ArtReview September 2013 by ArtReview

ArtReview Fernanda Gomes

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September 2013

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Brazil

HA U S E R & W I R T H

MATTHEW DAY JACKSON SOMETHING ANCIENT, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING STOLEN, SOMETHING BLUE

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HA U S E R & W I R T H

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27 September — 2 November 2013 29 Bell Street, London

Tatsuo Miyajima I-Model

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Photograph: Nobutada Omote

Liu Xiaodong 27 September — 2 November 2013 52–54 Bell Street, London

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Idris Khan Beyond the Black 20 September - 9 November 2013

Victoria Miro 16 Wharf Road · N1 7RW

ISLINGTON

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ROBERT

Philip-Lorca diCorcia Hustlers September 12 - November 2, 2013

David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 212 727 2070 davidzwirner.com

Philip-Lorca diCorcia East of Eden September 26 - November 16, 2013

David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ 020 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com

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Anne Truitt Threshold MATTHEW MARKS, NEW YORK

Presenting: Pablo Accinelli / Caetano de Almeida / Leonor Antunes / Juan Araujo / Alessandro Balteo Y. / Laura Belém / Erick Beltrán / Alexandre da Cunha / Matías Duville / Olafur Eliasson / Marcius Galan / Carlos (BSBJDPB 'FSOBOEB (PNFT #SJBO (SJGmUIT 'FEFSJDP )FSSFSP Magdalena Jitrik / Marcellvs L. / Luisa Lambri / Tonico Lemos Auad / Laura Lima / Armin Linke / Jarbas Lopes / Mateo López / Jazmin López / Renata Lucas / Jorge Macchi / Antonio Manuel / Marepe / Gilberto Mariotti / Cildo Meireles / Pedro Motta / Muntadas / Bernardo Ortiz / Nicolás Paris / Pedro Reyes / Marina Saleme / Gabriel Sierra / Edgard de Souza / Adrián Villar Rojas at Frieze Art Fair Rua Padre João Manuel, 755 São Paulo | Brasil www.galerialuisastrina.com.br

Fernanda Gomes. Installation view at the XXX Bienal de São Paulo (detail) - The Imminence of Poetics, 2012

What ArtReview did this summer “Editorial!” barked ArtReview’s new designers outside the entrance to Art Basel on opening night, jabbing their crooked fingers at the magazine’s new ‘flatplan’. “Easy!” ArtReview spat back, whipping out its iPad and steeling itself to plunge its fingers through the greasy iridescent meniscus covering the screen. Anything to demonstrate just how fluidly it can peristalsise thought into written word. And so there ArtReview was, one squeeze of antibacterial spray away from spilling a flood of complaints about all the travelling it and the other art ‘lovers’ it hangs out with have been ‘forced’ to undertake these past few months (in ArtReview’s case, not even for its own ‘pleasure’ but just to keep people like you up-to-date with what’s going on with the art ‘world’). It began in late April in Berlin with the city’s Gallery Weekend, which was fun (more on that in the November issue, btw), and ended mid-June in Basel and its famous art fair, which was in Switzerland. In between, there was New York (art fair in a tent on an island), Hong Kong (art fair in a convention centre on an island), Venice (art fair on 118 barely afloat islands) and Zurich (Switzerland again). And somewhere in the midst of all that, ArtReview found time to Skype long enough and hard enough with ‘the East’ to launch a sister magazine, ArtReview Asia. Poor ArtReview. Or : ( as some of its once eloquent middle-aged correspondents now like to say when they’re trying to tell ArtReview how they ‘feel’. The spray ArtReview had told its assistant to ‘fetch’ still hadn’t arrived and ArtReview’s mind was somewhere else entirely: its iPad was revealing, in a blurry prespritz way, that in all the places ArtReview was planning to travel (in order to manufacture what its publisher likes to call the ‘focuses’ of its September issue), the locals had started to protest: Istanbul, São Paulo, Rio, Wimbledon Public Library (threatened with closure, ok? And no, ArtReview wasn’t going there for the tennis – the Basel vip card doesn’t work for that – but because that’s where it first read Ernst Gombrich’s brilliant essay ‘Norm and Form’ and thought it could do almost as well and so enrolled on an arthistory course). Didn’t these places understand the responsibilities that come with being an art destination? What the hell were these people doing, letting their ‘life problems’ make art lovers feel unsafe or inappropriate? By now ArtReview was tired of waiting for that bacterial spray to turn up, and as it grabbed another vodka from the tray of free drinks that was going around and placed it next to the others on its Apple-manufactured personal drinks tray, started to ponder the fact that there might be some sort of ‘gap’ developing between art and ‘real’ life. (continued overleaf )

Protest

This shit was real! And with that ArtReview hurled its drinks, the greasy Apple iTray and all its frequent-flyer cards – but not the Basel vip card it had snaffled while ‘interviewing’ a collector (not Stoschek): it needed that free ride to the airport – at a startled-looking Art Basel security attendant and headed to London to get busy ‘fixing’ the new issue. With its favourite Scorpions track turned up to ten, it began to ‘inform’ its staff of the new direction. “Out with the old design and in with the new!” it screamed. “Colons are the weapons of our syntactical oppressors!” it chanted, patting the canister of teargas it keeps strapped to its chest for ‘overseas’ travel. “We need to make things as clear and readable as a protester’s placard! Look at the attention they’re getting!” it raged. “Austerity of form! For an extravagance of function!” it howled. “Space to breathe!” it slobbered, wondering why no one was wandering round the office with trays of free vodka. “Clarity of thought…” it whimpered as it ran to the liquor store. This is the bit where ArtReview was told to tell you something about the consequent improvements to the magazine, but as you’re already holding the results in your hands and presumably don’t suffer from total blindness, that doesn’t seem necessary. In any case all ArtReview can really remember is the designers bragging about how the new-look mag’s got an extra 5mm of girth – but that’s only because those words are an unpleasant reminder of the boasts of those people (you know who you are) who introduced it to the ‘miracle’ of jelqing in the toilets of Ve.Sch (see p. 46). Anyhow, all this is just a roundabout way of saying that the relationship between art and life is something that’s been vexing ArtReview this summer. And it’s something of a theme throughout this issue – from the work of cover artist Fernanda Gomes, to the features on Istanbul’s art scene and Brazil’s art economy. But read on and you’ll find out for yourselves. ArtReview :*

Jelqing

Poppy Field No. 3, 2011, oil on linen, 31 1⁄2 x 23 5⁄8" (80 x 60 cm) © Zhang Huan Studio

Zhang Huan POPPY FIELDS 534 West 25th Street New York September 20 – October 26, 2013

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ArtReview vol 64 no 6 September 2013

Art Previewed 25

Previews by Martin Herbert 27

V.I. Lenin on Reena Spaulings Fine Art Interview by Matthew Collings 54

Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Hettie Judah, J.J. Charlesworth, Sam Jacob, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Mike Watson, Raimar Stange & Mark Rappolt 37

Julia Stoschek Interview by Mark Rappolt 58 Gabi Ngcobo Interview by Tom Eccles 62

page 56 Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011, lenticular panel and lightbox, 83 × 123 × 10 cm. Courtesy Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva Galpão | 10.08.13 - 14.09.13

Nuno Ramos Galeria | 15.08.13 - 14.09.13

Iran do Espírito Santo Galeria | 26.09.13 - 09.11.13

Mauro Restiffe Galpão | 28.09.13 - 09.11.13

Beatriz Milhazes Galpão | 23.11.13

Coletiva / Group show

Art Rio 04.09.13 - 08.09.13

Galeria | 28.11.13

Frieze 16.10.13 - 20.10.13

FIAC 23.10.13 - 27.10.13

Art Basel Miami Beach 04.12.13 - 08.12.13

Art Featured 77

Fernanda Gomes by Oliver Basciano 78

Enki Bilal Interview by Paul Gravett 116

Brazilian market forces by Vincent Bevins 86

Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darrieussecq 120

Artur Barrio Interview by Oliver Basciano 92

Sarah Morris by Mark Rappolt 124

São Paulo’s new cultural institutions by Claire Rigby 98

Art Safari by Emma Love 128

Chelpa Ferro Interview by Oliver Basciano 108

Istanbul: welcoming the unthinkable by Lara Fresko 132

page 78 Fernanda Gomes, Untitled, 2013, pencil, pencil line, nails. Photo: Michael Brzezinski. © the artist. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Art Reviewed 143

exhibitions 144 Friends of London, by J.J. Charlesworth Michael Dean, by Sean Ashton Dunne & Raby, by Hettie Judah Jac Leirner, by Agnieszka Gratza Ruairiadh O’Connell, by George Vasey Curiosity, by Helen Sumpter Andreas Schulze, by Martin Herbert Costume, by Susannah Thompson The Cat Show, by David Everitt Howe On Nature, by Brienne Walsh Jack Goldstein, by Joshua Mack Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, by Siona Wilson Joyce Pensato, by Terry R. Myers Yvonne Venegas, by Ed Schad Subliming Vessel, by Joseph Akel Kōji Enokura, by Andrew Berardini The System of Objects, by Kimberly Bradley The Whole Earth, by John Quin From Radiance and Dissolution, by Fatos Ustek Carsten Höller, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Mike Kelley, by Barbara Casavecchia Keiichi Tanaami, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Virlani Hallberg, by Jacquelyn Davis When Attitudes Become Form, by Mark Rappolt Dark Paradise, by Claire Rigby books 170 The Night, by Michele Bernstein, and After the Night, by Everyone Agrees Flickering Light, by Christoph Ribbat Holy Bible, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Forty-One False Starts, by Janet Malcolm

page 153 Michael Dean, Analogue Series (tongue), 2013, concrete, 7 × 8 × 9 cm. Courtesy Herald St, London

consumed 177 the strip 182 contributors 184 off the record 186

MAX WIGRAM GALLERY

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Art Previewed

It was middle-class art at middle-class prices for middle-class people with middle-class taste 25

John Akomfrah Michael Joaquin Grey Eva and Franco Mattes Manfred Mohr Natascha Sadr Haghighian

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John Akomfrah, The Call of Mist - Redux , 2012. HD video, colour, sound, 14 min

Previewed Painting Forever! Various venues, Berlin 18 September – 10 November

4th Thessaloniki Biennale Various venues 18 September – 31 January

Claudia Wieser Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 12 September – 26 October

Hurvin Anderson ikon, Birmingham 25 September – 10 November

Anna-Bella Papp Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London 6 September – 5 October

François Morellet Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles 21 September – 6 November

9th Bienal do Mercosul Porto Alegre 13 September – 10 November

Yan Xing Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing 21 September – 3 November

Gabriel Orozco Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 1 August – 18 October

Pablo Bronstein Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva 13 September – 24 November

1 Martin Eder, Nervosität, 2012 (in Painting Forever!, 2013, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). © Friedrich Christian Flick Collection / vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013

September 2013

1 Painting Forever! Now there’s an unequivocal title, and a marker of how long it’s been since painting was dead. (Artists and markets disagreed with that.) And a grand affair of a show, timed to coincide with Berlin’s Art Week and spreading its turpentine-scented self across Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Gallery, Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle and kw Institute. Those venues, we’re told, will continue to collaborate afterwards: the magnificent deathlessness of painting was apparently the first thing they could all agree upon. And painting in Berlin specifically, with this project hymning it by covering all career tiers and formats, from monographic shows to themed group exhibitions. If you’re a Berlin-based painter and not included (Franz Ackermann, Thomas Scheibitz

and Antje Majewski are among those who can like barbershops, that kept edging into liquefied rest easy), maybe reconsider your career choice, abstraction. The combination in such works tell yourself that your work is too advanced of a bright, synthetic palette, sociopolitical for a show called Painting Forever! or complain addressing and instability – speaking of fluctuant loudly about artworld politics. memory and between-ness – now feels more like 2 Hurvin Anderson has, it seems, been something he owns. This homecoming survey, painting forever (sorry) without quite becoming Reporting Back, his largest show to date, aptly also fixed in the artworld’s imagination. That’s features new works relating to his upbringing possibly how he wants it, and certainly it in the city’s Handsworth district. hasn’t hurt his prices. His early-2000s canvases, Staying with notions of visibility, the 3 9th Bienal do Mercosul opens this month in with their tropical settings, mix of gated communities and decrepitude, and approximate Porto Alegre, Brazil, under the title Se o Clima for feel of a postcolonial Michael Andrews, read Favorável, which translates as Weather Permitting. like welterweight Peter Doigs. Later, though, Alongside a lineup that encompasses Pratchaya the Birmingham-born, second-generation Phinthong, Hans Haacke, Leticia Ramos, Jamaican-British artist took a rewarding turn Cao Fei and (inevitably) dozens more, advance into geometric forms and other subject matter, information suggests that the Sofía Hernández

2 Hurvin Anderson, Country Club Series: Chicken Wire, 2008, oil on canvas, 240 × 347 cm. Courtesy Gordon Watson

3 Su Won Lee, The Darkness of Light, 2013

ArtReview

Chong Cuy-helmed event is going to begin with statement reads as though translated about geometric indents waiting for correctly shaped reflexive considerations and end by girdling the four times, each more distant from the original pegs, classical detailing, fragments of faces. More earth. We’re invited to consider why certain art sense. But it seems the wide horizon of the sea minimal ones are dashed with abstractionist gets seen or doesn’t; to consider the disturbance is metaphoric for that of the artist, a figure swathes of muted paint, but even those that of the atmosphere as metaphoric for conventions emblematic of existential freedoms; and since aren’t split the difference between painterly and their disruption; and to ponder art (and numbers and names at least are fairly universal, and sculptural depth. And if in general the nonart) that addresses meeting points of nature we know that there’ll be over 50 artists from 25 Transylvanian artist’s works look like gnomic and material culture. Side note for gourmands countries in her main exhibition, Everywhere relics, then they feel like icebergs, plays of thin – churrasco, aka grilled-meat ambrosia, was But Now, and that they’ll include Ghada Amer, revealing and heavy concealing that argue for invented in this region, so the eats can be Claire Fontaine, Adrian Paci, Miltos Manetas those rare qualities within and without today’s depended upon. and Marina Abramović. art: restraint, discretion, modesty. Moving on to a somewhat less financially Straight from postgrad studies at De Ateliers 6 Yan Xing has modest ambitions, too – upholstered biennale host, the fourth 5 onto Modern Art’s roster, Anna-Bella Papp like, say, encapsulating the whole teleology of makes air-dried clay reliefs of modular orientation Modernism in a single installation. Admittedly 4 Thessaloniki Biennale’s thematic locus appears to be the Mediterranean itself. Hard – they can be presented tabletop fashion, or hung that’s not entirely modest. But it’s certainly to tell exactly what curator Adelina von on the wall – that are dun-coloured concatenawhat Modernist, Super-Modernist (2012) aimed at, Fürstenberg is planning, given that her mission tions of hints: crescents, needles, wagon wheels, convening among other things an actor reading

4 Miltos Manetas, Looking at the Blackberry, 2013, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist

5 Anna-Bella Papp, Obelisk, 2013, clay, 30 × 26 × 3 cm. Courtesy Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London

6 Yan Xing, Film Still No. 2, from Arty, Super-Arty, 2013, ultra giclee print, b / w, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing & Lucerne

September 2013

an Ernest Hemingway book (in reference to Performative reanimations are Pablo retrospective of Bronstein’s drawings and of his 7 a painting by Shi Chong), a minimalist bench, Bronstein’s wheelhouse too. When not using videos, plus ‘a large-scale architectural model’, a snake on the ground and a photograph of a intricate drawing to collapse antique, classical, and be aware that ‘performance will be an post-ejaculatory penis – linking High Modernism baroque and postmodern architectural styles integral part of the exhibition’. 8 to what the artist calls an ‘art genesis’ scenario. together – constructing, in the process, links Claudia Wieser intersects Constructivism Elsewhere, using performers, Yan has reanimated between different forms of civic space and how and German Romanticism, using geometry everything from Mapplethorpe photographs they’re used in the interests of authoritarian as a spiritual, utopian portal – which, in turn, to Florentine sculpture; the newer video Arty, control – he’s set dancers loose (or loose-ish) in means an installation like her recent one at Super-Arty (2013), meanwhile, features seven galleries, their sprezzatura movements evoking Galerie Kamm, Berlin, might unite wallpapered extremely stylised, crisply monochrome tableaux limited, codified freedom within circumscribed photographic reproductions of classical scenes referring to Edward Hopper paintings, space. Dan Graham meets Martha Graham, if architecture, iridescent abstract paintings Yan arriving at an idiosyncratic conception of the you like; though by enacting his analysis of the reminiscent of Hilma af Klint or tessellated ‘super-arty’ via an intent, detailed reanimation social within the gallery, the Buenos Aires-born copper plates decorated with glowingly of the past. Going one better than what’s gone artist also reinhabits the deserted edifice that colourful circles, squares and triangles. What’s before: what could be more modernist? is institutional critique. Here, expect a first striking, at least for anyone acclimated to

8 Claudia Wieser, 2013 installation view, Galerie Kamm, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Kamm, Berlin, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

7 Pablo Bronstein, Temple of Convenience, 2011, wood and plasterboard structure, plaster ornaments, 350 × 676 × 426 cm. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

ArtReview

Teresita Fernández 12 September – 9 November 2013

407 Pedder Building 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong lehmannmaupin.com

Golden (Panorama) and Golden (Vantage Point), 2013

despairing revisitations of modernist utopian thinking, is that despite the neopostmodernist ambience that hangs around her aesthetic, there’s an almost numinous sincerity powering Wieser’s work. At Boesky, she’ll be wallpapering one space and, in another, drawing in gold leaf directly on the gallery walls. Sticking with the triple-pronged theme of geometric abstraction brought to American 9 galleries by Europeans, François Morellet is having a moment in the English-speaking world. First inﬂuenced by the tapa – or bark cloth – art of the islands of Oceania, the French artist credits that work with containing ‘everything I loved and still love: precision,

rigor, geometry’. Pursuing those qualities, in 10 the 1950s, made him a precursor of Minimalism and has led to a further 60 years or so of vivacious, often witty asceticism in which what can be done with lines seems boundlessly renewable, whether expressed via spatial arrangements of neon batons, Op-related quivering fields of grids and circles or deadpan confrontations of thick and thin contours. For his first solo show in Los Angeles, Morellet is exhibiting a site-specific, gallery-filling neon installation and wall works using strips of black tape. It’ll be sharp. As James Brown once sang, Papa don’t take no mess. And closing the circle on the geometry theme, the Fruitmarket Gallery’s current

Gabriel Orozco exhibition effects some lateral curating (or as the gallery puts it, ‘[cuts] a slice through’ the Mexican artist’s practice), starting with Orozco’s 2005 painting The Eye of Go. Its cell-structure-like confederacy of black circlets on white will serve here as a key for his ideas on organisation and structure, mappable onto – among other things – a previously unseen series of acetate abstractions from the mid-1990s. It might sound different for the sake of being different, but the show is organised by Briony Fer, art historian of abstraction extraordinaire, so expect the thinking that countersigns it to be as impeccable as Orozco’s contours.

9 François Morellet, Triple X Neonly, 2012, 6 blue argon neon tubes, dimensions variable, edition of 5. Photo: Heather Rasmussen. Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

10 Gabriel Orozco, Untitled, 1994. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

ArtReview

VERMELHO São Paulo

2013 ARCO, Madrid SP-Arte, São Paulo ART LIMA, Lima PARC, Lima Frieze Art Fair, New York arteBA, Buenos Aires ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro Frieze Art Fair, London artBO, Bogota ARTISSIMA, Torino

CIA DE FOTO

ArtBasel, Miami Beach

ArtReview and EFG International are proud to present the fourth in a series of six specially commissioned poster projects featuring unique artworks created by artists following their selection as 2013 Future Greats. Each artwork is reproduced in ArtReview and is available as a full-size limitededition poster in subscriber copies of the magazine.

Poster series: No 4

Pat McCarthy selected by Tom Sachs

Practitioners of the craft of private banking

Following his contribution to the exhibition La Dernière Vague (The Last Wave) at the Friche in Marseilles earlier this year, in which he sold hot cheese and pigeon egg sandwiches from his two-wheeled grilling vehicle, Cheesebike, the artist Pat McCarthy has turned his focus to a flock of pigeons he’s been keeping for the past 18 months. McCarthy’s birds reside in a sculptural world he calls Babylon Gardens, which the artist has created from salvaged materials found in his neighbourhood. This centrefold image, taken from issue 52 of McCarthy’s fanzine series Born to Kill (which is all about his pigeons and their environment), features some of Babylon Gardens’s 50 or so flying residents. The birds, of all breeds and mixes, produce eggs that are then either left to hatch, adding to the flock’s population, or are scooped up and sold in the aforementioned sandwiches, adding to the revenue on which the low-fi coop community subsists. The ceramic nesting bowls that McCarthy’s feathered pinups roost in are the result of lessons from a fellow 2013 Future Great, the ceramicist JJ PEET, who has been teaching McCarthy the craft.

www.efginternational.com

Points of View Jonathan T.D. Neil What do we hate when we hate the art market?

J.J. Charlesworth Do arts venues in the uk need public funding?

Mike Watson Italy’s Venice pavilion: not a disaster

Maria Lind Venice – a victory for brains over brawn

Sam Jacob Corporate hqs tell us all we need to know about 21st-century culture

Raimar Stange Berlin – city of brotherly love

Hettie Judah Is culinary porn too mainstream to be a turn-on?

Mark Rappolt Off-space no 14: Ve:Sch

Jonathan Grossmalerman The nsa and me

Jonathan T.D. Neil What do we hate when we hate the art market? Why does the artworld hate the art market today? For most, the fear and loathing begins and ends with the major auctions, which means the modern and contemporary art auctions that are held by the two (sometimes three, if you count Phillips) ‘big houses’. Yes, the accelerated art fair circuit makes many wince, but for sheer numbers, try this on: since the beginning of the year, the New York and London sales of these categories at Sotheby’s and Christie’s have seen more than $2.1 billion change hands – that is, assuming everyone pays up. It’s not the best-kept secret that an exceedingly small fraction of the big houses’ clientele accounts for about 90 percent of that business. So when The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or Barron’s or Forbes runs articles with (hopeful?) headlines such as ‘Stocks Tanked, Will the Art Market Follow?’, what they’re reporting on are the activities of, in relative terms, a handful of players. And when critics such as Blake Gopnik call out the ‘contemporary art bubble’ and bloggers such as Felix Salmon say that ‘prices’ fetched at the big sales are ‘quantitatively completely bonkers’, they are also, by extension, talking about the activities and tastes of a small but very monied minority. Ironically, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and ‘We are the 99%’, that minority has found it has an ‘image’ problem. The entirety of the last us presidential election was contended on it. We know this, but we pay attention to the numbers anyway, mostly because we can’t help taking

them as an indication of the health of the market more broadly. Just as we don’t really want the stock market to ‘tank’, we don’t really like entertaining the question of what happens when the rich stop buying art, because if the rich stop buying art, that means the rest of us have probably stopped buying other things, such as vacations or houses, and everything that goes with them.

Just as we don’t really want the stock market to ‘tank’, we don’t really like entertaining the question of what happens when the rich stop buying art Deep down we know that the art market is a trickle-down economy. When it’s good at the top it can be either good or bad down the line; but when it’s bad at the top, it’s only bad all the way down. We’re nostalgic for the days (though few of us were alive to see them) when collecting was an acceptable and accessible middle-class pastime, when well-read shrinks and doctors and lawyers were buying what they liked from the small coterie of artists and dealers that simply were the artworld. It was middle-class art at middle-class prices for middle-class people with middle-class taste. But who out there is really banging the drum for middle-class art, which sounds as wince-worthy as the middle-class art fairs at

September 2013

which arriviste dealers wouldn’t want to be caught dead selling it? What artist today would echo Matisse in wanting his work thought of like an armchair for the tired businessman? Middle-class pricing in today’s parlance means ‘young’ or ‘emerging’ or ‘experimental’ or ‘alternative’. The pitch is that this work won’t stay middle-class or doesn’t even want to be. It has aspirations to importance and recognition, though preferably not merely posterity’s. Only being ‘elite’ or ‘other’ will do. None of this accords with middle-class taste, which is aspirational as well, but the importance and recognition it values are mostly seen in the mirror, when the trappings of one’s self and surroundings look something like what one sees in the checkout magazines and on tv. (This is different than proposing that they are or could be the same, which is the hypothetical that Soﬁa Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) entertainingly plays out.) Call it kitsch if you like, but given the recent recuperations of that term, not-evenkitsch would be closer to the mark. Either way, its dominant value remains consumerist, which both art and the middle-class have always been. Hatred of the market, then, is really just a symptom of this unbearability of not really being middle class, which is to say of being middle class and not believing it, but also of not really being ‘elite’ or ‘other’ either. About the market, members of those two groups either don’t worry or don’t care.

Maria Lind Venice – a victory for brains over brawn Three smallish pavilions without big budgets were my highlights during this edition of the Venice Biennale. Not only do they exemplify that plenty of money and grand gestures are not necessary to make a difference at one of the artworld’s most prestigious events, they also indicate a shift in the formulation of agendas. Two of the pavilions are located outside the main biennale areas of the Giardini and Arsenale, and the third – Georgia’s Kamikaze Loggia – is a brilliant extension of the last part of the Arsenale building complex, in the ﬁnal section of the old shipyard, where a makeshift structure containing a group presentation by six artists and one artist group can be reached by tall wooden stairs. Offering the best view at the Arsenale, Georgia’s presentation includes (alongside works by other artists) carefully selected preexisting works by Thea Djordjadze and Nikoloz Lutidze. The studio of Gio Sumbadze serves as the model for the pavilion itself, which is designed by this artist. In Tbilisi, he is working in one of many ‘kamikaze loggias’, architectural addenda that have proliferated since the country’s independence in 1991. Built beneath the radar of the authorities, they are part of an older tradition of glassed balconies and other airy extensions to residential buildings. Like Lutidze’s contribution, a euroremont – a Russian neologism that refers to a local way of renovating private houses according to European standards – Sumbadze’s work, as orchestrated by curator Joanna Warsza, engages with urban development in Georgia at the time of both the ‘neoliberal revolution’ and the ‘pr dictatorship’, as the catalogue describes the consecutive periods after the Rose Revolution in 2003. A certain spirit of collectivism is felt in the Georgian Pavilion and it is not a coincidence. This is how younger generations operate under tricky conditions, ﬁnding ways of working that often entail taking matters into their own

hands, picking up the habit of apartment exhibitions that subsisted during the Soviet regime. The Bouillon Group is known for having first quickly made up and then demolished an apartment in Tbilisi, commenting on ‘facadism’, a method of renovation promoted by the former government which means that only facades were treated, leaving everything behind to decay. Bouillon has also drawn on the gestures of political and religious ceremonies in Georgia, creating aerobicslike choreographies out of them. In Venice, it was the movements of the representatives of the church in the clashes at the Tbilisi Gay Pride rally a few days before the opening of the biennale that provided the raw material for an irresistible aerobics performance on the gravel next to the canal. Scotland’s presentation, high up in the old Palazzo Pisani, is more classical. But as with Georgia it is the precise choice of artists – Duncan Campbell, Corin Sworn and Hayley Tompkins, curated by the Common Guild in Glasgow – and the generous installation of their works that contributes to the pavilion’s success. Entering the space, you immediately feel the effects of efforts to mediate the work through people onsite and by providing written material that goes beyond the usual dutiful provision of facts. An ‘Information Assistants Programme’ has been devised whereby students from five academic institutions in Scotland are getting professional training with regard to how a pavilion like this one is conceived. Aerobics reappear in a hilarious performance based on gymnastic exercises drawn from Soviet Lithuanian morning tv in the combined Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion. Here, however, the information offered is considerably and consciously more enigmatic than at the Scottish Pavilion. If you enter this pavilion by climbing the seven flights of stairs to the top, you are likely

Oo (installation view), 2013, Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion, Venice Biennale. Photo: Robertas Narkus

to experience a state of shock and awe: the magnificent, fully equipped sports arena Palasport Arsenale, completed in 1977, is a giant gem hidden one block away from the entrance to the Arsenale. In this concrete wonder, sculptures, videos, installations and performances are inserted under the title Oo, which is borrowed from a dream of one of the artists. Gabriel Lester’s collection of art museum walls from across the globe make perfect sense as players on a field that constructs obstacles for the play it is supposed to facilitate. As for the rest, hats off to curator Raimundas Malašauskas for drawing on generative art scenes and for directing magical moments with performances, gatherings and spontaneous dancing during the opening days of the biennale. And for showing that curatorial pirouettes where the artworks disappear in the swirl can be worthwhile, given the right staging and context. These three pavilions turn what seems to be a disadvantage into an advantage. In addition to demanding the efforts of climbing many steps, they all use their modest scale and equally modest conditions of production to show interesting work in well-curated presentations that refer back to the current situation on their home turf. Small and often young nations (or young-nations-to-be, in the case of Scotland?) like these, with small economies and no fixed pavilion in the Giardini to act as an automatic platform for visibility, have shown that the Venice Biennale cannot be the same after this year’s edition. In fact, among the nations that have consistently had the most interesting and significant presentations since the early 2000s are Lithuania and Scotland, being right where new ideas and ways of acting are being formulated. Brains, probably helped by aerobic agility, have won over the plain force of muscles.

Gio Sumbadze, Kamikaze Loggia, 2013, Georgian Pavilion, Venice Biennale. Photo: Gio Sumbadze

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Hettie Judah Is culinary porn too mainstream to be a turn-on? At the end of the upper gallery in London’s Somerset House, in the dark-walled final room of the elBulli exhibition (elBulli: Ferran Adrià and the Art of Food, to 29 September), is a fuzzy Polaroid of a white-haired man, slim and bearded, lying prone on a scrubbed steel work surface. While it has the whiff of a mortuary, this clean, laboratorylike space was the kitchen of Ferran Adrià, who arrived at elBulli in 1984 and made it arguably the most famous restaurant in the world before closing it in 2011; and the white-haired man is Richard Hamilton, who first visited elBulli during the 1960s with Marcel Duchamp and went on to eat there almost annually. Hamilton was vocal in his admiration for Adrià – in an accompanying video he compares Adrià not only to Duchamp but also to Shakespeare, noting that he had not only invented a new vocabulary but a new grammar as well – an endorsement that likely contributed in no small degree to the Catalan chef’s controversial participation (albeit at a 850km remove) in Documenta 12. Hamilton’s conviction that we would all, one day, be speaking Adrià’s language is certainly borne out by creative agency Gestalten’s new survey of global food entrepreneurs, A Delicious Life (2013). Examining, among other things, the new visual culture of food, the volume depicts a global gastronomy ranged between the axes of the neo-rustics (beards, sourdough, forage and artisan charcuterie) and the lab-coated ludics (flavoured smoke, odd geometry, spume, smears and powders), both of which owe a debt of influence to the Catalan master. A Delicious Life concludes with an entry

on Cook It Raw, the world’s most exclusive culinary club, in which leading avant-garde chefs learn from indigenous culinary practices and heritage ingredients. Led by culinary innovators including Adrià’s brother and cochef, Albert, Cook It Raw (founded in 2009) is the perfect resolution of the rustic, ludic and scientific tendencies. The aim is to evolve advanced culinary culture by strengthening links with tradition and a global sense of terroir. As a contribution to visual culture, however, it often appears more like an exercise in depicting the uneatable. One memorable dish, Pollution – 20.30 Modena (2009), by Massimo Bottura, resembled a fetid pond of black water complete with spume of a compellingly gastric consistency; another occupied a white dish decorated with fresh (one assumes bona fide) bloody fingerprints. For rarefied outfits like elBulli and Cook It Raw, visual representation is the only way that anyone beyond the few thousand (or in the case of Cook It Raw, few dozen) actual diners could experience their creativity. Dishes at elBulli were obsessively documented, and disseminated as image. Concomitant with this super-elitist look-but-don’t-taste foodie culture arose a growing obsession with the documentation of the plate. Competing with comic cats and ‘glamour’ shots, food pictures have bloomed like yeast across social media platforms; in the space of five years, the term ‘sharing a meal’ has developed an entirely new meaning. The Natasha Gornik, Jack Slut, 2007, inkjet print. Courtesy the artist

September 2013

Instagrammed Scotch egg may be gastronomically polar from the luscious depictions of haute cuisine from elBulli, but they are siblings in the new visual culture of food – or rather in a culture of food that prioritises the visual. New York-based photographer Natasha Gornik is a passionate advocate of advanced sexuality, rather as the avant-garde chefs are passionate advocates of advanced gastronomy. Her work focuses on the sticky end of the city’s bdsm lifestyle – plump buttocks bearing angry lacerations, cloth-pegged scrota and lovingly regimented batteries of props and tools. As with the Cook It Raw creations, only a rare few will get (or want) the physical experience, but many, many more will enjoy the visuals. The bdsm images are Gornik’s ‘public’ work: they’re what go into the galleries. Her ‘personal’ photographs, by contrast, are almost all of food. Her blog carries immaculate depictions of her meals and kitchen paraphernalia, alongside explicit texts discussing sex parties that she’s attended or what (and who) she’s done before dining. Gornik comfortably relates food and sexuality – she describes the ‘tease’ of a restaurant and the importance of taking a moment to be a ‘voyeur’ once the plate arrives, as well as A chef who makes art and the parallel acts of a photographer who’s into consummation. But advanced sexuality – yikes exhibiting straight-up food photographs doesn’t interest her – as she notes, so many people photograph food that it’s no longer something new. The art of the plate, it seems, has already become hopelessly vanilla.

J.J. Charlesworth Do arts venues in the uk need public funding? It’s June, it’s summer (sort of), it’s time for another government comprehensive spending review – and another instalment of the phoney war being waged between government and the arts sector over funding cuts to the arts. As the Conservative government (with a bit of help from their Liberal Democrat coalition buddies) gnaws away at the fiscal deficit with little or no sense of where they’re headed, making cuts to welfare, healthcare and much else, the funded arts sector has also been feeling the pinch. In June, the government announced further cuts to the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (dcms), and its client body, Arts Council England (ace). As it turned out, the dcms was hit with a cut of eight percent, with ace having to cope with a five percent cut in its grant from 2015. Now, much as this will put further pressure on core funding for the Arts Council’s client organisations (its ‘national portfolio organisations’, or npos), this is not the end of the world. But the story of these latest cuts, and the noisy but predictable pr campaign against them conducted by ace during the spring, is becoming increasingly unreal, given the peculiar shift taking place in ace funding. As noted previously in this column, while ace’s core government grant has fallen since the Tories took over, its share of proceeds from the National Lottery just keeps going up: in 2009/10, ace’s government grant was £453 million, while its share of lottery revenue was £172m. By 2011/12, following the first government cuts, its grant fell to £394m, but its lottery funds had grown to £210m. And while ace’s core funding continues to fall – £360m in 2012/13 – lottery revenue has exploded. Interim figures suggest that ace will receive around £270m from the lottery in the same period. In other words, ace has more money to hand out today than four years ago.

Of course, lottery revenues are unpredictable (although projections suggest a continued upward trend); in a recession, however, it seems that people are eager to gamble their way out of austerity. And ace is in the odd position of complaining about cuts while having to hand out more cash. But because lottery funding cannot be used as a substitute for normal government spending, due to the principle of ‘additionality’ established when the lottery was set up, it has to fund activities that are supplementary to ace’s core funding. As lottery money has grown, ace’s various strategic funding initiatives have become more signiﬁcant, through schemes designed to develop arts

As ace’s core funding declines, its duty to dish out the lottery loot effectively drives the government’s agenda of reinventing arts venues as private-sector organisations organisations’ ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ – with the intention of making npos increasingly less dependent on state funding, and therefore realise the government’s vision of a privately funded arts sector. The last year has seen announcements of £50m in capital funding, £7m for the ‘capacity-building’ Catalyst Art scheme, £30m of match-funded grants to found endowment funds and, among other schemes, £500,000 to support young musicians in developing their careers in the pop industry – an odd incursion into commercial culture that may indicate a degree of confusion at ace about what its role in supporting ‘the arts’ actually is. ace, perhaps, protests too much. While it makes all the right noises against cuts to core funding, it is doing the government’s bidding

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by preparing organisations for the brave new world of patrons, private philanthropists and corporate sponsorship. Ideologically, anyway, ace long ago seems to have gone soft on the idea that funding activities that might not survive in the market was a principle worth defending – a principle, ironically, on which the Arts Council was founded. In practice, the corporatisation of the npo sector is resulting in the concentration of resources among a predictable roster of trusted, institutionally well-connected venues: £3m of endowment funds to the already heavily corporate Serpentine Gallery and £1m to the Whitechapel, with Catalyst funding turning up for respectable outﬁts such as Camden Arts Centre, the South London Gallery, the Chisenhale Gallery and so on. Maybe arts venues don’t need public funding. This is, after all, a question of political principle. As ace’s core funding declines, its duty to dish out the lottery loot effectively drives the government’s agenda of reinventing arts venues as private-sector organisations of a certain scale and character, however much it complains to the contrary. Choices are made, and that lottery funding could just as easily be directed to a greater support of small-scale, temporary projects and commissions, even venues – precisely the grassroots, artist-driven activity that has withered as the economy of small commercial galleries has succumbed to the recession. But that is a possibility ace seems unwilling, or incapable, of imagining: between 2008 and 2011, Grants for the Arts (gfa), the small-scale, open-application grants, fell from £67m to £51m, only bouncing back to £68m in 2012. But on closer inspection, as a share of total lottery revenue, gfa dwindled from 46 percent of funds in 2008/09 to not even a third of lottery funding in 2012. Small may be beautiful, but for the moment, biggest is best.

Sam Jacob Corporate hqs tell us all we need to know about 21st-century culture Over the last year or so, many of the giant digital corporations have unveiled plans for new headquarters. For Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook these are a far cry from the dorm rooms, garages and startup spaces that spawned them. They look like nothing less than the palaces of a new technological cabal: Versailles of the twenty-first century, designed not for a Sun King in a powdered wig but twentysomethings in fleeces with a penchant for table football and iced lattes. Apple is synonymous with the particular kind of sleek high-end product design that helped it rise to become, at one point, the world’s most valuable company. And the new hq , nicknamed ‘Apple City’ (in Cupertino, where Apple has been since the late 1970s), seems part of that ethos. Designed by Foster + Partners, the building arranges 260,000sqm of office space into a metal and glass doughnut. It sits on a massive plot planted as a forest. The building forms a ring around a huge circular interior courtyard, also partially forested, according to the architect’s renders at least. In these scenarios, Apple workers stroll in endless autumn sunlight through a landscape that is part science-fiction metallic gleam and part abundant nature. If, in Versailles, the palace and its garden are organised to present the visitor with an extreme expression of omnipotence and divine rule, Apple City and the other new hqs might also reveal something of the ideology of West Coast digital culture. For Apple, the giant zerolike plan creates a building that has fewer hierarchical qualities than a block with a top and a bottom. Its continuous circular form, without a beginning

and end, seems to encapsulate something of the strange ﬂat spatial organisation of digital information. But while this suggests a kind of equivalence, if not equality, across its plan, as with much of digital culture, apparent freedoms also contain their own controls. We can also see echoes of less liberating scenarios: arrangements of the Pentagon, Britain’s gchq and the Panopticon. It’s worth remembering too that Apple was named by Steve Jobs as a reminder of his experiences at All One Farm, an apple orchardcum-hippy commune shrouded, apocryphally, in Eastern mysticism and lsd. Perhaps there is something of this baby-boom fantasy recalled in Apple City’s vision of nature. Google’s new California campus is designed by the ﬁrm nbbj, whose corporate mantra reads, ‘Design lifts the spirit, unleashes human potential and transforms our world.’ Its architecture is far less striking than Foster’s Apple City, appropriately for a company whose own design culture is far less sophisticated (Google’s multicoloured logo originates from its founder’s dabblings with the free graphics program Gimp). But these generic architectural blocks have been twisted and bent by the stuff that Google knows best: data about human behaviour. Deformations generated by the working patterns of the employees who will occupy it, adjacencies of departments and so on mean that workers across the 102,000sqm development will never be more than two-anda-half minutes from one another – creating a kind of hyperlinked organisation. In Menlo Park, Facebook has employed the doyen of West Coast architecture, Frank Gehry,

to design its new headquarters. Like Apple City, it uses an image from the natural realm, one that Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg described thus: ‘From the outside it will appear as if you’re looking at a hill in nature.’ Inside it will be the largest open office space in the world. Perhaps only minds immersed in Californian digital culture can conceive of these two apparent opposites merged into a literal bureau-landscape. But it is Amazon’s new Seattle hq that provides the most full-blown example of the digital obsession with techno-nature. It includes three 6,040sqm biodomes. Each glazed dome is conceived, according to the promotional literature, as ‘a plant-rich environment that has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting’. Amazon – named, after all, for an environment – seems to be becoming a habitat in its own right. In each of these examples we see echoes of the hippy, pastoral techno-utopias of the 1960s, blended with management theory and marketeering. These are ideologies made of glass and grass, where office and orchard become indistinguishable from one another. They promise liberation from the tyrannies of traditional offices. At the same time, A corporate though, there’s the terrifying idea mantra: design lifts that nature itself might have become the spirit, an office, thanks to the always-on unleashes connectivity of digital technology. human An apple orchard was once a place for potential and Steve Jobs to go, drop out and tune transforms in. Now, perhaps it’s only another our world! place to log on.

Facebook campus design model. Courtesy Frank Gehry / Gehry Partners, Los Angeles

September 2013

Jonathan Grossmalerman The nsa and me This Snowden/nsa debacle has really got out of hand. The thought of that mindboggling heap of data he has yet even to leak makes me shudder, and it’s got me to thinking that maybe I should get ahead of this ‘info curve’ and do my own ‘data dump’! That way, when the public reads awful things about me on the Internet, they can say to themselves, ‘Big whoop! I already knew all that stuff and at least I got it straight from the horse’s mouth!’ So, here we go… stuff that I’ve done and had always planned to keep to myself but because of the government everyone now knows… well, I mean, they don’t know now but probably will… I mean they certainly will now that I’m telling them. Anyway… this isn’t going to be easy for me. I’m not proud of some of it… Like the time in 2005 I went to the Hugo Boss awards in a suit I stole off a truck. Well, I didn’t actually steal it. My assistant Neal stole it. But I told him to. So I guess I bear some of the responsibility. Even though it wasn’t actually even the suit I wanted. I wanted the cream summer wool one. Neal is always fucking up like that.

I bet you’re thinking, ‘So you had your assistant steal a suit! Big deal!’ It gets worse. Like when Ashcroft was still attorney general. That guy would call me every week to try and talk me into spying on the artworld for him. He had a keener understanding of contemporary art’s threat than he was ever really credited for. In any case, I was all for it, but we could never agree on my title or the licence to kill, epaulettes and sabre/belt accessory stipulated in my contract. One justice department mission I did accept was spying on Dash Snow. Mostly because his drugs were excellent. In fact, I was with him the night he died, though it wasn’t me who killed him. The cia did that. They were terriﬁed of Dash Snow because he was so smart, talented and articulate and had an axe to grind with the government. Mostly regarding unreasonable cigarette taxes. A gripe we both shared! I liked that kid. It was wrong to kill him like that. He could have been the voice of a generation. I was also key in bringing the fbi’s attention to G***’s murder pit. A rough-hewn hole of unspeakable horror smack dab in the middle of Chelsea. After a great deal of initial interest the

Courtesy Jonathan Grossmalerman

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fbi took a pass on pressing any charges or even shutting the murder pit down. G*** must have known I was the snitch, because he was curt at a party, and later that week a stranger approached me on the street and smashed my right leg with a Crescent wrench, breaking it in three places. The murder pit is still in operation today. I was there just last week! I had a really great time. Beyond all the little embarrassing data points – like how I bought all of my own paintings at my ‘breakout’ show or was caught completely off-guard by the ending of The Crying Game, and that I don’t love my children, any of them, or how I had my penis unsuccessfully ‘fattened’ by some conman in Mexico, and the time I was arrested for stealing Alex Katz’s colour-mixing recipes, and how ugly the end of my affair with Courtney Love actually was (the tabloids don’t know the half of it!) or how I got lost on Sixth Avenue (Sixth Avenue, for Christ’s sake! How does anyone get lost on Sixth Avenue?!), there’s really only one other scoop worth mentioning. I taught George W. Bush to paint. It was me. I did it! It was done as a favour and it wasn’t easy.

Most people are unaware that the artworld was pretty high up on the NSA’s list of snooping priorities

Mike Watson Italy’s Venice pavilion: not a disaster Venice seems like an idyllic city, so long as one ignores the facts that its waters are so dirty as to be dangerous to human health, its land practically sinks under the weight of its tourist hordes and its sea views are regularly marred by the presence of huge polluting cruise ships. Venice, like Italy, is full of contradictions, presenting a facade of cultural prestige derived from its past, while facing a future of growing cultural irrelevance on the world stage. This all said, there is some reason to be cheerful this year as the Venice Biennale’s perennial underachiever – Italy itself – managed an impressive exhibition after years of mediocrity, culminating in the farce that was curator Vittorio Sgarbi’s 2011 pavilion. Sgarbi, former mayor of Sicilian town Salemi and ex-undersecretary to the culture minister under Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, was appointed curator by Berlusconi’s then culture minister, Sandro Bondi, and proceeded to nominate several hundred university professors from different ﬁelds to in turn nominate their favourite living artists. The result – partly because Italian university professors are themselves often out of touch, maintaining their positions through a form of nepotism – was an unmitigated disaster. Sgarbi’s intention – to break open the power clique that presided over the contemporary art scene and invite a wider participation – would have been well founded if it had not been completely self-serving. As part of the rightwing political elite, and a vehement critic of contemporary art, Sgarbi – who is also an art historian and television personality – is naturally not a darling of the broadly leftleaning contemporary art scene. The resulting

exhibition was a national embarrassment, a kind of Salon des Refusés selected by a committee of privileged fools. This year the Italian Pavilion was curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, director, until recently, of Rome’s macro – the city’s museum of contemporary art – a contemporary artworld insider with a specialisation in Italian contemporary art. The exhibition, titled Vice Versa, aims to give an overview of recent Italian art via a series of seven dualities, each represented by a different pair of artists, who each present complementary works: Francesco Arena and Fabio Mauri (body/history), Luigi Ghirri and Luca Vitone (view/space), Massimo Bartolini and Francesca Grilli (sound/silence), Giulio Paolini and Marco Tirelli (perspective/surface), Flavio Favelli and Marcello Maloberti (familiar/ strange), Gianfranco Baruchello and Elisabetta Benassi (system/fragment) and Piero Golia and Sislej Xhafa (tragedy/comedy). This ambitious exhibition, comprising 12 new works out of 14, reﬂects on Giorgio Agamben’s Categorie Italiane, Studi di Poetica (1996; published in English in 1999 as The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics), in which the Italian philosopher argues that Italy can only be understood in terms ‘of a series of polarised conjugate subjects’. So for example Favelli and Maloberti present La Cupola (2013) and La Voglia Matta (2013), a wooden cupola fashioned after the dome of St Peter’s Basilica and used during religious processions, and a work in which four performers standing atop a piece of Carrara marble continually raise and lower one beach towel each. Both pieces reﬂect on the familiarity and yet unusual nature of ritual and daily life. Carrara marble is fundamental to Italy’s history,

Vice Versa (installation view, featuring work by left Gianfranco Baruchello, Elisabetta Benassi, right Flavio Favelli and Marcello Maloberti), 2013, Italian Pavilion, Venice Biennale

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as is the church, with its processions and customs that underpin personal, regional and national identity in a country otherwise difficult to define or understand. The exhibition includes work by two deceased artists – Fabio Mauri (1926–2009) and Luigi Ghirri (1943–92) – leading to criticisms at the announcement of the artist lineup that the focus was not contemporary or radical enough. Indeed, it is arguable that Pietromarchi didn’t have to do much to outshine his predecessor, who is something of a pariah in the contemporary artworld. Pietromarchi’s is a competent, clean pavilion with few shocks. However, this is in itself an accurate reflection of the Italian cultural scene. The exhibition is extravagant yet not flamboyant. Maloberti’s block of marble and Piero Golia’s large cube of concrete mixed with one kilo of gold dust – Untitled (My Gold Is Yours) (2013) – displayed outside the pavilion come across as austere yet elegant. But Pietromarchi’s achievement may reside in having done just enough. Much like Italy’s performance in other fields – football and fashion come to mind – Italy’s contemporary artistic production is characterised by a kind of solemn vivaciousness. Perhaps a welcome antidote to the shocks, irony and highfalutin statements that often characterise biennials. Following protocol, the new mayor of Rome will now appoint a new culture minister to deal with the appointment of a successor to Pietromarchi at the head of macro. The post may well go back to Pietromarchi, which would seem reasonable given his competent stewardship during these hard times. If he does return, he will have much to live up to following Vice Versa.

Raimar Stange Berlin – city of brotherly love After this year’s summer slump, Berlin is now moving into the Kunstherbst (or ‘autumn of art’) in three concerted steps. First, the large-scale commercial gallery exhibition abc – which many consider to be effectively an art fair – is taking place again, this time making a collective effort to include off-spaces (not-for-proﬁt ventures) in the presentation. If that’s accomplished, the event will also have succeeded in taking the once-independent scene under its wings. Second, Berlin Art Week, during which nearly all of the city’s important exhibition spaces will have their openings, is happening at the same time, alongside some satellite art fairs, like Preview Berlin. And third, there’s the ambitious exhibition project Painting Forever! Here, each of Berlin’s four major institutions – the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie, kw Institute and Deutsche Bank KunstHalle – is exhibiting a self-curated show on the subject of painting. The Berlinische Galerie offers a retrospective of Franz Ackermann (not primarily known as a painter these days, but rather for his multimedia installations). The newly established (after the closure of the Deutsche Guggenheim) Deutsche Bank KunstHalle is showing four female painters, Giovanna Sarti, Katrin Plavcak, Jeanne Mammen and Antje

Majewski – an explicit reaction to the exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, whose director, Udo Kittelmann, had previously announced that he would present four simultaneous shows of male painters (Martin Eder, Michael Kunze, Anselm Reyle and Thomas Scheibitz), as if painting were still a male domain. Lastly, the kw is attempting to present the entire spectrum of the Berlin painting scene with a ‘salon hang’ of some 70 works, one by each of the selected artists. The wall-ﬁlling ensemble will make it difficult to really see the art; serious curating doesn’t look like this. This trend towards collaborative exhibition planning in the German capital has been evident for a few years. One only needs to think of the annual Gallery Weekend, four days in which all the important galleries in Berlin have their openings and celebrate one big party together. Another example of joint venturing was the controversial exhibition Based in Berlin, initiated by the Senate of Berlin in 2011, in which institutions including the kw and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein took part. One year later, Berlin Art Franz Ackermann, My Local Horizon, 2013 (in Painting Forever!, 2013, Berlinische Galerie), oil on canvas, 220 × 170 cm. © the artist

September 2013

Week was hosted for the first time. But why is it that once-competing institutions and galleries are suddenly behaving as overly cooperative team players? The objective, it seems, is to compensate for conceptual deficits – when compared to other countries – by using concentrated mass. For example, the Berlin fair Art Forum never managed to be a really successful event. Last but not least: the Berlin Biennale has been controversially discussed in the last few editions; and the city’s institutions are suffering from an acute lack of funds: the disappointing and much criticised Martin Kippenberger retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which was entirely assembled from the museum’s own collection – and consequently none of the artist’s larger works (none of his metro stations, for example) were on view – because of its financial difficulties, is a good recent example. So Berlin’s art planners are now trying to put together an attractive package to make a visit to the city worthwhile again, not only for art connoisseurs, but also for tourists interested in art. This joint operation is all the more sensible in Berlin in that, thanks to collective marketing and organisation, it can probably also save a great deal of money. Translated from the German by Emily Luski

Mark Rappolt Off-space No 14: Ve.Sch, Vienna Ve.Sch (the name comprises the abbreviated surnames of its two founders) is not an off-space in the same sense as, say, London’s alternative art spaces: off the map. Located in the centre of Vienna (Schikanedergasse 11), it’s just around the corner from one of the city’s main gallery drags (Schleifmühlgasse), in between two pillars of Vienna’s contemporary art mainstream – the Secession and the Generali Foundation – and just a few minutes’ walk from the main cluster of contemporary art institutions, at the MuseumsQuartier, as well as another chunk of commercial galleries on Eschenbachgasse. It’s nothing special to look at from the outside (an anonymous, graffiti-covered door leading to a three-room half-basement) and has the feel of a rowdier, grungier Cheers bar, but physically it’s at the heart of things. Neither is it one of the many off-spaces that comes and goes after a limited run or the culmination of a speciﬁc programme: Ve.Sch, an artist-run space, was founded in 2008, and is something of a Tuesday- and Thursday-night (it’s only open those evenings, from 7pm through to various deﬁnitions of morning) institution within the city’s art community. In fact, when I meet three of the four artists who run it, they go out of their way to downplay this, pointing out that some elements of the art ecosystem don’t generally hang out at this

combined bar and exhibition space (apparently on a visit to Ve.Sch it can be guaranteed that you will ﬁnd hardly any collectors and only a few commercial gallerists). Ve.Sch is currently run by Martin Vesely (the Ve.), Ludwig Kittinger (who joined in 2010 and, with fellow artist Fernando Mesquita, developed the Dienstag Abend – Tuesday night – programme of one-night exhibitions, between 2008–10), Franz Zar (an artist and musician, who joined in 2011) and Thea Moeller (who recently joined the team to strengthen the space’s links to a younger generation of artists, with whom the boys are not so well connected). As that suggests, each artist brings his or her own social, artistic and intellectual networks to the project, taking it in turns to invite artists to use the space. Ve.Sch is about dialogue, Zar points out, and he means it both in terms of the dialogue between one artist and another (between the four artists and between individual commissioners and commissionees), and in terms of the conversations around the bar. Indeed the bar itself is perhaps the biggest artwork in the space: an installation as much as a sales point. (Although it is the latter too, as the sales from the bar are crucial to ﬁnancing the space, which also receives state support.) While it might be intimidating for an outsider to walk into a bar in which everyone seems to know everyone else’s name, the art on

Hugo Caniolas, Wound, 2013 (installation view), ink on linen, 470 x 950 x 300cm. Courtesy Ve.Sch, Vienna

ArtReview

show acts as a leveller. You’re never short of conversation in Ve.Sch – if worst comes to worst you can talk about the art. Ve.Sch is dedicated to showcasing the productions of the local art scene. Recent displays have included an interactive work by David Moises that involved barflies firing aluminium bolts from a sports crossbow into cans of pressurised polyurethane foam, and Wound (2013), for which Hugo Canoilas (a Vienna-based Portuguese artist) covered the walls of the bar in linen painted with Mad Men-era adverts promoting the benefits of cigarettes, lard, firearms and the erotic potential of the right deodorant. Other exhibitions have featured performances, installations, works hung on the wall and music – the kind of mix of genres and styles that makes the space hard to define or categorise. Vesely points out that Ve.Sch sets out to be ‘a space for everyone’ – not just one particular clique, movement or age group – and to avoid the sense of hierarchy that is so prevalent in the artworld in general. “It’s not about power,” Kittinger ads, before conceding that the very fact he needs to mention as much means that, on a certain level, it is. But the real lesson from Ve.Sch is that it’s not the most visible institutions that make an art community (and the construction of a community is the real Ve.Sch programme), it’s the less visible places like this.

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 24

V.I. Lenin on Reena Spaulings Fine Art Interview by Matthew Collings

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, born in 1870 in the provincial town of Simbirsk, in the Russian Empire, became the leader of the world’s ﬁrst constitutionally socialist state. His party, the Bolsheviks, took power in Russia following the revolution in 1917, and in 1922 he instigated the formation of the Soviet Union. His 1902 essay, ‘What Is to Be Done?’, contained his ﬁrst proposal for a vanguard elite party to push through the transition to socialism. Suffering stress-related illness throughout his life, Lenin died in 1924, near Moscow.

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artreview When you are not fomenting revolution, why not try relaxing in our new art galleries? vladimir ilyich lenin Most enjoyable, I agree. But even there I can’t shed the habit of making notes for speeches. I have some here. ‘Details to consider. The values of transnational capitalism have permeated the artworld. The whole of the artworld is an epiphenomenon of capital. Check this: abstract qualities in abstract art also bear the meaning of capital, since they can only have meaning at all if you’ve been initiated into knowledge systems peculiar to the artworld and possessing no currency outside it.’ ar Abstract art is a porous notion now. It can be perceptual experimentation. Or you can deconstruct painting’s institutional meaning. Or just express your feelings. vl The emergence of abstraction in art a century ago is of interest to me together with the question of its continuity today. But if I think of Russian Constructivism initially, it is not only because I created the basis for a paranoid and autocratic secret bureaucracy that, among other crimes, caused those artists to be persecuted, and I wish to apologise for that – mistakes are inevitable; revolution is a long process – but also because that particular instance of abstract art – with its dynamic geometric formations developed from Malevich’s experiments in Suprematism – was high-powered and confident. It was produced by men and women whose admirable aim was that art should be visually refined, but at the same time entirely identified with the construction of a new society with progressive values. ar We have great collectives now, too. Bernadette Corporation, for example. It is an offshoot of Art Club 2000, which was made up of students from New York’s Cooper Union. Art Club 2000’s first show, in 1993, was of photos of themselves, posing at street corners in New York, in absurdly repetitious Gap outfits. vl A stunt that comments on the despair of a nullified politics – yes, facetious comment can be a stage of effective criticism. I’m familiar with the present trend of artist collectives. With the activities of Bernadette Corporation, more specifically, I receive an overall impression of fictional institutions layered in front of and behind one another, for the purpose of criticising bourgeois tendencies. John Kelsey, one of its more visible members, is admired for being an artist, running a gallery and writing articles. The latter are a mixture of publicity and promotion with terminology from the kind of theory often described as ‘Academic Marxist’. If this is an awkward fit, then Reena Spaulings Fine Art, his gallery – run with a partner – is a clockwork definition of critical

intervention: a real business but only radical subversion gets a look in. It is named after a ﬁctional art curator who stars in the novel Reena Spaulings, issued by Bernadette Corporation in 2004. The meaning of this multiauthored anonymous work is that culture is produced not by authors but by a time and place. It is clear how this long-lasting group has become a model to emulate. Today’s collectives are committed to concepts like the return of history, the necessity to question everything through undermining the codes of art and insisting that thought about art should always be in terms of what lies beyond it.

Apart from one panellist nobly attempting to present serious arguments, it was something like a monkey house mixed with a clown act. Gibbering outbursts dominated, amounting to an overall amazing incoherence. The moderator, determined to bring an atmosphere of nonurgency to an event already replete with fatuousness, posed questions into the air, as few and as empty as possible, as if passing the time politely with a crackpot relative ar Those are good concepts aren’t they? vl The collectives’ real raison d’être isn’t always the same as their adopted credos. Bernadette Corporation references fashion repeatedly as an index of suppression, but also, unashamedly, it seems, as a way to appear fashionable. ar What’s wrong with fashion? vl It depends on the context. Certainly individuals want to survive in a competitive, business-driven artworld, and being perceived as fashionable can help with that. But how does it help change society’s values so they are more progressive, and less reactionary and exploitative? I saw a conference at the ica in London the other day called ‘The Trouble with Artist Collectives’. Sitting in the audience I was reminded of our Social Democratic Labour Party congresses early in the twentieth century. Overt political activity was illegal in Russia. The sdlp’s Second Congress, in 1903, was held initially in Brussels and then in London. We were surprisingly few in number, considering

September 2013

the impact on history that we were to have. In a building housing a printworks in Clerkenwell, owned by one of our British sympathisers, we found ourselves divided into two even smaller groups, and the Russian words for their relation in terms of pure size became the names of the two parties that eventually arose from the split: namely Bolsheviks, ‘majority’, and Menshevics, ‘minority’. Now here I was, at the ica, in the Mall, exactly 110 years later. The talk was part of a series; I saw an earlier one, as it happens, in 2010, called ‘The Trouble with Painting’. It is accessible on YouTube. Apart from one panellist nobly attempting, with the patience of a saint, to present serious arguments – I deeply respected her capacity for philosophising; she is an abstract painter – it was something like a monkey house mixed with a clown act. Gibbering outbursts dominated, amounting to an overall amazing incoherence. The moderator, determined to bring an atmosphere of nonurgency to an event already replete with fatuousness, posed questions into the air, as few and as empty as possible, as if passing the time politely with a crackpot relative, deaf as well as senile. ar What happened at the art collectives talk? vl There was a collective present that didn’t want to change society but rather to maximise, through group power, the attractiveness of individual members’ creativity precisely for the society that already exists. Its supporters in the audience and spokespeople on the panel were baffled by the contrary aim of a different collective, also represented on the panel, which was to tear down the artworld. Each could only see the other as a grotesque caricature of difference: eager apolitical entrepreneurs versus tormented nihilists. ar Ha, ha, I heard about that: you mean Luckypdf and bank? vl Yes. Each is known only dimly to the artworld beyond the shores of the uk. But global readers of this interview will have been excited by our mention of Bernadette Corporation, whose 20-year retrospective at the ica was the occasion for this conference – they themselves are far too cool to have been in the room. The collectives now tend to be tuned in to conditions of display and reception that prevail outside the artworld, which almost corresponds to their claim to be undermining art; at least, that is their strongest joke, the estrangement they perform on artistic convention. That this has become a convention itself is not even a problem, as Bernadette Corporation’s events and announcements make clear.

ar The artworld loves Occupy: the collectives are part of that. There are real revolutions everywhere now. Bernadette Corporation is on their side. vl Yes. There is a diagram that many art people have in their heads about power and its possible overturning. They see the developed world providing profit for the maintenance of its extravagant lifestyle expectations by modes of exploitation that are imagined to have gone out with the Victorian age. But they are only removed out of sight to the undeveloped world, and there you see the brutal reality of the boss–worker model. At the same time, over there, as you say, revolutions are happening. People are being shot in Egypt. There are civil wars. Over here, because lifestyle expectations are being met, we can go on being flip. ar What is to be done? vl For better or worse the collectives on the whole want what it is correct to wish for, by the standards of centuries of struggle for human emancipation and fulfilment: a different world. They point to its possibility through the type of art that they feel comfortable with, one that destroys substance. However, dialectical logic impels me to examine an opposite proposal: abstract art’s confident substance. ar You mean all abstract art? vl I look at it across the board, yes. If you put aside its legends you have a chance of seeing what it is and how it has a place in the current project of building a better world. Surely it must be based on a better understanding of what the world is? Abstract art, in its aesthetic enquiry, is all about that. It is not a question of preabstract art being redone but with

depictive elements taken out, so that geometric shapes alone remain – the rectangles in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, say. Rather, a painting by Mondrian transposes the whole visual intensity of Las Meninas to a purely abstract context: it is not a picture of squares but a metaphor for existence. ar You said ‘legends’. Which ones do you mean? vl All of them, but abstract art made nowadays is often assumed to have something to do with Abstract Expressionism, whether it’s ironic towards it or sincere or even if, in reality, it couldn’t care less about it: so let’s look at Abstract Expressionism. It has legends of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, self-creation and self-destruction; and then another legend of cia involvement in promoting Abstract Expressionism abroad. It becomes much less obscure and its potential for reseeing reality is decongested, if you look at Abstract Expressionism in association with its fallout style: the art of target paintings, poured paintings and metal-girder sculptures, which is derided as formalism. This kind of abstraction was often justiﬁed by its creators as being concerned with meanings that are artistic rather than relating to other kinds of knowledge. Or being about looking. That is, meaning is there if you will only permit yourself an undistracted kind of looking. Desire to be informed as to the

next month Grandma Moses on Rosalind Krauss

Bernadette Corporation, 2000 Wasted Years, 2013 (installation view, ica, London). Photo: Mark Blower

key to meaning, as if the work itself were not the key, is a typical distraction. Meaning is in the work, it is said, which is the product of looking. Interestingly, the Russian literary critics and analysts who ﬁrst came up with the term ‘formalism’, in the 1910s, Viktor Shklovsky, for example, among others, were certain that an artistic preoccupation with it was about vivid expression of life, not turning away from life; it was only the later Stalinist position to see formalism as opposed to reality (and therefore antisocial). To me, in any case, what the formalists of the American and Western European 1960s and 70s demanded in relation to ‘looking’ seems useful today. It is not the opposite of doing, or the opposite of politics. It helps Abstract Expressionism to stop being this cotton-wool ﬁction ‘Abstract Expressionism’, and to be instead so many different instances of a consciously arrived-at concentration of abstract values, whose meaning is a metaphorical expression of a multiple reality that is layered and dynamic. This is the same for anything in the history of abstraction, whether machinist forms by Picabia and Duchamp, or vibrating coloured discs by Sonia Terk-Delaunay or geometry by Hilma af Klint. Abstract art can take its place as a tool for change, one that is on the side of antibourgeois real substance, where Bernadette Corporation is on the side of destroying bourgeois illusions of substance. The collectives have interpreted the world, in terms of witty rebuttals of neoliberalism’s attempt to make everyone the same. But the point is to change it, in terms that are a bit more complex than just being sarcastic.

ArtReview

Great Collectors and their Ideas No 1

Julia Stoschek Interview by Mark Rappolt

The Julia Stoschek Collection, located in Düsseldorf, is an international private collection of contemporary art with a focus on time-based media. Begun in 2003, the collection opened to the public in 2007 in 2,500 sq m of a former factory converted by Berlin-based architects Kuehn Malvezzi. The building also houses a small cinema, and storage and conservation facilities. Stoschek, a shareholder of the Brose Group ( founded by her great-grandfather), lives on the top ﬂoor. The seventh annual exhibition from the collection, opening on 6 September, features work by Ed Atkins and Frances Stark. Stoschek is a member of the board of trustees of moma ps1, New York, the acquisitions committee of Kunstsammlung nrw, the boards of the Kunsthalle and Kunstverein in Düsseldorf, and the kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Monika Lahrkamp, an art historian, works for the collection.

ArtReview

artreview What was the first artwork you bought? julia stoschek The first work I acquired was a painting, which is funny because if you look at the collection now, the focus is on time-based media art. It was at an art fair in 2003. The painting, in fact, is a mixed-media painting by Pep Agut and it’s still in the collection. Three years ago, when the collection was presented [Julia Stoschek Collection – I Want to See How You See] at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, it was the first piece at the entrance. I still love it. ar Was it for your home? js It was intended for my home but it was ultimately never installed in my apartment. Two art handlers arrived with the piece and it didn’t fit through my front door. At that point I had no idea what to do with an artwork, and it was then that I learned about external storage. ar Do you distinguish between the works you live with and the works in the collection? js Yes, to be honest I have much less art in my apartment – maybe this is because I live so close to the exhibition space. In my private surroundings I need space. There are some site-specific permanent installations, like a large-scale work by Carol Bove and Mark Manders and a sculpture by Terence Koh, but also white walls, which help me clear my mind. ar How did you get into collecting? js I studied business and economics (my family is not involved in the art scene). I grew up in an industrial entrepreneur setting, but I did some internships while I was studying Business Economics in New York. There I learned a lot about art and the art scene. After finishing university, I opened a gallery. I did this for three months until I realized that dealing is not my thing. I can’t sell anything. I tried it once with a horse – I gave it to a friend – and then a car, which was pretty unsuccessful. So instead I started an artist residency project as well as organising exhibitions, being so close with the artists, seeing how they work, getting into their life and collecting. Also, I met Harald Falckenberg in the early 2000s. He was the first private collector I met and this encounter really influenced me. It was a key moment for me to visit his collection and experience him talking about his passion for art. It opened my eyes to an exhilarating possibility I had not considered before. Ingvild Goetz, whom I met very early, also influenced me and helped me a lot – they were helping me find my way in the art world and I’m happy and thankful to say that they still support me now.

ar When did the collection start to get bigger than an apartment-size collection?

collection, Fragile [2008], we had a lot of works by female artists from the 1960s onwards.

js I think the starting point was when I bought the ﬁrst video piece. That was in 2004 with Aaron Young and High Performance (2000), which is one of his most important works, in my opinion. I met him at moma ps1, where he was part of the Greater New York show. Aaron didn’t have a gallery at that time, and everything he did after that was strongly connected to that work. I remember we were both sitting in the cafeteria and he asked me, ‘What do you want to pay for it?’ and I asked him, ‘What do you want to have for it?’ I can’t believe this happened ten years ago and how everything has changed in the meantime.

ar When you say it’s a female collection, what do you mean?

ar Do you think, when people walk round your collection, they get some sort of picture of you? js Hopefully. I live so close to the collection, better: I live with it. Just think about Ingvild Goetz; her collection is within her immediate surroundings, but it’s separate. The only [other collector] I know who really lives so close with her works is Erika Hoffmann in Berlin. So yes, I surely identify myself with the collection a lot.

‘For sure it’s a woman’s collection. I’m not particularly interested in gender-specific art, but I’m very, very happy to find good works by female artists’ ar What kind of picture do you think people get of you from the collection? js You’d have to ask the people! ar You also project something, surely? js What’s really important for me and also for the collection is that it is contemporary. I do collect contemporary art, because I live in the “here and now”. I love art in general, Classical Modernism for example, but I couldn’t imagine collecting it. I’m very interested in my generation and the art of my generation. For sure it’s a women’s collection. That’s how it is. I’m not particularly interested in gender-specific art, but I’m always very, very happy to find good works by female artists. ar I can’t think of any in the current show though, Number Six: Flaming Creatures, which centres on the work of Jack Smith. js We have fewer in that show. But the next show will represent two artists Frances Stark and Ed Atkins – one female, one male. Indeed, for example, in the second presentation of the facing page Photo: Yun Lee

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js I’m a woman. I don’t know if this makes a big difference compared to collections that are built up by men. We talk about that quite often. I don’t know. I just do what is right for me and I do it my way. ar Are you competitive about collecting? Do you look at what other people are doing? js I really have to say that in a very real sense my competitors are museums, not collectors. For sure Ingvild Goetz has an incredible media collection, but she doesn’t only collect media art. To compete with museums can get tough, because if there is an edition of three, and one is reserved for the moma and another for the Tate, then I have to struggle to get the third edition. I have to say the artists really appreciate my collection as an institution. We work professionally and we try to generate surroundings where the artists feel that their presence and works are very much appreciated. Even if you are talking about installations, we always work together with the artist. My former partner, Andreas Gursky, is an artist and I could feel how important it was to him to have his works installed the right way, and how upsetting it can be if that is not the case. I learned a lot during that time. ar To what extent does your social life revolve around art, too? js Yes, it does. ar Was it always like that? js Two friends of mine live round here and sometimes it feels so natural and so good not to talk about art with them. As you know, I travel a lot and we are all part of one big art family. I’m happy to be part of this family and I really like it. ar Do you have to like the artists you collect, if you meet them? js No, I don’t need that. I have a lot of works by artists whom I’m not so close to and do not have such a personal connection with, but I’m absolutely fascinated by their art. So it’s nice, if sympathy and appreciation of the works come together, but it doesn’t have to be this way necessarily. ar Why did you become interested in time-based media? js I think this is strongly related to my personality. I like the moving image. I grew up with mtv. A lot of events in my formal life were captured on video. My father has a strong affinity to technical equipment – we always had the newest cameras and video equipment.

So in a way, starting to collect time-based media was inevitable. The speciﬁcs of time-based media can make it exhausting to experience them in an exhibition context – you have sound, you have the moving image, you have so much information, one after the other – and you really need to provide a way to make it a stimulating experience for people, less of a tour de force. ar Is the increasing redundancy of media technologies a problem in the long term? js It’s the biggest challenge. We have agreements with all the artists, specifying whether their works can be displayed using the newest technology or whether a work requires the use of speciﬁc older models. We constantly research the availability of all these old technical devices like monitors, projectors, everything – to have a pool. The technical aspect is challenging even for archiving and preservation. We have a strategy, which involves at least three different media formats for each work: We digitalize all video pieces, and store them on an external server. But besides this we always try to get two other copies in different analogue formats, like digital Betacam, mini dv, dvd to have two backups in stock.

we can see the institutions here have changed. I have the feeling that they have a stronger focus on time-based media now than, let´s say, ﬁve to seven years ago. ar How much do the collection and what you show relate to being speciﬁcally in Düsseldorf? You mentioned previously that John Bock’s inclusion in Flaming Creatures was partly because you wanted to include a German artist. js The main focus of the collection is us-American art – most of the artists represented are American – nearly 90 percent, and I think this is natural given that I’m collecting timebased-media art. There are very few works by German artists in the collection, in comparison.

ar Does it upset you if someone comes round here and says, ‘Oh, I had a terrible time, that was all rubbish’? js Yes, absolutely. ar You take that quite personally?

ar Are you attracted to work that is provocative or shocking? js The current show, Flaming Creatures, is very provocative. If you look at the whole collection you won´t ﬁnd a general theme or a focus on provocative works. The concept is to draw a line from the 1960s until now, so historical pieces and works by emerging artists are interacting with each other. What I also try to do is not get only one piece by an artist, but really to follow an artist and to get the masterpieces, like a whole group of works to get a big spectrum of an artist’s work.

ar When did you decide you wanted to share the collection with the public?

js Yes, absolutely, and I’m on the acquisitions committee of K20 and K21 here in Düsseldorf, which I think makes so much sense and I’m very happy that Marion Ackermann asked me to be part of it. It really doesn’t make sense if she is acquiring two Keren Cytter pieces that are in my collection, for example.

js I love the guest book and what people write in it. Also, I really like it if it’s critical. Last Saturday there was somebody writing in the book, ‘There is too much money in one place’, or something like that. I appreciate people’s reactions. The response is essential to me, the good as well as the bad and the critical, absolutely – I think I’m quite cool with that.

monika lahrkamp The problem used to be the analogue media, like digital Betacam. If you copied or digitalised them, the quality was insufficient. Today, most of the young artists are aware of this problem and work with hd files. 16mm or 35mm-films pose different challenges. It’s getting more and more difficult to even get the material for the films! Kodak, for example, shut down their business.

js First of all, when I started collecting time-based media and multichannel installations, I realised from the beginning that I needed space to make the works visible and bring them to life. So I started researching and I was very lucky to ﬁnd this building. I renovated the building and meanwhile I was thinking about opening the collection to the public. I really didn’t know if there was any interest in it. Düsseldorf is a fantastic art city and there´s a long tradition and acceptance of art, if you look at [Joseph] Beuys and the Academy, but, historically speaking, it’s not a place you would associate with time-based media art. Even the Art Academy didn’t specialise in video and time-based media art for a long time. Now there is much interaction and collaboration between us and the academy and its students. And for sure

ml You also donated three main works of your own collection to the moma collection.

ar How do you see the collection developing; can it just keep growing?

ar In your roles on museum boards, do you ever have conﬂicts where you want something and they want something different? js moma ps1 doesn’t have a collection. I was a member of the Trustees of the Department of Media and Performance from the moma and for sure I was involved in the decisions for new acquisitions for the collection. It’s always fascinating to vote for a piece and then half a year later you go into the museum and you can see it; it’s installed there.

Gwenn Thomas, Jack Smith in Jack Smith’s Fear Ritual of Shark Museum, Cologne Zoo, 1974, 28 × 35 cm, silver-gelatin print, printed 2005. Courtesy the artist and Exile Berlin

ArtReview

js The collection is growing, but the budget is ﬁxed. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I’m happy to be able to spend much of my income on art. I really have to say collecting is one thing. To open a collection to the public is another. It is really cost-intensive to have the collection available to be experienced by the public, with changing exhibitions and accompanying catalogues. If I was putting all the funds that I´m spending on the building and the exhibitions into buying new art pieces, my collection would be so much bigger by now. But giving people a chance to experience the art of my collection is something that is more important to me, and I’m happy to see how it all worked out.

Other People and Their Ideas No 8

Gabi Ngcobo Interview by Tom Eccles

Gabi Ngcobo lives and works in Johannesburg. She is an independent curator and educator based at the Wits School of Art, University of the Witwatersrand. In 2010 she cofounded the Center for Historical Reenactment (chr), a Johannesburg-based independent platform that seeks to look at history in order to investigate how certain values have been created, promoted and subsequently assimilated into a broader universal discourse. In 2013 she became the ﬁrst pool curatorial fellow, which has resulted in the exhibition Some a little sooner, some a little later, on show over the summer at luma Westbau in the Löwenbräu art complex, Zurich.

ArtReview

Our goal was to activate Fanon’s statement from the ‘The Fact of Blackness’ (1952): ‘Since the other hesitated to recognise me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known’

artreview When did you first consider curating? gabi ngcobo For me curating was not so much a consideration, it was fated, perhaps by the political circumstances of the time (post1994), which fuelled us with organising impulses geared at righting the wrongs or at showing other sides of a story. I considered myself a curator, albeit sceptically, when I began to name and to find a home for those impulses. ar So, what was the first project you ‘curated’? What was the situation at the time? What were the impulses, what wrongs were being righted? gn I would have to say the Masked/Unmasked project, ‘curated’ in 2000 as part of the 3rd Eye Vision collective, which operated from a house we occupied in Durban between 1999 and 2003. It featured artists from Durban who felt unrepresented by local institutions – black artists. Our goal was to activate [Frantz] Fanon’s statement from the ‘The Fact of Blackness’ (1952): ‘Since the other hesitated to recognise me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.’ ar Fanon also said: ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.’ Now, after more than a decade of curating and organising, how has your ‘mission’ evolved, if at all? In some ways you seem to have maintained a very focused approach, with a real belief in the potential for art as a political and social force. After studying in the United States, you returned to South Africa and founded the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg. It explores ‘how artistic production helps us to deconstruct particular readings of history and how historical context informs artistic creation… How art can help us reinterpret history and its contextual implications and how it can add and suggest different historical readings and help in the formation of new subjectivities.’ It sounds very ‘Fanonesque’. How do the projects manifest themselves and how do you judge their effectiveness? gn I think I belong to a generation that is never satisfied with ‘how things are’. Sometimes there is a need to fulfil and then betray the mission. These tensions are necessary. Coconceptualising

I think I belong to a generation that is never satisﬁed with ‘how things are’. Sometimes there is a need to fulﬁl and then betray the mission. These tensions are necessary…

and then cofounding chr during and after my studies at Bard College was the only way I could imagine a reentry into the South African cultural space, and I was fortunate to find myself working with two artists I have great respect for – Donna Kukama and Kemang Wa Lehulere. For two years the chr space functioned as a collective experiment or a rehearsal of the kind of creative gestures we were interested in seeing happen around us. We are not so much into filling voids – that would be dangerously presumptuous. Our mission is rather to find alternative strategies that point towards

those voids and then search for a grammar of inhabiting the emptied and ‘ghosted’ spaces. In December 2012 we staged an institutional ‘suicide’ with an event titled We are absolutely ending this, which in a way can be viewed as a betrayal of the mission. For us it is also an opportunity to rewrite the mission statement as a desire for an existence that haunts obsolete systems that continue to condition present life. With our projects we strive for an approach that allows for a judgement biased towards the affective before the effective. There are no shortages of ‘audiences’ in Joburg. There were audience-orientated questions that were critical during the early years, shortly after the transition from apartheid in 1994, especially those that were activated by the two versions that were to be the ﬁrst and last Johannesburg biennales, in 1995 and 1997 respectively. For example, the question directed by the critics and media at the second biennale – who was it for? – remains relevant. Indeed, the question begs for a re-posing, a rearticulation and a reversal. Experiences and relationships we wish to have with this question are those that are skewed; that is, they need not look at the obvious but rather at what the obvious obscures. Our projects are meant for us, collectively and in our individual practices as well as the people and institutions we have collaborated with thus far. The South African (artistic) landscape remains uneven and characterised by hierarchies. The national project of commemoration for example is fraught with hierarchies that are also linked to other political imbalances, especially – but not limited to – the economies of gender, race and sexual freedoms. What is experienced when one walks into our projects is an attitude to art that is focused on a kind of knowledge activation not far removed from tensions, contradictions, misunderstandings and spaces of mutual recognition experienced every day.

Facing page Gabi Ngcobo speaks at luma / Westbau pool symposium, June 2013. Photo: Olivier Branden

ar The Johannesburg Biennale was sadly short-lived, with only two iterations (the ﬁrst directed by Lorna Ferguson, the second by Okwui Enwezor). Have you and your colleagues considered resuscitating the idea in some

We are not so much into ﬁlling voids – that would be dangerously presumptuous. Our mission is rather to ﬁnd alternative strategies that point towards those voids and then search for a grammar of inhabiting the emptied and ‘ghosted’ spaces. We staged an institutional ‘suicide’ with an event titled We are absolutely ending this, which in a way can be viewed as a betrayal of the mission. For us it is also an opportunity to rewrite the mission statement as a desire for an existence that haunts obsolete systems that continue to condition present life

September 2013

form? Recently you headed up the ‘Incubator for a pan-African Biennale task-force’, a yearlong project arranged to facilitate the articulation of critical positions regarding the notion of a Pan-African Biennial. What conclusions did you come to? gn The Johannesburg Biennale is a spectre that haunts chr the most. Through our projects we have searched for various forms to help us identify some of the biennale’s achievements that were overlooked or perhaps needed more time to process. The second version of the biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography, remains one of the most important biennials of the 1990s. It is remembered and evoked by many wherever we go. Its questions, which remain relevant, follow us like a memory of a disappeared relative – not dead but not alive. For example, our long-term Xenoglossia research project and Xenoglossia exhibition, which just opened in Johannesburg [at GoetheonMain], directly departs from Julia Kristeva’s essay (and question) featured in the jb catalogue: ‘By What Right Are You a Foreigner?’ The research project was a platform to search for the contradictions and misunderstandings occurring within languages; the mistranslations and the untranslatable. The exhibition makes space for these questions and contradictions to happen within its space in order to pose questions about the often-overlooked estranging quality of exhibitions and their grammars in the context of Johannesburg. With the Incubator for a pan-African Biennale we had the answers before we knew the questions; we knew that we do not need another kind of biennale because the artistic spaces in various African centres – from Dakar to Rabat, Maputo to Alexandria, Johannesburg to Nairobi, etc – were again at their most exciting moments. The continental scene was already taking on a form rooted in the need to provide itself with resources that would sustain its most urgent questions and build an environment where art can grow beyond nationalistic agendas. In 2012, Raw Material Company in Dakar hosted the symposium ‘Condition Report’ on building art institutions in Africa;

for those of us who were involved in the Incubator, this, as its title suggests, was a platform for evaluating the founding principles of independent organisations that had emerged in the continent in recent years. The symposium conﬁrmed what we already knew: we ‘desired’ what we already had. ar Most recently you organised the inaugural exhibition for the pool project at luma /Westbau in Zurich. The exhibition, Some a little sooner, some a little later… drew on works from the collections of Maja Hoffmann and Michael Ringier. It was a beautifully poetic and quite subtly (surprisingly) political show. How would you describe working within this context alongside the Kunsthalle Zurich and with the incredible resources available? What role do you see for private collections in the public sphere? gn I regard the title of the exhibition as one that emphasises a performative gesture. With this title I also wanted to recognise the idea of the ‘pilot’ as one rooted in the desire for

The South African (artistic) landscape remains uneven and characterised by hierarchies. The national project of commemoration for example is fraught with hierarchies that are also linked to other political imbalances, especially the economies of gender, race and sexual freedoms. What is experienced when one walks into our projects is an attitude to art that is focused on a kind of knowledge activation not far removed from tensions, contradictions, misunderstandings and spaces of mutual recognition experienced every day Many artists and creative people working in South Africa right now are engaged in a battle scene of translations; an impossible necessity with a vast stage and limited (if not limiting) resources. The scene is fuelled by the fact that, as a nation, we have been able to manifest many ways (both noble and questionable) of keeping the ‘world’s’ eyes on us

ArtReview

continuity. The pool project is a visionary project, it recognises a critical gap within post-curatorial training and attempts to find the right questions to ask and the right tools to ask those questions. I see it as an initiative that seeks to prevent important ‘things’ (objects, moments, ideas and their articulations) from disappearing into oblivion. Obviously the Western context as well as the collections contain many exciting moments of Western art and art shown within Western frameworks. The most important resource given to me was the freedom and trust to work with the two collections and to find myself within them. By this I mean I was conscious of not leaving myself behind but rather of finding a narrative that would allow me to articulate things from my perspective while staying close to the artists’ intentions and showing future potentialities of the work. With the pool initiative, privately collected art is allowed a chance to locate its unending potentialities. Hopefully the initiative can also afford a space for private collections to identify ways of diversifying their collections. ar If you were to give advice on how to approach collecting African artists, what would you say? gn I would politely decline to give such advice. ar Maybe a different question is better: what advice would you give an artist in South Africa thinking about locating their work within a global (maybe Western) context? gn Many artists and creative people working in South Africa right now are engaged in a battle scene of translations; an impossible necessity with a vast stage and limited (if not limiting) resources. The scene is fuelled by the fact that, as a nation, we have been able to manifest many ways (both noble and questionable) of keeping the ‘world’s’ eyes on us. I find myself drawn to artists who are able to make sense of tensions occurring within the scene of translation, especially what is ‘lost’ in translation. My advice to artists would be to remain true to themselves, critical of the spectacle and sensible to the larger world with whatever means are available to them.

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Art Featured Brazil

‘I never put the bloody bags in the poorer areas, the favelas’ 77

Fernanda Gomes The Rio-based artist blurs the line between raw material and ﬁnished art object, calling on the viewer to form a closer relationship with both by Oliver Basciano Photography by Pat Kilgore

ArtReview

Just outside a window of Fernanda Gomes’s sixth-floor flat in the entirely white; the bottom three only partially, in a manner that Copacabana district of Rio de Janeiro is a piece of fine wire piping, highlighted the grain of the material. Another example: two lengths stretched out like a fishing rod. At its end hangs a feather, which, as of bamboo attached to each other with cotton. Installed upright in twilight descends on the city, bobs to and fro in the warm evening the middle of the gallery, the thin totem bows slightly under its own breeze. This gentle interaction between the ad hoc mobile and its sur- weight, a curve that gives the eye a break from the straight lines and roundings, combined with the elegant simplicity of its construction, geometric constructions that surround it. Gomes’s interplay with the makes it, and Gomes’s work in general, a beautiful thing. architecture of the exhibition space is even more apparent when she Despite being made by the artist’s hand, this is not an object that works on a bigger scale. Part of her installation at last year’s São Paulo will end up in a gallery exhibition. It’s unlikely to be bought or docu- Bienal used much larger pieces of found building plaster and rough mented (this article aside) or incorporated into any of the official sys- wood frames that created barriers and subtly controlled the viewer’s tems that validate something as ‘an artwork’. It is simply an object passage through the space. that the artist made for herself. She and the few visitors she invites Back at the artist’s apartment the mobile is not the only work in evidence. While there is a small room to the rear of the building into her apartment are its only intended audience. To understand Gomes’s work is to understand the importance of that could be referred to as a studio, it is apparent that Gomes effects her authorial hand in the validation of her work – which can perhaps no separation within her working and living environments. The be perceived as a self-portrait, charting her relationship with the sitting room is almost entirely taken over by her own art, either material as she manipulates it into a sculptural object – a modernist carefully installed with the same attention she might give a gallery perspective at odds with the more contemporary notion that it is the show, or otherwise stacked to one side. Or perhaps the stuff stacked beholding subject who dicis still just materials, and tates the semantics of a work. only the formally installed I first met Gomes in London objects are finished work. It’s – a month prior to visiting far from clear. The same situthe artist in her apartment ation can be found through– during her spring exhibiout her home – the kitchen, hallway and her bedroom all tion at Alison Jacques Gallery. incorporate a similar level of Despite her renown in Latin America (she emerged as restrained bricolage. part of the generation of RioThis friction between raw material and finished born artists that also includes art object is one that Gomes Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto encourages. Sitting in her Neto and Adriana Varejão), lounge – the remaining light this exhibition was the first in the British capital since her of the day playing off a length solo outing at the Chisenhale of bamboo wedged between Gallery, in 1997. At Jacques, a the floor and ceiling – the profusion of slight objects colonised the floor and walls of the space artist is talking about how she has no need for a studio, and doesn’t – an installation that is characteristic of Gomes’s practice, though she desire a separation between her professional work and the rest of her does not exclusively work on such a small scale. Despite their num- life. She could be talking about the products of this multipurpose ber, the delicate nature of the works meant that the gallery space space too. Gomes’s perspective on the status of the things she exhibits disdains that art cliché about the ‘alchemy’ of the readymade. There’s never felt crowded. All untitled (as they always are), the objects were made from no mental or conceptual transformation that occurs in the transporcheap, prosaic materials – frequently, but not exclusively, wood – tation of an object from general life to the gallery. Her installation either found in the street or bought from basic hardware or artist- at the São Paulo Bienal also included a stem from a bunch of grapes, supply stores. Among them were two strips of mdf nailed to form a installed protruding from the gallery wall. One could imagine the perfect right angle; a wall-mounted cardboard box mysteriously cov- stem was sourced from the artist’s lunch, or perhaps that of one of the ered with tissue paper; a linen thread from which hung a dozen or technicians, or maybe it was just found in a public place sometime so half-burnt sheets of cigarette paper; and on the floor, a small rock. prior to its installation. Whatever its origin, the grape stalk is both Approximately half the objects displayed were materials in their ‘nat- food waste and artwork simultaneously: for the viewer, the waste ural’ state without any physical alteration by the artist – a 20cm offcut nature of the materials catalyses a subtle quashing of the hierarchies of a wood floorboard placed on the gallery floor, for example. She had between art space and street space. simply transported them to the gallery space and then requested that If it is obvious that, like the mobile, the works installed in the artwe give them attention. Some of the materials were left unpainted; ist’s home have been made for Gomes to enjoy personally, one is left others had a rough white matt finish. Other wondering whether all her works, wherever above Fernanda Gomes, 2013 (installation view, works were delicate and precarious forms of they are shown, have the same primary aim. Alison Jacques Gallery, London). bricolage, their elements loosely attached to I ask her why, when she applies paint to an Photo: Michael Brzezinski each other. In one corner five 12-sq-cm wood object, it is only ever white. She tells me how facing page Interior of the artist’s Rio de Janeiro blocks were piled up, the top two painted she started doing it (continued on page 84) apartment. Photo: Pat Kilgore

September 2013

Untitled, 2012 (installation view, São Paulo Bienal). Photo: Pat Kilgore

Untitled, 2012, wood, brick, plaster, 29 × 8 × 8 cm. Photo: Michael Brzezinski. © the artist. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

during the mid-1980s, and how she appreciates it as a “receptive colour” that will highlight subtle changes in the light levels of the environment around the installation. The installation at the São Paulo Bienal was completed by little pools of dappled natural light coming in though from the glass walls of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Bienal Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park – glinting off two nails hammered into a block of wood that lay on a narrow shelf, or partially illuminating sections of crumpled translucent white paper pinned to the wall. In Rio, Gomes – wearing a white flowing dress (she frequently makes her own clothes) – carefully places a plate of pale wheat snacks down on the table in front of me before pouring tea from a pale tea set. She tells me she is interested in the fact that white is what the eye sees when all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum hit it at once. She’s interested in the colour’s all-encompassing nature. Her use of white throughout her work (in the apartment, the lampshades, which she designed herself because she couldn’t find any that she liked, are white too; as are the walls and much of the furniture) seems an analogous reflection of this optical all-inclusivity. The artist immerses and invests herself

in her surroundings – be it the apartment, the gallery or the street – and the viewer is encouraged to look as the artist looks, to take in the world as she does, from minute changes in light to the close observation of the smallest but perhaps overlooked things. “The other day I came across an interesting-looking screw,” she says by way of explanation, knowing, one presumes, that to most people one screw is just like the next. She goes on to describe how she recently met a man on the beach who was weaving hats for tourists from palm leaves. Gomes asked him to teach her how to do it, because she wanted to understand the process – she wanted to initiate a deeper understanding of and a closer relationship to the object; to be somehow invested in it, rather than simply to consume it. And it’s this desire – to privilege the relationship between the ‘I’ and the world around it – that lies at the heart of Gomes’s sculptures. For the viewer, then, there is an encouragement to erase traditional distinctions between subject and object, to suggest that there can be no consciousness without it being consciousness of an object – an argument for a particular notion of being in the world. ar

preceding pages and above Interior views of the artist’s Rio de Janeiro apartment. Photos: Pat Kilgore

ArtReview

Market Forces by Vincent Bevins

ArtReview

In the wake of the summer’s highly visible protests against Brazil’s social and economic inequalities, will the country’s ‘emerging’ art scene operate on a new economic model or simply rely on more of the same?

facing page Helicopter over São Paulo. Photo: Diego Lezama. Courtesy Lonely Planet Images / Getty above Protests in Rio de Janeiro, 20 June 2013. Courtesy Reuters

September 2013

Almost two decades of governments have managed to stabilise the institutions play a big role in putting on exhibitions (foreign and Brazilian financial system and create a credit-led boom in domestic Brazilian) but do comparatively little to collect or directly promote consumption, while surging Chinese demand for commodities has contemporary art. Most of their money comes from the government, provided markets for Brazil’s vast natural resources. Powering for- which tends to bankroll projects with a broad educational focus rather ward economically and socially, the country has slashed poverty and than – so far – put measures in place to really get a mature market created new wealth, and now has about the same amount of buying going. Rich Brazilians who want to get involved in the arts don’t tend power as the biggest Western European countries (in nominal cur- to make a donation – they’re inclined to open up a commercial gallery rency terms Brazil is roughly on par with the uk, for example). While to promote the artists lucky enough to be cared for by their patron. this boom has begun to slow, the sheer size of the domestic market “This is without a doubt a difference when compared to Europe,” says Ana Letícia Fialho, the head researcher for the Brazilian has largely staved off the crisis spreading through the West. In the last couple of years, the domestic art market has grown Contemporary Art Association’s (abact) annual report on the contoo (on an international level, for temporary art market, referring to the example, Beatriz Milhazes’s hyperdominance of private galleries. “But the galleries here end up playing a role tropical My Lemon (2000) set a new aucthat’s cultural as well as commercial. tion record for Brazilian art, selling The [private] market has really strong last year for $2.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York). Much more teams that produce, travel and support, quickly, in fact, than the economy and show off Brazilian artists as well.” in general – which is good news for The art market in its current conBrazilian artists and gallerists who figuration is doing just fine. The total believe that the levelling out of the amount of exports from Brazil jumped from $10 billion in 2010 to $18.6b in gdp doesn’t have to mean a reversal of fortunes in the artworld. 2011. Nearly all of these sales come from São Paulo. But scenes of tear gas, barricades and over a million people on the street And though the 2012 report is, Pinacoteca do Estado museum, São Paulo. Photo: Felipe Borges after police violence exploded and at the time of writing, yet to be pubset off a wave of protests in June were only one particularly dramatic lished, Fialho says that over 80 percent of the galleries surveyed saw reminder that Brazil is not yet entirely a new country. This is some- gains in sales. But the vast majority of these (around 70 percent, in thing that’s clear for most working within or without the world of 2011) are driven not by exports but by private Brazilian collectors – art. Despite the language and the lily-white skin of most involved in the superrich bankers and professionals who in São Paulo are somethe arts scene, this isn’t Europe: things are done differently here, and times stereotypically, but not wholly irrelevantly, represented in the there’s plenty of room for the art market to mature. Depending on global imagination by a sky full of helicopters ferrying people too one’s mood, this can mean intractable historical dilemmas, or oppor- rich and too busy to set foot on the ground below. And it makes sense that private concerns dominate art so far in São Paulo, a city in which tunities to implement obvious solutions – that is, low-hanging fruit. One of the things that is most obvious to any foreigner in Brazil everything is in for-profit hands – most public spaces, for example, is the still-shocking level of inequality. In the art market, something have long since been sold off as sites for the city’s many skyscrapers. that may be related, perhaps indirectly, is the dominance here of priThe government does put a lot of money into arts funding, but the vately owned gallermajority of that fundies compared to the reling is naturally aimed at atively less influential a very broad section of public and nonprofit society – Brazil is still a sectors. Museums and country with significant

Odires Mlászho, Zero Substantivo (Substantive Zero), 2013 (installation view, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo). Photo: Edouard Fraipont

ArtReview

rates of illiteracy – rather than developing a commercial market. The purchasing works of art, either for private or public collections,” Ministry of Culture says that, directly and indirectly, the government says Eliana Finkelstein, abact president and director at one of puts almost r$2b a year into supporting the arts, but adds that, while Brazil’s most widely respected galleries, Galeria Vermelho. There is market stimulation is a concern, its primary endeavour is to ‘offer to also no special tax code defining what kind of goods works of fine art all Brazilians the possibility of consuming and producing culture’. are, says Fialho, something that could easily be altered. But culture is One ambitious and populist project being implemented at present slowly changing. “I believe private collections are committed to collecting works to is to give every worker in the country a r$50 stipend ($25, or about 7 percent of the monthly minimum wage) towards something as sim- be able to later donate them to public collections. The recently opened ple as seeing a film or dance performance for the first time. The money mar [Rio Museum of Art] is a good example of this,” says Finkelstein. spent on visual art often goes to phenomenally successful blockbuster Another example, she says, is a group of collectors assembled to proexhibitions of famous foreign works that generate hours-long lines of vide patronage to the Pinacoteca do Estado museum in São Paulo, Brazilians dying to see Impressionists probably Brazil’s best museum. or Caravaggio. But for promotion of But the main driver behind Brazil’s local contemporaries, the private gallerart boom has been the newly rich or the ies pick up the slack. newly interested in collecting art. And globally, the country’s new moment on “It’s not bad for the artists that have the world stage has led to new interrepresentation. The galleries work hard to nurture and protect the artists’ est – driven no doubt by the commercareers, and fund exhibitions and pricial artworld seeking new markets – in Brazilian art, which has long been of a oritise sales to museums and instituhigh quality. While people here are in tions,” says Marina Romiszowska, the habit of saying that one thing that an art adviser who will be putting on hasn’t changed is that Brazil has a lot a Basquiat exhibition at the publicly of artistic talent and creativity – somefunded Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio next year with head curator thing that stretches back to its earlyRio Museum of Art (mar). Photo: Andrés Otero. Courtesy mar twentieth-century avant-garde – will Dieter Buchhart. “But [those lucky enough to be represented by galleries] are an exclusive minority, and the market keep expanding as the economy takes a big hit and prothat’s a reflection of our social dynamics. Artists without funding have tests unleash unpredictable (and perhaps large-scale) political change? few options.” For better or worse, the growth depends on people who are Romiszowska also says the big museums need more independence extremely likely to stay rich. Historical trends show that once the rich for their shows, rather than having to rely on the current system of move into more ‘sophisticated’ consumption patterns – art collecting, corporate sponsorships whereby big companies get tax breaks to fund for example – they don’t usually go back. So the Brazilian art market cultural events. But it may not require Brazilians to get big overnight is likely here to stay, and whether the majority of money comes from on private patronage (in general, philanthropy isn’t so big here – most the private sector, the government helps the industry on its way with of the rich want to get richer) or for the government to pour tons of a change to art’s tax code or the situation continues as it is, the current cash into new projects to quickly improve the market. It could just be upward trajectory seems likely. We can avoid the tear gas, explosions a question of smarter policies and a few adjustments here and there, and fires in the street this summer – except, of course, as an obvious one of the things abact source of inspiration would like to see. for future works. ar “It’s essential to note that in Brazil there’s no tax exemption for

Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (ccbb), Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy ccbb

September 2013

frieze masters 2013

Concrete Parallels / Concretos Paralelos british constructivism / brazilian concrete and neoconcrete Dan Galeria . Rua Estados Unidos 1638 . São Paulo . SP . Brazil ph +5511 3083 4600 . www.dangaleria.com.br . info@dangaleria.com.br

Artur Barrio What happens when an artist who spends all of his life as an outsider is absorbed into the commercial art system? by Oliver Basciano

p...h..., 1969, toilet paper. Photo: César Carneiro. Courtesy the artist

A people living under dictatorship stand fundamentally distanced from their government. The populace is not only disenfranchised, but also cut off from any means of defining its own society. Dictatorial authoritarianism will penetrate culture, commerce, family life and all the other means by which individuals construct a society. While the ‘leader’ appears to embody the society, he is in fact keeping himself apart from society, often using violence or the threat of violence to keep these boundaries in place. Artur Barrio spent much of his early life living under a dictatorship. So perhaps it’s no surprise that ideas of what it means to be an outsider or on the periphery are central to his work. And that despite the fact that he is now represented by a commercial gallery in São Paulo, that his CV includes biennials, museum shows and major awards, that he lives in a comfortably furnished flat in Rio de Janeiro and that he has a sailing ship to further his interest in diving, the artist continues to cast himself as an outsider. This is not a piece of subjective role-making, however, but the consequence of an early life in which oppressive regimes – ones that fragmented and divided the society he lived in – seemed to follow him around. In 1952 his politically progressive father emigrated, with his young family (including seven-year-old Artur) from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro (where they arrived three years later by way of Angola), in order to escape the authoritarian Estado Novo regime. Nine years after the artist settled in Brazil, that country’s democratically elected government was felled by a dictatorship too. Barrio himself doesn’t like to talk about this formative time. “I don’t want to take advantage of the history,” he tells me through a translator. “I don’t want to use it as marketing.” Yet from the outset his work, if not always expressly set against the political authorities, of necessity had to circumnavigate them. The most significant consequence of this was the artist’s almost exclusive use of public space to present his early works, among which are sculptures made from impermanent materials intended to be found by passersby, and various open-air performances and anarchic ‘actions’, some of them documented, others left

in the memory of their author alone. “It wasn’t that I was necessarily looking for a wide audience, but going to these places meant working with new boundaries, new limits and new types of interaction between myself and the public,” he explains. p…h… (1969) – a performance in which the artist, stripped to his trunks in the gardens of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, threw armfuls of toilet paper into the sea – is a rare occasion when Barrio got close to an institution (though it’s telling that he never entered the building and remained on the periphery of the property). Even if the toilet paper almost instantly disintegrated and was washed away, there is photographic documentation of the work. 4 Dias 4 Noites (4 Days 4 Nights), on the other hand, remains entirely undocumented and without any record of its even having had an audience. In May 1970 Barrio walked the streets of Rio for four days and four nights, not stopping for food or rest, and without any planned route or destination. While he has recounted his increasingly hallucinatory memories of the performance – interacting with the people and places he passed by – no images or ﬁrsthand spectator reports exist. What the work did engender, however, is a change – catalysed by sleep deprivation and hunger – in terms of the way in which the artist perceived his surroundings. The assumed reality of the surroundings was broken up, rewired and undermined by the tricks his mind played on him. Indeed, this idea of rupturing preconceived assumptions is one of the enduring aims of Barrio’s work. Where 4 Dias 4 Noites was an entirely personal experience, the works that brought the artist to greater prominence within the generation of artists – among them Antonio Manuel, Cildo Meireles and Lygia Pape – that came to attention during the late 1960s and 70s were the sculptural bundles he left in the streets for as wide a public as possible to stumble across. In 1970 the artist distributed no less than 500 of these ad hoc sculptures around Rio, a series he titled Situação (Situation). The aim of these works, made from stained blankets, meat, bones, blood, shit, condoms, tampons and other such items associated with animal effluence, was to provoke in

Situação… orhhh…ou…5.000…t.e…em…ny…City…1969, 1969 (installation view, mam, Rio de Janeiro), paper bag with newspapers, aluminium foam, bag of cement, garbage. Photo: César Carneiro. Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo

September 2013

others a similar rupture of perspective that 4 Dias 4 Noites had trig- into their making, these objects were not meant to last or endure; gered in the artist himself. Ultimately Barrio wanted the discov- they were supposed to have a limited existence.” ery of these horrific-looking things to shock certain elements of How does the artist’s protest work – which often verged on anarthe public out of their complacency about the political status quo. chy – hold up now that its original target, the Brazilian dictator“I never put the bloody bags in the poorer areas, the favelas, though,” ship, has collapsed? How does the work made since the transition Barrio points out. “They’re used to seeing violence and dead bod- to democracy in 1985 react to an arguably far more slippery and wily ies, whether they’re killed by the drug dealers or the police. I would enemy: neoliberalism? The artist continues to make his work from never have put them in places where violence happened. They must cheap materials – and his exhibitions deliberately avoid any objects be in places in which such things are out of the regular order, to make that could become fetishised or easily subsumed by the market. people see things out of the regular order.” While politically danger- His Brazilian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale consisted of what ous – the police were frequently called to investigate the bundles – looked and smelt like piss up the wall, alongside a real box of fish Barrio avoided censorship (or arrest) by observing the reactions from heads, reeking in the Italian heat, and other similarly unattractive installations. The walls were covered afar, though the artist is at pains to Barrio’s interest in impermanence in lines taken from the artist’s varinote that his observance and the docis not only influenced by his adopted country ous artist books – which he refers to umentation of the action is secondas CadernosLivros (‘notebooks’) – that ary to the action itself. but also the few childhood months he creates to accompany actions and Barrio explains that he has paid he spent in Angola. performances. Installations for the little attention to the aesthetic qualities of his work – he used waste materials for pragmatic reasons – São Paulo Bienal in 2010 and for Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 “there was no cost, they were readily available and it meant I could (2002) had a similarly chaotic, degraded quality. Smaller works that work anywhere” – as well as for their innate material qualities: they might occasionally surface at art fairs have a violence to them: for deteriorate quickly, leaving little evidence. This suggests parallels example, …Situation…Town…y…Country… (1970) is a bundle of breadto Arte Povera, but Barrio points out that while in Europe there was sticks resembling a collection of high explosives. Or they might a choice as to whether to aestheticise the ‘poor’ materials, in Brazil, include materials that could put off the average collector: the burnt, where industrialisation was developing slowly, it was more a neces- untreated cardboard, erratic scribbling on paper and unidentified sity. “The paint that was made in Brazil was of very poor qual- brown mulch present in a series of framed wall-mounted bricolages ity; it would not endure,” he says by way of example. “If you were a made throughout the 1970s and recently revived, their collective painter and you wanted your work to last, you had to spend money title Os Meus Desenhos Heterodoxos (My Heterodox Drawings), is perhaps on imported paint.” Barrio’s interest in impermanence is not only a sly fuck-you to the doctrine of capitalism. “My work has stayed the influenced by his adopted country (he retains Portuguese citizen- same, even though the world has changed around it,” Barrio says. ship) but also by the few childhood months he spent in Angola. The “It is the system that changed, it has accepted the work into its instituartist owns a large collection of traditional art from the country, part tions.” He goes on to reaffirm the mindset of anarchy from which his of which he inherited, but the rest of which are his own acquisitions. work is generated. “It’s not directly ‘political’. It exists outside that… Gesticulating at the crowd of traditional masks that dominate his it is about resistance. So if it is now about resisting the art market living room in Rio de Janeiro, Barrio says, “While great skill went or the artworld, then fine.” ar

Artur Barrio, idéiaSituação interRelacionamento SubjetivoObjetivo, …………. (detail, Documenta 11, Kassel), 2002. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Untitled, from the series Os Meus Desenhos Heterodoxos, 1973/2009, mixed media, 50 × 67 × 3 cm. Photo: Everton Ballardin. Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo

September 2013

São Paulo

by Claire Rigby Photography by Cássio Vasconcellos

The birth of a new generation of cultural institutions

facing page Casa do Povo above Edifício Copan

Phosphorus

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Casa do Povo

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Teatro da Vertigem, Bom Retiro 958 Metros, 2012–13, play performed at Casa do Povo. Photo: Flavio Portela

Opening of the exhibition Oásis, 2013, organised by Hercules Martins, Casa do Povo

Opening party in June 2013 for Carmela Gross’s installation Aurora, 2003, at Pivô

Gustavo Ferro, Acting-Out, 2011, performance/installation, Phosphorous

Opening of the exhibition Oásis, 2013, organised by Hercules Martins, Casa do Povo

Screening, part of the Laboratório de Crítica Cultural, 2013, Casa do Povo. Photo: Luiza Sigulem

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There’s something stirring in downtown São Paulo; indeed, there’s the city ballet, two orchestras, two choirs and a string quartet. The something stirring in Brazil in general. As work on this article began complex – parts of which were built on land expropriated for the in June, a sudden wave of protests swept the country, filling the purpose by City Hall – consists of various modules ranging from a streets in a seismic, cathartic calling-into-question – to boil it down beautifully restored neoclassical facade to the sleek, brutalist concrete to basics – of the kind of society people wish to live in. In São Paulo, walls enclosing the new dance and orchestra headquarters. many of the protests began in and radiated out from the downtown Facing the complex from across the narrow valley is Estúdio neighbourhood of Centro, an area that has been the epicentre of Lâmina, occupying half a floor of a grand old building whose entrance various creative, self-starting movements recently, both social and is peppered with pixação – São Paulo’s spiky, hieroglyphic graffiti tags. artistic. From street parties like Voodoohop and Carlos Capslock Attend a salon evening at Lâmina, and you can expect to be presented to a string of diy-spirited festivals – BaixoCentro, AnhangaBaú with anything from live Brazilian-flavoured bluegrass to howling da FelizCidade, Existe Amor performance art. “There are so ‘This is a stepping-stone – it’s somewhere em sp – they are blooming here many young artists who can’t between the cracks, where the get a foot in the door of the art new artists can find a space, and where new city’s once-beating heart spent circuit,” says Estúdio Lâmina’s consumers of art can be formed as well’ the end of the twentieth century founder, Luciano CortaRuas. sliding into dirty, dilapidated decadence. “This is a stepping-stone – it’s somewhere new artists can find a space, Many of the city’s major art institutions are or once were located and where new consumers of art can be formed as well.” here in sp’s historic centre: the Museu de Arte Moderna (mam) was But of the new downtown art spaces, the most emblematic is based here until 1958, as was the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (masp), undoubtedly Pivô, whose name means ‘pivot’. With some 3,500sqm until it moved in 1968 to its current home, an iconic masterpiece of floor space, the not-for-profit art and cultural centre occupies by architect Lina Bo Bardi on the city’s grand, businesslike Avenida one end of the magnificent Edifício Copan, an S-shaped architecPaulista. The Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (ccbb) is currently tural behemoth created by the late Oscar Niemeyer, which is home to considering the possibility of migrating to a new, larger home close to around 5,000 residents, in apartments that range from 27 to 270sqm. the masp – but for now it still ranks among Centro’s doughty institu- Pivô launched the same night as last year’s São Paulo Bienal with an tions, along with Caixa Cultural and the grand Pinacoteca do Estado ambitious set of interlinked exhibitions held together under the art museum. title Da Próxima Vez Eu Fazia Tudo Diferente (Next Time I’d Have Done It All And joining their ranks, albeit on a range of smaller scales, a Differently) – which featured installations by Carmela Gross, Nazareno new generation of São Paulo cultural institutions is currently being Rodrigues, Guilherme Peters and Paloma Bosquê, among others. established in and around Centro. These plucky new spaces – Pivô, Displaying an early knack for creating and working new networks – Estúdio Lâmina and Phosphorus – are making the most of the cheap a hallmark of the people behind these new centres – Pivô has hosted rents and the quality of available premises. The veteran, rising-from- shows by the sp commercial galleries Mendes Wood and Emma the-embers Casa do Povo is in the next-door neighbourhood of Bom Thomas alongside its core programme, which includes performances, Retiro. Driven forward by ambitious young cultural players, what book launches and debates, and has rapidly consolidated its position these four have in common are their not-for-profit or nonprofit- as one of the city’s most credible and interesting new spaces. With oriented ethos, their love for Centro and its surroundings, and their studios available to artists working on upcoming exhibitions, Pivô is currently in the midst of renovations to make its vast interior, which locations in long-neglected but fine old downtown buildings. “The quality of the buildings in Centro is excellent,” says Baixo had lain empty for 20 years, more accessible. There are also plans in Ribeiro, “and the infrastructure is all in place, readymade.” Best hand to make room for a library, together with bar or restaurant in known as the cofounder of sp’s leading urban-art gallery, Choque the ground-floor space, to open early next year. “Constructing Pivô Cultural, Ribeiro, along with artists from the collective BijaRi and was like moving into an empty apartment,” says Fernanda Brenner, architects from the studio Arquitetura da Convivência, is a leading the centre’s cofounder and director, and an artist herself, with a backlight in CoLaboratório, an urbanground in the film industry. Paulo Bruscky’s work is notable because, “You need somewhere to sit; so planning project focusing on you buy a chair. It’s like making Centro. “For many years, the by its very nature, it managed to evade the censors a huge installation, dealing area was presented as an ugly, during the country’s long dictatorship. directly with the space and the dangerous place, or as if it was somehow abandoned,” he says. “A sort of institutionalised prejudice people. We moved in and tried to realise with our bodies how everygrew up around it, but in reality Centro has always been vital, full of thing should work.” life and human diversity.” CoLaboratório is currently mapping the Phosphorus, another of the city’s new art endeavours, is set inside area with a view to registering the rich urban culture already present an even older historic building – and that’s no mean feat in São Paulo, there, and adding to it by encouraging artists and art-related projects where knock-’em-down and build-’em-upwards has been the order of into its empty properties, with an initial focus on the microregion the day since the mid-twentieth century. Behind a nondescript door in around the Valley of Anhangabaú. The region, extending from sp’s a quiet street close to the huge Praça da Sé square, a flight of stairs leads baroque Theatro Municipal on one side and up to the ccbb on the up into an unexpectedly fine atrium, from which swooping wooden other, is a favourite spot for open-air festivals and events, and has just banisters lead up and away to the floor above. On my last visit, in June, gained an important addition in the form of Praça das Artes: a new sparsely figurative embroideries by Silvana Mello lined an upstairs home for sp’s music conservatory, with class and rehearsal space for corridor, including one depicting a full-blown riot in progress,

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while in the main exhibition room downstairs, in a solo exhibition those who died in Europe during the Holocaust. With a mission to by Luiz Roque, two men danced and whirled euphorically in slow preserve and promote humanist ideals, the centre was once a hotbed motion as part of an affecting piece of video art, O Novo Monumento of radical thought, home to a library of 4,000 books in Yiddish; the (The New Monument, 2013). In a small internal patio, a profusion of experimental Taib theatre company; the vanguardist school Sholem ferns sprouted from ruined chairs in a long-term installation by the Aleichem; a kindergarten, Colônia Kinderland; and the newspaper artist Rodrigo Bueno, and Phosphorus’s founder Maria Montero was Nossa Voz (Our Voice), which was shut down a month after the military holding court to a trio of attentive visitors, explaining that the 1890 coup in 1964. building once housed the city’s first notary public, just paces from the A victim of a slower, more gradual decline, the school closed Pátio do Colégio, a Jesuit church and college that marks the city’s 1554 in 1980 and the theatre in 2004; and while a tiny flame of cultural and community activity has flickered on all the while – including founding spot. This is São Paulo’s historical ground zero. a traditional Yiddish choir and Phosphorus, which runs an Of the new downtown art spaces, an amateur theatrical group – artists’ residency programme as the centre shrank in on itself, well as exhibitions, opened in late the most emblematic is undoubtedly Pivô, retreating into fewer and fewer 2011, when Montero, an artist, whose name means ‘pivot’ parts of the building’s five storeys curator and producer who was working at the upscale Luciana Brito gallery at the time, was invited and eventually leaving the top floor and the basement theatre more to take on and share the magnificent building with Simone Pokropp, or less derelict. owner of a vintage clothing business. “I hadn’t even thought about Now with a new team at the heart of the Casa do Povo since last opening my own place,” says Montero. “But Simone said to me, ‘Let’s year, headed up by a young Frenchman, Benjamin Seroussi, the Casa take a leap into the unknown together.’ I came to see the building, is currently reigniting its progressive, experimental spirit and reand I said yes.” creating itself as a beacon for cultural life in the neighbourhood and in Soon after launching the space, Montero was approached by São Paulo in general. I visited in June, attending Biomashup, a contemJaqueline Martins, a gallerist notable for her interest in 1970s artists of porary dance performance in the building’s huge, all-purpose secondthe likes of Alex Vallauri, Bill Lundberg and Letícia Parente. Martins floor main hall. On the floor below, an art exhibition, Oásis, comprised proposed an exhibition, Soma Não-Zero (Non-Zero Sum) to take place at works by São Paulo- and Amsterdam-based artists, including a sound Phosphorus during sp-Arte, the city’s powerhouse art fair, which was installation, My Voice Is Jardim da Luz (2013), in which recordings made founded in 2005. It felt like a perfect fit. “I’m not interested in just in the nearby park were remixed and reproduced by the Polish artist showing young, emerging artists,” says Montero. “I want Phosphorus Anna Orlikowska. to be about experimental practice and art that subverts.” She followed Meanwhile, the work of restoring the building and putting the Soma Não-Zero with a show of the works of Paulo Bruscky, a pivotal centre’s affairs in order continues at both the micro and the macro figure in Brazil’s 1970s Conceptual art scene. His work is notable levels. “We’ve been working on the details – replacing floor tiles, fixing because, by its very nature – clandestine, private, person-to-person – it windows – at the same time as the bigger tasks,” says Seroussi. The archimanaged to evade the censors during the country’s long dictatorship. tect Isay Weinfeld, responsible for some of sp’s most prestigious buildPhosphorus is aided by donations from collectors and friends, ings (among them the swish Fasano hotel), is on board as the designer and recently a grant from ProAC, a São Paulo state arts funding of the forthcoming major renovation project. Weinfeld, who grew up body, which provided for four artist residencies and a curatorial/ in the area, is undertaking the work as a labour of love, says Seroussi. production residency, currently occupied by the Puerto Rico-viaThere are plans to create ateliers in part of the top floor, which was Buenos Aires curator Marina Reyes Franco. Keeping Phosphorus once the kindergarten; but as for the ruined theatre in the basement, alight is one of the hardest things she has ever done, says Montero, the idea is to take a critical approach, in keeping with the Casa do Povo’s explaining that she still needs to work on external commercial questioning, intellectual roots. “Before we do anything down there,” projects in order to contribute to its upkeep. “I think about giving up says Seroussi, “we want to have the debate: does São Paulo theatre need another stage?” every other day,” she says. “But Two men danced I’m told that’s a healthy ratio: That critical approach, and and whirled euphorically in slow motion that it’s only when it happens the gentle touch necessary to two or three days in a row that reignite the cultural spark at as part of an affecting piece of video art Casa do Povo, where longtime you really have a problem.” Away from Centro proper, just a hop from the Pinacoteca art members and associates, mostly now elderly, have kept the embers museum, the neighbourhood of Bom Retiro is home to São Paulo’s alive for so many years, echoes the care and thoughtfulness that textile industry. Upright bolts of cloth frame shopfronts along streets shines through in conversation with almost all of the Centro’s fledgin this now mainly Korean area of town: Bom Retiro, also home to ling movers and shakers. thousands of Bolivians, is São Paulo’s immigrant neighbourhood par “Centro has never been abandoned, never been empty,” says excellence, and was at the centre of Jewish life here from the early Fernanda Brenner. “So I’m not comfortable with the word ‘revitalitwentieth century until the 1960s, when much of the community sation’.” Like CoLaboratório, Pivô is planning a project, ‘Drop Pin’, migrated to Higienópolis. It’s here that one of the most fascinating to create a conceptual map of downtown sp – “a kind of critical city of sp’s new cultural projects is in the throes of being born – or reborn. guide”, says Brenner – taking into account the homes, businesses and The Casa do Povo (House of the People) was founded in 1953 by agents that are already in the area: “We want to work with what’s here, São Paulo’s progressive Jewish community as a living monument to not to replace anything. We want to merge with it,” she says. ar

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Chelpa Ferro When it comes to deﬁnitions, the three members of Chelpa Ferro prefer to be called a band but concede that ‘multimedia group’ might better describe what they are really about

They have exhibited in the Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and are about to record their fourth studio album. The visual aspect of their performances and installations, they say, is just as important as the sonic effects Interview by Oliver Basciano

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ArtReview

Barrão makes sculptures, Sérgio Mekler edits feature ﬁlms and Luiz Zerbini is a painter; together however they are Chelpa Ferro, a band and artist collective that has been making a big noise since the mid-1990s. Based in Rio de Janeiro, the three put aside their respective work to meet up each Wednesday at Zerbini’s studio and plan exhibitions of their sonic sculptures – ad hoc lo-ﬁ kinetic assemblages whose movements create sonic environments – or to discuss and rehearse for occasional gigs played as a straight, cacophonous band, albeit one that stretches the limits of sound generation. The ‘instruments’ range from guitars, drums and keyboards, to various miscellaneous everyday items – electric hand saws, ball bearings on Perspex – freely manipulated for their sonic qualities. There’s a playfulness to the work – the comic absurdity to be found in how much sound one can produce by attaching motors from food blenders to a series of kitschily colourful plastic bags in their Jungle Jam (2006) installation, for example – that perhaps stems from the laid-back attitudes of the three old friends. Yet Chelpa Ferro is no side project: the group is working on its fourth studio album, it represented Brazil at the 2005 Venice Biennale and it is shown by commercial galleries in Brazil and the uk (Chelpa Ferro has shows at Sprovieri, London, and Vermelho, São Paulo, next year). artreview How did you come together as a band? luiz zerbini We were friends before Chelpa Ferro. I’m from São Paulo. When I moved to Rio, I met Barrão and Sérgio. sérgio mekler In 1995, or in 1993 – we can’t remember – Chacal, the poet from Rio, invited us to perform at his theatre.

sm For people from the music world, we are a multimedia group, but for artists, we are on the border. lz We had never performed before, but he invited us, and even though we couldn’t play anything, we accepted. That was our first performance. sm Back then we were just playing guitars. A music-producer friend came to tell us that the sound was bad, that we needed to improve it and that he would like to help us. Then he invited us to make a record at his studio. ar So you’re now a proper band? barrão It’s not as easy as it looks! It was really very funny when we went to the place, because it was the first time that we did this, and they asked to check the sound. The sound techs looked at us with our very old guitars, without cables or amplifiers. But then we started to understand how it worked, and I think that really put us in a position to experiment with sound. sm We found another way to play together. We don’t make music; we improvise. So I think now we’re better with this technique, provided we only play together. lz It’s a good question, though, because we were in the newspaper [O Globo] today and they called us a multimedia group. They always talk about us as a multimedia group. I think it’s the best word to define what we do, but we prefer to be a band.

facing page Chelpa Ferro. Courtesy the artists above Chelpa Ferro, A Autópsia da Cigarra Gigante, 2008, performance (Teatro Oi Casa Grande, Rio de Janeiro). Photo: Gregoire Basdevant. Courtesy the artists

September 2013

ar How did the installations come about? Are the objects, which make the intentionally nonmelodious noise, partial stand-ins for yourselves? b When we made that record, we recorded a lot of stuff, and then we began to edit everything. When we decided to release the record, we couldn’t play it live, because we weren’t musicians. We couldn’t replicate the noises easily. So we did some installations, some sculptures to play the record, and some things that are not on it but that related to the sounds. We only began to regularly play live once we improved. lz We felt like we had the potential to do a good thing together. We started playing together because there was opportunity, but we knew that together we could integrate that into the artworld. So we got more varied instruments and found we could also make noise without proper instruments. ar Some of the objects make the noise that is expected of them, though. In one work, a branch with dried seedpods is attached to a motor that vibrates and causes the seeds to shake. Do you choose these objects for their sonic properties? b It’s mixed, because I think the visual part is very important. Sometimes that comes first, so it’s not always about the sound. sm Either the sound or the visual can come first and we come up with a solution for the other. We made a chair, for example, but attached a motor so that it would shake and walk – that’s an object chosen for visual properties, made to make noise. ar The installations are made from found objects and basic second-hand electronics removed from everyday items: how much is that a conscious reference to Arte Povera and Brazil’s own distinct history of using nonrarefied materials in art?

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So how do you pin down what, exactly, Chelpa Ferro is? And does that matter anyway?

Acqua Falsa, 2005 (installation view, Brazilian Pavilion, 51st Biennale di Venezia). Photo: Julio Callado. Courtesy the artists

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b I think we pay attention to what is around us. We think about these ordinary objects and try to change them, or ﬁnd other meanings to them. It’s a reaction to the everyday world, as opposed to anything grand. It’s looking at the small things. lz At the same time, I think there’s an identity in the things that we show. I hope one gets a feel as to where they have come from. sm We like to ﬁnd the objects. If we need some speakers, we naturally look for old speakers – looking through the markets, searching the streets – we don’t just buy new ones. We didn’t have the money to buy new ones early on.

ar What about the music? sm We were invited to a music festival in Bologna. There were a lot of people from the noise scene. When we ﬁnished our show, the guy who organised the event said we have a very special kind of noise, he said it was a ‘Brazilian noise’ with a ‘sweet kiss’. b He said it had a Brazilian rhythm, yet people in Brazil think we are completely alien to the culture. There’s no tradition of this kind of music here.

ar Is there not? Of the kind of improvised, experimental noise music you make? b I think now it’s getting bigger here. Now there are three places in Rio that you can see and hear this kind of music. sm And it was hard for the galleries or museums to understand it. They didn’t have the right equipment. They couldn’t understand that we needed to rent an ampliﬁer for a month – it’s very expensive for them, and they probably wouldn’t have been able to sell the work after. lz We were once asked to play a gig in the morning at a museum, which was very strange for us and the visitors.

b And we like the experience of searching these things out.

sm What’s interesting is the difference between the art people and the people from noise music that come to see us. When we were starting out, we invited people that we knew from the galleries to see the show. They couldn’t believe it – it was weird, the gig environment was another world to them. They didn’t know about this music, and they didn’t expect this from us. Luis, they knew from his painting, and Barrão from his sculpture. Now, happily, it’s not like this any more. Now people like it more, and they stay to watch.

ar Does the fact that they are locally sourced lend them a particularly ‘Brazilian’ identity, do you think? Or a particularly Rio identity? lz I feel that people see it that way, so I understand, and I agree that it’s got a Brazilian identity. [to others] Don’t you think so? b Yes, or rather than a Brazilian one, maybe a third-world identity. But it’s just because we are interested in the things around us. When we did a performance at Sprovieri in London [in 2010], we did it with a lot of objects that were found in the streets around the gallery, so perhaps that took on a different look because of the change in source.

Ruim, Chelpa Ferro’s fourth studio album, will be released later this year.

Chelpa Ferro, Jungle Jam (installation view, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, 2008), 2006. Courtesy the artists

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Art Featured

The artist had one champion in the press, who summarised her situation thus: ‘She lacks nearly everything that is needed to win hearts and ﬂatter the casual and untutored glance…’ 115

Enki Bilal We are coming to the end of a world Interview by Paul Gravett

Julie & Roem, 2011, page 51 (detail), acrylic and pastel. © the artist / Casterman

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In his early sixties, Enki Bilal feels in his prime, enjoying the freedom of being able to apply his brooding, speculative visions and narratives fluidly between comics, films, paintings and other projects. An ex-Yugoslav naturalised as a Frenchman in 1967 and an acclaimed author of bandes dessinées since 1972, Bilal remains something of an outsider, at one remove from France’s cultural elites, despite such honours as two one-man exhibitions this year in Paris, one at the Louvre, the other entitled Mécanhumanimal, currently at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Born in Tito’s Communist Belgrade to a Czech Catholic mother and a Bosnian (nonpractising) Muslim father, Bilal grew up amid the fault lines that would eventually fracture his homeland. Becoming an attuned observer of global tensions, he anticipated in his fully painted graphic novels the breakup of the Soviet state and visualised the attack on the World Trade Center years before 9 / 11. His latest trilogy introduces a looser, stripped-down technique in crayons with added highlights on tinted paper. His story envisages the planet traumatised by our abuses into an unrecognisable, untameable sentient environment, in which humans and animals are realigning and hybridising to survive. As Bilal takes a seat in his Paris studio for this conversation, a stuffed zebra’s head stares down from the wall behind his head. enki bilal I think we are living through a period of interior mutation. People in France say there is a lost generation, who have difficulties getting a job, difficulties their parents never had. That’s true, but that generation is arming themselves with technologies, with which they will construct a world of their own making. It’s a difficult time for them, but they are also pioneers of something new. The same is happening in politics, which has become impotent. Why? Because it is business, finance, which controls everything. We are coming to the end of a world. It’s interesting to compare today with the radicalism of the 1960s, like the famous May 1968 revolution in France. I think we’re now facing a more peaceful, technological revolution. In the coming months, European politics is going to realise that it is powerless to direct the economy. This may allow this young generation to take matters into their own hands and demand change, because they have the strength to demand this, a strength for survival. So perhaps little by little we will move into an unfamiliar zone where things can happen. I hope so. I don’t consider this younger

generation to be lost, quite the opposite, they must continue. It is up to them. The old political system no longer functions. art review Growing up in Yugoslavia, were you let down by communism? eb Tito never let me down. When you’re young, you’re unaware. Tito imprisoned or eliminated his political enemies, but he kept the country together. The collapse of Yugoslavia and what followed were far worse. Out of the patriotic groundswell against the Germans, Tito had forged a sort of authority and solidarity around him, which meant that religions no longer really existed; the Catholic Croats could support Tito, who was a Croat, and the Orthodox Serbs, the Muslim Bosnians, all of them fought side-byside. The fact that I was born into this gave me something. Coming to France, I realised by sixteen, seventeen, that communism, especially the Soviet model, was a failure. ar I gather you don’t see yourself as a futurologist, but how do you feel when what you imagine becomes real? eb That happened with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Pierre Christin and I showed in The Hunting Party [1983]. We had the idea of telling the story of the Third World War next, but we said no, we should stop here! It’s the freedom to imagine what is to come that gives me this ‘talent’. Where journalists have to stop because Capsule of a high-altitude balloon, 1931, in the exhibition Mécanhumanimal, 2013, Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris. Photo: Michèle Favareill

September 2013

they must report and verify the facts, the writer and artist can go further into imagining what may lie ahead. This is how I function. For example, to explain ‘my greatest prediction’, in 1997, of the fall of the towers of the World Trade Center, when I was working on the graphic novel The Dormant Beast [1998], there was a dimension in the Yugoslavian civil war that was barely dealt with at that time by the media, the religious dimension. We heard lots about different nationalisms, but it was as if political correctness in France meant no one dared to say it was a war of religions. I read a report in 1995 on the Taliban in Afghanistan and learned more about what they were doing. My mind was also caught up with the horrors of the war in Yugoslavia, in which the mujahideen came to the defence of the Bosnians, and you had Serbs on the extreme nationalist right. But I did not want The Dormant Beast to be about contemporary Yugoslavia, I wanted to create a universal story, so I projected my main characters 30 years into the future as adults, but they were born at the moment when I was making this story, during the war in Yugoslavia. I was really afraid about the world falling into the hands of the Taliban, as had happened with the Communists. So I imagined what if extremists from the three main monotheistic religions succeeded in creating this ‘Obscurantis Order’. What would be the first symbols of the West they would attack? And I thought of New York. ar How do science fiction, and science fact, inform your work? eb I come from a culture of science fiction. I’ve read many authors, [Roger] Zelazny, [Philip K.] Dick and others, like the Australian Greg Egan, though I read little science fiction these days. There are good French sf authors but they’re marginal, there’s not the same openness to science fiction here compared to America or Britain. Real science moves very fast now, faster than political progress or curing diseases. While I can read about these incredible developments, I can also go a bit crazy and devise absurd things, anything is possible. ar Are you also in touch with scientists and other thinkers? eb Yes, at conferences or inviting them to contribute to projects like my latest exhibition about inventions, planetology and hybridity, Mécanhumanimal. I was speaking about it with Paul Virilio, a great architect and theorist. He’s become very depressed because his writings about catastrophe have made him so conscious of the desperate situation we are in. In the end,

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Corinthian-style helmet, 2012. © the artist and Futuropolis / Musée du Louvre

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he says something very simple: with each new extraordinary invention, man invents the catastrophe that comes with it. It’s a profoundly realist, lucid analysis and ultimately pessimistic. The butchery of the First World War was horrific but also led to major advances in medicine. Mankind is like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. ar You have directed three feature films of your own and are developing the fourth, adapting your graphic novel Animal’z [2009]. How do your films influence your comics? eb I don’t want to make comics like films. I’ve added more text narration and interior voices into my more recent comics and changed the page layout, making them more literary than comics or cinema. So in Julie & Roem [2011], I incorporate Shakespeare and have characters who find themselves speaking Shakespeare’s lines. I know that book pleased many people, but upset others who didn’t understand it because it destabilises them, it’s not normal, there’s too much to read! Cinema by definition shows the maximum, while literature demands that the reader imagine everything. Comics are a mixture of both, but if you put more emphasis on written text, you increase the role of the reader to make their own additional images in their head. ar How did your book and exhibition Les Fantômes du Louvre [2012] come about? eb Since 2005, the Louvre and publishers Futuropolis have had a partnership, each year giving a comics author free rein to explore the galleries and collections, and make a graphic novel in which the Louvre is the main character. They wanted me to do something, but I did not want to make a comic. Then the Louvre director, Henri Loyrette, gave me carte blanche to make a book, and right away I saw it. I told

him I would take photos of works in the galleries and invent the stories behind ghostly faces appearing in them, of unknown, fictional people who at some point in their lives had crossed paths with that particular work and artist. In total I made more than 400 photos. I narrowed them down to 23 pieces, each one photographed from a distorting angle to create space in which a phantom could materialise. I left the fictional characters almost entirely to chance. I painted a man, a woman, old, young, at random and then researched the work, the period, to find out who this character might be, what is their connection. Each story begins with their precise date of birth, sometimes to the second, the place, even the weather, to show that

I don’t consider this younger generation to be lost, quite the opposite, they must continue. It is up to them. The old political system no longer functions. this is a game, it’s apocryphal. Strangely some people have been taken in. An eminent critic on France Culture asked me what documents I had used to trace these obscure historical lives! I painted these portraits over my photos, printed onto canvas and slightly desaturated to give my ghosts more presence. When Loyrette saw them in my studio, he said we must exhibit them in the Louvre. He found a magniﬁcent gallery, the Salle des Sept Cheminées, and hung them alongside the Winged Victory of Samothrace, one of the works I had chosen.

Artwork for the exhibition poster to Mécanhumanimal, acrylic and pastel on digital proof. © the artist / Casterman, 2013

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ar Your arrival and success in the art market have been relatively recent. eb Yes. I sold two large paintings at my first selling exhibition in 1994 for 618,000 old francs, a good price at the time. Then, in 2007, one of those paintings came back on the market and was put in my first sale at Artcurial. The expert’s estimate was €35,000 and I said you must be crazy. Then it went for €170,000. And everything else sold at a very high price. A modest portrait of a woman, estimated at €6,000, sold for €93,000. That was a Trafalgar for Artcurial, for the art market and the comics world. It took off from there. The way people looked at my work changed, but it has not changed me. There were other sales of my comics art the year after, emblematic pages from my graphic novels, which fetched €100,000–€120,000. I also sold all my drawings for the graphic novel Animal’z in 2009 as one lot for €900,000. It seems among living painters in France, I am now the second-best seller; only Pierre Soulages sells for more. ar Animal’z, much of it set at sea, and Julie & Roem, set on barren dry land, are two parts of a trilogy. What comes next? eb I have started the third part, called The Colour of the Air, about characters trapped aboard an airship. We follow them and we meet the characters from the previous books. Everyone will eventually find each other. All of them are heading towards one place, invited there by the planet. And at a given moment, the graphic treatment will shift from my subdued palette back and transform into painted colour. ar Mécanhumanimal is on view at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, until 5 January

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Paula Modersohn-Becker In the ﬁrst in a new series of articles looking at the importance of the work of dead artists to the practice of the living, a novelist describes her fascination with a German painter – how, after spotting one of her works in the unlikeliest of places, she felt compelled to ﬁnd out who the painter was and why she was so little known by Marie Darrieussecq

For the centenary of the death of Paula Modersohn-Becker (1875– 1907), the Frankfurter Allgemeine carried a front-page headline that ran ‘The German Picasso is a woman’. In Germany her paintings are a familiar sight on postcards, and specialists argue over the interpretation of her works. Yet in France, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, she is totally unknown to the general public. In the United States, it is, for the most part, feminists at the major universities who have brought her (relative) recognition and who have translated her Letters and Journals. (All citations here are taken from Gunter Busch and Liselotte Von Reiken’s edition, translated from the German by Arthur Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey, 1990. See also Diane Radycki’s Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist, 2013.) Modersohn-Becker painted, in her short life, some 500 pictures: portraits, landscapes and still lifes. One could as much call her an intimist painter as a post-expressionist. She lived in an artists community in Worpswede, near Bremen, together with Fritz Mackensen, Fritz Overbeck, Heinrich Vogeler and her future husband, Otto Modersohn. While she might have painted, as they did, peasants and birchwoods, her art glorified neither the return to the earth nor values identified with the national landscape. In the ample correspondence that she left us, she talks of nothing but form and colour, body and ‘intensity’, and dreams of nothing but Paris. Ridiculed in her native town of Bremen – she sold just three paintings during her lifetime – the artist had one champion in the press, who summarised her situation thus on the eve of her second (and last) exhibition, in 1906: ‘She lacks nearly everything that is needed to win hearts and flatter the casual and untutored glance… Whoever might choose to see Paula Modersohn’s Head of a Young Girl as ugly, and then brutally decide to subject it to his scorn, can safely count

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on the approval of many of his readers.’ The style of her Sleeping Child (c. 1904) was described as ‘unhealthy’. ‘Repulsive’, ‘repugnant’ and also ‘un-German’ were words aimed at her style. The Nazis exhibited her Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch (1907) among the ‘degenerate artists’ in Munich in 1937. While one can see her as the archetype of the cursed artist, little known and dying young, she had nothing of the Romantic to her. Her husband deplored her ‘unpainterly and harsh’ use of colour (11 Dec 1905), her ‘error of preferring to make everything angular, ugly, bizarre, wooden… hands like spoons, noses like cobs, mouths like wounds, faces like cretins’ (26 Sept 1903). But he also said (in June 1902) that she passed on to him her ‘lapidary quality’ and that she ‘has something absolutely rare – she is fundamentally more artistic than Mackensen, Vogeler or Overbeck’. He cautiously shared her admiration for ‘primitive pictures’. During her frequent visits to Paris she admired the Fayum mummy portraits at the Louvre. She liked Van Gogh, Maillol, Matisse and Gauguin. Her friend Clara Westhoff (whom she introduced to future husband Rainer Maria Rilke) recalled a memory, from 1900, at the art dealer Vollard’s showroom, of the young Paula confidently turning over the works by Cézanne that were piled up against the walls: ‘We did not even know his name.’ Paula sought ‘something compelling, something full, an excitement and an intoxication of color – something powerful’ (summer 1907). Her flowers became trees, gorged with vitality, fleshy. And her nudes. There’s nothing erotic about her nudes, nothing sweet, nothing sacred, but nothing deathly either. She paints only as she sees: damaged bodies, crude breasts, hairs because they’re there: neither Olympia or the Madonna. After centuries of the male gaze on the female body, Paula Modersohn-Becker was

ArtReview

Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary, 1906, Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstrasse, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen

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the ﬁrst woman to paint a self-portrait in the nude. The enigma of the picture for which she is best known in Germany, Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906), has fed a long debate: she appears to be pregnant, but at that date she was not. It seems to me that Paula could very well imagine herself pregnant, could submit herself, in a way, to a pictorial test of pregnancy. Her belly gently swollen, her unprovocative forward-facing gaze: it’s truly the image of questioning. Who am I? What is a woman? What am I in my century, beneath this tireless social gaze, under these perpetual injunctions? ‘My experience tells me that marriage does not make one happier. It takes away the illusion that had sustained a deep belief in the possibility of a kindred soul… And is it perhaps not better without this illusion, better to be eye-to-eye with one great and lonely truth? I am writing this in my housekeeping book on Easter Sunday, 1902, sitting in my kitchen, cooking a roast of veal.’ Paula had dociley taken a cookery course. In marrying she also accepted that she would look after her husband Otto’s daughter, Elsbeth, with whom she developed a very affectionate bond. She had allowed her worried parents to believe that she would stop painting at the age of thirty. ‘Father wrote to me today and told me I should look around for a job as a governess. All afternoon I’d been lying in the dry sand on the heath reading Knut Hamsun’s Pan’ (5 July 1900). Three years later she wrote to her husband: ‘They say great art begins in your fortieth year’ (18 February 1903). The brief career of Paula Modersohn-Becker is the story of an artist who ‘lived very intensely in the present’ (20 April 1903), but who, because of the obligations she bore as a woman, never ceased to project herself into a freer future or to fantasise about her coming death. (‘I know that I shall not live very long’, 26 July

1900). Her letters from Paris to her husband mention on the same page Victor Hugo, the Louvre, the new metro system, Rilke’s meatless diet and the worries left behind at home. ‘The butcher’s bill? There’s something wrong about that. I know nothing about it… Don’t pay it until I return.’ (28 February 1905). She often alludes to her happiness at being far away, not to escape Otto, but for the independence that she gains ‘eating cold rice and cold apple compote’ – to paint rather than to cook. Paula separated from Otto in 1906. But at the end of an intensely productive year in Paris, she realised that she was not surviving economically. She returned home and became pregnant straight away. Two weeks before the birth, she wrote to Clara Rilke-Westhoff, ‘My mind has been so occupied these days by the thought of Cézanne… (he has) affected me like a thunderstorm, like some great event.’ To Rilke, during the same period, she spoke of nothing but his essay on Rodin. To her sister Herma, ‘I’m painting again and if I only had a magic cap to make me disappear, my wish would be to go on and on painting.’ And to her other sister Milly, ‘Don’t ever write me another postcard with words like “diapers” or “blessed event”.’ In getting up for the first time 18 days after giving birth, she collapsed, struck down by an embolism. She died ‘the old fashioned death’ of women, as Rilke put it in ‘Requiem for a Friend’ (1909), which is partly dedicated to her. She was thirty-one. According to Rilke-Westhoff’s account, she just had time to say: ‘A pity.’ At the time of Modersohn-Becker’s death, Picasso was twenty-six. He was finishing his rose period. In five minutes he would hold in his hands a Congolese mask, and his art would be transformed. It is indeed hard not to think, for Paula, and with her: ‘A pity.’ ar

Bildnis Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906, Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen.

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Translated from the French by Hettie Judah next month Gianni Colombo

ALBANIA / Gallery On The Move, Tirana // AUSTRIA / Galerie Altnöder, Salzburg / Artelier Contemporary, Graz / Projektraum Viktor Bucher, Vienna / Charim Galerie, Vienna / Galerie Chobot, Vienna / Galerie Heike Curtze, Vienna / Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna / Galerie Frey, Vienna/Salzburg / Lukas Feichtner Galerie, Vienna / Galerie 422 Margund Lössl, Gmunden / Raum mit Licht, Vienna / Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna / Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna / Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz / Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna / Christine König Galerie, Vienna / Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna / Knoll Galerie, Vienna/Budapest / Galerie Konzett e.U., Vienna / KROBATH, Vienna/Berlin / Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna / Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz / Galerie Lindner, Vienna / Galerie Lang Wien, Vienna / Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Salzburg/Vienna / Galerie nächst St. Stephan - Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna / OstLicht. Galerie für Fotograﬁe, Vienna / Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna / Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg / Gabriele Senn Galerie, Vienna / Galerie Schmidt, Reith i. A. / Galerie Silvia Steinek, Vienna / Kunsthandel Heinrich Steinek, Vienna / Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck/Vienna / Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna / Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz // BELGIUM / Galerie Valérie Bach, Brussels // BULGARIA / 0gms Gallery, Soﬁa / SARIEV Contemporary, Plovdiv // CZECH REPUBLIC / Drdova Gallery, Prague / POLANSKY GALLERY, Prague / SVIT, Prague // ESTONIA / Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn // FINLAND / Gallery Taik Persons, Helsinki // FRANCE / Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris // GERMANY / AANDO FINE ART, Berlin / Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich / Galerie Crone, Berlin / Galerie Robert Drees, Hannover / Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin / Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin / Galerie Hollenbach, Stuttgart / Galerie Jochen Hempel, Leipzig / Galerie MaxWeberSixFriedrich, Munich / Kai Middendorff Galerie, Frankfurt / Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin / Galerie Sherin Najjar, Berlin / ph-projects, Berlin / Galeria Plan B, Berlin/Cluj / Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin / taubert contemporary, Berlin / TEAPOT, Cologne / ŻAK | BRANICKA, Berlin/Krakow // HUNGARY / acb Galeria, Budapest / Erika Déak Gallery, Budapest / INDA Gallery, Budapest / Kisterem, Budapest / Ani Molnár Gallery, Budapest / TRAPÉZ, Budapest / VILTIN Galéria, Budapest // IRAN / Shirin Art Center, Teheran // ITALY / Galleria Goethe, Bolzano // LATVIA / ALMA Gallery, Riga / kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga // LITHUANIA / The Gardens, Vilnius / Galerija Vartai, Vilnius // KAZAKHSTAN / IADA, Almaty/Paris // POLAND / BWA Warszawa, Warsaw / COLLECTIVA, Poznań/Berlin / Czułość, Warsaw / Galeria Propaganda, Warsaw / Galeria Stereo, Poznań / Le Guern Gallery, Warsaw / lokal_30, Warsaw / Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw / Raster, Warsaw / Starter Gallery, Warsaw // ROMANIA / Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest / :BARIL, Cluj–Napoca / Club Electroputere, Bucharest / Experimental Project, Bucharest /Ivan Gallery, Bucharest / JECZA Gallery, Timisoara / Kilobase Bucharest, Bucharest / Salonul de Projecte, Bucharest // RUSSIA / 16thLINE Gallery, Rostov-on-Don / Gallery 21, Moscow / Nadja Brykina Gallery, Moscow / Glaz Gallery, Moscow / Marina Gisich Gallery, Saint Petersburg / Galerie Iragui, Moscow / Pop/off/art gallery Moscow/Berlin / Regina Gallery, Moscow/London / RuArts, Moscow / Triumph Gallery, Moscow / Ural Vision Gallery, Yekaterinburg // SLOVAKIA / Gandy Gallery, Bratislava / Krokus, Bratislava / Roman Fecik Gallery, Bratislava // SLOVENIA / P74, Ljubljana // SOUTH KOREA / Gallery H.A.N., Seoul // SWITZERLAND / Galerie Clemens Gunzer, Zurich / ribordy contemporary, Geneva / Scheublein Fine Art, Zurich // TURKEY / Cda-Projects, İstanbul / Galeri Nev Istanbul, Istanbul / Sanatorium, Istanbul / Galeri Zilberman, Istanbul // UAE / Carbon12, Dubai // UKRAINE / MIRONOVA Gallery, Kiev // UNITED KINGDOM / Division of Labour, Worcester / Gazelli Art House, London/Baku / Hada Contemporary, London / Ibid, London // USA / Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York/Geneva / Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York / Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles

Vienna International Art Fair 10—13 October 2013

www.viennafair.at www.facebook.com/viennafair blog: thenewcontemporary.com

Sarah Morris

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The American artist’s latest ﬁlm takes as its subject a city that has recently been the site of controversy and protest, but will, thanks to World Cups and Olympic Games, be constantly in the global eye over the next few years. So, what does it tell us about Rio, the so-called ‘Marvellous City’? What do we learn? by Mark Rappolt

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About seven minutes into Sarah Morris’s 90-minute film Rio (2012), all the footage he had shot.) They become like buildings without a one-hundred-and-four-year-old man with a body that appears to corporate or civic labelling. Which, of course, also highlights the be more skin than bones mouths silently at the camera. Anything complications implicit in navigating and understanding any city – he might be trying to communicate is buried under an electronic a condition more clearly apparent in one of Morris’s previous films, soundtrack that is suggestive of the kind of sound babble picked Beijing (2008), which partly documented a city in which a certain up by receivers designed to monitor electromagnetic radiation proportion of access needed to be negotiated via the International from outer space. Given that the old man has apparently arrived in Olympic Committee (whose influence is already shaping Rio in shot Willy Wonka-like, having popped through the carpeted floor advance of the 2016 Games). Harnessed to Morris’s static shots that of a white-walled office in a glass elevator, it’s hard not to pick up a jump from location to location in a deadpan, unhysterical manner, there’s also a distinct sense of the science-fictional vibe. One that might As his mouth opens and shuts involve serious advances in geronKafkaesque in Rio. tology and the clinically hygienic As with previous works, Rio is like that of a goldfish, Oscar Niemeyer’s Modernism-inspired sets from a film structured in a manner reminiscent of fleeting presence in this film has the like Gattaca (1997). A few seconds a Situationist dérive, in which members feeling of a last interview in which the of the 1950s group would ‘let go’ and later, the camera pans from the old allow themselves to drift on the ‘psyman’s liver-spotted cranium to the tape recorder wasn’t turned on equally bald pate of a bust of Lenin, chogeographical’ currents of a city. (For perched directly behind him, and we are suddenly in the past. Rio is a the group’s chief theorist, Guy Debord, psychogeography involved portrait of a city that appears to be constantly oscillating in time and ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographispace. Later on we see workers in the city’s Duloren underwear fac- cal environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and tory working side by side with robotic pattern-cutters; we see men behaviour of individuals’.) In Morris’s film we never get any shots of in what might be Hazchem suits seated at the computer-screen con- the city as a whole, but rather of a city in parts – cafés, bits of infratrols of one of the largest assembly lines in South America – produc- structure, beaches, football stadia, apartments, offices and factories. ing Brahma beer; and we see a man on a bicycle delivering large bags The dreamy quality of all this is enhanced by the fact that the only of ice to one of the city’s beaches – out of the bicycle basket, onto his soundtrack to what looks like a fair degree of urban hustle and busshoulder and off across the sand. tle is provided by electronic music composed by Liam Gillick. And yet, Rio is the latest in a series of eleven films by the artist that portray for all that, the opening shots of Rio – which place a certain emphasis various cities – beginning with Manhattan in Midtown (1998) and on turnstiles, escalators, security cameras and the locks of gated resiincluding Washington, Las Vegas, Miami, Los Angeles, Munich and dences – present a vision of a city in which is impossible to ‘let go’, just Beijing – and people or events that have decisively shaped them. The as the ailing Niemeyer (we see his wheelchair before we see him) seems centenarian in Rio is Oscar Niemeyer, pioneer of Modernism, contro- unable to let go of his office chair, and just as much as Morris’s film is a versial sculptor of many of Brazil’s most famous architectural mon- series of carefully framed shots (a number of which play with mirrors), uments, chief architect of the country’s capital Brasília and former cuts and selected locations. If the dérive involves actively suppressing president of its Communist party, filmed shortly before his death in your self-control, this city is geared to facilitate the opposite – to force December 2012. As his mouth opens and shuts like that of a goldfish, you in certain specific directions. And, of course, one of Morris’s recurhis fleeting presence in this film has the feeling of a last interview ring themes is the structure and representation of power in the urban in which the tape recorder wasn’t turned on. But, not surprisingly, environment. In case we forgot that, one of the initial shots of the film lingers on a paper coffee cup bearing the logo ‘Capital’. it’s his architecture that speaks for him throughout. And Niemeyer’s presence, as well as that of seventy-nine-yearAnd yet this is Rio. And this film was shot during its famous old, much plastic-surgerised former model (and present journalist) carnival – something that only becomes apparent at the end, when Danuza Leão, and football star Ronaldinho amongst others, indi- we’re shown footage of the Carnival Champions’ Parade at the cates a network of associations – personal, emotional and celebrity Sambadrome – a purpose-built structure designed by Niemeyer. driven – connected with the city. In Rio’s case, clichés included, rather The scene encapsulates the two extremes of Rio. On the one hand, than avoided. And yet however visuan anarchic expression of colour, In Morris’s film we never get any ally evocative Morris’s film is, at times rhythm and the human body, present it feels as if what’s being traced here throughout the film in shots of street shots of the city as a whole, but rather is a series of connections and associalife. On the other, a city in which of a city in parts tions that, because of the lack of comthe culmination of carnival occurs mentary, the lack – in terms of diegetic sound – of anyone or anything within a specially built and specially defined structure in the city. being ‘heard’, requires some serious Googling or Wikipedia-ing for Related to this, what’s intriguing about Rio is the sense it conveys anyone not so familiar with Rio to plumb its depths. The film indi- of the equivocal. It depicts a place in which Capital (coffee cups) and cates that these people are significant – by giving them screen time Communism (Lenin’s bust) sit side by side, where manual labour – but holds back when it comes to saying explicitly why (other than and the latest computer-controlled manufacture operate in tandem, the inclusion of the odd archive photograph). (Just as one of the where the natural (the beach and the mountains around the city) is less-than-obviously present personal inspirations for Morris’s film, a constant reference point in a city of pet groomers and plastic surshe states, is Orson Welles’s It’s All True, 1941–2, which the direc- geons. As seen in Rio, this is a city of contrasts and contradictions, tor was forced to abandon midway, apparently overwhelmed by in which many possible futures might play out. ar

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PARTICIPATING GALLERIES

THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART NAVY PIER 19–22 SEPTEMBER

2013

Mylar Cone (detail), Studio Gang Architects

Galeria Álvaro Alcázar Madrid Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe New York Gallery Paule Anglim San Francisco BASE GALLERY Tokyo John Berggruen Gallery San Francisco Galleri Bo Bjerggaard Copenhagen Marianne Boesky Gallery New York Jonathan Boos New York Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie Berlin Russell Bowman Art Advisory Chicago Rena Bransten Gallery San Francisco THE BREEDER Athens | Monaco CABINET London David Castillo Gallery Miami Cernuda Arte Coral Gables Chambers Fine Art New York | Beijing James Cohan Gallery New York | Shanghai Corbett vs. Dempsey Chicago CRG Gallery New York Stephen Daiter Gallery Chicago Maxwell Davidson Gallery New York Douglas Dawson Gallery Chicago MASSIMO DE CARLO Milan | London DIE GALERIE Frankfurt Catherine Edelman Gallery Chicago Max Estrella Madrid Henrique Faria Fine Art New York Peter Fetterman Gallery Santa Monica Fleisher/Ollman Philadelphia Galerie Forsblom Helsinki Forum Gallery New York Honor Fraser Los Angeles Fredericks & Freiser New York Galerie Terminus Munich Galeria Hilario Galguera Mexico City | Berlin Cristina Grajales Gallery New York Richard Gray Gallery Chicago | New York Garth Greenan Gallery New York Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin Chicago | Berlin Hackett | Mill San Francisco Haines Gallery San Francisco Carl Hammer Gallery Chicago Galerie Ernst Hilger Vienna Hill Gallery Birmingham, MI Nancy Hoffman Gallery New York Rhona Hoffman Gallery Chicago Vivian Horan Fine Art New York Edwynn Houk Gallery New York | Zurich Il Ponte Contemporanea Rome Taka Ishii Gallery Tokyo Bernard Jacobson Gallery London | New York R.S. Johnson Fine Art Chicago Annely Juda Fine Art London Robert Koch Gallery San Francisco Koenig & Clinton New York Michael Kohn Gallery Los Angeles Alan Koppel Gallery Chicago Galerie Lelong New York | Paris | Zurich Locks Gallery Philadelphia Lombard Freid Gallery New York Diana Lowenstein Gallery Miami Luhring Augustine New York Robert Mann Gallery New York Magnan Metz Gallery New York

Matthew Marks Gallery New York | Los Angeles Barbara Mathes Gallery New York Galerie Hans Mayer Düsseldorf The Mayor Gallery London McCormick Gallery Chicago Anthony Meier Fine Arts San Francisco Andrea Meislin Gallery New York Jerald Melberg Gallery Charlotte Laurence Miller Gallery New York moniquemeloche Chicago Carolina Nitsch New York David Nolan Gallery New York | Berlin Richard Norton Gallery, LLC Chicago P.P.O.W. New York Pace Prints New York Franklin Parrasch Gallery New York Galeria Moisés Pérez de Albéniz Madrid Ricco/Maresca Gallery New York Michael Rosenfeld Gallery New York Rosenthal Fine Art Chicago Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin Carrie Secrist Gallery Chicago Marc Selwyn Fine Art Los Angeles Sicardi Gallery Houston Manny Silverman Gallery Los Angeles Skarstedt Gallery New York | London Carl Solway Gallery Cincinnati MARC STRAUS New York Hollis Taggart Galleries New York Tandem Press Madison Paul Thiebaud Gallery San Francisco Tierney Gardarin Gallery New York Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects New York Vincent Vallarino Fine Art New York Tim Van Laere Gallery Antwerp Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Los Angeles Weinstein Gallery Minneapolis Max Wigram Gallery London Zolla/Lieberman Gallery Chicago David Zwirner New York | London

EXPOSURE Benrimon Contemporary New York Blackston New York Bourouina Gallery Berlin Callicoon Fine Arts New York Galerie Donald Browne Montréal Luis De Jesus Los Angeles Los Angeles Diaz Contemporary Toronto DODGEgallery New York Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden New York Charlie James Gallery Los Angeles JTT New York MARSO Mexico City Galerie Max Mayer Düsseldorf THE MISSION Chicago On Stellar Rays New York ANDREW RAFACZ Chicago Jessica Silverman Gallery San Francisco SPINELLO PROJECTS Miami VAN HORN Düsseldorf Workplace Gallery Gateshead, UK

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Art Safari A new retreat in Kenya offers visitors a chance to see art created by artists of African heritage in the context of an African landscape. But is it the opening up of a new frontier or symptomatic of the problems inherent in cultural tourism? by Emma Love

Contemporary art from Africa is having a moment. Tate Modern’s of sub-Saharan art is based in Geneva, and although exhibitions programme, launched two years ago to provide an international are curated from it and pieces are lent to museums, there isn’t platform for African artists, is coming to fruition with the recent a part of it that’s on show anywhere permanently. “When I created purchase of Meschac Gaba’s long-term Museum of Contemporary African my foundation, it seemed logical to evolve the cultural aspect of it Art project; at Bonham’s Africa Now: Modern and Contemporary through art,” says Zeitz. “Art is the ultimate expression of creativity, African Art sale in May, over 20 artists broke world records (includ- and I think context is important too: art lives through the context ing the late Ben Enwonwu, one work by whom – a collection of seven in which it is shown, hence art by artists with African heritage being wooden sculptures – fetched £361,250, compared to his previous seen in Africa.” best of £125,000); a record number of African countries were repZeitz started out buying Pop art (“Lichtenstein, Warhol, the obresented at this year’s Venice Biennale, with Angola winning the vious suspects”) nearly 25 years ago because he likes to be “surrounded Golden Lion for Best National Participation; and next month, by beautiful things”, but six years ago he decided to change direcSomerset House, in London, is hosttion. The first step came when his ‘We don’t just want to show art here ing 1:54, a new fair named after the friend Marie-Claude Beaud, then for visitors and guests. We also want 54 member countries in the African director of Mudam in Luxembourg, Union, at which 15 galleries will introduced him to South African art to make it a place of interaction show contemporary art from Africa, adviser Mark Coetzee. At the time, and inspiration for artists themselves’ Coetzee was organising 30 Americans, to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair. One collector attempting to shine a spotlight on this vast continent a group exhibition of work by African-American artists in the Rubell is Jochen Zeitz, the German-born, Kenya-based former ceo of Puma, Family Collection (of which he was director) during Art Basel Miami who earlier this year opened Segera Ranch, a 50,000-acre private 2008, which Puma subsequently sponsored. Zeitz brought Coetzee reserve on an important migratory corridor for wildlife in Laikipia, on board at Puma to expand Puma’s artist-related and creative proa 45-minute plane ride from Nairobi. It’s based around his own jects in Africa in the buildup to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, ‘4 Cs’ concept – conservation, community, culture and commerce – and the pair realised they both had the same long-term goal: to create which lies at the heart of his nonprofit Zeitz Foundation, whose a contemporary collection of art from Africa, in Africa. main goal is to create a network of sustainable-tourism projects. The pair has been working together on expanding Zeitz’s collecThere are also community projects, from building local schools to tion since 2009, focusing on art from the twenty-first century that repintroducing energy-saving cooking devices; the Segera Retreat, resents different aspects of the continent and artists with African herwhich was originally built as a private home but is now open to the itage. The current display includes Zimbabwean Kudzanai Chiurai, public at a premium rate that’s on a par with other top-end safaris; Ethiopia-born Julie Mehretu, South African artists Kyle Morland and his private art collection, of which a rotating snapshot is on and Sue Williamson, South Africa-born Marlene Dumas, BritishNigerian Yinka Shonibare and Ghana-born Owusu-Ankomah – and show at the property. Although Zeitz is by no means the first collector of contem- that’s just in the restored stables. There’s also sculpture in the garporary art from Africa, this idea of context, and showing the art den surrounding the guest villas and art out on the open plains (more against a backdrop of the open plains, seems to be the main differ- of which later). ence between his collection and that of, say, fellow collector Jean Of course, there is an ongoing debate as to whether artists from Pigozzi. The Italian businessman and photographer’s collection Africa should be grouped in this way (this isn’t done with European

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Sue Williamson, Virginia Mngoma (from A Few South Africans series), 1984, photo etching, screenprint collage. Courtesy Zeitz Collection

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Strijdom van der Merwe, Migration, 2013, land intervention. Courtesy Zeitz Collection

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artists, for example), particularly if you consider the fact that the the boundaries. Of course it has to be visually appealing to me and artists whose work Zeitz collects don’t actually have to be based in not lose its good taste, but also have a deeper level, an expression Africa, so his art-buying net is cast even wider. Is this an all-inclusive of a serious message, whether it’s political, social or it just makes way of thinking or simply commercial speculation in an emerging art you think,” he explains. “It’s also got to be something that I think market? Certainly, and in a similar way to Pigozzi’s, Zeitz’s collecting needs to contribute to the greater story of the collection, and that strategy – to identify individual artists that he’s interested in and buy needs to be seen.” vast bodies of their work – is commercially savvy. The collection is still very much a work in progress, particularly Take the aforementioned Chiurai, whose outspoken looped video- when it comes to engaging with the landscape around the retreat works Iyesa (2012), a retelling of the Last Supper, and Creation (2012) are itself. Currently, the showpiece is South African Land-artist Strijdom a good example of this collecting strategy: “Jochen and I were plan- van der Merwe’s Migration (2012), a series of huge boulders, each bearning on visiting Documenta 13 together last year and I heard on the ing text that refers to migration and the movement of humans and grapevine that Kudzanai was going animals; but commissions in the ‘Art lives through the context in which it pipeline include a long-term project to have a whole room for his work,” recalls Coetzee. “Jochen had already is shown, hence art by artists with African by Kenyan artist Peterson Kamwathi, who will be creating a number of steel bought a number of his sculptures, so heritage being seen in Africa’ we were conﬁdent in his practice. We ﬁgures each year. “This is a particular called the gallerist and said we were interested in buying the entire landscape – you’ve got the heaviness of the sky, the different vegeshow, which included paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints, tation, the animals – and we’re talking to artists who will come and with the option to see it before we actually signed the deal. We got do work here,” says Coetzee. “It’s not necessarily Land art: Strijdom there and were totally blown away.” came here and used natural materials, but other artists will bring new Similarly, Zeitz bought Nicholas Hlobo’s Limpundulu Zonke media, which isn’t what you normally associate with land like this.” Ziyandilandela (2011), a giant rubber dragon made from inner tubes And Zeitz continues: “We don’t just want to show art here for visitors that was exhibited at the 2011 Venice Biennale, after Coetzee saw it and guests. We also want to make it a place of interaction and inspiraand sent him a picture. “I saw the context of its position and how peo- tion for artists themselves.” ple were walking underneath it, and I thought it was fascinating. I see Yet while there are plans for a published catalogue on the collecsomething and I know very quickly if I like it,” Zeitz says, acknowl- tion, and an app, neither of these are equivalent to experiencing art edging that while he has a passion for art, he’s not an expert. “I always in person. Currently the collection can only be seen by paying guests surround myself with people who challenge me, and having someone staying at the retreat, which begs the question: would Zeitz one day who is a specialist, [who] can put art in a historical context and help consider opening a larger, permanent institution in Africa so it can me interpret pieces, is what I need in order to put a good collection be seen by everyone? At this point, he’ll only say this: “I do have bigtogether. But if I don’t like something that Mark suggests, I don’t ger plans. I’m building this collection for a purpose, which is to share buy it.” So what is he looking for? “I think art needs to be pushing it with others in Africa.” ar

Kudzanai Chuirai, Iyeza, ﬁlm still, 2012. Courtesy Zeitz Collection

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Welcoming the Unthinkable

Istanbul hit the headlines over the summer following a series of antigovernment protests that resulted in ﬁve people dead, 11 missing an eye, 8,000 injured and a government unmoved. As the city launches its biennial, how does the nation’s art reﬂect its society? by Lara Fresko

top Taksim Square, Istanbul, 6 June 2013. Photo: Lara Fresko above Let’s Go to Postering!, 1963–1980: The Turkish Left’s Visual Adventure, 2013 (installation view). Courtesy Depo, Istanbul

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Public Space: Where Artists Live

Oda Projesi, founded in 2000 by members who had been together In his most recently translated book, Aisthesis (2011 French/2013 since 1997, work with issues of urban transformation. Like many English), Jacques Rancière writes: ‘Thinking is always firstly think- other artist groups, they experienced the gentrification process of ing the thinkable – a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by wel- Galata, the neighbourhood of Istanbul in which they had a space coming what was unthinkable.’ The events that took place in Istanbul until being forced out in 2005 as a result of the selfsame gentrificaat the end of May, and spread across Turkey this summer, were tion. They continue their work as a mobile collective. one of those instances when a large number of people started welcomAtıl Kunst, an all-female collective established in 2006, has, ing the unthinkable, simply by experiencing it. alongside other work, long been emailing weekly Gündem Fazlası (Surplus of Agenda) – digital images It’s too soon to tell what the Gezi The reaction to the initial threat that can be printed out as stickers – Park events will amount to. It is, howwhose content engages with current ever, possible to look back upon what against ‘a couple of trees’ was both literally led to them by reviewing a recent hisand symbolically the product of Istanbul’s and ongoing issues in social, political tory of Istanbul’s contemporary art and quotidian life. Extending their experience of urban transformation scene – a scene in which welcoming interest in the digital medium, the the unthinkable has been a practice, not only in works of art but also collective has also exploited the Internet as a space in which to invite through the ways in which artists relate to each other and their worlds. other artists and collectives to contribute. kaba hat, a very young collective, founded in 2012 by artists who Urban Transformation, Communities and Collectives have been working together since 2010, followed yet another method Let’s begin with the most visible trigger for the events of this sum- of opening the ground to others while engaging with issues of urban mer: the reaction to the initial threatened destruction of ‘a couple of transformation. They issued an open call for projects in honour of trees’ in the proposed redevelopment of Gezi Park was both literally the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara. (The collective was taken to court and symbolically the product of Istanbul’s experience of urban trans- by the mayor of Ankara.) These practices – of sticker production and formation, an issue with which many artists, collectives and institu- public projects – aim at existing within a larger public sphere, beyond tions have grappled. And since the first instances of welcoming the what we think of as the traditional venues for the display of art, and unthinkable occur in conversation, beyond the singularity of self into the streets. Ha Za Vu Zu, a collective best known for its sound(even if it is a conflicting one), I would like to begin by outlining some based live performances, takes this up in the performance piece Cut the Flow, performed on several occasions in different cities, with the of the artist collectives based in Istanbul. Hafriyat is a collective founded in 1996. The name – which literally creation of a human barricade to block the flow of a pedestrian road. Essential to what each of these collectives does is the way in which means excavation – is most commonly used to designate the debris extracted when digging for foundations or the detritus of destruc- they relate to each other – by inviting other artists and collectives into tion and construction. In keeping with this, the members of Hafriyat their venues and collaborating with them on projects; and also how tackle issues of urban transformation and the displacement – human, these groups of artists relate to their environment – materially, culcultural and material – that it entails. Early works by members such turally and personally. That is to say, it isn’t solely their artistic works as Murat Akagündüz, Antonio Cosentino, Hakan Gürsoytrak and that are significant, but the ways in which their practice extends Mustafa Pancar depicted their urban surroundings and the changing beyond art into social and political formations. fabric and moments from daily lives situated within it. Consumerism Institutions, the Public and the Protest was integral to their critique. A work by Neriman Polat, shown in the Hafriyat exhibition Your Eyes Are Bigger Than Your Stomach (2007, part of Institutions whose programming focuses on uncovering the historthe 10th Istanbul Biennial) spelled out Mülk Allahındır (All Possessions ical archive as well as creating a current one, exploring issues from Belong to God), using mosaic tiles to mimic the decorative aesthet- Turkey’s recent past – such as urban transformation as well as the aesics associated with the ‘liberal’ architectural style – simultaneously thetics of resistance and revolution – have also been important in the referring to the new rising Islamic bourgeoisie of the time, the eco- lead-up to the Gezi Park moment. salt, for example, which consists of nomic network that brought that bourgeoisie about, the ideology that three previously separate initiatives – Osmanlı Bank Archives, Garanti secured it and that ideology’s interDesign Gallery and Platform Garanti Especially valuable to the conversation nal contradictions. Nalan Yırtmaç, – focusing, respectively, on historical another member of Hafriyat, has have been exhibitions that present archives archives, urban studies and contemlong been working with children in porary art, has held many talks and and histories of previous moments neighbourhoods undergoing gentriexhibitions exploring the urgency of resistance and revolution in Turkey of these issues in our daily lives. fication. Her most recent exhibition, titled ‘Lütfen Arkaya Doğru Ilerleyiniz II: afetsehir (Please Move Towards Depo, a nonprofit space that focuses on social issues alongside the arts, the Back II: Disastercity) (2012), in X-Ist gallery linked urban transforma- has also hosted many gatherings by artists, such as Açık Masa (Open tion, immigration and economic insecurities, in paintings and collages Table), a platform for discussion set up by Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz in based on photographs taken in Anatolia and Istanbul’s transform- 2000, as well as curated exhibitions that bring together works that are ing neighbourhoods. The collective set up its own space, Hafriyat- pertinent within the context of sociopolitical engagement in the arts. Karaköy, in 2006, holding exhibitions and gatherings, and hosting Especially valuable to the conversation now have been exhibitions other artists and collectives who deal with similar issues – many of that present archives and histories of previous moments of resistance and revolution in Turkey, because they have provided context whom I mention below.

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Cut the Flow has been performed on several occasions in different cities, with the creation of a human barricade to block the ﬂow of a pedestrian road

HaZaVuZu, Cut the Flow, 2009 (performance view, Rotterdam). Courtesy the artists

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and dialogue for the current generation of artists. Afişe Çıkmak, 1963– 1980: Solun Görsel Serüveni (Let’s Go to Postering!, 1963–1980: The Turkish Left’s Visual Adventure) at Depo, and Duvar Resminden Korkuyorlar (Scared of Murals) at salt, which followed the five-year history of the Visual Artists Association (gsd) up to the 1980 coup and explored the relationship between the artists community and the workers movement, are two such examples just from 2013. Talks held in the context of these exhibitions brought together artists of different generations in an interaction that marked gaps and traced continuities. Scared of Murals, which I worked on as a research assistant, triggered protests by student collectives and a group of art activists who claimed that an institution with ties to capitalist enterprises such as a bank, whose two historical buildings salt occupies and is in most part funded by, couldn’t or shouldn’t appropriate leftist aesthetics. Part of this group would later also protest this year’s 13th Istanbul Biennial and its public programmes, which tackle issues of the public sphere in its curatorial framework. Talks and performances that began almost seven months ahead of the main exhibition aimed to start a conversation around the public domain as a political forum, hosting artists, activists, architects, musicians, poets and thinkers from around the world. The initial critique of this year’s biennial followed on from protests that may have gone unnoticed in previous editions – that the big corporation(s) financing this critical art event are the perpetrators of urban transformation themselves. Another group that has played a role in the criticism of the biennial’s choice of topic and execution, though from a different angle and in a different manner, has been ImeCe (Turkish for ‘collective work’), a group known for its urban activism, which, in an essay published in Bir+Bir magazine, articulated its position to be one of ‘turning their backs’ on the biennial in order to foster ‘another public’. The group, which is primarily an urban movement, includes artists, academics and art activists, and has been a prominent voice in this debate. Their statement thus opened another aspect of the debates on what is public, what are different publics and how do they relate to our commons. In responding to the biennial and the protests that it drew from such a multiplicity of different views, a conversation ensued,

perhaps best foreseen by Robert Sember of Ultra-red (a soundart collective, founded in la in 1994 by aids activists now concentrating their activities on what they call ‘deep listening’), who was a speaker at the set of lectures held on 22 and 23 March within the public programme of the biennial. Speaking on the second day, after the protests against the biennial, he asked: “How can we listen to the protests yesterday?” It seems now, in retrospect, that even if the protests were heard by most simply as noise, it has become an intervention from which a much larger debate emerged. Reframing the Writings on the Wall Though by no means an exhaustive account, this limited history gives a glimpse of what have been long years of dedicated search for, and practice of, alternative art strategies that directly act upon and engage with the world both socially and politically. The ongoing moment of Gezi Park, which during its short-lived occupation was transformed into a place where everything was free, has changed many to the core, in that they experienced firsthand the possibility of a different economy, and related to each other in new ways. It has also given us a lens through which we can reread previous histories and practices where this may have been explored. Looking into the future I believe the moment of heterotopia, with all its flags, banners, slogans and writings on the walls, will remain in our psyche for a long time to come. We will probably not be able to articulate what transpired instantly; it will surface through daily routines and latent epiphanies. Which is why the historical trajectory of what came before is valuable to establishing what might be done in the future. Nowadays people are being drawn back to their local parks, where they are meeting their neighbours for the first time; and to their communities, where they will continue their struggle. ‘Art is not political because it deals with political matters or represents social and political conflicts,’ Rancière writes, ‘it is political first and foremost because it reframes the distribution of space, its visibility and habitability.’ It seems the moment of Gezi Park has, in turn, reframed the way we look at contemporary art practices. ar The 13th Istanbul Biennial is scheduled to take place from 14 September to 10 November

Neriman Polat, Mülk Allahındır (All Possessions Belong to God), 2007, glass mosaic. Courtesy the artist

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Participating Galleries 1900-2000, Paris Didier Aaron & Cie, Paris Acquavella, New York Bacarelli Botticelli, Florence Jean-Luc Baroni, London Berinson, Berlin Bernheimer, Munich Daniel Blau, London Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Blumka, New York Julius Böhler, Starnberg Brimo de Laroussilhe, Paris Cahn International, Basel Caylus, Madrid Cheim & Read, New York Coll & Cortés, London Colnaghi, London Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago Alan Cristea, London Dan, São Paulo Thomas Dane, London Dickinson, London Donald Ellis, New York Ben Elwes, London Entwistle, London The Gallery of Everything, London Faggionato, London Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf Sam Fogg, London Eric Franck, London Peter Freeman, New York French & Company, New York Gagosian, London Francesca Galloway, London Thomas Gibson, London Gmurzynska, Zurich Elvira González, Madrid Richard Gray, Chicago Richard Green, London

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Hauser & Wirth, London Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London Edwynn Houk, New York Sebastian Izzard, New York Jablonka, Cologne Bernard Jacobson, London Ben Janssens, London De Jonckheere, Paris Annely Juda, London Daniel Katz, London Jack Kilgore & Co., New York Tina Kim, New York Koetser, Zurich Michael Kohn, Los Angeles Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York Kukje, Seoul Landau, Montreal Simon Lee, London Lefevre, London Dominique Lévy, New York Lowell Libson Ltd., London Salomon Lilian, Amsterdam Lisson, London Luxembourg & Dayan, London Malingue, Paris Marlborough, London Barbara Mathes, New York McCaffrey, New York McKee, New York Anthony Meier, San Francisco Meyer Oceanic Art, Paris Victoria Miro, London Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York Mnuchin, New York Moretti, London Edward Tyler Nahem, New York Otto Naumann, New York Jill Newhouse, New York David Nolan, New York

Stephen Ongpin, London Franklin Parrasch, New York Robilant + Voena, London Sanct Lucas, Vienna G. Sarti, Paris Schönewald, Düsseldorf Bruce Silverstein, New York Skarstedt, New York Rob Smeets, Geneva Sperone Westwater, New York Stair Sainty, London Moshe Tabibnia, Milan Timothy Taylor, London Thomas Modern, Munich Tomasso Brothers, London Tornabuoni, Paris Ubu, New York Van de Weghe, New York Johnny Van Haeften, London Vedovi, Brussels Axel Vervoordt, Antwerp Emanuel von Baeyer, London Rupert Wace, London Washburn, New York W&K - Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, Vienna Adam Williams, New York David Zwirner, London

Spotlight Agial, Beirut Aref Rayess Berenice Arvani, São Paulo Rubem Valentim Luciana Brito, São Paulo Liliana Porter Buchholz, Cologne Martin Barré frank elbaz, Paris Tomislav Gotovac Espaivisor, Valencia Nil Yalter Henrique Faria, New York Alejandro Puente

Frittelli, Florence Georges Adéagbo Goodman, Johannesburg Willem Boshoff Grosvenor, London Francis Newton Souza Alison Jacques, London Lygia Clark Sean Kelly, New York Joseph Kosuth Johann König, Berlin Kiki Kogelnik Andrew Kreps, New York Martin Barré Lelong, New York Nancy Spero Millan, São Paulo Anna Maria Maiolino P420, Bologna Irma Blank Riﬂemaker, London Judy Chicago Nara Roesler, São Paulo Julio Le Parc Richard Saltoun, London Bob Law Karsten Schubert, London Rose English Thomas Schulte, Berlin Alice Aycock Thomas Solomon, Los Angeles Gordon Matta-Clark Barbara Thumm, Berlin Anna Oppermann

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions / uk Friends of London, David Roberts Art Foundation, London Michael Dean, Herald St, London United Micro Kingdoms (umk), Design Museum, London Jac Leirner, White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London Ruairiadh O’Connell, Project Native Informant, London Curiosity, Turner Contemporary, Margate Andreas Schulze, Sprüth Magers, London

Yvonne Venegas, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles Subliming Vessel, Morgan Library & Museum, New York Kōji Enokura, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles exhibitions / europe & rest of the world The System of Objects, deste Foundation, Athens The Whole Earth, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

Costume, Tramway, Glasgow

From Radiance and Dissolution, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

exhibitions / usa

Carsten Höller, Air de Paris

The Cat Show, White Columns, New York

Mike Kelley, Hangar Bicocca, Milan

On Nature, Sean Kelly, New York

Keiichi Tanaami, Karma International, Zurich

Jack Goldstein, Jewish Museum, New York

Virlani Hallberg, Galleri Riis, Stockholm

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

When Attitude Becomes Form, Fondazione Prada, Venice

Joyce Pensato, Santa Monica Museum of Art

Dark Paradise, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo

books The Night, by Michèle Bernstein / After The Night, by Everyone Agrees Holy Bible, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Flickering Light: A History of Neon, by Christoph Ribbat Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, by Janet Malcolm consumed Things to collect, things to buy, plus some practical artworks from Little & Large Editions off the record Gallery Girl – it’s been a long, hot summer

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Friends of London: Artists from Latin America in London from 196x–197x David Roberts Art Foundation, London 7 June – 3 August While curatorial agendas have turned, in recent years, to the revisiting of postwar art beyond North America and Western Europe, recovering the history of these other ‘scenes’ has tended to eclipse the culture of international artistic exchange and migration that characterised much avant-garde art in the postwar period. Friends of London, curated by Pablo León de la Barra with Carmen Juliá, turns an effective spotlight on the largely forgotten history wof Latin American artists in late-1960s and early-70s London, provoking questions about the nature of artistic internationalism, political art in a period of political repression and the marginality of experimental art existing beyond mainstream institutions. Friends of London follows on from Juliá’s 2012 display for Tate Britain, which focused on the activity of four cosmopolitan London galleries of the 1950s and 60s: Gallery One, New Vision Centre, Indica and Signals. Here, Signals is presented as a meeting place for foreign and British artists beyond the Anglo-American axis. Reprints of Signals Newsbulletin stand in for the gallery’s early presentations of artists such as Brazilians Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, and Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto, but after Signals’s closure, in 1966, the show moves quickly into the post-68 period, in which migration and exchange are marked by enforced, or selfimposed, exile. In Mexico, Brazil and then Chile, rightwing coups and authoritarian

crackdowns saw artists flee their homes, finding temporary refuge abroad. What is striking in Friends of London is the relative unimportance of national background and cultural identity in the work. This is still a world of itinerant avant-gardists, at odds with mainstream culture wherever they are from, tied by shared artistic commitments informed by the international counterculture, by Fluxus, the European-Latin American legacy of Neoconcretism, conceptualism and performance art. So, Argentinian David Lamelas is represented by a sculpture of scattered and arranged steel plates (28 Plaques Placed in Two Unconventional Forms, 1966–7/2013), first shown in Buenos Aires, but then re-presented as a graduation piece for his Saint Martins diploma, because Anthony Caro (then head of sculpture) wouldn’t countenance Lamelas’s turn to film as ‘art’, as witnessed by the latter’s Reading Film from ‘Knots’ by R.D. Laing (1970). Oiticica’s key 1969 show at the Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Experiment, realised by Guy Brett, survives here in preparatory material and installation shots, and – surprisingly vivid to read – cuttings of the extensive press coverage that Oiticica’s ambitious development of installation art provoked, splitting critics over its infantilising or otherwise liberating effects. That critical response highlights what is hard to imagine today – how such artistic experiments could be seen by a broader public

Hélio Oiticica, Whitechapel Experiment, 1969 (installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London). Courtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

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as part of a subversive counterculture, created by artists who wished to disrupt the normal order of public space and behaviour – hence the particular emphasis on ‘performance’ art. Felipe Ehrenberg epitomises this in his 1970 intervention at the Tate, in which the artist turned up masked in an old pillow cover and tried to ‘view the artworks’. The ensuing argument with Tate security, transcribed in pages of typescript, crawls with misunderstanding and mistrust – artists protesting against the institution of art. Protest is also the subject of the material on the 1974 ‘Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile’, instigated by artists David Medalla and John Dugger and held at the Royal College of Art, from which emerged Cecilia Vicuña’s Abstract Hut, a cane-built enclosure on which hung paintings referring to then current political and environmental crises. Out of fragments and archives, Friends of London manages to create a picture of a moment where artistic experimentation existed as a self-deﬁned alternative to the mainstream, precariously formed in migrant networks of like-minded individuals. It reveals London as a transit-town for radicals and marginals, a place where the artworld was not totally professionalised, and creative energy was fed by migration and open borders: something our current, supposedly ‘globalised’ artworld could do well to reﬂect on. J. J. Charlesworth

Michael Dean Hah Ahahahahaha ha Hahaha Herald St, London 13 April – 19 May Thirty-four works are listed as being in Michael Dean’s exhibition, but given that several are combined to make new works, the actual number could be more – or fewer, depending on how you see it. All bar a few are assimilated into a presentational structure: waist-high mdf partitions containing mdf chairs and tables, which divide up both galleries. The titles are unwieldy, ranging from Ha Ha to Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. I think I’ll refer to the works as ‘the locks’ and ‘the tongues’, for that is what they represent for the most part. Both series of sculptures (all 2013) are made from concrete and glue. The locks are scaled-up approximations of actual mechanisms, crude travesties of precision-made objects, ‘the driver pins and spacer pins, knitted like ﬁngers’, to quote Mike Sperlinger’s exhibition text. The

tongues are comparatively realistic. When not physically incorporated with the locks, they droop from the edges of tables, mark the pages of books or sit there like saintly relics. They evoke torture, salt licks, laughter, charcuterie. The locks are equally suggestive, full of latent movement, like physical stills from dark animations: one can imagine the tumblers disintegrating as Jan Švankmajer turns the key. All have a shapeshifting character, especially Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, an even hybrid of tongue and lock, geometric on one side, ﬂoppy on the other. The coolly machined furniture that accommodates these objects is as basic as possible, operating as a Platonic backdrop that throws the objects’ materiality into greater relief than might be achieved by presenting them in isolation. But it also countermands their autonomy, making them appear like ‘lesser’

forms, earthly derivations of archetypes. It’s this contradiction that holds your attention, and there are counterpoints to prevent it becoming glib: a concrete cabbage, cast directly from a real one, is rolled casually into the mix, and small piles of coins function as precarious supports for some of the locks and tables. This was enough for me. But Dean has added some typescripts, cryptographic ‘translations’ (as I understand it) of appropriated texts using an alphabet consisting of just Hs and As. While these reams of laughter apparently hold the key to the sculptures’ evolution (and perhaps their titles), their physical inclusion feels unnecessary, a didactic nod to the installation’s linguistic origin. If the words have to be here, would it not be better to integrate them with the work’s sensate effects, rather than juxtaposing them as a bibliographic addendum? Sean Ashton

Analogue Series (Tongue), 2013, concrete, 7 × 8 × 9 cm. Courtesy Herald St, London

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Dunne & Raby United Micro Kingdoms (umk): A Design Fiction Design Museum, London 1 May – 26 August What will you prize most in the future? Limitless reserves of energy and a life of luxurious ease? Your status as part of a fast-moving information network? A strong, self-determining community, independent of central control? Or biotechnological advances that will allow you to live in harmony with the natural world? In United Micro Kingdoms, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby imagine a future England in which such considerations have evolved from lighthearted issues of consumer choice into the ﬁerce, deﬁning credos of four geographically divided social groups, respectively the Communo-nuclearists, Digitarians, Anarchoevolutionists and Bioliberals. For each group, their prize comes at a cost: high quality of life and limitless energy require both risky technology and strict population control, participation in a rapid information network entails a loss of privacy, self-sufficient communitarianism is physically demanding, biotech is smelly and slow, and so on.

United Micro Kingdoms is a ‘design fiction’; part of an emerging field in which future or parallel worlds are dreamed into being to inspire and test new ideas in design. Created by two of Europe’s most radical and influential design educators – Dunne heads up Design Interactions at the rca, London; Raby, Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna – the research behind United Micro Kingdoms reflects the multidisciplinary ethos that they bring to their pedagogic work. Consultants for the exhibition include professors of bioethics, international relations and synthetic biology, and the result is a design project that has more evident kinship with the works of Margaret Atwood and China Miéville than it does with traditional product development. As fruit for an exhibition, herein lies the rub. However much research they feed into the development of their fantastical worlds, writers of literary fiction can rely on their readers’ imaginations to fill in great quantities of detail. When Atwood introduces us to the pungent pigoon or

laboratory-bound ChickieNob, she need specify only enough to make them live in the mind. This is not a luxury afforded within the world of design fiction, where the decor in the synthetic kingdoms is submitted to the same rigorous testing that it would be in the real world. In literary fiction, you can create an object with a few words; in design fiction it will take months of development to achieve even a model in miniature. Dunne and Raby’s ambitious, beautifully researched project translates into a half-dozen exhibits: a city-size nuclear-powered train, digital car-pods, super-evolved humans and animals, a mass-transport bicycle and bio-gaspowered vehicles. Each is immaculately rendered, but none more than 20cm high. The demands of the genre necessarily make this feel like a first gesture – the opening salvo of a project that could occupy them for a lifetime. Not evident fruit for an exhibition, but a fascinating peephole into an emerging discipline, nevertheless. Hettie Judah

Dunne & Raby, United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction, 2013, image from Communo-nuclearist society, ‘a no-growth, limited population experiment. Using nuclear power to deliver near limitless energy, the state provides everything needed for their continued survival. Although they are energy rich it comes at a price – no one wants to live near them. Under constant threat of attack or accident, they live on a continually moving, 3 kilometre, nuclear-powered mobile landscape.’ Courtesy Design Museum, London

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Jac Leirner Hardware Silk White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London 17 May – 6 July Someone who walked into Mason’s Yard with no prior knowledge of Jac Leirner’s art would conceivably find it hard to decide whether the works that comprise Hardware Silk were made by a male or a female artist. On the basis of the ground-floor gallery’s wall-works alone – more ‘hardware’ than ‘silk’ in their rigorous horizontal alignments of rulers or spirit levels and elongated, anthropomorphic wall pieces using ‘tough’, punkish materials such as chains or climbing clips – one might think that Leirner were a man. One of the first artists from Brazil to rise to international prominence (via a spate of high-profile exhibitions during the 1990s), Leirner doesn’t take kindly to being branded a ‘female artist’, any more than she likes to be pigeonholed as a ‘Latin American artist’. But gender and nationality are not so easily escaped, and critics inevitably latch on to these categories when discussing her work. The inherent tension in the exhibition’s title does an adequate job of conveying the competing pulls within the work – its combination of solid and flimsy materials, of weight and

lightness. ‘Mixed media’ in the titular Hardware Silk 3 (2013) is thus a useful shorthand for an array of disparate, more or less easily identifiable, metallic and brightly coloured plastic objects – disks, clamps, clips, turnbuckles, curtain rings, basically ‘whatever had a hole in it’, as Leirner put it in an interview – strung together on a 19m steel cable that cuts across the lower ground floor gallery at below chest level, forcing the viewer-turned-participant to negotiate it in order to move from one end of the room to the other. Aside from two small-scale watercolours on paper and two more pendantlike sculptural wall reliefs whose very titles – Girl and For Him (both 2013) – invoke the human figure, most of the wall space in this room is given over to works from the 2013 Skin series, monochrome, rectangular grids made up of hundreds of neatly aligned cigarette papers (‘silk papers’ or papeis de seda in Portuguese). Stuck directly onto the wall, these come in a range of beguiling colour varieties – from ‘Watermelon’ and ‘Cotton Candy’ to the skin-coloured ‘Raw Classic’, named

after flavours from Juicy Jay’s King Size Slim cigarette brand. Colour comes readymade, as it were: it inheres in these delicate sculptural materials whose habitual use carries with it the suggestion of mortality. Leirner’s smoking habit has fed into her work ever since the 1987 Pulmão (Lung) series. In the last room, collapsed multicoloured packs of cigarettes have been lined up on spirit levels, each under the title Rolling Level (2013). For curator and critic Robert Storr, who first encountered Leirner’s work about 20 years ago while visiting her father’s outstanding collection of Brazilian abstract geometric art, ‘her link to the legacy of Concretism can be found in her pitch-perfect receptivity to the geometric and chromatic syntax of [such] found objects’. (Storr organised the first iteration of Hardware Silk at Yale School of Art, New Haven in 2012.) A final flourish in the shape of After the Show (2012) – a necklace of yet more ringed hardware, livened up by the whimsical touch of the odd plastic bracelet – gracefully rounds off this spare yet alluring exhibition. Agnieszka Gratza

Rolling Level No 4, 2013, wood, paper and Plexiglas, 128 × 16 × 4 cm. Photo: Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy White Cube, London. © the artist

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Ruairiadh O’Connell Project Native Informant, London 15 May – 15 June There has been a decorative turn in some recent British art. Artists such as Jackson Sprague and the Granchester Pottery (Phil Root and Giles Round) have been riffing on a particular strand of decorative Modernism. One can read such tendencies as a reaction to the neoconceptual work that has dominated recent artistic discourse. The ‘decorative’, of course, has had a fraught relationship with art history, and like these peers, Ruairiadh O’Connell, in this compact solo exhibition, explores both the conceptual and cosmetic. The exhibition brings together a new body of works without titles (not even the conventional Untitled), and is accompanied by an oblique text taken from an email exchange between the artist and his former art professor at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, Judith Hopf, discussing cocktails. Cumulatively, the works recall decorated satellite dishes; on closer inspection their proﬁles are in fact lifted from commercial aircraft windows. The artist has mixed brightly coloured pigment with rubber

and embellished the surface by scoring it when still wet. Alongside Aztec and tessellated patterns are simple botanical motifs. I’m reminded variously of Omega workshop designs, public-transport seating and my grandma’s carpet. The colour combinations – lemon-yellow and white, or orange and ultramarine – veer between delicate and garish. The works are installed on freestanding metal armatures and anchored off the galley walls. There is a notion of the promiscuous nature of aesthetics, tracing the trajectory of particular motifs from artists’ studios to fashion houses and, ﬁnally, to the mass market. We might look to the entangled genealogies of Op art as an example of mass adoption of avant-garde tropes: the perceptual and formal rigour of Bridget Riley became quickly adopted by the Mod generation, who were keen to express their radicalism through bold styling. O’Connell is interested in these forms of translation – questioning, for instance, why the imperfect line of the artisan is retained in mass-produced

2013, plaster, silicone rubber, hessian, lino, oil paint, carbon ink, steel, 41 × 41 × 3 cm; wall stand: 31 × 19 × 18 cm

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design. He inverts this process by reinscribing the artist’s hand into commercial patterning, transforming industrial products back into a unique object. Chris Maluszynski’s recent photographic series exploring garish Las Vegas casino carpets illustrates the attempts to manipulate social environment by the use of excessive patterning. There have been various semiacademic research claims that all those jarring colours and ﬂora act as a visual Lucozade to keep gamblers awake and spending; O’Connell’s work also interrogates these subtle uses (and abuses) of aesthetics. We fall for patterns quickly and unconsciously; the wonky artisanal patterning of machine-made fabrics can be used to disguise the fact that the human hand has been almost entirely evacuated from its production. Ideologies can be camouﬂaged and behaviour subtly altered through the canny deployment of design. O’Connell understands that sometimes the best way to conceal something is to hide it in plain sight. George Vasey

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing Turner Contemporary, Margate 24 May – 15 September Like an updated version of the Enlightenment wunderkammer from which curator Brian Dillon takes inspiration, this exhibition mixes artworks and illustrations, objects and artefacts, science and natural history, from the ﬁfteenth century to the present day. There are drawings by Leonardo, a cabinet of the exquisite glass models of sea life by Victorian father-and-son duo Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a sculptural arrangement of radiometers by Nina Canell (The New Mineral, 2009) and a collection of photographs of popes looking through telescopes, presented by Laurent Grasso. The overarching title may seem broad, but it’s curiosity of an intellectual and creative kind, rather than a prurient one, that is the focus – perhaps with the exception of Miroslav Tichý, whose furtive photos of women, taken with homemade cameras, manage to be both. Judging by the packed galleries on my visit, it’s a curiosity that the general public seem to share, although the considered selection of exhibits here is obviously key; perfectly balanced to highlight how objects and artworks can add context and meaning to each other. In its usual setting of South London’s Horniman Museum the taxidermied Canadian

walrus, bought by the museum in 1893 (and filled almost to bursting because at the time it was not clear that loose folds of skin were an anatomical feature), is an overstuffed exhibit in a room full of other stiff, stuffed creatures. Here though, alongside Dürer’s fantastic etching of a rhinoceros from 1515, in which the rhino’s thick wrinkles are similarly misrepresented as tortoiselike armour plating, and with Robert Hooke’s 1665 drawing of a gigantic flea (from the first English book to show objects as seen under a microscope), the walrus appears less of an oddity and more heroic. In the above company Gerard Byrne’s cleverly ambiguous film Figures (2001–11) and photographs Connecting Shapes (Three Part Analogy) (2001–), depicting Loch Ness and its legendary inhabitant, also gain extra potency in their blurring of what is fact and what is fiction. Whereas some exhibits are more obviously artefacts – 1930s Angolan fertility dolls given to girls at puberty – and others more obviously art, such as Nicolaes Maes’s trompe l’oeil Dutch genre painting An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding (1665), the most interesting are those that already encompass the two, such as the work by Agency, a Brussels-based initiative coordinated

by artist Kobe Matthys. Over the past 20 years Agency has collected and presented examples of legal controversies (mainly in relation to intellectual property) over how ‘things’ are classified in terms of nature or culture. Here they have selected cases that question the role that systems and processes play in what constitutes an artistic ‘arrangement’. One example is the legal case brought by the Harold Lloyd corporation against Universal Pictures for copyright infringement of a sequence performed by Lloyd in the film Movie Crazy (1932), involving a magician’s coat, by a similar scenario in the 1943 film So’s Your Uncle. The examples are presented in the form of a library of indexed box files (containing documentation on the legal cases – written summaries, photos, film clips, etc) that can be selected and explored at leisure. In one sense this exhibition may be looking back to a seventeenth-century concept of engagement with the wonders of the world, but it’s also a form of engagement that’s increasingly contemporary in a general context, where currency in information is less about discovering or gaining access to it, and more about how that information is selected, collated, curated and presented to us. Helen Sumpter

Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka, Argonauta argo (c. 1860–90). © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru / National Museum of Wales

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Andreas Schulze Looking and Listening Sprüth Magers, London 28 June – 17 August Andreas Schulze is at that comfortable or perhaps ticklish point where his gallery, in receipt of fresh creations, can repeat things they wrote about his last show in London, back in 2009. His new domestic sculptures, just like the earlier ones, ‘tap into a vein of Schulze’s practice that is replete with, and almost fetishises, bourgeois décor and ornamentation, which is symptomatic of Schulze’s fascination with modern yearnings for contentment’. One might extrapolate that nobody’s working up a substantial sweat here. (Note, too, how painstakingly neutral that language is.) Yet if Schulze makes slow progress, bear in mind that his way of going forward involves a lot of going backward. Facing each other on smooth columnar plinths before a jolly mustard-coloured wall are a pair of ceramic representations of the artist’s head, wearing glasses and a half-smile. The top of each skull neatly ablated, they’re ﬁlled with soil and houseplants. One of these works appeared in Schulze’s 2012 show at Team, in New York, where it was part of a more explicitly environmental scenario in which Schulze handpainted the ﬂoor, laid out chairs, hung

curtains, etc: the full Bauhaus soup-to-nuts ideal. Here, the self-portrait feels like a sweet travestying of the idea of the artist as fecundity incarnate, blooming with ideas, but also a would-be bridge to earlier times when modern artists were genuinely seen as heroic. Schulze, born in 1955 and coming of age on the cusp of the postmodern, seemingly doesn’t lack for sentiment about modernity while being able to keep his emotions pretty much in check. And that temperamental mix is even more apparent from the acrylic-on-cardboard paintings that are this show’s primary bequest. Schulze made them after visiting Sicily, pilgrimaging across Europe as the Old Masters used to do. His mode of execution, however, is a tad more recent: Schulze has long carried a torch for de Chirico, while his avuncular simpliﬁcations of form and colour reference Léger in particular. Here his decorous landscapes and seascapes have, at once, a surrealist tilt and a decorous sociability. In Untitled (Bett am Meer), 2013, as with many works here, it’s hard to tell whether the action is transpiring at the bottom of the sea, or on the shore: the view in this case is half-blocked by a brown L-shaped form that

Untitled (Bett am Meer), 2013, acrylic on passepartout cardboard, 80 × 172 cm. Photo: Mareike Tocha. © the artist / vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, Berlin & London

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might be a bed, or something on the seabed. Smooth recumbent rocks rise above it, topped by pointy forms that might be waves (as they appear to be in the rain- and snow-strafed seascape Looking and Listening, 2013) or mountains or undersea flora, and affectless circlets that might be clouds or bubbles. The whole thing, meanwhile, pitches itself between asking to be looked at and situating itself as colourful, unthreatening background. Choose to look and it’ll please with housebroken weirdness, but then keep going and it starts to look ghostly, a persistence whose own irrationality feels fitting. So it’s a sly conceptual egress Schulze is occupying, evidently. He can keep painting this way, and as the times adjust around it – as, say, revisiting Modernism becomes an issue and then a nonissue, or art crossing into decor flits in and out of vogue, or as Surrealism is rehabilitated – so will perceptions change too, ideally refreshing an art which meanwhile gets to look convincingly detached from intellectual fashions. If Schulze is in no rush to shred his own playbook, it’s hardly surprising. Martin Herbert

Costume: Written Clothing Tramway, Glasgow 3 May – 16 June In Aesthetic Theory (1970) Theodor Adorno noted that ‘great artists since Baudelaire were in conspiracy with fashion’. As a signiﬁcant feature of many modernist and early avant-garde movements, costume has long offered a space for the critical collision between fashion, adornment, performance, theatre and art. From Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Sonia Delaunay to Theo van Doesburg and Hans Arp, artists have adopted gesture, pose, performance and costume as powerful modes of expression and critique. Long before Lady Gaga’s appropriation of Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987), art and costume had pursued a reciprocal, if sometimes fractious, relationship. Artists’ interest in costume continues unabated today, perhaps no more so than in interrogations of gender and identity through performativity. Following Roland Barthes’s notion of ‘written clothing’ (as articulated in The Fashion System, 1967), the group show Costume: Written Clothing attempts to reﬂect on some of these

themes by drawing together a fairly disparate range of artists who have, according to curator Claire Jackson, conceived of costume as ‘a device or prism through which to investigate relationships between performance, image and Sculpture.’ As a whole, the exhibition succeeds in highlighting the multifarious and layered approaches to costume adopted by contemporary artists, yet the sheer number and variety of works on show might also be deemed its biggest ﬂaw. Any thematic coherence, however subtle or nuanced, is sometimes lost within a fairly crowded, cacophonous arrangement. The works themselves are also uneven and it can be hard to ascertain the rationale for the inclusion for some of them. On the other hand, Jackson has avoided the temptation to devise the kind of heavyhanded, overly curated or tightly woven theme where, as John Baldessari has observed, artists are used simply to illustrate a curator’s thesis. As such, works range from Matthew Darbyshire’s Standardised Production Clothing Versions 1–10 (2009) – garments on mannequins displayed in

ﬂoor-to-ceiling, street-facing windows which appear as a pop-up shop in the gallery space – to Cuff and Collar (2010), a monumental oil-onlinen painting by Alexis Marguerite Teplin. Other works include videos such as Walker (2010) by Pablo Bronstein, inkjet prints by Sarah Wright and sculptural collage/assemblage by Steven Cairns. Some of the strongest components of the exhibition offer the audience an opportunity to revisit the relics of performances past, reactivating debates on what Amelia Jones has described as ‘presence in absentia’. In Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan’s costume from Think, Think Thingamajig: What Do You Represent? (2006) and Clare Stephenson and Sophie Macpherson’s Untitled (Tracksuit) (2012) and Untitled (Opera Cloak) (2012), for example, the works are provocative in questioning the status of these formerly inhabited and performed costumes as static sculptural objects which simultaneously historicise and document past work. Susannah Thompson

Alexis Marguerite Teplin, Paul, 2009, Undine, 2012, Elsa, 2012, Ludovic, 2009 (installation view, Tramway, Glasgow), oil on linen, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary, Glasgow

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The Cat Show White Columns, New York 14 June – 27 July The cat’s out of the bag! White Columns’s pitch-perfect summer group exhibition The Cat Show has proved, once and for all, what everyone in the artworld has already known since the dawn of Modernism: it’s impossible for a faggot to pan a show about kitties, no matter how stupid the feline ‘premise’ (it would be like denouncing dick, and that’s something a homo takes with him to hell). So I’m happy to say that going to The Cat Show is sort of like going to the Willy Wonka factory. There are so many kitties – kitties everywhere! Up high. Down low. Tied in a knot. Tied in a bow. Hung salon-style. Hung catty corner (literally, Kay Rosen spelling out ‘catty’ and ‘corner’ in two corners of a gallery). Projected as a hologram (Antoine Catala’s Cat, 2012, which also emits cute kitty meows periodically). Projected in 16mm, with a cat’s tail twitching abstractly in black and white (Mark Leckey’s Flix, 2008). There are drawn kitties, collaged kitties and – ohmygod! – kitties in the ﬂesh, ready to be adopted and loved in a new

home (mine!). It’s almost unbearable, like brain freeze from too much ice cream, or getting so stoned you can’t move. (It feels like I’m losing brain cells even as I write this.) But what’s not to like, after all, about an exhaustive collection of famous artists’ secret, large-scale c-print portraits of their favourite felines? With 90 contributors to the show, some of the works are bound to be dumb, and some of them are bound to be beautiful. Michele Abeles’s 6th of April (2007) and Eileen Quinlan’s The Last Picture I Took of Crow (2012) are in the former camp: they’re both straight-up, closecropped glamour shots (which gets redundant, though they sure seem like nice pussies). Perhaps more interesting is Ann Cathrin November Høibo’s Documentation Is Everything #09 (2013), for which she disables a black tripod by gluing one of those Chinese lucky fortune cats to the spot where a camera should go and painting the creature black to blend in sneakily – a hilarious misuse of its function. Marilyn

The Cat Show, 2013 (installation views). Courtesy White Columns, New York

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Minter’s huge Cat’s Eye (2006) is strikingly gorgeous. The picture zooms in on a woman holding her black cat; the colours are saturated and sumptuous – and, somehow, the composition comes off as genuinely touching. Jake Ewert’s two soot-on-corduroy panels, both abstractions of a cat’s face – easily the least representational cats here – have something vaguely Frank Stella about them. But let’s not forget the big cat habitat, which is the show’s centrepiece. Filled to the brim with artist-made toys and structures, including a pallet by Joe Scanlan and a Zen Litter Tray (2013) by Rob Pruitt, which is a functional litter box, by the way (and one I now lust over), this ‘salon-style’ ‘kitty kunsthalle’ for ‘purrrformance’, as curator Rhonda Lieberman recently phrased it, has live cats for adoption every weekend (courtesy of Social Tees Animal Rescue). It just goes to show that, gay critic or otherwise, everyone in the artworld is an old cat lady at heart. David Everitt Howe

On Nature Sean Kelly, New York 28 June – 2 August On Nature, a group exhibition that aims to capture, as the press release states, ‘the ephemeral, expansive qualities of the natural world and present it within the context of the constructed gallery environment indoors’, seems bound to fail. Not least because ‘qualities’ of the ‘natural world’ being plural, the exhibition might want to ‘present them’, not ‘it’, in the gallery. But one can’t really blame Sean Kelly for the theme. A summer group show is about a gallery ﬁnding the biggest umbrella under which a wide range of artists, its own and others’, can shelter. ‘Nature’ ﬁts the bill perfectly. Visitors are greeted by Olafur Eliasson’s Colour Vision Kaleidoscope (2003), a glass cylinder resting on a simple wooden stand that looks like a set piece from a children’s movie about magical inventions from the nineteenth century. If you look at it from the front end, the window of the gallery is refracted back at you as a prism of rainbow-coloured fragments. Hanging above the staircase leading down to the basement theatre (where one can see Nummer negen, the

day I didn’t turn with the world (2007), a beautiful but dull time-lapse video of the artist Guido Van Der Werve standing at the North Pole and turning with the sun) is Rebecca Horn’s Crickets Night Watch (2011), which consists of two brass antennas mounted on a lava stone. The piece mimics the movement of an insect waving its feelers; it’s unexpectedly sweet. For many of the works, ‘nature’ is just what’s in the pictures. Constantin Brancusi’s photograph Endless Column (c. 1926–7) shows the artist’s signature sculpture against a cloudy sky. Darren Almond’s Fullmoon @ Farm (2003) captures a placid river coloured with a chromogenic tint (the image is so crisp that if it appeared on your Instagram feed, you’d deﬁnitely ‘like’ it). Places of Power, Waterfall (2013) shows Marina Abramovic in a white robe standing in a cruciﬁxion pose underneath a waterfall (a reminder of why higher beings normally stay invisible). Other works feature humans. A tiny drawing on brown paper by Joseph Beuys, Untitled (Ohne Titel) (1948), crudely renders – depending on

your imagination – a man capturing a naked woman with a lasso or a couple engaging in a sex game, which may be the same thing. Antony Gormley’s Untitled (2007) offers a perfectly symmetrical man drawn on a leaf from Luzon Island, Australia. Man Rock (1982–3), also by Gormley, gives us the crude outline of a man who seems to hug the Portland limestone from which he’s carved; it calls to mind nothing so much as Earth Day. Unsurprisingly, one doesn’t feel the force of nature in the exhibition so much as the presence of one’s own body. For example, looking into Gao Weigang’s In One Breath 2 (2013), a stainless steel wall piece, you catch your own reﬂection as well as that of Laurent Grasso’s 1610 (ii) (2011), a constellation of neon blue stars that twinkle benignly. To get there, you have to walk around Richard Long’s Leuk Stone Circle (2000), a circular ﬂoor sculpture made of stones from the Rhône’s riverbed. The piece itself may just be a relatively uninspired bit of indoor Land art, but it keeps you moving. Brienne Walsh

Marina Abramovic, Places of Power, Waterfall, 2013, framed ﬁne art pigment print, 160 × 213 cm, edition of 7 + 2 aps. © the artist. Courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly, New York

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Jack Goldstein × 10,000 Jewish Museum, New York 10 May – 29 September In a twist of tragic irony, Jack Goldstein, who considered his name so ordinary it might appear 10,000 times in a telephone directory, never found his personal or artistic identity. During the early 1970s he studied with John Baldessari at CalArts; he was included in Douglas Crimp’s epoch-defining exhibition, Pictures, in 1977; he showed at Metro Pictures along with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo during the boom years of the 1980s; and he spent his last decade as a recluse in a trailer in East la. He committed suicide in 2003. Goldstein’s work, particularly as presented in this small but thorough retrospective, comes off as a restless journey through late-twentiethcentury American art. He debuted with sculptural arrangements of commercial lumber dependent on gravity for stability, and films of short performances in which, for example, he banged his fist against a table, splattering milk from a brimming glass in Ab-Ex-like patterns: a deadpan irreverence towards tradition derived from Baldessari and Bruce Nauman. By the mid-1970s he’d moved on, pressing 45rpm

records of appropriated sound effects and directing short films investigating how visual and aural conventions construct viewer responses – in one a stunt dog barks on cue, and in another a loop of the mgm lion transforms a commercial cliché into art, punning on the studio’s slogan, ‘Ars gratia artis’. Goldstein’s paintings from the early 1980s reduce photographs of natural disasters and battles to dark silhouettes and white streaks. His last pieces, compendiums of texts typed and formatted on computers, complete the distillation of content to denatured logo and form. Appropriated epigrams – such as ‘Slow descent again, the long submersion’ – in these printed works suggest an existential anxiety, and it is possible to trace this disquiet forward from the first precarious arrangements of wood through to the paintings of catastrophe. The exhibition catalogue examines a complementary artistic strategy of withdrawal, whereby Goldstein functioned as an unseen hand, directing film crews and instructing the assistants who airbrushed his canvases,

Butterﬂies, 1975, 16mm ﬁlm, colour, silent, 30 sec. © Estate of Jack Goldstein. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne, and the estate of Jack Goldstein

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creating uniform surfaces devoid of human touch. Identity is always tentative. Given the circumstances of his death – he also suffered drug addiction – it’s tempting to read Goldstein’s work as an allegory of contemporary culture: the endlessly reproducible content of stock footage and word processing quashes individuality. But the media trades in highly developed aesthetics and on the personal responses they elicit from audiences, a dynamic that, say, Cindy Sherman nails in work that creates new visual beauty and insightful critique from the intersection of the constructed and the individual. Aside from the punning wit of his ﬁlms, little in Goldstein’s work engages. His paintings are affectless; his early sculptures, generically postminimalist. His use of various media makes his work seem like a series of starts that remain unresolved. He understood how canned information functioned, but never developed a vision, and perhaps a sense of self, as coherent and strong as the media’s own seductive yet cynical beauty. Joshua Mack

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge s/he is her/e Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh 15 June – 15 September A retrospective that spans more than 30 years must inevitably be partial, presenting mere fragments of an oeuvre. For Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the connective tissue for these severed pieces of a largely collaborative practice, from coum Transmissions during the 1970s to Lady Jaye Breyer in the 1990s and 2000s, is the ‘cut’. The slashes of the exhibition title, s/he is her/e, point to the surgical cuts of the artist’s ﬁnal collaboration with Lady Jaye: submitting themselves to the plastic surgeon’s knife, the two artists undertook a series of surgical procedures and hormone therapies to transform their bodies into mirrors for (or uncanny doubles of) one another. Breyer P-Orridge is the name for this merged identity – the pandrogyne ‘third being’, as the artists put it – produced by these corporeal cuts. Following Lady Jaye’s death from cancer in 2007, only Genesis remains as the embodiment of this extreme collaboration. Thus, the twofold gesture of severance and connection seen in s/he is her/e is also an ongoing act of mourning.

Most of the work in the exhibition is collage-based. Aesthetically unremarkable as visual art, it was made largely during the period when P-Orridge was best known in the alternative music scene. But the transgender aspects of the later collage ‘cutups’ are signiﬁcant as a kind of visual record or documentation of the performative project on identity. This work is neither ironic nor camp: rather, as Genesis puts it in the video The Pandrogyne Manifesto (2003–11), it is a ‘total commitment to the idea not the ideal’. In this sense, it is an utterly sincere avant-gardist undertaking, and the use of the manifesto form, with its desire to realise the apparently impossible, is wholly apropos. The works from the era of coum Transmissions, a performance art collaboration that also included among its members Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, are few. But they are some of the standout pieces. One in particular, Mum and Dad (1971), is a repeated grid-format arrangement of passport photographs of P-Orridge’s parents.

The captions ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ are shuffled free from the correct image in a game of gender misnaming. Evocative of surrealist uses of play, this queering of the family structure upends the heterosexual norms of that formative avant-garde precedent. There is minimal reference to the groundbreaking industrial music group Throbbing Gristle, which formed in 1976 and included the three key members of coum (together with Chris Carter). With the exception of the emblematic neon Thee Ghost (2010) that viewers face upon entering the exhibition, evidence of the later band Psychic tv (fronted by P-Orridge) is also likewise sparse. The decision to sideline the music projects in favour of the collage-based visual works makes sense for a museum venue. But the music context is decisive, for the visual work makes most sense as a form of memorabilia marking P-Orridge’s challenge to the commercial ideals of the pop idol and the group identiﬁcation of the fan. Siona Wilson

s/he is her/e (Transmusicales, Rennes), 1999

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Joyce Pensato I Killed Kenny Santa Monica Museum of Art 1 June – 17 August The beginning of the 1990s was a hell of a moment for Joyce Pensato. That was when she started making paintings of the cartoon characters she had drawn with charcoal since the 1970s. Jettisoning the so-called abstract paintings she had been producing up to that point – large and literal territories of soiled oil paint peppered with holes punched through the canvas – Pensato took on bucketloads of black-and-white enamel and doubled down on her canvases. Fusing her paintings and drawings, she immediately transformed her enterprise into the wicked game it has been ever since, an achievement that would need another 20 years of voracious output to get the broader attention it deserves. A lesser artist would likely have been more than satisﬁed with those earlier paintings (their distressed painterly qualities did have a certain something), but they didn’t stand a chance once Pensato shifted into overdrive and made ‘action painting’ count again. This exhibition, her ﬁrst museum survey, demonstrates that she

accomplished this and then some. Moreover, to have this survey also be her ﬁrst solo exhibition in Los Angeles highlights the possibility that there is still a certain kind of painting that New York provokes best, and that Brooklynborn-and-based Pensato has turned out to be – along with partner-in-crime Christopher Wool – one of a few painters capable of keeping the New York School relevant. If the recent retrospective at MoMA helped us realise that de Kooning was in on the joke of painting all along (he was neither ‘abstract’ nor ‘expressionist’, and mindful of earnestness as the enemy of painting), then Pensato’s survey should be seen as a successful presentation of why that joke still matters. With hindsight, Batman Chair ii (1976), one of the early drawings included in the show, is a perfect and ridiculous representation of the struggles of painting and drawing at the time (which were led by New Image Painting’s reinsertion of the recognisable image into the discourse of abstraction). Pensato’s superhero,

Batman, 2012, enamel on linen, 203 × 203 cm. Private collection, New York

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a lifesize cardboard cutout, set the parameters for the character choices she’s made ever since. Using masked or masklike faces that only convey emotion in the extreme (starting with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Felix the Cat, and continuing with the perfect targets of The Simpsons and South Park), they are impassive one moment and outrageous the next, depending on when the switch has been flipped. The switch in question is Pensato’s process; it is her command of her markmaking that enables her work to embody calm and fierceness all at once. Ricocheting her unmistakable touch against canvas, paper and, significantly, the wall itself (I found the outsize oval ‘eyes’ of Blinkies, 2013, which have been slapped onto the wall in the rear of the space next to the bathroom door, particularly effective), Pensato, like de Kooning, has taken on everything from popular culture to taste to the nature of expression itself. But far more importantly, she reminds us in no uncertain terms that it all comes down to claiming one’s space. Terry R. Myers

Yvonne Venegas Borrando la Linea Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles 1 June – 23 August Jack (2006) by Yvonne Venegas is a straight-ahead portrait. A teenage boy has loosened his tie and leans back into a couch, turning to the camera with a slight grin. Jack seems tired, but the emotion and his subsequent physical embodiment of ‘being tired’ are impossible to be certain about from this photograph. Jack is a real person, but also an actor playing a character in the Mexican telenovela Rebelde. His character is part of a fictional band called rbd, which has been signed (in real life) to the emi label and thrust suddenly from fiction into nonfiction, touring with all of its members presumably still in character. The venues are real, the fans are real, but what could we possibly know about Jack from his portrait? Who is tired, the character or the real person? In such a world, is an outtake even possible? Venegas followed rbd for months, on the invitation of the show’s producer, Fundación Televisa, as the cast and their invented band completed shooting and transitioned to the

reality of their international tour. The subsequent photos, which debuted as a book by the Latin American publisher rm and now appear at Shoshana Wayne, effortlessly capture the strangeness of these various layered realities as they collect and multiply. There are no attempts to play to the spectacle of this twisted reality. On the contrary, Venegas’s photos are decidedly understated, much in the manner of Larry Sultan’s view of the porn industry in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. These are people at work, though their work would strike almost anyone as bizarre. Ample photos feature rough exterior landscapes barely in view and gritty backroom spaces hardly glamorous enough to be anything but real. One photo, Fans Posando (Fans Posing) (2006), is remarkable for its starkness: very young children pose in the costume school uniforms of the telenovela (though at a concert) and so reﬂect the band’s real inﬂuence. Which is to say that the children dress according to how the band is

‘dressed’ by the dictates of television. The reach of tv here is total, so much so that one wonders if a portrait can ever truly pierce this bubbled reality. One important detail to remember, which a non-Televisa-watching audience would not know, is that a key storyline of the telenovela has these teenagers attending the Elite Way School, essentially a school that trains low-income kids for higher society. Class structure and the trappings of the evolving elite have long been of interest to Venegas, and this subtext is central. As these kids move from ‘low’ to ‘high’ at their ﬁctive school, so too are they transitioning into actual pop stars. As this occurs, all manner of behind-the-scenes people responsible for producing the television show and concerts ﬂicker in and out of view, raising the question of whether or not these sideline players are making this band and this version of reality out of their own dreams. The difference between the pop star and ordinary reality is as thin as Venegas’s camera lens. Ed Schad

Yvonne Venegas, Dulce en el Telefono, 2006, digital print, 51 × 61 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles

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Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney Morgan Library & Museum, New York 10 May – 2 September It is fitting that Matthew Barney, an artist so enamoured with heady conflations of mythmaking and physiological mutation, should have a retrospective of his drawings across the way from an exhibition dedicated to one of the greatest tales of transfiguration around – the Holy Eucharist. Such matches are made in heaven, or in this case, at the Morgan Library. With over 70 drawings, a dozen vitrines and the remnants of an in situ performance piece, Barney’s Subliming Vessel offers a crash course in the artist’s accretive, utterly fabulist cosmology. While technically a retrospective, the exhibition eschews sequential presentation in favour of constellatory groupings, with pieces from Barney’s current ongoing project, the Ancient Egypt qua Norman Mailer-inspired River of Fundament (2007–), accounting for the majority of drawings included. Works in the show are further divided into two categories: vitrine-encased ‘storyboards’ of preparatory sketches; inspirational texts and collages related to Barney’s performances and films; and mounted, custom-framed drawings that represent spinoffs from the latter.

Intended to elucidate, the storyboards instead are nothing more than wunderkammern committed to Barney’s unrelenting creative purview, promulgating narratives that have come to define his works, such as bodily augmentation, unsavoury reproductive cycles, Freemasonry and, of course, biomechanical erotica, among others. As with the storyboard dedicated to Barney’s film Cremaster 2 (1999), press clippings of murderer Gary Gilmore sit alongside Mormon scripture, Houdini-related ephemera and the artist’s heavily annotated copy of Mailer’s epic Gilmore exposé, The Executioner’s Song (1979). And yet, rather than laying bare the threads that underlie his projects, Barney winds them all the more tightly in his self-fashioned web of mythos. Several dozen drawings line the walls of the main gallery. Framed in Barney’s signature medium of self-lubricating petroleum, Drawing Restraint 7: Spin Track Manual: Kid (1993) evinces the artist’s interest in biomedical science. Milky white speculumlike retractors tug at the image’s border, exposing renderings of Barney’s recurring lozenge- and crossbar-shaped ‘field

khu: Five Points Make a Man, 2009, graphite on paper in polyethylene frame, 24 × 30 × 4 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London, and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

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emblem’. His quasi-vanitas, Mirror Position (2006), depicts General MacArthur’s skeleton, with corncob pipe alight, contemplating its own reﬂection. Far from the abstract, gestural sketches of his earlier career, Barney’s morbid rendering of MacArthur falls somewhere between Albrecht Dürer and James Ensor. Elsewhere, River Rouge: Sulfuric Acid (2011) depicts a grotesque phallus ejaculating torrentially. Invoking the mammoth Ford automotive plant, Barney’s painted steel frame and use of sulphuric acid marries the industrial with the procreative. Much as it was for the pharaohs with whom he is so currently taken, Barney is undoubtedly the centre of his universe – the myth of selfcreation lies at the heart of his whole enterprise. This is nothing new for artists (think of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol); however, just as a great story can fail when readers become aware that they’re reading, the fault with Barney’s myth is not the story he’s weaving but the fact that we’re aware he’s doing so. Joseph Akel

Kōji Enokura Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 6 June – 13 July Kōji Enokura was a maker of symptoms and stories. His symptoms, fleeting performances captured in photos, became, with time, stories: sizeable wall pieces blackly hanging between painting and sculpture. Nature always shaped his work, defining its presence and tension between body and mind, even as the artist switched from evanescent events to permanent objects. A founding member in the late 1960s of the Japan-based Mono-ha (School of Things) group, Enokura emerged alongside artists Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, Nobuo Sekine and others, from this kind of homegrown Minimalism, which collectively took on the elemental quality of thingness but with a shift of emphasis to nature (an elemental antidote to the testicular industrialism of Judd and the gang). Symptom – Floor, Water (P.W. – No. 50) (1974) is only a snapshot of some vinyl tiles, gridded out and flecked just so, just another mass-produced petroleum derivative only perfected last century, likely lining your kitchen right now. These tiles have an institutional aura, a pattern easily

recognised from sundry hospitals and streetcorner sanatoria. Whatever might heave or spew, splatter or smear across their waxed surface can be easily wiped away with the janitorial swoosh of a bleachy rag mop. In the background, solid sunlight pours through some hidden window, the light angled by its shape. In the foreground, water puddles shapefully – an imperfect spill line made by the weight of water splashing itself thinly against the force of gravity, its ancient and elemental irregularity broken by the hard edge of the square tile, the puddle caught and reformed into a perfect straight line. The shimmer of the water catching the light, the variable shape on one side momentarily angled into the tile’s abstract, manmade geometry. Though the tiles are industrial, it is the natural structure and behaviour of water that stars in this performance. As it’s not all form, it’s also time. The water hangs there on the edge, precariously, ready to spill over and be done. A quiet moment of common suspense, but common only because

of the materials, which are so everyday, found anywhere. Distinctly modern and the essence of ancient, here they appear peculiarly potent, dramatic. Nature seems poised to wash over the angle, to flood over this tiny edge. A complex tension understood in a glance. What Enokura called stories stage his ephemeral symptoms into setlike paintings, more scenes or sites than things. In Intervention (Story – No. 63) (1991), black paint stains one side of the canvas, the spill some ancient seepage passed through colour field with its oozing oil-dark flow. Across the raw cotton hangs a simple black curtain, running the height of the canvas, mimicking the stain of the paint. Against the stasis of the object, something active, human, theatrical breathes out of the draping fabric. The curtain gives the work a weird expectancy. Twenty-two years after its crafting and 18 since the artist’s death, the soft darkness of paint and fabric flowing down, it still feels like something’s about to happen here. Andrew Berardini

Intervention (Story – No. 63), 1991, acrylic on cotton, curtain, 249 × 333 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist’s estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

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The System of Objects DESTE Foundation, Athens 15 May – 30 November Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects (1968) has long served as a prescient exploration of object commodification. Here, architect-writer-curator Andreas Angelidakis takes the book as a ‘carpet’ underlying his sweeping exhibition of the same name – touted as a reload of founder Dakis Joannou’s collection, which spans many objects of contemporary art, of course, but also design, fashion and ephemera. A reload it is. It’s also an expansive renovation. Angelidakis and cocurator Maria Cristina Didero have broken through walls, reversed room sequence, exposed rough and raw architectural elements and built temporary structures to create a labyrinth of spaces showcasing hundreds of “peripheral” works by 214 artists, culled from Joannou’s collection. A dark warehouse entrance leads past Josh Smith’s untitled stop sign from 2012 and over a metal bridge to Pawel Althamer’s ominous Evil (2012), a scary, seated, gas-masked figure in a low-lit room; a separate room wallpapered with deste archive snapshots (a younger Massimiliano Gioni, lots of Jeffrey Deitch) immediately lightens things up. A nearly unlit hall sparely installed with sculptures and fashion objects overlooks (through a hole in the floor left over from a former exhibition) an airy space packed with seminal late-1960s furnishings.

Narrow rooms lead to dead-end video spaces. Larger spaces use provisional architecture, like wood ‘cages’ (essentially rooms whose drywall is missing) to display works in miniexhibitions. One is packed with wonderful works on paper by Sean Landers, Paul Chan, Christiana Soulou and many others; leave this ‘room’ and the works’ versos, including labels, are visible. The warren of wonders continues, works by David Salle, Mark Manders, Jeff Koons, David Altmejd, Urs Fischer, Haim Steinbach, Linder, Viktor & Rolf, Martin Margiela and an array of Greek artists swirling by. In a trapezoidal room, plaster putti on plinths – which young Joannou apparently collected from ﬂea markets in Rome – are juxtaposed with Alexander McQueen hoof shoes and a small Soulou drawing. On the roof, the focal point is a vast photograph revealing frolicking ﬁgures in a latter-day garden of earthly delights, amid design objects we just saw in different spaces below, in a Maurizio Cattelan photo shoot for the artist’s Toiletpaper magazine. By now at the latest, the show starts feeling like another place in which images and ‘objects’ (or images of objects) are in such convoluted, multilayered abundance: the Internet (no wonder: some of Angelidakis’s early architecture exists only in Second Life). It’s as if the curator has

The System of Objects, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Fanis Vlastaras & Rebecca Constantopoulou. Courtesy deste Foundation, Athens

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simulated a ‘virtual’ experience in ‘real’ life (or made the real into a simulated virtual experience), and played with another Baudrillardian concept: here, however, the simulacra are doubled back on themselves. The show ends in a large room. On a mountain of art-shipping crates (again with revealing, intriguing labels) are myriad videos, pictures and objects. The surrounding walls display a ‘museum’ of photographic reproductions from the Harlem art space Triple Candie; its seemingly random categorisation of knocked-off art-historical images immediately calls Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–9) to mind. A George Condo piece of Joannou and his wife overlooks it all. The confusing paths, the ﬂurry of images, the voyeuristic look at a lifetime of object-collection: is it good, is it worthwhile, do we like it? As a quick read into the catalogue (where images from the exhibition are superimposed on sepia iPhone images of Angelidakis’s own beachworn copy of The System of Objects) reveals, Angelidakis, too, knows that sometimes when we click ‘like’, we forget; sometimes we remember. Regardless of where we ﬁnd them, when the visuals are compelling, we keep coming back to look again, or look for more. Kimberly Bradley

The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 26 April – 7 July The Whole Earth is a hugely ambitious show inspecting the impact of the famous nasa image of our big blue world and how it coloured the California counterculture’s highly influential musings on politics, the environment, cybernetics and art. We face a text-heavy display that takes hours to digest. As with launch countdown at a late critical juncture, surrounded by all the facts and technology, guidance is internal and you’re on your own. Curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, this is a book of ideas that, in an overt literary move, consists of seven chapters. We begin with ‘Universalism’ – earth as one interconnected system, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, etc. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 harped on about a new connectedness, but the curators here do not ‘seek to repeat the old narrative of the sold-out, failed counterculture’. And so next we enter ‘Frontier: At the Pacific Wall’, where the curators posit (creakily) that after the nasa photo you could no longer break on through to the other side because geographically there was no outside there any more. They see the meaning of the earth image as a reversal of gaze: not outward as a door to space as the final frontier, but now, paradoxically, driving us inward. ‘Whole

Systems’ follows with some welcome comic relief: tv footage of mit guru Jay Forrester calling himself an optimist. Here he is, unwittingly hilarious, talking with Adam Curtis: “Our problem is the hard problem.” “And that hard problem was?” “The world.” More-intentional giggles arrive via Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s East Coast, West Coast (1969), where Smithson parodies California dippiness and remains remarkably deadpan while saying guff like, “I’m a friend of Chief Soaring Eagle’s son.” And then we are back in the black hole that is ‘Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation’, with the curators presenting a counterargument to the Age of Aquarius. To quote them, ‘the whole as false – a system, a life form condemned to destruction’. Enter Raymond Pettibon, with his drawing O.D. a Hippie/Legalize Heroin. Ban Hippies (and New Yorkers) (1982). For the next chapter, ‘Boundless Interior’, read navel-gazing and Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1965), the double-screen projection of arch-narcissist Edie Sedgwick chatting with herself on tv, a prototype of the selﬁe. This leads to ‘Self Incorporated’, aptly illustrated by Ashley Bickerton’s wall-mounted leather-clad construction Commercial Piece #1 (1989). ‘The Earth Is Not Whole’ concludes the exhibition

pessimistically, with the curators wondering if ‘the whole earth has turned into a malicious, hopelessly divided middle class that is doomed to perish’. Cheers! Diederichsen, like his British pop-cultural counterpart Paul Morley, suffers from an intellectual horror vacui. Maybe this show is an example of ‘outsider curatorship’. The hall resembles those endless poster displays beloved of international academic conferences mounted on cheap plastic boards with no obvious directional strategy. This near-manic lack of coherence may deliberately mimic random Google-search wanderings but it doesn’t necessarily persuade one that there is a novel underlying thesis, aside from the beloved ‘everything connects’ of Charles Eames or Leonardo da Vinci. There’s much too much tangential stuff here, scads of tomes, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to books by biologist Barry Commoner. And music, too: album covers a-go-go and way too much Jefferson Airplane. Sun Ra? Why not? The net effect is to reduce the artworks to just more human stuff used to prop up a loose argument rather than letting them speak for themselves. Some contemplative gaps would have helped. After all, space is the place. John Quin

Philipp Lachenmann, shu-Still, 2003 / 2008, lightjet print on acrylic, framed, edition of 6 + 1ap, 126 × 168 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich

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From Radiance and Dissolution Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 5 July – 10 August The idea of forces emanating from the visible and invisible realms runs through From Radiance and Dissolution: seeking to peek beyond what is apprehensible and representable, curator Margarida Mendes has selected 11 artists who employ methodologies such as stream-ofconsciousness, explorations of synaesthesia, visual hallucination and ﬂuid computation as apparatuses for investigating abstraction. Tamara Henderson, for example, has taken journeys under hypnosis, guided by a practitioner, to imagine – and thence materialise – models for chairs she has never really seen. Kressengarten Chair (Nurnberg) (2013) thus emerges as a composite: its form resembles that of a chair, though it’s partly made of plaster and one couldn’t sit on it. Chris Martin’s longstanding study of psilocybin mushrooms, meanwhile (involving ingestion), runs parallel to Henderson’s journeys into the unconscious; Martin’s painting Untitled (2007) expands onto the borders of the canvas, as if the depicted scenery is expanding into another world. Max Eastley, gravitating towards the synaesthetic, explores the association of the colour spectrum and musical notes: in Drawings for Color and Music Projects (1968), for example, he has reassembled a Bach fugue in colour code.

Kareem Lotfy operates within the digital domain, composing 3D sculptures and assembling them in real spaces such as an art gallery. Here, he displays four drawings generated in binary graphic software, and printed on tracing and photographic paper. He intervenes into binary code by introducing bodily gestures, moving his hand on a drawing pad attached to the computer; the resultant images operate as digital relics, fusing our own time with the traditions of calligraphy and symbolism. Similarly investigating symbolism through collective/subjective consciousness, although differing in manifestation of content, Diogo Evangelista focuses on carpet-making from North Africa, where explorations of the chaos and order of the universe are animated as patterns: for instance, in some of the carpets lightning is the theme for weaving and organising threads. Evangelista’s video piece documenting these carpets is ﬁlmed in an anthropological style, the camera slowly moving across one rug and then another while the soundtrack interweaves experimental electronic music with traditional Persian and Tunisian tunes. The soundscape of the video and the unsettling imagery collide, the result feeling uncannily alluring. The condition of being immersed in

sound (even if only implicit) and image is twisted with Maybe Then, If Only As (1993), a ‘holopoem’ by Eduardo Kac, wherein viewers look into the shiny-surfaced frame hanging from the ceiling and change position in order to experience the piece. In other words, according to where one positions oneself, some words appear more clearly than other ones encoded into the piece’s holographic surface – moving slightly upwards, or from left to right, introduces a new configuration depending on the angle of sight, so that the piece introduces cross-associations to a set of words forming a line or a sentence. James Whitney’s 16mm piece, Lapis (1966), meditatively displays a flow of forms, his hand-drawn figures melting into unified compositions filmed while simultaneously receiving a variety of light sources. Whitney’s investigation of multiplying sources for perception is, it would appear, an exploration of seeing things as they really are. Relatedly, From Radiance and Dissolution brings forth the liminal space between seeing and neural cognition through artworks that suggest what lies beyond the visual through the methodologies of abstraction. As manifested in the exhibition, ‘seeing’ is particular, and at times limiting. Fatos Ustek

From Radiance and Dissolution, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Katarzyna Kimak. Courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

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Carsten Höller With Air de Paris 25 May – 13 July Hanging so discreetly that you could miss it when first entering the gallery, So Alone (2012), a photograph of Carsten Höller taken by photographer Davide Monteleone, portrays the artist from above, surrounded by no less that 30 pairs of twins. It sets the tone for his show at Air de Paris, his first in the city for nearly six years. In With, an exhibition made up of collaborations, the artist’s singular authority, touch and soul get purposely lost, making room for other voices. In doing so, the show renews – more or less successfully – Höller’s exploration of the double, an idée fixe that has intermittently haunted his practice since the 1990s. The works presented here were made ‘with’, respectively, taxidermist Yves Gaumétou, model-maker Rigobert Nimi, perfumer Ben Gorham, unnamed twins, photographer Attilio Maranzano, artist Philippe Parreno and architect François Roche. Höller is, of course, known for his participatory and playful artworks, and while Memory (2012) and The Memory Game (2012) might not be as exhilarating as his notorious slides and carousels, they can still make your head spin. The first work is a series of 30 reversible frames: on one side of

each is a photograph, taken by Maranzano, of a different ride in an amusement park; on the other is a four-colour processing of the exact same picture, by Höller, that resembles a drunken version of the original. (In order to decide which side of the Janus-faced work faces the viewer, a member of the staff ﬂips a coin on a weekly basis.) The second work is an actual and improved version of the children’s game of Concentration based on the Memory photographs: 32 double-sided (this is the improvement) cards left, with instructions, for the viewer’s sportive pleasure on a table in the middle of the room. This time, Maranzano’s and Höller’s pictures don’t correspond on both sides of one given card, so that one has to concentrate doubly hard in order to ﬁnd a pair. At the end, when no card is left unmatched, the player who got the most pairs wins the game (though that does not mean he or she can leave the gallery with the artwork). The biggest surprise in the exhibition is Höller’s recent collaboration with Gorham: a collection of fragrant toothpastes, Insensatus Vol. 1 Fig. 1 (2013), to be commercialised in the

near future and here displayed in a fancy walnut box. The package includes three flavours (‘Male’, ‘Female’ and ‘Infantile’) and a base toothpaste (‘Activator’) to blend them with before use at night; brushing with these promises – depending on your dosage – to influence your dreams accordingly. Finally, you may experience a definite thrill at the end of the show while venturing into the installation Hypothèse de Grue (2013), made with Roche. Rising high in the middle of the room and vaguely dragon-shaped, a white metallic structure containing a smoke machine releases a deep, blurring fog, filled – according to a large wall caption that is impossible to miss before entering the room – with unspecified neurostimulants. This causes you to wonder about their effects and analyse your own behaviour: are these substances actually enhancing your mood in any way, or is your sudden excitement only due to the fact that the notice warned you to step back if pregnant or sick? The only certainty is that no spectator will be harmed – merely intoxicated, but since you can’t tell, you can’t sue – in the course of Höller’s show. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Carsten Höller & François Roche, Hypothèse de Grue, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Marc Domage. Courtesy Air de Paris

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Mike Kelley Eternity Is a Long Time Hangar Bicocca, Milan 24 May – 8 September While I was at this year’s Venice Biennale, it struck me that the ‘encyclopedic palaces’ of my generation had been Mike Kelley’s The Uncanny (1993) and Educational Complex (1995): the international exhibition, with its insistence on ‘repressed memory syndrome’, seemed to reflect Kelley’s influence so consistently that I found his exclusion inexplicable, and kept waiting for his work to appear. The retrospective that followed his death (as seen at the Pompidou, in Paris, in my case) had felt painfully frustrating for symmetrical reasons: as if to compensate for the lack of the artist’s presence, it packed together an oppressive number of works, making it hard to breathe. In a note on his Harems (2004), Kelley had written: ‘Every single [collection in Harems] contains absences. The uncontrollable impulse to collect and order is itself, uncanny; the strange sense of loss and wonder attendant to the gaps in collections is uncanny.’ The exhibition at Hangar Bicocca, meanwhile, goes in the opposite direction to the retrospective, not trying to mimic the artist’s entropic layouts or emphasise the collaborative nature of several of his projects. The works are only ten in number, all solo and large-scale, and they are theatrically made to emerge as luminous islands from the cavernous dark space. What’s not there is, clearly, the majority of Kelley’s oeuvre: this was an admittedly personal choice. The show is cocurated by Andrea Lissoni and Emi Fontana, who had been close to Kelley. In 2000, Fontana invited him to show in her (now closed) gallery in Milan the first episode of the cycle Extracurricular Activity (which would become, in 2005–6, the monumental musical Day Is Done at Gagosian New York), then moved to la after she and Kelley started a relationship. They broke up, but kept in touch, so that the selection records the same years, 2000 to 2009, like a diary.

The first work is thus Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000. It works well as a prologue in many respects: as a recreation of the set of the high-school play whose picture Kelley had found in a yearbook, it uses theatre as a symbol of his continual research into rituals of representation and ‘deviance’. The video restages the half-hour existentialist drama heavy-handedly played inside the same set by two actors. With a good deal of deadpan humour, the title of the exhibition comes from one of them, who says: “Eternity is a long time, isn’t it?” before sticking his head in the oven. The sequence of works is organised by free associations, instead of chronology, to reflect the circularity of Kelley’s sense of time, where past and present obsessively collide, as well as his recursive analytical approach. Light (Time) – Space Modulator (2003), which pays tribute to MoholyNagy’s kinetic sculptures, is a time machine: a spiral staircase taken from the artist’s house revolves horizontally, thus making the slide projections turn around as well. Some images are found snapshots of the Latino American family who had lived in the same house, others are photos Kelley took by reinterpreting the original scenes in the same places, in an endless loop of haunting proximity. The large installation, divided in office cubicles, A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark’s Film ‘Porky’s’ (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnick’s Electronic Composition ‘The Wild Bull’ (1968), and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room (Office Cubicles), 2002, gathers hundreds of drawings, sketches, maps and newspaper clippings used by Kelley for the Educational Complex, thus showing full evidence of his fixation on indexing. John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide,

facing page, bottom Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000 (installation view, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2007). Photo: Santi Caleca, François Pinault Foundation. © Estate of Mike Kelley

facing page, top Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) (detail), 2000, b/w photo. François Pinault Foundation. © Estate of Mike Kelley

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1968–1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) 2001, too, looks like a self-ironical monument to Kelley’s compulsion to mine his own past: commissioned for the 300th anniversary of the founding of Detroit, it consists of a large statue of America’s ﬁrst astronaut (and illustrious local hero), covered in debris and multicoloured fragments of glass, ceramic, metal and trash collected by the artist in Detroit’s riverbed. It’s the most autobiographical work on show here: Kelley’s high school was dedicated to John Glenn, and it’s with an obvious pleasure that the artist turned him into a ridiculous harlequin, his bottom smeared in dubious brown stuff. The last work, presented in the vast cubicle at the back of the Hangar, is a surprisingly lyrical ode to art history and poetry: created for the Louvre in 2006, Profondeurs Vertes (Green Depths) is a multimedia installation hypnotically focusing on two paintings, seen by the artist as a child at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which had deeply fascinated him: Watson and the Shark (1777) by John Singleton Copley and Recitation (1891) by Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The whispered soundtrack is made up of readings from the second canto of Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont (aka Isidore-Lucien Ducasse) and excerpts from female writers and poets of nineteenth-century America. Kelley notoriously hated the ‘bad boy’/‘slacker’/‘dysfunctional’ label perennially attached to his work. When, back in 2000, I interviewed him in Milan, I was foolishly surprised to hear him say that “art has to be academia, to have a critical function, look at things and analyse them, instead of being just good fun or stupid consumption. I am not a populist”. I think I understand a bit better, now. Barbara Casavecchia

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Keiichi Tanaami Karma International, Zurich 8 June – 13 July Keiichi Tanaami has enjoyed a Zurich renaissance of late, thanks to exhibitions at Studiolo and now Karma International. The seventysomething Japanese artist and designer was never forgotten – he has exhibited steadily since the 1960s – but exhibitions like this one nonetheless fill in blanks in his remarkable back catalogue. On show at Karma are poster designs from the late 1960s, a 1969 collage, numerous Dream Diary Drawings (2007–12) and a large canvas triptych, Elephant and whale in cherry blossoms falling day (2013), while the gallery’s back office is crowded with other sculptures and works on paper. Posters like No More War_4 (1967) make the first impression: intensely coloured silkscreened designs suggest the era of their making viewed through drug-addled eyes. The antiwar message of this work’s title is just a grace note between two burnt-red female faces that loom over an image of a wavy-lined sunset reflecting on water, while another woman holding an oversize flower is seen in front of a larger torso, the face above it an orange blank. If Tanaami was

employing distortions redolent of hallucinations in that period, the recent painting on display is a much more psychedelic experience. Together the three panels of Elephant and whale… are three metres wide and two metres tall, and jam-packed with forms and details that pulse before your eyes. The subjects are nominally a breaching and blowing whale and a yellow elephant against a blue sky thick with pink blossoms, but the image is a tumult of other creatures. Fix on one form and you can no longer decipher its surroundings, pan out and the focus is lost. The water writhes with recurrent characters from Tanaami’s oeuvre: a lute with eyes forms the face of a hunched monklike figure walking with a stick; a snake has a man’s head; skulls abound, as do more long-lashed eyes; there are cockerels too. Even the surfaces within these forms are delivered with virtuoso touches. The elephant is filled with a dot pattern that references Lichtenstein while complicating, not clarifying, depth of field; the black and white spray on the water calls to mind classical Japanese landscapes; and the tigers at the base

stretch out like Hans Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors (1533). While Elephant and whale… is a tour de force, it is the Dream Diary Drawings that are most intriguing. On display are 80 pages, 38 × 50 cm each, some collaged but largely in coloured pencil, that ﬁnd room for all kinds of fantasies – sexual, medical, biological and even architectural. Each is divided into two portrait-format drawings that sometimes mirror each other across the centrefold and often evolve from one side of the page to the next. In one, for example, the right-hand side shows a man pushing down on the shoulders of a woman upright in a pool; on the left-hand side the same scene is repeated, but her eyes are closed and something like a starﬁsh, with an eye, is boring into her abdomen. Whether the man is ministering or abusing is unclear. Seen en masse (though still only a fraction of Tanaami’s diaries), this collection suggests the artist is observer, not agent, of these visions. But once captured, they are the stuff with which he cultivates a vocabulary and a cast to populate his extraordinary canvases. Aoife Rosenmeyer

The House in Ascension-1, 1989, wood, lacquer, 14 × 46 × 87 cm. Courtesy the artist, Nanzuka, Tokyo, and Karma International, Zurich

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Virlani Hallberg Galleri Riis, Stockholm 17 May – 20 June Born in Jakarta, the Berlin- and Stockholmbased artist Virlani Hallberg draws attention to the boundaries between individual and collective trauma, and how violence affects individuals in a long-term fashion – sometimes hindering, other times transforming those involved. Using photography and video, Hallberg emphasises that fiction and ‘sensual knowledge’ are tools to empower the individual against what psychologists refer to as the ‘double bind’ – being immersed in conflicting messages or forced to choose between options which do not guarantee a positive outcome. The exhibition is divided between two rooms, the first devoted to multiple video stills from O (2012) and the second showing the video installation Receding Triangular Square (2012). The stills from O – originally a three-channel installation – illuminate a bourgeois love triangle between a newlywed Caucasian couple and their hired help, a woman of colour. Various scenes focus on how all parties objectify each other via their everyday activities and implicit social contracts. The space between violence and desire is magnified; one party psychologically tests another, dependencies surface, relationships between characters are manipulated as one role questions another and the gaze shifts between those in each frame. In one particular scene, the

wife wears the exact clothing and adopts the compositional position of the maid in the initial still; chosen archetypes are tweaked to reject and question their fundamental components. Receding Triangular Square, a collaboration between Hallberg and art historian/psychoanalyst Leon Tan, proves to be the highlight – with vivid images of Taiwanese individuals sporting red blindfolds in trancelike scenarios, Taiwan’s countryside, appropriated political propaganda footage, keen elucidations of alternative rituals and traditions, and political and cultural observations stressing East-versusWest differences. Taiwan was Japan’s ﬁrst overseas colony, and how colonisation affects, subjugates and inﬁltrates notions of healing, psychological illness and despair are, here, recurring issues. Power and politics obviously relate to trauma and the ways in which cultures methodically recover and transform themselves after such life-altering experiences. The phenomenon of detachment presents itself from a number of perspectives. The video remains elusory due to its dependence upon the singular experience; it was hard to know what the characters were actually feeling; one could only speculate. Yet one senses the positioning of Eastern philosophy as superior to Euro-American psychotherapeutic paradigms. How the O stills and Receding Triangular Square video speak to one

another in the same exhibition is unclear, meanwhile, aside from the fact that both works were made by the same artist. This is a recurring problematic of solo shows – forced content, urgency to ﬁll the space with artworks even if they, perhaps, prove to be incompatible for the viewer to absorb in one designated stretch. An intriguing addition to the show – perhaps, even, a useful segue between aforementioned works – is a comprehensive text conversation between Hallberg and Tan. Along with other topics, they share views on the state of affairs in Sweden, which proves to be more discriminatory than other countries naively perceive about the Nordic nation. A country rampant with subtle (and not so subtle) racism and repression, Sweden (alongside other Scandinavian countries) is becoming fodder for a number of immigrating artists and researchers who feel such issues can no longer be muffled. They draw attention to the notion that the country is reluctant to accommodate difference. Even though Sweden admits a quota of immigrants, it does not take appropriate steps to properly integrate them once ‘inside’. Thus, the collaborative duo attempts to expand their critical approach and artistic research methods to include confusions and misrepresentations that stem from immigration, colonisation and their effects – no easy feat. Jacquelyn Davis

Untitled (Diptych), 2013, c-print on aluminium, 78 × 140 cm

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When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina Venice 1 June – 3 November Curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with artist Thomas Demand and architect Rem Koolhaas, this restaging of an oft-called ‘legendary’ curator’s most ‘legendary’ show, Harald Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form, presents the viewer with many challenges. Chief amongst these is that it offers, as the object of study, the contemplation of an exhibition rather than individual artworks. Plus, the ground ﬂoors are devoted to displays of documents related to the preparation of the original exhibition and contemporaneous video interviews with Szeemann and the artists involved, most of them now established historical ﬁgures – Beuys, Heizer, Nauman, Merz, Serra, Morris, etc – but who were then the new kids on the block. (Most entertaining among these is Lawrence Weiner, sitting on a staircase and clutching a beer whilst chipping plaster off a wall to create Removal To The Lathing Or Support Wall Of Plaster Or Wallboard From A Wall (1968), a square of wall with the plaster removed.) These videos do, at least, give a sense of the reactions to a then-shocking exhibition. Related to that, though, we are asked

to understand a show that took place in the modernist spaces of the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, transplanted to the baroque spaces of Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, 44 years later. Silhouettes of works from the original show that, for whatever reason, could not be presented here are outlined in white on the floor, like the clichéd white outlines around murder victims’ bodies, adding to the sense that there is a zombie aspect to the show, while the floorplan of the Kunsthalle is ‘overlaid’ onto the Venetian palazzo, with artworks shown in their ‘original’ constellations (Szeemann’s concept for the exhibition had been to explore the mindset of a generation by placing works in dialogue with each other) as far as the particular arrangement of the rooms in the 2013 venue allows. And beside the question of how far some of these (primarily site-specific) works can be ‘remade’ for a new venue, there are times when this becomes more than a little confusing. I’m too young to have seen the original (it felt good to say that) and that, of course, affects how I see this restaging. Largely because I’m seeing many of the individual artworks for the

When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, 2013 (installation view). Photo Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Venice

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first time. But in the interests of playing according to the rules of the game set here, I’ve avoided writing about this show as the experience of individual works encountered for the first time. That’s not to say, however, that this exhibition falls short in conveying the strength and force of those works – many of which deal with themes of ecology and environment that have a tremendous force and relevance today. It’s a strength of this extraordinary project that the individual voices of the artists remain heard. Yet, above all else, there remains the nagging (but not uninteresting) question as to what exactly we are being asked to look at here (and it’s easy to tie yourself up in knots over this). A self-serving display of the importance of curators as, so to speak, the flypaper to whom everything sticks? Ultimately – and particularly in the context of the Biennale that is being celebrated along the canals surrounding Ca’ Corner – it’s also a question of the instrumental power of art. When it comes to connecting art to life, is it the curator or the artist who holds the key? On the evidence of this show, it’s a bit of both. Mark Rappolt

Dark Paradise Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo 15 June – 10 August With a cheerful eclecticism that’s in contrast to its brooding, lyrical title, this group show adheres only sporadically to its stated theme of landscape. A set of children-in-peril-themed collages (Untitled, 2010–3) by the self-styled outsider artist Alex Rose seems dislocated from the figure-free landscapes of most of the other works; while in A Fire in My Belly (A Work in Progress) (1986–7), by David Wojnarowicz, the only terrain discernible is an inner panorama of fear and shock. In the infamous film, which sparked outrage in the art community after a version of it was excised from a 2010 Smithsonian exhibition for fear its religious imagery might offend, ants swarm over a crucifix; a man’s mouth is sewn shut; and images of death and fire flicker past, torrentlike. Four small portraits from Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series (1978–9) depict a ‘bankrupt, burned-out and dangerous New York’, in the words of curator Tim Goossens (a version of this show was presented at the city’s Clocktower Gallery earlier this year). Backstreet, desolate beauties, the images evoke the lonesome rattle of a freight train passing tenements in their perfect noir encapsulation of that New York at that moment in time. Their tone chimes

unexpectedly with a nearby set of photographs by Patti Smith, taken on a 1981 trip to French Guiana. In another of Smith’s images – now beautifully realised as silver gelatin prints, but originally developed at Walgreens – the serpentine River Ouse (in Yorkshire) slides by, sinister in the twilight. It’s inhospitable sandy landscapes that go past in Nancy Holt’s 16mm film Pine Barrens (1975), as the voices of local people – these are the backwoods of southern New Jersey, near where Holt grew up – tell of chilling local legends, including that of the fearsome Jersey Devil, a winged, clawed creature with the head of a goat. Down by the river and into the trees, branches snap back into the moving camera’s face as it rushes through the pines. In Thiago Rocha Pitta’s O Cúmplice Secreto (The Secret Accomplice, 2008), an ink-blue sea fills the alcove into which the film is projected, rising and rolling moodily against itself. The work is shown to poor effect here, with insufficient darkness (on a sunny Saturday afternoon) for its deep navy blues and blacks. But glinting in the water against a Rio de Janeiro horizon – all hooked black mountains, reminiscent of the iconic Pedra da Gávea rock shown in

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Laying on Mattress), 1978–9/2004, silver gelatin print, 36 × 28 cm. Courtesy estate of David Wojnarowicz and p.p.o.w Gallery, New York

a lushly tropical photo montage by Marcos Chaves, also part of the show – a mysterious metallic object rocks and rolls in the high sea, moving closer (or is it us getting closer?) as the screen smoulders and fades to black. Further along, a quartet of 2m- and 3m-wide panoramas by the Israeli-born artist Zipora Fried bring us soaring mountains and heavy, undulating landmasses illuminated by washes of colour and light. Up close, Fried’s sumptuous images, made from found postcards overlaid with paint, smeared onto slides and scanned, have the look and feel of acid-etched, devoré images on velvet: in the slightly gritty texture of the pigment on archival paper, and in the darkly kitsch, created landscapes they depict. Their semifictitious essence only adds to a sense of standing before mysterious nature, portrayed here on a scale that eclipses and almost obliterates the viewer. Then the pleasure of the colours, infiltrating the dark skies like the Northern Lights, pulls us back into the picture in an act of recognition, witnesses to wild beauty. Marrying their unknown, unpopulated terrains with an audacious, fertile dash of human creativity, they make a sure-footed finale to this darkly paradisiacal show. Claire Rigby

Patti Smith, The River Ouse, East Sussex, England, 2003, silver gelatin print, 36 × 28 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery, New York

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Books

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The Night After the Night by Michèle Bernstein, translated by Clodagh Kinsella Book Works, £11.95 (softcover) by Everyone Agrees Book Works, £8 (softcover) Michèle Bernstein and her first husband Guy Debord have long been figures of fascination for those grooved by the Lettrist and Situationist movements. But interest in the two novels Bernstein wrote half a century ago has grown because the story each tells appears to provide insights into her open marriage to Debord. The second of them, The Night, published in France in 1961, has now been translated into English. It tells the same story as Bernstein’s first book, All the King’s Horses (published in France a year earlier, translated into English in 2008): the tangled but loving relationships of Gilles, Geneviève, Carole and Bertrand. All the King’s Horses was written in the style of a popular romance, whereas The Night is billed as parodying the nouveau roman. However, Bernstein was too hung up on the strategies a young wife uses to maintain her husband’s love to write a successful parody of the format – or at least in the style of its best-known protagonist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who used pseudo-objective descriptions to reveal human subjectivity. Bernstein makes no attempt to do this and her burlesque goes little further than using an apparently random and nonchronological ordering of events. What Bernstein does well is produce a paradigmatic example of Lettrist détournement – the hijacking of preexisting cultural material and its redeployment to revolutionary ends. She very successfully incorporates elements from

her own life, various ﬁlms and other people’s books into The Night. Bernstein has a great sense of humour and sends up the scene to which she belonged in ways it would be difficult to imagine some of its male members doing (particularly those who, like Bernstein, were native French speakers). For example, a silly but amusing parody of the cobra painting movement: ‘Someone will… explain that their host is none other than the founder of the Python movement, already famous in certain avant-garde circles, and that Python, as few people know, represents the initials of: Paris, Yokohama, Tunis, Hamburg, Oslo and Namur; Ole’s group having members in these six towns…’ . (cobra, of course, took its name from the initials of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.) Bernstein is clearly very much in love with her husband, Debord (Gilles in the book): ‘Gilles once created, in some art form or another, such a systematically negative masterpiece that he now thought he had the right to ten years of peace if poverty didn’t take him by the throat.’ I assume the ‘masterpiece’ in question is Debord’s 1952 ﬁlm Howlings in Favour of de Sade, which I view as the high point of his oeuvre. No doubt Debord fanboys will read sentences like the one I’ve just quoted and see them as fostering the untenable anarchist myth of their hero managing to live differently within capitalist society, although the actual message

of the book seems to be the complete opposite. Gilles/Debord is/was supported by his wife in both the book and real life, and The Night is probably the most honest account of the banality of everyday life within the Lettrist International precisely because of its status as fiction, which allows Bernstein to present her material both poetically and prosaically. One strand of The Night concerns a walk, or drift, around Paris on 22 April 1957 during the final days of the Lettrist International – the Situationist International was founded a few months later. In After the Night, a détournement of Bernstein’s book by the anonymous London–New York-based collective Everyone Agrees, this drift is transposed to contemporary London. The text of After the Night was finalised for print on 26 April 2013, and the book references events that took place just a few weeks before it was published. Like the original novel, the rewritten version includes much appropriated material, including this from a piece I wrote about Wu Ming for the April 2013 issue of ArtReview: ‘Strong coffee is a common addiction in British counterculture.’ Despite the obscurity of certain references, Michele Bernstein says After the Night made her laugh out loud. The rewrite has genuinely funny moments, but Bernstein’s mirth also stemmed from the seriousness with which Everyone Agrees treats The Night – never the author’s intention. Stewart Home

Holy Bible by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Mack, £50 / €60 / $80 (hardcover) Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s Holy Bible project is an unhappy one. It is an exact replica of the King James Bible but with at least every other page overlaid with an archive photograph. The image choices are informed by a corresponding line of Scripture, neatly underlined in red to draw the reader’s attention. A photograph of uniform war graves, each desecrated by a daubed swastika, sits near Jeremiah 44:29, ‘And this shall be a sign unto you, saith the Lord’, the words ‘a sign’ highlighted. A police picture of a dead woman, naked and bloodied, possibly sexually assaulted, overlays the last page of Song of Songs. The opening line of the underlined verse 5:2 is

heartbreaking, ‘I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh. Open to me my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.’ Not all of Broomberg and Chanarin’s image choices are as depressing – an animal handler, his suit and hairstyle circa 1970s, kisses a tiger (‘Now it came to pass’, Jeremiah 36:16); two young children cuddle a giraffe (‘the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven’, Daniel 2:28); a couple dance at their wedding reception (‘we walk in the light’, from the first epistle of John) – but the vast majority of images bear witness to violence, war, poverty and degradation. It is unclear what perspective on religion, and its relationship with the horrors of humanity, Broomberg and Chanarin

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(winners of this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize) have. An essay by philosopher Adi Ophir foregrounds God’s destructive nature, drawing parallels with modern state-sponsored violence – yet the words of the Bible, their poetry, seem to give comfort to the pictures. If this was intended as a bit of a snarky, Richard Dawkinsesque attack on religion – easily argued given the provocation of covering the ostensible word of God – then I’d question why we look for abstract notions or partial sectors of society on which to blame the violence of the world. Perhaps the fault lies not with God and his believers – but is instead, sadly, tragically, the intrinsic nature of the human animal. Oliver Basciano

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Flickering Light: A History of Neon by Christoph Ribbat Reaktion Books, £19.95 (hardcover) ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas.’ It might be just an association of words that inserted this Rolling Stones lyric into my head while I was reading art historian Christoph Ribbat’s book on the history of neon – neon is essentially a gas-filled flash of light, after all. But there are some attributes applicable to both neon and the Rolling Stones – namely an on-off-on love affair with the public, resulting in a longevity far greater than anyone might have expected. Flickering Light describes not only the commercial development of neon – as advertising and signage – but more interestingly weaves around this its cultural influence as metaphor and inspiration for the writers, artists and musicians who, throughout the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, have made reference to it in their work. Neon gas (one of the ‘noble’ category of gases – odourless, colourless, monatomic) and its characteristic red glow when electrically charged were discovered in 1898 by British chemistry professor William Ramsay and his assistant Morris Travers. But it was business-savvy French chemist and engineer George Claude who saw the potential in the discovery. It was Claude’s experiments in the following decade, including exploring the coloured light properties of other noble gases – the blue produced by argon, for example – and also his idea of mixing gases and coating the light’s glass tubes to create a wider

range of colours, that led to his creating and enthusiastically promoting the first commercial neon lights. For such a European invention, it’s somewhat ironic that American cityscapes – New York’s Times Square, known as ‘the Rainbow Ravine’, and Las Vegas, which in the 1960s was described not by its architectural skyline but by its artificial glow – have come to epitomise neon’s often contradictory appeal to artists in all artforms; that is, an ability to embody both the idea of an optimistic urban modernity and its flipside of a darker dystopian underbelly. Nelson Algren’s 1947 short story collection The Neon Wilderness focuses on the seedy lives of Chicago’s underclass of prostitutes, criminals and alcoholics, played out under the city’s neon glow. At the same time Algren was writing, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was entranced by the vibrancy of those same Chicago lights, capturing their energy in his experimental, almost abstract photographs. Among the visual artists who have worked directly with neon, Bruce Nauman is singled out for his philosophical explorations of the meaning of language using flashing texts in works such as Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972). In Tracey Emin’s more emotive neon texts, such as You Forgot to Kiss My Soul (2001), shaped in the form of the artist’s own handwriting, the artist’s combination of sexual energy and vulnerability is equated by Ribbat with the brash glare and

physical fragility of the glass tubes themselves. All of which is also connected to Emin’s upbringing in Margate, Britain’s own (onceglamorous, now fallen into disrepair) Las Vegas-style resort. For musical references, Ribbat’s examples include Cole Porter’s down-at-heart 1936 song Down in the Depths. Here the excitement of the ‘million neon rainbows’ seen from the windows of a Manhattan high-rise serve only to exaggerate the contrast with Porter’s own melancholy state of mind at the time. In Kraftwerk’s song Neonlicht, from their 1978 album Die Mensch-Maschine, it’s the cool, detached quality of neon rather than its emotive qualities that forms the basis of the metaphor. The ongoing development of neon lighting technologies in the latter half of the twentieth century – their application in the development of modern plasma displays, for example – isn’t focused on in the latter half of the book. Instead Ribbat ﬁnds more examples of how adaptable and pervasive a metaphor neon lighting in its 1930s–60s heyday still is, from the Verve track Neon Wilderness, off their 1996 album Urban Hymns, to David Foster Wallace’s story ‘Good Old Neon’, from his 2004 collection, Oblivion. Newer neon technologies may be subtler, smoother and more efficient, but where’s the edgy attraction or rock ’n’ roll inspiration in that? Helen Sumpter

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm Granta, £20 / $27 (hardcover) About two-thirds of the way through her proﬁle of the painter David Salle, Janet Malcolm confesses that she hasn’t found anything he had to say about his work interesting. And she’s been interviewing him for two years. So why does she waste so much of her time talking to him? The answer comes immediately. When Salle talked about his life, she confesses, ‘his words took on the speciﬁcity, vividness, and force that had drained out of them when he talked about art’. Malcolm talks to artists to have the ‘truth’ of their art proved via the information she gleans about the ‘reality’ of their lives, which is then compared to the kind of life their art suggests they lead. Enter photographer Thomas Struth (in a separate essay), giving Malcolm an example of why Bernd and Hilla Becher, his much-hyped tutors at the Düsseldorf Academy, were so great by explaining how Bernd used to insist that his

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students needed to understand the photographs of Eugene Atget ‘as a visualization of Marcel Proust’. Has Struth read Proust? Malcolm interjects. No. Embarrassment follows. The question of whether or not this makes Struth a better or worse artist is one the author leaves open, while both subject and proﬁler concede that this will become the crux of the matter. ‘His art has made him rich,’ Malcolm casually notes later in the article. And perhaps that’s all she needs to say. The birth of the culture industry (as evidenced by everything from trends towards gigantism in photography catalogues to the management of the estates and reputations of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group) is another key theme. And perhaps this (and the fact that a number of these essays were originally book reviews) explains the amount of attention

ArtReview

Malcolm devotes to analysing media or mediated coverage of her subjects. It’s hard not to ﬁnd Malcolm’s schoolmarmish insistence that her tests are passed somewhat annoying: for her, there’s a correct way to produce a photography catalogue and there’s a correct way to be a bohemian. It can seem as if she’s on an arduous quest to trip her subject up. And perhaps it’s in an episode in which she analyses why she chose to show Salle some of her own collages that this side of her is unmasked: ‘every amateur harbours the fantasy that their work is only waiting to be discovered; an established fantasy – that the established contemporary artists must (also) be frauds – is a necessary corollary’. You can’t help but admire a journalist who’s prepared to forensically investigate not just her subjects, but also herself. Mark Rappolt

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Photographic documentation of a performance by Aston Ernest on Sizewell Beach, Suffolk 1989

Listings

Austria

Denmark

France

Galerie Perrotin Michael Sailstorfer: Freedom Fries am Arbeitsplatz Claude Rutault: Actualités de la Peinture Sun Yuan & Peng Yu: Dear 12 Sep – 9 Nov Open 11–7, Tue – Sat 76 Rue de Turenne 75003 Paris perrotin.com

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Galerie Meyer Kainer Heimo Zobernig 4 Sep – 5 Oct Open 11–6, Tue – Fri; 11–3, Sat Eschenbachgasse 9, a-1010 Vienna meyerkainer.com

Belgium

Almine Rech Gallery Adam Helms: Pathos Formula 6 Sep – 26 Oct Open 11–7, Tue – Sat 20 Rue de L’Abbaye Abdijstraat b-1050 Brussels alminerech.com Tim Van Laere Gallery Rinus Van de Velde 5 Sep – 19 Oct Open 11–6, Tue – Sat Verlatstraat 23–25 2000 Antwerp timvanlaeregallery.com

Kunsthal Charlottenborg 30 Aug – 1 Sep Nyhavn 2, 1051 København K Denmark press@chartartfair.com chartartfair.com

Galerie PerrotiMuseet for Samtidskunst Henrik Plenge Jakobsen: Kapital 21 Sep–15 Dec Open 11–5, Tue – Fri; 12–4, Sat – Sun Stændertorvet 3a dk-4000 Roskilde samtidskunst.dk

Almine Rech Gallery Beatrice Caracciolo: Attraversare Il Fuoco Eduardo Terazzas: Constellations 6 Sep – 5 Oct Open 11–7, Tue – Sat 64 Rue de Turenne 75003 Paris alminerech.com Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin George Baselitz: The Dark Side 8 Sep – 31 Oct Open 10–7, Tue – Sat 69 Avenue de General Leclerc 93500 Pantin ropac.net

September 2013

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais Lee Bul: Pure Invisible Sun 7 Sep – 12 Oct Open 10–7, Tue – Sat 7 Rue Debelleyme 75003 Paris ropac.net Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve Paris Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison: Measuring the Sky 12 Sep – 31 Oct Open 11–7, Tue – Sat 7 Rue de Pastourelle 75003 Paris suzanne-tarasieve.com

Germany

Hélio Oiticica Das große Labyrinth mmk Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main 28 Sep – 12 Jan Open 10–5, Tue – Sun 10–8, Wed Domstraße 10 60311 Frankfurt

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Requiems, Masses arranged for all occasions. We will deal with any necessary harmonic repairs. Rapid transformation of symphonies, quartets, etc. etc. The most difficult pieces arranged for one ﬁnger. Subtlety within reach of everyone. Sonatas reduced, reharmonized. Our music comes with guaranteed playability. No more incomprehensible compositions.

Italy

Galleria Continua Michelangelo Pistoletto / Etel Adnan 21 Sep – 11 Jan Open 2–7, Tue – Sat Via del Castello 11 53037 San Gimignano (si) galleriacontinua.com Massimo de Carlo Kaari Upson 25 Sep – 9 Nov Open 11.30–7.30, Tue – Sat Via Giovanni Ventura 5 20134 Milan massimodecarlo.it

The Netherlands

Grimm Gallery Alex Verhaest: Temps Mort 7 Sept –5 Oct Open 12–6, Wed – Sat Frans Halsstraat 26, 1072 br Amsterdam grimmgallery.com

Doug Fishbone and Friends Adventureland Golf

Vered Lahav The Garden

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Midlands Art Centre (mac)

31 Aug – 15 Sept Open 11–6, daily; 12–6, Sunday

Sep – 17 Nov 12–8, Tue – Sat; 11–4, Sun

Market Place, Cathedral Quarter Derby, de1 3as

Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, b12 9qh

t +44 1332 290 606

t +44 121 446 3200

info@derbyquad.co.uk derbyquad.co.uk

info@macarts.co.uk macarts.co.uk

Bob Parks And The Heavens Cried

Cao Fei House of Treasures

Sweden

Malmö Konsthall Rawiya: She who tells a story 4 Sep – 17 Nov Open 11–5, daily; 11–9, Wed St Johannesgatan 7, se-205 80 Malmö konsthall.malmo.se

Switzerland

Karma International Ida Ekblad 30 Aug – 28 Sep Open 12–6, Wed – Fri; 12–4, Sat Hönggerstrasse 40 ch - 8037 Zürich karmainternational.org Peter Kilchmann Hernan Bas: Deep in the Dark of Texas 30 Aug – 19 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Fri; 11–5, Sat Zahnradstrasse 21 8005 Zurich peterkilchmann.com

uk, Midlands

Grand Union 7 Sep – 27 Oct Open 12–5, Thu – Sat 19 Minerva Works Fazeley Street Birmingham, b5 5rs

The New Art Gallery Walsall The Hecklers to 22 Sep Damien Hirst: He Tried to Internalise Everything, 1992–1994 to 24 Nov Open 10–5, Tue – Sat; 12–4, Sun Gallery Square, Walsall, ws2 8lg thenewartgallerywalsall.co.uk

Eastside Projects

Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep

Ron Muek Artists Rooms

86 Heath Mill Lane Bormingham b9 4ar t +44 121 771 1778

Wolverhampton Art Gallery

info@eastsideprojects.org eastsideprojects.org

to 2 Nov Open 10–5, Mon – Sat Lichﬁeld St, Wolverhampton West Midlands, wv1 1du

Spain

Nottingham Contemporary

Helga de Alvear Slater Bradley: She Was My La Jetée 19 Sep – 2 Nov Open 11–2, 4.30–8.30, Tue – Sat Calle del Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid helgadealvear.com

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21 Sep – 16 Nov Open 12–5, Wed – Sat

to 22 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–6, Sat; 11–5, Sun Weekday Cross Nottingham ng1 2gb

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uk, London

Atelier Voltaire, London Aston Ernest: A Rottenness: Making Fools of Men 31 Sep – 31 Nov The presentation of these works marks an end to a period of intense activity on the artist’s part, which is followed by a period of apparent complete inactivity and a retreat to his studio in Suffolk.

usa, Chicago

Corbett vs. Dempsey Rebecca Morris: Party Cut 6 Sep – 19 Oct Open 10–5, Tue – Sat 1120 North Ashland Avenue, 3rd Floor Chicago, il 60622 corbettvsdempsey.com Carrie Secrist Gallery Andrew Holmquist: Worlds Collide! 7 Sep – 12 Oct Open 10.30–6, Tue – Fri; 11–5, Sat 835 W Washington Boulevard Chicago, il 60607 secristgallery.com

usa, New York

Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gene Davis 5 Sep – 12 Oct Open 10–5, Tue – Sat 525 West 22nd Street New York, ny 10011 amy-nyc.com Mary Boone Gallery Liu Xiaodong: In Between Israel and Palestine 5 Sep – 26 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Fri; 10–5, Sat 745 Fifth Avenue New York, ny 10151 maryboonegallery.com Paula Cooper Gallery Sol LeWitt 3 Sep – 5 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 534 West 21st St New York, ny 10011 paulacoopergallery.com Betty Cuningham Gallery Chuck Webster: Blessing to 10 Dec Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 541 West 25th Street New York, ny 10001 bettycuninghamgallery.com

Galerie Richard Dionisio González: Halong Series 5 Sep – 12 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 514 West 24th Street, New York, ny 10011 galerierichard.com

Mary Aurory, Vivi Enkyo, Abbé Faria, Santo Sterne, Rose Duvall All to show together in retrospective group show at warehouse in Hoxton, East London this Freize Art Fair period. The ﬁrst time the ‘blue conceptualists’ have been shown together since the group show We have arrived was shown in 1992 at bozar centre for fine arts, brussels. Amazing that someone in the media thirsty London art world has thought to put on a show of such amazingly conscientious ground breaking practitioners, considering they are somewhat under the radar outside benelux.

Salon 94 Lucien Smith: Nature Is My Church 8 Sep – 20 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 12 East 94th Street New York, ny 10128 salon94.com

la Louver Alison Saar: Slough 3 Sep – 5 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 45 N Venice Blvd, Venice, ca 90291 lalouver.com

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Leslie Hewitt 7 Sep – 5 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 530 West 22nd Street New York, ny 10011 sikkemajenkinsco.com

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles Heather Gwen Martin: Pattern Math 7 Sep – 12 Oct Open 11–6, Tue – Sat 2685 South La Cienega Boulevard Los Angeles, ca 90034 luisdejesus.com

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects Kunié Sugiura: Collage 1977–81 5 Sep – 26 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 535 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor New York, ny 10011 tonkonow.com

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Steve Roden 7 Sep – 26 Oct Open 11–6, Tue – Sat 6006 West Washington Boulevard Culver City, ca 90232 vielmetter.com

wallspace Paul Elliman 7 Sep – 19 Oct Open 11–6, Tue – Sat 619 West 27th St, New York, ny 10001 wallspacegallery.com

Feature Inc. Richard Kern: Medicated, Etc 4 Sep – 12 Oct Open 12–6, Wed – Sat 131 Allen Street New York, ny 10002 featureinc.com Hasted Kraeutler Nick Brandt: Across the Ravaged Land 5 Sep – 19 Oct Open 11–5, Tue – Fri 537 West 24th Street, New York, ny 10011 hastedkraeutler.com Casey Kaplan Nathan Carter: The Fly-By-Night Mega Metro Sub Rosa Turbulent Twister 5 Sep – 26 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 525 West 21st Street New York, ny 10011 caseykaplangallery.com Yossi Milo Gallery Pieter Hugo: Kin 6 Sep – 19 Oct Open 10-6, Tue – Sat 245 10th Ave, New York, ny 10001 yossimilo.com

Mike Weiss Gallery Michael Brown: Schematics and Silhouettes 7 Sep – 12 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 520 West 24th Street, New York, ny 10011 mikeweissgallery.com

usa, Los Angeles

The Box Judith Bernstein 7 Sep – 12 Oct Open 12–6, Wed – Sat 805 Traction Avenue Los Angeles, ca 90013 theboxla.com Gallery Alan Cho Humans Being Human 9 Sep – 14 Oct 2680 South La Cienega Boulevard Los Angeles, ca 90034

Petzel Allan McCollum: Plaster Surrogates Colored and Organized by Andrea Zittel 6 Sep – 5 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 456 West 18th Street, New York, ny 10011 petzel.com

David Kordansky Gallery John Mason 7 Sep – 26 Oct Open 10–6, Tue – Sat 3143 South La Cienega Boulevard, Unit a Los Angeles, ca 90016 davidkordanskygallery.com

Marc Foxx Jennifer West 6 Sep – 5 Oct Open 11–6, Tue – Sat 6150 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, ca 90048 marcfoxx.com

September 2013

Brazil

A Gentil Carioca Jarbas Lopes 6 Sep – 26 Oct Open 12–7, Tue – Fri; 12–5, Sat Rua Goncalves Ledo 17 Sobrado, Centro, Rio de Janeiro agentilcarioca.com.br Galeria Laura Marsiaj Clemens Krauss 3 Sep – 3 Oct Open 10–7, Tue–Fri; 11–4, Sat Rua Teixeira de Melo 31c Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro lauramarsiaj.com.br Progetti Matheus Rocha Pitta: Nau 7 Sep – 3 Oct Open 12–6, Tue – Sat Travessa do Comércio 22 arco do Telles Centro, Rio de Janeiro progettirio.com Anita Schwartz Abraham Palatnik: Histories and Stories of Colors to 14 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–5, Sat Rua Jose Roberto Macedo Soares 30 Gavea, Rio de Janeiro anitaschwartz.com.br

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Galeria Millan Bob Wolfenson: Belvedere 28 Aug – 28 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 11–6, Sat Rua Fradique Coutinho 1360 Pinheiros, São Paulo galeriamillan.com.br

Call for Commissions

Conceptual commissioned portraits, produced by the artist Ryan Gander. The portraits will be made in response to the completion of a questionnaire which takes the form of a book, The Sitting, written by the artist. The commissioner will have three months to complete the questions and tasks which replace the traditional ‘sitting’ for a portrait. From this book completed by the commissioner, the artist will build a response to the commissioner’s idiosyncrasies. The portrait will be conceptually constructed and physically produced during the three month period following the return of The Sitting to the artist. The way in which the portraits will manifest themselves will vary and be dependent on the artist’s response to The Sitting. Interested parties are asked to contact one of the artist’s galleries in order to begin discussions with the artist about possible conceptual portrait commissions.

Galeria Marilia Razuk Vanderlei Lopes: Cavalo 16 Sep – 10 Oct Open 10.30–7, Tue – Fri; 11–3, Sat Rua Jeronimo da Veiga 131 Itaim, 04536-000 São Paulo galeriamariliarazuk.com.br Nara Roesler Artur Lescher: Pantographic Thought to 21 Sep Milton Machado: Mão Pesada 24 Aug –21 Sep Cães sem plumas 11 Sep – 27 Oct Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–5, Sat Avenida Europa 655 01449-001 São Paulo nararoesler.com.br

Silvia Cintra + Box 4 Marilá Dardot to Sep Open 10–7, Mon–Fri; 12–6, Sat Rua das Acacias 104 Gavea, Rio de Janeiro silviacintra.com.br

Casa Triangulo Max Gómez Canle 27 Aug – 21 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–5, Sat Rua Pais de Araújo 77, Itaim Bibi 04531-090 São Paulo casatriangulo.com

Mercedes Viegas Open 12–8, Mon – Fri; 3–7, Sat Rua João Borges 86 Gavea, Rio de Janeiro mercedesviegas.com.br

Oscar Cruz Open 11–7, Tue–Fri; 11–5, Sat Rua Clodomiro Amazonas 526 04537-011 São Paulo galeriaoscarcruz.com

Raquel Arnaud Silvia Mecozzi: Branco de Si 15 Aug – 14 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 11–4, Sat Rua Fidalga 125, Vila Madalena 05432-070 São Paulo raquelarnaud.com

Dan Galeria Open 11–7, Tue–Fri; 11–5, Sat Rua Estados Unidos 1638, Jardim America 01427-002 São Paulo dangaleria.com.br

Galeria Berenice Arvani Open 11–7, Tue – Fri, 11–5, Sat Rua Oscar Freire 540, Cerqueira César 01426-000 São Paulo t +55 11 3088 2843 galeria@galeriaberenicearvani.com galeriaberenicearvani.com Baró Roberto Jacoby & Alejandro Ros: Abertura Felipe Ehrenberg: Apocalipstick to 9 Sep Pablo Siquier: Antesala Mariana Sissia 21 Sep – 26 Oct Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 11–5, Sat Rua Barra Funda 216, Santa Cecília 01152-000 São Paulo barogaleria.com Luciana Brito Rochelle Costi 24 Sep – 26 Oct Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–5, Sat Rua Gomes de Carvalho 842, Itaim Bibi 04547-003 São Paulo lucianabritogaleria.com.br

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Luisa Strina Eduardo T. Basualdo Nina Canell and Soﬁa Hulten to 14 Sep Open 10–7, Tue–Fri; 10–5, Sat Rua Padre Joao Manuel 755, loja 02 Cerqueira Cesar, 1411-001 São Paulo galerialuisastrina.com.br

Fortes Vilaça Nuno Ramos: Anjo e Boneco (guaches, 2013) to 14 Sep Open 10–7, Tue–Fri; 10–6, Sat Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 05416-001 São Paulo fortesvilaca.com.br Galpão Fortes Vilaça João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva: O problema de Molyneux to 14 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–6, Sat Rua James Holland 71, Barra Funda 01138-000 São Paulo fortesvilaca.com.br Galeria Leme Nina Pandolfo 14 Sep – 11 Oct Open 10–7, Tue–Fri; 10–5, Sat Av. Valdemar Ferreira 130 05501-000 São Paulo galerialeme.com Mendes Wood Pedro Wirz and Luis Gispert to 21 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 10–5, Sat Rua da Consolaçao 3358, Jardins 01416-000 São Paulo mendeswood.com

Emma Thomas Theo Firmo Adam Nankervis 26 Aug – 26 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 11–5, Sat Rua Estados Unidos 2205 01427-002 São Paulo emmathomas.com.br Galeria Vermelho Suspicious Minds, curated by Cristina Ricupero 28 Aug –21 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 11–5, Sat Rua Minas Gerais 350, Parque Fernanda 01244-010 São Paulo galeriavermelho.com.br Zipper Galeria Ricardo Rendón to 14 Sep Open 10–7, Tue – Fri; 11–5, Sat Rua Estados Unidos 1494 01427-001 São Paulo zippergaleria.com.br Art Rio 5–8 Sep (preview 4 Sep) Pier Mauá, Av. Rodrigues Alves 10 Centro, Rio de Janeiro artrio.art.br

ArtReview

Classiﬁed Advertisements

Wanted £3,000,000 needed to renovate derelict school in Saxmundham, Suffolk, into elite international centre of excellence / art school. Art is not a middle class pursuit. Lets make things happen. Please meet me with the cash, veg aisle, Waitrose, 6 Oct, 11:45am. Internationally renowned artist seeks swap, artwork of signiﬁcant value in exchange for luxury timepieces, Patek, Jaegar, Rolex, Panerai etc. No time wasters please. studio@frankandeunice.com

Notices green, Irwin – Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Friday 22 July 2011. High esteemed author, linguist, theoretician and journalist. Beloved husband of Saffron Green, dear father of Baxter Julian and Mary Ann (Mary Myers). Loving grandfather of 4 grandchildren. Resting at Highgate Cemetery, 7 Highgate High Street, London, n6 5jr. Funeral Saturday 9.30 a.m. St Michael c of e Church, South Grove, Highgate, London, n6 6bj. No ﬂowers please.

Consumed

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Practical, artist-designed offerings from Little & Large Editions, Berlin

Dan Rees, Carry on Shaky Price on application

Tobias Kaspar, 20122tk1jeans €450

Martin Boyce, Forest Fire £900

Tobias Kaspar, 20122tk1jeans, 2012, 100% cotton, dimensions variable, Special signed and limited numbered edition Working with fashion designer Joy Ahoulou, these jeans are presented by Tobias Kaspar as a limited-edition artwork. Made from ﬁne Japanese denim, these are jeans reduced to their basic components – free from considerations of either art or fashion. This edition is signed and numbered. A limited regular edition is also available.

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Dan Rees, Carry on Shaky, 2013, wool, 78 × 169 cm, edition of 10 An exact replica of the jumper worn by Shakin’ Stevens for his performance of Merry Christmas Everyone during the 1985 Christmas edition of Top of the Pops. Known by some as the ‘Welsh Elvis’, this gyrating sex symbol had a reputation for being one of the nicest men in pop, with a memorable line in bespoke knitwear.

ArtReview

Martin Boyce, Forest Fire, 2012, chromed steel and Grill Chef barbecue, 31 × 25 × 6 cm, edition of 15 An enduring (and functional) metal sculpture coupled to a readymade (and disposable) base, this ﬂammable multiple from Martin Boyce comes with a signed and numbered certiﬁcate, but alas no sausages. The title of the piece itself is hidden within the patterned grill, revealing itself as a charred memento on the underside of your steak. littleandlargeeditions.com

And some other things you didn’t know you really needed

Jasmina Cibic, The Fruits of Our Land £150

Richard Patterson, The Birth of Jan £350

Adam McEwen, Chocolate Bar £1,020 Jour Mal Jour Nal, Issue 1: The Minister’s Black Veil Free

Richard Patterson, The Birth of Jan, 2013, digital archival print on paper, 21 × 29 cm, edition of 50 There’s a splendid new monograph on the British artist Richard Patterson that surveys his thickly laden paintings, which tend to ping-pong between Pop art and Abstract Expressionism. A limited signed run of the book is accompanied by this print. timothytaylorgallery.com

Adam McEwen, Chocolate Bar, 2012, Graphite sculpture, 1 × 10 × 19 cm. Edition of 45, In this, the latest in a line of works by Adam McEwen in which the artist recreates vernacular forms in graphite, we get a platonic form of the chocolate tablet: the blueprint that all other confectionary bars elaborate on, though one that is ironically imperfect: you can’t eat it. countereditions.com

Jasmina Cibic, The Fruits of Our Land, 2013, wallpaper, signed limited edition of 500

Jour Mal Jour Nal, Issue 1: The Minister’s Black Veil, 2013, compact disc, edition of 50

There is a little eyeless bug that lives in the dark caves of Slovenia who has an even darker past. The Anophthalmus hitleri – common name ‘the Hitler beetle’ – was named after the dictator by Oscar Scheibel, a German entomologist and Nazi supporter, who discovered the creature in the 1930s. As part of her exhibition in the Slovenian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Jasmina Cibic wallpapered the gallery space with handdrawn images of the blameless, but demonised, beetle – a rumination on historical baggage and national identity. To help with the production costs of the exhibition, rolls of the wallpaper, in an edition of 500, are now for sale. jasminacibic.org

Issue 1 of the Jour Mal Jour Nal journal comes in the form of a four-track cd, with soundworks by Joseph Walsh, Alice Theobald, Simon Raven and Jess FloodPaddock. The editorial direction – coordinated by painter and writer Susan Finlay with a sleeve designed by Justine Frischmann – takes inspiration from ‘issue 0’, which took the form of a paper publication. There’s no saying what the format of Issue 2 will be, but contributions that take inﬂuence from the work contained herein are welcome, apparently. jourmaljournal.co.uk

September 2013

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The Rogers House 1967, Freehold property, London, £3.2 million

From time to time ArtReview thrusts a copy of this magazine into its parents’ hands – and waits for some indication that they might be proud of their offspring. More often they just look bemused. We can only feel envious of Richard Rogers, then. In 1967 his parents commissioned the architect to design their house in Wimbledon, the leafy

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southwest London suburb. He built them a modernist marvel, the plans for which were shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale the year before construction began. The Grade II* listed building – with its glass facade and distinctive bright palette for the exterior frame and interior – is on the market for the ﬁrst time. themodernhouse.net

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Contributors

Oliver Basciano

Lara Fresko

Claire Rigby

is managing editor of ArtReview. For this issue he went to Brazil to edit a special focus on the country. Between myriad studio and gallery visits he managed to get caught up in a four-million-strong street festival in downtown São Paulo, attend a favela funk party in Rio and, when invited to a collector’s thirtieth birthday party, dive into the ball pond installed in her modernist villa. Tragically he failed to see any street monkeys. For further reference he suggests Claudia Calirman’s Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, Frederico Morais’s still relevant 1970 manifesto ‘Against Affluent Art: The Body Is the Motor of the Work’ and scraping Soundcloud and YouTube for Baile funk mixes.

is a writer, researcher and art worker based in Istanbul. This month she looks at the recent history of contemporary art in Turkey’s largest city, with a particular focus, through the lens of the Gezi Park events that have been taking place over the summer of 2013, on artist collectives and institutional projects that deal with the public sphere. For further reading she suggests you follow her updates and links on Twitter @larafresko.

is the editor-in-chief at Time Out São Paulo. As a freelance writer, she contributes to Folha de S.Paulo’s ‘From Brazil’ blog, ArtReview, Frame and Mark, and has written for newspapers including The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Buenos Aires Herald and the South China Morning Post. This month she discovers Paulistano artists’ occupation of the urban realm. For further reference she notes that part of the Cao Hamburger film O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, 2006) was filmed inside artist-run gallery Casa do Povo. The film tells the story of a young boy whose parents are arrested during the dictatorship and who finds shelter in the heart of the Jewish neighbourhood of Bom Retiro.

Vincent Bevins is Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and runs a blog for Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper. A Californian, Bevins moved to São Paulo in 2010 from London, where he worked for the Financial Times, The Guardian and New Statesman. This month he analyses the possible economic and political future of the Brazilian art market. For further background, he suggests reading Darcy Ribeiro’s hefty The Brazilian People or, alternatively (or perhaps simultaneously), listening to Caetano Veloso’s eponymous Tropicália album from 1968.

John Morgan studio designed the magazine you are holding in your hands – the ﬁrst issue of a redesign. The studio’s graphic identity for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year graphic design award in 2013. Studio clients include Tate Britain, Raven Row gallery, the Architectural Association, David Chipperﬁeld Architects, Four Corners Books, Turner Contemporary and Museo Jumex. John was appointed a member of agi (Alliance Graphique Internationale) in 2011. For further reading John is currently installing a library of 400 Gallimard Blanches in Seoul for the Korea Craft & Design Foundation.

preceeding pages “One of my preoccupations is how to represent childhood realistically. There’s a great collective amnesia towards childhood. Adults often regard it as a lost utopia, when in fact it’s often brutal and cruel.” In his graphic novel debut, The Black Project, from Myriad Editions, Gareth Brookes unﬂinchingly anatomises the secret obsessive crafting of artiﬁcial girlfriends from found objects by a prepubescent boy named Richard. Set in a suburban Surrey of headlines like ‘Mammoth Marrow Madness’, Richard’s unselfconscious narration is part memoir, part diy guide and part sex education manual, his joined-up handwriting weaving between embroidered frames and images and linocut vignettes. Like Richard in this story, Brookes was taught embroidery by his mother but explains that

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Cássio Vasconcellos is an artist. Born in São Paulo in 1965, he started his journey in photography in 1981. His work has been shown in several galleries and museums, in Brazil and abroad. He had commissioned projects in the 1994 and 2002 editions of the annual Arte / Cidade exhibition. He was awarded the prize for best exhibition of the year by apca (Paulista Association of Art Critics), for his exhibition Noturnos – São Paulo, from which originated a book of the same name. This month he created a commissioned portfolio of images inspired by the occupation of the urban realm by various artist collectives.

Gareth Brookes by Paul Gravett

autobiographical similarities end there. Brookes shows how with each successive model – Laura, Charlotte, Melissa, Jessica – Richard’s queasy imitation of life and grasp of sexuality awkwardly improve. A mostly friendless ‘boff’ at school, Richard is subject to tensions at home from his prying mother and drunken father, and to the unspoken sadness of his brother’s death. Brookes deliberately avoids specifying Richard’s age. “Anything to do with sexuality and childhood is a massive taboo, whereas teenage sexuality is a matter for innuendo and mirth; one year either way could change the character of Richard’s behaviour from slightly odd to downright abhorrent.” Four years in the making, The Black Project feels as obsessive in its stitching, cutting and manuscript

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as Richard’s female constructs. For its layouts, Brookes looked beyond comics to medieval and early Renaissance church art, stamps, matchboxes, postcards and other designs in which image and text cohabit. Words flow into scrolling, ribbonlike banderoles, heraldic devices and almost architectural features. To these techniques, Brookes adds pressed flowers for Dead Things, his new Strip overleaf, about children twisting their mother’s religious explanation of funerals to suit their nasty impulses. “There’s something oddly violent about a flower press; tightening the screws is like some form of torture,” Brookes says. He exhibits his prints and embroideries at London Print Studio this month.

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September 2013

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Off the Record September 2013 It was a difficult summer. Things started innocently enough with the now-annual ritual of the Serpentine Gallery Summer Party. After a gentle couple of warm-up pints in the Tea Clipper pub in Knightsbridge, I moseyed on down Kensington Road, my One Vintage Paradis dress gently ﬂuttering behind me. At the party, I was delighted to be surrounded immediately by lots of folk from the artworld – Princess Beatrice, Donna Air, Pixie Geldof and Sarah Jessica Parker. Daphne Guinness was dressed as the pint of Irish delight she’s named after, her white hair setting off her black dress like a foamy head lovingly poured by a handsome yet desperately poor barman from Galway. I knocked back a couple of Eclipse Lychee Martinis. The mini steak canapés were somewhat rubbery, but I rose above the disappointment by hurling them through the Sou Fujimoto pavilion at Mick Jagger, who fended them off surprisingly well for an old guy. The night of heavy partying that followed at the Groucho Club with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jagger was delightful, but to my surprise I found myself alone by the time I crawled into the Montagu Pyke on Charing Cross Road at opening time the following day. A couple of hard days’ drinking followed at this less than salubrious establishment, a cavernous place that was once an adult-movie cinema but is now better known for its cheap lager and intense staff. By the time it got to the Masterpiece Midsummer Party at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, I was starting to feel pretty revved up, to be honest. As I stumbled in, I noticed more good folk from the artworld, like Princess Beatrice, Donna Air, Sir Rocco Forte and Hugh Grant. I hadn’t eaten for some days, so dived into the canapés, but alas the Scotch quail eggs were a touch heavy on the tarragon. I complained forcefully – perhaps in retrospect a tad too forcefully – to Lady Helen Taylor, the gracious hostess of the event. Leaving before her two security guards could reach me, I hopped into my waiting minicab and headed to a sedate party in St James’s for the venerable Apollo magazine. I admired Andrew Neil’s splendid

headpiece before wrestling the young editor, Oscar Humphries, to the ground and demanding that he up his offer of hunks of Parmesan and assorted olives. Next stop: Horseshoe Inn, an unusual experiment that fuses a British boozer with authentic Mongolian cuisine. I skipped the dumplings deep-fried in mutton fat, and instead immediately ordered a bottle of Chinggis, a vodka named after the great warrior of the steppes. By the time the Lisson Gallery barbecue rolled around the following week, I was admittedly in a bad way. Brushing past Nicholas Logsdail, I headed straight for Greg Hilty’s lovingly tended pineapple skewers. These were good, but nothing compared to the bananas I whipped out of my Valentino Rockstud leather trapeze bag. I deftly sliced open the elongated fruit with my Victorinox Classic sd Swiss pocket knife before grilling and smearing them liberally with Nutella. Hilty looked impressed, but his praise was drowned out by Richard Wentworth yelling, “Knife! Knife!” and gesturing in my direction. To my horror I saw the two heavies that Lady Helen Taylor had unleashed heading in my direction. I mustered myself for a sprint but was momentarily unbalanced by Ryan Gander lobbing a pineapple skewer at me. It was too late. As I was bundled into the unmarked Ford Transit, I knew that a one-way ticket to Jordan awaited me. The disguise had worked for so many years – surely it couldn’t end like this? I thought of the endless parties, private views, art fairs and biennials that had made up this peculiar double life. I knew I had to escape. I looked up at my captors and issued one ﬁnal plea: “You’ve got to let me go. I’m needed in Theaster Gates’s performance at the Manchester International Festival.” The two guys hesitated for a moment, and as time slowed to almost perfect stillness, I felled them both with a Muay Thai ‘throwing buffalo punch’ and burst through the back doors, rolling quickly onto the pavement before picking myself up and disappearing into Edgware Road’s Dar Marrakesh café to ponder my next move. GG

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