ArtReview September 2015 by ArtReview

Tamar Guimarães

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION BROOCH IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

www.chanel.com

H A U S E R & W IR T H

JOSEPHSOHN 29 AUGUST — 31 OCTOBER 2015 LIMMATSTRASSE 270 8005 ZURICH WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

FOREGROUND: UNTITLED, 1979, BRASS, ED. OF 6 110 × 56 × 46 CM / 43 1/4 × 22 × 18 1/8 IN BACKGROUND: UNTITLED, 1995, BRASS, ED. OF 6 155 × 96 × 63 CM / 61 × 37 3/4 × 24 3/4 IN PHOTO: KATALIN DEÉR, KESSELHAUS JOSEPHSOHN

HA U S E R & W I R T H

TETSUMI KUDO INSTALLATION CONCEIVED WITH OLIVIER RENAUD-CLEMENT IN COLLABORATION WITH ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY 22 SEPTEMBER — 21 NOVEMBER 2015 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

GRAFT ’72 (GREFFE ’72), 1972 PLASTIC, METAL, SOIL, THERMOMETER, RESIN, ADHESIVE, PAINT, HAIR AND ROPE 88.9 × 58.4 × 38.1 CM / 35 × 23 × 15 IN © ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2015 / ESTATE OF TETSUMI KUDO, HIROKO KUDO. IMAGE COURTESY ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Concrete Cuba 5 September - 3 October 2015

David Zwirner London

Pedro de Oraá Sin Título (Untitled), 1960 (detail) Private Collection

Wolfgang Tillmans PCR 16 September - 24 October 2015

David Zwirner New York

YOSHITOMO NARA SEPTEMBER 16 – OCTOBER 24, 2015 RAIMER JOCHIMS PAINTINGS AND STONES FROM 1967 TO 2015 SEPTEMBER 16 – OCTOBER 24, 2015 — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10, D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE

ABC – ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY MARTIN BOYCE, RYAN GANDER SEPTEMBER 17 – 20, 2015

GABRIEL KURI AN OLD NICHE FOR YOUR NEW NEED SEPTEMBER 16 – OCTOBER 24, 2015 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ABC – ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN, ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS SEPTEMBER 17 – 20, 2015

Upcoming Shows

Marcius Galan 7 October - 14 November, 2015

Beto Shwafaty 7 October - 14 November, 2015

14th Istanbul Biennial

Cildo Meireles Adrián Villar Rojas 5 September - 1 November, 2015

RUA PADRE JOÃO MANUEL, 755, LOJA 2, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL T 55 11 3088 2471 | WWW.GALERIALUISASTRINA.COM.BR

DAVIDE BALULA SEPTEMBER 24 – DECEMBER 19, 2015

GAGOSIAN GALLERY 3 MERLIN STREET, ATHENS 10671 WWW.GAGOSIAN.COM

Tarik Kiswanson No Hard Feelings September 5 — October 3 2015

ALMINE RECH GALLERY 64 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris, France

From top to bottom: Paola Pivi, 100 Cinesi, 1998, Photographic print on forex, 186 x 289 cm / 73 x 113 inches | Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Tiger, Bursting), 1998, C-print installed on aluminium and Plexiglas 48.2 x 40.6 cm / 19 x 16 inches | Yan Pei-Ming, Paysage International, 1998, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 200 cm / 39 x78 3/4 inches | All images are Courtesy of Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London.

In 1998.

1998 is the Chinese year of the Tiger Paola Pivi debuts at Massimo De Carlo with a solo show featuring 100 Chinese people

and Piotr Uklański realizes ‘Tiger Bursting’.

Moreover

Yan Pei-Ming starts his collaboration with Massimo De Carlo in a group exhibition titled ‘Tales of China’.

www.massimodecarlo.com info@massimodecarlo.com

@mdcgallery

massimodecarlogallery

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

NOTES TOWARD A MODEL OPERA

ULLENS CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, BEIJING 27 JUNE – 30 AUGUST 2015

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, SEOUL 1 DECEMBER 2015 – 27 MARCH 2016

FORTUNA

MUSEO AMPARA, PUEBLA

O SENTIMENTAL MACHINE

14TH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL HOTEL SPLENDID PALAS, ISTANBUL

UBU AND THE TRUTH COMMISSION

PRINT ROOM AT THE CORONET, LONDON

BY JANE TAYLOR

15 OCTOBER – 7 NOVEMBER 2015

LULU

THE METROPOLITAN OPERA, NEW YORK CITY

BY ALBAN BERG

www.goodman-gallery.com

4 JULY – 5 OCTOBER 2015

5 SEPTEMBER – 1 NOVEMBER 2015

5, 9, 14, 17, 2, 24 & 28 NOVEMBER 2015

JOHANNESBURG

CAPE TOWN

163 JAN SMUTS AVE, PARKWOOD, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA P. +27 (0)11 788 1113 F. +27 (0)11 788 9887 jhb@goodman-gallery.com

3RD FLOOR FAIRWEATHER HOUSE 176 SIR LOWRY RD, WOODSTOCK, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA P. +27 (0)21 462 7573/4 F. +27 (0)21 462 7579 cpt@goodman–gallery.com

FRANCESCO VEZZOLI’S ETERNAL KISS SEPTEMBER 8 – OCTOBER 3, 2015

ALMINE RECH GALLERY 11 Savile Row, 1st ﬂoor, Mayfair, W1S 3PG London, UK

Julião Sarmento 15.08.15 - 26.09.15 Galpão

Sara Ramo 24.09.15 - 24.10.15 Galeria

Los Carpinteros Art Rio | Prisma Erika Verzutti, Rodrigo Matheus 09-13.09.15

27.10.15 - 19.11.15 Galeria + Galpão

Simon Evans 19.11.15 - 22.12.15 Galeria

Frieze London 14-17.10.15

Art Basel Miami Beach 03-06.12.15

Jac Leirner Tamar Guimarães 28.11.15 - 29.01.16 Galpão

IMRAN QURESHI IDEA OF LANDSCAPE PARIS MARAIS SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2015 ROPAC.NET

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

15/08 – 25/09 2015 Stewart Uoo

Runo Lagomarsino

03/10 – 20/11 2015 Allyson Vieira

Paulo Monteiro

Michael Dean

Poem N° 0000000000000000000000000000, 9 curated by Supportico Lopez Julian Beck Henri Chopin Adriano Costa Lenora de Barros Natalie Häusler James Hoff Karl Holmqvist Gregorio Magnani Zin Taylor

Mend e s Wood DM Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm

David Godbold More like living than life itself 4 September –10 October 2015 Kerlin Gallery www.kerlingallery.com

ArtReview vol 67 no 6 September 2015

The soul of ArtReview under capitalism “He is so very out, out, out. I am very in, in, in.” No, that’s not from a begging letter referencing ArtReview’s upcoming Power 100 (November issue, ladies and gentlemen, and not a whisper before). Rather, that’s Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev talking about the relative proximity that she and her husband, the artist Cesare Pietroiusti, have to the inner mechanics of the artworld. (You can hear more on the artworld from the curator of the Istanbul Biennial, opening this month, in an interview 40 pages or so on from here; she’s been number one on ArtReview’s power list before, for those of you looking for tips.) Christov-Bakargiev made no value judgement as to which position was better. Yet the statement got ArtReview thinking. What does it mean for an artist to be in the artworld, and is it possible for an artist to be outside it? Can artists ever push away the hoopla – money, pr, dinners, parties and market and curatorial trends – that surrounds the stuff they make, and, in the cases of the lucky ones, boosts its value? Actually, here’s a confession: it wasn’t Christov-Bakargiev that made ArtReview think about all this. It had been planning this issue for a while. The Christov-Bakargiev bit is more of a rhetorical construct (incidentally, you’ll ﬁnd there’s a lot about constructed vs real situations in this issue). Anyhow, to get back on track, ArtReview has been thinking about the in-or-out question for some time: it was one of the reasons ArtReview wanted to ﬁnd out more about Brazilian artist Mônica Nador (btw, seasoned readers will remember that September is the month ArtReview traditionally takes stock of what’s happening in Latin America’s largest country), who rejected the hubbub and distraction of the art scene, moving to a rundown suburb in the far south of São Paulo to initiate a community printmaking workshop.

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

And yes, one of the questions that ArtReview’s attention raises is whether covering Nador’s endeavour serves to drag it back into the dark artworld heart she fought to escape. Thanks, then, to Gustavo Speridião, who in a new work created for this issue points out that the market, and its media proxies, have a way of consuming everything, even dissent (while he also extends this issue’s homage to Friedrich Engels: cf Matthew Collings’s interview with the Chong to Marx’s Cheech). But it’s not all about the superior soul of man under socialism (although that’s what ArtReview was reading last night). At its epic summit with the great curator, ArtReview overheard Christov-Bakargiev confess, “I use theory to confuse people” – which seemed to it to be what most people in the artworld use it for, albeit ‘people’ in that context generally indicates the person doing the theorising. That’s not true of this month’s cover artist, Tamar Guimarães, however, even if theory plays a prominent role in her work. That’s because she looks at theory in its more fundamental sense: as a system of ideas intended to explain something. She doesn’t shy away from difficulty, but doesn’t aim at confusion. Instead the Copenhagen-based Brazilian’s work is about ﬁnding different ways to think about the world, in order more accurately to describe it, or to organise it. Delving into Amerindian worldviews and going back to the dawn of Modernism, Guimarães questions societal givens by revealing certain truths, unmasking or stripping away authoritarian (and authorial) performances of social and intellectual power. It’s something Paul McCarthy, whom ArtReview caught up with over the summer, is doing in a rather different way. And it’s something that artist Pablo Bronstein, in his reﬂection on the artworld’s relation to history and novelty, also seeks to do. Confused? Don’t be. There’s no theory here (that’s a rhetorical device again, btw). Just a range of different positions on how art engages with the world around it. Be brave: read on.

Yoga – the coward’s way out

Nigel Cooke Black Mimosa

510 WEST 25TH ST NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 18 – OCTOBER 24, 2015

5,186 9$1 '( 9(/'( :KHUH FORXGV EHFRPH VFXOSWXUHV DQG D GRJ WDONV SKLORVRSK\ 6HSWHPEHU 2FWREHU

7,0 9$1 /$(5( *$//(5< ::: 7,09$1/$(5(*$//(5< &20

Art Previewed

Friedrich Engels on great women artists Interview by Matthew Collings 66

Previews by Martin Herbert 37 Points of View by Mike Watson, Laura Oldﬁeld Ford, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Lucas Ospina & Bill Clarke 51

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Interview by Oliver Basciano 70

page 38 Marina Pinsky, A + B Time, 2013. Photo: © dr. Courtesy Clearing, New York and Brussels. Included in the Lyon Biennale

September 2015

Art Featured

Tamar Guimarães by Stefanie Hessler 82

Aço e Carne (Steel and Flesh) by Gustavo Speridião 104

Poema / Processo by Tobi Maier 90

Conservatism by Pablo Bronstein 116

Mônica Nador by Claire Rigby 96

Paul McCarthy by Mark Rappolt 124

Ivan Grilo by Oliver Basciano 100

Amalia Ulman by Erik Morse 132

page 96 Mônica Nador, Untitled, 2008, car paint on paper, 70 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Flat World, by Dean Kissick Dan Rushton, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Andra Ursuta, by Brienne Walsh Susan Cianciolo, by David Everitt Howe Figure 8, by Iona Whittaker Omar Badsha, by Matthew Blackman

exhibitions 140 Julien Prévieux, Francisco Sobrino, Raphaël Zarka, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Antje Majewski, by Raimar Stange Oscar Tuazon, by Michelangelo Corsaro Rochelle Goldberg, by Barbara Casavecchia Mark Bradford, by Dominic van den Boogerd Momentum 8, by Louise Darblay After Babel / Poetry will be made by all! / 89plus, by Stefanie Hessler Giorgio Griffa, by Robert Barry Eloise Hawser, by Sean Ashton Thomas Hirschhorn, by Dan Udy Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, by Helen Sumpter Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa, by Gabriel Coxhead Not with nothing but. With nothing., by Orit Gat Luke Fowler and Mark Fell, by Susannah Thompson Frances Stark, by Terry R. Myers Jennifer Boysen, by Ed Schad Sarah Cain, by Andrew Berardini

books 166 Cosmonauts of the Future, edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum, by Sara Wookey Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs Dissident Art, by Malcolm Miles Making Biennials in Contemporary Times, edited by Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Charles Esche, et al the strip 170 off the record 174

page 147 Valia Fetisov, Dzina Zhuk and Nicolay Spesivtsev, Paranoiapp, 2015, mobile application, inﬁnite dimensions. © Maksim Karalevich. Courtesy the artists. Included in Momentum 8, Moss

ArtReview

Ivan Grilo | Estudo para Movimentos Circulares #1, 2015 | print on cotton paper | 100 x 100 cm

ALBANO AFONSO . ALEX CERVENY . ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS . DANIEL ACOSTA . DANIEL LIE . DARIO ESCOBAR . EDUARDO BERLINER F LÁV IO CER Q U E IRA . G U I L L E R M O MORA . IVAN GRILO . JACK STRA N G E . JOANA VASCONCELOS . JULIANA CERQUEIRA LEITE MANUELA RIBADENEIRA . MARCIA XAVIER . MARIANA PALMA . MAX GÓMEZ CANLE . NAZARETH PACHECO . PIER STOCKHOLM . REGINALDO PEREIRA ROMMULO VIEIRA CONCEIÇÃO . SANDRA CINTO . STEPHEN DEAN . TONY CAMARGO . VALDIRLEI DIAS NUNES . VÂNIA MIGNONE . YURI FIRMEZA RUA PAIS DE ARAUJO 77 / ITAIM BIBI / 04531-090 / SÃO PAULO / BRASIL / +55 11 3167-5621 / WWW.CASATRIANGULO.COM / INFO@CASATRIANGULO.COM

Art Previewed

Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industries and the means of production are largely or entirely privately owned and operated for proﬁt 35

Previewed Lyon Biennale Various venues, Lyon 10 September – 3 January

Maryam Jafri Kunsthalle Basel 28 August – 1 November

Nicholas Nixon Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 10 September – 24 October

Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 moma, New York 5 September – 3 January

Alex Hubbard Maccarone, Los Angeles 19 September – 20 December

Berlin Art Week 15–20 September

William Kentridge Marian Goodman Gallery, London 10 September – 24 October

Joan Jonas Malmö Konsthall 26 September – 10 January

I Hope to God You’re Not As Dumb As You Make Out Mary Mary, Glasgow 26 September – 7 November

Charlemagne Palestine Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 18 September – 8 November

3 William Kentridge, Set of 3 Roman Heads (detail), 2014, oil paint on bronze, wood and steel trestle, 41 × 31 × 23 cm. Photo: Thys Dullaart. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

September 2015

Lyon, birthplace of the cinematograph, has counterbalancing tour of moma’s latter-day the revanchist modernity espoused by Nicolas internationalist acquisitions, from Eastern remained a forward-thinking city, hosting since Bourriaud some years ago, perhaps the modality Europeans (Ion Grigorescu, Sanja Iveković, Dóra 1991 the most consistently intelligent and pleahas become part of a patchwork of influences surable of contemporary art biennales. It hasn’t Maurer et al) to Latin Americans (Beatriz González, and detached from naive notions of progress per delivered every time, nonetheless, and curator Oscar Bony, Ana Mendieta, David Lamelas and se, an acerbic spectre rather than an animating more) and lively auxiliary wings like Fluxus East, Gunnar B. Kvaran’s cacophonous, youth-fixated spirit. We’ll see, and, as ever in this gastronomic 1 2013 Lyon Biennale perhaps bore on director and including many works never previously epicentre, reach conclusions over dinner. shown in the institution. Thierry Raspail’s subsequent announcement of Meanwhile, curators elsewhere maintain A troubled take on global modernity a history-minded, three-edition reboot themed that the modern and, indeed, postmodern of around the elusive concept of the ‘modern’. First 3 underlies William Kentridge’s show at Marian the last century is no settled matter but rather Goodman in London (and, indeed, the storied in the curator’s chair is Ralph Rugoff, director 2 a giant jigsaw in process. In Transmissions: Art South African’s work as a whole). In the eightof London’s Hayward Gallery and a long-term in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, moma furthers the collective mission of visioning screen video/animation More Sweetly Play the dab hand at gifting leftfield concepts with a global Modernism that has kept pace, over the Dance (2015), human figures and the occasional turnstile-turning charm. Via 60 artists from 28 countries, including Jeremy Deller and Marinella anthropomorphic tool dance, trudge and stumble, last decade and more, with new collector bases, Senatore (collaborating), Kader Attia, Ahmet to a shambolic brass soundtrack, across a blasted economic development in the East and South, Öğüt and Yuan Goang-Ming; references to the apocalyptic landscape that seems to be evolving and trustee induction, not to mention instituCharlie Hebdo murders and the Greek crisis; through the years as figures move upon it, tional hunger for fresh goods and novel narraand side events including a ‘Salon des Amateurs’, suggesting an endless historical processional tives. If this show’s title suggests a catchall the American curator asks what role the modern of migration and displacement. This picture, of ‘places that aren’t the usa or central Europe’, spirit retains within art practice. Rather than while beguilingly open-ended, gains specificity the lineup nevertheless promises an incisive,

1 Avery Singer, Heidiland, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 196 × 155 × 5 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

2 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints – Face), 1972, c-print. © Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

ArtReview

5 Alex Hubbard, To Be Titled, 2015. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist and Maccarone, New York & Los Angeles

4 Maryam Jafri, Generic Corner, 2015, research material. Courtesy the artist

in context. Ominous cavorting recurs in Notes Toward a Model Opera (2015), a three-channel video based on didactic ballet dances commissioned by Madame Mao during the Cultural Revolution, and inserting them into a history of dance stretching from Paris to Johannesburg. Elsewhere, in work relating to Kentridge’s silent-movie-inspired production of Alban Berg’s unﬁnished opera Lulu (1935), coming soon to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, one might discern – among the myriad onstage deaths – Kentridge’s overarching sense, set into metaphor, of the fatal disaster of utopian modernity. At this stage, one doubts a trip to Lyon would change his mindset much. In Maryam Jafri’s Product Recall: An Index 4 of Innovation (2014), a photography and textdriven project, the Pakistan-born American artist researches products withdrawn from the market for one reason or another – those ‘reasons’, when unpacked, opening onto all kinds of political

shenanigans and the production of desire In how many ways might one make (eg logos being placed on babies’ drinks bottles a painting without applying brush to canvas? or the forced introduction of textured soy 5 Over the past decade, Alex Hubbard has protein into America’s prisons as a cheap meat appeared to be enumerating them, dragging substitute, which led to prisoners suing for expo- the medium down to earth – literally, figuratively – as he goes. Some of the New Yorksure to excess hormones). As her largest show based artist’s works exist as live-action videos thus far – featuring this portmanteau work (à la Hans Namuth’s footage of Jackson Pollock) and numerous others – ought to amply display, Jafri is both an avid researcher and a cool concep- in which, for example, an aerial view tracks flowers arriving on a coloured sheet before tualist, adept at revealing ethical double binds of circulation and complicating didactic research being wrecked, sprayed with black paint and with fiction and aesthetic leanings. The compareswept away with a walking stick. On another and-contrast Getty vs Ghana (2012), for instance, occasion a Ford Tempo, seen side-on, is repeatlooks into the eponymous photographic agency’s edly, restlessly accoutred with different colours copyrighting of images from Ghana’s independand panels. What’s missing from this process, ence that belonged to the country’s Ministry in stark contrast to the I-was-here graffiti of Information, while her film Mouthfeel (2014) of Abstract Expressionism, is a sense of finality sets a discussion of the morals of genetically – the art seems arrested, not completed, not modified food into a tense scenario between fulfilling; the next work isn’t growth, it’s just a man and a woman in a chauffeur-driven car. something else. Inaugurating Maccarone’s new Go and watch things unravel, on multiple levels. Los Angeles branch are urethane paintings,

September 2015

to date features four large-scale installations made by layering pigmented urethane, resin Palestine made the durational, exhausting and several single-channel videos, spans the and fibreglass over cast stretcher bars. Those ‘body action’ videos that are likely to be a focus 1960s to the present (at seventy-nine, she’s now shown at Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, at the end in Vienna (though we’re promised, in this first retrospective, a mix of visual and musical of last year were suspended from the rafters; an advocate of GoPro cameras) and ought to work), psychodramas that activate kinaesthetic these, we’re told, are freestanding. Flaunting reassert how influential Jonas’s interlacing of video, performance and sculpture has been; senses through sound and movement; his stretcher bars and glowing colours, Hubbard’s recent works owe a few royalties to Sigmar Polke’s it might even, as per the illuminative slant of lengthy musical explorations, too, aim at otherthe title, shed light on Jonas’s ever-gnomic use alchemical experiments but have an orphaned worldly states. But Palestine is also deeply into quality of their own. Painting’s self-conscious of mythological imagery. stuffed animals (he owns thousands and, like ‘I just hated being an anything, I don’t know cognac, they’re a regular presence in his work) reversal of progress, they suggest, still has a and has explored the history of the teddy while to run. 7 why,’ said Charlemagne Palestine in a recent bear, invented in his native Brooklyn in 1902. interview, and his long career shows it. Though If Joan Jonas’s intangible praxis – which 6 his lengthy, slow-mutating musical composiLately, and sensibly, he’s been actively curating Pamela M. Lee recently assessed as characterised by deliberately postponed sense-making, mirtions for glockenspiels, organs, electronics and this evasive legacy: with any luck (and some ‘strumming’ were associated with the downtown roring and the presence of dogs – still didn’t persistence), it should soon register as strongly Minimalism of La Monte Young, Philip Glass outside of aficionado circles as, say, his old pal fully focus for you after her us Pavilion at this et al, Palestine calls theirs ‘typewriter music’ Tony Conrad’s. year’s Venice Biennale, then another chance 8 and insists he’s a maximalist, and, despite his is offered by her Malmö Konsthall retrospective, Two self-portraits by Nicholas Nixon, two Light Time Tales. (A third chance, really, since discography running to some 20 solo albums, black-and-white photographs. In one, it’s 1975 this show originated at Milan’s HangarBicocca.) ‘composer’ won’t contain his approach. ‘Trance and he’s young, fresh-faced, intently wide-eyed Jonas’s biggest Scandinavian retrospective inducer’ comes closer. During the 1970s, with pulled-back hair; in the other, it’s 40 years

6 Joan Jonas, Double Lunar Rabbits, 2010 (installation view, Light Time Tales, Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014). Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan

7 Charlemagne Palestine, Strummmmmmingggggg for the Music Palace CharleWorld Bösendorfer Imperial Piano, 2014. Photo: Laurent DeBroca. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

N A R I

W A R D

Breathing Directions September 9–November 7 201 Chrystie St New York, NY 10002 lehmannmaupin.com

Matthew Brannon, More Than This, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary, Glasgow

8 Nicholas Nixon, Our Front Porch, Brookline, 2014. © the artist. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

9 Heike Gallmeier, Surrogate Landscape #1, Berlin, 2004, c-print, 80 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist. Included in Welcome to the Jungle, kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin

later and his face is a map of creases, the camera leaning in, inspecting what he’s learned and how it shows. Nixon is fascinated by intervals, by containing structures, by thresholds: he photographs, in pinpoint large-format monochrome, the very young and the very old; cities; doorsteps, skin, lovemaking. Nixon’s stance is that the whole world is fascinating, that he’s a servant of the visible. But there’s a latent overarching poetics to his work that binds it beyond its obvious blend of emotion and precision. The Brown Sisters (1975–), an ongoing study of his wife and her siblings, is his work’s spine, but as this approximately 40-year career retrospective suggests, there’s more to this quiet master. Meanwhile, Berlin is still working out how to become a city where art is not only made 9 but sold, and the annual Berlin Art Week illuminates the fervid brainstorming. This year, alongside the eighth edition of the abc art fair – 100 galleries (smaller, or more exclusive,

than last year, which was smaller than the year 10 ‘I hope to god you’re not as dumb as before), sidebar of free panel discussions – you make out’ is, you will recognise, a line and the inevitable complement of openings, from Orange Juice’s 1983 song Rip It Up. It’s also the fair’s ‘banana hall’ offers a showcase of works the title of Mary Mary’s three-person show, and since Matthew Brannon’s in it, dumbness from local private collections, emphasising that is unlikely. Here, Brannon’s graphic luxe there are, indeed, collectors outside of monied trappings, which devolve into deep lexical West Germany. There’s also the auxiliary fair, ambiguities, are joined by two complementary Positions, now in a bigger space for its second if lesser-known practices. la-based Milano year. And, simultaneously, expect a new collaboration between the city’s major instititutions, Chow’s tight domestic drawings skew similarly entitled Stadt/Bild (Image of a City) and ranging to elegance and void, and suggest the classy from Kunstwerke’s group-show exploration obscurity of Alain Robbe-Grillet: mantelpieces of ‘the self and the other’, Welcome to the Jungle, framing empty space and accoutred with the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle’s inquiry into drawn postcards are a favoured format. Alan ‘home and the foreign’, Xenopolis, and the Reid, meanwhile, draws heiresses and fashionNationalgalerie’s ‘comprehensive reinvention’, istas; his works have been described, entertainingly enough, as ‘provocatively light’. You via various artists in various locations, of Allan see where this is going. Restraint, decorum, Kaprow’s communal melting-ice sculpture, low-watt angst, the discreet charm of the Fluids (1967). Fluidity, coolness, reinvention: bourgeoisie, etc. It sounds, in its way, perfect. one can certainly think of worse metaphors for Martin Herbert Berlin’s art scene right now.

ArtReview

PER KIRKEBY / UNTITLED 1967

EVA, PAMELA, VICTORIA... WORKS BY CHIE FUEKI, KIRSTEN JUSTESEN,

PER KIRKEBY, MAIJA LUUTONEN, GRAYSON PERRY, TAL R, GUY RUSHA, EVA SCHLEGEL AND ERIK STEFFENSEN 19/08/15—03/10/15 CHART ART FAIR 21/08—23/08 DANIEL RICHTER NEW WORKS 19/08/15—24/10/15

W W W.BJERGGA ARD.COM

Sotheby’s at Chatsworth: 10th Anniversary Exhibition 14 September – 25 October 2015 SARAH LUCAS Florian and Kevin, 2013

Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 6342 simon.stock@sothebys.com © THE ARTIST; COURTESY SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON

Chatsworth House Trust is a registered charity No 511149 dedicated to the long term preservation of Chatsworth.

WALTERCIO CALDAS. ICEBERG, 2014. STAINLESS STEEL AND ENAMEL ON ALUMINUM. 205 X 220 X 62 CM | PHOTO: ROMULO FIALDINI

ELISA BRACHER LUCTUS LUTUM AUG 22 – OCT 24 IOLE DE FREITAS O PESO DE CADA UM JUL 18 – SEP 13

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Wanda Pimentel Rio de Janeiro 8 September – 17 October 2015 Anita Schwartz Galeria de Arte London 14–18 October 2015 Frieze Masters [Spotlight]

Points of View

With 50,000 people reportedly escorted to safety from the Mediterranean to the shores of Italy so far this year, there is a coincident shift in demographics visible on the streets of Rome. This is just the figure for people who have taken that particular route. Many more are clearly entering Italy on a continuous basis via other coastlines and borders, desperate for work and financial stability: an estimated 150,000 illegal immigrants per year. Year on year for the seven years that I have lived here it has been apparent that illegal immigration is increasing exponentially, due in part to increasingly intolerable living conditions in Central and North Africa and the Middle East. This manifests most visibly as an increase in homelessness emanating out from Termini, Rome’s central station, down towards Via Merulana and the Parco del Colle Oppio, situated on one of the famous seven hills upon which Rome was built. At times, small clusters of tents appear on pavements, grass verges and in parks and lay-bys. This phenomenon goes unreported in the local and national press, as does the often-sudden disappearance of these small communities, which are presumably moved on and, in some cases, detained by the forces of law and order. Some unfortunate immigrants find themselves processed in Rome’s Centre of Immigration and Expulsion (or cie), situated in Ponte Galeria, a district on the city’s periphery, heading towards the beach at Ostia. Dubbed the Italian Guantánamo by its critics, Ponte Galeria cie is privately run and said to maintain its cells and facilities in appalling sanitary conditions, according to the few journalists who have been allowed to enter. The poor circumstances would appear unjustifiable in light of the fact that the facilities are managed by gepsa (Gestione Penitenziari E Servizi Ausiliari, or Management of Penitentiary and Auxiliary Services), who are themselves a subsidiary of Cofely, an energy management company in turn controlled by Engie, a French multinational energy giant with an annual revenue of just under €75 billion. While recent changes in the law have reduced the maximum period of detention in a cie to three months, the conditions remain unbearable, with insufficient supplies of basics such as soap and toilet paper, according to the few journalists

black on white? Being a report on the hardships suffered by those immigrants seeking refuge and betterment in Italy; and the Italian artworld’s tentative response to matters of migration, race and identity by

Mike Watson

Jebila Okongwu, The Economics of Reality is my Nationality, 2015, banana boxes, ﬁshing line, polystyrene foam, glue, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

September 2015

who have been able to enter. On the night of 4–5 July, despair led to a revolt in which a group of male inmates burned mattresses and tried unsuccessfully to force open the gates of the detention complex. From the safety and distance of the artworld, it is hard to relate to the conditions experienced by Italy’s most impoverished inhabitants, who are invariably immigrants. One reason for this is the lack of representation of the immigrant population in cultural circles. Other than one or two relatively privileged ‘expats’, the artworld here is overwhelmingly Italian and middle-to-upper class. This, though, is surely no reason to ignore the problematic issues of immigration and racial identity in Italy. With these in mind, the American Academy in Rome held the group show Nero su Bianco from 26 May to 19 July of this year. The 26 exhibiting artists responded to the notion of race with a strong sociopolitical intent that reﬂects the importance of racial identity to the future of Italy. The exhibition was divided into ﬁve themes – ‘Echoes of Antiquity and Italian History’, ‘The Colonial Legacy’, ‘African Americans and Italy’, ‘Immigration / Integration’ and ‘Persistent Stereotypes’ – and aimed to ‘pave the way’ for art institutions, and Italy itself, ‘to be more inclusive and diverse laboratories for an ever-changing world’, as expressed by the academy’s arts director Peter Benson Miller in his introductory catalogue text. Of the work on display, The Economics of Reality is my Nationality (2015) stood out for its forthrightness. The work, by Jebila Okongwu, a Rome-based uk-born artist of Australian and Nigerian parents, features banana boxes folded into the form of oversize bananas, displayed at the foot of a marble Greek torso in the academy’s entrance. This play on colonial trade networks and racial stereotypes sits uneasily among the opulence of the academy (as would be true if it had been displayed in the British School of Rome or the nearby Spanish Academy). At the same time, the work and the exhibition itself indicate the importance of starting the difficult discussion on race and cultural identity somewhere. But ultimately, the real value of the show will depend on whether it fosters further channels to continue the conversation with a diverse public.

Lansbury Estate. Walled gardens, narrow tracks. Late summer sharpening into autumn. You’re grasped by waving tendrils – clematis, passionflower – the coiled armatures of a b movie. Arcadia Street, Brabazon Street, New Festival Quarter. Coded nihilism on the towpath – this is the end, the future is just like now – and those diamonds, a trail of marker-pen sigils across the Teviot, across Chrisp Street, all the way to here. The job centre is sandy brick with a red plastic roof like a Lidl. The windows are slits like a fortress. You stand in an open-plan office waiting to be called. The defensive architecture seeps into the faces of the staff. Cold grilles, blank screens. Your adviser is a Ghanaian woman called Afia. You know straightaway she won’t cut you any slack. You’d hoped to see Lee again, a forty-fiveyear-old mod with total contempt for his job; it’s down to him that you haven’t been sent on endless training schemes. Afia shakes her head. This is ridiculous, you should have been assigned a course weeks ago. She addresses you by your surname but won’t look at you. She writes down a name and address – Skillsmatch, a recruitment service in Canary Wharf. Leaving that place feels euphoric, a lysergic moment of elevation – the September sun, the canal at Violet Road. You cross the bridge, trace the symbols of St Brendan carved in the walls – galleon, lighthouse, span of arches.

personal strategies An enforced visit to a job centre, in the heart of a ﬁnancial district, leads to new friendships, and a rebellion against the cult of self-improvement By way of buddleia, co-codamol, instrumental grime and oil-slicked concrete by

Laura Oldﬁeld Ford

This zone belongs to the shore, to thresholds and crossings; it emerges as an archipelago in a confluence of tracks, motorways and tidal rivers. You know the skein of paths stitching the islands together, a knowledge encrypted in chalk and spraypaint. Arcs and dots warn of police, triangles mark empty buildings; intermittent codes showing routes through the interstices. Limehouse, Westferry, Poplar High Street. You find the Vietnamese church, the garden with palm trees and stones arranged in circles. You can smell burning incense, the woody scents of frankincense and rosemary. The path takes you to an orchard of interwoven trees. You luxuriate in that sweet apple fragrance as you stoop beneath laden branches. The red brick wall is still there as you remember it, and that blistered green door with no lock. You push through into a forgotten acre of briars, ragwort and sycamore, a lawless, tangling riposte to the looming Serco depot. You still call it Securicor, so does everyone else round here. You look through razor wire at the armoured vans – the name detaching itself, proliferating in a matrix of holding cells, prisons and deportation centres. You dream of seeing that place razed – you think how easy it would be to do it, with everything blanched and tinder dry – the whole yard melting in 500-degree flashover – Serco, Group 4, Savills, Foxtons, all of them. The blame is shifting – the scapegoats reversing. You walk beneath the elevated sections of the dlr, searching for a footbridge. Under here, in the groves of buddleia, with the wheel hubs and slicks of oil, you cherish your last minutes of freedom. The bridge is a queasy conveyance between two worlds: to traverse those six lanes of traffic is to recalibrate space entirely. The glyphs you relied on have receded, displaced by a vast system of Masonic code. You feel the molten towers of Canary Wharf pressing down, you feel exposed, exhausted by the paranoid grid of boulevards. You need a cocoon. You stop at a Tesco for Benylin and Co-codamols. Chrysanthemums, burnt yellow, crowding the doorway, and you realise that even here the signs get through – Lammas, Lughnasadh – the first fires of Harvest. Helping You Back to Work. Third day and you’re going spare. You’re sitting at a hexagonal desk with plants in the middle, a mean-spirited arrangement of figs and parlour palms. The chairs are modular and the ceiling is exposed pipes wrapped in aluminium. There are water coolers and a machine you press for cappuccino. You only really know this place as a mirage of towers, omnipresent but distant. It is occupied territory – ring of steel, checkpoints, special police force. Now you’re in the kernel of it. Heron Quays, the nexus of occult geometry.

You look out at the bisected circles, the pyramids and obelisks, the spire of St Anne’s across the river. You’re all here under sufferance except the ‘mentors’, with their polished Home Counties accents. They make you read books by this bloke Tony Robbins, an American self-help guru. The whole thing is structured like group therapy. It spirals out of cbt and enters the realms of television evangelism. The emphasis is on you, as an individual, to adapt to the current situation, to think positive thoughts instead of being angry. If you’re poor it’s because you haven’t tried enough, you haven’t developed the right personal strategies. You can’t believe Tower Hamlets has hooked you into this stockbroker cult – all this stuff about cosmic ordering, how to visualise wealth. It’s a formula steeped in dank celebrity enclaves, cranks like Noel Edmonds espousing a perverse hyperstition.

Mentor puts everyone in twos. You and Ahmed. You have to ask each other questions and make a presentation to the group. Ahmed’s become one of your closest allies in here. You’ve only known him three days, but being trapped intensifies friendships, three days is like three weeks. He draws pictures for you, the crenellated towers and turquoise coves of Mogadishu, places he’s dreamt but never really seen. He’s got you into instrumental grime. A lot of the stuff you like now is because of him. You know Ahmed’s background: you’re writing it all down. He tells you about leaving Somalia in the civil war, the family moving to Stockholm in 1992, how they got housed on this estate called Tensta. He asks you if you’ve been to Elephant and Castle and says it’s a bit like that. Then he starts drawing it for you, this massive Brutalist housing scheme. He says the family came to London in 2001 when he was ten and moved to a flat on the Lansbury Estate. He describes the salmon-pink walls, the money plants and the view of Canary Wharf. He says when he first saw that tower he thought aliens might be living in the pyramid at the top. He draws Venn diagrams on the A-Z, overlapping circles, points of intersection, his journeys and yours – the sepulchral spaces under Balfron Tower, the burial mound in Robin Hood Gardens, that Somali stretch of the Mile End road. A mentor comes over and says all this is irrelevant. You can see he’s getting annoyed, buoyant charisma starting to perforate. He’s about thirty, with a clean Pentecostal demeanour. You imagine his aspirational flight from Streatham to Woking, from the ad hoc churches of Peckham to the Alpha Church configurations of Surrey. You hide the maps and start writing prosaic lists: warehouse, catering, retail. You’re looking out of the window at geometric gardens, boulevards and towers, and Ahmed says to you, Imagine if we was sitting here and the whole thing blew sky-high. He settles down with a biro and you watch the meticulous rendering of collapsing masonry and shattered glass. It gets passed with jumpy pleasure round the room. The mentors are gathering in Learning Zone Lime. The whole office is colour coded – Lime, Magenta, Chocolate – a disgusting confection in a sickly vat. They’re usually pleasant on the surface, but the drawing has cracked that and they’re demanding to know who did it. There’s a screw-face silence with everyone looking out of the window.

September 2015

And they’re saying, Right, Ahmed, come here, but he doesn’t move. You all stand in a circle around him. They’re panicking, talking about the police, saying they have a duty to report manifestations of extremism. There’s an impasse and you know they’re embarrassed, totally ill equipped to deal with you. They’re on their phones, pacing about, all their positive energy spent. They say they’ll report you to the dole office, they threaten you with sanctions, but you don’t care too much any more, because it’s breaking apart already – you’ve just watched the Chinese property market collapse and you know London’s going with it. There are all these empty flats, and people have started occupying them, tapping into the mains, the electricity. They say, ok, we need to get security up here, and after a few minutes of agitated silence, this hench Nigerian bloke walks in. He sees the drawing of the exploding towers and you detect a seam of pleasure in the stony face. You just walk out – the whole thing’s a joke. Somehow, being caught up in here has forged allegiances, emboldened you. You have found each other: become a cell, a unit. You pass silver edifices and marble lobbies of international hotels. You’re conspicuous in your crew of ten and feel the eyes of police in their burnished kiosks. You feel the pressure of the architecture, the mathematical wielding of power pulsing like a migraine. You find an aperture, narrow steps leading to a deep sediment, a dormant splinter. The temperature drops. Thickets of lilac push through a row of derelict cottages. You’re out of sight, hidden for the first time. You slink through plywood, buckled gaps in the corrugated iron. The rooms are dusty, layers of wallpaper torn in stalactite formations. You see the inscriptions glowing there, sentences in chalk, written and overwritten. You step out through a brick arch. You can smell the moss, the saltiness of the Thames. Elder trees are growing in the fracture lines of a concrete yard. You step into the shell of an old ironworks, ground livid with the ink of crushed berries. A network of paths emerges in the rubble, a covert crosshatching between office ruins and the steel skeleton of an 88-storey tower. You find that pub, the North Pole, still open. You walk into a bar that feels like a ship’s cabin, wood panelling and a twisting staircase. Kronenberg, Doom Bar, Double Diamond. You remember those diamonds, that swag log – the marker-pen sigils across the Teviot, across Chrisp Street and the Limehouse Cut. Samsung Galaxies, YouTube grime rips. And that melancholy Tory Lanez track – In for It. You recognise something in the vocal shifts – a doomed quality, the elegant splintering of architecture. You recognise the heartbreak, the crystals refracting it.

In Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s film Toxic (2012), a punk figure in glitter and a drag queen move around a studiolike space with violet curtains, and heaps of glitter and poisonous potted plants on the floor. Projected behind the two characters are images of people wearing peculiar masks known through various protest movements, and borrowing poses from mugshots and anthropological photography. A number of toxic substances are mentioned by the characters – among them heroin, ecstasy, mushrooms, radioactivity and AndroGel® – which remind the viewer that while toxins can poison you, they can also cure you and improve your quality of life. This type of double-sidedness is reemphasised by the drag queen, quoting Jean Genet in a 1980s interview: to be asked questions in front of a film camera can be as violent as a police interrogation. In short, an interview is not necessarily ‘un-poisonous’, however harmless it might appear. The first time I saw the film I had a strong feeling that it said something about the future. It is a highly staged scenario in which the past is recreated for a future use and new desires take shape. Amid the glitter, curtains, camouflage patterns and impressive wigs, a form of playful opacity makes itself felt among characters who are deliberately difficult to categorise. Even the scale is tricky to determine: one plant looks like a tree, another one like it was meant for a windowsill, while some of the projected photographs serve to oversize the people in front of them. Like several other of Boudry/Lorenz’s recent film installations, this one steps in and out of suppressed or illegible moments, staging the actions of individuals and groups living in defiance of normality, the law and economics. The performances are produced for the camera, as if in an intimate safehouse – sometimes looking like a doll’s house – making use of a dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography and underground (drag) performance. Intimate relations, as well as times ahead, are at the heart of Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) too. The book starts when a friend dies. Preciado (who has now transitioned and is known as Paul B. Preciado) then cross-dresses into the deceased comrade and begins her series of rendezvous with Testogel, synthetic testosterone, as if to bring the friend back to life. The purpose of taking the hormone is not to become a man but to test chemically induced sensations, a ritual moving far beyond established categories of sex, gender and objects. The encounters with Testogel involve the cutting of hair, shaving, making moustaches from the just-cut hair, donning dildos, looking into mirrors and recording the whole procedure for online sharing. At the heart of this performance,

orgasmic potential or

The future glimpsed in an art video in which

drag queens, glitter punks and synthetic testosterone contaminate the molecular basis of sexual difference, leading to the evolutionary metamorphosis of contemporary society by

Maria Lind

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Toxic, 2012, ﬁlm installation, vitrine with 15 photographs, theatre spots, curtain and Super 16mm ﬁlm, 13 min. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

beautifully described in great detail, lies a desire for transformation. Even a metamorphosis of life in contemporary society. This is where both Boudry/Lorenz and Preciado tell us something about a fundamental shift in biopolitics and the nature and economy of desire, about what more of the future will be like. But also what making theory can be, far beyond academicised routine. Preciado then takes the reader on a ‘somatopolitical’ journey through the world economy, where she claims that a new type of government of the living has emerged in the period after the Second World War, through the forceful interaction between advanced capitalism, global media and biotechnology. S/he labels this new type of government ‘the pharmacopornographic regime’. The emergence of terms such as ‘transsexualism’ (1954) and ‘gender’ (which Preciado suggests appeared in its current usage in 1957), changes in economic and governmental regulations of pornography and prostitution in the Western world and the development of synthetic molecules for commercial use paved the way for this ‘sex-gender industrial complex’. The Pill and Playboy are early and widely disseminated components of this material-discursive apparatus of bodily production that includes feedback loops. Viagra and Prozac are more recent examples. All of which is to say that, today, psychotropic techniques and biomolecular and multimedia protocols affect subjectivity in hitherto unseen ways. Not only is this inﬂuencing millions of individuals in their most intimate lives, but also sexuality and its semiotechnical derivations are the main resource of post-Fordist capitalism. It is a new model of production: the control, creation and intensiﬁcation of narco-sexual effects. If work is the central concept in classical economy, then ‘potentia gaudendi’ as formulated by Preciado, or orgasmic force, is the equivalent in the pharmacopornographic regime. Potentia gaudendi is the strength of a body’s excitation, its own extension in space and time. It is an event, relation, practice and evolutionary process; it is essentially impermanent and malleable. Potentia gaudendi depends on ‘techno-bodies’, half foetuses and half zombies, individual bodies as extensions of global communication technologies, oscillating between excitation and frustration. It is the planetary management of ‘naked technolife’ through virtual audiovisual connections. Toxic is part of the exhibition Loving, Repeating by Boudry/Lorenz at Kunsthalle Wien, guest-curated by Maria Lind as part of the Vienna Biennale, on show through 4 October

Across London there are holes: big gaping holes in the cityscape. Deep down below are machines called Phyllis, Ada, Elizabeth, Victoria, Jessica, Ellie, Sophia and Mary. These are Crossrail’s tunnel-boring machines, which until June were driving through the city’s subsoil, collectively progressing at an average of 38m a day. Over three years they bored 42km of tunnels for the new line. Crossrail is Europe’s largest current construction project, costing £14.8 billion and linking Heathrow and Reading in the west to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east. Long planned, it’s part of London’s endless expansive drive, increasing the city’s rail capacity by 10 percent and bringing an extra 1.5 million people to within 45 minutes of the centre. Its stats don’t end there, and include claims that Crossrail could help add £5.5 billion to residential and commercial real estate values along its route in just nine years and that it will support the delivery of over 57,000 new homes and 3.25 million sqm of commercial space. Right now, mid-transformation, we could also imagine Crossrail as a city-scaled piece of land art. Raw cuts into the fabric of the city are still wide open. Impossible views have opened up, altering, for a moment, the city’s normal sense of geography. Suddenly there are strange connections between one place and another. In Crossrail’s churn through the ground, the history and future of London come together. Bones and plague pits, the remains of discarded objects and traces of a time before the city even existed merge with future economic growth and the promise of glitzy new development. Chronology, in the midst of this rearrangement of the city, becomes fluid. The spinning heads of Crossrail’s tunnelling machines have created a kind of historical vertigo in which all of London’s eras have become one dizzying whirl: prehistory and technology; infrastructure and biology; stones and bones. All stirred up by the city’s own pursuit of culture and commerce. In a dark room at Bloomberg Space, giant tvs rotate on plinths while their screens display similarly spinning images in David Blandy’s monumental kinetic installation Hercules: Rough Cut (2015). The film offers a history of London where images of Greek temples, factory production lines and car parks spin over one another, while words such as

hercules in the underground A tale of tunnelling beneath an accelerated london in which

the convulsive transformation of The Metropolis by digging machines is compared to

an artist’s digital retelling of the city’s history as both myth and reality by

Sam Jacob

David Blandy, Hercules: Rough Cut (ﬁlm still), 2015. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

‘knowledge’, ‘economics’ and ‘civilisation’ rotate like deadly serious gameshow credits. Over this, a voice speaks as if channelling the language of Roman declamations, Thomas More, Samuel Johnson, William Blake, 1950s Beat poets and contemporary hip hop. The piece is composed from fragments found in Bloomberg’s picture library. An archive usually used to illustrate financial reports becomes itself a kind of archaeological site. Hercules: Rough Cut is its own form of the Crossrail tunnelling machine, driving through the archive to forge new connections and adjacencies. And as it cuts, it acts as a machine for viewing the story of London, for understanding its inherent violence, monumentality and voracious appetite for endless expansion and growth. And the thing that London consumes most of all is itself, devouring both its own physical fabric and its cultural heritage. Blandy’s ‘Hercules’ is the Hercules of classical mythology, but also the Hercules bomber and Kool Herc, the inventor of ‘breakbeat’ djing from which came hip hop. A single name spans civilisation, from ancient and divine via mechanised destruction to contemporary urban culture. The installation is sited within the cultural annex of part of London’s global financial engine in the City itself: a district whose aggressive self-belief is made clear by the sheer volume of construction currently underway. All those deep pits, looming cranes and provisional scaffolds are rapidly building a new supercharged version of the City. Amidst this, Hercules: Rough Cut reminds us that a city is, at root, a myth made real. ok, so Crossrail might not be a land-art project. But as much as it is a new, gigantic piece of urban infrastructure, it is also a form of storymaking. The narrative it writes as it bores through the history of the city is one of progress, acceleration, growth, mobility and wealth creation. This story, Blandy reminds us, draws on thousands of years of history in order to naturalise the future it brings. Once Crossrail’s cuts are filled in and redeveloped, the myths will have become steel and concrete, indistinguishable from the rest of the city. Just another part of London’s reality. A reality that, we should always remember, is a fiction narrated by the city itself.

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You may recall my last column (ArtReview, Summer 2015), in which I celebrated having been taken on by my new gallery, Nozzlebaum & Gack. Well… now that I teeter on the eve of my first exhibition there I’m beginning to have a few… how shall I put it… doubts? Misgivings? Reservations? You see, my attention has been drawn to some issues I had perhaps overlooked in my initial enthusiasm. Firstly – and believe me, I blame only myself for somehow having missed this – it turns out that their gallery is located entirely in the Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn. I can’t express how embarrassed I am, because this whole time I had assumed, wrongly, that the Bushwick space was a charming outpost of an otherwise global contemporary art empire, you know, placed there simply to gain a foothold in that youthful, hip enclave. Only now is it clear to me that this filthy, rat-infested storefront actually is the gallery! Take it from me: never agree to be represented by a gallery solely on their inclusion in a Time Out New York top-ten list of most-fun-galleries to visit with your folks from out of town! Also, they weren’t even number one. I think they came in, like, seven or something! Over the phone, Brittney, who I, in my feverish excitement (like a child’s!), assumed was the gallery assistant, enchanted me with her youthful voice and Southern accent. Her dulcet tones ignited a desire to stroke her wavy flaxen hair and ask if I could paint her vagina. In person she was quite a different story! Actually, besides turning out to be the gallery director and quite obviously of East Asian descent, she was pretty much the same… only younger! And she wore two different coloured socks stuffed in scuffed ballet flats! And I’m pretty sure she was high!!! She actually nodded out twice during our initial studio visit, blaming it on having been out all night dancing. Which, admittedly, is exactly how she smelled. Brandon, the other director (who was Mexican!), showed up late and was mostly preoccupied swiping right on Tinder. He wanted to show us who he had ‘banged out’

the fragrance of youth or

Bushes to Bushwick in which

last night. It took him several minutes to find. I would have really made a stink had they both not been so hot with youth! How is it that they might dress and smell so awfully and still be so terrifically perfect, and I, clean and finely dressed, so weak and firmly in their tendrils, shivering like a rabbit in the fox’s cruel maw? How can I get that flush back into my cheeks? Must I resort to rouge? Damned youth! Damned multicultural millennials!!!! It was then that I should have probably gone to check out the space. Fresh with my initial doubt. But Joyce had some freakout about stolen shoes, and Neal, my slow-witted assistant, hit himself in the head with a hammer he’d left on top of the studio ladder again and had to be rushed to the hospital. That idiot! So I never really got around to it. Had I done so, I could have easily seen that my huge paintings of vaginas and penises, and the new paintings of skulls that are really, actually, ruminations on death but apparently in a different way than the vagina paintings (ArtReview, May 2015) would never fit inside the small storefront space that had housed a bodega recently enough that hopeful customers would regularly enter demanding bacon, egg and cheese on a roll! Also, that they didn’t have enough clip lights… and there were rats. When I brought up the clip lights issue, Brandon simply smiled and handed me a cold Tecate from a bucket. “Don’t worry about it, man! Do you have a car? We could go to Home Depot and you could buy some.” Just then a ragtag stream of millennials filed in, looking around and talking nonsense and trifles, completely unaware of their rare beauty, filling the space with their juvenescence. A stronger perfume than the foul body odour they emanated. I was drunk with love. I would simply have to buy lots more clip lights and paint a suite of smaller paintings. My comeback will rest on the soft petals of their bloom!

Jonathan Grossmalerman, painter of vaginas, penises and skulls, ﬁnds millennial beauty ﬂowering in the dirt of the Outer Boroughs

Photo: Andrew Gosselin

September 2015

Redistribution is a dirty word in the United States, where the idea of a ‘welfare state’, a system of governance and public administration designed to protect the ‘welfare’ of its populace, is practically scoffed at. Though minimum wages have begun to rise around the country, and Obamacare nearly universalised healthinsurance coverage, these palliatives barely soothe the gross inequality of wealth that has grown unchecked since the 1970s. In other words, redistribution is fine, just as long as it’s redistribution from the bottom to the top of the income ladder. For intellectuals on the left, the market is ever the culprit. But recently a pair of leftleaning thinkers have embraced market principles – cost–benefit analysis and returns on equity – in order to think redistribution in the other direction, and importantly their arguments turn on the value of art. But for different reasons. First the detractor: Peter Singer, easily one of the most relevant moral philosophers working today, published in April The Most Good You Can Do (Yale, 2015), a book that unpacks and promotes the ‘effective altruism’ movement. Effective altruism is the name that has been given to cost–benefit thinking applied to philanthropic and charitable giving. Once spurned for bringing market logic to bear on values that simply could not be quantified, effective altruism is unabashedly running the numbers now, and the artworld, museums in particular, with their building campaigns, trustee boondoggles and trophy acquisitions, are coming up short. In the chapter titled ‘Are Some Causes Objectively Better Than Others?’ Singer poses the following thought experiment: you have $100,000 to donate. Your local museum wants to build a new wing, which will cost $50 million, will last for 50 years and will serve

redistributing the visible? in which our American correspondent, Jonathan T.D. Neil, questions the merit of art museums full of wonders yet

visited by no one and

proposes the great public beneﬁt of selling off a percent of art, thereby making the remainder accessible to more than the one percent

ArtReview

one million people a year. At 1/500th the cost of the expansion, your $100k will serve to ‘enhance’ (Singer’s word) 100,000 visitors’ museum experience. However, it takes only $100 to ‘prevent one to thirty years of blindness’ in someone suffering from trachoma, one of the most easily treated causes of blindness in impoverished countries. Therefore your $100k could also prevent 1,000 cases of blindness for on average 15 years. So what’s better? 100,000 enhanced museum visits or giving 1,000 people sight? Faced with this direct a decision, most if not all of us would donate to cure the trachoma. But here is where Singer pushes the cost–benefit reasoning one step further so as to avoid a kind of ethical authoritarianism where some causes are simply always better than others and which raises all sorts of other philosophical problems (eg, who would judge? and how?). Suppose that the new wing of the museum is built, but because of some strange force (Singer calls it an ‘evil demon’), one in every 1,000 visitors to it is struck blind for 15 years. Would you visit the new wing? Would anyone? Likely not. Here’s Singer: ‘If you agree, then you are saying, in effect, that the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by one thousand people visiting the new wing. Therefore a donation that saves one person from becoming blind would be better value than a donation that enables one thousand people to visit the new wing… You are, in effect, agreeing that a donation to prevent or cure blindness offers at least ten times the value of giving to the museum.’ Change your risk aversion – when would you visit the museum? When it’s only one in 10,000 chances of going blind? One in 50,000? – and you change the relative value of your donation; but at any value, you have made a cost–benefit decision as to which cause is better. (It still ain’t the museum.) Singer is not opposed to art per se, but he shows that the money that is being tossed around in the artworld, a great deal of it going to fund museum expansions and trophy acquisitions, could be better spent – indeed could do much more good – if directed towards organisations that channel the greatest share of their donated dollars towards alleviating some pretty horrible conditions, an alleviating that, comparatively, costs very little and, objectively, does more good. And now the defender: in March, Democracy magazine published Michael O’Hare’s ‘Museums Can Change – Will They?’, an essay that makes a convincing case that when it comes to ‘more, better engagement with art’ (the emphasis is O’Hare’s own), our great art museums are failing. Compared to the value of their collections, museum expenditures on public

engagement – more gallery space, free admission, educational programming, etc – mark a woefully inadequate return on the value of the museums’ collections. The solution? Change two things: one, the accounting rules that allow museums to keep the value of their collections off their balance sheets (so you know what you’ve got); and two, the code of ethics that stops museums from selling works in their collections for anything other than the purchase of other works (so you can do more with what you’ve got). Many of our great museums, particularly in the United States, have collections whose values run into the billions. Valuing these collections and then utilising them for ‘more, better engagement with art’ could have some profound effects. Using the Art Institute of Chicago as an example, O’Hare argues that selling a mere one percent of its collection by value (targeting, for example, duplicate or less signiﬁcant works by well-known artists) could fund free admission to the museum in perpetuity (while spreading this cultural capital to other, needier museums); another one percent could fund 30 percent more

gallery space, allowing the museums to hang more of the collection that is worth seeing and giving visitors – and the art – more space for engagement; and still one percent more would allow the museum to hire ‘200 more full-time researchers, educators, designers, and people studying the audience to understand what really goes on when people get up close to art’. O’Hare’s critics claim that opening the door to funding operations through sales of collections would lead to, say, conservative legislators cutting off public funds or museum leaders squandering the public’s cultural heritage when faced with the inevitability of their own financial mismanagement. The truth is that today’s major museums, apart from their nonprofit status, receive relatively little support from public funding agencies when compared to private donations, and that public support is de minimis when put up against the value of the collections. And if a museum is financially mismanaged, doesn’t this have as much to do with the museum’s board – ie, its major funders – as the museum’s

administrators? If the leadership can’t keep the ship aﬂoat, wouldn’t the valuable cargo be better managed by different leadership at, say, a different museum or foundation? What do we get if we take O’Hare and Singer together? If the logical outcome of Singer’s argument for effective altruism is that donating money to an art museum does very little comparative good, at least out to some point in the distant future when enough wealth has been redistributed to alleviate the very literal and horrible ills of poverty (or inequality), then none of us, the state or private individuals, should be directing funds its way. And if art museums’ donations were to dry up, because we have all accepted the unassailable logic of effective altruism, then museums would really have no choice but to put the existing value of their collections to work, which means redistributing them, exactly as O’Hare suggests. What we would get, in other words, is a radical revaluing and redistribution of the visible. Both the art museum, and the market, would never be the same.

above The Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing. Photo: Dave Jordano. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago facing page Courtesy Shutterstock

September 2015

0 to 10 years

once in a lifetime

You play, you are an artist.

10 to 20 years You don’t know what it is to be an artist, you have doubts, and you have doubts because you don’t recognise what it is to be an artist, or you have forgotten, or because no role model works for you, or they all do, or because what you thought it meant to be an artist does not yet exist and will only exist when you are what you believe it to be, or because in your education of thinking in images you ceded ground to words and concepts. You are an adolescent. You don’t know what you are suffering from.

The growing pains of an artist by

Lucas Ospina

60 to 70 years

20 to 30 years Studying art is an excuse not to enter the labour market; in the yellow pages, under the heading ‘Artists’, there are only magicians, musical trios and mariachis. Others study art without knowing it, either at university or outside it, living in preoccupation and learning from this distraction; they don’t take art classes, but they receive lessons not assessed in academic terms. Artists who study art systematise what they are doing, the form becoming attitude, and they show it, they construct this artistic persona – they are obliged to, at the very least in order to get their diplomas. The others, those who make art in their own time and at their own risk, prefer to live as artists, without the work or the understanding that they must expose themselves and accept this strange condition – a mix of vulnerability, courage and arrogance – by which artists publicise that yes, they are artists. There is no artist without ego. 30 to 40 years Academic credits convert to mortgage credits, the bank balance becoming the report card from the university of life. In the past, boredom could be shared: it was occupational, generational. Now it demands more attention; it is jealous, odd, driving away friends and lovers. It only puts up with those who understand the silences, and if this space grows, it allows other things to grow there: a relationship, children, a long conversation alongside the dialogue the artist is already having with language. Only in this way does the adolescent artist enter the profession’s ranks, clearing space for the work to come. Art’s social space ﬁlls with eloquent complaints about a cruel world that knows nothing of art nor pays any attention to the artist, an anxiety many attempt to ease by turning the prison bars

thirstier, and believing themselves triumphant they are condemned to an inane marathon of social scheming. The only thing that can save them from this pathetic and arid prairie is the steed of humour, a beast capable of jumping the walls of received wisdom; the reins of ethics are made with the leather of laughter…

of fashion into gold. Artists understand that since they have nothing, they have nothing to lose, and throw themselves into the void. Only a few land on their feet and triumph. 40 to 50 years ‘Life has more imagination than we do.’ Life begins at forty. And art? At what age does it begin? Perhaps the artist decides to become an artist when he realises that he is no good at anything else, and that nothing else will do. Art, freedom and life begin when one converts from romantic to cynic, from acid to alkaline, from ironist consumed by irony to a naive conceptualist, from wiseass to foolish professor, from anarchist banker to cultivator of indifference to intelligence and stupidity. ‘Life has more imagination than we do.’ 50 to 60 years At ﬁfty it’s clear that your remaining time is less than what you have already lived. You’ve made it into a few biennales by sheer luck, and now come the hagiographic exhibitions and publications, but each consecrating act contains within it something of a wake, and upon looking in the eyes of the medusa of art history, one limb after another is petriﬁed. The anxiety of prizes is such that, when artists arrive dehydrated at the podium, the potion of success has left them

An illustration included in a catalogue of religious images found in a print shop in Cali, Colombia, which served as curatorial inspiration for a series of eight solo exhibitions. Photo courtesy the author

ArtReview

Someone once defined the creative process as a stairway whose first steps are high, abrupt and closely spaced, later diminishing in height, with breaks for resting between flights, and more rhythm and method in their sequence, until at the end it flattens out, and the steps are barely perceptible. In youth, learning is playful and comes in strides; later, with the passage of time, the flow of these great leaps and changes diminishes, until at the end it seems that the stairway of creativity has turned into an eternal backwater, with no possibility of rising higher. In this flatness the artist is as alone as when he dreams, but it is a paradoxical solitude, his companionship is legion, the anxiety of influence ceases, and the voices he’d always thought came from outside his head show their truth: they have always come from within. To know oneself is to know the world; at this very moment the mind and the body begin to fail, and then begins another kind of learning. 70 to 80 years At this age many artists are only remembered for historical reasons, forgotten by all, unidentified objects on the curatorial radar. Their destiny appears to be that of a brief footnote for young historians who want to drink from them, artists without present or future. The homage they receive is posthumous; they must die in order to get a last breath of life. But some prefer to go deep into the enigma with the irreverence and self-confidence of their indifference. In one respect artists and the old resemble each other: stubborn, they do whatever they want to do. 80 to death A youngster, perhaps alarmed (or inspired) by the advanced age of a group of artists taking part in an exhibition, asks them in a roundtable discussion: ‘How do you avoid losing faith in art?’ To which one of the group responds: ‘Easy – never have it in the first place.’ The greatest surprise of life, a grey-haired and -bearded writer once said, is old age.

“Some of us went to a symposium on art in saunas and spas and thought we should try it here,” says Stephanie Fielding, an artist and member of the Torontobased collective 8-11. Since January, the group, which also includes curators and artists Xenia Benivolski, Simon Schlesinger and Sarah Kilpack, has coordinated ‘Sauna Sessions’ – artist projects mounted in a sweatbox in the backyard of their warrenlike eponymous space in Chinatown. “Artist Sean Procyk from Alberta designed and built it, and most of the materials were repurposed,” continues Fielding. “The biggest expense was the stove. It ﬁts about eight people comfortably. Building it was a bit self-serving because it was our personal heat source during the winter, too.” 8-11 opened in June 2014, and immediately landed the kind of publicity most grassroots endeavours dream of. dj/music producer Skrillex snapped a picture of the gallery (which had two balloons shaped like aliens in its front window) and posted it to Instagram. The photo was liked by over 63,000 people. However, the gallery’s sign, a lightbox based on the striped logo of 7-Eleven, the international convenience store chain, created by Toronto artist Elle Kurancid, was also in the photo. “Someone at 7-Eleven’s corporate office must be following Skrillex because we received a ceaseand-desist letter from them, ordering removal of the sign,” says Fielding. The group held ﬁrm, however, and the matter drew the attention of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which may come to the gallery’s defence if the case proceeds. “We originally planned for the sign to be an artist commission that would change, but then Elle’s work became a symbol of artists’ rights and freedom of creative expression,” says Fielding. To date, there’s been no follow-up from 7-Eleven, but the sign does cause people to enter the gallery looking for gum, milk and condoms. At present, 8-11 invites artists to mount exhibitions rather than soliciting submissions. Programming has featured noteworthy local talents such as Nadia Belerique, Brad Phillips, Laurie Kang and, recently, Montréal’s Walter Scott, whose installation of provisional-looking sculptures was as charmingly abject as Wendy, the title character in his popular artworld-based comic strip. One chilly April afternoon, Toronto artist Lili Huston-Herterich held storytelling sessions, titled ‘Sweat Shorts’, in the sauna.

Offspace: 8-11 toronto The 29th instalment of ArtReview’s guide to the most-interesting-yetsometimes-overlooked independent artspaces, hangouts or apparent recreational facilities from around the world This time a sauna. That’s currently shut (some of the neighbours have the impression that the people who run it are selling drugs or running a brothel, because naked women have been seen in the vicinity). by

Bill Clarke

Photos: Yuula Benivolski. Courtesy 8-11, Toronto

ArtReview

Participants reminisced about scars and marks on their bodies. “In a sauna, you’re stripped down, which makes you feel vulnerable. It’s a space that can be social or solitary, and has connotations of luxury,” she says. “I wanted to exploit these different associations. I didn’t know most of the participants, and several people came alone.” One participant talked about a bee-sting scar she got while in Japan for her grandfather’s funeral. Her story became a springboard for a conversation about family, death and dying. “There’s also an endurance aspect of holding an event in a sauna because, well… it’s hot,” adds Fielding. “And, with projections, the equipment needs constant attention, otherwise it stops working because of the humidity.” (HustonHerterich says she could last 20 minutes before needing a break.) Speaking of heat, only days before this article was due, 8-11 faced some again. “A neighbour complained to our landlord about seeing naked women in the backyard,” says Fielding with a sigh. “I’m not saying that women at ‘Sauna Sessions’ haven’t gone topless, but that’s legal in Canada, you know?” The landlord asked that, for now, 8-11 shut down the sauna. The group is looking at making the sauna mobile or partnering with sauna businesses in the city so that upcoming events, including one in which Leipzig-based artist Edgar Leciejewski will turn it into a steam room using alcohol (there is, apparently, a long German word for this), can go on as planned. “The community has been very supportive of the gallery,” says Fielding. “This one neighbour has the impression that we’re running a brothel and selling drugs, but such misunderstandings are all part of trying to do something different.”

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 40

Friedrich Engels on great women artists Interview by

Matthew Collings The cofounder of marxism, dialectical materialist and author of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State considers whether feminist revisionism is a useful critical approach to the work of agnes martin, while wondering why tate curators can neither say what they see nor see what they say

Together with Karl Marx, his corevolutionary, Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. They also collaborated on many other essays. After Marx’s death Engels edited the parts of Marx’s Capital that were left unﬁnished and released them as Volumes ii and iii. He brought out a fourth part based on Marx’s notes on surplus value. He was born in Germany in 1820 and died in London, from throat cancer, in 1895.

ArtReview

artreview What have you been up to? friedrich engels I went to the Agnes Martin show. ar What ideas were on your mind? fe Well, I thought about the appropriate art movements for that kind of work: Minimalism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. But also what might be the appropriate critical register: feminist revisionism. And also again, I couldn’t avoid thinking about mysticism, which, from what I know about this artist’s biography, I think of as New Age spurious spiritualism. Being a materialist, my ideas were not conﬁned to form and emotion but also included economy. Production not only supplies the want with material, but also supplies the material with a want. The want of art, as well as any other product, creates an artistic and beautyenjoying public. Production thus produces not only an object for the individual, but also an individual for the object.

is hard, or ought to be. All the initial responses and ideas, and so on, are never again the same. They are altered irretrievably, and probably they weren’t that important anyway. ar You mean it doesn’t matter what you think when you see a work? fe No. I mean criticism is a construct. It benefits from those first things, that first response, but it isn’t itself those things. It is a new thing arrived at later through intellectual labour. ar What was your first response to the Martin show? fe Incredulity. When you first enter the show it isn’t early work you see but late work, and it looks like nothing, it is visually uninteresting.

ar Art has no meanings of its own? fe I think nothing at all like that – far from it, in fact. Marx wrote about the economy so much not because everything boils down to it but because he saw correctly that since the onset of the Industrial Revolution that’s the thing that dehumanises everyone. He always said it was not the be-all and end-all and that at some point he’d write his book about aesthetics. But as it happened, the ‘economic shit’, as he called it, kept him bogged down to the day of his death. What I meant just now was that people do something to themselves so that they can say they’ve seen something important when they’re looking at an exhibition like this. And what they do is already established for them by the officially sanctified culture that surrounds the work, because of an unholy alliance between tamed academia and a newly rampant all-conquering commercialism, even though they think they’re doing it spontaneously. ar Before you set out to write a bit of criticism, is there anything you must have done first, besides seeing the thing you’re going to criticise? fe Yes, you have to do a bit of reading. You get lost otherwise. There’s a response, reflection on the response, certainly, and there are a few ideas – but then there’s a muddle. You rescue it with reading, but from that point on you’re really putting together fragments: that’s what the rescue consists in. That’s why criticism

Not diffident or modest or replete with secrets that slowly reveal themselves to the right sensibility, but actually frankly lifeless. ar Did you build up a sympathetic visual sense after you’d seen a few more works? fe No, I had the same sense of her career all the way through, at least from the point at which I’d gained an overall impression. It was apparent that the early breakthrough work, where she discovers grids and where the scale is small, about 15 inches across, is relatively good. Then the mature work, so-called, is nothing much. It is a steep decline, and there is simply an automatic

above Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday, 1999, acrylic paint and graphite on canvas, 1525 × 1525 × 40 cm. Courtesy Tate Modern, London facing page Friedrich Engels. Licensed under Creative Commons

September 2015

output for many years of more-or-less nonevents, visually speaking. Except you can appreciate from a distance, say 10 or 20 feet, a pleasing design effect, if you’re taking in four or five paintings at a time. The variation of basic geometric layouts is pleasing. ar Nothing more? fe I realised that to claim anything more I’d have to do the same self-enchanting that anyone does who claims this exhibition is a significant experience. A sensitive defender might say the work is not really part of Minimalism. Instead it is an inspired way of connecting to something from much further back. It connects more to the Bauhaus, but also – by surprising means, perhaps – to the painterly freedom of Manet and the Impressionists. And someone else informed about art might suggest looking at the Asian theme in a lot of American twentieth-century art. If all sorts of negative misreadings result from the ‘empty-your-head-of-everything’ rhetoric in her statements and interviews, nevertheless it might be said that the results she comes up with in the studio are genuinely compelling. She isn’t afraid to be awkward. She allows these objects that appear at first to be Minimalism to be in fact mere paintings. She makes up everything again every time she starts a new one, returning to a painterly degree zero. Plus she really did suffer a severe mental collapse, and the six-foot-square works, and then the five-foot-square ones – as she got too old to handle the bigger ones – all followed on from her recovery from that breakdown. She lived alone in the desert. Madness and isolation are real factors in the meaning of her life and work. ar That’s right, there’s every reason to take her seriously as a one-woman art movement. fe But my reply is I’m not complaining about seeing something in a gallery that suggests a certain kind of art but fails to deliver according to the requirements of competence to judge that kind of thing. Instead, I’m registering that the thing I’m looking at doesn’t offer you much of a reason to look at it. The advice offered by her defenders is really about frameworks for thinking about why someone might have done something. And I think Asian ideas, schizo ideas, living-in-the-desert ideas, personal-authenticity ideas and so forth are all compelling, and I really like what they all add up to with her, as biography. If I didn’t have any interest in what things

in art are particularly, but I thought context is everything, I’d love those paintings. I’d go around loving every little incident in them, really feeling the schizo meaning, Asian meaning, connection-to-Cubism meaning: all the meanings. But I don’t, so that’s a shame. I look at the work, I see it’s got little to offer and I think, ‘Well that’s clear then.’ ar Aren’t you being a male chauvinist? fe I haven’t heard that phrase for a long time. Of course it still has meaning. But feminism is not such a simple battle that you can win it by saying anything by a woman is good. And it would be unfortunate if you had to ﬁght the whole war based on Martin’s slim achievement. You can see Griselda Pollock in her book on Mary Cassatt rather forcing the issue in that way with works that are clearly substantial but just as clearly not very amazing, if you think of the bigger picture of the history of forms. In any case the struggle that a feminist engagement with art appreciation is about is to challenge every single oversight regarding women creating art, and thereby change the picture of the past in order to alter the conditions of the present. But it is least effective with the elevation of godlike entities. No matter if it is Martin, Emin, Bourgeois or Kahlo. As if a deity appearing can clear up the whole problem. The eventual triumph will not be because of these few mirage victories up in the air where everything is dematerialised. ar What’s your problem with feminist revisionism? fe I have none. It directly connects artistic idealisation with social relations. But I would say that if it replaces criticism as such, then something important – perhaps even more important than feminism – is lost. ar I suppose you think Baselitz saying women can’t paint is ok? fe He is a good painter, but in interviews he talks surrealistic gibberish. When I refer to something more important than feminism, I mean art involves questions of humanity and so does feminism, but they’re not the same thing. A feminist appreciation of art doesn’t mean art is being appreciated as usual except that historic unfairness has been removed. It is a certain way of appreciation that must by necessity, because of the struggle, be biased, whereas the ﬁrst condition of criticism is freedom from bias. ar Are you thinking Martin ought to have done some good shapes and brushmarks? fe She did those, but they are not good enough. ar Compared to what? fe Everything else that has been and all that is.

ar Hang on, what’s the struggle again? fe Feminism is part of the greater struggle to make an improved form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. ar If you and Marx ever got round to writing a book about art, would it have been like Adorno and Greenberg going on about ﬂatness and about modern art being the same as old art but with irrelevant picturing taken out and an aesthetic buzz emphasised instead? Art for alienated people in their alienated apartments, compensating for isolation and loneliness with timeless indeterminate visual pleasure?

I was intrigued by the wall labels: their explanations for a general audience were crazily inept, as if the responsible curator was concerned about being too academic but swung too far the opposite way, to the point of being mostly either meaningless or banal… I was told Humphries’s paintings ‘are made with silver and black paint so that areas absorb and reflect light in dramatic contrast’. Doesn’t all paint reflect light, and wouldn’t silver and black next to each other in any situation amount to a contrast? fe Who knows? You write a book bit by bit, as it comes. I expect we’d carefully read people like Greenberg and Adorno, just as we’d take in everything Griselda Pollock has written, and we’d compose a lot of commentary on those texts, and then dialectically proceed from there. We’d probably reference a few shows we’d seen too, like the Martin show at Tate Modern, and a show of paintings done using spray cans that I liked very much at Gagosian. Oh yes, and a display called ‘Painting After Technology’ I also saw at Tate Modern. I spent much more time with that than the Martin. ar Why? fe I was intrigued by the wall labels: their explanations for a general audience were crazily inept, as if the responsible curator was concerned about being too academic but swung too far the opposite way, to the point of being mostly either meaningless or banal. The first

ArtReview

line of one, referring to a very good painting next to it, which had clearly been created by a process of improvisation, that is, without any pre-set composition, boldly declared, ‘Von Heyl works on each new painting without a pre-set composition’. Thinking, ‘Gosh, excuse me while I adjust my blindfold, which is apparently compulsory eyewear at all art exhibitions’, I progressed to a later announcement on the same label informing me that this artist ‘likes to play with our expectations about layering’. Do we have expectations of layers in the sense that playing with them implies a special meaning? In fact is it not just a simple matter that paintings by Charline Von Heyl are layered, as many paintings are? We have expectations of words, for example, that one will often follow another, but if a sign in Tate Modern by a door says only ‘Exit’, we don’t usually feel our expectations are being played with. Is it layers of paint that are being referred to, which many paintings of course have, or is it layers of meaning, which much art has like onions? Perhaps the Tate Modern curator has only recently heard the astonishing information that the practice of painting often involves layers but is still unsure what they are exactly. The label pushes the boat out with this line, at least so far as just listing things that anyone can see is concerned. But the boat’s full of holes. Then with Jacqueline Humphries, again a very good painter, I learned from the curator’s wall label that her paintings create ‘less stable light effects’ than ‘screens and tablets’, a kind of technology that has influenced her approach to painting, apparently, as it has, we are told, in the case of every artist whose work is included in the display – even though anyone can tell they’re all much more involved with issues of how to reorient painterly mark-making than they are concerned with computers and cameras. I was told Humphries’s paintings ‘are made with silver and black paint so that areas absorb and reflect light in dramatic contrast’. Doesn’t all paint reflect light, and wouldn’t silver and black next to each other in any situation amount to a contrast? And isn’t it for us, the viewers, to be the judge as to whether contrasts in the present case are dramatic or not? On yet another label in the same display I learned that ‘Abstract Expressionism was often associated with the heroic male painter, each brush-stroke supposedly a trace of his emotions’. A possible vulnerability here is the attribution of an idea that can’t be proved and is in fact obviously false to some other originator than the author of the sentence in which it is stated.

next month Athena, goddess of wisdom, on the merit of Ai Weiwei

12.15 NOV 2015 GRAND PALAIS

Other People and Their Ideas No 23

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an art historian and curator, having worked at New York’s moma ps1 and Turin’s Castello di Rivoli. After curating the sidney biennial in 2008, she became artistic director of Kassel’s documenta 13 in 2012. She is currently curator of the 14th istanbul biennial, which opens this month Interview by

Oliver Basciano

The Istanbul Biennial was founded in 1987. The last edition, curated by Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemc, was mired in political controversy and became the subject of repeated protests. Here, Christov-Bakargiev talks about traversing the city as a political act, topologies and her reading of Lacan

ArtReview

One overcast morning a few months back, I have an appointment to meet Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at an Istanbul ferry port. She arrives with the artists Ed Atkins and Heather Phillipson in tow. We board a ferry. Listening back to my recording, I hear Christov-Bakargiev’s voice ebbing and flowing against the constant chatter of fellow passengers, the occasional passing of a man selling hot, strong chai, the ferry’s tannoy and the constant chug-chug-chug of its engines. She weaves in and out of ideas, leaving a trail of references as she goes, and on occasion struggling to turn her natural curiosity back to plans for Istanbul. artreview So, where are we heading? carolyn christov-bakargiev I thought you might like to accompany us on a site visit. We are going to the island of Büyükada, southeast of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara, which will house works by about six artists in the biennale, including Ed’s work. He is seeing the building where he will show for the first time. Büyükada is where exiled emperors and kings sent their princesses to live. So even though Trotsky was there in exile more recently, for a thousand years earlier it has been an island for banished royals and aristocratics. This is earlier than the Ottomans; it goes back to Roman history. It’s a beautiful place, especially the architecture. There are buildings from the 1930s, 1940s, but mainly late 1800s, including the Mizzi Pavilion, one of the most important buildings [Raimondo] Tommaso D’Aronco designed. I was looking for a villa with a garden for Pierre Huyghe and I really wanted a Tommaso D’Aronco building, because it was the most avant-garde style in the 1900s. In the end Pierre won’t use it, but we will use the building instead for the work of an older Arte Povera artist – I won’t tell you who. The Mizzi Pavilion used to be a hotel. It’s not in a state of ruin – as is the house that Ed will be showing in. Trotsky probably came in here many times for tea or something. Giuseppe Garibaldi lived on Büyükada for a bit too. Büyükada will provide one of the further moments of the show; it will take the visitor three hours from end to end. You will have to take boats in the opposite direction from the middle of the city to reach the show. ar I assume that was a conscious decision to put the visitor at what might be thought of as an inconvenience? It seems to hark back to your curation of Documenta, which spread from its traditional base of Kassel to also include elements of the show in Afghanistan, in the cities of Kabul and Bamiyan. ccb With Documenta, the first point was to address an injustice in which the globetrotting artworld can go to biennales all over the place, but that people local to those places often

cannot. So I wanted to do part of Documenta where even the richest of artworlders could not get to. Afghanistan. Because you can’t get a tourist visa. You might have a private plane, but you can’t land it. We managed to persuade the German government to get visas for some of the artists to go for the sole purpose of discussing art with students at Afghani universities. It was about redressing an injustice because the students at Kabul University can’t get to Kassel, they can’t get a visa to Europe. There was another reason, however. You’ve heard me talk about partiality, right? I didn’t want the visitors in Kassel to have a sense of power over the exhibition, to have them carrying the guide and ticking off the works until they say, ‘I saw the show’. What does that mean, ‘I saw the show’?! Nobody sees anything. They can’t see their own birth, or their own death. They see nothing. It means nothing to say they saw

art versus private art. I’m not using the streets – Heather’s work will be in a hotel room. I like art that temporarily inhabits private spaces because it opens up a hole and entrance for the visitor that wasn’t there previously; it is like the visitor goes off the map, and that could be a catalyst for radical things. They are otherwise off the map. I think about Laura Poitras’s ﬁlm Citizenfour [2014] – Edward Snowden almost brought down a government from a hotel room. I don’t see the point of an artwork that is very political but placed in, say, Istanbul Modern. That’s preaching to the converted. It serves no purpose at all. But take a Morandi painting and put it in a library on a small island; that creates a hiccup in the normal chain of life.

I don’t see the point of an artwork that is very political but placed in, say, Istanbul Modern. That’s preaching to the converted. It serves no purpose at all. But take a Morandi painting and put it in a library on a small island; that creates a hiccup in the normal chain of life

ccb Everything is political. And I come from Arte Povera. All my real teachers were Arte Povera artists – Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz – Arte Povera was of course very political, but they were in a polemic against the explicit, contentdriven political artists like Victor Burgin and so on because they thought that was bourgeois. They believed in a politics of material, and in terms of the position of the spectator and a democracy of space and the relation to space. They, and feminism as well – not that they were feminists, but I bridge the two, I’m a feminist from formation – think that the revolution starts with the single individual and then the social revolution can come. If you don’t change how you sit at a table with your family, or how you love, or how you deal with the circulation of energy in the house, then how can you make a revolution that is any way real? So coming from that perspective it occurs to me that the truly political aspect of curating shows has to do with the time it takes to see a whole exhibition. Slowing down the viewer goes against the notion of speed or simultaneity that are capitalist notions. I’m thinking of Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 [2014] here – yet rather than just writing and reading a book about how we should slow down, we need to enact it. So taking this ferry is part of that plan.

the show. So I wanted to address the hubris of the power we think we have over images and the power over experience that the digital age seems to convey. The power of access. Access to what? Access to becoming detached from actual human bodies. ar This has resonance beyond the politics of art, and its consumption, presumably? ccb Art is not just an arm of globalisation; it opens up doubt, and extends possibilities within a civic society. I’m not interested in direct political statements or directly political artworks. But I think the existence of work and work disseminated in this way, not in one building but dispersed about the city along the Bosporous, has an agency. It has a transformative agency. It’s about the politics of form; you are experiencing something that is uncertain, is unequivocal or open. It’s not about public facing page Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Photo: Ilgın Erarslan Yanmaz

September 2015

ar You mention politics of form. You’ve written a book on Arte Povera, and Giuseppe Penone and Alighiero Boetti were included in Documenta. This is connected right?

ar Had you been to Büyükada before? ccb No, I came to meet Orhan Pamuk here, because this is where he stays during the summer. He is one of my advisers. ar You have various advisers for the Biennale – in the preliminary literature they are termed ‘alliances’, and among them is Huyghe, whom you’ve previously mentioned, William Kentridge, Cevdet Erek and Chus Martínez. Surrounding yourself with, I suppose,

interlocutors, again this is similar to the model that you used when curating Documenta. How does the relationship work in practice though? ccb Oh, it varies from each person to the next. Griselda Pollock, who is advising me for this show, was very speciﬁc, for example. She suggested two artists – two older women artists – one is Bracha Ettinger, whom I had worked with many years ago but I know more as a psychoanalyst and theorist. She was the person who wrote the theory of the ‘matrixial’, which I’ve quoted in various essays in the past, so to bring in her paintings seemed very natural to me. But I wanted her not just to show the paintings but to also record and read some of her theory. The other artist is Christine Taylor Patten, who is in her eighties and was one of the last assistants to Georgia O’Keeffe. She has been working on a project for the last 20 years called micro / macro [1997–], producing one little drawing for every year [since 1ad]. They are very small, detailed, and are almost like waves in as much as each one proceeds from the other. They are abstract thoughtforms. They are drawings that in some way refer to vibrations. Griselda thought of this work because she knew of my interest in thought forms. Patten is completely unknown bar a show at the Drawing Center in New York about a decade ago.

ccb The exhibition has a core, which encourages ﬂights of emancipation for the mind and the body. Within the core will be Lacan. In his last lecture Lacan dedicated himself to topology. His last seminar was titled ‘Topology and Time’ but it was never published, I believe at his daughter’s behest. It’s a very important development, however, which connects to my work on embodiment, because Lacan went from the diagrams that illustrate the relationship between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, to an attempt to somehow emerge from the language of the thought, which is the language of the symbolic. Freud published

ar So you will show his notebooks? How else will this theory make itself known in the biennial? ccb Yes, but the theory is there in the title of the show: Saltwater. The Bosporous is a saltwater river, and salt is the most dangerous weapon against digital technology. If you get water on it, you can dry it. You get saltwater on it and it will corrode the copper; from this I was thinking of it as a corrosive of the body. I was also thinking about the waves. It occurred to me that a wave is a line that wants to be a knot. It hits a peak and tries to turn in on itself…

ar Can you explain what you mean by thought forms? ccb A thought form is both a mental idea and a physical thing. It’s like a ghost. So for me a thought form is an artwork, a thought form comes from any kind of dissent. ar It is something that has affect? ccb Not affect, no. It operates in the space of imaginal. Do you know Henry Corbin? He was an Islamicist in Paris in the 1950s and picks up on the notion of ‘the imaginal’, which is the ghostly space between the real and the mental representational. There’s no binary; they exist together. This third membrane really comes from the Greeks – Aristotle uses the example of the mirror and the fact that the reﬂection is there in the world, yet it’s not a thing, but nor is it in the mind. At this point Christov-Bakargiev delves into her bag for a book. ccb You can help me pick the Lacan lines. ar What are they?

Topology allowed him to do that, not theory. Topology started in the uk, by the way, through Peter Tait, as well as Islamic aesthetics in terms of patterning and activating the gaze. So when he decides to go towards topology, the symbolic order and the imaginary become one, or the symbolic disappears. When you do topology, it has to be plausible. So you see these drawings, some of which we will show. Lacan may have been thinking Deleuze, though I can ﬁnd no reference to that, but he’s beginning to think about forms and the inside and outside of forms. Lacan tries to make Borromean knots that are incredibly complicated, and his whole last seminar is on knot theory, and I believe that this was not published because it moves from the idea that the subconscious is structured as a language, an idea which is antiLacanian. Lacan is somehow disarming his own theory, so for me these drawings present some kind of tension between, to be banal, our virtual lives and our lives as bodies that decay. Somehow it relates to that, and it relates to thought forms.

18 books, Lacan does 17 seminars, so Lacan has already done the shift from the written language to the spoken, so that is already a liberation in a way from power. Yet this orality is still based on the symbolic, so until he discovers topology, he can’t make the next step of liberating himself from the symbolic. Venues for the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Satellite image provided by Yandex. © cnes 2013, distribution Astrium Services

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We are staring out into the sea when Christov-Bakargiev interrupts her line of thought to excitedly point out a small rocky island, Hayırsızada, in the far distance. She launches into a story about how, at the turn of century, the Istanbul authorities rounded up the city’s 80,000 stray dogs, and after jettisoning plans to use the newly invented Zyklon B gas to exterminate them, deported them to this island. For months after, people could hear their howls. A typhoid epidemic and the 1915 earthquake occurred shortly after. Sensing bad omens, authorities brought the surviving dogs back. As she ﬁnishes the strange anecdote the boat is nearing Büyükada, where we will disembark. We will ride one of the island’s phaetons, and, in the rain, visit the ruins of the house Trotsky lived in during his exile.

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Ai Weiwei, Saâdane Aﬁf, Julieta Aguinaco, Abdullah Al Othman, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Justin Almquist, Benjamin Appel, Helene Appel, Florian Auer, Olga Balema, Marius Bercea, Benjamin Bergmann, Zander Blom, Katinka Bock, Martin Boyce, Jonathan Bragdon, Carina Brandes, Cäcilia Brown, Michał Budny, Peter Buggenhout, Nidhal Chamekh, Julian Charrière, Ivan Comas, Kate Cooper, Alice Creischer, Alexandra Croitoru, Natalie Czech, Björn Dahlem, N. Dash, Tobias Dostal, Felix Droese, Constant Dullaart, Keith Edmier, Henrik Eiben, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Ester Fleckner, Luca Frei, Günther Förg, Marilia Furman, Ryan Gander, Jeanno Gaussi, Thomas Geiger, Soﬁa Goscinski, Daniel Grüttner, Heather Guertin, Grit Hachmeister, Tobias Hantmann, Simon Cantemir Hausì, Iris Häussler, Mathilde ter Heijne, Robert Heinecken, Federico Herrero, Karl Holmqvist, Tilman Hornig, Li Jinghu, Michael Just, Günter K., Lukáš Karbus, Luisa Kasalicky, Felix Kiessling, Wilhelm Klotzek, Florin Kompatscher, Marlena Kudlicka, Felix Kultau, Sarah Kürten, Veit Laurent Kurz, Alicja Kwade, Annika Larsson, Matts Leiderstam, Simon Logan, Axel Loytved, Marin Majić, Dorit Margreiter, Michaela Melián, Alexej Meschtschanow, Caroline Mesquita, Ari Benjamin Meyers, John Miller, Li Ming, Philipp Modersohn, Matt Mullican, Wilhelm Mundt, Lada Nakonechna, Lydia Ourahmane, Lukas Quietzsch, Josh Reames, Mandla Reuter, Grit Richter, Mikko Rikala, Gerd Rohling, Max Ruf, Max Schaffer, Toni Schmale, Iris Schomaker, Marinella Senatore, Trevor Shimizu, Société, Simon Starling, Esther Stocker, Anton Stoianov, Tillmann Terbuyken, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Iris Touliatou, Ryan Trecartin, Luca Trevisani, Jonathan VanDyke, Marcelo Viquez, Jorinde Voigt, Jan Voss, Merete Vyff Slyngborg, Johannes Wald, Pae White, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Agustina Woodgate, He Xiangyu

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Brazil

Capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights 81

ArtReview

Tamar Guimarães by Stefanie Hessler

“I’m not so interested in history per se, or in historical records as such. But I’m very interested in the variables – in how any given thing, person or event will be perceived differently from a different perspective”

September 2015

above and facing page Canoas, 2010, 16mm ﬁlm transferred to digital, 13 min 30 sec preceding pages 15 1/2, 2013, slide projection with synchronised sound, 13 min 30 sec

ArtReview

September 2015

In 1951, modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer designed a residence for to offer luxury accommodation for the wealthy. Other themes ranged his family in Barra da Tijuca, on the slope of a hill overlooking the bay from the military dictatorship and nervous breakdowns to comments of Rio de Janeiro. In the home, which is called Casa das Canoas, large on the allegedly poor quality of Brazilian champagne, as delivered in glass windows provide an unhindered view through the curvilinear an improvisation by the (actual) French cultural attaché in Rio at the house and into the gardens. The flat roof protrudes from the building time. Dialogues are followed by scenes of dancing and silence. At the itself and casts shadows that invite its inhabitants to spend those end of the night, a group of black servants leaves the building as the hot carioca afternoons by the pool. The setting is a perfect projected sun begins to rise again. surface for tropical fantasies of glamorous events held by the Canoas confronts anthropologist Gilberto Freyre’s mythic characBrazilian upper middle class, and forms both the backdrop and the terisation of Brazil as an erotic paradise in which desire transcends theme of Tamar Guimarães’s work Canoas stratifications of class and race with a critique Canoas confronts the (2010). The 16mm film follows a party – from of precisely that structure upon which the country’s middle and upper classes have preparations to end – at the modernist estate, characterisation of Brazil relied since long before the 1950s, and coninspired by, among other things, Jacques Tati’s as an erotic paradise in tinue to rely today. However, it would be too Playtime (1967), in which the French filmwhich desire transcends easy to categorise Canoas as merely a critique maker depicts a night coming undone: from elegance to entropy. stratifications of class and race of class and race relations represented through In the time leading up to the 2010 Bienal the setting of the house. The film also calls de São Paulo, where Canoas was first exhibited, Guimarães invited into question the role of the political Left – and pays tribute to the a group of friends, politicians and professional actors – some of tangible attraction of the building. whom turned up, some of whom didn’t – to spend an evening at the Simultaneous critique and fascination are characteristic of house. Different eras, from the 1950s to today, appear to merge via Guimarães’s work. When we meet in Denmark, where she has lived clues provided by the clothing, the music and the topics of debate. since 2002, she explains how she finds inspiration in apparent contraGuimarães asked her guests to repeat things she had overheard them- dictions. Guimarães was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, in the selves and others say in conversations prior to the evening. The focus ‘interior’ of Brazil. The state is known for its baroque churches, and was primarily on architectural Modernism in Brazil, which, unlike in lacking a coastline of sandy beaches, it is not what foreigners typiother places, served less to supply housing for the masses and more cally imagine when they think of Brazil. Perhaps this fact, combined

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with her having lived abroad since 1987 – first on a kibbutz in Israel, frequent collaborator, the Danish artist Kasper Akhøj, following a later in Jerusalem, then Basel, London, Copenhagen, New York and commission for the Belgian Pavilion in this year’s Venice Biennale. again Copenhagen – allows Guimarães to confront subjects linked to It was one of my personal highlights of the exhibition. her native country from a position of distance. The sequence of short fables is an allegorical treatment of the Guimarães hardly finishes sentences when she speaks. Her narra- meeting between Western avant-gardes and non-Western cultures, tions spin off numerous ramifications, weaving a net of parallel and refers to Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928), a magical realist stories only to eventually come back full circle and go down the next novel representing pan-Brazilian culture and written in a combinapath. Her way of speaking reminds me of the parallel intersecting tion of Portuguese and indigenous languages. De Andrade’s story stories in Canoas, and of the Amerindian cosmology that anthropol- is centred around a ‘hero without a character’, who was born in the ogist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls ‘perspectivism’. This thinking jungle and possesses the ability to shape-shift. In short, that hero, considers what nonhuman-centred viewpoints might be, and con- Macunaíma, departs for São Paulo to retrieve a lost amulet, and after ceives of knowledge as unstable and constantly in flux. There are no an adventure-filled trip, returns to the forest. stationary positions, but only dynamic relations of mutual transforGuimarães and Akhøj’s bichrome video consists of a black backmation. Similarly, Guimarães repeatedly encircles her subjects via ground on which white text and geometric patterns appear in an ebb the use of different perspectives in order to look at how artefacts and and flow. The abstract lines extend to the wall installation, resemanecdotes travel through time. She lets a multitude of voices speak, bling a stylised garden in which faces, animals and trees overlap. It contradict each other and mutate. She tells me: “I’m not so interested is accompanied by clay vessels placed on the ground. Formally, the in history per se, or in historical records as such. But I’m very inter- video reminds me of João César Monteiro’s film Snow White (2000), ested in the variables: in how any given thing, person or event will be which evolves entirely on a black screen. Whereas Monteiro’s movie perceived differently from a different perspective – and time passing is completely deprived of visual imagery and accompanied by a dense is one of the key ‘perspectival modifiers’.” and associative audio track, in The Parrot’s Tail there is no sound, only A similar critique of the kind of dualistic Western thinking moving patterns and text. The writing hints at anthropologists such as Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Claude that divides humans from nonhumans above and face page Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, and culture from nature runs through the Lévi-Strauss, who have contributed to shaping The Parrot’s Tail (installation view, Belgian Pavilion, video and installation The Parrot’s Tail (2015), our image of Brazil. In describing flowers 56th Venice Biennale), 2015, video and mixed media. eaten raw and cooked, the fable points to the which Guimarães produced together with her Photo: Alessandra Bello

September 2015

irreconcilable binary oppositions of which Lévi-Strauss thought both of which results precisely from the Western nature–culture dualism. myth and the structure of the human mind are made up. Other lines In their own ways, artists including Melanie Bonajo, Pedro Neves allude to artists like South African-born Ernest Mancoba, a founding Marques, the Otolith Group, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, Daniel but largely forgotten member of the avant-garde European painting Steegmann Mangrané and Angela Melitopoulos – to mention a few – as well as curators and thinkers, from Anselm Franke to Karen Barad, movement CoBrA (1948–51). Throughout the videowork’s five variations of the tale, a shadow Jussi Parikka and Bruno Latour also work on and through these called ‘Half’ clings to the other characters like a poststructuralist dichotomies, from positions of the much-discussed Anthropocene dybbuk. When Half tries to turn into a cobra – a reference to the to object-oriented ontologies to dark ecology, or ‘ecology without transformations that occur in shamanistic rituals, and an aspiration nature’, as philosopher Timothy Morton calls it. of Surrealists and dissident Surrealists like CoBrA – he fails. He has When picking her subjects, Guimarães’s choice often falls on comtraded direct experience for a set of critical tools. A character called plex characters with fissures and blank spots. She chooses them over ‘One’ in turn stands for Mancoba’s universalism and constitutes people she admires, like her mother, who was part of the politically a counterpoint to Half, who cannot get out of the dualistic black- engaged movements during the military dictatorship, explaining: and-white thinking. In the last chapter of the video, Half meets a “My heroes would rot on the screen, I want to protect them.” One of talking bird, a nod both to anthropologist Viveiros de Castro and to these controversial characters is Francisco Cândido Xavier (1910– the parrot sitting on Macunaíma’s shoulder when he returns to the 2002), who worked as a civil servant and became one of the most imforest. Some of these cues may only be decipherable through contex- portant psychic mediums and psychographers of all time. Not only tual information. In fact, much of Guimarães’s work applies veiling did the dead speak through him, but he spoke to a large audience, as strategy. She asserts: “At what volume do you say something? writing over 400 books and becoming a well-known tv celebrity. In some contexts it will feel as if you are screaming, while in others A Man Called Love (2007/8) comprises a slide projection with a voicenothing much will be audible.” That said, the reflections on human over and subsequently a publication about Xavier, whose work as and nonhuman perspectives in The Parrot’s Tail are clearly perceptible. a psychic medium came to greatest prominence during the 1970s, concurring with the time of the military rule The work points to the need to renegotiate Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, in Brazil. Xavier desired, dreamt and wrote these divides to find new ways of thinking Captain Gervásio’s Family, 2013–14, 16mm film, 16 min about social utopias, which were potentially in the face of the ecological catastrophe, part

ArtReview

aligned with the left. However, he did so as someone who doesn’t capitalism or language. A Man Called Love and Captain Gervásio’s Family fight politically, but who attempts to arrive at paradise through astral revisit controversial figures who ought to be seen further, beyond bonuses – that is, through obedience, cooperation and deeds accruing (or in excess of) a set of symptoms of a society in disarray. in an ‘accounting system’, promising justice if not in this dimension, While the structure of our conversation is following the interthen in the next. woven encircling variations of themes in Guimarães’s work, we arrive Whether Xavier really spoke to the dead is of lesser concern to at the next logical subject, which is repetition. Or as she puts it: “To Guimarães than how he reimagined the state in a different light. be able to process something, you need a certain percentage of differXavier acted as a messenger from the state’s benign double, which ence, but also of repetition, otherwise it is not recognisable.” Her hovered nearby, informing and instructing its earthly counterpart interest in revisiting things, including her own work, comes from the below with wisdom from above. She calls him a “loving bureaucrat”, understanding that everything said is always a temporary suggesa description for someone who might have come straight out of a tion. During my visit, she quotes from Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Robert Walser story. Her interest lies in the manoeuvres through Saints (1981), which she is currently rereading: ‘For a scholar, a book is which a man who was born under precarious conditions acquired a far better seen not as a static monument, but as one step in a journey. All too often, when reading the books of our colleagues, we forget voice, and in who speaks through him – and who doesn’t. In their black-and-white 16mm film Captain Gervásio’s Family this. We freeze them.’ Guimarães veils, defers and delays so as not to (2013/4), Guimarães and Akhøj supply a second chapter to A Man Called arrive at a result too soon. For, once a conclusion is reached, there is no Love with a portrait of a spiritist community in Palmelo, where half further resonance. ar the inhabitants are psychic mediums. The film refers to a map drawn by a spiritist woman, outlining 20 astral cities that hover over Brazil Work by Tamar Guimarães is on view at Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt, Biel/Bienne, 27 September – 22 November; in 25 Years Casa Françaand are infinitely more perfect than any place on earth. Guimarães considers the work ethnographic science-fiction, not because of techBrasil, Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, through 20 September; in Ver-Revelar, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, nophile future visions, but due to the projection of other societies and spaces of living. In her understanding, 19 September – 9 January; and in I See So I See So. A Man Called Love, 2007–8, slide projection with voiceover, 20 min spiritism is no more a collective psychosis Message from Harry Smith, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 5 September – 20 December producing fantastical projections than either all images Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

September 2015

Poema / Processo How Brazil’s forgotten poetry movement fought a military dictatorship by combining politics, protest and the visual arts by Tobi Maier

A poema / processo action from the 1960s

ArtReview

Although it only lasted five years (1967–72), at its height, Brazil’s material (for example, paper, textile, glass, metal) and advocated the poema / processo movement counted as many as 200 to 350 poets notion of direct viewer interaction with the poem/object. Occurring (depending on the source) within its ranks. It’s a surprise, therefore, simultaneously to the emergence of process art in the us and Europe, that the collaborative work of its members, characterised by an em- poema / processo sought to invite a new participative reader, one ‘who phasis on shapes, images, colours, three-dimensionality and print- leaves behind his or her role as a passive, contemplative spectator in order to become an explorer of probabilities of the process, its strucmaking techniques, is today so unknown. The principal premise upon which poets Wlademir Dias-Pino, tural probabilities and operational solutions’, as one of the few female Álvaro Sá, Neide Dias de Sá, Moacy Cirne and Falves Silva set out in De- protagonists, Neide Sá, has put it. This was not just a case of exploring the formal qualities of poetry cember 1967 during the first national exhibition of poema/processo, at the Escola Superior for Industrial Design in Rio de Janeiro, was a qual- and the role the ‘reader’ takes for the sake of it; it had a political itative break with traditional, modernist and postmodernist poetry impetus. Poema / processo was born in the first decades of Brazil’s milithrough a radicalisation of language. In this respect it is analogous to tary dictatorship, and ‘it appeared with a very direct political critique’, the better-known development of concrete poetry. Yet it came also as Dias-Pino has said, affirming the movement’s creation as ‘a manifest a reaction to the hegemony of the concrete movement – championed political act’. Therefore, it can be considered not only an important in Brazil by Décio Pignatari and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de milestone within the development of poetry and publishing in Brazil Campos in São Paulo, who, through their strong connection with the but also a key moment within the countercultural history of the Ulm School of Design and figures like Max Bill and Eugen Gomringer, country. This critical voice crystallised in the public actions that took dictated the kind of Brazilian visual poetry that was to proliferate place in parallel to the collaborative publishing that was the mainstay internationally. With this in mind, the simultaneous launch of the of the movement. At the exhibition that occurred on the occasion of poema / processo manifesto Proposição-1967 and exhibitions staged in the launch of the movement, Neide Sá pegged photos to a washing Rio de Janeiro and the northeastern city of Natal can be seen as a care- line in her work A Corda (1967), creating various subversive juxtaposifully planned act of pr. The manifesto advocates the visualisation of tions such as placing an image of a general next to a picture of a gangstructure and reading processes, it propagates the nondefinitive (so no ster. In Rio de Janeiro in 1968 and in the Minas Gerais municipality judgements of good or bad) and ideas of optionality and participation; of Pirapora in 1969 literature students organised protest walks under it favours ideas of communication over contemplation. the name of poema / processo. Some of their banners carried slogans critical of the dictatorship, which The roots of all this can be traced naturally attracted the attention beyond the movement’s official start, Occurring simultaneously to the to what is credited as being the earliof the police. emergence of process art in the us and est artist book in the history of BrazilDuring poema /processo’s second Europe, poema /processo sought national exhibition, at the Escola ian art: A Ave (1948–56), published by Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Dias-Pino in an edition of 300, of which to invite a new participative reader no one copy was identical to another. Janeiro, a so-called rasga-rasga act hapIn A Ave each page consists of two sheets of paper featuring perfora- pened on the stairs of the municipal theatre in Rio de Janeiro in tions (resembling the aesthetics of computer punch cards), folds and January 1968. Various of the key figures from the movement ripped coloured pages. Leafing the pages, the viewer, by means of the punched apart books by traditional discursive poets such as Carlos Drummond holes, can already gauge the colour and content of the following page. de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Alvaro Sá referred to the A Ave exemplies the kind of circular reading that appears in electronic ripping of the poems as analogous to ‘ripping laws’ – a protest against media. Its integrated circuits play with reading, launching words in the military dictatorship. From then on, members of poema / processo minuscules and majuscules that don’t obey the laws of grammar. The were frequently harassed and searched by the police, and the group poem ‘auto-generates’ itself. A Ave was a book that, for the first time was eventually forced into a tactical stop in 1972, concluding the activin Brazil, radically assumed its structural condition as book-manu- ities of the movement with an optional future action, under new sociofactured-as-object /poem, and not as a mere support or container for political circumstances. poems and literary texts. Many of the artists of the poema /processo movement are still In general, though, Brazil’s sprawling network of visual poets active today, though the movement as such never took off again. tended to publish in anthologies, and alongside their 1967 poema / Falves Silva in Natal has shifted his attention, working within the processo manifesto issued their first official publication, Ponto (Point), popular realm of quadrinhos (comics). Dias-Pino, poema / processo’s with a second edition the following year, which featured different most active protagonist, continued with A Marca e o Logotipo Brasileiros positions from visual poets such as Dailor Varela, Anselmo Santos, (Brazilian Brands and Logos, 1974), a substantial and unnumbered publiAnchieta Fernandes and Ariel Tacla. The two publications were sent cation on branding design in Brazil. For an open-ended visual encyclopaedia, Dias-Pino created 1,001 categories (city, Egypt, Christ, art, by mail to hundreds of Brazilian and foreign poets. Poema / processo differentiates radically from the more structured event, for example), collects images and illustrations from a variety of and text-based visual poetry of the concrete poets. Where they rigidly sources (books, manuals, advertising pamphlets) and stores them in insisted on the use of typography alone, the new movement was based a library of white boxes. A work always in process, he says, the visual on semiotic research and moved away from mere verbal, chronolog- encyclopaedia can at no time be exhibited. Perhaps it is also due to ical and alphabetically structured readings. In place of these it sought the concealed production of its protagonists that 50 years after its out processes and languages that might be considered more open- founding poema / processo has not yet received a proper retrospective ended. Accordingly, its poems could be produced on any physical exhibition in this country. ar

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Neide Dias de Sá, A Corda (detail), 1967. Photo: Roberto Moriconi. Courtesy the artist

A poem by Falves Silva, title and date unknown. Courtesy the artist

A page from Wlademir Dias-Pino’s artist book A Ave, 1948–56. Courtesy the artist

A poem by Falves Silva, title unknown, 1976, 48 × 33 cm. Courtesy the artist

Mônica Nador by Claire Rigby

Despite what you read in the newspapers, art isn’t all about the money. At least not for one pioneering artist who abandoned the market and took to the streets, bringing the residents of a down-at-heel São Paulo district with her for the ride 96

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Mônica Nador lives at the end of the line. And then some. Reaching the community in terms of art and culture, and settled on the model jamac, the community arts space that she founded in 2004 and that of continuing education that jamac embodies to this day, as a nondoubles as her home, involves a metro ride to Jabaquara, the last stop profit entity running arts-based workshop classes for adults. Funding on the north–south, Linha 1–Azul line, followed by a 6km taxi ride for jamac comes from various, mainly governmental sources – to the bairro of Jardim Miriam, deep in south São Paulo’s vast urban mostly Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, thanks to jamac’s status, as of sprawl. Along the way, the city’s concrete jungle skyline dwindles into 2010, as a ‘Ponto de Cultura’: a designated cultural hub. The centre an arid, low-lying concrete scrubland, and as we draw closer to jamac, also makes some income from its wall-painting projects, and Nador the taxi driver frets about motorbike bandits and general thievery adds personal funds to the extent that she is able, “which is not in Jardim Miriam, a neighbourhood in which more robberies were that much.” reported in December 2014 than in any other part of São Paulo. Born in 1955, Nador graduated from São Paulo’s elite faap univerNear a busy high-street dotted with shops and spit-and-sawdust sity in 1983 and quickly found success as a painter, holding her first bars, the Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (jamac), an independent commu- solo show that same year and taking part in multiple group shows nity art-hub and arts-based adult-education centre, lies behind a wall and exhibitions. She was well connected from the start – her father adorned with panel after panel of vividly colourful, hand-stencilled was an art lover, a painter himself and a leading light in local cultural patterns. Inside, through a green door and past a long, sunny patio politics; and her contemporaries and friends at faap included some lined with workbenches, the artist is drinking coffee at a table in her of the most important figures in Brazilian art today, among them spartan living space: a covered patio with a tiny bedroom leading off Leda Catunda, Jac Leirner, Sérgio Romagnolo, Dora Longo Bahia, Ana it, and a small kitchen and lavatory that are also used by the students Maria Tavares and Leonilson, and the gallerist Luciana Brito, who curwho come to jamac for courses in stencil, screenprinting and film- rently represents Nador. making. The Saturday-morning cinema workshop is starting up as The landmark 1984 exhibition Como Vai Você, Geração 80? (How are we speak, and some of the students drift in to greet Nador with a kiss. you doing, 80s generation?), held at the School of Visual Arts at Parque She first came to the neighbourhood in 2002 to carry out a set of Lage, Rio de Janeiro, featured works by Nador, Tavares, Catunda, wall paintings, one of a series of such proLeonilson and Romagnolo, among many jects she has been taking into Brazilian others, including Beatriz Milhazes, whose “I wanted to stay close to Brazil communities for almost 20 years, helping exuberant canvases are now among the and Brazilians, but I felt very distanced residents to develop their own motifs and most highly valued of any living Brazilian from that inside the mainstream art artist. While Milhazes’s work, recalls patterns, create their own stencils and deNador, already showed a highly decoracorate their homes, schools, parks, hospicircuit… no one seemed to want tive bent, featuring cherubs and curlitals and streets with swathes of colourful to set foot in the places, here in Brazil, cues, Nador showed a series of dark, dense patterning. ‘What the artist is offering’, where people actually live” curator Ivo Mesquita has said of Nador large-scale graphite drawings, Campos ‘is the possibility to realise the contem(Fields). In her Campo 6 (1983), a multitude porary practice of painting as a borderless, hierarchy-free territory.’ of short, insistent lines surge across the paper in tight-packed, systemReferring to one of the first of such projects, in 1998 in Nilo Peçanha, atic columns; a dark mass that seems lit from behind by a soft, insistent northeastern Brazil, in which the artist asked residents to paint a wall glow made by minuscule gaps between the strokes. with images representative of local culture – masks and drums were These stormy works subsided as Nador moved into a mid-to-laterecurring motifs – Nador wrote, ‘I thought the public should play a 1980s period of painting warm, richly colourful works like those in larger role. After all, those people would definitely not need one more the series Um Bom e Velho Monocromático (A Good Old Monochrome, 1989), “foreigner” showing off their wisdom and talent as opposed to their in which fields of colour, often built from rough, jerkily gestural strokes, are bordered by neatly patterned, painted ‘frames’. In the own local misery and ignorance.’ Explaining the decision not only to put down roots in the form of series Para Orar (To Pray), and A Arte (The Art), also from the late 80s, jamac, but also to move to Jardim Miriam herself, Nador tells me that Nador demonstrates a growing interest in Islamic imagery, incorposhe “became tired of doing projects, forging connections, and then just rating shapes and motifs reminiscent of the style, and creating sumpleaving again…I wanted to stay close to Brazil and Brazilians, but I tuously toned forms, mandalalike, that twist and swirl like dervishes. felt very distanced from that inside the mainstream art circuit.” In São Nador’s initial interest in the style was sparked when she was treated Paulo, much of the talk in the artworld was of exhibitions and events in for a medical condition in a house decorated with Turkish forms and farflung places like London, Madrid, Tokyo and Dhaka, she says. “But motifs. Contemplating an ornate ceiling with beautiful plaster mouldno one seemed to want to set foot in the places, here in Brazil, where ings that had been painted beige, spoiling the work, Nador began to explore “chromatic solutions” for the ceiling, and soon found traces people actually live.” Prior to the founding of jamac, in a display of the kind of radical of Islamic-style art infiltrating her own work. “I became interested in social empathy that appears, says Nador, to have gone out of fashion what for me became the loveliest expression of human culture – a kind these days, she and a small group of kindred spirits – architects, of true excellence in artistic expression.” Her discovery of the style’s ornate, harmonious forms also coincided artists, urbanists – initiated a long period of discussion with Jardim Miriam residents and activists, among them feminists, militant metal- with a sea change in her spirits. As we leaf through the pages of a book workers and members of Brazil’s landless movement, about her work, Nador halts at the dense black mass facing page Para Meca, 1989, Movimento Sem Terra. The meetings moved, step by of Campo 6. “That’s the way I was,” she says. She flips acrylic on canvas, 200 × 150 cm. step, towards a vision of what might most benefit Courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo forward to A Arte (1988), an ornate, surging mandala

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both images jamac, São Paulo, 2015. Courtesy Claire Rigby

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in shades of pink and blue: “This is what I became.” The change, she What about her own work – does she still make paintings of her says, was due to her discovery of Rolfing, an alternative medical treat- own, beyond the works made collectively during jamac’s projects ment focusing on hands-on bodywork and movement training, which and workshops? Nador crosses to a long, low cabinet and comes back marked a turning point in her life as well as in her art. “There was a with two beautiful lithographs made during a 2014 residency at the before,” she says, “and there was an after.” The ‘before’ included many Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A stylised house years of bulimia and depression, the latter still present but kept at bay motif discernible in one was, she says, made at Tamarind the previous at different times by remedies including complementary medicine, year by a resident from Botswana. Does it matter that the motif was Prozac and assiduous use of marijuana. “It helps me find my axis, and created by someone else? Is some level of shared authorship an inesstops me acting neurotically,” she says. “It helps me to be here.” capable part of her work now? She finds the question odd. “I liked the Being in Jardim Miriam has never been simple for Nador, and it image,” she says. “I’ve always used other elements – Islamic patterns, isn’t simple now, ten years on. From inside her bedroom, where two and so on. They’re ready. They’re beautiful. I don’t feel the need to cats are snoozing the day away, a small window looks through into make a new one. That’s the way it appears to me, it’s the choice I make. the main workshop, and we stand and peer through for a moment, We live with what’s possible.” She laughs, then looks serious again. watching the film class in full swing, unseen. “These days, I sometimes “If I was doing any other job,” she says, “I’d be mad.” feel like I’ve become superfluous,” she says. “I’m not even sure whether She would paint more, she says, “But my work doesn’t sell. I can’t I still need to be here.” understand why. A gallerist once told me, ‘Everyone knows that it’s Nador has repeatedly set herself rigorous challenges. In 1995 she the artist who really does the selling.’ So as well as making the work, I began a masters degree at eca-usp, the University of São Paulo School have to sell it as well, and still give half to them? I can’t seem to relate to of Communications and Art, under the tutelage of the artist Regina gallerists.” Nevertheless, barely a year goes by without Nador’s work Silveira, who introduced her to the 1981 essay ‘The End of Painting’ being shown in a major exhibition of some description. Over the years, by the us art-historian Douglas Crimp. In it, Crimp asks, ‘To what she has shown her work at most of São Paulo’s major institutions end painting in the 1980s?’, casting the medium and those who cham- and galleries, including at Galeria Vermelho, Galeria Luisa Strina, Casa Triângulo and her home gallery, pion and profit from it as ‘reactionary’ in Luciana Brito; at the mac, the mam, the contrast to art practices of the 1960s and Nador didn’t paint another canvas Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the Pinacoteca 70s, which, Crimp wrote, ‘abandoned for the next ten years; and yet in 1996, painting and coherently placed in quesand masp – the city’s major institutional tion the ideological supports of painting, following a commission to create a wall players; and at the biennales of Sydney and the ideology which painting, in turn, (2004), Havana (2000), São Paulo (1983, painting at São Paulo’s Museum 1991, 2006) and Gwangju (2012). She will supports’. Profoundly affected by the of Modern Art, she alighted on the idea travel to Puerto Rico to take part in the text, Nador herself abandoned painting. of working as part of a group iv Poly/Graphic San Juan Triennial, and “It paralysed me,” she says. Her artistic a shared-authorship exhibition of her practice was, she realised, being channelled into a system that worked to create artificial constructs around work and jamac’s was held in January at Paço das Artes, a gallery inside it, aimed at “proving I was a ‘real artist’. I felt like my creativity was the University of São Paulo. She is also currently working on a project being diverted, only to be buried. I didn’t want to connive with my in central São Paulo, leading a team to unearth decorative elements from a stunning, semiderelict 1920s mansion, part of the Vila Itororó class in that process.” Nador didn’t paint another canvas for the next ten years; and yet in complex, which is in the process of becoming a new cultural hub. 1996, following a commission to create a wall painting at São Paulo’s We linger over a set of lithographs she and others made the previous Museum of Modern Art, she alit on the idea of creating large-scale day, in which an abstract pattern is printed first in dusty brown, then works as part of a group. For Nador, the remedy for the death of the the paper turned 90 degrees and the pattern overlaid again in a rich author/painter, and for the futility of the market-driven art machine, cerise. The juxtaposition of the shapes and colours in one particular became shared authorship and the creation of socially useful art. She print is spectacular, resonating with the perfection of a two-part spent the next few years carrying out wall-painting projects in commu- harmony. Nador stares at it, transfixed. “It’s magic when this happens. nities in São Paulo. This is why we do it, this is the reason for the patterns in Islamic art – In the main workshop space at jamac, where the film workshop is it’s how the universal order works. It’s searching for God, it’s a matter still underway, Nador reaches into a rack to pull out bolt after bolt of of mathematics, it’s a way to align your head,” she says. It’s clear, also, hand-printed fabric, made in jamac’s workshops. She whispers the that art has been Nador’s way of trying to align far more than her own stories behind the motifs covering the rolls of cloth, some of them head. Having first used it to explore darkness and then a lighter, more printed on various swatches, in multiple formations and colour optimistic brightness, she has carried it along with her all the way, from combinations. A turtle motif swarms a length of chocolate-brown and what felt like the art market’s betrayal of her creativity into a transformmidnight-blue fabric, and is strewn across a cream swatch in dreamy ative, deeply committed present day, pressing it into action in order to greys and pinks. It was created by an older woman, says Nador. “She enact social change. Everyone has convictions; few possess the courage wanted to draw a turtle,” she says, “but she’s illiterate, and had never to live them. Deep in Jardim Miriam, a speck on the map in South been taught how to hold a pencil. It took her ages, but she managed it.” America’s largest metropolis, Nador is quietly doing just that. ar Other fabrics are decorated with stylised trees, fruits, drums and abstract patterns. They are beautiful, bold, exquisitely coloured and Mônica Nador’s work is included in the iv Poly/Graphic San Juan, Triennial, 24 October – 27 February skilfully printed.

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Ivan Grilo By taking some of the less-travelled routes through the story of Latin America, resisting its certainties while accepting its confusions, one artist is reconstructing history as something useful rather than oppressive by Oliver Basciano

Ivan Grilo is a chaser of histories. Frethree framed images of a three-mast quently he’ll chance upon a tale, a fact, galleon were hung higgledy-piggledy, a snippet of information, and seize the each with half their glass etched so that opportunity to investigate. This will that section of the image is blurred take him across Brazil, from his home in (Studies on Possible Shipwrecks, 2013). These Itatiba, in the state of São Paulo, delving works and their companions alluded to into local archives, investigating halfa story, that much was clear – narratives forgotten museums and, most imporcould be pulled out, a geography came tantly, hearing the stories of those he into focus, assumptions could be made – meets along the way. When I spoke to but, for the viewer, a deﬁnitive tale him recently, for example, he began couldn’t be ascertained. telling me about an island someone had Looking for a clue, one might perhaps have turned to the portrait of a told him about, off Paraty, on the coast between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, young man, in sixteenth-century aristowhere slave owners used to send the cratic dress; but it’s faceless, the scant slaves that were unﬁt to work. Grilo couldn’t say too much more on image formed by stamped numbers counting out its title, 2987 Times the project. It was still in its infancy, yet he intuited a thread there I Waited for You (2013). This chap is in fact Prince Dom Sebastião, King that, if pulled on, could lead to something more. This is how all his of Portugal and the Algarves from 1557 to 1578. His father died 18 projects start. They end, however, in gallery shows of discrete photo- days before his birth, and so Dom Sebastião, age three, assumed the graphic and sculptural elements – elegant materialisations of his Portuguese throne. In 1578, the king, now of age, organised a crusade research trips – that coalesce to hint at strange new versions of the to North Africa with 500 ships and 20,000 men. In the midst of combat, historic narratives that inspired them. folklore has it that a fog descended on the Moroccan region of AlcácerTake Grilo’s 2013 exhibition at Luciana Caravello in Rio de Janeiro, Quibir; when it lifted, Portugal had lost almost half its soldiers and Feeling Blindness. Here, a satellite photo of a coastline was covered the king had disappeared, his body never to be recovered. From that with Plexiglas (On the Seas I Have Been, 2013); a large photograph of point Portugal, then a global power, is said to have entered a state a sand dune, printed on cotton paper, was attached to a board by of permanent decline. Such was the mourning for this lost internathe top two corners, a fan placed a few metres tional standing that a cult awaiting the return 2987 Times I Waited for You, 2013, of Dom Sebastião (subsequently nicknamed in front causing the print to ripple in the subink stamps on paper, 100 × 65 cm. sequent breeze (Wind Against the Pier, 2013); and ‘The Desired’) arose. Courtesy the artist

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top Concealing Luck, 2013, print on cotton paper, sand, 52 × 42 cm. Courtesy the artist bottom Wind Against the Pier, 2013, fan, print on cotton paper, 180 × 350 × 250 cm. Courtesy the artist

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The place depicted in Feeling Blindness is not Portugal, however, or form of archival photographs presented in various ways – including Alcácer-Quibir, but the Ilha dos Lençóis in the northeastern Brazilian in vitrines and, again, behind etched glass – together with a brass state of Maranhão. Here, the fervour for Dom Sebastião lives on, and plaque and an architectural installation in which a new spiral stairlocal legend has it that the king reigns over the island from an under- case connected the main gallery with its mezzanine. The latter recrewater castle. Grilo’s research does not attempt to sort fact from fiction: ated a set of spiral stairs designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi for her rather, ostensible hierarchies between oral histories, legends, primi- Solar do Unhão Museum in Salvador; indeed, Bo Bardi (an increastive beliefs and the sort of primary sources that historians have tradi- ingly venerated figure in Brazilian art) and the time she spent traveltionally relied on – photographs, letters, public records – are presented ling through the northeastern states of the country were the subject in a state of ongoing collapse. In Feeling Blindness the opaqueness of the of approximately half the works here (an earlier body of work based storyline is intentional and mirrors the process of research, in which on this subject was produced for Grilo’s presentation at the 2013 FotoBienalMasp at the Museu de Arte facts and narratives are often sought through a mist of confusion, in which de São Paulo). The other half, following It might be considered that Grilo misinformation can be as telling as fact. is experimenting with something akin on from a series of works made for a solo show, Quando Cai o Céu, at Centro Grilo’s work in Feeling Blindness seems, to useful fiction: revealing strange, Cultural São Paulo in 2014, followed in additionally, less a question of trying to the footsteps of folklorist, musicologist tell the historic story per se than of constructed historical models narrating the artist’s explorations and and poet Mário de Andrade, another weaving his own experiences into the old legend. So while the fan figure crucial to Brazil’s modern identity. De Andrade also undertook and the hang of the nautical images conjure Dom Sebastião’s journey, many research trips through Brazil’s northern states – not least for his they also refer to the sensory experience of Grilo’s own boat trip. 1928 epic work of proto-magical realism, Macunaíma – but what was to Chronologies, researcher and subject, and fact and fiction become as be his final project was cut short when he was fired from his position blurred as the images behind etched glass that so frequently appear at the Department of Culture following the installation of President in Grilo’s work. Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian ‘New State’ in 1937. Grilo’s work stems His most recent solo exhibition, I Want to See, at Casa Triângulo, from a trip to the state of Bahia and is, the artist says, an attempt to São Paulo, in April this year, saw the intermingling of the results of finish de Andrade’s project: it includes various archive ethnographic two discrete research projects, which while conphotographs, found during Grilo’s research. Avant-garde na Bahia, 2015, book, Plexiglas, wood, Estudo para Movimentos Circulares #1 (2015), for tinuing the methodology of research carved aluminium support, 36 × 29 × 5 cm. instance, is a photographic print depicting out in Feeling Blindness were both subtly more Photo: Edouard Fraipont. political. Works from these projects took the two women dancing, displayed behind etched Courtesy Casa Triângulo, São Paulo

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Plexiglas; in Os Heróis da Liberdade #2 – Zumbi dos Palmares (2015), a print following a central government crackdown on his insurrectionary of an old archive photograph with all the colour digitally removed, preaching). All these characters – Bo Bardi, de Andrade, Rugendas, we see a murky image of a group of freed slaves. Zumbi, Conselheiro – coexist within the show like characters in a The title of the 2015 exhibition stemmed from a lyric in Jorge strange play that looks a little like Brazilian history, but has been Ben’s Zumbi (1974), in which the Brazilian musician sings, “Eu quero muddled, transformed and regenerated. Dates become confused; ver quando Zumbi chegar, o que vai acontecer” (“I want to see when chronologies begin to lose meaning. True to Grilo’s disinterest Zumbi arrives, what is going to happen”). The selection suggests in a linear sense of time – in favour of one in which histories are that the artist himself wants to see what unpredictable narra- looped, remixed and never presented didactically – the phototive will emerge when two apparently separate histories collide. graph of Conselheiro could either be a document of the statue being The lyric from which the title derives also refers to what links the erected or of it being taken down. While Grilo’s work has centred two projects, the northeastern states of Brazil, where the country’s on Brazilian history, this, he says, is only by virtue of circumstance. African heritage can be felt most strongly. Zumbi was the leader of Yet it owes much to the sense of Brazil being made up of many dispathe Quilombo dos Palmares, a seventeenth-century resistance group rate, commingling histories. It also can be seen as working within of escaped slaves that roamed the region, and he is just one of various the legacy of magical realism and its rejection of Western concepts of other tangential ﬁgures who make themselves known through the linear time in favour of Amerindian culture’s spiritual transgression works. Another, Johann Moritz Rugendas, the German painter who of spatial or temporal bounds. In Grilo’s hands, historic documents travelled throughout Brazil in the early nineteenth century, is refer- are released from the restrictions of academia and given new guises enced in a text-based work on paper, Onde estão os homens? (depois de and alternative lives. This is all undoubtedly entertaining – Grilo is Rugendas) (2015), in which Grilo has removed the faces from a repro- a gifted storyteller – but has serious ends too. It might be considered duction of Rugendas’s drawn ‘taxonomy’ of African slaves, leaving that Grilo is experimenting with something akin to useful ﬁction. just the original corresponding captions attesting to their country He reveals these strange, constructed historical models so that they might have a role to play in understanding or changing society. The and tribe of origin. From a book included in Bo Bardi’s archive, displayed in the exhi- heroes of Grilo’s recent narratives, or his reminders of their existence, bition inside a vitrine, Grilo has removed via scalpel all the images are perhaps even more pertinent to a country whose black citizens are, bar one, in which one sees, grasped by a winch on the back of a on the whole, poorer and more likely to experience police harassment truck, a statue of Antônio Conselheiro, a quasior be the victims of homicide. Indeed, Grilo’s Estudo para Movimentos Circulares #1, 2015, print on cotton messianic leader who formed a commune of exart is not about history because it has happened, paper, engraving on Plexiglas, wood, 100 × 100 cm. slaves in the later nineteenth century (before but rather it is about a version of history that Photo: Edouard Fraipont. his death, partly brought on by severe fasting, might be of use to the present. ar Courtesy Casa Triângulo, São Paulo

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Gustavo Speridião by Oliver Basciano

Rio de Janeiro-based Gustavo Speridião’s work harnesses painting (often hung off stretchers, in which text and abstraction and pictorial representation freely intermingle) to, variously, photography, collage and drawings, often featuring words, pictures and mark-making atop existing media. As a body of work, it is an unashamedly polemical but nonetheless often humorous and cheeky response to prevailing capitalist hegemony and the free market economy. The preceding pages contain a project the artist has created for ArtReview. artreview Where do the images you have used here come from? Are the slogans of your own making? Or are they direct quotes? gustavo speridião These photos were taken by me in Berlin, at the beginning of the global economic crisis in 2008. The slogans are my creations, based speciﬁcally on the writings of Marx, Trotsky and Joseph Conrad. ar The project for ArtReview is similar to an earlier work, The Great Art History [2005–13], in which images from the Life magazine archive are drawn and written on. But here you took the photographs yourself. What is the relationship between the two projects? gs The use of poetic interventions (words, drawings or blotting) over the archive images is a constant feature of my work, but as you say, in this instance all the images are of my authorship. Nevertheless, my research does not concentrate on the origin of the images. I’m not seeking a debate over authorship of the images; what interests me is the possibility of altering the image/word relations. ar I’ve seen The Great Art History as both a wall work (at the Lyon Biennial in 2013) and as a book (at an exhibition Maria Montero curated in 2014 at Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo). Does the context of publishing your work as a project within a magazine have an effect on it? Was it something you considered? gs I think that is a great question. I’m only taking this job, for a commercial magazine affirmative of the global art market, so I can send out my political message: destruction of the bourgeoisie. for the end of all classes. to free humankind from all forms of oppression. we are all clouds.

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And also to show the image of Marx and Engels, still not much appreciated by the bourgeois and their intellectuals. Of course what you will find in these preceding pages is an attitude of intentional propaganda, just as the magazine is propaganda for the neoliberal cultural market. I see this space as if it were the wall of a business centre ready to be tagged. ar Does the neoliberal cultural market consume everything, even protest against it, though? Can you resist it? gs I find that yes, the cultural market (not only in neoliberalism) consumes everything; for beyond being profitable, the acceptance of rebels strengthens important concepts of bourgeois democracy, like freedom of expression and the autonomy of the artist, which are advanced and very progressive concepts of the modern era. To accept opposition is a sophisticated concept and a more efficient means of ideologically winning people over for capitalism (ultimately ideas, not armies, uphold systems and regimes). The only form of censorship in which the art market engages is that of sales; if he or she does not create profit, the artist will not exist. Personally, I see myself as a visual arts worker, and therefore I have both the market (fairs, galleries and collectors) and the state (public grants/competitions, museums and universities) as my ‘bosses’. In relation to culture, the bourgeois state works in partnership with the market, and it’s increasingly difficult to separate the two. The result is public money for private ends. It is not possible to resist this gigantic political and economic mechanism by culture alone. But the market sees profit and the public (the spectator) sees the poetics. So I think that resistance is in this relationship with the spectator. Resistance is possible in the domain of creation: by not submitting one’s own poetics to the wishes of the market; by not being alienated from one’s own role as an individual in history; by not accepting any form of censorship and constantly denouncing it when it occurs; and by always being on the side of the only class that has the means to revolutionise the world and therefore art: the working class. ar Your recent show at Anita Schwartz in Rio de Janeiro was hung interestingly – some works were framed, others pinned to the wall. There was a

ArtReview

provisional nature to it, rather like the haphazard scanning in this project. What was the thinking behind this? gs Just as I have used the raw canvas on the wall, to make evident the support, with no mechanism of making up the object, such as chassis or frames, here I have used the scanner to make evident the materials used – photographs, photos, pencil and pen – and to distinguish my work from the rest of the magazine, from that ‘clean’ and ‘no edges’ aesthetic standard of the regular visual programming. It indeed works in a haphazard way, with a zine aesthetic. I often seek the rawness of the materials I work with, with no adornment. ar How does the political history work alongside the art history? gs In my opinion, all art history is actually a political history of art also, yet it is not called so because there is an idea (a wrong one) of autonomy in the aesthetic sphere. The current concept of art is still the art concept of the bourgeois: objects or attitudes of commercial value. The artistic avant-garde only appears after the political vanguards. Art history is the history of class struggles, as well. ar Can art be an effective means of protest? Is this an aim with your work? gs Art is an effective means of protest against the system, as long as we understand the limitations of the term ‘effective’. Artists do protest, and take on political stances, through their artistic production. These are symptoms of political crisis. It is an effective means of protest in the sphere of ideas, not in the sphere of action. Yet there is a tendency, historically observable, in which this kind of protest through art is absorbed by capitalism, as it is ﬂexible enough to devour like a phagocyte all that is superﬁcially antagonistic to it. What is much harder for capitalism to phagocytically devour are actions such as general strikes, alternate means of exerting political power and revolutionary movements. I believe that a work of mine that contains a protest (the one herein as an instance) is no more than a sign of indignation with reality. I believe that this feeling that permeates my works will be more effective using political tools, not only aesthetic ones, that can bring about action. ar

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Capitalism is generally characterised by competition between producers 115

Conservatism

The relationship of artworks to function; the construction of newness and oldness; the ‘traditional’ role of the artist; and the role of context (or a lack of one) by Pablo Bronstein

The Great Stairs of Chatsworth House, viewed from the Painted Hall. Photo: Paul Barker. Courtesy Chatsworth House Trust

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In the traditional distinction between architecture and art, all archi- garden-room prints for queens living in the Hamptons. Either a world tecture is underlined by a contract in which the client/architect rela- of irrelevant, labyrinthine premodern pedantry, or a world of superfitionship is declared. This is what is called a brief. Even the most cial Europhiles and their scatter cushions. It should go without saying outlandish-looking hypothetical projects by Ettore Sottsass or that in order for something to be traditional, strictly speaking it must Archigram carry within them an intrinsic idea of an intended good form part of an ongoing tradition. There has been no regular presence provided as a service. To have an interest in architecture and design of historically inspired architectural drawings within the contempoas an artist means that occasionally you can lend yourself to be of use rary artworld, but the occasional ignoring of the context for my work and, in so doing, blur the traditional role reserved for you within the says a lot about what the aesthetics of contemporaneity signifies for art institution. As I have an interest in historical decorative objects, many of its viewers. I was asked to design, curate and make artwork for a show that I am partly responsible for the suspicion my work can sometimes bridges both Nottingham Contemporary and Chatsworth House. arouse. Flirting with the fusty, the Tory and the decorative is a form Chatsworth House in Derbyshire is one of the most visited historic of drag that I alternately enjoy and feel queasy about, depending on palaces in England and is a baroque building crammed with objects how immersed I become in the role. I get approached every so often and artworks collected over 500 years by the same family, the Dukes by artists or architects who consider themselves to be working within of Devonshire. I was to select a range of objects from the house, and a classical tradition. They commiserate with me that, just like them, I present them in the white interiors of Nottingham Contemporary. am trying to make the past relevant, or trying to say that classicism can At Chatsworth the objects form part of a layered and complicated be soooo contemporary to people ignorant of the higher truth. They environment in which no individual item is seen clearly; rather, each imply that classicism exists a priori within culture, lying dormant, forms part of an elaborate and dense historical matrix. Within this and waiting to be revived if only the wisdom of Andrea Palladio were baroque world, objects may draw your attention because of their followed. This is borne out in the literature produced by its leading staging – they may be the only white object in a very dark room, for architects, many of whom emphasise the supposed natural origins example – or on a qualitative basis, as the most elaborate or finest of of the classical orders. God, either as metaphor or actual being, is a series of comparable objects, or alternately they may have a partic- implied as the originator of the golden mean and the corresponding ular historical association that makes them noteworthy. None of classical proportions that our times are so wilfully and imprudently these criteria are necessarily relevant to a contemporary art institu- neglecting. Lest we forget, Britain lost its empire with the advent of tion, whose white walls continue to push towards sculptural staging the modern and Rome fell to the barbarians once its meticulously for effect and ‘intentionality’ for its rationale. And yet, if the staging upheld architectural rules began to be slackened. That the classical is of an object creates an aura of seriousness, people will take it seriously. a dustbin for disgruntled provincial architects should make us view This is the deadpan with which I have had to approach organising and it with particular interest and more so because of the comedic ways in selecting the objects for the show. which that strain of architects delusively view themselves as heirs to As we no longer live in a world where outraged Le Figaro critics a very grand tradition. hurl cabbages at ballet dancers, censure now happens through such The show at Nottingham about Chatsworth is a pseudo-archimeans as refusing to buy, refusing to write about or refusing to tectural study of newness and oldness. It begins with a set of digital show. My half-imaginary enemies accuse me models of the future house before construction Pablo Bronstein, Palladian House of making ‘traditional’ work. By this I imagine in the late seventeenth century and shorn of the Refreshed in Lemon Yellow, 2012, ink and watercolour that they see grubby old illustrations redolent later eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentiethon paper in artist’s frame, 120 × 148 cm. of arcane discourse, or, conversely, of decorative century additions. These images mimic the final Courtesy Herald St, London

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Pablo Bronstein, Silver Temple, 2015 (installation view, Nottingham Contemporary, 2015). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy Nottingham Contemporary; Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth; Herald St, London; Franco Noero, Turin

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stage of design and present the purified house in an abstract space progress through them. Chatsworth is a perfect example of a house of limitless possibility. The objects chosen from the collections repre- that serves as an emblem of the social order, in which the way that the sent all the shiny luxuries that money could buy, and are displayed space is occupied gives one the measure of one’s social rank within with some of the new-money glamour that these objects must have the neighbourhood, the county or, in the case of royal residences, the possessed at the time of purchase. Fresh boulle marquetry cabi- kingdom. How this type of interior layout evolved, and the uses it put nets direct from the workshops in Paris, the latest silver designs by its fine objects to, are important in our understanding of the evoluHuguenot craftsmen, huge Delft pyramids in Chinese style. These tion of our art museums. This would be a line of development from the objects were primarily imported, or at the very least had to make the Elizabethan ‘long gallery’, or ‘walk’, and not from the cabinet of curiperilous journey from London to Derbyshire, and some were consid- osities (which has a similarly country-house origin, but one tied up ered so important that they travelled from house to house with the with private connoisseurship). The long gallery, designed for exercise owner. At Chatsworth there hangs a solid silver demountable chande- and to impress guests, was lined with portraits and battle scenes aimed lier that still has its travelling case, for example. The function of the at aggrandising the wealth and position of the owner. This history silverware, which when arranged into tiered is certainly more resonant with the experibuffets alludes to papal princely luxury, was ence of sleepwalking through the countless The objects chosen represent primarily to carry material wealth (which Warhols and Basquiats that grace the walls of all the shiny luxuries that could be remelted and has intrinsic value), museums and private foundations, artworks money could buy, displayed and certainly served to impress visitors. But whose main function is to demonstrate to more than this, these objects were visual the visitor or rival institution the power and with new-money glamour markers that carried the eye in and through wealth of the patron in being able to acquire a route that in its spatial organisation was a choreographic embod- and house objects of particularly high cultural and monetary value. iment of power, authority and history. The Delft flower pyramids, Unlike a museum of decorative arts, which values the maker’s fabulously expensive in their own right, were to be seen in rows, on mark or the development of a craft through time above all else, parade as a vast accumulation of wealth shown to its best advantage the association of owner to object is the most important thing in a stately home. Art at Chatsworth is presented as part of an ongoing by the repetition of objects along a vista. The sequence of parade rooms at Chatsworth, which form the ducal collection, where the taste of the generational line is of greater core of the visitor experience today, was a sort of visual and experien- interest than the individual contents of the house, Leonardo da Vinci tial representation of the personal power of the Duke, and your rela- drawings excepted. Some of the objects I selected communicate a tive position to him. The route around the house begins in the great historic link directly, such as a Peter Lely sketch of the first Duke in hall, which pretty much anyone in the seventeenth century who wore court dress, or the large silver pilgrim bottles engraved with the ducal a hat had access to, encompasses dining rooms, formal parlours and crest. There has been a recent attempt at Chatsworth to crystallise this state bedrooms, and ends up in the piss-cupboard behind the private rationale through the creation of a display by Jacob van der Beugel in closet, which would have been accessed by only those closest to the which the signature motifs of the dna code of the present Duke and owner of the house. The rooms comprising this sequence, known his heir have been turned into moulded porcelain reliefs that line the as an enfilade, were symbolically titled things walls of the ceramic gallery between the vitrines. Pablo Bronstein, Tombs of Eminent Romans, like parlours, dining rooms, bedrooms, etc, but The days of ‘brown’ furniture connois9th century ad (detail), 2015, were in fact demarcators of your social posiseurship are long gone, but although visitors ink and watercolour, 18 parts, each 120 × 220 cm. no longer carry pocketbooks detailing how tion depending on how far you were allowed to Courtesy Herald St, London

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above Adriaen Kocks, Delft ﬂower pyramid, c. 1690, tin-glazed earthenware. Courtesy Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement preceding pages Attributed to Bailey and Saunders, coronation chairs of William IV and Queen Adelaide (installation view, Nottingham Contemporary, 2015). Photo: Andy Keate. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. Courtesy Nottingham Contemporary; Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth; Herald St, London; Franco Noero, Turin

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to distinguish between Georgian antiques, interest in how people collapsed empires to bring back inspiration for their country homes, once lived in these large houses has grown. The National Trust lays as well as the odd souvenir. out silver-framed photos and chamber pots of family members that Some of these souvenirs are shown in the final room at Nottingno longer own the houses. Each house with the Trust has a list of ham, such as a huge Roman marble foot fragment, as well as some of the priority objects to be saved in case of fire. When such a calamity the objects these remains directly inspired, like a solid marble bath in recently engulfed Clandon Park, among the prize objects rescued the antique Roman style, by a follower of Antonio Canova. There is were knickknacks that told of family history and connection to the even a set of antique Roman hand fragments purchased by one of the place. Rare eighteenth-century furniture competed for priority over Dukes directly from Canova’s studio. My drawn panorama of imagiwedding photos of long-dead people with a scant place in public nary Roman funerary monuments acts as a backdrop to these. They are history. At Chatsworth, this provenance is taken to great heights in a made-up archaeological cross-section of the Via Appia, the suburban part because it is unbroken, as the family still owns the house and road between Rome and Apulia, in which the great and good in the continues to live in a part of it. This provenance plays out mightily ancient world were buried. Some areas of the drawing show dramatic at auction. The Chatsworth attic sale five years ago brought in crazy national complexes, some show how competitive funerary real estate prices for soap-dishes and magazine racks. Also of increased interest had become on this prize stretch of landscape. These tombs are repreat the moment is the display of life at these houses that mirrors the sented as being in the ninth century ad, when the Western Roman present-day visitor’s own historic connections to such environments. Empire, repeatedly sacked, had finally collapsed. As a result, some of The below-stairs experience has therefore been duly sanitised for the the architecture still retains basic definition and has some colour and baby boomer descendants of the nineteenth-century scullery maid. detail, while in other areas nothing remains but rubble poking out of Here in lovingly restored kitchens, among gleaming copper and the soil. This Ozymandian room terminates in a pair of magnificently scrubbed pine, retired volunteers show smiling little girls how to gaudy but completely dilapidated coronation thrones, used by George make nineteenth-century cupcakes using the original moulds. The IV, and William IV and Queen Adelaide. These are the best examples volunteers are not expected to take the reenactment a stage closer to Chatsworth has of objects designed to be visible from a distance, and the historical truth by taking a morning shit in a communal bucket aim to embody power and importance. They are very bizarre things when seen outside a cathedral. Just as contemporary art in a historic under the table. There is an element of revenge on the part of middle-class hordes setting is framed as a ‘surprise’ or an intervention, historic decoraeating and buying their way through historic houses. Although some tive objects in contemporary settings are framed as weird, eccentric who still own their family seats make a good deal of money out of the sculpture. If the question of conservatism is one of context, then it is lavender pomanders and Edwardian nostalgia books on sale, there is therefore also one of institutions. The self-defined object groupings no doubt that the visitor is now the client, which the house is expected and audience expectation characteristic of each venue are of course to adapt to and entertain accordingly. The food court at Chatsworth attempts to protect the art we know and expect, which can appear a is vast, the gift shop has an unrivalled knowledge of its customer base good deal more fragile when exposed to an alien audience. However, if and the events and activities range from pianist and tv-presenter I may appropriate a metaphor from the grand tour, Rome had no need Jools Holland’s evening concerts on the lawn to lace-making classes of protective walls while it still had its empire. ar for weird teenagers. The country house’s decline Pablo Bronstein, Tombs of Eminent Romans, and its rescue by tourism has of course an ironic Pablo Bronstein and the Treasures 9th century ad (detail), 2015, echo in the original eighteenth-century grand of Chatsworth is on view at Nottingham ink and watercolour, 18 parts, each 120 × 220 cm. tourists visiting the remains of ruined and Contemporary until 20 September Courtesy Herald St, London

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Paul McCarthy Interview by Mark Rappolt

The artist discusses a new body of works – ‘spin-offs’ – that continue a process of mirroring the products of the entertainment industry while also reﬂecting on his own production process and his search for the perfect, uncontrived and unconstrained gesture 124

ArtReview

It’s been four years since ArtReview last caught up with la-based artist Paul McCarthy, when he was in the midst of his epic Pig Island project (published as a supplement to the January 2011 edition). One of the most influential artists of his generation, McCarthy often deals with the power of the entertainment industry, consumerism, mass media and repression in American culture, his work spanning performance, installation, film, sculpture and painting. This time, at the opening of Spin Offs: White Snow ws, Caribbean Pirates cp (its title a reference to the entertainment industry practice of ‘spinning off’ new products from popular franchises), a selection of new sculptures at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, he discusses the latest in a series of exhibitions drawn from ongoing, multiformat projects that were initially inspired by two Disney franchises, both personally overseen by Walt Disney: the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, dating from the 1960s. Later this month he will present Rebel Dabble Babble Berlin, a collaboration with his son Damon based on Nicholas Ray’s classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the stories surrounding its production, onstage at Berlin’s Volksbühne, the first time the work, originally made in 2012, has been presented in a theatre setting.

ar It seems to be a darker sort of spectacle or fairytale? pm Both show here. Obviously Caribbean Pirates and White Snow relate to Pirates of the Caribbean and Snow White. Caribbean Pirates [2001–] came ﬁrst. My son [Damon] was a ﬁlmmaker, and we’d done pieces together before using sets and props. I suggested that we remake the ride as a video, knowing that we were going to use that as a structure, but break from that. Who knows where it was going to go? That piece went on for a number of years, and after that I was interested

ar But Hollywood plays a big role in the work on show here… pm Away from its location, Hollywood is an abstraction. These pieces maybe have more to do with the direct imagery of Disney and, at the same time, through Disney, entertainment, Hollywood, that sort of spectacle.

ar It just came? pm Snow White seemed like, ‘Whoa, that one’s a loaded one. That one’s pretty incredible.’ And it had a lotta odd ties. Like with Snow White being a brunette and my mother being a brunette and Karen [McCarthy’s wife] being a brunette and women in my life being brunettes: there was an oddness there. ar Is that biographical connection important to you in your works? You’ve got the casts of yourself in Chop Chop (2013). pm Well, it slips in. A lot of things just drive the subject. It can be a chance acquaintance with somebody, it can be all sudden, especially in a piece like this, when there’s so much being made through improvisation. You just go, ‘Whoa. That’s now part of it. I don’t think I can destroy that.’ In Chop Chop I hadn’t planned on my body being on it, but I was interested in a life cast, and a clay representation, which was so comical, so brutalised, ending up there. I had these life casts: this thing of cutting up my own body and then putting it up there – when the head went up on the chair – it’s a superbrutal image, and it’s your own image.

artreview la seems to have changed quite a lot in the last 10 to 15 years. paul mccarthy I think areas are quite different. I mean, certain areas have been migrating away; they’ve been migrating for 15, 20 years. Hollywood is more ludicrous than it used to be. I’m not sure what shit goes down, but it’s more comical. It used to have a kinda odd dark side to it. I never go there any more. I used to have an interest, but I don’t now.

in Adolf Loos and modernist architecture, and so Heidi became a merger of, in a way, Adolf Loos and Heidi: city, urban, country, Minimalism in architecture, ornamentation, chalet, Grandfather, Peter; all that. I’d never thought about Snow White for some reason.

ar How does it feel when you look at it?

in making a Western. We had all these ideas about a Western and then up came Snow White. I’d made pieces about Heidi and Pinocchio. I’d made a Heidi [1992] with Mike Kelley. Mike wasn’t connected directly to the subject of Heidi; I had already started that. He and I talked about doing a collaboration and we were part of an exhibition in Vienna. Mike had an interest above White Snow, Singularity, 2015, bronze, 348 × 240 × 230 cm facing page White Snow, Party, 2014, bronze, 275 × 314 × 220 cm

September 2015

pm Well, I was describing that piece as a kind of death boat: it exists within certain notions of life and death, Tibetan, Egyptian… it isn’t so much that I look at it and say, ‘Oh, that’s what happens to me. Jesus, that’s going to be terrible.’ It is a thing that makes me think about death. It makes me think about ﬁnality, and it’s a statement about after death; at least it’s more of a register about a key theme of thinking about my own immortality/mortality. ar Is that often how the works come together during construction? That there’s a kind of dialogue between you and the material?

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pm Yes, a thing unravels. Sometimes I think through the process and I arrive at understanding. At other times you arrive at a thing that illustrates, represents, indicates or stands for something that you didn’t intend, yet seems quite significant to you, because you keep it and you keep pushing at it. ar And is that what you enjoy the most? The recognition of something you didn’t intend? pm I don’t know whether it’s the most, but it certainly can be. I’ve said in other interviews that the pieces from the 1970s, the performances, had a lot to do with what I couldn’t predict and what I couldn’t see coming. I don’t know whether that would be the key now. What seems to be critical now has more to do with, ‘Can I arrive at something that’s a physical substance? Can I affect the physical? How often does that happen? Can I direct it?’ One of the things that happens is setting up situations that I think will get to something that produces a meaningful physicalness in myself, a sensation. ar And is it yourself rather than an audience that you have in mind when you’re making the work? pm In some ways we’re the same. ar That’s quite optimistic. pm That I’m the same as the viewer? It’s the only way I can see to do it. ar Going round the show, there’s almost a series of stages between something that looks like it came from the studio directly during the process, to highly finished works, to works that are in between the two. Is that something you looked to set up, exposing the method of production to some degree? pm It’s not that I set out to do that. The show has three different types of work in it, and to a degree they’re all related. I work that way. I knew that when I got through, it was so obvious: it looks like three people made these things. ar I find the balance between your displays of intention and chaos really interesting – for example, when you see the exposed armatures in a sculpture like Chop Chop, it indicates an intention – and yet the whole looks incredibly chaotic. Are you interested in this tension? pm In all of these pieces there’s an element I can’t predict. Even in the bronzes [White Snow Singularity, 2015; White Snow, Party, 2014; White Snow, Bambi, 2014; and White Snow, Asleep, 2013–14]. The thing that fascinates me about working with the computer to create these is that I’m looking at a screen, and on that screen, in a sense, I can only see one dimension. So I stick that object inside the other object. Then I have to turn it and rotate it to see how it has affected the other side, and I can only somewhat predict that.

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There’s a whole thing of turning it and then going, ‘Whoa. What the–? The leg just went through the eye. Didn’t see that coming.’ That sense of the unpredictable – I’m interested in that. In a lot of ways these things create themselves. Like the big Singularity out there. I had made that as a form and had been working on it for a day and then all of a sudden I just thought, ‘Wow. What happens if I take that thing, double it and pull it up? What happens? Well, before we go, let’s do that.’ I was being careful, conservative, and then at one point, ok, let’s move, pull it up. Then it was like, ‘Oh my God, look what happened,’ which interests me: what drives that piece and why is it a singularity? I’ve been thinking about the subject of singularity and its relationship to cosmology or its relationship

The pieces from the 1970s, the performances, had a lot to do with what I couldn’t predict and what I couldn’t see coming. What seems to be critical now has more to do with, ‘Can I arrive at something that’s a physical substance? Can I affect the physical? How often does that happen? Can I direct it?’ One of the things that happens is setting up situations that I think will get to something that produces a meaningful physicalness in myself, a sensation to Buddhism. I’ve been looking at it and I was thinking of it as a form. What is the form? What is a singularity within astrophysics? Within Buddhism? What is duality? I was looking at it like a Rubik’s Cube. Each day I would go, ‘Oh well, if you think of it this way it’s this, and…’ ar Were you attracted to trying to look at the form of something that in many ways has no form? pm Well, once you’re in the singularity, that’s where you’re at. Once you’re into certain lines of thinking about the sense of Buddhism or something, there’s the end of duality, which is the end of the other, which is the end of form. And there you are: you’re at consciousness, or a point in consciousness that has no other. And the thing of Singularity: it’s essentially the coming together of multiple facets; multiple sculptures are brought together and the turning

ArtReview

of the sculpture onto its end, or the base coming up, was also something within consciousness and singularity. Is there an orientation? Well, there can’t be an orientation either. So the piece becomes about orientation, the mixing of three, four pieces into one, but they’re not without a sense of themselves, it’s not a complete singularity. Within that form of singularity there’s a recognition of one self separate from the other which is all one. And then there was the person inside there, and she’s in a way cuddled within the arms of the fantasy of Snow White. She’s in that fantasy. There’s something about being held within the form, like the actual person, the life cast, is held within the fantasy of the form. It’s a piece that draws you in. You go around the back, you come to the front… The other one [White Snow, Party] you see from the front, you go to the side, you’re pushed from the back, you’re drawn in. And what are you drawn into? Into the person who is sitting up. She’s not lying down [like the other ﬁgures]. She’s not looking at you, but there’s a sense that you’re becoming part of the piece in the same way that you view an object or a piece of art, and in some ways, by understanding it you become part of it, or it becomes part of you. The pieces are set up to take you in. ar Is that how you see your work in general? As operating on the edge of things like physics, consciousness and religion? pm With Singularity I was trying to understand it as a form, which is different from the experience of a metaphysical singularity or conscious singularity. You could say it’s a kind of enlightened state. Do I believe in those things? Do I experience them? Well, to some degree, I guess, yes, but in another way I was interested in the subject as a form. Consciousness is an interesting subject to me. ar Has it always been? pm I think so. ar Over time, as you look back on works, does your understanding of them or relationship with them change? pm No, there’s an evolution of thinking, but they still deal with cultural conditioning and repression, or desire, and in Freudian terms some sort of id that has always been in the work. And there’s always been the attempt of culture to put a cap on it, and it’s that – that struggle and that relationship to culture and conditioning, and then its manifestation in tyranny or trauma or brutality – that is part of the work. Always has been. And then that relationship to some sort of skin of normality and its relationship to the corporate, and the drive of the

above and overleaf Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation, 2013, clay, wood, mixed materials, 351 × 552 × 229 cm. Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

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corporate, and the drive for power, and power over others and its relationship to the repressed drive. I think it’s all part of my work, and visible, and it exists in these pieces. ar And do you think you have more concerns about how culture’s deployed in those power situations now than you did 20 years ago? pm It’s an increasing concern, yes; by making art, I’m always in it. It’s in every piece, so the conversation never leaves me. The involvement never ends, I’m always seeking out a reference and the conversation is continuing. But so much of the making of art is an action within the physicality of stuff, whether it’s sculpture in its direct physicalness, or performance and its direct physicalness within creating an action, or direct physicalness in an action that might leave an object. I recognise it within verbal or written language, drawing or how I approach writing now.

But I think there’s still the struggle with work, with better pieces, with not thinking, ‘Wow, what is this?’ Or making something and a year later hating it, or a year later seeing something new. The opportunities are there. When there’s more money, there’s help to do things. In fact in some cases I can just fail more because I can make more and there’s an opportunity. You say, ‘Wow,’ you know, ‘Why did I just make that?’ I make it and I think, ‘That’s got nothing to do with what I’m interested in.’ It’s just an inkling. I did it because I could do it. Then you’re stuck with it. So, the whole thing of the process of making art and struggling with what something is, and whether it does something, or feels like something, is still there. It’s no different. ar It’s also partly about expectations. I guess an audience now coming into the gallery on Art Weekend in Zürich has expectations based on your past work

ar I guess when I look at Chop Chop I see all these actions, dropping, throwing, pushing, as much as I see an object. I see traces of how the material was manipulated. pm Yeah, but you don’t really know which ones ended up staying that way. I actually went through and altered certain things. So, yes, for the most part. I’m careful not to alter something from the serve. Like, when I take and stand that wooden thing up, you know. It would be slightly risky because what created that thing was the perfect, uncompromised gesture. To alter it could immediately create a contrivedness. It’s not that contriving couldn’t be interesting, but for the most part that piece has a sense of wholeness, I think. That would reﬂect a living thing. ar I guess, from early on in your career, you were an outsider to some degree; now, when you are with a big gallery, with production opportunities, and people look to you as an artist, does that change the way you work at all? pm Yes, in some ways. I didn’t have as many opportunities: in the 1970s once in a while some sort of gallery museum thing, but for the most part I didn’t have that. I would show in my own studio, or something, and the work continued, I couldn’t do as much, because I had a job or I had to live, but then you end up in a gallery like this and now you have an opportunity to show every year. There’s other things that change: there’s more access to people, more access to money to produce.

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and what they know of you and your art. And maybe you don’t have to deal with that so much at the beginning of your career, when people are like, ‘Who is this guy?’ pm Yes, I would guess that having more of a presence has changed something with what I do; I have to deal with certain aspects of that, that I didn’t have to deal with before. But in some ways they were there pretty early on in some form. Maybe not to the scale of now, but once the work did enter the public, in the 1970s, I was having to deal with issues with that, and public issues. Going back to your first question, I can’t say that Hollywood and Disney or Los Angeles didn’t influence my work. It absolutely did, and I can’t say that my position within the artworld hasn’t influenced or changed what I do, but I do think Original Pot Head Clay, Resin Block, 2014, clay, plaster, urethane, aluminium pot, resin, steel base, 125 × 134 × 165 cm

ArtReview

that I am dealing with a lot of the same attempts and the same discursive failures, or questions, that I was then. It’s really between me and the work most of the time. ar How do you react to the failures? pm Oh, the failures. How I react, oh God. One way, they sometimes turn into something else. Like: you see the failure, you realise what you don’t want to do. ar Is it something you get more comfortable with over time, once you’ve dealt with some things not working out? Or is it still as annoying? pm I have regrets about waste; waste of time. ‘What did I do that for? I can’t take it back.’ Some pieces I think of as not so successful lead to something else really quick. Others, it’s more subtle. The pieces exist in a more subtle way with me, and who knows, in five to ten years, what I think of them? Maybe it becomes a body of work that is linear or has a trajectory, that went on for a while, and there’s an aspect that is still interesting to me, or seems significant enough to do them. I don’t totally regret them. And then there’s pieces in which the attempt is made to break away from what I think is the failure of pieces, or even the subtle failures. I make the attempt and they fade or they fail in aspects. There’s something about moving to the next piece, moving to the next thing. There’s always this: the next one. ar Is there a flow in that, from one body of work to the next? Does a new body of work start emerging as you’re working on the old body? pm Right now, I’m in the midst of Stage Coach [a long-term, multiplatform project based around the John Wayne western], but White Snow is set up in the studio, in one of the buildings, and, you know, there’s the thing of going back to it, and wanting to. So those two pieces are going simultaneously. Like, one’s got energy into it. With Stage Coach real people are being brought onboard. Real objects are being made. Most pieces are going simultaneously. ar You’re working with actors in Stage Coach, working with other people who might do things that might go beyond what you intended. Is that different from a material behaving that way?

pm In some ways I don’t know what Stage Coach will be because it does involve a number of people. I’ve searched out people that I thought could respond to the material, what I wanted to do, and have an understanding of an improvisation. We’ll see what happens when we really get going. With the question of people, we did all these life casts. At ﬁrst, the people have to agree to that and be willing to say, ‘I’m ok with this: it’s not an issue for me in terms of where my body is, or how it’s exposed, and it’s not an issue with the claustrophobia, with the position.’ They have to be relaxed. Then that’s all videotaped. In terms of Spin Offs, 400 drawings were made. That whole process became a real journey: there are scripts and drawings, and the script can be dialogue, it can be what I think is going to happen, and then the drawings are trying to visualise the positions of people at certain moments.

ar Freed yourself from yourself? pm I removed myself, yeah. As a way of removing the decisions that I would make that would control it, or contrive it… ar But why would you want to do that? pm Because I think that it can allow things to happen that I couldn’t make happen otherwise. ar But nevertheless there must be a part of you that’s still in control of it? Otherwise you’d be off to a psychologist.

ar I guess, when you’re describing working with people on the ﬁlm, it seems like you propose something and there’s an immediate action, or reaction to what you proposed. Whereas with a sculpture, for instance, and a relationship with the audience, you don’t have to be here when that reaction takes place. pm That’s the nature of theatre, or performance, with a public, and there’s an energy that’ll drive a piece. It’ll move them. They’re affected for sure. ar Does that give you pleasure? Is that some way you judge the success of the work? pm I think, in one way, I want to remove them. When I did performances in the past, I would always go into the state where I start, you know, hiding under a table and asking them to leave, even though I know they’re not going to. Or I would start saying, ‘Don’t pay attention to them. They’re idiots.’ It was a character. It’s not that I believed they’re idiots, or maybe I did, I don’t know, but it’s a character. I did that in paintings: with the paintings in ws sc [a show of paintings related to White Snow and Stage Coach that took place at Hauser & Wirth London in 2014] I often did them in a character and the character would talk about hating the painting. By doing that I kind of freed myself.

pm It goes both ways. They alter, or at one point I just don’t even care about it and go back to dealing with the piece in a very me, artist, shtick. ar We’re sitting outside this atomised body of yours in Chop Chop. This body that’s been dismembered. Does that relate to the use of the characters in the painting? pm Is it my issues of self-destruction? Or are they the issues of shame and destruction within the culture? In a way, embodying something that is the whole subject of the person, the private and the public, gets pretty grey and pretty confusing. I sometimes think it’s strange how the personal and the private can get mixed with the cultural, or the public, and you’re making a piece that’s quite traumatic and quite private, and it involves other people: it can be damaging. Writers do it all the time. Writers will ﬁnd themselves describing a situation that is completely private, loaded. They try to disguise it, use elements to disguise it: different location, different names, different gender, they replace a human with an object, and they’re mining their selves. I’m only saying writers because that’s one people can directly connect with, but actors do it. And I do it as an artist. Like, it can be a drawing. The private can be hidden in there, and then people realise it. They realise, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ You go, ‘No,’ but yes. ar Do you think an audience wants to ﬁnd the real Paul McCarthy in your work?

pm Yes, there is. I’m not totally gobbledegook. Like, somebody once said, ‘Are you in a trance?’ I said, ‘No, dear. I’m not in a trance. I’m way more focused.’ ar Is that character something that you have in mind before you start? Or is it just something that develops as you’re working?

White Snow, Party (detail), 2014, bronze, 275 × 314 × 220 cm all images © the artist Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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pm The private and the public is all twisted. I think the audience is very aware of when something speaks of them, and they ﬁnd themselves, like, ‘This is not Paul McCarthy, this is me. This is who we are. This image of self-destruction is, actually, not Paul McCarthy. Or maybe it is initially within Paul McCarthy, but it’s actually us. I think that will is super-potent. All of a sudden, you carry the burden. You realise the trauma that’s being represented. ar Rebel Dabble Babble Berlin is on show at the Volksbühne, Berlin, from 19 to 27 September

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Amalia Ulman by Erik Morse

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Utilising a vast array of media and disciplines, the Spanish artist seeks to track down and interrogate ideas of the self in an era of rampant global capitalism

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above International House of Cozy (still), 2015, video preceding pages Excellences and Perfections (Instagram Update, 10th July 2014), (nervous and excited!!), 2014, Instagram; Instagram Update, 3rd June 2014, 2014, Instagram

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In one of her recent domestic installations, waggishly titled erasure through what she calls “the cosmetic gaze” – one aspect of International House of Cozy (2015), Los Angeles-based conceptual art- the trending ‘new normal’, or ‘normcore’, the fashion-inspired celeist Amalia Ulman transforms Rotterdam’s Showroom for Media bration of the ‘flattening’ homogeneity of middle-class aesthetics. and Moving Art (mama) into a Starbucks-inspired lounge crowned Similarly the motifs repeated throughout many of Ulman’s exhibiwith a proprietary café logo. Inside, the gallery’s ecru walls are tions, such as butterflies, pearls, hearts and motivational slogans, accented with glass containers, glowing candles and other brand- suggest a Nabokovian boutiquification of youth and beauty, one in name tchotchkes, between which are hung heart-shaped filigree and which the ‘precious’, personal symbology of girlhood is extruded at personal empowerment slogans. To one side of the space a collec- a gendered (and market) premium. tion of fold-up chairs sits beneath a flatscreen television, which plays Aspirations for such cultural capital do not, however, emanate a soft-focused short film of an art-industry couple encircled by the exclusively from the domain of the middle classes, as Ulman percepsame glass decor and wheaten colour scheme. Choreographed in the tively highlights in the less glamorous Used & New (2014). An antithesis manner of an Airbnb or Zara YouTube campaign, the film’s attractive of sorts to International House of Cozy, Used & New was presented at Los pair, clothed in high-end casual, discuss organic coffee, Los Angeles Angeles’s threadbare ltd. gallery, wherein a series of glass cabinets hotspots and artisan jam while thumbing through worn copies of and cheap Perspex shelves are stocked with heart-shaped mirrors, Artforum. When the couple shuttles into a bedroom to perform the key-chains, decals, money boxes and lace panties, all ostensibly downfilm’s unanticipated sexual climax – sequenced in various positions market goods vended as gifts. However, upon closer inspection, these to emulate a gonzo porn short – the sense of quotidian detachment objects are interspersed with blood stains and images of war zones and designer branding proves both uncomfortably titillating and and fetishised female bodies, all of which disturb the initial presentation of whiteness, softness and femininity, and hint at the underplayfully mocking. The morphologies of the virtual and material in International lying precarity and violence that ensure their production. Similarly, House of Cozy typify the wide citational and conceptual filters at work Been There (2010–12), a contemporary cabinet of curiosities from in Ulman’s ‘post-Internet’ oeuvre, which alternates between the Ulman’s show Moist Forever (2013), mixes aspirational tourist trinmillennial’s social-media platform and kets like Goldman Sachs golf balls, internamore conventional object-accumulative enThe motifs repeated throughout tional currencies and premium cosmetics with lipstick-smeared shot glasses, handvironments, in whose displays of cultural many of Ulman’s exhibitions, curiosities are portrayed complex semiolomade bracelets and melted candles. Placed such as butterflies, pearls, hearts side-by-side as gifts or curated artifacts, the gies of class stratification, lifestyle trends and adolescent sexualities. A twenty-six- and motivational slogans, suggest resultant bricolaging effect interrupts the year-old graduate of Central Saint Martins stratified exchange values once impregnated a Nabokovian boutiquification in London, Ulman is often associated with in such objects. feminist social-media artists like Jesse Ulman’s purview as an expatriate artist of youth and beauty Darling, Kate Durbin and Ann Hirsch, and originates in a childhood spent in the is perhaps best known outside of the artworld as the proprietor (or industrial north of Spain, where she witnessed the country’s transi‘prankster’ according to more disapproving critics) of the Instagram tion from socialism to eu hypercapitalism and then bankruptcy. The series Excellences and Perfections (2014). Ulman’s performance, which region’s mercurial, object-driven markets expanded exponentially lasted a period of five months, employed the popular photo- and during the 2000s, and the influx of speculative debt and consumer video-based social network to invent a fictional persona based on trends that followed are no doubt reflected in Ulman’s fascination tropes of the ‘young girl’. The resultant Bildungsroman narrative, of a with capital’s alternating desires for territorial circulation and accubeautiful innocent who moves to the city to pursue a career in model- mulative interiorisation. For Ulman, the new psychogeographies ling; aspires to wealth and luxury; dabbles provocatively in drugs produced therein contract and obscure traditional divisions between and plastic surgery; suffers severe emotional setbacks; and ultimately city / town, capital / purlieu and market / home. retreats to her homeland to mend and rediscover her ‘true’ self, was “The fear of provinciality… makes me avoid nationalism, makes catalogued in frequent posts and accompanied by simulated, selfie me… walk towards imports like a moth flies towards the light,” photographs of the artist in character. Such promises of voyeuristic she intones in her visual essay Buyer, Walker, Rover (2013), echoing spectacle and salacious confession ignited her account’s realtime fan the language of flanerie in Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (1883) or base and drew mainstream coverage from pop-culture glossies like Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927–40) for a new global plexus New York Magazine, i-D and Dazed and Confused. of pedestrian malls, corporate hotels and transnational sweatshop Despite its very public staging, viewing the archive of Excellences labour. “In the midst of solitude, in the midst of isolation I receive and Perfections retrospectively reveals the kinds of complexities and messages from the metropolis through imported goods… Visiting intimacies of Sophie Calle’s most arresting, and controversial, perfor- these stores I can widen my mental map. I’m closer to everything mances. The feminine visage of Ulman was the cynosure of the series’ and very quickly, I don’t feel lonely anymore. The sharable qualities online viewership, but much of its compositional efficacy is due to of these items make them something intimate, cosy. I’ve seen you the artist’s acuity for design – graphics, costumes, props and setting – before, yes.” which trades on popular tropes of ‘girlhood’ and ‘taste’ as they circuTo relegate this sensibility of ‘cosiness’ she extols (a domestic late on platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. Ulman correlate to her other, somatic themes of ‘cute’ and ‘pretty’) to an presents herself as a protean assemblage of designer clothing, ironic, Marxist ploy of false consciousness would be an oversimpligilded bibelots and decorative tableaux, seeking out the fantasy of fication of Ulman’s work. Rather, in exhibits like Moist Forever and

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Buyer, Walker, Rover (stills), 2013, Skype lecture

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the cloud-based ios photostream Seeking Arrangements (2013), whose automobile accident that injured her legs and left her permanently titles play on sly double-entendre, the serialised placement of flower disabled, a condition requiring long-term physical therapy. The exarrangements and willow stalks in corporate and resort settings perience, which stripped her of the comforting assets of her previous evokes the temptations of what she calls the ‘democratic judge’ of life and transformed her body into an object/specimen of mutarootlessness, one that leads to the ecstatic freedoms of the world tion and medical intervention, contributes to her most disturbing experienced as dromological commodity. “From my delimited phys- works, The Destruction of Experience (2014) and Stock Images of War (2014). ical interior I dream of freedom,” she continues in Buyer, Walker, Rover. These installations utilise signifiers of hygiene and domestication (eg clocks, calendars, motivational posters, “All streets lead to nowhere and all streets take me home… Drink your coffee in the room deodorisers, food) within threatening Despite the institutional morning and walk to work. Pretty. The and disorienting tableaux – a doctor’s office displacement of global capital, world is yours!” Despite the institutional and a war zone, respectively – to explore or perhaps because of it, displacement of global capital, or perhaps how fragile and perishable is the clinical because of it, the pleasures of commodity body. The installations’ integrations of the pleasures of commodity still trade on intimate fantasies of owneranxiety and mundanity offer a startling still trade on intimate fantasies indictment of the ‘soft’ violences capital ship, immanence and self-invention. of ownership, immanence can inflict upon the human under the aegis But in an increasingly multimedia marketplace, where both image and object of acquisition. and self-invention are valuated and traded at sublime speeds, What continues to fascinate most about what distinguishes the physical boundaries of the consumer and Ulman’s progressing oeuvre is not only the vast conceptual net under the commodity, the rational life of the capitalist and the secret life of which she interrogates theories of identity, domesticity and fantasy, the object? And how do our bodies negotiate between antagonistic but the challenging heterogeneity of disciplines and templates that she engages from exhibition to exhibition – from poetry to design fetishes of both intimacy and novelty? Much of Ulman’s recent interest in these questions of somatic to online performance. In the era of social media’s generic ‘new displacement has focused on the increasing technologisation of normal’, Ulman’s quiet ambitions for difference qualify her as a vital, the human. In late 2013, Ulman herself was involved in a severe feminist voice. ar

above The Destruction of Experience, 2014 (installation view) all images Courtesy the artist and, on the opening spread, Arcadia Missa, London

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5,6 EYLÜL / SEPTEMBER 2015

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Art Reviewed

The emergence of capitalism is often mistakenly linked to a Puritan work ethic 139

The Family Tree of Russian Contemporary Art 12 June – 9 August Field Research: A Progress Report 12 June – 23 August Rirkrit Tiravanija Tomorrow is the Question 12 June – 23 August Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow If you’re traditional enough to think of museums as institutions that, via study, collection and display, connect the present to the past, then the notion of a museum of contemporary art will always seem like something of a contradiction, given its apparent commitment to newness (or a moment that differentiates the contemporary from the historical) over continuity. Such broad debates, however current, admittedly fall beyond the purview of a review of an institution’s opening displays. But they are evidently something that the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art encourages, both through the design of the building that houses it and through the smorgasbord of future programmes that its opening exhibitions advertise. Of course, at a moment when privately funded cultural Xanadus are popping up around the world like so many mushrooms (this particular venue being paid for by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich), you might think that a fancy building is, indeed, what makes a contemporary art museum – not least because most museums, with their increasingly showy exteriors, invite you to do so. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which, prior to the opening of its new space and the acquisition of a number of archives, was called the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, is housed in a 1,200-seater, two-storey, Brezhnev-era restaurant located in Moscow’s Gorky Park. Dating from 1968, it has been resurrected by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture ﬁrm oma, fresh from opening Fondazione Prada’s new premises in Milan. If the name Garage preserves a history of its origins (the institution’s ﬁrst home was the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage in Moscow), then its new building does something similar. The original structure of the restaurant has been largely maintained, which means open spaces that declare the building’s public function. Retained, too, are various elements of period decor, including brickwork, bits and pieces of green tiling and, notably, the remains of a mosaic of autumn: the restaurant was

called the Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year). The whole thing is encased in a reflective, translucent polycarbonate that functions like some sort of architectural aspic. Inside of this sit the building’s services, ‘revealed’ in a way that makes the most of the material’s translucency, projecting the idea that it is ‘open’ in every way and that preservation (climate control, at least) constitutes the very fabric of the building. In some ways this is clever, since form and function appear united. In other ways it’s not, since the narrative of the building competes with or perhaps even dictates the narrative of the art – leading to a feeling that the institution controls rather than enables its displays (and might one day suffer from a serious lack of wallspace that doesn’t articulate a narrative in competition with any work of art positioned on or next to it). The most dynamic of those aforementioned displays is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Tomorrow is the Question (2015, which references an Ornette Coleman album title; there’ll be a Smiths reference later on). Located in the centre of the second floor, it contains three participatory elements – a series of ping-pong tables activated in partnership with the Moscow Ping Pong club; a series of dinner ladies preparing and serving pelmeni dumplings; and a group of students printing and distributing T-shirts with various slogans (‘How soon is now?’ etc) – as well as a small display of work by the Czechoslovakian conceptualist Július Koller (1939–2007), one of Tiravanija’s inspirations (most obviously in this context via Koller’s 1970 Ping-Pong Club). With stray ping-pong balls bouncing all over the place, you’re in no doubt that the building is ‘activated’, a public engaged (eating, playing or T-shirt-wearing) and history – both art’s and the building’s – acknowledged. On the ground floor, history is more directly confronted via The Family Tree of Russian Contemporary Art, a small archival display of mainly Russian-language documents illustrating the web of relationships that constitute

facing page, top Field Research: A Progress Report, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov. © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

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the Russian art scene from the mid-twentieth century onwards, presented as a graphic network diagram. It’s a project that at once acknowledges the Garage’s acquisition of archive material relating to this era and positions it as the academic research institution that will be central in creating the ‘story’ of the nation’s art – even though the diagram of the Russian art scene, despite some names being printed larger than others, pointedly has no individual or institution at its heart. Field Research: A Progress Report is a series of four embryonic exhibitions that essentially internationalise the Garage’s declared interest in documenting Russian culture, while simultaneously bigging-up the centrality of the arts to Soviet identity and the roles of institutions in preserving it. Two of the shows examine the importance of culture in Soviet diplomacy: one via the exploits of Russian-trained African and Arab filmmakers, another through the more confrontational impact of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. The two other projects include Anton Vidokle’s This is Cosmos (2014), a fascinating film – the first part of a projected trilogy – exploring the utopian ideas of the late-nineteenth-century Russian cosmism movement, and Taryn Simon’s Black Square xvii (2015), a collaboration with Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation that will result in a black square (proportions after Malevich) made of vitrified nuclear waste, to be displayed at the Garage once it becomes radioactively inert, in a thousand years’ time. In case you were in any doubt, the Garage is here to stay. To some extent, it’s entirely logical for a (re)new(ed) institution to launch itself with a series of displays that have the controlled character of an aggravated mission or pr statement: self-justification, to an extent. Yet the sheer ambition and diversity of the activities advertised here indicate that the Garage’s future trajectory, should it be as open as the building that houses it seeks to suggest, will be one to watch. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Rirkrit Tiravanija: Tomorrow is the Question, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

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Julien Prévieux, Francisco Sobrino, Raphaël Zarka Jousse Entreprise, Paris 28 May – 25 July The summer show at Jousse Entreprise gathers works by Julien Prévieux, winner of the 2014 Prix Marcel Duchamp; Raphaël Zarka, represented by Parisian gallery Michel Rein and a nominee for the prize a year before; and Francisco Sobrino (who passed away in 2014, but whose estate is represented by Jousse), a seminal ﬁgure in Op art and a cofounder of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (grav) in 1960. Although this small exhibition has no generic title and the practices of the three artists share no apparent ground, the works displayed are loosely bound together by the leitmotif of gesture. To some degree, everything here questions how engineered application and, more importantly, misappropriation of artworks or devices, further the aesthetic experience beyond contemplation or strict usage. Mounted on a wall near the entrance, Mobile (1967), a wooden kinetic assemblage by Sobrino, is exemplary of the grav historical programme and certainly the most practical method here of playfully prompting participation: viewers are simply invited to set in motion and swing, via stretching, four white disks joined together by steel springs on a large black panel, thus creating a metallic sound that resonates within the entire exhibition space and slowly fades away until stillness. Next to it, Zarka’s minimalist sculpture Free Ride (La Prophétie) (2009) is a plywood replica of American artist Tony Smith’s Free Ride (1962),

which is installed in the Sculpture Garden of moma in New York. It consists of three two-metre-long parallelepipedic sections, each of which smoothly transitions from the previous one with a right-angled turn (two laying on the ground, the other upright). For Zarka, Smith’s work serves as a symbol of skaters’ misappropriation of public sculptures, which they use as frameworks for stunts. Indeed, in a passage of his book Free Ride: skateboard, mécanique galiléenne et formes simples (2011), which is quoted in the press release, he observes that it could function as both a bench for passersby and, more peculiarly, an L-shaped ledge for skateboarders. While I was openly invited by Jousse’s staff to sit on Zarka’s replica, I couldn’t tell you if the creative irreverence of skateboarders was actually welcome here since I didn’t get to see any tricks in action. Instead I had to content myself with surveying Zarka’s ensemble Riding Modern Art, a cover collection (2015), 15 covers of skateboard magazines displayed on shelves in the following room. Each shows an athlete sliding on or jumping over urban art, not only experiencing but truly playing and transcending it; which is what Zarka refers to as ‘phenomenological minimalism’. Even though anomalous here considering there was apparently no serious curatorial process for the show, Zarka’s passion for skateboarding, which he shares with Prévieux, is the reason he was invited to exhibit at Jousse

Raphaël Zarka, Riding Modern Art, a cover collection, 2015. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Jousse Entreprise, Paris

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Entreprise. I should add, parenthetically, that Prévieux ﬁnished second in the 1992 French freestyle skateboarding championships, but this isn’t the issue of What Shall We Do Next? séquence n°2 (2014), the 17-minute ‘videodance’ presented in the last room that he originally screened when competing in (and winning) the Duchamp Prize. For this work, Prévieux created a choreography with six dancers out of gestures patented by companies mainly in the area of natural user interfaces, which he collected from the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. While some of them haven’t been marketed yet, a voiceover and the dancers recount anecdotes about the registered inventions they perform in a void, as it were, missing the apparatus they are supposed to activate, with the ‘pinch-to-zoom’ and ‘slide-to-unlock’ gestures among the most commonly used. Overall Prévieux’s video offers a curious glimpse of our bodily future, which is epitomised when one of the dancers jokingly cites English writer Douglas Adams’s conceit, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), of an imaginary radio that would be controlled by waving: ‘It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme’. In the end, despite the regrettable lack of curatorial direction, this exhibition left me ever more eager to play with art on my own terms. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Antje Majewski E.F.A. im Garten Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 7 July – 15 August Antje Majewski’s exhibition E.F.A. im Garten is something like a finely calibrated hybrid of socially critical environmental activism and visual art. That is to say, the language of visual art is deployed to use a well-regarded gallery space as a forum for ecological activism, a forum both aesthetic and critical in which this project can present its oppositional work and foment discussion. The concrete point of departure is a small colony of allotment gardens situated across the road from the artist’s flat in the Berlin district of Wedding, a rather ‘socially disadvantaged’ district, home to a relatively high proportion of immigrants. The land was recently sold to an investor, who subsequently cleared the gardens with ambitions to erect a self-storage facility on the same spot. Majewski began her exhibition project at this point, filming the demolition of the allotments and now showing four minutes of destruction in the video loop Die leeren Gärten (The Empty Gardens, 2015) in the back room of the gallery. The artist also collected wooden planks, stones and steel bars, among other items, that lay strewn around the grounds after the demolition. From this debris of readymades she formed

abstract sculptures that may at ﬁrst glance bring to mind Native American art, but ultimately constitute fragile memorials to the former allotments. Or are they perhaps tombstones for the buried hopes of the allotment gardeners? The artist has painted the sculptures in green, purple and black. These three colours are echoed in the emblem for the activist group she founded this year, ‘Eco-Feminist Anarchism’, to which the title of the sculptures makes explicit reference: E.F.A. im Garten 1–9. The third element of the exhibition is a group of photographs the artist took during and after the demolition of the garden colony. They depict incidental sculptural situations that invoke a minimalist aesthetic. A lone remaining tree trunk suggests an abstract vocabulary of form as well as a circular satellite television antenna on a rudimentary stone wall. The artistic strategy of these photographs embraces a concept the British artist Richard Wentworth famously developed for his ongoing photographic series Making Do and Getting By (1974–), which documents ‘sculptures’ found in everyday life, but recharges this concept with new, ecological mass. Such artistic appropriation

can also be seen in Majewski’s current exhibition with Paweł Freisler at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, as part of which 100 apple trees will be planted, a variation on Joseph Beuys’s legendary tree-planting campaign, 7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982–7). As Majewski shows here, activist engagement is even more important to her than the artistic originality so treasured by many of her colleagues in the august art establishment. Majewski, widely known as a painter, also uses the time-honoured medium of painting in E.F.A. im Garten, presenting a large-format, naturalistic depiction of the various ﬂora that are now beginning to reproliferate on the otherwise barren grounds. Between these plants lay three small, tightly nestled chunks of stone, again painted green, purple and black; thus, the Eco-Feminist Anarchism group has also left its artistic mark on the painting E.F.A. im Garten (2015). Majewski admonishes us here, with both poetry and force, that the reckless and brutishly speculative destruction of ‘our’ urban biotopes must be confronted with bold civil courage. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

E.F.A. im Garten 9, 2015, encaustic on wood, metal, organic and mineral pigments, 85 × 30 × 22 cm.Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

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Oscar Tuazon Break the Glass Kastro, Antiparos, Cyclades 28 June – 31 August The day after Alexis Tsipras announced the referendum on the Greek bailout, Oscar Tuazon’s Break the Glass opened at Kastro, a small art space started by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2014. If Tuazon was able to adapt to the harsh conditions of the Alaskan island of Kodiak – he was there in 2008 with his brother Eli Hansen to produce a remote section of their Seattle Art Museum exhibition Kodiak – he might well hack it on Antiparos, despite the incoming fear of economic disruption spreading through its shopping-oriented streets. Greek islands have become increasingly popular summer destinations for a certain kind of art crowd: collectors, artists, writers and sundry professionals who are willing to set forth for a relaxing weekend by the sea equipped with their best sunglasses, and who often need to liaise and network. Antiparos offers a generous backdrop for these professional activities. It is an inherently different way of working portably from the one we know from Tuazon’s art, which involves extreme isolation, survivalism, nomadism and diy adaptability. Still, it is by virtue of adaptability that Break the Glass adjusts to the domesticated charm of the Greek location.

If Tuazon’s research into radical living and isolated forest-dwelling here feels reduced to the minimum – to the point that something of his practice seems missing – all the works, perfectly installed in one tiny room, maintain his sculptural practice’s distinctive character, which might be described as a dark architectural intelligence meeting the sex appeal of a hardbodied carpenter. A wooden gallows pole firmly fixed on the wall (Hanger, all works 2015) echoes another work, sitting next to it, consisting of an oak log gripped in a base of fibreglass-reinforced concrete (I Like I Take). On the opposite side of the room is Experience It (Scale Model), a Douglas fir table with a recessed pool filled with pitchblack water. Here the functional character of the table partially withdraws to endorse the transformation of the tabletop into a miniaturised landscape. Above it, hanging on the wall, It is It looks like a shady moon suspended in a fake sky. In the middle stands a big framelike structure made of solid wooden logs (Framer), while half-hidden behind the entrance is Break the glass, a vice partly engulfed in a concrete cube. The grouped works stand as a reminder of the artist’s complex theoretical and practical framework, on the order of a souvenir.

Break the Glass, 2015 (installation view) Photo: Gertraud Presenhuber. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich

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In ‘Repressive Tolerance’ (1965) Herbert Marcuse described the market as a ‘complacent receptacle, a friendly abyss’ able to swallow up the radical impact of art against the established reality. If today, 50 years later, someone decided to rip the belly of the market open in search of the ingested radical impact of Tuazon’s art, I am afraid they would come back empty handed. In fact it wouldn’t be because Marcuse wasn’t right, or because things are different now. It would rather be because certain artists – and Tuazon is one of them – have learned to withdraw part of their subversive instances from the market, so that the opportunity doesn’t present itself. Those instances of noncommodiﬁed artistic practice have moved away into other materialisations of life, or rather towards life itself (as when, in 2006, Tuazon journeyed through Oregon with curator Clémentine Deliss and the students of Future Academy in search of the publishers of a zine called Dwelling Portably), and sometimes they don’t need to ﬁnd their place in a commercial context. In this case, Break the Glass looks like it could have been a more comprehensive representation of Tuazon’s work, and thus a seemingly better exhibition. It could have been, no doubt. But should it have been? Michelangelo Corsaro

Rochelle Goldberg The Cannibal Actif Vava, Milan 5 June – 4 July Chartreuse green and anthracite black: Rochelle Goldberg’s installation The Cannibal Actif (all works 2015) turns Vava’s ground floor into a contrast-rich landscape. A miniature forest of verdant chia sprouts colonises three areas of grey carpet, as if eating it up, while a composty smell pervades the space, surrounding a series of dark glazed ceramic sculptures. Shaped like coiled serpents – some lifelike, some amorphous, some oddly pressed into the rectangular shape of a briefcase, like the negative space of deluxe snakeskin luggage – they glow seductively under the spotlights. On the silvery surface of her sculptures, Goldberg has impressed the uneven patterns of scalelike marks, so that the line between organic and inorganic, natural and synthetic becomes ever more difficult to draw. These petrified reptiles remind me of a morning from my childhood: trying to plant tulip bulbs in a corner of the lawn, I found a family of hibernating lizards. Their perfectly rolled up, cold and dry bodies looked uncannily dead and alive. Other creatures inhabit this exhibition space: the floor and columns are bisected by the glossy slime trails of live snails, covered in glitter, ‘like turtles that will soon collapse under the weight of their jewel-encrusted shells’, Goldberg writes in the elliptical accompanying text, ‘Notes on the Cannibal Actif’. It’s an overt reference to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884), a now-almost-clichéd monument to decadence and the toxic beauty of artifice,

whose protagonist Des Esseintes improves upon the vividness of an Oriental rug by placing on it ‘a striking object’: ﬁrst he has his tortoise’s shell glazed with gold, then ‘incrusted with rare stones’, the weight of which kills the animal, ‘unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it, the rutilant cope with which it had been covered’. In the gallery’s basement, Goldberg has installed another set of sculptures in black glazed ceramic, Hungry Hungry #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, in the shape of crocodile heads with open jaws, held aloft by wiry steel frameworks: another work evidently ingesting a historical source, this time Lucio Fontana’s glazed ceramic Coccodrillo (Crocodile) (1936–7). These predators at the top of the food chain – as well as of the fetishism of the luxury industry, given their precious skins – seem aﬂoat in an invisible pond, waiting patiently for some (dead or alive) food to fall from the ceiling. An active cannibal hunts and kills others of its kind, before eating them; a passive one only feeds on corpses. Michel de Montaigne introduced the distinction in his essay ‘Of Cannibals’ (1580), on the Brazilian Tupinambá people, while Oswald de Andrade, in his celebrated Manifesto Antropófago (1928), turned into a positive paradigm the primitives’ vital capacity to absorb and process the ‘other’. Now that the doom-struck scenario of the Anthropocene is here to stay, it is pretty clear how voracious and actively lethal our current

cycle of consumption can be, both at planetary and individual level. With her installations, Goldberg appears to stage allegories of our enhanced rhythms of growth, decay and forced revitalisation. Chia is marketed as a miraculous ‘superfood’, an ideal combination of nutrients, antioxidants, Omega-3, vitamins and minerals that provides prolonged hydration to the body, so that it can sustain prolonged fatigue. If we’re tired, it’s perhaps because, besides daily labour, we also have to withstand the increasingly heavy encrustation of our fabricated online personas. ‘Devouring forces eventually run dry in a circuit of dissolve,’ remarks the artist. After writing her ‘Notes’, Goldberg relatedly invited the artist Eric Schmid to ‘add his own voice to it’, resulting in three pages of freewheeling scribbled notes, keywords and comments, in the form of a Google Docs poem. For instance, Goldberg’s ‘Where could anyone locate the threshold of becoming animal?’ is followed by Schmid’s ‘Desire, fucking, shitting, eating’. One ﬁnds references to the uncertainty principle, Henri Poincaré, hallucinations, love, Antonin Artaud, Friedrich Hölderlin, tectonic plates, dis-identiﬁcation, etc in an open stream(ing) of consciousness. Here, the materials to consume, churn, digest, turn into fertiliser, sow and then swallow, over and over again, are processed language and metainformation. No live prey, apparently. Barbara Casavecchia

The Cannibal Actif (detail), 2015. Courtesy Vava, Milan

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Mark Bradford Sea Monsters Gemeentemuseum den Haag, The Hague 20 June – 18 October You might anticipate hip-hop emerging from South Central Los Angeles, but one of the most interesting painterly ventures in recent years? Not so much. Yet it is in the district’s Leimert Park, where he grew up, that Mark Bradford ﬁnds the inspiration for his large-scale works. Here, he collects the posters moneylenders use to sell ‘sexy cash’ to destitute homeowners. In Sexy Cash Wall (2015) dozens of such cardboard advertising hoardings have been painted, sanded and assembled into a 23-metre-long tiled wall. ‘we buy houses’ is just about legible, as is ‘ugly and nice’. Above all ‘ugly’: the work looks as if it has been unearthed from the bomb crater of the credit crisis. Capitalism’s turbulences obviously manifest globally as well as locally, and in this, his ﬁrst European museum exhibition, Bradford looks back at the dawn of economic globalisation. The paintings are inspired by charts of global trade routes from the colonial era of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when the Dutch distinguished themselves as outstanding cartographers and wily businessmen. Equipped with beads and mirrors – the Dutch Golden Age’s equivalent of ‘sexy cash’ – they roamed the oceans in search of lucrative trade. They seized coastal areas in Asia, Africa, South America and North America or bought

them for a song. In the patterns on The Tongue in the Middle of the Port (2014) the radial figures of the meridians and mapped transit routes can be made out, sometimes hazily, sometimes in sharp focus. The paintings are in fact collages of layered paper, their surfaces painted on, glued together and sanded, though not necessarily in that order. The fun the artist must have had in creating them is infectious. You follow him on his intuitive voyage of discovery, how he wrecks and restores the image’s surface and, planing away, conjures up black waves or a silver sparkle. Despite their battered surfaces the paintings possess the grandeur of panoramic vistas, of epic tales: a bit like Anselm Kiefer’s history pieces, but abstract. A Siren Beside a Ship (2014) evokes swirling sea currents; The Winged Turtle (2014) reminds you of a vast river delta. In front of the exuberant Sea Monster (2014) your gaze drifts across the canvas, as in a Pollock, until you think you can spot a seahorse, a dragon or an octopus in a mirage. No Time to Expand the Sea (2014) is an overwhelming sea of pink and yellow brilliance in which everything flows and finds its own course with great force. Three recent, nonstretched canvases seem inspired by a dark mass of water breaking with a big splash in the surf (Untitled, 2015).

The paintings are complemented by six sculptures, formed out of inﬂatable ships’ fenders. They are wreathed in colourful cord and, like the paintings, placarded, painted and sanded. One stands upright and glistens like mother-of-pearl, others lean against the wall, stripped or deﬂated. These Sea Pigs (2014) have everything in them to liven up the exhibition rooms and to reinforce the theatrical, baroque features of Bradford’s nautical tales; but the uninspired positioning of the majority of them along the walls does not make the most of these opportunities. Still, with his individual, haptic way of painting Bradford puts a new face on abstraction. His approach is sometimes referred to as ‘Social Abstraction’ because of its linking the nonrepresentational image and sociopolitical reality. There are, of course, other abstract painters who have done this: even Gerhard Richter sees in his paintings a metaphor for the social coexistence of opposites. Bradford’s work is therefore not so much a break with tradition but a continuation of it by different means. It mixes autonomous Abstract Expressionist painting with a romantic cartography of the world, closeup and far away, from South Central to far over the horizon. The result is as attractive and alluring as sexy cash. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

Sea Pigs, 2014, mixed media, collage, six buoys, each 109 × 142 cm. Photo: Joshua White. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London & New York

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Momentum 8: The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art: Tunnel Vision Moss, various venues 13 June – 27 September Ernesto Sábato’s novel The Tunnel (1948) opens with the confession of Juan Pablo Castel, a socially isolated painter, who admits to having murdered his lover. The ultimate unreliable narrator, Castel takes the reader through the unfolding events, from the beginning of his obsession for Maria (his lover), to the ﬁnal ending, via a neurotic, circular narrative. Along the way, he spins a tale of justiﬁcation, obsession and paranoia, dragging the reader with him as he gradually falls deeper into a tunnel of madness and delusion. Obsessive and paranoid behaviours as a result of social reclusion are some of the aspects explored via the highly idiosyncratic perspectives of the 25 artists and collectives whose work is gathered under the title Tunnel Vision – designating the loss of peripheral vision – for Momentum 8. Less existential than Sábato’s symbolism – ‘a single tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel wherein passed all my infancy, my youth, my entire life’ in Castel’s words – the show uses the concept of tunnel vision as an umbrella to look at altered consciousness, worlds of paranoia and conspiracy theories, ‘Nordicness’, isolation as a condition for artistic creation (resonating locally with Edvard Munch’s four-year retreat in Moss) as well as the effects of an ultra-networked society that feeds increasingly personalised information back to us through self-referential loops. A humid fog room created by Fujiko Nakaya, a haunting mouldy smell spread

on the walls by Sissel Tolaas and an underground multipart soundtrack by electro-pop musician Zhala act to physically condition the visitor for tunnel life, and introduce the rather dystopian works on show at the Kunsthall. Released on YouTube ahead of the opening, Edward Shenk’s promotional trailers combine existing and ﬁctional conspiracy theories in a compelling, Anonymous-style exposé that sets to uncover links between the biennial, the Norwegian oil industry, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Norse apocalypse myth of Ragnarök. Paranoid behaviours are concretised in Valia Fetisov, Dzina Zhuk and Nicolay Spesivtsev’s Paranoiapp (2015), which, once downloaded to your phone, allows you to follow people around you, and in turn be followed, making you an active participant in an increasingly surveilled society. Steina’s cctv installation Machine Vision (1978), presented upstairs in the Kunsthall, offers a historical lineage to the app, sharing a similar fascination with surveillance technology more than 30 years before. Using different cameras and kinetic tools (such as rotating devices and mirrored spheres), Steina creates an actual sculptural cctv system, which captures the visitor anywhere in the room on one of its six screens. The works of Swedish artist Joanna Lombard and Mexican Brody Condon present a compelling perspective on how tunnel vision also emerges from collective rituals

and therapies. Condon’s The Zeigarnik Effect (2015) is a film of a session of Live Action Role Play in which a group accesses altered states of being through a series of interaction exercises inspired by Gestalt therapy – an experiential form of psychotherapy that focuses upon the individual’s experience in the present moment. As they engage in these exercises in a confined space, they enter another state of consciousness and lose sight of reality in a way that resonates, too, with Lombard’s four-channel video installation Orbital Re-enactments (2010). Here, recreating scenes from the artist’s 1970s Swedish childhood, when she lived with her mother in the alternative commune of Ljusbacken, the video presents radical lifestyle experiments – aimed at reconnecting with the primal function of the body – that the adults perform as a group while the children, shown on adjacent screens, are left entirely unsupervised. Typically defined as a pathology, or figuratively as a certain narrow-mindedness, ‘tunnel vision’ here appears, on the contrary, as a productive artistic process. The resulting exhibition is spot-on in its ability to capture the symptoms of an era characterised by the individualised and the digital, takes us on a fascinatingly dark and psychological journey into the human psyche, and leaves us with a disturbing afterglow that’s hard to shake. Louise Darblay

Joanna Lombard, Orbital Re-enactments, 2010, four-channel video, installation, 13 min, loop. Photo: Vegard Kleven. © Punkt Ø / Momentum. Courtesy the artist

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After Babel / Poetry will be made by all! / 89plus Moderna Museet, Stockholm 13 June – 30 August After Babel / Poetry will be made by all! / 89plus follows the structure of a Russian doll, nesting several projects within each other. The exhibition is intertwined with a symposium, a conference, workshops and poetry readings. It references attempts to make art an integral part of social life (from Russian Constructivism to the New Left countercultures of the 1960s) but also looks at how the conditions for creativity have changed in the more recent past: its ramifications bear the hallmarks of the late Martinican writer Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’, and while his 1990 text ‘To Build the Tower’, reprinted in the catalogue, underlines today’s globalised dialogue, the exhibition also acknowledges the intricate world order after 1989. It pivots, in fact, on that year, which marked the first stirrings of the World Wide Web, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s essay ‘The End of History?’ According to exhibition curators Daniel Birnbaum and Ann-Sofi Noring, 1989 heralded the end of an era. Since then, in various ways, the world has grown both closer and further apart. The centrepiece here is Simon Denny and architect Alessandro Bava’s Contemporary Tower of Babel / pmbmba (2015). The sides of this walkable steel scaffolding structure are covered with vinyl sheets printed with a trompe l’oeil pattern of brickwork and graffiti slogans from 1960s student protests, among them the infamous ‘The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head’, from the Paris unrests of May 68. The protest movement marks the second important event for the show, whose middle title, Poetry will be made by all!,

refers to an exhibition that took place at the Moderna Museet in 1969. Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all! was commissioned by celebrated director Pontus Hultén and featured documents mirroring political and linguistic utopias of the time. Photographs and texts of the documents featured in the original show (ranging from records of protest movements to constructivist architectural drawings and texts) are included in the 2015 iteration. Arranged around the tower, a second matryoshka asks us to look at language and interpretation, and to move beyond Eurocentrism. The eight artists here were selected because their work negotiates language to varying degrees, and because they have to deal with translation in their everyday lives, which they spend between different geographical locations. For Etel Adnan (France / Lebanon), her abstract landscapes painted from memory are reservoirs for thoughts, and her poetry evidences her linguistic range. In the case of Kader Attia (France / Algeria), a slideshow juxtaposes images of mutilated First World War soldiers’ poorly stitched wounds and African masks restored with buttons or whatever material was available. Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazil / uk) meanwhile presents a video that depicts a parrot nibbling seeds with punctuation marks printed on them, while a football commentator uninterruptedly transmits via radio in rapid-ﬁre Portuguese. During the original Poetry must be made by all!, Moderna Museet organised an event in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, with consequent threats to close the museum deterred by then prime minister Olof Palme.

Similarly, After Babel emulates a restless atmosphere characteristic of politically tumultuous times. Whereas in 1969 ‘Poetry will be made by all!’ had utopian connotations, within its third nesting doll, 89plus, the current exhibition commissions books by creators born in or after 1989, culminating in a total of ‘1000 Books by 1000 Poets’ since the edition’s start in 2014. The on-demand publishing project, by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist, forms part of their ongoing research platform investigating the new ‘generation of innovators’, and has included Valia Fetisov, Bunny Rogers and Bogosi Sekhukhuni. The book production points, however, less to a political potential for poetry than to the integration of creativity into today’s market logic. In fact, it could be claimed that the 1968 revolt, mobilising language, creativity and affect, boosted today’s cognitarian condition. Meanwhile in the Babylonian tower itself, artistic production is equalised with commercial products, from the museum’s surrealist drawing holdings to Kanye West’s Yeezus tour jacket to a model of constructivist architecture turned into a Benetton store. Matters culminate in an observation deck with yet another interlaced exhibition, dedicated to imagery and texts generated by Anonymous. The tower emphasises the role global trade relations play in social networking, as the curators underscore in the exhibition catalogue. What After Babel most poignantly shows, by way of example, is the levelling of commercial exchange and language as communication; or as Diedrich Diederichsen has put it, only the market can compare symphonies and pork halves. Stefanie Hessler

Rivane Neuenschwander and Sérgio Neuenschwander, Sunday (ﬁlm still), 2010. © and courtesy the artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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Giorgio Griffa A Retrospective, 1968–2014 Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva 29 May – 16 August Giorgio Griffa had painted landscapes, life models and natures mortes since he was eight years old. But in 1968, in his early thirties, the Turinese artist abandoned ﬁguration entirely for a stripped-back practice of simple marks and lines, carefully repeated, as if to invent a new language of painting from scratch. The earliest piece in this generous, ﬁve-room, 25-work exhibition, Dall’alto (1968), is an unstretched canvas of 107 × 160 cm. Slender lines in seven different shades of red, green, violet and blue extend from the top down to about the halfway mark. As distinct from the more regimented stripes of Daniel Buren, no two lines are quite the same length; none are perfectly straight. The parade of vertical stripes goes about two thirds of the way across the canvas, stopping abruptly some way before reaching the righthand side, as if frozen in the midst of a potentially endless sideways and downward motion. One year later, Griffa stopped putting his works in frames. Now they are all displayed in this way so we can see the ragged edges of the material. In Dall’alto these frayed ends bear paint indicating the continuation of its lines beyond

the edge of the canvas, gesturing towards the work’s outside and its coextensivity with the world it inhabits. At some point the painting has been folded and, as on all of Griffa’s canvases, the creases are visible, dividing the work (in this case) into four quarters. This is not merely an effort of desacralisation (suggestive of the painting being gathered up and stuffed in a cupboard somewhere, like any other sheaf of material), but a strategy for emphasising its transportability: this painting moves, it has a life and we can see the marks of that life in these folds. Griffa is now seventy-nine; for a long time, his work was rarely seen or discussed. When Casey Kaplan mounted a retrospective in 2012 at his New York gallery, it was the artist’s ﬁrst exhibition in the city for 40 years. That show was interrupted by Hurricane Sandy, and several early works were damaged in the process, later painstakingly restored at Kaplan’s behest (Griffa, I get the feeling, would have been just as happy to preserve these new marks, as Duchamp did with the cracks on his Large Glass, 1915–23). Upon reopening, however, the show was a success, with Griffa feted by The New York Times as

an important rediscovery. It was Andrea Bellini, director of Geneva’s Centre d’Art Contemporain and curator of the present show, who had first introduced Griffa to Kaplan. Over the two additional years that this retrospective covers, one senses a new mood to Griffa’s painting. In works like Canone aureo 887 (2014), a cascade of blotches in vivid colours, or Canone aureo 398 (2013), an ocean of Matisse-like figures in blue and turquoise, there is a novel sweep and assurance to the lines. The washedout pastels that characterised much of Griffa’s work during the 1970s and 80s have given way to a kaleidoscope of electric blues, hot pinks and almost fluorescent greens. All four new works here bear not only the artist’s characteristic lines and strokes, but also the first few digits of the nonrecurring fraction of the golden ratio painted in a similarly rough-hewn fashion. This number, for Griffa, represents not just the memory of the Parthenon and the Renaissance, but in its endlessly unfolding digits, gestures towards the infinite. In this way, the latest works continue a project dating back to his earliest. Robert Barry

Dall’alto, 1968, acrylic on canvas, 107 × 160 cm. Photo: Jean Vong. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

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Eloise Hawser Lives on Wire ica, London 1 July – 6 September Invented in the early twentieth century as a cheaper alternative to the orchestras that accompanied silent films, the cinema organ was soon made redundant by the talkies. And yet the organists played on. I recall hearing them before the main feature perhaps as late as 1980, and the ritual was not as anachronistic as one might imagine. Maybe the superfluousness of the performance was justified by the architectural immanence of the instrument, which, like a church organ, was plumbed straight into the building. And it didn’t just make a sound; it glowed. Eloise Hawser’s Lives on Wire resurrects this beating heart and turns it to another purpose. Her kinetic sculpture Resistance (all works 2015) features an rgb colour-changer mechanism used to illuminate the console of an old organ, rehoused in a steel frame stretching from floor to ceiling. Three metal weights hang from motorised electromagnetic coils connected to the ica’s lower gallery lighting system. As the weights move up and down, the walls are bathed in different colours, the transitions slow enough and the tones pale enough to provide an unobtrusive backdrop to the other works. Burberry Wurlitzer, a five-minute video shot in the basement of the Burberry store on

London’s Regent Street, offers glimpses of its own resident organ, a relic from the building’s past life as a cinema. The camera pans smoothly over the surfaces of the gloomy interior, darting in and out of the adjacent clothing displays (from the past to the present and back again, as it were). Stair banisters scroll past, visually echoing a chord played in the arpeggio style often associated with Wurlitzers. There is a mannequin revolving on a carousel, fragments of Regency architecture, stationary shots of a stuccoed ceiling, amorphous elements that pass too quickly to make out and also brief snatches from a catwalk show: a model’s feet pirouetting, closeups of a smiling audience, projected and shot in the basement or digitally superimposed, I can’t tell. Although the tonal contrast between the ﬂickering dark slab of lcd screens and the more slowly ﬂuctuating ambient light is effective, the montage itself feels inconsequential. The cinematography is tight, but there is no transformation of the subject matter, and once you attune yourself to the speedy editing, the images unfold in a prosaic stream of juxtaposition. It feels like a ‘placeholder’ work, content merely to point at its intriguing source material.

Similarly, the pile of ﬁbre-optic cables that comprise the sculpture 1600 Peut, though anchoring Hawser’s interest in obsolete technology, doesn’t quite function as the elegiac vehicle it is surely meant to be. I’m not sure readymades are capable of performing that role, ubiquitous as they now are. Resistance (detail), shown in the corridor, is a different case entirely. Six abutting lcd screens are attached to a wall-mounted aluminium frame, their circuitry exposed, the two righthand screens showing what looks like a live feed from a camera trained on the electromagnetic coils of the aforementioned Resistance. Or it may be recorded footage. To make a work that conﬂates sculpture, video and painting into a single gesture is difficult, but Hawser achieves it here. The ‘live’ movement of the liquid crystal has a germlike vitality, swarming within the facture of the work like an infestation, as though representing its own internal condition rather than that of something extrinsic. The results are so seductive that the representation begins to outrank its ‘host’, which conceptually underwrites it, yet is surpassed existentially. There is something genuinely uncanny about that. Sean Ashton

Resistance, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

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Thomas Hirschhorn In-Between South London Gallery 26 June – 13 September At the far end of South London Gallery’s main exhibition space is what looks like a bedsheet strung high up the wall, with a message sprayed onto it in large black capital letters: ‘Destruction is difficult,’ it reads, ‘indeed it is as difficult as creation.’ Credited to Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebook 6 (1930–32), the quote hangs among a mass of homemade detritus that engulfs all those who step into the Victorian gallery. Here, Thomas Hirschhorn has created the setting for the aftermath of an unexplained disaster. A huge whitewashed room has become the collapsed ruins of an office block-cum-apartment building, and in typical fashion, In-Between (2015) is both overwhelming in size and intensely claustrophobic. This isn’t the ﬁrst time the artist has engaged with Gramsci – Gramsci Monument (2013) was a sprawling ode to the philosopher – and nor is it his ﬁrst use of disaster as a major theme. Concordia, Concordia (2012), Break-Through (2013), Abschlag (2014) and Höhere Gewalt (2014) have all taken destruction as their modus operandi, and with them In-Between continues formal and conceptual tropes that have recurred throughout Hirschhorn’s career. Radical philosophy is often used to ground his democratic

ideals, and is manifest here alongside his favoured household materials (card, polystyrene and endless rolls of glossy brown packing tape). Whatever ﬁctional event occurred, the artist isn’t trying to suspend our disbelief: as the Gramsci quote suggests, Hirschhorn wants to make clear the work involved in creating this scene of destruction. The sheer scale of In-Between, and its obsessive level of detail, betrays how painstaking this labour is. The density of Hirschhorn’s installation speaks of a feverish producer, one plugged into continuous newscasts of death and destruction and compulsively crafting objects out of whatever lies to hand. What results is a low-budget fantasy landscape, resembling a gigantic diy crafts-project gone awry. As if in a doodle drawn out in space, structural elements such as spraypainted brickwork and cardboard rubble make a point of their amateur production; although Hirschhorn drew from photographs of real-world disasters, In-Between is less mimetic reproduction and more cartoonish reimagining. Despite being eerily static, its precarious objects hint at the potential for even

more destruction: pieces of tape hang from faux-industrial pipework, while stacks of wardrobes, desks and polystyrene slabs appear to buckle under their own weight. With a gentle nudge, one imagines, Hirschhorn’s mounds of rubble could easily come toppling down. Among the lightweight replicas sit real, heavy objects – toilets, sinks and neon strip lights – that disrupt our perception of mass. The response is a tactile urge, held back by gallery protocol: Hirschhorn toys with our haptic vision, and we want to reach out and touch, but if we did so it might all fall apart (and artworks aren’t for touching, anyway). Yet although playful at ﬁrst, In-Between quickly slides into unsettling; the mannequins that normally punctuate the artist’s works are nowhere to be seen, and the only traces of people are the furnishings they once used. By culling scenes from news coverage and reimagining them through his own distinctive aesthetic, Hirschhorn’s environment taps into our shared experience of the mediated world. It’s only when thrown into this uncanny version, though, that we realise how desensitised to such images we’ve become. Dan Udy

In-Between, 2015 (installation view), mixed media. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist

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Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions Tate Liverpool 30 June – 18 October ‘Text and context’ was the first thing I wrote about this group show curated by Glenn Ligon. In it, the artist has juxtaposed his own works with those of postwar artists – mostly wellknown, many American – who have been an influence on him, among them the makers of documentary footage of American civil rights activists and protests. The language of words – written, spoken, unspoken, suggested and silenced – is all around: in the paintings of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat; in Bruce Nauman’s neon; in the film and video of Adrian Piper and Kara Walker; in Jennie C. Jones’s nooselike arrangements of noisecancelling instrument cable and, indeed, in Ligon’s stencilled text paintings in which he repeatedly overwrites quotes from writer James Baldwin, comedian Richard Pryor and others, until the words disappear into illegibility. The premise for selecting works for the exhibition is inspired by the idea behind playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s book People Who Led to My Plays (1987), in which she acknowledges

those who have inspired her work. But the show’s dominant narrative is that which has run through the artist’s own work from the beginning: the experience of an African-American artist and writer like Ligon, growing up during the 1960s in a time of great political and social change, and coming of age as an artist during the mid-1980s, for whom the politics and history of race, class, gender and sexuality are inseparable from the politics of looking. Beyond the relationship to Ligon’s own artistic development, the exhibition highlights no explicit themes, but it’s evidence of the artist’s quietly reﬂective intellect that certain foci become obvious anyway, such as the perception of skin colour – in Warhol’s 1972 screenprint of a red-faced Chairman Mao; in William Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings from 2004 (Black People Are the Window and the Breaking of the Window reads one of their titular texts) and in Ligon’s Malcolm X #1 (small version #2) (2003). In this painting, a recreation of a page from a child’s colouring book that somewhat bizarrely included the face

Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X #1 (small version #2), 2003, silkscreen and Flashe paint on canvas, 112 × 91 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the Rodney M. Miller Collection

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of Malcolm X in an attempt at positivity and inclusivity, both race and gender are confounded by the child’s decision to not only leave the civil rights activist’s face white, but to give him blue eyeshadow and bright red lips and cheeks. Staring intently at Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting No. 5 (1962), which appears completely black, despite there being grids of blue and red mixed into the inky hue, I’m again brought back to text and context, and reminded of another of Ligon’s paintings, not in this exhibition, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background (1990), when a fellow exhibition visitor politely asks me if I can show him how to see the red and blue colours that the caption of the seemingly all-black Reinhardt painting describes as being present. Having just worked that out myself, I can – not by looking at the painting’s surface, but into the mirrorlike reﬂection of the gallery lights within it, which are able to pick up the pinky-red and blue hues of the colours, and make them clearly visible. Helen Sumpter

Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa Edel Assanti, London 12 June – 31 July There’s something nice about a work that alludes to its architectural environment, integrating with a room’s features in some appropriate or ironic way – and in Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa’s main installation at Edel Assanti, both qualities are in evidence. Beneath the gallery’s skylight, the young Puerto Rican artist has built a kind of sun platform or skydeck: a stepped, three-tiered structure made from untreated plywood, the top level of which sits just below the surrounding panes. There are arcing palm trees in pots dotted about the platforms, some tumbling spider-plants hanging from the skylight’s bracing and a commanding view of the rest of the show below. The whole thing would all be rather pleasant were it not for the fact that, on a warm London afternoon and after the exertions of scrambling up the structure, it’s actually unbearably hot and muggy up there. To be sure, such sensations of stultifying heat and closeness are entirely appropriate. Figueroa gives most of his smaller works the title Tropical Readymade (all works here 2015) – the idea being one of transplanting everyday Puerto Rican objects, of representing the island’s environment and social norms. In one such

series here, a triptych of footballs and basketballs – recalling Jeff Koons perhaps – have been cut open and converted into makeshift, greenery-filled planters: a reference, perhaps, to the tiny nation’s defining contrast of jungle and beach, its almost overwhelming fecundity. And in another series opposite, the evocation of adaptive, beach-bum lifestyles is even more literal, the works consisting of cheap plastic slatted blinds draped with shorts, T-shirts and other bright clothes, as if hung out to dry in the blistering sun. Of course, it’s difficult to view any of this as hugely original. The use of potted palms as a motif, the references to vernacular architecture, the participatory aspect of the sun platforms (also used for occasional performances and events during the course of the exhibition) – all of this can’t help but bring to mind the work of Hélio Oiticica. Figueroa has acknowledged the influence of Oiticica’s ideas, yet the fact that there are quite so many echoes of the Brazilian’s Tropicália philosophy still feels rather jarring. What saves Figueroa’s work from being an out-and-out rehash is, I think, the greater allowance he makes for layers of irony, for different aesthetic registers becoming jumbled

and confused. Although this is a pretty pareddown show in a small space, the best moments are those that evince a sense of exuberance, a kind of kitsch richness. It’s there in the melange of patterns on the hanging clothes: not just the tropical clichés of pineapple or palm-tree designs, but also a pair of Munch Scream socks – the idea being, perhaps, that art is something that feeds off popular culture, like Figueroa’s appropriations, but also feeds back in, in a process of constant looping and folding in upon itself. And there’s a similar layered complexity to a ﬁnal, uniquely titled piece. I Dream with Snakes consists of a small bright outline painting – bearing the vaguely heraldic device of twinned snakes and a sword, and the motto ‘dreams become true’ – placed atop a huge vinyl print of dense jungle foliage. The dream imagery (assuming that’s what the canvas depicts) is clearly personal, its meaning oblique; yet at the same time it’s derivative, based on commonplace forms and stereotypes. Ultimately, it’s this febrile sense of overlap, this melding of ﬁction and reality, that Figueroa would do best to pursue, rather than his less provocative paeans to social practices. Gabriel Coxhead

Untitled, 2015, wood, palm plants, hanging baskets, gel light ﬁlters, 288 × 597 × 555 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Edel Assanti, London

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Not with nothing but. With nothing. Project Native Informant, London 8 July – 8 August The exhibition title is taken from a line in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), a novel about a South African academic who loses his job after conducting an affair with one of his students. He moves to the countryside to live with his daughter, who, in turn, deliberates about leaving everything – her home – behind: ‘to start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing.’ This sense of having nothing is especially painful in Artur Zmijewski’s The Making of (2013). In the 12-minute video, the artist has formed a team made up of a hairdresser, a makeup artist and a photographer, who gather together in a women’s detention centre on the outskirts of his native Warsaw to give the inmates makeovers. There’s no glamour involved – in one scene a woman struggles to put on sexy pantyhose while keeping her feet atop her shoes so as to stop them touching the dirty floor – but there is sensuality. A few minutes in, the prisoners, who emerged from their cells makeupfree and wearing jeans, trot through the long, interminable hallway of the institution in their new outfits as if it were a catwalk. It’s jarring to witness how quickly these women are forced into a standard idea of femininity and just how free the photographer felt to tell one woman, for example, what to do: “Turn around, let me see your tattoos.” If the presumption was that the experience would build these women’s selfconfidence, the feeling is exactly the opposite:

that they were weakened, once again marginalised and forced into a sexualised identity for the gaze of the male photographer and that of the artist who orchestrated the scenario. That gaze is overturned instantly in Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho’s Flat Makati cbd, Friday, 00:00-01:30, Tuesday, 00:00-01:00 (2015), where a 61-second clip using footage taken with a GoPro camera on a lively evening in one of the 16 cities that make up Metro Manila is screened via a projector that has been modiﬁed in order to scatter the light so that the image spills beyond the screen (here a few hanging sheets of rice paper with ink drawings of human ﬁgures) to the back wall. In the video there is one arresting moment in which two girls, preparing to cross the street in a densely populated city, look directly at the camera. While the whole video provides a quick, pop-urban nightscape complete with fastfood restaurants, a view from a bus, cars driving down streets, these two girls somehow break the illusion, resisting the role they were assigned as mute participants. It’s a strong, lovely moment that leaves much more of an impression than Zmijewski’s subjects posing for his camera. The question of what options there are for women and their presence in society echoes throughout the exhibition, from Coetzee’s novel (where an illicit affair moves the narrative, where the daughter contemplates disowning of her land), to Zmijewski’s prisoners, removed from

society, and the strong presence of women in Lien and Camacho’s cityscape. Lena Tutunjian’s ongoing Tumblr work, http://pussyfriends.tumblr.com, purports to display a different location and course for sexuality. One of the ﬁrst images, presented on a small pc with a beanbag in front of it, is a text reading, ‘Reblog this if you were never taught in school about any sexualities or identities aside from straight, male or female.’ But the blog is complete with many photos of crass sexuality (no need for examples) and very conventional ones (Kurt Cobain onstage, black-and-white). It does little to offer any new form of identity, let alone escape mainstream Internet sensuality, but even worse – in the work Tutunjian makes no statement about its presentation, about the Tumblr format, instead relishing in a teenagery aesthetic that leaves little to discuss. In an exhibition that brings so many important questions about gender and representation, the variety of storytelling techniques – the documentary-cum-reality television of Zmijewski, the Tumblr and the GoPro footage – does not translate to any meaningful portrayal of these issues. Not that an exhibition needs to wear its politics on its sleeve, but for a show that takes its title from a novel that examines all possible roads (and dead-end streets) to understanding human relations, it articulates little of the complexities it purports to discuss. The ‘nothing’ in its title echoes strongly. Orit Gat

Artur Zmijewski, The Making of, 2013, single-channel video, colour, sound, 11 min 45 sec. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, and Project Native Informant, London

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Luke Fowler and Mark Fell To the Editor of Amateur Photographer The Modern Institute, Glasgow 30 May – 4 July In a letter to Hal Foster, editor of the now-classic anthology The Anti-Aesthetic (1983) and later excerpted in Craig Owens’s 1987 essay ‘Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism’, the art historian and critic Linda Nochlin bemoaned the lack of women contributors to the 1983 volume, noting that there were none, except those by Rosalind Krauss and Owens ‘playing a kind of Tootsie role’. Nochlin’s comment, veering towards homophobia, did not go unnoticed by Owens, a gay male feminist whose career was based on an analysis of the politics of representation. In his contribution to the book he had addressed with insight and acuity the very question of who has the right to speak, and on behalf of whom. Over 30 years later, this exhibition demonstrates that the role of men in feminism remains a contested and conflicted territory. This will undoubtedly be a central concern for many viewers of the film, as it clearly is for Luke Fowler and Mark Fell, the artists behind To the Editor of Amateur Photographer (2014), a 69-minute film that traces the early history of Pavilion, an organisation founded in Leeds in 1983 as a women’s photography centre based staunchly on feminist principles and firmly committed to challenging dominant, patriarchal forms of representation. So just how do we read a work whose subject is the history of a feminist organisation but which is produced exclusively by men? We might see it, variously, as ironic, problematic, provocative or, perhaps, evidence of a more nuanced, less separatist understanding of gender and feminism. Whatever the answer,

the making of the film and its reception have been fraught. The dilemma is acknowledged explicitly in the interviews with Pavilion’s founders and members that punctuate the visual narrative. Early on, Dinah Clark speaks about the “discomfort” that was felt “about men recording the history of the organisation”. Later, Deborah Best describes her concern over women’s histories “always being reinterpreted by men”, noting that “this [film] is a perpetuation of that”. And towards the end of the film, Sue Ball discusses gendered authorship and asks, “Whose voice is being represented here?” All are valid questions, and one might think that by virtue of their selection and inclusion the matter could be ‘put to bed’ – after all, the artists are clearly aware of their subject position. But in some respects the signposting of their awareness is a rather clunky approach, one that reminds me of artist Loulou Cherinet’s recent observation (on attitudes to race in visual culture among artists and institutions) that once a problem is declared, whoever has declared it is no longer part of the problem. Laudable as it is, does mere acknowledgement of the issue take the debate any further? The artists’ affiliation with feminism could be seen more tangentially through the soundtrack, with its overt references to early 1980s electronic music, a genre associated in many instances with political radicalism, counterculture and resistance to the mainstream (and with strong links to Leeds and Sheffield). In this way, the artists reveal an understanding of the cultural and political specificity of time

and place that is subtle and engaging in its allusive connections between Pavilion’s feminist aims and parallel interrogations of gendered representation and resistance to the canon in 1980s British synth-pop. The hd film is an undoubtedly accomplished example of documentary filmmaking, with material drawn from field recordings, archival ephemera such as zines, pamphlets and minutes, and vast numbers of 35mm negatives. These ‘click’ into place with each frame like a slide carousel. But even while it is utterly absorbing, and a fascinating account of Pavilion’s history, the film is almost too stylised – everyone looks cool, everything is edgy – and it is perilously close to being a picture of resistance commodification, with feminism framed and fetishised. Many of the archival images, shown as they are, could be 2015 club or exhibition posters aping 80s style. And though impeccably installed, another issue lies in the venue. Originally shown at Pavilion, this screening was held at the Modern Institute, Fowler’s gallery in Glasgow. The ethos of the Modern Institute, a slick, highly successful commercial enterprise, is almost diametrically opposed to that of Pavilion in the era documented by the film. It is also run by men. So, the setting in which the work is seen compounds questions already raised by the film itself. Here, ‘men in feminism’ seems to equal men – and only men – responsible for the commissioning, production, interpretation, display and contextualisation of a film documenting women’s creative and cultural activity. Susannah Thompson

Luke Fowler and Mark Fell, To the Editor of Amateur Photographer, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and the Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

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Frances Stark Intimism The Art Institute of Chicago 21 May – 30 August She snatched a charming painting, relatively small yet all the more captivating because of its compactness, and I won’t look at it in the same way again. Frances Stark’s borrowing of Félix Vallotton’s Madame Vallotton and Her Niece, Germaine Aghion (1899) from the European painting and sculpture galleries at The Art Institute is an act of nuanced devotion and productive refusal that magniﬁes the impact of this survey of her work. As one of the strongest artists of her generation, one who is more than willing to speak truth to power with humour and poetry, Stark’s repositioning of a classic representative of late-nineteenth-century Intimism couldn’t be more direct: is the child at Madame’s feet still ripping that paper to shreds or is she now calmly contemplating the fruits of her labour? The great thing about the painting, a point reinforced time and time again in Stark’s output, is that it can be both at the same time.

A direct, even formal connection is made in this show between the painting and this is not exactly a cat video: w/David Bowie’s “Starman” (2006), in which Stark’s young son and friend react to a video of Bowie playing on the screen of a MacBook as she ﬁlms. The thing that these two works have in common – a masterful presentation of the interplay between focus and distraction in both form and content – renders what makes them different pretty much irrelevant, especially the century or so between their dates. Overall this survey demonstrates Stark’s singular ability to provoke this type of assessment: her ability to work across media and get to real (as in life) connections over and over can be breathtaking. No focus without distraction, no disruption without contemplation. Nowhere is this more the case than in her multimedia installation Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention

Is Free (2013). As someone appalled by the travesty of the dismantling of the mfa program from which Stark resigned as a tenured professor, I’m well aware that this work about two ‘usc’s’ (University of Southern California and University of South Central) is preaching to my choir; nonetheless it remains one of the most immersive and oppositional art works of its time. (It is available for viewing on Stark’s website, but loses too much of its impact there.) One of the best things about this show is that many pre-college students are seeing it because the museum is a prime destination for school groups, even if, as I witnessed, the adult chaperones quickly whisk their charges out of the room containing this work with its booming rap music and all-too-honest script. But it was satisfying to watch other kids taking in Stark’s newest videos, for example Poets on the Pyre (2015), on monitors with headphones, right under their minders’ noses. Know hope. Terry R. Myers

Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and / or Paying Attention Is Free, 2013. Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

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Jennifer Boysen Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles 13 June – 11 July Jennifer Boysen’s ﬁrst solo exhibition in Los Angeles, which took place last year at Cherry and Martin, happened to coincide with Blum & Poe’s largescale survey of Korean monochromatic painting from the 1960s to the 1980s, which took place across the street. Remarkably, the far younger Boysen more than held her own in this context, matching the richness and slow contemplation of canvases by Ha Chonghyun and Yun Hyongkeun, and handling, with equal sensitivity, similarly absorptive surfaces of earthy, matt colours. Boysen has an old-soul approach to the monochrome that luxuriates in pigment, cloth and forcefulness of design. Nevertheless her works, though technically monochromes on canvas, feel less like paintings and more like substantial objects, even strange totems. The canvases stretch over supports that remain unknown to the observer, and the surfaces are full of protuberances, notches, slopes and dips. These anomalies usually come in patterns and can be arranged symmetrically, giving

the impression that the background is articulate and whole before it receives its covering. One background might be an ikea winerack (best guess); another may be an upside-down plastic storage palette. Like good sculptures, how Boysen’s paintings look from the front seems to have little to do with how they look from the side. All these details collect into an air of mystery – each work a different ghost in a sheet – and the effect is only increased by how delicately and intensely Boysen covers the canvases in soft, egg-tempera-based paint. Her browns are creamy, bright and deep. Her greys have the ancient feel of slate. Her black might best be paralleled with staring into the maw of a cavern. Boysen applies the paint over and over until the labour becomes seamless with the surface and nearly disappears. The end products look as effortless and assertive as an Ellsworth Kelly painting or a late-in-the-day shadow. It is hard to know where Boysen ﬁts in the contemporary artworld. She certainly has no

taste for ephemeral or fleeting experiences, nor does she have any desire to make objects that are smooth and easy to sell. Her paintings do not seem to footnote the long history of modernist abstract painting, nor do her sculptural tendencies have anything to do with finish-fetish California sculpture (though perhaps there is a little of John McCracken’s hippy weirdness involved). The works are stoic and hermetic like an Ad Reinhardt black painting and physical like the best of Eva Hesse’s work, yet, all told, one can more easily imagine Boysen making paintings for monks than for museum visitors. Boysen’s studio is atop a foothill in the San Gabriel Mountains, just east of Pasadena, and it is easy to imagine that scrubby terrain, with its limitless views of the Inland Empire, speaking through her work. There is enough quiet there to fill the hours with detail and changing desert flowers, yet enough space to dream of events far on the horizon. Ed Schad

Untitled, 2015, egg tempera on canvas, 122 × 79 × 17 cm. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

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Sarah Cain Bow Down Honor Fraser, Los Angeles 29 May – 11 July Is the ceremony about to begin or is it over? Sacred geometries angle and spiral across the surfaces of domestic effigies: a loveseat, striped, hearted and splotched; a wooden bureau patterned front and back holds a single vase of dead ﬂowers; a vanity half in ghostly white and half blotched with colour curves around a looking glass looking carefully prepared for divination. A single broomstick atop a latticed doorway bristles into a strange rainbow (witchcraft, all works 2015). Beads and dollars dangle in offering. A naked palm dipped in white splays over the wall (Palm Afterlife). One profane portal, barred and feathered, has been contained with a hard mint cross (mint green X). The long back wall of the largest room in this bright temple stands painted and designed, an altar ready in its hues to take on the necessary ceremonies with a handful of pews facing it for pilgrims. Everything stands prepared. Each of the shrines (paintings yes, but their dangles and cuts, inserts and protrusions, make them something

more) bear the markings of colourful splatters, odd animals sacrificed or holy liquids spilt in offering. Split by a mustard strip that angles up onto the canvas stretched above, loveseat’s polychrome heart, painted on the seatback, has a spray of blood-red dripping down into it, a human stain amongst all these hard edges. Spray-paint squiggles scar almost everything, but while illicit graffiti vandalises with its rebellious spray, these profaning marks feel worked into the ritual. Franz Kafka’s parable ‘Leopards in the Temple’ (pub. 1961) requires invocation here: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.’ A raw feminine energy makes these objects throb and glow. This is certainly a sanctum of priestesses and not priests, a monument to matriarchs. An exuberant femininity runs raw, almost too deep in its intimacy but protected by ancient forces, fearless of colour. One stained

Bow Down, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com. Courtesy Honor Fraser, Los Angeles

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cloth patterned in scrawled high-schooler’s hearts looks like a post-coital love rag (and is indeed called Love Rag, 2015), but is held aloft like a relic. Fucking here is sacred rather than a shadowy lust. The body here is the sacrament, not some crust of stale bread, but it is a woman’s body, deﬁnitely alive and certainly spirited. It isn’t any of these things really except in metaphor. Literally it’s an exhibition by Sarah Cain named Bow Down after a lyric (and precursor track to) pop singer Beyoncé’s raucous anthem Flawless, a tune that samples a speech by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled We should all be feminists. Beyoncé’s feminism is hers. Her belief in equality doesn’t limit how she can deﬁne herself or use her body. She can be as tough and dirty, as regal and forceful, as soft and sexy as she wants to be. The high priestess of a religion she invented. And with polychrome witchery and corporeal force, Shaker psychedelia and a leopard’s carnal grace, so can Sarah Cain. Andrew Berardini

Flat World David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 26 June – 15 August This exhibition of work by nine artists is organised around a vague concept and a perhaps intentionally misleading one too, for just as the world is not flat, neither are most of these works. Many are three-dimensional, and often curved. The accompanying text explains, ‘just as the Earth was indeed flat to those who perceived it as such; their “mistake” did not prevent them from exploring the world, developing technologies, or experiencing a full range of joys and disappointments,’ and in this same spirit Flat World is a show that rewards exploration with joys and disappointments. Its works are linked less by flatness than by a post-minimalist approach to geometric form, blocks of bold colour, and a sometimes surprising choice of materials – for example, the distorted wave form of Tauba Auerbach’s Slice / Wave Fulgurite iv.iii (2014) is sculpted out of cichlid sand, a specialist aquarium substrate intended for fish from the African Rift Valley lakes. Karma, a publisher, gallery and bookstore in New York, organised the show – the term ‘curated’ is avoided in all accompanying texts – and while no books are on display there are subtle allusions to literary forms. Charlotte Posenenske’s Deux reliefs – Série B (prototype 1967,

reconstruction 2008–11) is a pair of small, wall-mounted, curved sheets of spray-painted steel falling open like the pages of a magazine. Will Boone’s door (2015), one of four of the artist’s large word paintings on display here, consists of the blue-acrylic-on-canvas letters ‘D’, ‘O’, ‘O’, and ‘R’ cut out and layered atop one another on plain white canvas. The result is an indecipherable tangle of lines. Boone turns typography into abstract painting, and this tension between design and art objects is present throughout the exhibition. Richard Artschwager’s sculptures Brown Chair (2008), Granite Chair and Leaning Chair (both 2010) are modernist chairs constructed out of very thin Formica or laminate supported by a hidden wooden skeleton; strangely shaped and too weak to sit on, they resemble furniture yet cannot function as such. Similarly a sleek prism of apple-green aluminium, Robert Grosvenor’s 3 Wheeled Car (1969) includes a smoked-glass panel that, upon closer inspection, reveals a cockpit; it’s a scaled-down prototype for a futuristic racing car. Blending together abstract and ﬁgurative, the model looks like a minimalist triangle but also like a spacecraft from the Wipeout (1995–2007) racing video games that followed long after it.

In another muddling of our perception, Lee Lozano’s untitled, three-metre-wide painting from 1964 takes as its subjects a wrench and a razorblade and twists them into a foreboding, Escher-like architecture, a spatially disorientating world that recedes into tonal gradients. For a summer show, Flat World is perhaps too prescriptive a title, and by covering such a long period of time – 1963–2015 – and contrasting very established artists with lesser knowns, it undermines the narrative of progress that it hoped to present. Boone’s brightly coloured, thickly textured word paintings appear as very dull imitations of Peter Halley’s lurid orange, thickly textured Rectangular Prison with Smokestack (1987), which is hung directly opposite Boone’s work. Notwithstanding its technical virtuosity, John Mason’s Shifting Blue Spear (2014–15) – a tall spearhead shaped out of ceramic – appears boring compared to Grosvenor’s arrow-shaped car, Lozano’s razorblade architecture or even Artschwager’s chairs. While Postminimalism was once a vehicle for powerful ideas, on this showing, today’s formalists favour a more decorative approach; rather than revealing hidden depths, the ﬂatness of their work might only disguise a lack of ambition. Dean Kissick

Richard Artschwager, Brown Chair, 2008, Formica on wood, 122 × 31 × 51 cm. Photo: Lee Thompson. © the Estate of Richard Artschwager. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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Daniel Rushton Mazed Dutton, New York 1–31 July Sonia Dutton’s pop-up space across from the Whitney Museum’s new downtown demimonde, and her decision to close it with Daniel Rushton’s most recent suite of plotter paintings (more on these in a moment), are the kinds of moves that prove New York City still nourishes the commitments – aesthetic, social, historical – that made it, at least for a little while, the centre of the arts universe. And when was that? 1959. It was a turning-point year. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim opened its doors. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was taken off the censorship lists. And Dorothy Miller mounted Sixteen Americans at moma, which canonised, among others, Louise Nevelson, Jay DeFeo, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly, as well as Richard Lytle, Frank Stella and Jasper Johns (these being the only three born in the 1930s, which put them in their twenties). The future was there in the form of Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch! (1959). Next to it, everything else looked ‘painterly’, and so passé; at least that’s how the story of Stella’s rise has it. Not so fast, say the defenders of Johns. This was also the year of Device Circle and the introduction of that concept (the ‘device’) into the space of American-type – authorial,

expressive, subjectively triumphant – painting. Johns’s compass circle, like his stencils and casts, took the subject out of the mark, only it did so by making the latter the function of a mechanism that limited the hand’s degrees of freedom to one and made the ‘action’ of painting, in a sense, dumb. Though the work in Rushton’s Mazed is explicit about its interest in Picasso – the works draw from, literally, Picasso’s Minotauromachy (1935) and Blind Minotaur Led by a Little Girl in the Night (1934) – its debt is owed to Johns and the device. A few years ago, Rushton left behind more than half a decade of earnest yet highly conceptual and highly manual figure and landscape paintings for a repurposed plotter and some marker pens, the kind the kids like for tagging. The figures remained, but they were now transformed by Rushton’s use of a tablet and stylus to translate their contours into digital vector drawings that could be output by the plotter onto gessoed paper. The results look like manic diagrams, attempts at laying bare some figural logic that only computer and plotter understand. The governing dialectic at work in Mazed, as it is in Device Circle, is one of control and abandon. The disegno that once marked out

Minotaur and Girl with Bird, 2015, ink on gessoed paper over panel, 267 × 183 cm. Courtesy the artist and Dutton, New York

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the artist’s manual and intellectual mastery over everything that they could see and conceive is animated here by a technology and process so thoroughly mechanised as to become alien to its operator. Yes, Rushton is confident that the plotter will produce the drawing he tells it to, but just how it will produce it, what kind of path the pen will take, which lines will be made when, and how they will be connected is, in some sense, mysterious. That this dialectic is of central concern to Rushton is evident in his choice of earlier artists to quote: Masaccio (The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, c. 1425), Courbet (The Meeting (Bonjour Monsieur Courbet), 1854), Van Gogh (Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888) and, here in Mazed, Picasso, who in his Minotauromachy similarly mechanised, via etching, the conflict between the abandon of our bodily unconscious and the control of our eyes and mind. Too often today the lure of the digital leads artists to favouring the image over the machine, or vice versa (Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker would be, quite literally, the poster boys here). Rushton’s achievement lies in his staying close to the figure and to drawing, in his evocation of the manual, all the while hazarding their obliteration, like Johns, through the animation of the device. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Andra Ursuta O Nóɒoɑ ɅȽ ɂɀɂɏɅɂɜ ɌȽɋȽ Ramiken Crucible, New York 7 June – 12 July What was most compelling about past works by Andra Ursuta, such as Stoner (2013), an installation that consisted of a baseball pitching machine hurling handmade rocks at a ceramic wall over a distance of 12 metres at approximately 110kph (it was inspired by a news item about a woman who was stoned to death for committing an act of adultery in an Islamic fundamentalist country) was the ferocious rage it translated into controlled kinetic movement. Though the installation served to embody and so represent this kind of unthinking violence, the machine hurling rocks was, in effect, an avatar of revenge against those misogynistic, backward motherfuckers Ursuta read about in the news – and perhaps against men in general. This visceral hatred is absent from Ȫ Ȩɟɒɍɑ ɅȽ ɂɀɂɏɅɂɜ ɌȽɋȽ. The title is a Greek phrase that translates into ‘the south will rise again’. Consisting of 13 photograms and one large-scale sculptural installation spread out across Ramiken Crucible’s two locations on the Lower East Side, the exhibition’s only kinetic attribute on a recent afternoon were the three ﬂies that had migrated from the park next door and were alighting on the walls of the main gallery, where artworks were hung that made reference to international sports competitions. Scarecrow (all works 2015), a grey concrete, aluminium and powder-coated steel sculpture that resembles a squat basketball goal stands in the centre of the room. On the backboard,

which consists of three horizontal panels echoing the German national flag, is pinned what the press release describes as an inflatable grey monochrome replica of Fritz, the World Cup mascot of the German national soccer team – the backboard is meant to conjure a colourless national flag but looks more like the personal project of a very depressed balloon twister. On the wall to the left of it is Olympdicks, a series of five photograms burned on strips of velvet dyed to match the colours of the Olympic rings. These show silhouettes of penis costumes in various stages of contortion. In one, a penis cuts itself in half with a scythe. In another, a penis penetrates a man doing a handstand. Or at least that’s how it appears. These penises are open to interpretation. Here Ursuta sneers at men rather than raging against them. ‘Look at these stupid little egomaniacs, and their stupid little meaningless competitions,’ she seems to say. While Stoner was propelled by medieval attitudes towards women held by evil men, Olympdicks seems more the result of a few too many Tinder dates, even as it invokes the strained relations between Greece and Germany over the former’s debts. This dismissal of male machismo as embodied by flexing muscles paired with flaccid dicks is neither resolved nor continued in the second gallery. Located in the basement underneath the branch of a local bank, the space resembles an underground cave. Rendered in

saturated earth tones, and set against waterstained grey concrete walls, the remaining eight photograms look hauntingly beautiful. Despite menacing titles, such as From my top 5 Deaths You Didn’t See Coming and Natural Deselection, and the fact that the silhouettes of objects burned into them belong to Halloween decorations and S&M masks, what the images most resemble are the pulmonary X-rays carried around like calling cards by the idle bourgeois in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) – objects with talismanic rather than critical powers. Ursuta has stated that her work is informed by an unspoken logic that arises from the stream of media she absorbs on a daily basis. But this logic is confused in Ȫ Ȩɟɒɍɑ ɅȽ ɂɀɂɏɅɂɜ ɌȽɋȽ. In America, ‘the South will rise again’ is a statement associated with white supremacists looking to restore the conditions of the Confederacy, but in the context of this exhibition it also refers to a European north–south divide: the current debt crisis in Greece, and moreover, to Germany aggressively insisting on radical austerity measures before agreeing to a bailout of its eu partner. Ursuta may see the connections to the Olympics or S&M, but she doesn’t do a good job providing a key to the viewer, particularly in a us context more fraught than ever with racial tension and violence. Here all she does is metaphorically kick the douchebags of the world in the balls, but not hard enough that they can feel it. Brienne Walsh

Natural Deselection, 2015, dye on velvet, 192 × 150 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist and Ramiken Crucible, New York

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Susan Cianciolo if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite) Bridget Donahue, New York 17 May – 12 July Susan Cianciolo gained recognition as a fashion designer. After working with Badgley Mischka and Kim Gordon’s X-girl line, she started her own label, Run, presenting 12 collections from 1995 to 2001. In marked contrast to superpower fashion labels at the time, whose worldwide sweatshops became unfashionable black-eyes, Cianciolo’s Run garments were often made by sewing circles and in collaboration with friends and family (Cianciolo’s grandmother, and her daughter Lilac). Garments included a ‘do-ityourself denim skirt kit’, which is featured in her solo exhibition at Bridget Donahue; the skirt comes inside a cardboard ‘kit’. The show features 30 of these small, ramshackle, do-it-yourself kits, or sculptures, each resting atop a textile of some sort. The whole thing looks charmingly homespun, though it verges on the twee, with ordinary tape stylishly pinning paper to cardboard, or cobbled together books tied up in string, like giftwrap. Affected

or not, the boxes themselves are fascinating, and unfurling their contents for inspection becomes something poignantly performative. For visitors, Bridget Donahue herself often takes the honours, telling anecdotes while squatting on the ﬂoor, laying out contents like precious anthropological relics. Sitting beside Mini Me (2008–15), for example, Donahue laid out the contents of Cianciolo’s shoebox: a little wood person no more than 13cm tall, made of a cylinder, a sphere, two small pieces of wood for arms, and two dots and a line for a very simple face, lying in a fabric bed; three small, scribbly paintings on wood; pieces of torn-up drawings; three tiny wood bowls and a tiny wood laptop and book, arranged on a block of wood. Resting on a small piece of vintage embroidery, Mini Me had the look and scale of a child’s tiny doll’s house, replete with infantile scribbles and marks. In another kit, parts / Do It Yourself Kits (1997–2015), the do-it-yourself denim skirt is

accompanied by photocopies of shoe sketches and drawings, and a gouache-and-ink drawing of colourful triangles, which look like they have been filled in by a five-year-old. Also enclosed is a ‘Run Home Geometry Kit’ made this past year. Less an actual kit than a meditation on geometric shapes, it could become something functional if one willed it, though it’s better as a theoretical gesture than an actual garment. Like a lot of the objects Cianciolo has included here, the line between concept and product is wobbly and arbitrary. A lot of things can be worn if you simply tape them to your body. If you tape them to the wall, they become something else entirely – art or fashion, form or function, it’s whatever you want, however you want it. Such open-ended conceptualism is what is so appealing about if God comes to visit You, how will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite). It suggests that the only limits to creative thinking are self-inflicted. David Everitt Howe

if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite), 2015 (installation view). Photo: Marc Brems Tatti. Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

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Figure 8 Clifton Benevento, New York 26 June – 7 August The work of Channa Horwitz (1932–2013) revolved around systems and notation. The codes she devised mimic the languages of music and mathematics (indeed, some of her compositions were designed for use by musicians and dancers). In their final sum, the works appeal to the eye with visible rhythm and intense repetition, accumulating lines and colours to compose a fine mesh of marks or unusual shapes generated by a specific iterative logic. A single drawing in this exhibition, Movement # ii Sheet A (1969), is a modest testimony to ‘Sonakinatography’ – the code Horwitz devised, based on the numbers one to eight, for writing down time, rhythm and movement (each allocated to different elements of a composition) on eight-to-theinch graph paper. In it, precise thought is given form and their mutual satisfaction gives rise to Horwitz’s unique aesthetic. Figure 8 borrows from this system, assembling eight works by eight artists who are working with different forms of ‘writing’ and its transference into material. To lead with language in this way (however broadly) breaks from the raft

of gestural abstract painting now prevalent in New York and whose messiah, Albert Oehlen, has a concurrent solo show at the New Museum. The works at Clifton Benevento are thoroughly without gesture: the artists’ hands are all but invisible. Noticeable in the context of Horwitz’s oeuvre is the involvement of electronic computation in the works of these contemporary artists. A video work by Siebren Versteeg entitled boom (Fresher Acconci) (2007), uses a program to grab pictures from random Google searches and insert them into a loop of an offering hand. For Intersecting the Values of Hue and Brightness (2015), Joshua Citarella produced technicolour vinyl sheathes whose gradients are generated according to coordinates of the gallery’s architecture. The other highly coloured work in the show, something of a painting-by-numbers work by Mariah Dekkenga (Untitled, 2015), translates compositions from Adobe Illustrator by hand into paint on canvas. Next to these colouriﬁc surfaces are more sculptural pieces by Zarouhie Abdalian, who has assembled seven piano keys on the wall for

Every Instance (C#/D‫( ) ڷ‬2014), and Luis Miguel Bendaña, who traps a tangle of vhs tape beneath blue netting in Tears of a Pig (2015). Mike Yaniro has carved out letters and numbers from a blue pvc sheet and painted them in white. Something of an anomaly, Mailed Painting 168 (2015) by Karin Sander is nothing but a primed canvas bearing the marks of its unprotected transit from Berlin to New York. These works offer various artistic relations between media and music, illustration, transportation, image circulation and architecture. Unwittingly perhaps, the show in part recounts the disappearance of physical supports for data and the prominence of electronic analysis. Gone is the combination of functionality and great labour in Horwitz’s notations, with visual art as the transcendent outcome; in its place are swifter visible results, the ﬁnal sum of which might be purely decorative. Where these works lack a certain power, collectively they approach the question of where paths through art and information might begin today. Iona Whittaker

Channa Horwitz, Movement # II Sheet A, 1969, pencil on graph paper, 89 × 61 cm. Photo: Andres Ramirez. Courtesy Clifton Benevento, New York

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Omar Badsha Seedtime Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town 24 April – 2 August If one thing can be said about South Africa’s art scene it is that it has produced photographers. Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng and more recently Zanele Muholi, Pieter Hugo and Mikhael Subotzky are perhaps the most well known. But there are many others who rival them: Peter Magubane, Alf Kumalo, Guy Tillim, Paul Weinberg, Gideon Mendel, Cedric Nunn, Jodi Bieber, Sabelo Mlangeni and Thabiso Sekgala, to name just a few. Perhaps the most enigmatic of these others is Omar Badsha. To say that Badsha is only a photographer is to deny his contribution as an activist, trade unionist and historian. But it is precisely these idiosyncratic shifts that are present in his retrospective, Seedtime. The distinct periods in Badsha’s life are marked out chronologically within the five rooms that comprise the exhibition. The first two rooms, entitled ‘Under the Umdoni Tree’, reveal, most surprisingly, that from 1965 to 1972 he was an artist who produced drawings and woodcuts. The last two rooms show that his photographic interests were later almost solely focused on trips to Ethiopia, Denmark and India. The drawings certainly are those of a very talented artist, and yet their period and stylistic similarities with the works of Badsha’s friend and influence Dumile Feni and South African postwar Modernists like Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumalo make them not entirely original. However, the same is not true of his photography, which comprises the rest of the exhibition. I have often felt that many photographers who came after Badsha were influenced by

his compositions. And one can’t help but see in the room titled ‘Narratives of a Time of Revolution’, of photographs dating from 1976 to 1996, the effect his photography had on more recent practitioners. Certainly Zwelethu Mthethwa (currently standing trial accused of murder) came almost startlingly close to copying the composition, if not the feel, of people placed in domestic poverty that one first sees in Badsha’s Pensioner, Eastern Cape (1983), Woman and Child, Inanda, Kwa-Zulu Natal (date unknown) and Migrant worker, Dalton Road Hostel, Durban (1986). But as ‘Narratives of a Time of Revolution’ reveals, Badsha’s influence (and more generally that of the other members of the famous Afrapix photographic agency he helped form) did not end there. In overtly political images such as Funeral of anc soldiers Stembiso Nzuza and Moses Ramatlotlo, KwaMusha Township, Durban (1984), what is captured is the close-up of the human drama of South African politics. This was a distinct movement away from the Drum photographers of the previous generation, who conventionally placed the political subject in relationship to a specific, recognisable location. This strategy of the close-up, employed by Badsha, would become the photographic trope that would find its ultimate expression in the images taken by the photographic group known as the Bang Bang Club. Where Badsha’s photography of the above period differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his portraiture. Unlike David Goldblatt, who sought to capture a consciously composed photographic subject, Badsha caught people in very ordinary moments,

facing page, top Dorothy Nyembe, at a reception to celebrate her release from prison after serving a 15-year sentence for banned anc activities, Durban, 1984, digital print on ﬁne art paper, 38 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist

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ones in which they seem fleetingly to have uncomposed themselves in the presence of the camera. One sees this in images like Young Woman Repairing Home, Inanda (1982), where the young woman, clearly aware of the photographer, is briefly distracted by the building material she is carrying on her head. Or in Farzanah and Granny (1978), where Badsha’s grandmother gently touches her great-granddaughter’s foot. It is this ordinariness of the subject, without the creation of conscious photographic artifice, which is at the centre of Badsha’s oeuvre. Where Seedtime fails is in its scale – the five large rooms constitute an immense space. Badsha is a photographer of great importance to the development of the medium in South Africa, but his best work is largely confined to the apartheid period. This is not because Badsha became any less of a photographer in the years that followed, but because his focus changed with the postapartheid politics that directed his interests. And this change, first one of celebration and then one of the reaction to the current kleptocratic government, has not easily conjoined with the simple subtlety and authenticity contained within some of his best photographs. This resulted in a wane in Badsha’s photographic engagement. In the last two rooms, which show photographic essays from 1995 to 2001, taken abroad, you see little more than the occasional repetition of his best work during the apartheid era. A retrospective held in three rooms would have sufficed. Matthew Blackman

facing page, bottom Migrant worker, Dalton Road Hostel, Durban, 1986, digital print on ﬁne art paper, 38 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Books

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Making Biennials in Contemporary Times: Essays from the World Biennial Forum No 2 edited by Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Charles Esche, et al Instituto de Cultura Contemporânea, free (e-book)

In his essay for this navel-gazing reader – a publication that serves as a record of papers presented at the second World Biennial Forum, held last year in São Paulo, which though often dry occasionally pops into life as it considers the biennial as an increasingly dominant form of international exhibitionmaking – philosopher Peter Osborne makes the startling calculation that there are currently sufficient biennials around the world to make it theoretically possible to attend at least one weekly. ‘“Every other year” is now (for the global artworld) almost twice a week,’ he drily notes. This profusion, he argues, is eroding the purpose of biennials from within. Osborne (logically) deﬁnes biennials around their cyclical nature, arguing that while they seek

to be ‘artistic-cultural definitions of the historical present’, their collective regularity means that contemporary art is constantly being made historical and creating an audience perpetually and increasingly hungry for a new fix. The question as to whether the increase in the number of biennials is driven by market forces is one of the recurring themes throughout the publication’s 15 papers. If the intensification of time is one of the things turning the biennial into what theorists Anthony Gardner and Charles Green in their paper term a ‘neoliberal token’, the pair suggest the concept of ‘the global South’ as a mode of resistance. Here ‘the South’ is not merely geography but, drawing from the struggles following decolonialisation

and deimperialisation, ‘an inspiration for resisting the [countries bordering the] North Atlantic’s devouring of space, resources, alternative histories and epistemologies’. If this sounds like the cooption of a very real historical struggle for a neat academic turn of phrase, then perhaps curator Moacir dos Anjos expresses a more nuanced idea of geographical radicalness, positing localism and tradition as a ‘counter-hegemonic voice’ against the bland internationalism the market, and by extension, biennials, so often proliferate. Art that isn’t, doesn’t want to and perhaps can’t be understood by the kind of globalism that is second nature to neoliberalism: now that’s a reality I would support. Oliver Basciano

Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art by Malcolm Miles Pluto Press, £19.99 (softcover)

In this book Malcolm Miles seeks to identify the ways in which various cultural projects of the early years of this century, mainly British and often linked to the meaningless term ‘creativity’, have been used to mask urban regeneration as a form of control, selective wealth production and social manipulation, generally with the end goal of superficial city branding and various types of tourism. Along the way, he traces museums as sites of culture from Georgian and Victorian times (when conspicuous display of wealth shifted from the country to the city) through to the last round of New Labour landmarks, among them the New Art Gallery in Walsall, the Hepworth in Wakefield, Middlesbrough’s mima, Turner Contemporary in Margate and most prominently London’s Tate Modern. In doing so, Miles, a uk-based professor of cultural theory, identifies the art institution as consistently operating as a ‘productive space’: at first for the promotion of hygiene, virtue and taste in the filthy lower classes, and now as a tool for the creation of consumers and the promotion of capitalist values, pointing more than once to the inclusion of graffiti in the contemporary art gallery as an example of its ‘containment of more or less everything, as acted out in the art market’. Along the way there are the usual critiques of the empty seduction of

‘starchitecture’, the nature of ‘authenticity’, the myth of public space, the prominence of wealthy donors’ names in museums and the dominance of the art market. And plenty of quotations. Herein lies one of Limits to Culture’s weaknesses. In his introduction Miles excuses himself as a theorist rather than an empiricist. Much of what he has witnessed of the culture he seeks to investigate has been via the page or screen rather than in person: ‘I have not been to Bilbao,’ he says when analysing the city’s Guggenheim Museum, ‘so rely on published accounts’. Not long after, he’s arrived at the point of utilising quotations within quotations: ‘Jim McGuigan cites an article by Polly Toynbee…’, for instance. As a result, and despite his visits to several of the venues he discusses, Miles comes across as distanced: more focused on the academic and literary discourse around his subject than the subject itself. A difference perhaps between a representation and the reality it seeks to represent. It’s a problem which comes to a particular head when Miles summarises Jacques Rancière’s ‘Problems and Transformations of Critical Art’ (2004), in which the Frenchman describes (in Miles’s words) ‘how the exploited do not need explanations of the conditions they experience ﬁrst hand’: a suggestion that practice should

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replace theory and that experience is more powerful than representation. Bizarrely it’s here, when you can’t help thinking that to some degree Miles is doing to practice with theory (containing the former within the latter) precisely what he accuses the art market of doing to graffiti, that the book kicks off, as Miles gets to grips with the art inside museums, with participatory art and expanded fields of practice – in which art is not representation, but expression, and generative of a public. Not that he thinks participatory art is free of old problems: ‘I suggest that socially engaged and participatory art retains the artist’s privileged voice as project director… just as culturally led urban regeneration affirms the privileged role of property owning elites’. And so Miles turns to art that exists outside the artworld, or that may only loosely be termed art – the Occupy Movement or, closer to home, the family-run art-protest group the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home – to persuasively argue that the best hope for an art that aspires to have any real relevance to a broad audience lies in the mix of politics, dissent and conflict that exists in everyday urban life. Or in something that we might struggle to define as art in the terms set by the nexus of interests, among them museums, that is ‘the art market’. Mark Rappolt

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Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts From The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen Nebula / Autonomedia, £20 (softcover)

Since the late 1980s, critical work about the Situationists has often been overly focused on Guy Debord and events in Paris. With their new anthology, which follows an earlier collection of critical essays, Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (2012), Rasmussen, a Danish theorist, and Jakobsen, a Danish artist, have set about correcting this Francophile imbalance by drawing the attention of English-language readers to another part of this movement. One third of Cosmonauts of the Future consists of three long sections extracted from The Natural Order and Other Texts by Danish artist Asger Jorn (2002), and also includes a 12-page English translation of Jorn’s ‘On the Triolectical Method in its Applications in General Situlogy’. The rest of this anthology features work by the likes of Jørgen Nash, Jacqueline de Jong, Gruppe spur, J.V. Martin and Guy Debord. Jorn’s contribution, in which he undertakes a revolutionary reconstruction of philosophy from the standpoint of the artist, forms the core of the book. Among other things, Jorn makes a cogent critique of Marx’s understanding of the cycle of commodity production and consumption, but his unlikely digressions have also proved strangely productive. For example, this one: ‘…let us now imagine a whole new type of football ﬁeld, where, instead of two teams and two goals, there are three teams in play

and three goals…’ Here Jorn is using a metaphor to help map the ideas of Danish physicist Niels Bohr onto Marxist dialectics, and this leads him to triolectics. Some readers took this aside literally. Despite Jorn stating that three-sided football would ‘not be an exciting game’, it has been pursued as a sport since 1993 and there is even a Wikipedia entry dedicated to it. The book that this soccer digression originally appeared in is The Natural Order from 1962. This, indeed, is the year around which all the texts in Cosmonauts of the Future swirl. There are two reasons for this. It was the year internal politics caused a split in the Situationist International between Debord’s circle and those – mainly artists as apposed to theorists – who went on to form the Second Situationist International. 1962 was also the high point of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear annihilation and the politics spun around this are central to a number of texts in Cosmonauts of the Future. Thanks to his success as a painter, Jorn was able to fund the two rival Situationist factions while adroitly positioning himself between them. In this anthology, Jorn comes across as the towering ﬁgure of the Situationist movement, dwarﬁng everyone else into sideshow status. The texts by other Situationists are often amusing but also very much of their time, as can be seen from this heavily gendered proclamation

by Gordon Fazakerley: ‘The poet and painter have one thing in common, that no public relations officers can dispel: each can take his penis out and make art with it. And what critics on the face of the earth would dare to expose themselves, and let their penis speak.’ The earliest text in the anthology is from 1952 and by Jorn, while the final contributions from 1974 include this by Jens Jørgen Thorsen, referencing Michael Bakunin, the founding father of the modern anarchist movement: ‘Bakunin propagated the secret societies and proved them to be the until now strongest weapon in the fight for freedom and liberation.’ This shameless degeneration into anarchism comes shortly after both Jorn’s death (1973) and the dissolution of the situationist faction centred on Guy Debord. The strangest thing about Thorsen’s text is that it is not only endorsed by his long-term allies but also signed by Debord’s close collaborator in Scandinavia, the painter J. V. Martin. While there were differences between the rival situationist factions, Martin patently overplayed them in the 1960s for pantomime effect. Cosmonauts of the Future provides insights into the Situationists that many would struggle to find elsewhere; and by gutting translations of Jorn provides the easiest route so far into an understanding of one of the movement’s key figures. Stewart Home

Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum by Sara Wookey

The potentially provocative title question sets the tone for this collection of 15 concise conversations with gallery directors, curators and dancers that eloquently discuss the very recent history of dance in uk gallery and museum spaces with the same critical consideration normally given to work by visual artists in those venues. The ‘care’ under discussion being not only how to physically look after the safety and well-being of the dancers in that environment but to consider how the body interacts with the museum space. And, in terms of hierarchy, how to give the human gesture parity with the art object. It’s no surprise that this publication is produced by choreographer Siobhan Davies,

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Siobhan Davies Dance, £10 (softcover)

a passionate advocate of dance and of dancers as autonomous creatives. Davies has not only been making dance for non-theatre spaces since the early 2000s but opens up cross-disciplinary discussions about how dance is created, learnt, talked about and archived. It also helps that dance artist Sara Wookey conducts the interviews. Wookey’s insider’s perspective when talking with Hayward chief curator Stephanie Rosenthal and dance artist Katye Coe about Volumes Project, the performance element of the Hayward exhibition mirrorcity (2014), for example, or with choreographer Yvonne Rainer about Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works (2014), at Raven Row, brings an informed

ArtReview

intelligence, not only to the wider questions of why galleries want dance and why dance wants the gallery, but to more practical concerns; paying performers adequately, providing shower and laundry facilities and creating signage for an ‘exhibit’ that moves around a gallery. But perhaps this timely repositioning of dance in the gallery is best summed up by Hugo Worthy from Leicester’s New Walk Museum and Art Gallery when he points out, ‘the church is the model for the museum but what would have happened if, culturally, the fairground – which was kind of parallel to the church in the medieval period – had become the model?’ Helen Sumpter

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For more on Marcello Quintanilha, see overleaf

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Contributors

Pablo Bronstein is an Argentinian-British artist based in Kent. He has had solo shows at the Metropolitan Museum, New York; ica, London; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Forthcoming projects include the Duveen Commission at Tate Britain for 2016. He has published several books, including Ornamental Designs (2008), Gilded Keyholes (2013) and A Is Building, B Is Architecture (2013). His pocket book Postmodern Architecture in London (2006) will soon be followed by a guide dedicated to low-quality neo-Georgian developer architecture of the 1990s. Bronstein holds this type of architecture in high regard as the last ﬂowering of the British vernacular. This month he writes about conservatism. Maria Lind has directed Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, since 2011, cocurating numerous exhibitions and presenting monographic shows on the work of Iman Issa, Bernd Krauss and Hinrich Sachs. She has also directed Abstract Possible, a research project on abstraction that generated exhibitions across Europe and in Mexico City at the beginning of this decade; the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2008–1o); the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (2005–07); and the Kunstverein Munich (2002–04). She has taught and written extensively throughout, with recent coedited publications including Art and the F Word: Reﬂections on the Browning of Europe (2014). She is the artistic director of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale and a regular ArtReview columnist.

Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon: Spacemen 3 and the Birth of Spiritualized (2005) and, with Tav Falco, Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South (2011). He lives in Los Angeles and is an adjunct lecturer at Southern California Institute of Architecture. He also contributes to The Believer, The Guardian, Frieze, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review and Rolling Stone, among others. This month he proﬁles the work of Amalia Ulman. Publications that have recently caught his attention include Peter Sloterdijk’s Globes: Spheres Volume ii: Macrospherology (2014); Joanna Walsh’s Hotel (2015); Chloë Sevigny’s photographic autobiography (2015); Erik Butler’s translation of Léon Bloy’s Disagreeable Tales (1894/2015); and Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (2015), edited by Sarah Weinman.

Contributing Writers Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Matthew Blackman, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Pablo Bronstein, Barbara Casavecchia, Bill Clarke, Matthew Collings, Michelangelo Corsaro, Gabriel Coxhead, David Everitt Howe, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Stewart Home, Sam Jacob, Dean Kissick, Maria Lind, Tobi Maier, Erik Morse, Terry R. Myers, Laura Oldﬁeld Ford, Lucas Ospina, Claire Rigby, Ed Schad, Raimar Stange, Susannah Thompson, Dan Udy, Dominic van den Boogerd, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Iona Whittaker Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp

Claire Rigby is a freelance journalist living in São Paulo, where she moved in 2010 to launch and edit Time Out São Paulo. She currently works as a news reporter covering Brazil stories for the LA Times, The Guardian, Vice and others. This month she proﬁles Mônica Nador. For multilayered reading on São Paulo, she recommends the work of the journalist and author Luiz Ruffato, whose recently translated There Were Many Horses (2014) comprises 70 São Paulo vignettes, each from the point of view of different characters, spanning the classes and crisscrossing the city.

Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Marcello Quintanilha, Gustavo Speridão

Marcello Quintanilha (preceding pages)

Comics in Brazil are commonly called quadrinhos, or ‘little paintings’. Gaze into each panel of Marcello Quintanilha’s comics and you can see why, as they open onto vignettes of his country’s mixed society and mixed-up psyche. The son of a former football player and a schoolteacher, Quintanilha, born in 1971 in Niterói, across the Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, grew up in the city’s working-class Barreto neighbourhood. He has never forgotten his “permanent contact with things and values in total decay – shops and factories shutting down, old soccer ﬁelds closing, workers’ villages disﬁgured or abandoned, local festivities emptying year after year; everything that represented a more vital, promising and perhaps happier past seemed to be saying goodbye every day”. Out of this developed his strong nostalgic feelings “towards a reality which I didn’t necessarily take part in, but which lingered on in the people and settings around me”. At the age of sixteen he began illustrating martial arts and horror comics, and after

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a spell working in animation, he crafted Fealdade de Fabiano Gorila (1999), his first solo graphic novel. Told in the style of Italian neorealist cinema, it is based on a 1950s incident during his father’s career playing for the club Canto do Rio. Photojournalism more than painting is a key influence on Quintanilha, who spent hours as a boy looking at newspaper photos of footballers that captured the moment, “creating nearly impossible representations of the human figure”, which served as his drawing lessons in anatomy and movement. Later he incorporated the distinct iconography of Brazilian photographers Chico Albuquerque and Evandro Teixeira into his work. Despite moving to Barcelona in 2002 to illustrate a seven-volume Franco-Belgian bande dessinée thriller, Sept Balles pour Oxford (2003–12), Quintanilha does not “feel even 10 centimetres away from Brazil”. In the graphic fictions he writes and draws, he continues the Brazilian crônica, a narrative tradition dating back

ArtReview

to the birth of the press, which springs from a real event and intensiﬁes it with a ﬁctional or sometimes journalistic dimension. This spirit brims over in the pithy, prize-winning short stories compiled in his Sábado dos meus amores (2009), and in Tungstênio, a 2014 graphic novel that ensnares a dealer, a retired army officer, a cop and the cop’s wife in Bahia in an escalating nightmare. It’s evident too in his new Strip for ArtReview, in which he targets “the image and language of the corporate world and its excessive devotion to the idea of leadership”. Radically, Quintanilha’s comics stand outside the norm for ignoring any orderly overall page layout or meta-panel. Instead, he presents panels singly, loosely, ungridded, “to remove any notion of the whole page’s narrative unity, and to reduce that role to the panel itself, eliminating the idea that they are parts of a larger image”. Perhaps in this way Quintanilha comes closer to presenting his panels as ‘little paintings’. Paul Gravett

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on the cover and pages 169 and 174 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Phrases on the spine (from ‘Resistance Is Surrender’, by Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books, vol 29 no 22, 15 November 2007) and on pages 33 (wikipedia.org), 81 (capitalism.org), 115 (investopedia.com) and 139 ( econlib.org) offer various deﬁnitions of capitalism

on the cover hair by Kristina Rask at Zimmer:Sonne, Copenhagen

September 2015

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Off the Record September 2015 “This is marvellous! He’s now claiming he’s never heard of the Turner Prize. I know you said he was part of a new generation of curators, Gallery Girl, but that’s totally out there. He’ll be a magnet for collectors showering him with cash to get on his acquisitions committee. And then, we pounce on them. Your plan is splendid!” My boss, the director of this godforsaken gallery, has clearly knocked back a few glasses of the Lateral Shiraz that I’ve got in from Tesco on special offer at £20.94 per case for the private view. But I’m nervous. The guy I’ve hired from the Casting Collective Limited is wearing the gear that I specified – suit from Next, men’s shoes from British Home Stores – but there’s nothing in our prepared script about scrapping the Turner Prize. I go over to the small group clustered around where my boss just was. “Alex Farquharson, I’m so happy you could make it,” I bellow. I move in towards him so that the laciest bits of my Mary Katrantzou dress get as close as possible to his chest while I nuzzle his ear. “Cut out the crap about the Turner Prize. Just keep going on about being a seed of change and the terrible beauty of Barbara Hepworth,” I whisper. But I can smell the Lateral on his breath and I know none of this will be getting through. “Seeds of change?” he manages to whisper back at me before a collector grabs him from the other side and starts talking to him about bp or something. The seeds of change thing was a desperate line. After months of flatlining sales, my boss had finally called me in. He was always uneasy talking about the commercial side of the artworld. After all, this was an art dealer who had once got Rudi Fuchs to curate a show of Phillip King and Henri Chopin in a show called Fuchs King and Chopin. He had called me in to explain why I had not only consistently missed my sales targets for the last two years but had in fact made no sales whatsoever after exhausting the patience of the few wealthy former schoolfriends that were the nucleus of my black book. In desperation I had reached into my Laurent Monogramme Bourse mini-fringed bucket bag and pulled out the first thing I found – a packet of St John’s Wort seeds. I only had a foggy recollection of how they had got there, something to do with a bet that had gone wrong late the previous night with Ai Weiwei at the Pink Chihuahua on Brewer Street. “The seeds of change!” I had explained. “It’s not about the sales figures, it’s about the key influencers I can bring you. You need to be in the loop with a new generation of curators who are taking Britain’s museums by storm. Alex Farquharson! Nicholas Cullinan! Simon Groom from Scotland! These inoffensive, fogey-ish chaps are tearing up the museum world and sending sexual and cultural diversity back to where it belongs!”

The boss, still recovering from the horrors of Okwui’s Venice Biennale, had liked this. The petty cash and the Casting Collective Limited’s ﬁnest choice of inoffensive white late-thirtysomething extras had done the rest. But these things have a way of unravelling. As I break away from the extra who’s pretending to be Farquharson I can spy the guy who is playing Groom holding forth on how he would like nothing more than an energetic shag with Nicola Sturgeon. It seems an unlikely line from someone who is supposed to be director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Meanwhile the fellow playing Cullinan is holding a bottle of that bloody Shiraz and krumping in the highly expressive and energetic style that characterises this popular American dance. There is no music playing other than that which is in this Cullinan’s head. I can’t imagine the real Cullinan krumping. But who knows? I know nothing about Cullinan. Still, the Albanian waiters are unloading more of the Shiraz. It’s remarkable how many bottles you can get for £473. Outside, the September evening is turning into the warm darkness of a late summer night. Berwick Street is round the corner and there’s enough time for a couple of Aperol Spritz in Polpetto before Ai Weiwei really gets his groove on in the Pink Chihuahua. Farquharson seems to have vomited on the feet of the collector asking about bp. My boss has joined in the krumping. I haven’t seen him look so happy since using Hans-Peter Feldmann’s upgraded public restrooms at the Münster Sculpture Projects in 2007. I slip out into the evening air knowing that things can only get better. Gallery Girl

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