who is cocurating of (primarily) moving image, which Zealand – is more active in the fields will open in October, has used the of economics and culture.

Videobrasil, calls the Global South term in its artist-selection criteria On the one hand it is neoliberal “a fictional idea of community, since the São Paulo-based festival’s in outlook, in that its economic tracinception, in 1991. Raphael Fonseca, tion can be found in arrangements knowledge and creators that can who is cocurating Videobrasil, calls such as China and Brazil’s deal (this contrast with the hegemonic North” the Global South “a fictional idea past March) enabling mutual trade of community, knowledge and creators that can contrast with the and investment directly through the local currencies instead of using the US dollar. (“Every night I ask myself why all countries are obliged hegemonic North”, useful even in its construction.

Similarly loose definitions promise to be present too in next year’s to do their trade backed by the dollar. Why can’t we do our trade backed Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the title Foreigners by our currency?... Who decided it was the dollar, after gold as a parity Everywhere, which, the Brazilian says, will focus on artists ‘who are disappeared?” Brazil’s President Lula asked a meeting of the BRICS themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, countries.) Yet many people are as likely to meet the term within the exiled, and refugees – especially those who have moved between the cultural sphere, with curators keen to harness its radical sheen as a Global South and the Global North’. Weaving around September’s cartography in which, as the Indian historian Vijay Prashad articuand October’s institutional offerings in São Paulo is a festival of lates in his 2012 book The Poorer Nations, a ‘concatenation of protests kizomba music. Organised by musician and writer Kalaf Epalanga and against neoliberalism’ could take place. A place in which disparate artist Nástio Mosquito, the festival celebrates a genre born of south- fights might conjoin to common revolution. to-south exchange from Angola and the migrant bairros of Lisbon to The sea change is generational, says Fonseca. “Older generations – the ones of institutionalised agents, especially in the 80s, 90s and Brazil and then back again.

The definition of ‘Global South’ is a historically shifting one. First even 2000s – mostly came from privileged classes. These were those coined during the late 1960s, it maps out an anticolonial history as who were able to study abroad, move to Europe and the US, and play much as a geography. In the prewar period, first Aimé Césaire and essential power roles in the global art system. It is fascinating to notice

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Yuri u xëatima thë – A Pesca com Timbó (Fishing with Timbó) (still), 2023, directed by Aida Harika, Edmar Tokorino and Roseane Yariana (all Yanomami), video, colour, sound, 10 min. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Thuë pihi kuuwi – Uma mulher pensando (A Woman Thinking) (still), 2023, directed by Aida Harika, Edmar Tokorino and Roseane Yariana (all Yanomami), video, colour, sound, 9 min. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

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how, in the last ten years, younger agents from underprivileged back- we are talking about and working with artists that do not necessarily grounds – myself included – were able to expand their reach from have a country, or the country they were born in no longer exists? within the Global South and outwards from it. Many reasons for this How many countries do I have, or how many countries does Hélio can be listed here: a more significant connection between different have? Where do you place an artist who is indigenous and has multiple agents through social media, social movements that made insti- territories or their territory is not defined as a nation and a flag?” tutions reshape their goals, leftwing governments that supported The notion of the Global South can therefore provide some unity amidst a show whose participants range from an archival photogmore education.”

A four-person collective (with no chief curator), the members of raphy collective from Bahía to Colectivo Ayllu, a Spain-based South which – Manuel Borja-Villel, Grada Kilomba, Diane Lima and Hélio American trans group who seek to make ‘visible what Euromodernity Menezes – had barely met prior to their appointment, is in charge of seeks to erase’. The artworks, Menezes says, once installed in Oscar the current Bienal de São Paulo. Menezes, who trained as an anthro- Niemeyer’s 1954 modernist pavilion, which is named after founder pologist before moving to curating, Matarazzo, “will become fugitives says their taking the reins (the first from the building itself”.

“Are the biennials there to confirm time any Black curators have taken “We have objects, these are the a structure that always existed? facts of the show, and they talk. And control of the 72-year-old event) is “an Or is a biennial there to break its own very often they talk in ways you don’t opportunity to create something new, to overcome those hierarchical and expect,” Borja-Villel agrees. For the history, there to think anew? often violent ways of working that are former director of the Reina Sofía in so familiar”. One quiet innovation was to refuse to provide nationali- Madrid, the Global South is an attempt at thinking outside the paramties for the 120 artists taking part in the show in preview material. eters of the art canon historically established on the European and “Are the biennials there to confirm a structure that always North American axis. It allows a way “to reject European or Western existed?” Kilomba, who is an artist, replies when asked about this. universalism. Many of the artists we are dealing with, for example the “Or is a biennial there to break its own history, there to think anew? Mayan artists in Guatemala or the south of Mexico, in their languages One of the categories that biennials are constructed around is nation- they don’t even have a term for art. That doesn’t mean they don’t have ality. And countries are very keen on being represented.” Indeed, until artistic practices; it means their artistic practice is mixed up with reli1981 the Bienal was ordered around national pavilions, a structure the gion and is mixed up with ecology.”

Venice Biennale maintains. “But what is the most important aspect In his day job as the director of MASP, Pedrosa has been forging of an exhibition? Is it the artist? Is it artistic practice or the artwork? similar links recently, welcoming non-Brazilian artists who might Or is it a representation of a country? And what country is that, when have some affinity with a more plural understanding of Brazilian

Melchor María Mercado, Album de paisajes, tipos humanos y costumbres de Bolivia (Album of Bolivian landscapes, human types and customs) (detail), 1841–69, watercolour on paper, 141 sheets, each 21 × 33 cm.

Courtesy Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia

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Manuel Chavajay, from the series Saq taq Achik’, 2022.

Courtesy the artist

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Elda Cerrato, from the series Producción de energía.

Un resultado de la elaboración del Okidanokh (Production of energy. A result of the elaboration of Okidanokh), 1966, oil on canvas, 115 × 145 cm. Photo: Luciano Zubillaga.

Courtesy Elda Cerrato Archive (ECET), Buenos Aires

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identity. Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, a Yanomami Venezuelan artist, is cur- trade and massive forced migration. The musician and writer says rently showing, and Brook Andrew, an indigenous Australian, Brazilian domestic politics, of a type that date back to Rockefeller’s is opening an exhibition at the institution in September. It’s a sign original diplomatic meddling, “but which was taken to another level of progress, but there’s more to be done in a country that rarely by [far-right former president] Bolsonaro in modern times” have registers the outside world: a sign, perhaps, that for the signalling played a part in this musical estrangement. “It’s a fear of communism. of big, occasional art events, the idea of day-to-day postnational We forget that Portuguese-speaking Africa was part of the Soviet crew, Global South identity is a fantasy. “Brazil is still a very self-centred and Cuba played a role as well. Brazil’s power structure is paranoid country,” Fonseca says. “Of course, it has to do with the financial about that.” He warns that while ‘Global South’ must be “used with opportunities art agents have, but it is also historical and existential. an awareness of its limitations, considering the diverse and unique You need to look at how many projects in Brazil pay attention to characteristics of the individual countries it depicts”, it is nonetheless “useful in recognising shared the idea of Latin America – very few. experiences among countries with If we have this distant relationship “What can we say about geographical with our neighbours, what can we similar historical and economic backart scenes that have lots of shared say about geographical art scenes that grounds, reflecting the postcolonial challenges and fostering solidarity.” have lots of shared histories with us histories with us – like, for example, As ill-defined as the term might be, – like, for example, Southeast Asia – Southeast Asia – but are in the cultural sphere the real value but are generally forgotten in Brazil?” generally forgotten in Brazil?” of the Global South is to open a space Epalanga was inspired to stage the kizomba festival in Brazil because for decolonising conversations, artiche too was concerned that there was a lack of interest in the country’s ulating the kind of hybridity and complexity of modern identity that cultural entanglements beyond its borders. In his 2017 novel Whites a nationality cannot, a conversation held far from the old imperialist Can Dance Too, recently translated into English, Epalanga describes orders of the Northern hemisphere. A utopian geography that may a house party of Lusophone immigrants in Lisbon. As the Angolan never be real but can serve a purpose. ar writer’s characters put records on, dance and flirt, their conversation turns to the overlaps and divergences of music from Brazil’s northeast The 35th Bienal de São Paulo takes place at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion from 6 September to 10 December. Admission is free. and that from Africa. They discuss kizomba; how Cape Verdean morna The 22nd Biennial Sesc Videobrasil is on show in São Paulo music gave rise to its more energetic cousin koladera, the faster tempo from 18 October to 25 February. The Venice Biennale d’Arte 2024 of which is influenced by Brazilian samba and Cuban bolero, genres is on show from 20 April to 24 November with a base of African – particularly Angolan – DNA, born of the slave

Three-day festival organised by Kizomba Design Museum launches in São Paulo, 6–8 September. Photo: Kim Praise

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O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight.

Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 1 June – 16 September It is difficult to think about O Quilombismo without considering the broader reimagining of Haus der Kulturen der Welt, now under the direction of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the Cameroonian curator and founder of Berlin’s Savvy Contemporary. The exhibition’s subtitle heralds a clear break in the institution’s history: the leadership and curatorial staff have changed, the institution has a new brand identity and website, its spaces have been named to highlight the legacy of influential but neglected women of colour and the walls have been repainted in bright colours like magenta, teal and acid-green.

Pulling against HKW’s Western modernist image was always going to be a challenge, but this is certainly a determined start.

O Quilombismo is a rich and compelling exhibition, with an extensive programme of accompanying performances, workshops and events, many of which took place over its jubilant opening weekend. What remains now are the works – many newly commissioned – of more than 70 artists, shown throughout the iconic building and its grounds. Guiding the exhibition is Brazilian Pan-African thinker Abdias Nascimento’s theory of quilombismo, a political philosophy based on the quilombo, a community of escaped slaves. For Nascimento, the quilombo marked a tear in colonial power, a joyful, egalitarian society founded on refusal and escape. In this spirit, O Quilombismo emphasises the contributions of artists and communities, especially Indigenous peoples, in the main ignored by the traditional (Western) artworld.

Approaching HWK from alongside the Spree, I first notice three flags in black, red, yellow and green bearing the letters ‘DDR’, mounted high on the upstairs terrace. A new commission from Nigerian-born American artist and poet Olu Oguibe, DDR: Decarbonize, Decolonize, Rehabilitate (2022) compresses Pan-African, Australian Aboriginal and German flags, highlighting the colonialist foundation of German nationhood as well as the need for reparation. Moving around to the front of the building, a mural by the Brazilian artist Alberto Pitta celebrates the country’s Afro-diasporic culture, while In the Garden (2023), one of two works by Ibrahim

Mahama, covers and obscures a portion of the building’s architecture in decayed fabrics, handwoven together with traditional West African techniques.

In the ground-floor Sylvia Wynter Foyer, Amina Agueznay follows a similar path, wrapping six of the building’s thick columns in webs of yarn, made in collaboration with traditional craftspeople of her homeland, Morocco. Up above, an enigmatic nine-part mural by the Cameroonian artist Tanka Fonta is arranged in a circle, like an abstract cosmological epic. In the middle of the space, UK artist Barby Asante’s video installation Declaration of Independence (2017–) plays on three screens surrounded by two stone circles; here, we witness the weary but resolute testimony of women of colour (‘delegates’) in a white world.

Parodying the structure of UN or corporate summits, during which people of colour are often tokenistically platformed, it’s a powerful vision of refusal, self-organisation and collective healing.

In the largest space, the ground-floor Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, sculptural works take precedence – rising like knots from Nontsikelelo Mutiti’s intricate, braidlike floor mural (Kubatana (togetherness / unity / connecting / touching / holding), 2023); hanging from the ceiling; fixed to the walls. Recurring throughout, however, is an expanded, performative idea of art as something with ritualistic or spiritual purpose. This spans Big Chief Demond Melancon’s feather-and-bead costumes marking the entangled histories of African and Native American cultures (Bras-coupé (Vest and Dickie), 2016; Africa, 2011; Red Cloud & Sitting Bull, 2013), Bernardo Oyarzún’s paradefloat depiction of Piwuchen, the mythological shapeshifter of Mapuche Indigenous culture of Chile and Argentina (Kilombo: Piwuchen, 2023), and the delicate and uncanny fertility dolls of Tuli Mekondjo (Ounona vedu (Children of the Soil), 2023). These artworks are agents of wider, and likely much more meaningful processes that have only ever happened elsewhere.

Following a halting accordion refrain spilling out from an overlooking space, we find Assaf Gruber’s Never Come Back (2022), a video

facing page, top raumlaborberlin, Shaped to the Measure of the People’s Songs, 2023, pavilion installation. Photo: Nin Solis.

Courtesy Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

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installation featuring a naked accordionist, the instrument’s black leather straps taut against his skin, as he tracks around the storage rooms of Graz’s Neue Galerie. Looking for inspiration, titillation or both, he plays in response to a series of banal, seemingly traditional paintings, before moving on to the next. Placing ‘traditional’ art alongside a clear intimation of sadomasochism, and with the accordion tune’s frenzied lyrics – Desireless’s 1986 Europop hit Voyage, Voyage – spelled out in Fraktur, a typeface style associated with Nazism, the work denaturalises tradition to bind viewing and creativity with colonial domination and violence.

Across the foyer in the Beatriz Nascimento Hall, the work is smaller and more intimate.

Featured heavily are the coded paintings of Abdias Nascimento, which set the symbolism of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion against the totalising logic of Western modernism.

Elsewhere, Maria Auxiliadora’s effervescent, meticulous canvases capture the festive conviviality of Afro-Brazilian working-class life.

Elsewhere, in the fantastical short film Ngura Pukulpa – Happy Place (2021), Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey is a campy icon of the bush, flying over her ancestral homeland, dancing and singing with her compatriots.

These depictions get to the heart of quilombismo, as an anti-imperialist struggle founded on collectivity and joy.

Of course, the quilombo is both a real place and a utopia; as many have pointed out, the largest of them, Palmares, was not especially egalitarian but instead organised by strict kinship structures. What this exhibition and quilombismo itself seem to imply, however, is that radical change can only happen by making space for other perspectives within the dominant culture. This is hard to disagree with. Still, it remains to be seen whether that space is there within the traditional artworld – no amount of brightly coloured paint, after all, will free HKW from the conventions, and baggage, of the Western museum. What happens to these perspectives here? Do they lose something?

All I can say for certain is that they enrich HKW. Rebecca O’Dwyer

facing page, bottom O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies, 2023 (installation view).

Photo: Laura Fiorio. Courtesy Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

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Rosha Yaghmai Phantom Lands Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles 8 July – 12 August An unassuming sculpture made of eyeglass lenses raised on two pencil-thin steel rods occupies a corner of this sparely arranged solo exhibition. Each rod holds around ten lenses of varying shapes and sizes, collected from prescription eyewear, bifocals and sunglasses, stacked together and fastened in place by horizontal screws that pierce the centres of the transparent discs. Rosha Yaghmai, a Los Angelesbased sculptor who often works with light and optics, is an expert manipulator of sightlines and perception. Viewed from the front, this sculpture, Optometer, Receptions (all works 2023), bears some formal affinity to the diagnostic device after which it is named. (Optometers, in use until the 1920s, measured the refractive power of the eye and determined the necessary eyeglass correction.) It just as easily resembles a pair of sleek steampunk goggles, a model of sister solar-systems or one of orbiting electrons. Viewed from the side, the illusion is broken: the lenses become just that, and one sees their dullness and discoloration, evidence of usage and time.

Owing to allusions to her father’s Iranian ancestry in her previous work, Yaghmai is

sometimes classified as a Light and Space artist who recasts West Coast conceptualism through the lens of diasporic memory. At Commonwealth and Council, her references to migration and diaspora are decidedly vague, almost immaterial. Nine sculptures resembling conches spaced out on the walls like trail markers and simply titled Shell 1, Shell 2 and so on call to mind the sand and air of coastal regions. Gardens rooted in neither time nor place are evoked in Phantom Lands (Imprint) and the Phantom Lands (Rubbing) series. In the former, metallic flora sprouts from the pitted surface of an aluminium sculpture modelled after a vanity table. In the latter, oil-pastel perennials drawn on three glossy black floor-to-ceiling urethane panels, which hang adjacently to suggest a continuous veneer, seem to pop out of the void, a flurry of periwinkle, mauve, canary-yellow and crimson.

Emphasising the peculiarities of vision over the particularities of place, the sightlines in the two-room gallery refuse to settle. Phantom Lands (Imprint) – both vanity desk and vanitas – is furnished with a mirror that reflects the Claude glass-like surface of the Phantom Lands

(Rubbing) series, themselves as reflective as Gerhard Richter’s mirror paintings. The stacked lenses in Optometer, Receptions peer across the room at Shell 4 on the wall opposite, beckoning viewers to look closer. Indeed, on doing that, one finds that Yaghmai’s conches, which appear to be found objects, are in fact epoxy replicas whose forms have been elegantly manipulated. The deceptive imitations – some as large as dinner plates, the smallest the size of a closed fist – have tells as subtle as a folded aperture or elongated spikes.

The floriferous artifices of the exhibition are replete with traces of Yaghmai’s interventions. Here, her touch is cold and somewhat ruthless. In Phantom Lands (Imprint), for instance, we see two furrows of crushed flowers on the table where a pair of arms once leaned, as well as aluminium petals similarly flattened on the adjacent stool where a body once rested.

Rather than appeal to sentiments commonly associated with diaspora and migration – homesickness, nostalgia – Yaghmai offers a visual game, one that toys with viewers’ restless eyes and preconceptions. Jenny Wu

Phantom Lands (Imprint) (detail), 2023, recycled aluminium, mirror, two parts, dimensions variable. Photo: Paul Salveson. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles & Mexico City

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Roberto Jacoby Huyamos a Buenos Aires, nadie podrá encontrarnos Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City 16 June – 15 October Roberto Jacoby is quite a legend in Buenos Aires.

He was part of the Di Tella generation that pioneered conceptual and media art during the 1960s; he was involved in Tucumán Arde and Experiencias ’68, two 1968 exhibitions that were crucial in the political art history of the region; he was behind the concept for Revista Ramona, a beloved art magazine that ran for ten years until the 2010s; and he directed the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, an influential site for artistic research and pedagogy in the Argentinian capital. His prints are everywhere in the local artworld of the last six decades.

This show explores what might appear to have been his ‘slower’ years – he quit making art in 1968 and only came back to it in 1988 – but were quite the opposite: Jacoby remained active as a lyricist for the iconic rock band Virus, acted in theatre plays, threw parties. Democracy didn’t return to Argentina until 1983, and he worked in particular on putting back together a community that had been torn apart by the dictatorship.

The exhibition dedicates a lot of space to his collaborations with Virus, his sexy, funny lyrics framed on lengths of the walls. Jacoby would photograph the crowds at their concerts, and the energy is palpable, boundless and so, so young.

There’s a similarly raucous documentation of Body Party (1988), an ‘exhibition-pageant’ in which attendants could compete for $200 and the chance to become famous in and for 15 seconds: all one had to do was dress as a ‘living, breathing’ work of art. The results vary from the beautiful and baroque, to cute girlies prancing around naked. The jury included Argentinian painter Marcia Schvartz and the famed art critic Pierre Restany, who happened to be in town, and whom local artist and curator Jorge Gumier Maier describes as ‘slightly drunker than the rest, and with evidently foreign manners’ – ie, he was way too touchy.

At times the show feels a little stiff, like it could have afforded to be more fun, more focused on experience; to reduce such lively scenes to vitrines seems unfair to the source material.

Yet the kitschy power of the art object and its indisputable capability to produce experience manages to exceed this. This is evinced in the installation that lends its title to the show, Huyamos a Buenos Aires, nadie podrá encontrarnos (Let’s Run Away to Buenos Aires, Nobody Will Find Us, 1988/2023), reproduced almost exactly as it was shown in 1988. A small stage adorned with a projected image of the Buenos Aires

Ecological Reserve, a place where cruising and queer life managed to exist during the dictatorship years; two photographs of a nude Jacoby in the same pose, taken 20 years apart; a ceramic statue of a shaggy dog suspended on a little platform; a cascade of purple chiffon and an old-school electric fan to keep it flowing. It is an exercise in absurdity, a delightful commentary on the passage of time and on what manages to stay the same. The piece is so funny, so charming, it succeeds at representing experience beyond discursivity – precisely what escapes the archive: joy and sexiness.

In a section of texts from the 1980s, typed out by the artist in a mixed style of diaristic and cerebral, he declares the need for a ‘philosophy of the instant’ as the most adequate means to deal with the world. I wonder if an archive isn’t the opposite of that, but some lines later Jacoby presciently concludes, ‘We are animals transmitting eternity. That’s the idea.’ And in a way the show manages to do that, to capture the wildness and brilliance of a time and place, as seen through the eyes of one of its protagonists, who was there to catalyse so many of its moments, to experience them and then to transmit them to the rest of us. Gaby Cepeda

13 chicos más lindos, 1999, photographic rolls and a video, dimensions variable. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.

Courtesy Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City

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Before Tomorrow Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo 22 June – 8 October If you’re thinking that everything comes before tomorrow, you’d be right. Spanning both the museum’s buildings, this is a 100work ‘selection’ from the collection staged to celebrate its 30th anniversary. That collection has its roots in works first acquired by founder Hans Rasmus Astrup during the 1960s. It also marks a moment of change: the death of Astrup in 2021 and a new acknowledgement of multiple art histories, diverse canons and an artworld that increasingly demands collections that are inclusive of these.

Whether with an unwitting sense of irony or to acknowledge this, Queen Sonja of Norway’s remarks at the opening of the show were delivered in front of Kara Walker’s

monumental wall work THE SOVEREIGN CITIZENS SESQUICENTENNIAL CIVIL WAR CELEBRATION (2013), white silhouettes of degrading and cartoonish representations of Black people drawn from the history of violence in the American South that equally speak to the injustices and inequalities so prevalent in our present. Given that the exhibition shares its title with a 2008 Canadian movie (based on a Danish novel) about indigenous peoples who die following contact with white people, perhaps it’s the irony that wins out.

A different (but not unrelated) sense of irony, verging on a knowing comedy, continues through the paintings of Nicole Eisenman,

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Gay Marriage (2010; a pair of urinals with interlinked plumbing), the wordplay in Bruce Nauman’s 1972 neon Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (which, in this context, has sinister echoes of Walker’s work) and Louise Lawler’s Michael (2001), a photograph of a pair of art handlers readying themselves to move Jeff Koons’s 1988 lifesize porcelain sculpture (of the late pop star and his pet monkey) Michael Jackson and Bubbles (part of the artist’s Banality series), which itself appears later in the show.

Peppered with works by Koons (including floating basketballs, new Hoovers and ads for Merit 100 Lights), Nauman, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst (butterfly paintings,

Shirin Neshat, Fervor (still), 2000, two-channel video (b/w, sound), 10 min

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chopped livestock), Sigmar Polke, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Christopher Wool, the exhibition at times comes across as a 1980s-to-early-2000s history of conspicuous Western-oriented art-market consumption.

But while it certainly is that, it’s also only one history of those times that’s present here: works such as Yang Fudong’s four-minute film Lock Again (2004), which features two Chinese men in 1970s police uniforms in ambiguous scenes of capture and escape apparently trying to flee to some kind of freedom; or Shirin Neshat’s extraordinarily tense two-channel black-and-white film Fervor (2000) – split across gender binaries and featuring an agitated speaker lecturing (although his words are not translated) the separated men and women on the subject of the Quranic tale of Yusuf and Zulaikha (the former resists the attempts of the latter to seduce him), while the film’s main protagonists, a man and a woman in the crowd, exchange furtive glances – give glimpses of

the troubles of our times (and suggest they are not so different to those of times past).

At the more optimistic end of that spectrum (depending on how you read it) is Gardar Eide Einarsson’s Untitled (FT) (2017), a fabric work bearing the slogan ‘The good old days are gone and they won’t return’. Yet such disturbances to the Western-oriented (and very US-dominated) supermarket sweep are relatively few and far between. And this is not necessarily a criticism; rather a remark on the forces that have shaped the direction in which the collection, in general, leans.

There’s a sense, throughout, that the collection (or the part of it on display) is at times too vast to parse according to one theme or another. And perhaps that too is truly reflective of the world, and the world of art, at large. There’s the simple pleasure of rediscovering painters such as Walter Price and the complex of emotions conjured by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy-filled Untitled

(Blue Placebo) (1991), which is only enhanced and further complexified in a postpandemic era. But perhaps the last word belongs to the newer additions to the collection, a selection of Frida Orupabo’s tacked-together foundphotographic collages, which reflect on the Norwegian artist’s mixed-race heritage and Black female sexuality, and which do to the history of photography what Walker’s work does to the historical imagery of the American South. Or Norwegian-Sámi artist Joar Nango’s The same rope that hung you will pull you up in the end (2020), a bent birch pole from which a nooselike golden-copper ring (which also throws off Olympian vibes) is suspended on a reindeer hide and plasticfibre rope, which perhaps speaks, in its suggestion that exits can become entries, to the hopes for the future of all collections like this. Whether or not those hopes are real or delusional is quite another thing.

Mark Rappolt

Joar Nango, The same rope that hung you will pull you up in the end, 2020, mixed media, 360 × 130 × 25 cm. Astrup Fearnley Collection.

Photo: Thor Brødreskift. © Joar Nango. Courtesy Bergen Kunsthall

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Doris Salcedo Fondation Beyeler, Basel 21 May – 17 September I have often thought of Doris Salcedo’s work as a portrait of cancellation. In the first instance as the cancellation of monumentality, mostly because the first work of hers I saw was the installation Shibboleth at Tate Modern in 2007.

I was deeply impressed by the crack that extended from one end of the Turbine Hall to the other, and equally affected by its power to direct the visitor’s gaze away from the space’s vertical majesty to its floor. More precisely Salcedo conveys a portrait of political cancellation, inasmuch as her work focuses on the unacknowledged victims of political violence and makes these victims visible. I also have sometimes thought of her work as a display of silent lamentation. A feeling related to her commitment to marking the absence of people lost to violence, in order to make their pain perceptible, and to restore their dignity. I felt all these aspects reverberating in Palimpsest (2013–17), which has been exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler since last October and is now part of this impressive retrospective of more than a hundred works devoted to the Colombian artist.

Palimpsest is a wide dove-grey carpet of 66 stone slabs that list the names of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean and Atlantic over the past 20 years while attempting to emigrate from their countries in search of

freedom and a better life. Names are written on the stone through a complex hydraulic engineering system: water wells up through the stone, composing a name for a few moments, then drips away, drowning, before emerging as another name. The letters that form each name overlap with the next, like voices calling out from the water in mourning.

Salcedo both stresses and sacrifices the line between the permanent and the ephemeral, between installation and monument, creating a work that breathes and pulses. Palimpsest is the first work in which Salcedo has identified victims by name (more recent installations have also included names), highlighting their unique subjectivity and their irreplaceable lives. Over many years of research, she has recorded names that had not previously been recorded, actively engaging relatives of victims, giving them a presence, although ephemeral, in a space tragically void. A void that seems to be filled with a flood of tears, a scent of mortality, a mournful moaning, a silent liturgy.

The title makes specific reference to cancellation and rewriting, the only way to tell stories that have been lost, together with their voices, in the water. These names cannot bear the weight of the tragedy, and so they rapidly slip away, only for something else to come through, rise again. It’s a moment of grace; it chills my blood.

This moment is also present in the piles of white shirts folded and frozen in plaster (Untitled, 1989–2014) in the first room of the exhibition. Perhaps because I am reminded of the time when someone close to me took his life, and the image that remained with me was that of his folded warm shirt left on the cold rock from which he jumped. This image accompanies me, perfectly in step with a sense of forced and sudden abandonment, of time frozen and space petrified, in and around a dozen pieces of wooden furniture, such as armoires, tables and bedframes fused together and permeated with cement (Untitled, 1989– 2016), that are arrayed throughout the exhibition. The image of heartbreaking grief, like that of the impalpable silk blouses, pierced by thousands of needles, that hang on the wall (Disremembered X, 2020–21), triggering an inconsolable pain even though untouchable.

The image of a wound so fragile that, even when sutured, it still threatens to bleed, like the petals of thousands of roses stitched together with surgical thread into a wide, weightless mantle on the floor (A Flor de Piel II, 2013–14).

In an exhibition that reflects on the impermanence of bodies and voices, the human beings are gone, but their ghosts continue to whisper in and flutter through space.

Mariacarla Molè

Palimpsest, 2013–17 (installation view, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2022).

Photo: Mark Niedermann. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and White Cube

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A Flor de Piel II (detail), 2013–14, rose petals and thread, dimensions variable.

Photo: Patrizia Tocci. © the artist

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RECLAMATION (NXTHVN) Sean Kelly, New York 30 June – 11 August In 2018, painter Titus Kaphar cofounded NXTHVN, an arts incubator devoted to fostering professional development among emerging artists and curators of colour. The forwardlooking nonprofit – the acronym denotes ‘Next Haven’ – is located in the historically Black neighbourhood of Dixwell in New Haven, in close proximity to Yale University’s MFA programme, through which a number of notable artists, many of whom are artists of colour, have passed in recent years (among them are Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas and Kaphar himself). RECLAMATION spotlights NXTHVN’s fourth fellowship cohort. Organised by curatorial fellows Cornelia Stokes and Kiara Cristina Ventura, the heterogeneous presentation assembles painting, mixed media work, sculpture, installation and video by the group’s six studio fellows. The show’s thematic webbing, while loose, repeatedly returns to the question

of how prevailing icons – be they cultural, art historical or religious – might be remade and reclaimed by contemporary artists whose backgrounds or lived experiences are often not reflected by such imagery.

Capt. James Stovall V, a self-taught painter and muralist, engages with biblical narratives while reimagining their habitual iconography.

In his painting Let the world spin without me tonight / Mark 8:36 (2023), a figure wears a black balaclavacum-executioner’s hood marked with a Nike swoosh; a religious habit, a portion of which is left unpainted; a gold chain; and a nametag scrawled with ‘HIM’. Embodying the dream logic of some spiritual experiences, the figure materialises among two fish, a snake, the word ‘cheese’ and disembodied facial features. A set of low stairs positioned in front of the painting invites viewers to enter the scene – and, more broadly, to see themselves inside of religion

through the artist’s fervidly unorthodox interpretations. Ashanté Kindle also hits divine registers, though her work’s sublimity is relatively secular. The artist’s lush abstractions – a series of tondos, one of which takes its title from a gospel song, as well as large canvases and a single-channel video – are inspired by Black hair, which she celebrates as a site of bodily autonomy. Her painting Total Adoration (2022) has impastoed sections so thick they cast their own shadows; its sumptuous surface incorporates hair beads and barrettes alongside obsidian and glass stones. Whorls of plum, maroon, midnight blue and gold loosely allude to hair textures and styles as they simulate cosmic space, suggesting that the freedom conferred by appreciation for Black hair has the potential to radically expand to the largest of territories.

Chicano painter Edgar Serrano proffers critiques of that purported paragon of European

Capt. James Stovall V, Jesus and bird ‘1st and the 3rd’, 2022, acrylic, oil pastel and charcoal on canvas with frame drawn on wall in acrylic paint pen, 147 × 135 cm. © the artist. Photo: Chris Gardner. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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Modernism, Pablo Picasso, who along with his Cubist peers callously appropriated African and Oceanic artistic forms. (Picasso’s misogyny is also the subject of a widely panned exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum; on the 50th anniversary of his death, the modernist’s presence looms unusually large in New York City.) In his détourned canvas Demons Never Die (2023), Serrano approximates Picasso’s portrait of his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, with their Afghan hound, but replaces Roque’s face – normally fractured by Cubism, which drew inspiration from West African masks – with a shrunken head that has been intricately painted as to appear embroidered, its mouth woven shut. Nearby, Donald Guevara doesn’t so much challenge historic iconography as ask how our increasingly digital, dispersed lives might fold cultural icons into new shapes. His explosive collages layer printed or painted cutouts of disparate imagery, as seen in New American Quetzalcoatl (Ebony Alabaster) (2023), which pays homage to the Mesoamerican serpent deity with a ringed gallimaufry of human limbs, a bird’s beak and wings, parts of the Statue of Liberty and athletic gear; the juddering multicoloured

pattern that borders New American Quetzalcoatl nods to the liberatory potential of the ‘glitch’, or social ruptures in digital space, as theorised in Legacy Russell’s book Glitch Feminism (2020).

Anindita Dutta’s evocative sculptural assemblages combine shoes, furniture, clothing, fabrics, animal hides and horns, positioning such consumer objects – often found in domestic spaces – as witnesses to sexual violence or trauma in countries across the globe. In Sex, Sexuality, and Society – SWEDEN (2023), two cuissardes mounted to the wall are opened as if flayed, revealing plush golden insides that have been skilfully sewn so they resemble thorned plants. The boots are heeled with elegantly curved animal horns, alluding to violence that might be defensive or offensive.

Through its varied offerings, the exhibition underscores that reclamation can operate in a multiplicity of modes and on many scales. While Stovall V opts to refashion predominantly white, Western religious iconography, Dutta’s reclamation consists of the assertion of creative resilience in the face of sexual trauma; as Guevara remixes North American and Central American

imagery for a digital diaspora, Kindle builds cosmoses that revolve around the beauty of Black hair. For Peruvian-American artist Athena Quispe, reclamation is tied up with efforts to decolonise the discourse around painting, a medium that has long flourished among Indigenous creators. Rooted in her own cultural inheritance, Quispe’s disarmingly beautiful installations are less invested in an overt critique of the violences of Eurocentric painting – as seen in Serrano’s counter-appropriations – than in taking up the rich history of Moche-civilisation weavings, as well as South American artists’ ongoing use of organic materials like cochineal (an insect often harvested for its crimson pigment). In her Blood Memory (2023), its title a nod to ancestral knowledge that resides in the body, two long swathes of canvas extend to the ceiling, terminating in woven threads delicately dyed with cochineal and chlorophyll. Along with a stouter central canvas, these are set in steel armatures that resemble looms or stretcher bars, and are peppered with sharp steel shapes that suggest how a leaf might be synonymous with a knife. Cassie Packard

Athena Quispe, Tawantinsuyo: Chinchasuyo, Antisuyo, Qollasuyo, Kontisuyo, 2023, cochineal, chlorophyll, human fluids, ink, polymer, steel, pulverised citrine and powdered pigment in four parts, 117 × 112 × 3 cm (overall). © the artist. Photo: Chris Gardner. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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Tarek Lakhrissi I wear my wounds on my tongue (II) Collective, Edinburgh 24 June – 1 October Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, where Collective – an astronomical observatory-turned contemporary art venue – is located, was once a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, marked by the rise of empiricism. Lakhrissi, a French artist and poet, gestures towards this history in his exhibition here, which includes sculpture, light and sound.

(Its title draws from a 1997 collection of poems, Bite Hard, by the late Malaysian-American poet, essayist and performer Justin Chin.) Under the city’s former observatory dome, three bloblike resin sculptures are positioned in a triangle.

As the show’s title suggests, the sculptures represent oversize tongues – their pink gleam contrasting with the clinical coldness of the dark steel plinths on which they rest. Whereas the

room was once dedicated to the observation of stars, here our attention is firmly at ground level.

Presented in this context, Lakhrissi’s curious sculptures appear as if they might be tentacles or extraterrestrial matter fallen from the sky.

The orchestration of light is particularly tactful. Lakhrissi has covered the centre of the seven gridded windows punctuating the building with a yellow film, giving the exhibition space a warm glow that travels westward throughout the day and creates an ever-changing, otherworldly effect of colours when passing through the pink translucent sculptures, as if injecting life into them. In the background an 11-minute soundtrack made in collaboration with electronic-music composer Victor da Silva

plays on a loop (it can be heard faintly from outside the building and onto the hill). The atmospheric score combines elements of electronic music dubbed by an altered voice – that of the artist – and eventually climaxes in a Sigur Rós-like postrock tune.

With I wear my wounds on my tongue (II), Lakhrissi engineers both a sensorial and a philosophical experience. Indeed, if the great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment David Hume – who first lobbied for the public enjoyment of Calton Hill – was a fierce advocate of naturalistic empiricism, Lakhrissi, to the contrary, invites us to look beyond nature. His is a celebration of the supernatural, an observation method for a world that is yet to come. Benoît Loiseau

I wear my wounds on my tongue (II), 2023 (installation view).

Photo: Eoin Carey. Courtesy the artist and Collective, Edinburgh

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Tova Mozard ILOVERUSS Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen 26 May – 30 July “Today was my one hundred and eighty-third job as an extra,” says perennially struggling actor Russ Kingston. In this shot he’s in his fifties, lean, with a long face and kind, melancholy eyes. His tatty apartment is sparsely furnished: a folding card table and chair, an old metal filing cabinet, stacks of junk piled against the wall. Shot by the Swedish artist Tova Mozard during regular visits to Los Angeles over 20 years, the 51-minute ILOVERUSS (2023) is projected across five screens in Nikolaj Kunsthal, a former church, while one single soundtrack binds the disjointed video together: on one screen Kingston and Mozard sit by a pool, on another they’re already swimming; a scene from The Magnificent Seven (1960) plays while at the other end of the narrow but cavernous gallery Kingston reenacts the same scene; the camera pans over Kingston’s messy living room while he croons The Platters’ 1955 The Great Pretender; elsewhere he’s in his sixties or seventies, shirtless and emaciated, lying in bed, head resting on Mozard’s lap.

Kingston and Mozard are clearly immersed in the dreamlands of LA as well as other paranormal realms: “I was just broadcasting my feelings to you… did you hear?” Kingston asks during a call with the artist. In the gallery below ILOVERUSS, Mozard’s single-channel video Psychic (2018) documents sessions with by-thehour clairvoyants: “This angst is your integrity”, one tells her. Long shots hold on neon signs – ‘Palmistry’, ‘Tarot’, ‘Future’ – and a large ‘Palms Read’ banner discarded in a parking lot. In another gallery, photos of smashed cars, empty comedy club stages and film props deepen the Hollywood seaminess. Meanwhile, throughout the venue’s connecting corridors are self-portraits that further ingratiate Mozard into showbiz hinterlands: Snapshot (2000) features a young Mozard posing coyly with the German actor Udo Kier, as if snapped at a VIP party. Kier gazes out at us with mesmeric confidence while Mozard self-consciously averts her eyes like an aspiring starlet. In Channeling Elizabeth Short (2020) Mozard stands barefoot outside

a suburban home, dressed in a red nightie, eyes closed, apparently contacting the victim of the infamous 1947 ‘Black Dahlia’ murder – who, before she was killed, was just another Hollywood hopeful toiling against obscurity.

There’s little gloss to Mozard’s images. And despite her and Kingston’s expansive conversations, the mystical domains traversed in Psychic or the low-rise sprawl all around them, Mozard’s LA is a claustrophobic place of crummy apartments, windowless arcades, downbeat storefronts. Kingston is in the hospital and Mozard calls him: “Do you feel like you’re in a movie?” she asks. He avoids the question, instead hopefully wondering if she’ll “be a visitor?” No, Mozard replies, she has to return to Sweden.

It’s an excruciating, telling moment. In her lens as well as her onscreen persona, Mozard is thoughtful, self-contained, gentle but relentless.

She watches Russ through years of disappointment and failure to make it in Hollywood, struggling alongside him to make sense of all the dreams and memories. Nathaniel Budzinski

The Thing, 2003, photograph, 53 × 65 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen

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Art Encounters Biennial My Rhino is Not a Myth: art science fictions Various venues, Timișoara 19 May – 16 July In the disused transport depot of Timișoara, western Romania, three large inflatable textile sculptures by Anetta Mona Chișa, which mimic the shape of nuclear atoms, describe their own demise. From hidden speakers, a high-pitched childlike voice, purporting to be that of ununennium, a hypothetical element not yet fully catalogued on the periodic table, narrates some sort of Armageddon situation. Across the overgrown yard, inside one of the rusting old maroonand-beige city trams, is another series of sculptures, these ones by Cristian Răduț ă, in which the passengers and drivers of the vehicle have been replaced by oversize mutant animals crudely assembled out of card, tape and haphazard found materials. A spindly-legged bird,

a big yellow dog, a humanoid rabbit wearing boxing gloves – given the dereliction of the yard, the decay of the vehicle and their Frankenstein form, together they inhabit the vehicle like the last survivors of some terrible trauma.

Chișa’s Ununennium’s dream* (2023) and Răduț ă’s The Diamond Hunters (2019) are entry points to the themes of Art Encounters Biennial – this year overseen by Swiss curator Adrian Notz – in which doomed humanity, object oriented ontology (OOO) and what might be thought of as ‘known unknowns’ of science prove thematic focal points. These have, at least in Europe and the Americas, been curatorial mainstays for a decade now (though OOO owes a lot to far more ancient ideas of animism), trickling down from

the much-imbibed writings of Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway and others, into major exhibitions on the art-circuit calendar (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13, in 2012, for example), and now, the cynic might argue, they reach Romania’s fifth city in time for its European Capital of Culture celebrations as a kind of art-theory brand. There are works here that might fit this jaded view, given their biennial-circuit ubiquity: Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia (2016–21), for example – a series of films presented across town on monitors nestled among potted foliage, in which young men engage in variously sexualised and romantic entanglements with forest flora – has been exhaustively shown.

Anetta Mona Chișa, Ununennium’s dream*, 2023, mixed media in situ installation with sound. Photo: Adrian Cîtu.

Courtesy the artist and Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara

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The exhibition’s title, My Rhino is Not a Myth, is a reference to Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut rhinoceros (created 1515, famously before Dürer had seen the animal himself, a print is on display and the image adorns all the exhibition signage), and in the main the show counters initial doomist concerns by asking us to imagine the possibilities of transhumanism and posthumanism. Imagery of the end times still pervades: it is a pessimism present in Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury’s Waiting for the Becoming Song (2023), an installation of various random objects (including car seats, piles of bottled water, towers of electricals) the artist assembled during his time spent in Timișoara. A couple of old TVs among this junk are showing live rolling news, which on my visit is reporting an explosion at a chemicals factory in China and dust storms in America: stark warnings about wanton consumption and impending environmental disaster. That is played with too in Saša

Tkačenko’s Celebrating Ruins (2018), a pile of bent metal and debris (with a snaking strip of neon woven in and out) similarly scavenged, and made abundantly clear in Dimitar Solakov’s Exodus (2022) paintings, which show a rocket leaving burning Earth. It’s pretty depressing stuff, but glimmers of hope can be found.

That survives in Giulia Creț ulescu’s series of wearable (but wall-mounted) textile works, which have the look of something between stab vests and parachute packs, but posit the adaptability of the body in their added padded protection and the multiple straps offering prosthetic enhancement. Faint hope is found too, with more manipulated bodies, in Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s gratifyingly weird postapocalyptic paintings in which life survives, albeit not as we know it.

Deformed figures roam an acid-coloured landscape (one work is titled Spring in Chernobyl, 2019).

Optimism too in Maren Dagny Juell’s Monument For A Sim Inventory. What. We. Bring. Home (2023),

a stack of random motifs in uniform, white fibreglass situated in a busy public square, which we are told, in an accompanying plaque, imagines extraterrestrial refugee humans returning to Earth to collect things needed for its digital remaking. It might be a stretch to arrive at this narrative without the interpretation, but the sculpture nonetheless feels an alien presence as shoppers and drinkers mill around it.

Yet a show highlight suggests that maybe our best hope, our saviour aliens – or at least those traditionally alienated – are living here among us. Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s Opossum Resilience (2019) retells Mesoamerican myths of parallel worlds and times, through jaunty song and lavishly outlandish theatre in the desert.

It’s a formally seductive film – an ode to queer indigenous spirit – that posits how the world might survive if only the Eurocentric thinking, dominant since Dürer and the Renaissance, gives way to another way of being. Oliver Basciano

Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Opossum Resilience, 2019, HD video, 16 min 1 sec.

Photo: Claudia López Terroso. © the artist.

Courtesy Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara

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Doug Aitken HOWL Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich 9 June – 22 July Doug Aitken’s latest show revolves around a five-channel video, its projection screens mounted on freestanding wooden frames such that it’s all-enveloping. It’s pumping too.

Almost continuously. HOWL (2023) is set in an unnamed American town that, as presented by the artist, features more oil derricks than people. The former are constantly thrusting up and down, like the piston on a superaddict’s syringe. Which, presumably, is part of the point. Oil makes the world go round. And like anyone who is constantly pressing the needle into a vein, we’re all going to die. Although that last bit is never explicitly said.

The town, however, looks like it’s dead already. There are cracks in the streets, the

shopfronts are boarded up, the malls are derelict, the road signs shot up, the basketball nets just about hanging on, like Tom Cruise on a cliff-edge. “It’s old America,” says a paunchy old cowboy, “it’s an oil town… it’s a working town.” He’s standing next to the tiled skirting of an anonymous building, large sections of which have fallen off.

Indeed, anonymity, from the name of the town through to the numerous residents who are interviewed on camera (not that we hear the questions or directions), is a theme throughout the work. For all that this work is about people, they always remain subjects (of the film, of the oil, of the poverty… the list is endless), and there’s little or no suggestion

that they have any agency at all. “There’s not really much to do around here,” mumbles one young woman through a facemask, “people just kinda, like, walk around aimlessly, walking through the streets like they don’t really care.” There’s a distinct Dawn of the Dead (1978) vibe to proceedings.

We cut between one youth jumping his dirt bike through the dunes and then on to the Maids of Petroleum contest, where the town’s youthful womenfolk are pumping through a synchronised dance routine. Or, in the case of Contestant Number 12, pumping and thrusting a would-be attacker up and down from the floor, during her self-defence demonstration in the talent section of the

HOWL, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography. © and courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & Vienna

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competition. All of it, and the parade that comes later (with floats, audiences and the people who’ve been generally absent from the film to that point), subjects of petroleum.

Clarinets, trumpets, trombones, exhaust pipes and oil pipes. All connected or in service to the black gold.

Of course, it’s not about oil alone. It’s very much a human story too. There are hints at cycles of abuse (one interviewee is sporting a T-shirt for Alpha House, a safe haven for abused women in Kern County, California), frequent mentions of prisons and the general no-future vibe that suffuses the whole. This place, wherever it is, is where deep time, local time and no time merge into one ungodly whole. Or perhaps a whole in which petroleum is God. Everything is connected.

Not that it isn’t also frequently beautiful (in this perhaps Aitken, an artist for whom aesthetics always play a role, can’t help himself).

Even the shiny black muck is viscously alluring as it oozes out of the ground. Even though attacks on oil companies are now de rigueur in art circles (indeed, in that sense, oil companies are a relatively easy target), Aitken is not judgemental. Oil can seduce and look good, he seems to be saying. Its effects are not. Wealth is being sucked out of the ground and spread everywhere except to the pockets of the people who stand on that ground. And that, of course, is an issue that’s only magnified when that ground and those people are transported to a commercial art gallery.

HOWL makes no explicit reference to Allen Ginsberg’s celebrated 1956 poem of the same name. Other than a distant echo of lines such as ‘Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!’

But that’s not to say that Aitken doesn’t indulge in a little (concrete) poetry of his own.

The galleries leading to his centrepiece are wallpapered with backgrounds of oceans,

deserts, forests and crumbling brick walls, each of which is decorated with one of Aitken’s signature lightbox texts – DRAMA, HOWL, CONTACT, a jumble of letters, some repeating, that spell out UNREAL, each of which is made up of a collage of photographs of cliffs, caves, canyons, rivers and clouds – and a series of aluminium discs that function at once like shattered mirrors and casts of a cracked and broken earth. With everything here somewhat mediated, the effect is part World of Interiors, part National Geographic. And part, too, a knowing performance of what is being critiqued: the commercialisation and vandalisation of the natural world. We’re going in circles, walking around aimlessly, you think as you glimpse yourself in one of Aitken’s circular mirrors. As in the film itself, language, the human-made and nature sit together in a calamitous but disconcertingly elegant whole.

Mark Rappolt

HOWL, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography. © and courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & Vienna

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Chris Ofili The Seven Deadly Sins Victoria Miro, London 2 June – 29 July Which deity presides over the hallucinatory, outrageously fecund realm that the British artist Chris Ofili conjures in the septet of large paintings that comprises his latest solo exhibition?

Given that each canvas features the figure of a satyr – all burnished horns and luxuriously shaggy fetlocks, carob-toned skin and swishing, serpentine tail – we might assume that this is the domain of Dionysus, god of wine, fertility, ritual madness and religious ecstasy. In The Swing (2020–23) – a work that borrows its composition from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 painting of the same name – Ofili’s dandyish protagonist lounges amid lush vegetation, his lips drawing on what’s either an elaborate opium pipe or a flower stem tipped with a pulsing, vulvalike bloom. Eyes closed in narcotic or erotic rapture, he’s so deliciously woozy that he doesn’t appear to notice a naked woman swinging from a golden vine above his head.

And yet this is much more than an image of Bacchanalian excess. The title of Ofili’s show invites us to view The Swing and its companion paintings through the lens of the capital vices: lust, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy, pride and wrath.

Sinfulness, we should note, is a concept that has no place in secular ethics. The Late Roman theologian Augustine of Hippo defined sin as a ‘word, deed, or desire in opposition to the eternal law of God’, and it follows that for it to exist, so too must the Christian deity. If Ofili’s satyr is subject to heavenly authority (which would surely surprise him, given he’s a creature from Graeco-Roman myth), then he needs to watch himself: any transgression risks his immortal soul.

With its voluptuous foliage and humid, unearthly light, there’s something Edenic about the satyr’s environment. Perhaps he’s really a prelapsarian innocent, or else one of the saved, swept up by divine grace to Paradise. Despite the promise of the show’s title, none of Ofili’s seven canvases focuses on a single sin. Indeed, however long we spend with these works, the satyr’s actions and intentions remain hard to

parse, and thus hard to judge. Partly, this is because there’s a fine and culturally relative line between meeting the demands of our natural (God-given?) drives and indulgence in the capital vices. At precisely what point does the satyr’s pursuit of sustenance tip over into gluttony, of rest into sloth, of sex into lust?

Another barrier to interpretation is Ofili’s obscuring squalls of dotted pigment, which the artist showers across the picture plane as though he were flinging great handfuls of confetti in the viewer’s face.

Atoms, cells, dust motes, pollen, raindrops, bubbles, gemstones, fireflies, bioluminescent algae and stars winking in distant galaxies – the artist’s postpointillist dots suggest all of these things and more. One of their functions in paintings such as The Great Beauty (2020–23) and The Crowning (2021–23) is to keep the eye in constant motion, revealing a pearlescent hoof here, disrupting the supple contour of a woman’s body there, shuttling our attention around the canvas as we (sinfully?) gorge ourselves on Ofili’s complex, incessant play of figuration and abstraction, surface and depth, vaporous washes of colour and clumps of thick clotted paint. There’s so much going on here, so many painterly events happening simultaneously, so many layers of art-historical reference – from William Blake to Franz Marc, Henri Matisse to Sigmar Polke – that these works are impossible to fix in the mind as single images.

Instead they compel us to give ourselves over to them, to let them subsume us into the dazzling, disorienting fantasyland that they describe.

In The Pink Waterfall (2019–23) a tower of 15 disembodied heads rises up the left edge of the canvas. In their mouths they hold sinuous, heavy-petalled orchids, which stretch across the canvas and seem to double as paintbrushes, summoning the rest of the composition into being. At the centre of the work, a female figure practises a yoga pose – the one-legged crab – enveloped by a tumbling, roseate stream.

The spray she kicks up coalesces, on the right,

facing page, top The Great Beauty, 2020–23, oil and charcoal on linen, 200 × 310 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

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into the form of the satyr, who bows his head to reverently kiss, or perhaps sip from, the uppermost orchid. With its azure petals, this bloom recalls a central symbol of the Romantic movement, the blue flower, which according to the German poet Novalis represented his longing to touch the infinite, and the exquisite pain he experienced at knowing it was beyond his reach. The Pink Waterfall is in one sense the satyr’s origin myth, and if we understand him to be Ofili’s avatar, then the painting is also a selfportrait, in which its maker depicts his own birth, or rebirth. Perhaps it’s a meditation on how his art – indeed all art – is ultimately a conduit for the unceasing creativity of nature, and whatever ineffable force set it in train. If we adopt this reading, then in bringing his lips to the blue flower the satyr exhibits not the sin of pride, but its opposite: the virtue of humility.

There are moments when the narrative elements of Ofili’s paintings are so stubbornly hermetic that they defy any satisfactory construal. I couldn’t really tell you why, say, the plume of smoke curling from a jade bowl in The Fountain (2017–23) reforms itself into a cascade of tiny spectral figures. Perhaps the point – the lesson in spiritual discipline – is to let such mysteries be. Despite its title, The Seven Deadly Sins avoids obvious images of retribution, atonement, redemption and absolution. At first glance, The Fall From Grace (2019–23) appears to show the satyr tumbling through the sky, like the rebel angel Lucifer, or the hubristic Icarus of Greek myth. Has he been cast from the celestial kingdom as punishment for transgressing divine law, or is he in fact ascending towards the blazing, numinous sun, which radiates countless egg-yolk-yellow dots, as though it were endlessly replicating itself?

We’re looking at a painting – a static image – so we’ll never know. If there is a God in Ofili’s lambent, thrillingly enigmatic new works, it seems He is content to leave this sinner’s soul hanging in the balance, suspended indefinitely between heaven and earth. Tom Morton

facing page, bottom The Fountain, 2017–23, oil and charcoal on linen, 310 × 200 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

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We Are They: Glitch Ecology and the Thickness of Now Honor Fraser, Los Angeles 16 June – 26 August In her 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, feminist scholar Donna Haraway refashioned the cyborg – an amalgam of animal and machine often coded with feminine and non-Western characteristics and designed for exploitation – into a positive figure of liberation, by claiming that we are all, already, cyborgs. In 2020 writer-curator Legacy Russell gave the glitch a similar treatment in her book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, urging queer, nonwhite netizens to embrace the system error as a metaphor for the body, one that can be deployed to guide liberatory thinking, organising and artmaking in both physical and digital spaces. Published 35 years apart, these texts form the conceptual cornerstones of an eclectic exhibition.

Featuring 22 artists and just short of 50 artworks arranged cheek by jowl across three rooms, the show intends to survey and build solidarity across ‘glitched’ bodies operating under vastly disparate social conditions.

It succeeds in yoking these expressions of glitchiness together under the common reality of human-induced climate failure, which will

cause, the show implies, extinctions, ruination and, one hopes, the revaluation of existing binaries of domination: normative / glitched, productive / unproductive, human / nonhuman.

The otherwise unwieldy requiem for Earth’s flora and fauna is anchored by the abundance of death in the room. One sees representations of bones, limbs and silicone flesh, flies, spores and browning leaves, motifs of exhumation and preservation, and a smattering of calcified, slack and tattered materials.

Don Elder’s relief sculpture the mammoth in the room (Zed) (2021–22) – a mammoth skeleton cut from plywood and Styrofoam and adorned with e-waste and plastic detritus – presides over the main gallery, a dreary allegory of species extinction. Marianne Hoffmeister Castro’s video The Quiet Ones (2021) captures closeups of dead mice whose beady eyes and stiff paws are being cleaned in a laboratory setting. Andro Eradze’s video Raised in the Dust (2022) shows taxidermy animals in a forest at night, their petrified faces illuminated by the glow of cacophonous fireworks.

Obsolescence is another kind of death.

On a tiled platform in Chris Velez’s installation lignes de fuite (lines of flight) (2023), a silicone hammer lies on its side. Soft, pink and hairy, Velez’s flesh-hammer is both a cyborg and a glitch – a perfectly unproductive body. On a cardboard box nearby sit Blair Simmons’s sculptures made of old smartphones buried in lumps of cement (among the listed materials: data, memories).

In the revisionary spirit of Haraway and Russell, We Are They flips the negative figure of death on its head. Although the exhibition materials explicitly reference Russell’s 2020 book, the show points behind its back to an earlier essay Russell published in The Society Pages in 2012, in which she compared the glitch to an orgasm, writing, ‘A petite morte of the physical self can be easily mirrored in the metaphor of the digital “glitch”’. That joy can be found in ‘a little digital death’ seems to be what the exhibition ultimately suggests: the climate itself is glitching, and the breakdown is bringing us closer to freedom Jenny Wu

Andro Eradze, Raised in the Dust, 2022 (installation view), 4K video, 8 min 16 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser, Los Angeles

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James Chronister All the faces we know, all the / places to go / Shall we stop to say hellos?

Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles 15 July – 26 August James Chronister doesn’t paint landscapes.

Well, not traditionally speaking. His richly detailed greyscale paintings sidestep expectations: absent are the sentimental vistas of yore, the Romantic visions of untouched land. Instead, this Montana-based artist depicts closeup fragments of densely forested scenery to investigate the boundaries between the organic and the artificial. Heavily altered photographs of local environments serve as the source material for Chronister’s photorealist paintings, which feature overwhelming arrays of plant life cast in ghostly, unnatural hues. Chronister negotiates earthly abundance within the limits of its representation: his use of analogue and digital techniques further warps these compressed, fractured views, disrupting a genre marked by soothing illustrations of wilderness.

Chronister represents a claustrophobic, all-consuming natural world. These works defy conventions of landscape painting that typically imagine the artist removed from his surroundings, staring out at carefully encapsulated scenery. In contrast, Saudade (2021) positions the viewer both above and below layers of thick

underbrush, confusing perceptions of depth: trees appear simultaneously distant and near, their actual size made incomprehensible. In Summer Spell (2023) Chronister tricks the eye into following two-point perspectival lines along a pair of fallen logs; a swarm of crisscrossed branches quickly halts this Renaissance technique, stranding the viewer mid-frame. Where nineteenth-century painters like Caspar David Friedrich or those of the American Hudson River School privileged totalising representations of nature, these artworks imagine the environment – not the artist – as a conquering force, one that easily overpowers attempts to capture it in its entirety.

Chronister’s multimedia process – the artist begins with photographs, manipulates them digitally, then paints – destabilises any cohesive understanding of his landscapes. At first glance, each painting resembles a matt print of a highly photoshopped image: in Fine Time (2023) a lone dandelion sits overexposed in the frame’s centre, the surrounding flora reduced to a colour spectrum of greys, whites and blacks. A closer look reveals Chronister’s illusory technique,

where the artist’s meticulous stippling makes his brushstrokes nearly invisible. Chronister’s paintings evoke a lasting discomfort, an unease created by the inability to discern the artist’s medium: in I remember.. (3) (2023) a mass of daisies and grass recalls the flattened impression of a screenprint or cyanotype – not the multidimensional plane common to photorealism. The artist’s multistep method presents a world that is both manmade and not, disturbing the passive spectatorship offered by his predecessors.

It is rare to encounter artworks that feel as complex from afar as they do up close. These paintings operate like logic puzzles: it is impossible to decide whether they are more real than artificial, more natural than human. In an era that often calls for artists – especially artists working with landscape – to be de facto environmentalists, Chronister accomplishes a deft critique. Nature, here, is not reduced to symbol or argument; it does not serve to enlighten the human experience or testify to its supremacy.

What lingers is Chronister’s formal and ideological precision, a rigour that renders earth as it truly is: beyond comprehension. Claudia Ross

I remember.. (3), 2023, oil on linen, 56 × 41 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles

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we are a group of people composed of who we are Peer, London 23 June – 9 September On 20 November 1975, documentary photographer Neil Martinson wrote to Jo Spence and members of the Hackney Flashers, a feminist and socialist collective of photographers, about plans to reproduce images made by himself and the group on postcards. In principle, Martinson had no objection to the proposal, as long as the images were sold cheaply and made widely available. What must be maintained, he insisted, was a link between the political project of Hackney Flashers and its artistic output: ‘An image by itself cannot convey a message’.

Ostensibly, we are a group of people composed of who we are showcases artefacts produced by activists and artists working in and around the London borough of Hackney during the 1970s and 80s who share Martinson’s vision. It’s an attitude still espoused by many on the left today for whom political art must convey a moral

message. But the period covered here (1971–86) was very different to our own. Unlike activists today, the Hackney Flashers (whose correspondence with Martinson and others is on display) weren’t doing politics in a period of widespread political disengagement: in the heady days between the administrations of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, class struggle was alive and well, and antiracism was an attempt to defend the claim of former citizens of an empire in decline to the right to belong in a country whose history they had helped to forge.

The year 1971 marks the founding of Centerprise, the cooperatively run Hackney bookshop and community centre out of which much of the material on show here emerged, while 1986 saw the abolition of the Greater London Council, a political and administrative body that had provided funding for London-

based artists. Centerprise closed in 2012. The archival material, documentary film and painting assembled in we are a group… opens onto a world in which, for a brief period at least, a serious attempt was made to overcome the tensions that continue to define culture and politics in Britain: the divisions between producers and consumers of culture, and the participants and objects of politics. At Centerprise, books published by photographer Ingrid Pollard could be found alongside posters created by the Hackney Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, both on display in the show. These materials are brought to life by the short documentary film Somewhere in Hackney (1980), directed by Ron Orders, which shows packed rooms of people discussing politics in the community centre. In one scene, a young woman says that, were it not for the centre, she would never have known about

Jacob V Joyce, Centerprise Community Window, 2023, mural commissioned and produced by Peer.

Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Peer, London

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publications like Spare Rib, the feminist magazine that ran from 1972 to 1993.

These works and materials are displayed alongside two acrylic-on-wood paintings completed in 1975 by Dan Jones, an antiracist campaigner and artist. Prior to being shown here, they’d been hanging on the kitchen wall of the Cable Street house where Jones, now eighty-three, lives with his family. In their flatness and posterlike quality, they resemble the work of Lubaina Himid, another now-wellknown artist involved in the black arts movement of the 1980s. As with Himid’s paintings, the lack of depth in Jones’s works makes the figures on display entirely outward facing. What the viewer is forced to confront in these paintings is a vision of a cosmopolitan East End in which throngs of people from different racial backgrounds of all ages march through the street, passing fascist graffiti and holding antiracist banners. Viewed today, the sentiment of these images is easy to incorporate into the hegemonic language of diversity and inclusion.

But in the context of the letters and posters

displayed, they give the visitor a sense of real political stakes of defending multiculturalism in an England in which these ideas had not yet won out.

The average house price in Hackney is now £650,000, over twice the national figure. Rising rents have driven many middle- and workingclass people out of the borough, but a large stock of council-built housing, the majority of which is still occupied by social housing tenants, has ensured a continuity between the Hackney of the Centerprise era and the heavily gentrified area of today. Superficially, an art gallery like Peer, flanked on all sides by public housing, exists on a fault line in debates around the role of the culture industry in driving gentrification.

The show responds to these discussions by showing that art, rather than representing the interests of the wealthy, is capable of chronicling social change, providing the viewer with a way of comparing the East London of the 1970s and 80s with the area today and asking what has been lost.

One of the new works commissioned for the show is a large mural by Jacob V Joyce, a political activist and artist, which decorates an outdoor

wall adjacent to the glass frontage of the gallery.

Among its images are Vivian Usherwood, a child poet who briefly became famous after having his verses published by Centerpise; the logo for Hackney Gutter Press, a now defunct radical newspaper; and part of a poster for the Black Lesbian Group, a feminist collective active around the borough.

Peer’s director, Ellen Greig, speaking ahead of the show’s opening, explained how common it was for people to stop and look at the mural, and to share their memories of Centerprise with her.

Inevitably, these recollections turn to how much the borough has changed in recent decades, signalling the defeat of a project that attempted to offer a challenge from below to Britain’s closed and culturally homogeneous cultural sphere.

The show’s chief intervention is to suggest that with the political defeat of the left during the 1970s and 80s came also the defeat of a model of art guided by a notion of democracy that valued the right of citizens to creative self-expression, and accepted the mixed results that this would produce. John-Baptiste Oduor

we are a group of people composed of who we are, 2023 (installation view).

Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy Peer, London

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Hamishi Farah Arcadia Missa, London 2 June – 30 August It’s evening, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z are taking a dip in a milky blue lagoon, surrounded by bare and craggy hills. Behind the couple, a little way off, the heads of three other bathers are just about visible, although their features are fogged by the steam that rises from the surface of the water. At the shoreline stands a figure in hi-vis overalls attending to a huge circular lamp, which beams lemony light across the lagoon like a proxy sun. Bright as it is, it can’t compete with the wattage of the superstar performers’ smiles, their luminous joy at being here, now, together – looking so crazy in love.

This is Hamishi Farah’s painting Beyoncé and Jay-Z (The Love of Things) (2023), a slightly sicklylooking exercise in photorealism that’s hung near the entrance to the Somali-Australian artist’s tight, funny and politically barbed show of four new works. Almost nothing in the way of contextual information accompanies this canvas, but a Google Image search reveals that it’s based on a photo that Beyoncé posted to Instagram in 2014, during a trip with her husband to a geothermic spa in Iceland. Are we being asked to attend to the contrast between the tourists (Black American members of the 0.1%, whose lyrics often hymn unbridled capitalism) and their vacation spot (a small, overwhelmingly white, Nordic island-nation, which experienced a systemic banking collapse during the late 2000s), and then read the work as meditation on race, neoliberalism and the idea of alien visitation, or even invasion? Looking at the

grinning lovers, I’m reminded of their duet Apeshit (2018), which contains the line “I’m a Martian, they wishin’ they equal”. I get to thinking of Iceland’s Viking past, and its peaceful, mildly social-democratic present; of internet conspiracy theories about Beyoncé and Jay-Z belonging to a shadowy group of global puppeteers known as the Illuminati, and the title of the rapper’s best-known track, Empire State of Mind (2009).

At the far end of the gallery hangs Statement from Howard Kennedy LLP on behalf of their client regarding the colonisation and reappropriation of the physical body associated with Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli (2023), a work in the form of a legal document, drafted by a law firm at Farah’s behest. Its purpose is to declare a sovereign state located in the ‘territory’ of the eighty-twoyear-old couturier’s person, without his prior knowledge or consent, ‘while endeavouring to safeguard and uphold [his] inherent dignity, integrity, and inviolability’. This may be legally possible (I’m no lawyer), but it’s also patently absurd, although no less so than any of the territorial claims staked by European powers during their rush to colonise the Earth. Nearby, the 4.55m-high painting Roberto Cavalli (2023) is propped on its side against a sloping white ramp, as though it were awaiting wrapping and shipment. The canvas depicts Cavalli wearing nothing but a pair of skimpy swimming trunks, into which he plunges his hands. Squinting out at us, his wrinkled, sagging skin slathered in

semenlike sunscreen, he bears an unfortunate resemblance to a lifelong public masturbator who at this late stage in his career can no longer be bothered to conceal his frantic tugging beneath a raincoat. So much for Farah upholding his ‘inherent dignity’.

The painting is based on a 2013 long-lens paparazzi photo of Cavalli on his yacht, hosing down after a swim. If we detect a strong element of body shaming, and some troubling issues around consent, this may be Farah’s point.

In the same year the paparazzi shot was taken, the couturier published a digitally manipulated image of Beyoncé wearing one of his gowns, in which the singer’s celebrated curves were photoshopped out. Many commentators saw this as an attempt to make her physique confirm to a white standard of beauty, and as a denial of a Black woman’s bodily sovereignty.

In contrast, Farah’s painting of Cavalli doesn’t deviate from its source. He’s presented as he is: a pale, frail male.

Opposite Roberto Cavalli hangs Live-in Whale instead of Nation State idea (2021–23), a painting based on a stock photo of a breaching humpback whale. One way in which new states gain legitimacy is through their recognition by neighbouring powers. Will this ocean-dwelling leviathan – this alien intelligence – give the nod to Farah’s attempt to colonise the couturier?

Maybe not (what do whales care for land claims?), although I suspect that Bey and Jay might well approve. Tom Morton

Live-in Whale instead of Nation State idea, 2021–23, oil on linen, 208 × 109 cm.

Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

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Roberto Cavalli (detail), 2023, oil on linen, 455 × 185 cm.

Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

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Moki Cherry Here and Now Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 31 May – 3 September From the 1960s until their separation during the early 1980s, Swedish artist Moki Cherry (née Karlsson) and her American jazz-musician husband, Don Cherry, invented for themselves a pronouncedly countercultural, often itinerant way of living. The spheres of home, school, stage and gallery overlapped as they performed concerts and conducted children’s educational workshops in various venues between the US and Sweden. A photograph shows Don and their toddler son Eagle-Eye wearing Moki’s costumes and playing music in a geodesic dome in which the family lived – as part of an ongoing, participatory happening at the Utopia & Visions 1871–1981 exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1971. The exhibition-cum-living space was filled with Moki’s psychedelic textile designs and paintings, many of them – such as the mandala she painted on the floor each day – inspired by Eastern religions. Art and life are as if collaged together, their junctures in a state of undulating, improvisational flux. At the ICA, documentation, including more photographs, videos and notebooks, anchors Moki’s practice in its original setting, while the works – including several from her life with Don and subsequent collages and sculptures – testify to her to influence within it.

Gendered biases towards textiles as a medium and the holistic nature of her practice – at odds with the ideal of the autonomous art object – downplayed Cherry’s significance during her lifetime, and only in the decade after her death, in 2009, did she begin to receive recognition as an artist. As witnessed here (her first solo exhibition in the UK), Cherry’s work is too forthright to be decorative, its playful, hallucinatory ingenuity actively battling with the limits of sight, sound and touch, and of pictorial and verbal communication: her painting Communicate, How? (1970) features a dazzle-eyed face, with another, saurian creature growing out of one ear, the aural orifice visually transforming into a third eye; D.C (1981), her textile portrait of Don, shows him with an appendaged, dangling tongue and swathes of colour oozing from his ears, multiplying into a pyramidal energy field. Malkauns Raga (1973) epitomises the foundation of her and Don’s collaboration: as the urge to transcend the senses, and beyond language. Used by the couple as a teaching aid, the tapestry rhythmically spells out a raga, an Indian musical form strongly associated with the emotions – and colour – over and above words: in variously patterned fabrics, the lines

of (Latin) phonetics surf upon naifly outlined waves of cloth, accompanied by gesturing hands, possibly Hindu mudras, encouraging our bodily participation.

There is joy and disquiet in Cherry’s universe: the trip could go either way, and feminism informs much of her work’s tension: included is a notebook from around 2004–06 in which she wrote, ‘I was never trained to be a female so I survived by taking a creative attitude to daily life & chores’, and this necessitated playful, often humorous rebellion.

The skeletal dinner placement in her ghoulish Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1979) – enigmatically flanked by a toy spade and a dart on string, as if we’re supposed to dig and poke at the fabric – could be ridiculing the glitzy romance of, if not Truman Capote’s novella, certainly the film adaptation. In the later photographic collage, Not My Cup of Tea (2006), a woman advertises a sugary vision of domestic bliss, with the insertion of phallic lipsticks and a ‘harmoniously’ entwined man and woman taken from a classical depiction of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Thus she grappled with gender norms, and the stubborn prejudice that making art out of life wasn’t real art. Tom Denman

Malkauns Raga, 1973, textile appliqué tapestry, 250 × 200 cm.

Photo: Tom Van Eynde. Courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

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Sara Barker Watch Movements Patricia Fleming, Glasgow 9 June – 16 July The mid-renovation site of the new Patricia Fleming gallery offers a fitting setting for Sara Barker’s latest exhibition: literally, in some cases, as many of her new works are site specific to recessed spaces within the walls and floors, or inserted into rectangular gaps created by removed sections of tilework. Barker’s work often occupies the borderland between painting and sculpture: pieces that start out (or so it seems) as abstract landscapes or dreamy figurative scenes grow thin metal limbs extending outwards into space. But the chance to work in, and into, a still-dilapidated network of rooms – part of a former police station and training centre built in 1895, more recently used for underground raves – has allowed the Manchester-born artist to move away from this and to explore the threshold between artistic intervention and architectural decay.

In a former shower room, tilework has been selectively removed, with other sections of the ceramic wall-surface coated in copper leaf.

From a hollow in the floor a little metal tree sprouts, while a couple of the voids left by the wall extractions contain Watch Movements I–IIII (all works 2023), delicate arrangements of antique watch faces, suggesting branch or leaf patterns. In another set of rooms, an eye-level stripe of tiling has been removed from the walls, leaving a scratchy channel that the artist has filled with little bundles of wood and bent-wire curios, many, like Surround, suggesting skeletal floral forms. Once you spot these tiny interventions you start to assign aesthetic value to what might be random accretions of concrete fragments, little accidental smears of paint, fragments of desiccated duct tape that suggest a microscopic version of the gridwork pattern of the tiles. The point at which creative intervention ends is intriguingly tricky to fix.

There are also works that slot more neatly into their physical boundaries, including various chunky reliefs like Oxford House and Cleft, created with rubble and ceramic shards extracted from

walls and floors, combined with foil, paint and other materials, and bound with mortar to form rough, Dubuffet-esque friezes. The central space of one gallery is given over to Reenactment, a mobile of curved poles that sways gently in the breeze from an open window, some of the bends hinting at the dancing bodies that might previously have occupied these rooms.

But these more conventional pieces are complemented by a setting imbued with a pervasive sense of aesthetic intrigue.

Many of central Glasgow’s grand Victorian and neoclassical buildings are in a perilous state, the city’s postindustrial decline legible in this architectural degeneration. Barker’s interventions convert one such building into a speculative cross-section of its varied former lives, sensitising us to the structure’s real and possible histories in the very act of aestheticising its decay. If anything, this might initiate conversations about the future of such sites, in a way that resists the easy answers of private capital. Greg Thomas

Watch Movements IIII, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Keith Hunter.

Courtesy the artist and Patricia Fleming, Glasgow

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The more things change…

Wolverhampton Art Gallery 29 April – 9 July ‘Send this one back to the people [and] let the people demand an answer!’ Each of the 13 handwritten messages in Keith Piper’s 13 Dead (1981) concludes this way. Written on the back of postcards, each is dedicated to one of the young people, aged between thirteen and twenty-two, who died in London’s 1981 New Cross Fire, in which a house hosting a birthday celebration went up in flames, killing several Black and mixed-race partygoers. These deaths, initially thought to be caused by an act of racially motivated arson, spurred the local Black community to organise a ‘Black People’s Day of Action’, which saw 20,000 people march through London to protest the tragedy. The collection of postcards is set against a panel with charred and peeling wallpaper, bordered at the bottom with a skirting board. The work is both a remnant of the past and, with its instructions to seek justice, a manual for the future.

The more things change... reexamines the work, both artistic and political, of the Blk Art Group, a group of young Black art students from the Midlands who fought for institutional representation while questioning and critiquing the social and political landscape of Britain. Showing these works in Wolverhampton is a homecoming of sorts, given that the group held their first show, Black Art an’ Done, at the gallery in 1981. Across three gallery spaces, the exhibition

focuses on work made by Claudette Johnson, Marlene Smith, Keith Piper and Donald Rodney during the group’s active period, between 1979 and 1984. Later works by the artists, including pieces from Janet Vernon’s more recent jewellery and textile practice, are interspersed throughout, along with new commissions from Johnson and Smith.

Archival materials displayed in the first gallery provide new context to the Blk Art Group’s work. These include correspondence between the group and museum officials regarding the development of exhibitions such as The Pan-Afrikan Connection, held at London’s Africa Centre in 1982. The conversations over shows that laid the foundations of the highly influential British black arts movement reveal the group’s grit, persistence and strategic approach to getting their voices heard on their own terms. Reading these letters is a bittersweet experience; anger at the injustice these artists faced mixes with pride in their successes in opening doors for artists of colour working today.

This ambivalent sentiment permeates the rest of the show. Johnson’s Trilogy (1982), a triptych of slightly larger-than-life full-body paintings, depicts lone Black women standing tall and taking up space. In Trilogy (Part Three) Woman in Red, the woman stares defiantly at

the viewer with her arms akimbo, grazing the borders of a canvas that only just contains her.

One of the vitrines displays a promotional text for The Pan-Afrikan Connection that includes Johnson’s artist statement: ‘My work is about [...] the experience of the African woman born and raised in the West. It attempts to express the myriad aspects of oppression, racist and sexist, that have shaped us. It deals not with specific events but with our responses: anger, frustration, fear and depression.’

Johnson’s focus on and understanding of the condition of the Black Western woman is as relevant now as it was 40 years earlier. This same is true of the other artists’ work. Rodney’s Cataract (1991/2023), which features collaged portraits of Black men, alludes to the monstrous stereotypes and depersonalisation Black men continue to face. Smith’s print Do, Please. A Happy Ending (1987), which depicts smiling adults and children at a wedding, suggests the enduring strength and support of multigenerational communities. There is comfort in seeing Black people depicted on their own terms, but this is tinged with a sadness that context in which these works were made has not progressed as much as it should. Nevertheless, the show provides hope and tactics for ensuring that the more things change the less they remain the same. Salena Barry

Keith Piper, 13 Dead, 1981, mixed media.

Photo: Garry Jones. © the artist

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Claudette Johnson, Trilogy (Part Two) Woman in Black, watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper, 1982–86. © the artist.

Courtesy Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

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Books Drag: A British History

by Jacob Bloomfield University of California Press, £25 (hardcover) The time-honoured artform of drag is reaching audiences like never before – even the 2022 Netflix hit series Queen was made in Poland, currently the worst-ranking country in the EU in which to be LGBTI. As such, this academically rigorous yet very readable book should draw readers.

But those seeking an all-encompassing survey of British drag might be disappointed.

Jacob Bloomfield sets some parameters early, focusing on male performance – on stage, screen, radio and record – between 1870 and 1970.

He proposes that during this era ‘female impersonators’ (as they were once called) cannot be squarely understood through present-day characterisations of drag as a transgressive, queer artform; a turn that Bloomfield dates to the Stonewall riots of 1969, or closer to home, the ‘radical drag’ of the British Gay Liberation Front (1970). Rather, by shining a spotlight on popular cross-dressing revues by ex-servicemen of the interwar period, or summoning the once ubiquitous figure of Danny La Rue, Bloomfield illustrates how drag has long been a complex yet ‘ordinary’ artform, straddling queer radicalism and mass entertainment along the way. But is ‘ordinary’ ever that simple?

It’s a question that seemed to often flummox state censors at the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Some of their hilariously prudish comments could easily fall from the pages

of a mid-twentieth-century social satire; a choice quote by one employee finds him so flustered by ‘the eternal subject of sexual intercourse’ he wishes ‘God had not created Man and Woman but thought of something else!’ – to which an arch queer response might be, ‘Quite!’ But the evidence shows that ‘respectable’ audiences ‘with great enthusiasm’ for drag-based entertainment have always outweighed a loud handful of conservative fundamentalists, such as those currently protesting ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ events at venues – including Tate Britain – across the country. Despite the niggle of persistent anxieties, drag seems to have benefited from a British sense of insouciance about its ‘threat’, though to trust this would be a fool’s game.

As Bloomfield points out, much contemporary drag rejects the binary that ‘female impersonation’ suggests, but ‘even the most abstract forms of present day drag… prod spectators to consider gender’. The book wrestles with figures from drag’s history who now feel uncomfortably retrogressive, such as La Rue, who was apparently so keen to dismiss the label of ‘drag’ and assert his masculinity that a New York Times reporter described him as ‘a man impersonating a man impersonating a woman’. These figures are hugely significant to understanding the British relationship to sex and gender, and the ways in which its society has and continues to

transverse the spectrum. Bloomfield advocates for this with notable attention to the British class system. If ever there were a nation that thrived on nostalgia, polite eccentricity and giggling over sex, it is, for better or worse, the UK, and Arthur Lucan, as ‘Old Mother Riley’, understood this completely. Where La Rue was the court jester playing to Middle England, Bloomfield hails Lucan for energising the figure of the ‘dame’ with comedic, emotional complexity and rallying his working-class audience as he took on the establishment in films such as Old Mother Riley, MP (1939). He argues that while Lucan was an ostensibly heterosexual cis man performing a regressive stereotype, he nevertheless brought Old Mother Riley’s womanhood, age and Irish ethnicity to the fore in a joyful, ‘unruly’ way that freed her from society’s conventions and restrictions, and to which his audience could crucially relate.

A figure such as Lucan, derided as ‘lowbrow’ by both Tory politicians and the cultural elite, should not slip so easily from the queer lens.

Bloomfield’s book is peppered with delicious quotes that nudge such ideas along, and one from La Rue is perhaps key to the book’s message; when a master of artifice declares, ‘I admire message theatre, but I haven’t got any messages’, trust that there is more to know. Phoebe Blatton

Magma 1 edited by Paul Olivennes Documents Publishing, €60 (hardcover) To say that Magma is a lavish publication is an understatement. Clothbound, hardbacked, supported by Bottega Veneta, each (numbered) edition comes with a 7-inch single (etched on a medical X-ray) and a facsimile letter, folded in quarters and in its own envelope. It’s like the full-package multimedia experience of the predigital age. Indeed, editor-in-chief and creative director Paul Olivennes claims it’s inspired by old-fashioned revues d’art such as Surrealist journal Minotaure (1933) and Andy Warhol’s Interview (1969). The cover says that it’s ‘a forum for artistic expression’; the manifesto (by

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Olivennes) asserts that it is a (yearly) journal without qualities: ‘MAGMA has no theme.

MAGMA takes no position. MAGMA adheres to no principle.’ One page later a foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist (in the form of a handwritten note, which mainly reveals that he needs to improve his handwriting) says that it’s about Édouard Glissant’s ideal of mondialité and resisting the homogenising force of globalism.

Although, when it comes to the artworld, Obrist is arguably that force. Elsewhere there are photographic portfolios by Frida Orupabo (collaged in her case), Luigi Ghirri and

wonderfully beautiful-creepy images of cakes and space (in Cairo) by French architect India Mahdavi. The 7-inch features Andra Ursuța; the letter is by René Char. Sophie Calle, Lucas Arruda, Agnès Varda and some guy called J.W. von Goethe are among the contributors. The layout is generous, suited to largescale imagery. But the extent to which one thing in this compendium is really in conversation with the next is debateable – it can, at times, feel like diving into someone else’s very neat handbag. And yet somehow this works. Part cabinet of curiosities, part gallery of nice things. Nirmala Devi

ArtReview

17/08/2023 13:56

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16/08/2023 17:14

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever

by Prudence Peiffer From the mid-1950s to a decade later, one dead-end street in Lower Manhattan quietly hothoused seismic changes in American art.

Amid the former sail-making warehouses of Coenties Slip, on the East River in what’s now the Financial District, a disparate group of artists – including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney and Jack Youngerman – gathered to live and work. From these unheated and unventilated lofts came innovations in post-Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture – hard-edge abstraction (Kelly, Martin), Pop (Rosenquist, Indiana) – as well as in avant-garde cinema (in which Seyrig was a key figure). As opposed to Ab Ex, furthermore, the creative figures were often gay, female or both. In critic and art historian Prudence Peiffer’s meticulously researched and lucidly written memoir of the thoroughfare and its significant occupants, the street serves as a metaphor for a Manhattan art life that’s barely available anymore. Her story tilts the established trajectory of modernist art-history away from linearity and masculinism, and from narratives of standalone genius. Instead, the focus is on collective development and what Peiffer calls ‘little pathways of influence and intrigue’.

The Slip, from its title onwards, also serves as an embodied argument for the importance of place in understanding how art gets made. Time and again, Peiffer reports on how the new art

Harper Collins, $38.99 (hardcover)

emerged directly from the texture of the Slip.

The even-keeled Kelly teased his abstractions from drawings of the avocado trees that he grew on the roof; Martin (who’s reported as saying, in 1950, ‘I don’t care who I have to fuck’ to succeed) made her first grid works by hammering nails into scavenged wooden panels and, additionally, found in the Slip the silence she needed to purify her abstract painting. Indiana sourced materials from the building itself, making proto-Pop assemblages like Coenties Slip Studio (1961); the acres of loft space allowed Rosenquist to work big. In pointing out that the artists could both support each other and withdraw to create new aesthetics, The Slip argues for the virtues of what Peiffer calls ‘collective solitude’; a condition of spacious mutuality, she notes, that’s inimical to the distractive digital atomisation of today.

The book’s evocation of the midcentury American artworld is accordingly a dispatch from a melancholically vanished realm, bringing it back to life via teeming detail; look here if you want to know exactly what groceries cost in Manhattan circa 1957, or how the broke artists got by (hosting workshops, tapping gas lines, allegedly collecting loose change from payphones in Martin’s case, borrowing lots of money from parents in Seyrig’s). It’s also an immensely satisfying read due to how it’s structured. At the beginning, Peiffer backs up a few centuries to evocatively limn the centrality of maritime trade to old New York. (Herman Melville mentioned

Coenties Slip in Moby-Dick.). She asserts the importance of Kelly’s and Youngerman’s pre-New York sojourn in Paris, and how artists like Matisse and Monet impacted their aesthetics. Her gradually tightening narrative ticks off the meetings that bring her brilliant gang together in one place, judiciously assesses the importance of supportive figures like gallerist Betty Parsons and the role played by other luminaries such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, and – of course – watches as the protagonists find success.

And then, inevitably, the party ends. As New York is transformed under Robert Moses’s urban planning, skyscrapers start going up on the Slip – all that’s left today is numbers 3 to 5 – and the artists have to get out. The author watches them go, mirroring earlier chapters in which she’d described each artist’s manner of arrival with dedicated sections that mark their departure and, finally, offer tight précises of their subsequent careers: everything the Slip gave them. In the end, Peiffer is careful not to be too prescriptive, or despondent, concerning what form a ‘collective solitude’ of today might take, but she doesn’t slide into lamentation. Admittedly, such a phenomenon probably won’t happen again in Manhattan’s Financial District. But The Slip, for all its immersion in a rebuilt past, nevertheless has a hopeful, toolkit feel: you leave wondering how and where such unseen but crucial communities might coalesce in the future. Martin Herbert

Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia

by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) I want to say, right up front, that I sleep easily and deeply, which according to the philosopher Emil Cioran, who is cited in the opening pages of this by-turns breezy and harrowing account of the insomniac’s immiserated nights and ghostly days, disqualifies me for any comprehension of ‘the most profound experience one can have in life’. (There is the implication here, offered nonjudgmentally, that those who sleep are simple.) Sleeplessness came for Darrieussecq – a Paris-based novelist, journalist, art writer (including contributions to this magazine) and sometime psychoanalyst – with the birth of her first child, 22 years ago (Sleepless was originally published in French, in 2021), and has gripped her in its unequal embrace to varying degrees

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ever since. ‘The insomniac’, she writes, ‘is not so much in dialogue with sleep as with the apocalypse.’ This book is her quest to get the bottom of sleeplessness, to solve it, by digging up the history and literature of its sufferers, tracking down references in film, music and art, and feeding these through her own story so as to provoke a sort of immune response and return her to the lost paradise of untroubled sleep.

For the author the witching hour is 4:04am, “Too late to end it now/Too early to start again”, as Charlotte Gainsbourg sings in (the slightly later) 5:55 (2006). The intimation of death is apt: a ‘defective form of sleep… a simple error of dosage’, Darrieussecq writes as she takes us through treatments (wine, pills), rituals (counting lovers)

and other practices (burrowing, gravity blankets). As her investigation expands it pulls in psychiatry, sorcery, genocide, street lighting, first husbands, lobotomies, the despoliation of nature. Drawing on her journals, previously published works, travels, personal photographs and memories of the pandemic years, the result is itself a bit like a sleepless night: hypnagogic, discursive and goes on too long. But I’m hazarding this was Darrieussecq’s intention, a mirroring of insomnia so as to release its power over her, while extending a generous hand to sleepers and nonsleepers alike to enter a night-time churn of thoughts so that we might all have at least a passing familiarity with life’s most profound experience. David Terrien

ArtReview

16/08/2023 17:14

Bad Infinity: Selected Writings

by Aria Dean Essays should make you think new thoughts about things you’ve either never considered, or only examined with a deceptive, false certainty. The ten texts in Aria Dean’s collection do this, with a complexity often spilling into convolution. This dynamic can be appreciated as an inherent vice of the large goal that the Los Angeles-based artist/ writer sets herself. Not content to understand how the best artworks function, she wants to intertwine this understanding with a deeper perception of Americanness and Blackness.

Dean’s ‘Acknowledgements’ prep us for chaos: each text ‘is a creative writing exercise… more interested in experimenting with whether it is itself possible than with being correct’. The title Bad Infinity is a phrase from Hegel, which she thought ‘sounded cool’.

Her near-cocky nonchalance elicits certain unflattering comparisons between the populist disdain for truth and an approach to art theory often heavy on rhetoric and reference but light on clear argument. This concern, however, is counterbalanced by the effort of Dean’s thinking, and her complex demeanour on the page. A one-way penpal exchange with the sculptor Robert Morris is characterised by tenderness and subtle self-deprecating humour. The reader is in turn presented with a challenge, experiencing this lightness only pages away from expositions on the

Sternberg Press, $23 / €19 (softcover)

dehumanisation of Black people, a subject so grave as to render humour unspeakable.

‘Channel Zero’, for example, winds through the phenomenon of police brutality videos. Ostensibly serving justice, these clips have also become ‘vernacular cinema’. Dean demonstrates how certain artists – John Akomfrah, American Artist, Harun Farocki, Peter Friedl – can help us to understand the broader social, technological and perceptual mechanisms through which both police brutality and its documentation are carried out. This important task, Dean explains, coexists uncomfortably with the urgent action that state violence demands. ‘Black Bataille’ sketches a theory of art. Dean senses resonance between Georges Bataille’s idea of ‘base matter’, which describes things that are ‘the low, the lumpen, and the inhuman’, and the position that to be Black – as articulated in Afropessimist thought, particularly via American writer/dramatist Frank B. Wilderson III, interviewed at length elsewhere – is to have been dehumanised by white American society.

Following a conviction that art should fundamentally embody reality, Dean posits that the debasement of Black people, being central to Western society, must also be essential to any broadly applicable conception of art.

To the extent that I’m reading between the lines, it’s because those lines are laced with so many energised, provocative, sometimes

contradictory thoughts that any summary requires abstractions and deductions.

‘Trauma and Virtuality’ (2018) asks what constitutes actual and virtual experience in the internet age. A voracious quote-hunter, Dean primes us for the complicating of such distinctions with an epigraph from academic Susan Willis: ‘The real is not a kernel, conveniently rock hard and discernible through the veil of fiction; it is instead the very structure, the warp and weft of the veils’. Dean then exhaustively reads two violence-fixated artworks: Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) and Arthur Jafa’s Cassowary: Mechanics of Empathy (2017).

By way of these artworks, Dean retrains her focus from the massive question of the place of virtuality in actual experience to that of how our experience of violence figures into this equation.

Having seen the discussed works, I’m not quite ready to buy her thesis that they ‘force a critical awareness of the spectator’. This kind of critical and reflective viewing presupposes a set of tools for interpreting art, which – it is easy to forget – tend to be available to people educated in American MFA programmes of the sort Dean (like myself) attended. All the same, the idea that art might be capable of advancing our society’s deeply confused relationship to screenmediated reality and violence is hopeful, and it is this spirit – variously marked by comedy, gutting realism and unimpeachable curiosity – that characterises Dean’s writing. Mitch Speed

Juliette: or, the Ghosts Return in Spring

by Camille Jourdy, translated by Aleshia Jensen Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 (softcover) ‘Everything feels different, like there’s this curtain of fog between me and reality,’ explains the eponymous protagonist of Camille Jourdy’s English edition of her 2016 (French) graphic novel. Having returned to her hometown from Paris, Juliette searches the streets for childhood memories – and her neck and wrists for a pulse.

We follow her through the quietude of suburbia, the uncomfortable silence of her dad’s apartment and the tumult of her extended family.

Meanwhile, Polux Georges lives in the house sold as a result of Juliette’s parents’ divorce. Of a similar age, he offers Juliette companionship.

Although Polux is ostensibly a lonely, grimy bachelor, his relationships are playfully unorthodox, a counter to Juliette’s quiet isolation.

His guerrilla love-poems, delivered anonymously to strangers’ houses, are a highlight: ‘I like you better without your glasses, when you can’t see anything’. The line attends to the power dynamics of love, care and desire.

This wry, circumspect tone pervades the story – epitomised by Juliette and Polux’s relationship, which tentatively wavers on the threshold between romance and friendship.

In Jourdy’s most lucid account of the difficulties of intimacy, Juliette’s sister, Marylou, has an affair with a costume seller. Their trysts take place in Marylou’s greenhouse; her lover appears in fancy-dress (a bear, a bunny, a wolf, signalling a furry fetish, and finally, a ghost) before stripping down. Intent on dividing her

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life neatly in two, Marylou is reminded that emotional experience is fluid and often nonnegotiable: ‘You can’t only ask me to love you on Thursdays’.

Jourdy’s graphic novel takes a gently unravelling approach to bittersweet familial and romantic relationships. Though the author offers disaffection as one possible coping mechanism in dealing with a fractured nuclear family, Jourdy’s tale also suggests that some relationships could be as reparative as they are destructive. Beneath a ghost’s pallid costume is a naked, living person. Executed in watercolour and consistently blushing with pigment, Juliette takes us behind the curtains and beneath the sheets. Madeleine Jacob

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Jon Arbuckle ’ s amazing adventures in Art Land Episode 2: Monstrous Times Filet gallery, Hoxton. The opening of a show by Colombian artist Sergio Bonilla Pinzón. At which he presented paintings depicting a somewhat Medieval underworld of monstrous bodies doing symbolic battle with religious men (or vice versa). As well as unveiling, and performing, a manifesto on a scroll which rambled poetically around (I think) the liberation of Queer bodies, sexualities and persons, from the strictures of Cis-Religious (and in particular Catholic) repression.

Having made an initial perusal of the paintings I wandered outside with a (not quite free) beer and I found myself discussing the show with an indie artscene pal, a kooky, Gen Z recent London Art College grad who reminds me of one of Neo’s sidekicks from The Matrix, happens to be an Eastern Mediterranean convert to Islam and spends much of the day in bed, subsidised by her wealthy father. She’d been fasting and praying over Ramadan. And she said, when pressed, that she was a bit allergic to all this in-your-face ‘Queer expression’ around the London art scene (such as this show), as she found it all rather narcissistic, tedious and unenlightening. And she couldn’t help but feel, following some philosopher or other, that ‘too much freedom becomes its own slavery’. Although she didn’t want to say these things in public as one risked being labelled ‘a Nazi’ or ‘a homophobe’ or some such.

Her take being that the monstrous, oppressive, ‘religion’ of our times – at least amongst her London Art College cohort – wasn’t ‘Cis-Culture’ nor established religion but a cultish ‘identity politics’ of the Alt-Left, sometimes summarised as ‘Woke’. Indeed, she noted, a classmate of hers had recently been thrown out of a ‘top’ London art college for deigning to even question this apparently allpervasive ideology.

We then came to discuss the fact that the ‘Alt-Left’ and the ‘Alt-Right’ (having emerged chiefly via social media out of the cracks of the ‘Financial Crisis’), whilst supposedly diametrically opposed, also have a lot in common. Chiefly an unwavering faith in the moral purity of certain ideas. The Alt-Right’s tenets being a confused, diffused version of the Nazi ‘blood and soil’ ethnonationalist mythology of a pure Aryan race oppressed by a nebulous variety of corrupted, alien ‘others’.

The Alt-Left’s ideology could, she thought, be seen as an inversion of that peculiar fiction. Namely, that there is a morally pure people, a kind of imagined nation, of the eternally and essentially oppressed. The great oppressor of this downtrodden volk being a nebulous entity called ‘White, Straight, Patriarchal, Colonial-Capitalism’. All of which, and whom, must be attacked, silenced, marginalised and ultimately destroyed, on the road towards the Promised Land.

Having reached what felt like an important conversational waypoint we then moved back inside to experience the artist’s rather theatrical (indeed Bard-like) manifesto-reading. At the beginning of which, to gain our attention, he utilised a metal knife to smash a wine glass he was holding, which shattered all over the floor.

Afterwards, crunching the odd bit of glass beneath our feet as we ambled around the gallery, we returned to our consideration of ‘Woke’, as manifested in inner-London-Art-College-land. Which is,

on the whole, a playground for the ‘diverse’ offspring of the global rich. There being something absurd about being lectured (as one often is) about the oppressive nature of (White, Straight) Patriarchal Capitalism by (vaguely Queer and sometimes ‘Non-White’) twentysomethings who, it turns out, happen to be lavishly subsided in their distinctly hedonistic Art Land adventures by their wealthy parents.

‘Woke’, in their hands, becoming little more than a fashion statement and moral cudgel with which to bully people.

As the light dimmed outside Filet and I supped on another (by now free) beer, our final thoughts related to the ‘purity’ of ‘monstrous bodies’. After all, the Alt-Left and Alt-Right don’t just want to control your mind, and what you can say (or read), but ultimately, want to control your body (or at least the ideology around it). The most obvious example on the Alt-Right being abortion; while on the Alt-Left, the apparent zeal for chopping off body parts, and chemical castration, even of minors, in the name of the God of one’s ‘true identity’. And if you question either doctrine then you are either a genocidal ‘baby murderer’ or a genocidal peddler of ‘transphobic hatred’.

The monstrous Alt-Left and Alt-Right are thereby ultimately united, we concluded (for my part by now only slightly pissed), in wanting to draw black and white symbolic lines through the mess of bodily material reality. Which is to say that they both exhibit a strong whiff of Manichaeism, and the idea that the dirty, messy body can be separated from (and ruled over by) the purity of one’s ideals: the Alt-Right feeling that the Lord knows you, your purpose and your body, better than you do. And the Alt-Left feeling that its ideas about identity should take certain, brutal and everlasting primacy over your body, its organs and its reproductive capacity.

However, dear reader, out of the crooked timber of mankind nothing straight was ever made, and rather than paradise, both cults are most probably leading us towards a monstrous, puritanical netherworld. Amen.

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