ArtReview September 2016 by ArtReview

Barrão

What’s art for: pleasure, protest or profit?

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HIGH JEWELLERY RING - UNIQUE PIECE 14 CT BRILLIANT CUT WHITE DIAMOND - 44 CT PIGEON BLO OD RUBY BRIOLET TES

New York

Ryan Gander I see straight through you

Tony Cragg London

HAUSER WIRTH & SCHIMMEL

MARIA LASSNIG 17 SEPTEMBER — 31 DECEMBER 2016 901 EAST 3RD STREET LOS ANGELES CA 90013 WWW.HAUSERWIRTHSCHIMMEL.COM SELBSTPORTRAIT MIT SPRECHBLASE (SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SPEECH BUBBLE), 2006 OIL ON CANVAS 200 × 150 CM / 78 3/4 × 59 IN © MARIA LASSNIG FOUNDATION

HA U S E R & W IR T H

MIKE KELLEY: FRAMED AND FRAME ORGANISED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MIKE KELLEY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS 23 SEPTEMBER – 19 NOVEMBER 2016 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

FRAMED AND FRAME (MINIATURE REPRODUCTION “CHINATOWN WISHING WELL” BUILT BY MIKE KELLEY AFTER “MINIATURE REPRODUCTION ‘SEVEN STAR CAVERN’ BUILT BY PROF. H.K. LU”), (“FRAMED” SECTION, DETAIL), 1999 2 PARTS: STEEL CYCLONE FENCING, ELECTRICAL FIXTURES, PAPER LANTERNS, FAUX CONCRETE, WOOD, PAPER PULP, ACRYLIC, STATUARY, SPRAY PAINT, MATTRESS, AFGHAN, PILLOW, VASELINE, CONDOMS “FRAMED” SECTION: 287 × 485 × 409 CM / 113 × 191 × 161 IN; “FRAME” SECTION: 348 × 574 × 531 CM / 137 × 226 × 209 IN ART © MIKE KELLEY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY RENNIE COLLECTION, VANCOUVER COURTESY THE FOUNDATION AND HAUSER & WIRTH PHOTO: ANDRÉ MORIN

HOMO LUDENS

curated by Ricardo Sardenberg Bas Jan Ader José Bento Pedro Caetano Waltércio Caldas Alex Cerveny Wesley Duke Lee Marcius Galan Fernanda Gomes Agnieska Kurant Guto Lacaz Leonilson Jarbas Lopes Jorge Macchi Montez Magno Marepe Cildo Meireles Rivane Neuenschwander Dieter Roth Beto Shwafaty Erika Verzutti among others...

31 August - 5 November 2016

Rua Padre João Manuel, 755 / 974a, São Paulo, Brazil | www.galerialuisastrina.com.br

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZbURG

JAMES ROSENQUIST FOUR DEcADES 1970 – 2010

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ASCÂNIO MMM: AS MEDIDAS DOS CORPOS CURATED BY PAULO MIYADA . SEP 4 - OCT 8

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URS FISCHER, UNTITLED (DOOR), 2006, CAST, ALUMINIUM, ENAMEL, 215 X 136 X 51 CM

JOSH SMITH, UNTITLED, 2014, OIL ON CANVAS, 223.5 X 195.6 CM

AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU 77-YEAR-OLD NOMINAL PERFORMANCE ARTIST PIERRE PINONCELLI CRACKED MARCEL DUCHAMP’S FOUNTAIN, 1917, WITH A HAMMER.

THE SCREAM AND MADONNA, TWO ICONIC PAINTINGS BY EDVARD MUNCH, STOLEN TWO YEARS EARLIER, ARE RECOVERED IN A POLICE RAID IN OSLO.

THE SWISS ARTIST URS FISCHER PARTICIPATES IN A DOUBLE EXHIBITION WITH RUDOLF STINGEL AT MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN. IN 2016 MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS THE SEASON WITH A DOUBLE SOLO EXHIBITION IN VIA VENTURA AND PIAZZA BELGIOIOSO BY URS FISCHER.

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DAN COLEN, OH SHIT, 2011, OIL ON CANVAS, 152.4 X 127 CM

IN 2006

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13/08 – 21/09 2016 Lucas Arruda East and North Rooms Paloma Bosquê West Room

10/09 – 11/12 2016 Mariana Castillo Deball 32 Bienal de São Paulo

Mend e s Wood DM

Image: Lucas Arruda

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

UGO RONDINONE TWO MEN CONTEMPLATING THE MOON 1830 SEPTEMBER 16 – OCTOBER 22, 2016 — SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65 D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ABC CHRISTOPHER ROTH SEPTEMBER 15 – 18, 2016

Ugo Rondinone, wanderer above the sea of fog 1818, 2015

Willie Doherty Loose Ends Kerlin Gallery 3 September–19 October 2016

www.kerlingallery.com

RYAN MOSLEY Coup de grâce

1 September - 8 October 2016

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY

Barrão is represented by

Arranjo, 2016

AFRICANS IN AMERICA

IN CONTEXT

CURATED BY LIZA ESSERS & HANK WILLIS THOMAS

2016 GHADA AMER, THEASTER GATES, ALFREDO JAAR, JULIE MEHRETU, WANGECHI MUTU, ODILI DONALD ODITA, KEHINDE WILEY

GOODMAN GALLERY JOHANNESBURG

JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY

1 7 N OV E M B E R – 17 DECEMBER 2016

A C I T Y-W I D E I N I T I AT I V E IN JOHANNESBURG

BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] III: REINVENTIONS: STRAINS OF HISTORIES AND CULTURES

UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND JOHANNESBURG 17-19 NOVEMBER 2016

A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN GOODMAN GALLERY, HUTCHINS CENTER FOR AFRICAN & AFRICAN AMERICAN RESEARCH/HARVARD UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S LAPIETRA DIALOGUES, TISCH SCHOOL OF THE ARTS AND THE INSTITUTE FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND AND THE UNITED STATES MISSION TO SOUTH AFRICA. IN ASSOCIATION WITH PHILLIPS, MOCADA, STUDIO MUSEUM HARLEM, WISER INSTITUTE, CENTRE FOR AFRICAN STUDIES, PRINCETON, JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY AND CONTEMPORARY AND WWW.GOODMAN-GALLERY.COM | WWW.BLACKPORTRAITURES.INFO

ArtReview vol 68 no 6 September 2016

You may say I’m a dreamer… When one’s eyes and ears are full of the sturm und drang of terrorist attacks, Brexit meltdowns, attempted coups, dope-fiend athletes, the impeachments of elected presidents and the ravings of wannabe presidents, it might well be hard to see what an art magazine whose cover features a middle-aged man clutching a makeshift ceramic has to offer in terms of ameliorating the lamentable state of the human condition. Even if you’ve just come back from some exotic holiday, are worrying about what kind of after-sun care can take the lizard out of your skin, feel incredibly distant from all that world-news stuff and are instead staring at your prized collection of exotically colourful porcelain fists. ArtReview hears you, and while it makes no promises that the talk about art in its pages can do anything to solve the world’s problems, it will make the case that within the discussions that surround art (which is the stuff of which magazines such as this one are made), ways of thinking through such problems can emerge. Hard to believe? Does it sound like the kind of thing certain museum directors say shortly before they ask you for a big fat donation? OK, ArtReview hears that too. And it’s not suggesting that reading its pages is any alternative to therapy. But hey – it does pride itself on being a bit more direct than most museum directors. That’s why it made Sarah Jilani write about how performance art impacted on the means of protest deployed by the occupants of Gezi Park three years ago, and how those protests have, in turn, affected the nature and makeup of Istanbul’s art scene since then. Some of that might be useful in times when issues of free speech and freedom are becoming central issues to everyone within Turkey’s borders (and sometimes to those beyond). But ArtReview didn’t stop there. Oh, no. Now that what used to be called protest art or ‘artivism’ is increasingly the subject of art-fair discussion panels,

Hélio Oiticica, Tate Modern, London

museum shows and everyday art tittle-tattle (it’s come so far into someone’s idea of a public consciousness that the term even has a Wikipedia entry), ArtReview also made Raimar Stange write about what some PhD student is doubtless calling ‘the artivist turn’, or as Stange puts it, ‘art that has no cultural or commercial value’. ‘What’s the point of that?’ ArtReview hears you groan as you flick the dead skin off your left arm and slap another dollop of Herborist After-Sun Care Crackling Mousse and check the current state of your Sotheby’s shares. You’ll have to use your nongreasy hand to flip to the article to find out. Given that you people claim to be art lovers, ArtReview has no doubt that you’re all fully in agreement with George Orwell’s thoughts about organised sporting activities – ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting’ – which means that those of you who didn’t get enough sun this summer have been saving yourselves for a trip not to Rio’s Olympics, but to São Paulo’s Bienal. While the nonviolent event’s curator, Jochen Volz, explains how his festival of uncertainty will improve the world in ArtReview’s ‘Other People and Their Ideas’ column, we also take a look at the work of Bienal exhibitor Luiz Roque and the way he tackles notions of gender, art history and Brazilian history to project notions of past, present and future societal living. It’s not all about horror and violence, however. In this issue ArtReview also decided to take a look at the other side of the coin (because, as you well know, this priest of art operates a broad church), and three artists – Barrão, Ignasi Aballí and Bosco Sodi – who tackle ideas about how to be in the present (for that’s what contemporary art is all about, right?) via more formal approaches to making things: Barrão’s attention to the essential nature of things, Aballí’s focus on the structures and minutiae of the everyday and Sodi’s Zen-inspired marriage of nature and culture. For those of you with a theoretical bent, it hasn’t escaped ArtReview’s attention that there is a certain skirting around issues of dasein in the work of all three artists, but one of ArtReview’s operatives promised you that Heidegger wasn’t going to be ‘gone into’ in these pages. Let’s not forget that art can also provide a degree of calm – or stepping back – amidst the storm. ArtReview

Collection Max Ernst – Dorothea Tanning, Seillans

Random International On the Body

537 West 24th Street, New York September 23 – October 22, 2016

Art Previewed

Osiris, god of the dead, on the return of painting Interview by Matthew Collings 54

Previews by Martin Herbert 37 Points of View by Oliver Basciano, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Jonathan Grossmalerman 45

Jochen Volz Interview by Oliver Basciano 58

page 39 Damián Ortega, Abrasive Objects (detail), 2016. Photo: Gerardo Landa Rojano. Courtesy the artist

September 2016

Art Featured

Barrão by Oliver Basciano 76

Protest, Not Profit by Raimar Stange 94

Luiz Roque by Kiki Mazzucchelli 84

Ignasi Aballí by George Stolz 100

Three Years On: The Artistic Legacy of Istanbul’s Gezi Park Protests by Sarah Jilani 88

Bosco Sodi by Mark Rappolt 108

page 84 Luiz Roque, O novo monumento (The New Monument), 2013, 16mm film transferred to video, 5 min 35 sec. Photo: Joana Luz. Courtesy the artist and Sé Galeria, São Paulo

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 118 9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag, by Martin Herbert Pure Fiction, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel ¿Cómo te voy a olvidar?, by Robert Barry Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, by Kimberly Bradley Basim Magdy, by Louisa Elderton Olga Balema, by Dominic van den Boogerd Superstudio, by Mike Watson Francesco Vezzoli, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Kirill Glushchenko, by Helen Sumpter Ian Cheng, by Karen Archey Liverpool Biennial 2016, by Helen Sumpter The Science of Imaginary Solutions, by Ben Street Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, by Louise Darblay Jim Hodges, by Sean Ashton Making & Unmaking, by Laura Smith This Is A Voice, by Fi Churchman Paul Lee, by Larry Wilcox Neïl Beloufa, by Andrew Berardini Benjamin Carlson, by Jonathan Griffin

Michael Rakowitz, by Arielle Bier Ed Ruscha, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Radcliffe Bailey, by Brienne Walsh Christopher K. Ho, by Owen Duffy Evan Robarts, by Ysabelle Cheung Nasreen Mohamedi, by Joshua Mack Chelsea Culprit, by Kim Córdova Arquivo Ex Machina, by Claire Rigby Books 152 The Hatred of Poetry, by Ben Lerner Towards a Conceptual Militancy, by Mike Watson Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, by Fredric Jameson Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint, edited by Defne Ayas THE STRIP 158 A CURATOR WRITES 162

page 142 Radcliffe Bailey, To Be Titled, 2016, photograph printed on aluminium, 188 × 124 × 8 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

ArtReview

NEW YORK

PARIS

HONG KONG

SEOUL

909 MADISON AVENUE

76 RUE DE TURENNE

50 CONNAUGHT ROAD CENTRAL

5 PALPAN-GIL, JONGNO-GU

DANIEL ARSHAM ”CIRCA 2345“ 15 SEPTEMBER - 22 OCTOBER

TAKASHI MURAKAMI 10 SEPTEMBER - 23 DECEMBER

YUXING HUANG “AND NE FORHTEDON NÁ” 1 SEPTEMBER - 15 OCTOBER

GREGOR HILDEBRANDT “BILDER MALEN WIE CURE” 22 SEPTEMBER - 12 NOVEMBER

Art Previewed

For families who love bacon, now there’s a tasty way to enjoy it beyond breakfast 35

Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin

Polnisches Institut Berlin Burgstraße 27 10178 Berlin

Organized with the financial support from the city of Warsaw

21.07. — 30.10.16

Previewed James Richards Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 21 September – 13 November Ben Rivers Renaissance Society, Chicago 10 September – 6 November Clemens von Wedemeyer Hamburger Kunsthalle 30 September – 8 January

Taipei Biennial Various venues, Taipei 10 September – 5 February

Luc Tuymans Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp 7 September – 22 October

Damián Ortega Fruitmarket, Edinburgh through 23 October

Lothar Baumgarten Galleria Franco Noero, Turin through 15 October

Marwa Arsanios Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 17 September – 8 January

Isabel Nolan CAG – Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver through 2 October

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin 30 August – 29 October

2 Ben Rivers, Slow Action (still), 2010, 16mm anamorphic film, 45 min. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

September 2016

1 Newcomers to James Richards’s work might and by the quiddities of contemporary technolconsider his films as sphinxes wrapped in ogy. Along the way, they speak of how the self enigmas. This, admittedly, assumes a newbie might speak through secondhand materials. audience is even conceivable when you’ve been Richards often carries parts of one film over nominated for the Turner Prize, won the Jarman to another. For his ICA show, though, which Award and the Ars Viva Prize, and will represent premiered at Bergen Kunsthall and is headed your country at the next Venice Biennale – but for Hanover’s Kestnergesellschaft, he’s turned let that slide. The Cardiff-born artist’s rhythmiproperly cannibalistic. Requests and Antisongs cally edited medleys bring together self-shot uses his 2015 film Radio at Night as the starting digital and found VHS footage, nature and point for a trio of video and multichannel sound pornography, art-historical and instructional works: an affective dismantling in which aspects material. Tonally and texturally, they flip will recur and a whole will be ‘smeared’ (in the between positive and colour-reversed imagery, artist’s lexicon) across multiple edits in multiple rooms. Attend also to Richards’s public propin-sharp and ‘poor’. Yet these aren’t abstruse gramme, which encompasses talks, performances codices, nor are they formalist demonstration pieces. Rather, the transient signals and tempers and film screenings: a superlative composer/ resulting from Richards’s juxtapositions reflect arranger/remixer, he’s no slouch as a DJ either. connoting’s chanciness, montage’s heavy lifting. Among British artists, Richards’s closest What we see, they insist, is finessed by what we match in the filmmaking/film-programmjust saw, by what comes next, by soundtracks 2 ing stakes might be Ben Rivers. The latter, (Richards, as his standalone audio pieces though, shoots most of his own footage, makes confirm, is also an accomplished sound artist) long (sometimes feature-length) films, blends

documentary and fiction, and as his first US solo exhibition, Urth, will confirm, focuses on makeshift utopias, hardscrabble escape routes, lives outside of contemporary technocratic society. So, hmm, actually they’re pretty darn divergent. In the four-screen Slow Action (2011) Rivers collaborated with speculative sci-fi writer Mark von Schlegell on a filmic-literary narrative in which skewed island societies pop up after sea levels have risen. Things (2014), divided into ‘seasons’ and shot over a year, was made entirely in the artist’s home, creating a shut-in’s cosmology out of underexplored domesticity – bed, books, views through the window, etc. Rivers’s new film, rounding out this show, was filmed in the sealed domes of the now-defunct, University of Arizona-owned Biosphere 2, where in 1991, for two years, a group of scientists locked themselves in, living off a closed ecosystem. Amid the Silent Running vibes and the artful tilt towards US subject-matter, expect no abandonment of mission on Rivers’s part.

3 Clemens von Wedemeyer, Otjesd (still), 2005, 16mm film transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 15 min (loop). © the artist and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris

1 New work by James Richards. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

4 Chih-Hung Liu, Coastal Woods in Aurora, 2016, oil painting on canvas, 55 × 88 cm. Courtesy the artist and Taipei Biennial

5 Damián Ortega, Eroded valley (detail), 2016, red bricks, dimensions variable. Photo: Gerardo Landa Rojano. Courtesy the artist

One more filmmaker purposefully pulping fact and fiction, you say? All right, but 3 mind the alliteration in future. Clemens von Wedemeyer’s first institutional German solo show rewinds through the career of an artist many first clocked at Documenta 13 in 2012, where his three-screen Muster (Rushes) (2012) explored the history of a Benedictine monastery near Kassel, turned consecutively into a prison, a concentration camp, a reformatory and a psychiatric institution, the story partfictionalised so that art might be, as Picasso famously had it, the lie that tells the truth – or might be, might not. Earlier, von Wedemeyer had made works such as the nine-part The Fourth Wall (2009, shown at London’s Barbican), which ran the story of a group of possibly unsullied modern-day primitives in the Philippine rain-forest through a Brechtian filter, and Von Gegenüber (From the Opposite Side) (2007), a pseudo day-in-the-life documentary about a railway station, spiked with fictional episodes. Like

archive-riffling contemporaries Luke Fowler and Duncan Campbell, then, he misleads only to remind us of what – the objective documentarian view, footage’s fidelity to history – we’d be naive to trust. It’s a new paragraph. Are we still in the archive? Yep, and specifically in Taipei, where 4 French curator Corinne Diserens’s Taipei Biennial is titled Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future. The art, we’re assured, will variously perform ‘the archive… the architecture… [and] the retrospective’. It will relate to (among other things) the ‘artistic gesture’ and the relationship between archiving and ‘anti-archiving’. And it will create ‘critical intimacy’ between art and viewer. We can glimpse how performance might fit into it, as apparently it will; elsewhere the artist list leans heavily and naturally towards Asia (including Vietnamese-American Tiffany Chung’s migration-themed multimedia proposals, Taiwanese Chih-Hung Liu’s studiedly pallid paintings and

September 2016

(also Taiwanese) Hong-Kai Wang’s audio-video explorations of the politics of sound). Also on board, meanwhile, are esteemed – and, notably, often archive- and history-delving – Western figures such as Tacita Dean, Manon de Boer, John Akomfrah, Peter Friedl and Reinhard Mucha. 5 Damián Ortega’s Cosmic Thing (2003), the Mexican artist’s most famous work, is an exploded Volkswagen Beetle meticulously deconstructed by assistants and strung from wires; a couple of years ago, he told The New Yorker that he did this to show the complexity of systems, the interdependence of their parts (we paraphrase). In the same interview Ortega also showed off his tool collection, and tools and systems are what characterise his Fruitmarket exhibition. The works are mostly made from clay – fragility and flux being among his art’s fundamentals – and a large display-cum-timeline of tools made from seemingly unfired clay ranges through human innovation, from flints to smartphones. That’s the earth and the human

hand in synchrony, then, and indeed Ortega’s architectural renderings and models, and maps show (which includes other forms, such as waves, reflect the Lebanese capital’s fast-changing icebergs and models of river erosion) is directly urban spaces and garbage crisis, correlating the concerned with the four elements and how they city’s notorious landfills and morphing shape shape our world, as well as mankind’s desire with the evolution, if that’s the word, of the to harness the natural world for our own use. neoliberal project since the early 1990s. Ideology is most successful when it’s I once interviewed Jos de Gruyter and 7 6 invisible: ergo, Marwa Arsanios tracks its Harald Thys by email, or rather tried to interphysical effects. In her 2014 film OLGA’s NOTES, view Thys while he confessed he’d rather be all those restless bodies, built on research into watching Midsomer Murders and eating soup. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Later he announced an admiration for extreme introduction of reforms to the country during introverts, since they’d found a way to avoid the 1960s and particularly his introduction reality. That may be the famously oblique of a ballet school in Cairo as a ‘factory of the Belgian sense of humour at work. Nevertheless, bodies’, dancers variously perform dances done over the last quarter-century – first in video, for Nasser, or pole-dance, or brokenly enact using a regular cast of amateur actors, and a harem dance, or reference Yvonne Rainer. increasingly in sculpture and drawing – the If such work suggests indignities and damage Belgian pair have constructed a world in which damaged-seeming individuals either drift to the human body, the Washington, DC-born, slack-jawed in their own headspaces, get bullied Beirut-based Arsanios’s project for her first in institutional environments, lash out at each Los Angeles exhibition considers a sullied city and the political weather behind it. Here videos, other or complain mildly about mediocre

package holidays. Meanwhile, their drawings – affectless pencil sketches that equalise the dramatic and the mundane, Fischli/Weiss style – appear made in character, as if in some kind of rehabilitation class. De Gruyter and Thys’s worldview takes some extracting; but as blackly comedic philosophers they’re in a class, and world, of their own. Also in ‘Belgian interviews’: when ArtReview 8 spoke with Luc Tuymans four years ago he was arguing that he’d been a proper painter all along, an aficionado of light in particular rather than a theorist of the medium’s weakness and inability to represent history’s horrors, and he had just gear-shifted into relatively bright colour schemes and self-shot (albeit off TV screens) imagery. To judge from the warm tonalities that speckled his most recent New York show, he’s still feeling perky. Or as perky as he gets, since that show, the Godardreferencing Le Mépris (2016), was thematically concerned with ‘isolation, melancholy,

7 Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Die Aap van Bloemfontein (The Ape from Bloemfontein) (still), 2014, single-channel video projection, colour, sound, 23 min. Courtesy the artists and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin

6 Marwa Arsanios, falling is not collapsing (still), 2016, digital video. Courtesy the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris

8 Luc Tuymans, Scramble, 2016, oil on canvas, 208 × 155 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

ArtReview

degradation, and nostalgia’. The Antwerp-based (which Baumgarten dates to 1492, the year painter doesn’t strike one as nostalgic; he Columbus arrived in the New World) to the doesn’t, he says, keep hold of his own paintings, present. The German conceptualist is uncomdoesn’t want to see his old ones. Yet on the monly qualified to map his own career onto evidence of 25 Years of Collaboration he has warm that timeline, since it has taken him from feelings for his longstanding and local gallery, early institutional critique during the 1960s Zeno X. Expect a compressed retrospective to engagements with South America during and plenty of evidence for how and why, during the 1970s, further explorations of colonialism the 1990s, a generation of figurative painters in the 1980s, a focus on botany in the 1990s emerged in Tuymans’s authoritative wake. and a general concern and lamentation for the fate of indigenous populations and nature. Tuymans has made work relating to Joseph What we’ve seen of the show, an elegant-looking 9 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lothar parcours, is as heterogeneous as you might Baumgarten, opening Franco Noero’s second expect from an artist who’s constantly avoided gallery space, has called his own retrospectively a signature style, except in the graphic identity themed show Specchio del mare, or ‘Mirror of he cocreated with Dutch typographer Walter the Sea’, a likely reference to Conrad’s eponyNikkels, which appears in stacks of lettermous 1906 book of essays and sketches. Way blazoned canvases: an ‘I’ to set against the to go, Joe, not to mention the endless topicality mutually dependent ‘We’ that Baumgarten of The Secret Agent (1907). Baumgarten’s show understandably favours. collates works dating from 1968 to now, but Isabel Nolan’s own previous literary sources 10 considers a longer arc – its theme being the include George Eliot, Hippocrates, John Donne reduction of natural resources, here pursued and Shakespeare, and the Dublin-based artist’s from the beginning of the Anthropocene

recent body of work at CAG Vancouver, The weakened eye of day, spins off from Thomas Hardy’s fin de siècle poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), whose ‘weakening eye of day’ apostrophises a wintry sun. From here the Irish artist considers light as metaphor; the sun as a symbol; and vast cosmological events, from the formation of the earth’s crust to the sun’s own eventual burnout. Nolan, heedless of outmoded formal distinctions, moves – in an evolved version of a 2014 show for the Irish Museum of Modern Art – from a huge textual scroll to small abstract paintings, sprouting plantlike sculptures to chromatic carpet-making, murals to steel sculpture, while sidestepping the hubristic notion that works in any media can truly reckon with the enormity of her subject matter. The work’s poetic spaciousness is a gift, though. In ‘The Darkling Thrush’, the narrator hears a thrush singing, out of ‘Some blessed hope, whereof he knew/And I was unaware’. Spend enough time in galleries, and you’ll know how the listener feels. Martin Herbert

10 Isabel Nolan, Based on my recent observations (1–7) (detail), 2014, 7 drawings, colouring pencil, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

9 Lothar Baumgarten, Eine Reise, oder mit der MS Remscheid auf dem Amazonas (A Journey, or with the MS Remscheid on the Amazon), 1968 – 71, 81 slides, 14 min. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

ArtReview

LUCIANABRITO /GALERIA

CAIO REISEWITZ /Aterro TOBIAS PUTRIH /Compressões 3 September – 29 October

Galler y space view, photograph by Caio Reisewitz

LEANDRO ERLICH FIAC 2016 booth /0.C51

Avenida Nove de Julho, 5162 - São Paulo - Brasil T: +55 11 3842 0634 | www.lucianabritogaleria.com.br

CONGRATULATE DAVID CLAERBOUT ON HIS SOLO EXHIBITIONS FUTURE DE PONT MUSEUM, TILBURG SEPTEMBER 3, 2016 – JANUARY 29, 2017 OLYMPIA KINDL – ZENTRUM FÜR ZEITGENÖSSISCHE KUNST, BERLIN SEPTEMBER 11, 2016 – MAY 28, 2017 DIE REINE NOTWENDIGKEIT STÄDEL MUSEUM, FRANKFURT SEPTEMBER 28 – OCTOBER 23, 2016

David Claerbout, Olympia (The Real Time Disintegration Into Ruins Of The Berlin Olympic Stadium Over The Course Of A Thousand Years)

SEAN KELLY, ESTHER SCHIPPER AND MICHELINE SZWAJCER

Points of View

Watching atrocities unfold. Clicking the mouse, refreshing the browser, turning the newspaper page, tuning in. A friend’s family lives in Nice. I send a text: ‘Hope you’re OK…’ A reassuring reply: no family or loved ones caught up in the 14 July attack on the city’s Bastille Day celebrations. Back to passive observation. A few hours later I scroll as social media and rolling blogs report the ominous events of Istanbul and Ankara. Picture editors hurrying to replace images of the body-strewn French Riviera with tanks on the bridge over the Bosporus. This is how most experience the horrors of life. Over the coming weeks, more images of shootings, rampages and attacks move those of Nice and Turkey down the news agenda. The McDonald’s in Munich, the clinic in Berlin, the protests in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the care home in Sagamihara, the nightclubs of Orlando and Fort Myers, throughout Syria, in Yemen, the Chad Basin, Burundi. Come the slaying of the priest in Normandy, it all seems terribly familiar. Scenes of horror available at any given moment, a ghastly Hobbesian ‘war of every man against every man’ to scroll and flick through at any moment we choose. Very real for those present, a mediated horror for the rest. It is difficult to think how art could react to this landscape of violence, particularly in this era of its unceasing mediation. The historian Walter Laqueur notes that ‘the success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives’. If ‘art’ is synonymous with ‘image-making’ or as a means of communication through signs and symbols, then these conflict events, arguably committed with a view to their mass-media proliferation and symbolic agendas, could be regarded as artistic acts in themselves

the horror, the horror How can art react to acts of terror and violence, particularly when much of that terror and violence is orchestrated with image-distribution in mind? By

Oliver Basciano (as sickening as that might sound). The perpetrators of these atrocities are self-aware, less in the business of conflict for militaristic cause, and more in the business of utilising violence as a means of creating ‘terror images’ for the media and for our consumption. The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was much maligned when he referred to 9/11 as ‘the greatest work of art imaginable’, but his point, made perhaps too glibly so soon after the event, was that it would be the image of the Twin Tower attacks (the ‘incandescent image’ as Baudrillard termed it) that would linger longest in the collective memory.

September 2016

Without wishing to oversimplify an event of great social, political and psychological complexity, one can only assume that Adel Kermiche, who made Father Jacques Hamel kneel before cutting his throat, would be aware of the symbolism of such an image, even if no cameras were there to capture it. Likewise, the commanders of the Turkish coup were surely thinking of the news cameras as much as military strategy when they ordered two tanks to occupy the Bosporous Bridge (and the protester who lay down in front of them might have done so with the iconography of Tiananmen Square in mind). Terror images beget terror images. Xanadu (2006), a four-screen installation by Robert Boyd currently on show in the group exhibition The New Human at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, can be read as a reaction to the temperament of conflict post 9/11 in its hyperaestheticisation of violence. As the video on one screen displays George W. Bush’s first State of the Union address following the New York and Washington, DC attacks (“Let’s roll”), a mirror ball attached to the gallery ceiling starts to spin. The Olivia Newton-John disco track after which Boyd’s work is titled kicks in and the viewer is subjected to a torrent of intercut projected images of war, murder and genocide from throughout the twentieth and early-twentyfirst centuries. Incited crowds riot, shots are fired, bodies tied to the back of Toyota pickups are dragged through the streets, corpses pile up, cities shake, buildings are burnt. When I first saw the work, I remember leaving the gallery feeling numb. Yet increasingly, as I read the news, I feel like I’m back there, trapped in that terrifying artwork as the horrors of the world pass interminably over the computer screen.

“Have you heard about the artists invading Boyle Heights?” This question was put to me in early July by a young and promising student in my artsmanagement programme who comes from that neighbourhood. Yes, I had. A number of articles in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere have detailed the brewing conflict between newly arriving creative types and the longtime Latino residents of Boyle Heights, which served as an immigrant landing zone in the boom years of the 1920s and 30s, when Jews, Asians, Blacks and Mexicans made it a bustling and diverse enclave. By the late 1940s the area had become mainly Mexican and Mexican American, and that heritage dominates today. The newspapers and blogs tell of militant groups escorting wayward city-planning students out of town and community meetings that have served as fronts for activist ambushes of newly arrived artists and art galleries (Maccarone, Nicodim, Parrasch Heijnen and Venus are just a few of the bigger names, and bigger showrooms, in the area). One group, Defend Boyle Heights, demands that all of the art galleries leave, and that the spaces and buildings they occupy be used for emergency housing or job-training centres, as determined by the ‘community’. Another, Serve the People – Los Angeles, threatens agents of gentrification with violence ‘by the people’. Compare this with something like MONTH2MONTH, a monthlong series of events that took place this past May in New York City and that examined ‘art’s uncomfortable relationship to real estate development and neighborhood change’. Organised by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, two artists with individual practices that target the socioeconomics of the artworld (often with frightening and hilarious accuracy), MONTH2MONTH brought together different-sized gatherings of the public into different domestic settings to, say, sip champagne with writer Felix Salmon and hear him opine on the economics of housing affordability, or take part in a ‘consciousness raising’ karaoke party for real-estate agents and their clients. More serious fare was on the menu too, such as roundtables with housingpolicy experts and discussion groups on what actually happens to those displaced by rising rents and redevelopment.

The ‘g’ Word An interloper – sorry, newcomer – wades into the LA gentrification debate. Will Jonathan T.D. Neil’s hard-learned New York ideas FLOAT?

Antigentrification march, Los Angeles, August 2014. Photo: Katie J. /Enclave LA

ArtReview

What’s interesting about MONTH2MONTH is that it is, or was, unabashedly an art project – specifically a ‘public art project in private residences’, and I don’t think it would be going too far to say that MONTH2MONTH made art out of gentrification, that gentrification was, in some sense, it’s medium or material. What this also means, perhaps, is that ‘gentrification’, as a term or descriptive label with any agency, with any force, at least in the New York City context, is obsolete, or heading in that direction. MONTH2MONTH is only possible in a city otherwise resigned to the reign of real-estate development, a place where one looks around and says, channelling Beckett, ‘It could never happen here; but yes, it will happen here.’ Gentrification remains one of the dirtiest words in LA. Some sections of the city, such as Highland Park, have been overtaken by G-forces in record time. Downtown Los Angeles is finally, and fully, undergoing the major ‘revitalisation’ that many had written off as simply part of the city’s historical discourse. “The Eastside is the place to be,” an old high-school friend recently told me. (He lives in Silver Lake, which became ‘hip’ back in 2002; now I’m pretty sure it’s safely bourgeois.) But LA’s lack of density means its segregation is more severe. Geographical boundaries of race and class are much more apparent. And as Defend Boyle Heights and Serve the People – Los Angeles demonstrate, gentrification is a call to the barricades, because barricades are still a possibility in Los Angeles, and not an art project. I don’t believe that culture should be, or be only, a territorialising force, however. There can be little doubt that artists and art galleries, because of the economies and social groups they often represent, are vanguards of gentrification and need to accept some complicity in its evils. But building walls around economic and ethnic enclaves in the name of class warfare and cultural preservation smacks of a different kind of evil, one that is all too present in US politics and political discourse today. It sounds trite, but there must be better ground in the middle, where the politics can be both/and rather than either/or (or us/them). But what do I know. I just moved here, and I live on the Westside.

A blurry figure dressed in black becomes visible high up in the lush foliage of a stout rubber tree. Camera shots from ‘within’ the impressive tree and along its long branches follow. Another person, this time lying on a thick branch, appears, eyes turned towards the sky; this one wears leopard-print tights and a butterfly-print top. A third person enters the picture, wearing a flower-patterned outfit blending with the surroundings. Finally, an establishing shot shows six immobile figures, all high up in the tree, the whole now transformed into a fantastical human-plant-animal hybrid. This taxonomic oddity features in a threeminute silent video by Buenos Aires-based Osías Yanov titled Gomero, The Order of Orgies (2015). And as much as it crosses the divide between animal and vegetable, the work also bridges the gap between genders, for Yanov’s figures mix traditional male and female features. They carry themselves with the stature of beings who have found a place to quietly inhabit, while being reminiscent of the transformations from human to plant or animal in Ovid’s or Kafka’s tales of metamorphosis: not as melodramatic as most Greek or Roman myths; more towards the quotidian transformations of Kafka’s tales of human–animal beings. Pre-postmodern precursors of cyborgs. A calm insistence similar to that seen in Yanov’s creatures, a stubbornness even, figures in Seoul-based writer Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian (2007, translated into English in 2015). When the story’s central character, Yeong-hye, decides to become a vegetarian, her life changes drastically, together with the lives of her near and dear ones. Until this point, the only unusual thing about this mild Seoul housewife had been a dislike of bras, but then one day, after an intense dream, she decides to stop eating meat. This seemingly uncomplicated and harmless choice is the starting point for more or less violent conflicts, both with her family and, in the form of the medical system, with society. Along the way, she is invaded by the desire to become a plant. She wants to blend with nature, as if a vegetative condition is appealing to her. Like the hybrid figures in Yanov’s tree, Yeong-hye peacefully pursues her thing,

Age of Hybridity There’s something in the air, the water, the trees, and it’s bringing age-old stories of human-plant-animal transformation into the biochemical and pharma-pornographic present writes

Maria Lind

Osías Yanov, Gomero, The Order of Orgies (still), 2015, video, 3 min 30 sec, loop

September 2016

which involves wanting to be part of the flora; it is something unconventional, something undemanding, without directly disturbing or troubling others. And yet the effect is tremendous: those around her become aggressive, confused and abusive. Renouncing meat or bras – highly personal choices that damage no one else – is taken to be deeply disturbing and provocative. Although they do not know about her desire to become a plant, those around her would most likely reject that idea too. Writing in simple, straightforward language, Han drives her lead character to disaster inside a stiff and unyielding system, one that forces everything into a narrow box, including human relationships. The tree in Yanov’s video happens to be a Ficus elastica, which reproduces via a coevolved relationship with a specific type of wasp. Such coevolutions, something Charles Darwin wrote about, occur on both microscopic and macroscopic levels, across the plant and animal kingdoms. Genetic diversity is likely to have a source here. In addition to the age-old fascination with transformations of humans into animals and plants, and gender performativity, this genetic side directly connects it with current discussions of the proximity of the natural and human worlds, as well as the pharma-pornograhic regime of our time, with biochemistry as a dominant factor. Natural, social and political things also happen on a molecular level; the characteristics of biochemical and genetic change can be found in both the Ficus elastica and trans practices. At the end of Yanov’s video a seventh body materialises, backlit by strong sunlight as if specially chosen. This creature wears a full bodysuit, head and body entirely covered

with green foliage patterns. Now in total camouflage, the figure merges with the majestic ficus, equally undramatically, and yet with the feeling of culmination. I think there is something important about this quiet appearance of the mimetic trans-figure, and occupation of a particular place, of border-crossing as equally performative, biochemical and genetic, something pointing to the future in the sense of how it is possible to exist in the world.

I was extremely honoured this year to be asked to give the commencement speech to Cooper Union’s graduating class. In the Great Hall! Where Lincoln himself roused the crowd. The request was a real feather in my cap and sort of the proof in the pudding that is my return to the limelight. Unfortunately I was unable to attend due to having tickets for the smash Broadway hit Hamilton on the exact same day (extremely hard to get). So I asked ArtReview to print my speech notes, thinking that they can perhaps advise aspiring painters out there in my readership. [look out over audience, give everyone the thumbs up, SMILE] Thank you… Thank you… I’m so happy to be here. Looking out over all these faces, bright and open, flushed with rapturous expectation, obscured only by peek-a-boo bangs… with long futures ahead of them before death doth make a home. It makes me so hopeful and happy. There’s really [pause one beat] no place I would rather stand right now than in front of you…

Style, not content stupid! Unless you’re painter Jonathan Grossmalerman, who mails in these notes on his favourite content to the graduates of the Cooper Union (he was busy that day)

[can I get an ‘Amen’?] Carroll Dunham? Please!!! That guy is all content! And his brightly hued cartoony style is a direct ripoff of mine, only confused and full of enraged markings. No. I am the only vagina painter of note!!!

[smile wisely and pause to create dramatic tension]

In unsettled times, it is the job of painting to offer some sort of cultural continuum, a standard aesthetic nutrition, a sense of value in a milieu otherwise populated by dilettantes with arbitrarily clever ideas. I implore you! Don’t waste your good years flitting from

Certainly not Betty Tompkins, with her humdrum vaginas. It’s as though being in possession of one has robbed her of her sense of wonder.

Lisa Yuskavage’s are decent and soft, but one gets the feeling she's more about boobs. There aren’t enough tiny, pink vaginas included to really call her a ‘painter of vaginas’ in all honesty.

If there be one piece of advice I might impart… one nugget of wisdom to issue forth from the bosom of my experience, it is this…

[scan audience for girls who seem interested]

[hands aloft, pause for an answer]

[pause for murmurs of agreement]

[pause for applause]

I can’t stress enough how important it is for a painter, any painter really, however short or dull witted… full breasted and pouty lipped [point and wink]… rough or tumble… to settle on a distinct painting style. One big signature technique you can really hang your hat on. A brand. A calling card, if you will. A visual millstone with which to anchor your work, that it may remain fixed and immovable against the impending maelstrom of a quickly changing artworld. Spinning madly and careening (as it does) from one fashionable medium to the next, with only a few brief weeks on the beach in Amagansett to offer respite.

I will say this once. Content is in no way a substitute for style. Yes, it is true that my obsession with delightful vaginas is particularly singular and unrelenting… But let me assure you…, it is my flat, cartoonish and brightly hued images that make them memorable! Not the vaginas themselves. Their power is not to be found in the gentle velvet folds of the labia and her diminutive but lively sidekick the clitoris. No, it’s my method of approach! Who else could paint vaginas so enchantingly!? With such finesse? I ask you?

[pause for supportive yelling from the audience]

one style to the next! Like some dirty whore! Find one modus operandi and stick to it! Dance with the girl that brung you! [smile at the girl who seems interested] Some of you no doubt will be thinking to yourselves, ‘What if I choose a consistent subject matter? Is it good enough to stick with one subject matter? After all, you, Jonathan Grossmalerman, paint exclusively vaginas… beautiful, beautiful vaginas…’ [pause for audience agreement on this point]

ArtReview

While it is true that I recently rebooted my career with a new mature style… one I like to call wet, thin and sloppy… it only came out of a desire to make more paintings, faster. That the critics and collectors are going gaga over it is merely a happy accident! That the rushed application of turpentine-cut paint reinforces my unrelenting relationship to the subject matter is but a stroke of luck! A perfect marriage of vaginas and desperate, slapdash painting! Lightning strikes twice!!! [really loudly] But what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. [repeat 3× for impact] So… in summary… find a style… Also, my studio is not that far from here… so… if anyone needs an unpaid internship this summer… or in the fall… or would just like to hang out sometime… there is so much more I want to teach you [stare insanely at girl who seems interested] Now go out and knock ’em dead.

MAMMA ANDERSSON & TAL R

TWO PARALLEL TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS: GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD, COPENHAGEN 24.8–22.10 2016 GALLERI MAGNUS KARLSSON, STOCKHOLM 30.8–23.10 2016 MORE INFO: WWW.BJERGGAARD.COM / WWW.GALLERIMAGNUSKARLSSON.COM

ABDOULAYE KONATÉ Symphonie en couleur 2 — 24 September 2016

London | 4 Hanover Square

CHIHARU SHIOTA Uncertain Journey 17 September — 12 November 2016

Berlin | Potsdamer Straße 77–87

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 49

Osiris, god of the dead, on the return of painting Interview by

Matthew Collings

The realm of the Egyptian deity Osiris is death, but also – because death is considered to be transition – regeneration. The Osiris cult is believed to have been the most important in Ancient Egypt. Adopted by Graeco-Roman culture, it is also likely to have influenced Christian mythology.

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ARTREVIEW Osiris, lord of the underworld, what do you think about painting returning? OSIRIS Painting is supposed to have died sometime in the 1960s. It certainly used to be the bearer of important content, and was at the centre of society. But that was long before that point. It was even before the invention of photography. Photography was invented in the first half of the nineteenth century, and by the end of the century it was a common tool. Throughout the twentieth century painting wasn’t anything to do with any industrial process, it was an exotic archaism compared to the movies and TV. Perhaps it could be said to be the bearer of some kind of cultural content, nevertheless. And even today that could be true. After all, it takes a long time for cultural forms to die. And the 1960s is only a generation ago. What died out in those days was painting’s centrality to art production. But it lost its social centrality long before. AR What painter are you thinking of when you say it might have some content now? OSIRIS Thinking ideally – rather than of actual shows and, it must be said, their chronic unevenness, as well as the general decline of his work over the past ten years – I would suggest a figure such as Luc Tuymans. AR Because…? OSIRIS In paintings of the early 2000s, where he depicts the political scene in the Congo many decades ago, you see an idea about society, the world, power, politics, structures of making and the reduction of the painting process to one day: a lot of intertwined ideas pretty much making sense as a whole. AR What about Francis Bacon? Did you see the retrospective that opened at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco in July, which is going to tour to Bilbao? OSIRIS I saw it, yes. It was amazing. It was a shocking triumph, really kitsch and yet really effective. By use of dramatic lighting, fabrics, screens, spaces that were suddenly vast after ones that were more cramped, and the most skilfully controlled arrangements whereby colour is suppressed and then surprisingly unleashed, the whole Bacon decorative aesthetic was manifested by the exhibition designers as a physical context for the paintings – without ever seeming clumsy or overdone. It was histrionic like Bacon is histrionic, but it didn’t fail as Bacon of course sometimes does fail. In fact, that was another remarkable feature of the show, for which Martin Harrison, the freelance curator working with the directors of the Grimaldi Forum, must be praised: the quality of so much of the work. It only lessened when the inevitable point

arrives in Bacon’s career, the later 1970s, and the work empties out, becoming quite obviously aesthetically meagre. No amount of brilliant staging can disguise that problem. However, you speak of a regeneration of painting, and if there is one, then Bacon cannot be said to be part of it, as he has been dead many years. AR I guess. I went on the press trip to Monaco and it seemed a great show, for the reasons you say, and there was certainly a feeling of vitality. OSIRIS Have you seen anything else that has that feeling? AR No, the energy is all about the definite death of painting, the fact of it, for better or worse. An example would be some very good parodies, or remakes, or appropriations of Fontana by Gavin Turk, which I saw in a gallery in Belgium. They were all egg-shaped, mimicking those few egg-shaped canvases Fontana created. Each had its own distinct personality, its own

The question of how to avoid a painting looking pretty rubbish as a painting, regardless of the love stories, surely ought to be part of the thinking. After all, we know, if we’re civilised, that we’re amazed by Velázquez, regardless of kings and courts and so on. But now it’s as if we’ve got to pretend the courts are great after all surface and colouring, and its own degree of aggression with Fontana’s famous perforations. OSIRIS What’s the problem then? AR It would be an exaggeration to claim that this led to painterly interest as such. OSIRIS Ah, yes, I know what you mean. It’s more issues of artistic originality and identity, the authority of meaning, the way the avant-garde is this mysterious entity for many people, full of questions about who’s in charge and what’s their motivation. AR Yes, he’s looking at all that, not painting per se. OSIRIS How would you know if painting came back from the dead? AR It wouldn’t be like painting shows usually are – uninteresting and dead-seeming. You’d feel instead that the medium was exactly that, a medium, and facing page A priestess makes an offering to Osiris and the four sons of Horus

September 2016

ideas could be expressed by it. Instead you get a very dead idea of the medium, with ideas that aren’t really ideas hardly being expressed at all by it. There was a lot of applause for Nicole Eisenman’s show in New York at Anton Kern, for example, a few months ago. Did you share that delight? OSIRIS No, I agree, I thought it was pretty dead too. Maybe dead isn’t the right word. It was pretty stupid. It was basically art for idiots. AR Do you despise women artists then? OSIRIS Ha, ha – yes, and disabled ones, and certainly if they’re outside the European Union. AR Whatevs. Ha, ha. OSIRIS But to be serious, the whole issue of it being important that a woman did it precisely highlights the moribund nature of painting. The painting is nothing and is accepted as such, whereas the author is something, in fact the main thing. The prioritising means that an adolescent narrative style, where something’s drawn out and filled in, is regarded with sighs as if it were the most delicate and rare painterly sensibility since Chardin. AR Why’s it like that: what’s happening? OSIRIS The social groups that used to be marginalised by painting, women and black people, say, have fought for space to redo painting. This is absolutely right politically. But the deadness of the results is a mistake. It’s even worse when instead of addressing it we claim Eisenman is more interested in the narrative of lesbian love stories than mere technicalities. But the question of how to avoid a painting looking pretty rubbish as a painting, regardless of the love stories, surely ought to be part of the thinking. After all, we know, if we’re civilised, that we’re amazed by Velázquez, regardless of kings and courts and so on. But now it’s as if we’ve got to pretend the courts are great after all. We’re too dumb to have ever known that a painting isn’t stories; it’s something about how the thing is done. These technicalities – how it’s done – aren’t technicalities like in baseball. They are the essence of the philosophical meaning of any painting, of painting generally. AR You mean not having dumb, filled-in colour, and the limbs of the body looking like flabby bananas, is the essence? OSIRIS Yes. When you don’t have those dumb things you have something that isn’t dumb as a whole, and tells us instead about why Velázquez was ever remembered at all, or Bacon for that matter. Not how to depict things but how to express reality via painterly means.

AR Was painting always white?

AR Where did they get the look from, then?

OSIRIS No, there’s a good case for the opposite, for its origin in blackness, if you think that the famous European cave paintings were done by people whose ancestors came over from Africa; and also if you consider the few ancient Egyptian frescoes that have survived, pictures of ducks and geese and so on, with marvellous colouring and design.

OSIRIS The resources of the Renaissance classical revival were to some extent textual and archaeological, but to a great extent, of course, painterly. They employed the painterly forms and traditions that existed. I’m speaking of the legacy of Byzantine icons and the development from icons to Italian and Flemish art of the late Middle Ages. They just altered and twisted that legacy, and added new things, new ways of spatialising and vivifying, which they discovered by trial and error, but in a context of great, breathless pressure and urgency, because of all the competition at the time to exceed the achievements of rivals. Patrons of painting, the famous Renaissance dukes and popes, were violent gangsters, mainly. They used painting to propagandise recently acquired power.

AR You’re from thousands of years ago, so you’re in a good position to know: was painting always profound? OSIRIS No one denies the magnificence of cave paintings. Egyptian painting was part of a whole decorative language, and the real marvel was the totality of it; the visual communication and beautification that went with the Egyptian cult of death, and which is left to people alive now as so many awesome crumbling fragments. For Egyptians, great art was funereal, and as you just mentioned, it lasted in the same form for several millennia. Painting wasn’t at the centre, but architecture and sculptured objects were: great monuments. Greek and Roman art, which both evolved from Egyptian style, elevated painting to a form on its own. AR Wow, what were Greek paintings like? OSIRIS It’s not known what those classical paintings looked like; of course they all crumbled and disappeared with the passing of time. AR How does Renaissance painting fit in? OSIRIS Renaissance art, when it revives an idealised classical past, 2,000 years after the supposed classical heights, is a funny leap whereby artists and patrons create a look that they believe is worthy of being thought of as classical. That is, it’s worthy of being up there on the same level as the paintings these Renaissance people learned existed at one time, by reading surviving ancient texts that described them.

AR What about scientific discovery in the Renaissance? Perspective in paintings, picturing the world and navigation, so you could actually go round the world, and get rich from conquering lands and opening up markets – didn’t they go together? OSIRIS You’re a good student, Matt. Yes, scientific discovery and painterly discovery went together. Painting was philosophical, spiritual, intellectual, commerical, beautiful and sensual. That’s the centre of painting when painting’s at the centre of social power. When it loses that position, then the artists, who are now free – but freedom means freedom to disappear or be useless – just have to philosophise themselves and their purpose: the purpose of art. AR Gosh.

AR And Francis Bacon? OSIRIS If he seems fun now it’s because of a strength we’re seeing, which we know to be lost. The liveliness of Eisenman, by contrast, is all up in the air, something to do with erotic meaning and empowerment, all sorts of social meaning, actually, which are divorced from the medium of painting, but asked to be somehow entwined with it nevertheless. Two gay painters, one aesthetically lively and one dead as a doornail as far as aesthetic significance goes; one actually dead and the other alive as anything – but society equates them and believes both work and make the same sense. I think society’s wrong in that. The people in the design office of the Grimaldi Forum, who based their scenography for the Bacon show on the work of the modernist designers Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig (both long dead) did Bacon genuine service with their rather shocking staging of a large selection of his writhing monsters. And you can go round the spaces of that show, with their harsh divisions of shadow and brilliance, and crazy constructed platforms and false doorways that reflect shapes and light in the paintings, and really feel the medium of painting is powerful. But all the design in the world could never do that for Eisenman. With her the message is that the only power is the myth of the artist and it’s fine for painting to be any old dead junk. Next month David Bowie on his art collection

Francis Bacon: Monaco et la Culture Française, 2016 (installation view). Photo: J.C. Vinaj. Courtesy Grimaldi Forum, Monaco

OSIRIS Yes. The purpose of painting isn’t of any innate or inherent interest, of course. The artist, when art is free, when there are no more patrons, and cinema not painting is the big depicting machine, has to give it its interest: imbue painting with excitement and fascination. Society will go along with it. That’s the tradition that petered out during the 1960s, 500 years after the Renaissance.

ArtReview

Other People and Their Ideas No 31

Jochen Volz As the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo opens this month, its curator talks with ArtReview about what politics might learn from artists, particularly as artists expand their fields of investigation and expertise into alternative cosmologies Interview by

Oliver Basciano

The German art historian is the former artistic director at Instituto Inhotim in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where he retains a curatorial role. He was head of programmes at the Serpentine Galleries, London, until 2015. In 2009 he organised the international section of the 53rd Venice Biennale, together with artistic director Daniel Birnbaum, and in 2006 he participated as a curator at the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, where he realised a special project in homage to Marcel Broodthaers.

ArtReview

ARTREVIEW The title for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo is Live Uncertainty. The condition of uncertainty is, naturally, uncertain. But I presume that recent political events – largely beyond anyone’s control – are causing even more in flux. JOCHEN VOLZ It’s very interesting to see how a condition like ‘uncertainty’ all of a sudden becomes ubiquitous. After Britain’s EU referendum, people said, ‘Well they’re leading us into uncertainty.’ During the impeachment process of Dilma Rousseff, they would say, ‘Oh they’re bringing us uncertainty’. Two years ago this was not necessarily the case, and yet all of a sudden the word has become omnipresent. Our project [for the Bienal] had to learn how to incorporate this. In Portuguese the title, Incerteza viva, has a little bit of a celebratory feel, as in ‘long live uncertainty’. That reflects the fact that when we started to work on the Bienal, it was a very different situation. As these various political events have come to pass, the theme seems to have gained an additional urgency. AR Is that celebratory gloss problematic given that uncertainty, as it is commonly deployed in the public sphere today, has negative connotations, at least in a left-liberal mindset, given Brexit, the impeachment or even how America will look should Trump win? JV We understood from the beginning that the way ‘uncertainty’ had been used in media and in politics has always been to associate the word with fear, with instability, with crisis. So basically in all rhetoric, let’s say a media or political rhetoric, it’s been construed as something that is absolutely bad. But I think that in the arts this is not the case. Think of impromptu theatre or free jazz, for example. Chance has to

be incorporated into the artistic process. Visual art has always played with it and always fed off uncertain moments too. It has to inhabit and embrace uncertainty, in a way. The idea of celebrating uncertainty is something that should be embraced more widely. I think that it has become quite urgent to say, ‘Let’s inhabit uncertainty, let’s embrace it, let’s live with it, let’s learn from it or learn how to live with it,’ instead of always associating it with fear or crisis, which is what everybody else wants us to do. From the very beginning the Bienal has been led by the belief that the arts can teach us, maybe, how to live with uncertainty or how to, somehow, understand uncertainty as a generative force. As a potential for something new to happen. That is maybe more exciting than what the media and politics want us to believe, that we should run away from it – avoid it at all costs. AR I suppose, in art, uncertainty is analogous or synonymous with radicality; radicality, of course, is a positive thing within contemporary art. It’s the driving force of it. JV Exactly, that’s it. AR The most successful art is often the most uncertain. The least didactic works, works that allow multiple readings, these are all things we hold dear. How could we pull that idea out of art and into politics or media or society? JV I think if you look at artistic practices of late, you can see that artists are not stuck with, let’s above Gabriel Abrantes, Untitled (still), 2016, 16mm film transferred to HD, 25 min. Courtesy the artist facing page Jochen Volz. Photo: Sofia Colucci. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

September 2016

say, one kind of knowledge system. It’s not by chance that a lot of artists have started to become artist-scientists, artist-anthropologists, artistspiritualists. They have actively sought to cross disciplines. Inherent in artmaking today is a multiplicity of truths or a multiplicity of narratives, or a multiplicity of, say, histories and traditions. It has become possible, without being binary, for an artist to test disciplines against each other. I think this rejection of binary narratives, in a world that is increasingly bipolar, can be, or should be, transferable into other fields of public life. For the media or in politics something is either good or bad, you’re for Brexit or against Brexit for example. AR It feels like the political polarisation of the American-style culture wars has been exported globally. Certainly I feel that in Britain of late: you’re either liberal leftwing or you’re rightwing. There’s no crossover or dialogue between the two. It’s just a constant state of war, I suppose. JV Yes, our understanding of society has become very binary. I think what artists do is operate outside of party ideas. Artists take a little bit from here, a little bit from there. The best try to bring different possible visions together, and articulate, or try to provoke, or imagine, something else. That, I think, is the most powerful contribution that art can make to our society. Through this we can push urgently for another political reality, for a reimaging of social organisation, of another social fabric between people. AR I was struck by the global reach in the artists you’ve selected for the Bienal: there’s Dineo Seshee Bopape from South Africa, for example, Em’kal Eyongakpa from

Cameroon, Iza Tarasewicz from Poland, Maryam Jafri from Pakistan, Ruth Ewan from Scotland. How much did Brazil bring to your thinking? JV Even before the whole impeachment process started, some of the main themes of the Bienal were already present in Brazilian reality. So, for example, if you think about the environment and our uncertain relationship to it – the equilibrium between landscape, nature and humans – then Brazil is a very important place to look at this. There are few places in the world where monoculture is so largely exercised. If you ever see, for example, TV pictures of biomass plantations, these are often taken in the heart of Brazil in the area of the so-called ‘Brazilian Savanna’, the biodiversity of which has shrunk to, I think, almost 60 percent of what it was in the face of this monoculture. These crops are not only feeding Brazil, but the entire world. The same is true, I think, in terms of knowledge. If you think about knowledge systems, Brazil is a country with an estimated 340 different ethnicities and indigenous groups who speak (and sign) over 250 languages. So you still have, let’s say, a cultural diversity that is quite radical, but which is under threat at all times. This diversity, this cultural and natural diversity, which is so characteristic of Brazil, is present in everyday politics and everyday discussions here. Where do people come from? How are different histories used to manipulate an understanding of society? I think that the themes that we were interested in exploring with uncertainty have long been present in Brazil. I would say, additionally, what we have done over the last months has been to even expand and to question a bit the role of the São Paulo Bienal. It was, for many decades, Brazil’s main window to the world. The Bienal was the place to which Brazilians who would not have access to culture or art produced in other parts of the world would go. That has changed, and over the last 10, 15 years, there have been different institutions in Brazil that are now able to have an international programme bringing artists from all over the world. The discussion has become a different one. Art now gets circulated differently. So I think the role of the Bienal has changed a bit. It now has to be a platform to imagine alternative realities; I think that’s what the Bienal de São Paulo can do now.

To do that it also needs to look beyond the national borders of Brazil. So, for example, we organised a public programme between March and June in various places beyond São Paulo. The first was in Santiago de Chile, which is a place that has, let’s say, always understood itself. Even the name ‘Chile’ refers to ‘at the end of the world’ [etymologically from the indigenous Nahuatl language]. Through this ideas of being at the very end – and of course every end is also a beginning – we thought it would be great to think about this cosmological certainty. Then we went to Accra in Ghana, which, like many of the West African countries, has a very strong connection with Brazil through the slave trade.

of the century, often effecting discordant living and political conditions where bloodshed, loss of lives, arrests, executions, forced labour, floggings and mass deportations of those deemed as threats to the white population prevailed. An estimated 8,000 Afro-Brazilian Muslims and former slave rebels are reported to have been expelled from Bahia ‘back’ to Africa, settling in present-day West African coastal nations, including the then British colony of the Gold Coast (Ghana). So, they arrived, and they brought a whole series of, let’s say, European inventions, or European traditions to Africa, including how to build houses, how to work in agriculture and also how to best become a slave trader. They didn’t just come and live in freedom, they came back, and they were very good friends with the Portuguese, and with the Dutch, and with the English and the Danish, and continued, in some cases at least it is reported, to work in the very business of which they were once victims. AR I suppose, that story, however unpalatable, is an example of the agitation of received narratives right? JV Everything becomes much more complex. In this sense, it was very, very interesting for the discussion of the Bienal, because the established narratives might not be sufficient. The people who lived on the [Ghanaian] coast probably had a different involvement than those people who lived in the inside of the country and were enslaved. You need more than one narrative. AR Why should people come to the Bienal? What agency will it have?

Yet it became very clear that these narratives that we know are not so solid either. Doing research, speaking with historians, artists and musicians in Ghana, we heard stories about returning slaves. For example, in January of 1835, a sizeable number of African slaves in Salvador da Bahia orchestrated an uprising, historically the most significant slave rebellion in Brazil, the Malê Revolt (Muslim Revolt). Slave revolts had been occurring throughout the first decades Curators of the 32nd Bienal of São Paulo visit a native community in the Amazon, April 2016. Photo: Gabi Ngcobo. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

ArtReview

JV The exhibition sets out to trace cosmological thinking, ambient and collective intelligence, and systemic and natural ecologies. It recognises uncertainties as a generative guiding system and is built on the conviction that in order to confront the big questions of our time objectively, such as global warming and its impact on our habitats, the extinction of species and the loss of biological and cultural diversity, rising economic and political instability, injustice in the distribution of the earth’s natural resources, global migration and the frightening spread of xenophobia, it is necessary to detach uncertainty from fear. The 32nd Bienal de São Paulo is on view from 10 September to 11 December

VIJA CELMINS RITA DONAGH PETER DREHER MARLENE DUMAS ROBERT GOBER NAN GOLDIN FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES RICHARD HAMILTON RONI HORN STEVE McQUEEN JEAN-MICHEL PANCIN DORIS SALCEDO WOLFGANG TILLMANS

WRITINGS

4 SEPTEMBER– 30 OCTOBER 2016 READING PRISON FORBURY ROAD READING BERKSHIRE RG1 3HY ARTANGEL.ORG.UK/INSIDE

AI WEIWEI TAHMIMA ANAM ANNE CARSON JOE DUNTHORNE DEBORAH LEVY DANNY MORRISON GILLIAN SLOVO BINYAVANGA WAINAINA OSCAR WILDE JEANETTE WINTERSON

READINGS NEIL BARTLETT RALPH FIENNES KATHRYN HUNTER RAGNAR KJARTANSSON MAXINE PEAKE LEMN SISSAY PATTI SMITH COLM TÓIBÍN BEN WHISHAW

The Artangel Collection on display across the UK

LINDSAY SEERS Nowhere Less Now Turner Contemporary, Margate

until 25 September

BETHAN HUWS Singing for the Sea ATLAS Arts, Isle of Skye

24 August – 5 October

DINH Q. LÊ The Colony 133 Rye Lane, London Site Gallery, Sheffield

25 August – 9 October 3 September – 3 December

JEREMY DELLER The Battle of Orgreave Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum

17 September – 26 November

DOUGLAS GORDON Feature Film Peninsula Arts, Plymouth

24 September – 19 November

MIKE KELLEY Mobile Homestead g39, Cardiff

22 October – 17 December

TONY OURSLER The Influence Machine Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh

23 – 26 November

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THE COLONY UNTIL 9TH OCTOBER

133 RYE LANE, LONDON SE15 ARTANGEL.ORG.UK/THECOLONY

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David Claerbout future

3 Sep - 29 Jan 2017

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ART-IN-ARCHITECTURE COMPETITION FOR THE EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE / GERMAN PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE Bundesamt für Bauwesen und

Builder

Institute for Federal Real Estate (BImA)

Awarding Authority, Competition Coordination and Management

Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), Unit A2

Location

As part of the renovation of the European Patent Office (EPO) and German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA), we are conducting an anonymous, open competition in two phases for artwork in a canteen and in the DPMA lobby. For the canteen, the work can consist of lighting, murals or hanging installations. For the DPMA lobby we will consider projects in the form of lighting, murals or glasswork. Budget for the canteen: €140,000 plus VAT. Budget for the DPMA lobby: €100,000 plus VAT.

Procedure

Raumordnung

Eligible are professional artists and artist groups worldwide. The objective of the first phase is to develop concepts for the two spaces. The jury will choose 10–15 entries from each location in this phase, and the selected artists will have the opportunity to further develop their ideas in accordance with recommendations made by the jury. Each verifiable entry selected for participation in the second phase will receive a fee of €1,500 plus VAT.

Deadlines

The deadline for submitting proposals for the first phase is 15 December 2016 and for the second phase is 12 May 2017, both by 2pm. The jury will meet in February and June 2017 to make its selections for the two phases.

Full details of the competition will be available for downloading from 12 September 2016 at www.bbr.bund.de / BBR Baubereich / Wettbewerbe / Kunst-am-Bau-Wettbewerbe. The announcement may also be requested by fax +49 3018 401 7209 or email EPA_DPMA@BBR.Bund.de.

“The lines of life are various, like roads and the contours of the mountains…” Hölderlin 10/09/2016 - 29/10/2016

M AR k uS BACHER RO N AN BAR ROt F LO R IAN BAuDR ExEL SAR AH BR AM AN M AR IE JO Sé BuRkI S IM O N CAL L ERY DEN IS CAS tEL L AS F R AN Ck CHAL EN DAR D E BER HAR D H AvEkO St k u R t k AppA kO CHER SCHEIDt R éMY JACquIER JERO EN JACO BS FER N AN D L éG ER FR AN k N ItS CHE pAS CAL pIN AuD éR IC pO ItEvIN RO L AN D quEt SCH u L R ICH RüCkR IEM kuR t S CHWIt t ER S FR AN k S tEL L A B EAt S tR Eu L I MItJA t ušEk JES SE WIL L EN BR IN G

GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON WANDHAFF w w w.b e r n a r d c e y s s o n.c o m

Darren Almond

New work 17 Sept - 13 Nov 2016 Roche Court East Winterslow Salisbury, Wilts, SP5 1BG

NewArtCentre.

T +44 (0) 1980 862244 F +44 (0) 1980 862447 nac@sculpture.uk.com www.sculpture.uk.com

Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future

: A new lexicon for the biennial Jean-Luc Moulène, 21 SKF ball bearings, from the serie Thirty-nine Strike Objects, 1999-2000 © The artist & ADAGP

TAIPEI BIENNIAL 2016 SEPTEMBER 10, 2016 FEBRUARY 5, 2017

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Art Featured

It’s inspired by professional air fresheners 75

Barrão by Oliver Basciano

From ceramic mashups to work with sound- and musicorientated collective Chelpa Ferro, the Brazilian artist has made dissonance a central feature of his explorations of thingness 76

ArtReview

The head of a sea lion pokes out the top of a vase. The moustachioed on at the time – come out as a headache-inducing blur. This interest in mammalian face wears what is best described as a plaintive look. distortion, and discord more generally, perhaps stems from Barrão’s Look closer though and it seems more the case that the sea lion’s head roots in experimental music. As much as Chelpo Ferro make kinetic morphs into a vase. Zoom back out and you’ll find that vase is glued sound installations for gallery settings, they also play live gigs, on top of another vase, which in turn is attached to several more. Take frequently employing DIY instruments or misusing conventional a step back and you’ll find that this is just one of four branches of ones. In their installations they often include junk or waste materials a floor sculpture created by Brazilian artist Barrão, Nós Somos Assim combined with hijacked motors or elements of audiovisual equip(We Are Like This, 2013), assembled from large broken fragments of ment – be it a room of plastic bags attached to motors taken from shop-bought, mass-produced porcelain objets d’art. Each branch ends kitchen blenders that rustle as they spin (Jungle Jam, 2010) or their in a different animal – the others being an owl, a duck and a cockerel. commission for Brazil’s participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale, There’s something monstrous about it – the artist’s very own Hydra Acqua Falsa, in which a giant amp emitting abstract noise was strung across the water-flooded pavilion. – and an air of doleful resignation is How much can something mutate The live gigs are typically atonal evident on the ornamental animals’ walls of sounds combining instrupainted faces. or evolve yet maintain its original state ments and digital software, compoBarrão, born Jorge Velloso Borges of ‘objecthood’? sitions that sit somewhere between Leão Teixeira but known for as long as anyone can remember by his nickname, likes to quote a sentence by digital hardcore and postrock. Barrão’s personal involvement in the the poet Mário Quintana, the so-called ‘poet of simple things’, when Rio de Janeiro rock scene is further evidenced in the collaged sleevetalking about works such as Nós Somos Assim. ‘Because scrap actually art he’s made over the years for albums by myriad musician friends – whatever it once was – is a mere transitory state, there’s nothing and their various bands (including Fausto Fawcett’s 1987 funk-punk tragic about it.’ ‘Scrap’, Quintana writes, ‘is material on vacation.’ It hybrid LP Fausto Fawcett e os Robôs Efêmeros). is this sense of transition that is abundant in Barrão’s sculpture. The There are two artworks from this early period that point to Rio de Janeiro-based artist has, since the early 1980s, taken prosaic Barrão’s transition from audiovisual to ceramic sculptures. Elefantes items, often symbols of bourgeois life, and given them a new verve de Circo (Circus Elephants, 1986), consisting of four turntables, upon by mixing elements of one object with those of another into fantas- which are identical clay elephants, marks the artist’s first use of tical new arrangements. Besides the gaudy mass-produced ceramics animal ornaments. Synchronised, the animals turn in silence. Perhaps that have been a recurring presence in his work since 2000, the more striking in terms of how Barrão’s art was to develop formally, artist has also employed all manner of other consumer items in the however, introducing his interest in the breaking of everyday objects service of this goal – from telephones and fridges, to bar tables and and the collaging of their parts, is Mulher Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola Woman, 1987). In the sculpture the torn-off head and arms of a doll are placed Wellington boots. Beyond his work as a solo artist, Barrão has been a participant in on the neck of a full mixer-bottle of Coca-Cola. The Coke bottle has various artist collectives, most notably Six Hands (throughout the a rich lineage in art, most obviously with its repeated appearance 1980s, with Ricardo Basbaum and Alexandre Dacosta) and Chelpa in Warhol’s screenprints, but also Cildo Meireles’s Coca-Cola Project, Ferro (formed with Sergio Mekler and Luiz Zerbini in 1995; the three one of the two Insertions into Ideological Circuits the artist enacted in continue to meet on a weekly basis in Mekler’s studio), and there is a 1970, adding political slogans to the bottles before returning them strong crossover between his own art and both collectives’ preoccupa- to the shop and putting them back into circulation. Barrão’s work is tion with sound, music-making and audiovisual installations. TV Cara less outwardly political – there’s none of the direct commentary on (Face TV, 1984) is typical of the artist’s early habit of covering working American imperialism of Meireles’s project, for example – a testatelevisions in paint, for example. The boxy analogue set has a man’s ment to the younger artist’s interest in testing out forms against each face and shoulders (the traditionother through aesthetic play: the Coke bottle, of course, was designed ally framed shot of the news anchor, Can an elephant be an elephant without perhaps) cartoonishly applied to the after the female form. its trunk (or ears or eyes)? screen. Similar faces, this time with Initially Barrão just went at the speech bubbles issuing from their mouths, are painted on the front ceramic ornaments – which he collects over a period of time and stores of two further sets exhibited in the 1984 group show Como Vai Você, taxonomically in his studio – with a hammer, intuitively working out Geração 80? (How Are You Doing, 80s Generation?) at the art school in Rio’s how the resulting broken fragments could be glued back together. Parque Lage. Mounted on stools, each is installed to suggest that the Later he made use of an industrial ceramic-cutter, giving him greater figures on the boxes are in conversation with each other. These and control over the dismemberment of the original ornaments and other such works were exhibited switched on and tuned to a local resulting sculptural recompositions. In divining a feel for how colour channel, causing a playful dissonance between sound and imagery. and form might coalesce in each work, he is in effect developing an It is this sense of discord or visual confusion that has been an abiding alternative taxonomy, each sculptural amalgam operating as a propoprovocation in the artist’s work. One can see it markedly in the 1989 sition for a new way of cataloguing the various collected objects from sculpture Telefunk too. Another television set, the casing painted in which it is formed. Rastro (Trace, 2013) features a cat ornament, the blue car-paint, has had its screen all but masked by a mesh of spec- kind of kitschy thing that was the mainstay of working- and middletacle lenses, each offering a different degree of class homes during the 1950s. To the rear end of facing page Bicho de Sorte (Lucky Animal), 2006, magnification. Here the transmitted images of the cat Barrão has added a funnellike section of plastic, wood and epoxy resin, 29 × 19 × 38 cm. newscasts and soaps – whatever happened to be china (its origin unclear) that attaches in turn Photo: Julio Callado

September 2016

above Nós Somos Assim (We Are Like This), 2013, porcelain and epoxy resin, 111 × 65 × 75 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega preceding pages Rastro (Trace), 2013, pottery and epoxy resin, 54 × 114 × 35 cm. Photo: Julio Callado

ArtReview

Boca do Mato (Forest Entrance), 2009, pottery and epoxy resin, 177 × 72 × 68 cm. Photo: Julio Callado

September 2016

to a bulky array of different patterned, coloured and broken porcelain stands for bathroom sinks, and which, without the basins that rest vessels that have presumably been chosen for the slight curves evident atop – and ‘complete’ – them, are without purpose. Yet the blocks in each of them. The result has a distinctly bodily feel to it – with the remain unchanged in substance. Likewise Com Que Roupa Eu Vou? (What parts delineated by the epoxy lines gluing them together, it resembles Clothes Am I Going to Wear?, 2007) is recognisable as a mashed-up goldone of those diagrams that details the different cuts of a farm animal. and-white tea service, but one that will never again be used to serve tea. The cat, in turn, looks over its shoulder as if surprised to see the porceThese sculptures also owe a dept to the artist’s experience as a lain beast it has seemingly farted out. musician and the gradual mass layering of sound that characterises Other works from this era are equally nightmarish (though not Chelpa Ferro’s live performances as a band. One of the group might without their humour), reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s tortured play the trumpet, or a guitar riff, and this will be initially recogcreatures or the poor etched animal hybrids in Goya’s Los Caprichos nisable as such by the audience. These noises are then typically fed (1797–8). In Bicho de Sorte (Lucky Animal, 2006), for example, a plastic through software to remix, loop and layer them on top of each other Godzilla with a fierce snarl is made to look Frankensteinian, with its to such an extent that gradually the individual instrument is all but new cumbersome prosthetic limb, a wood-carved hand, fist clenched. lost within a cacophonous wall of sound. Something similar happens Yet perhaps what we are seeing is less gruesome than one might first to the familiar objects used in the sculptures – be they elephants or suppose. Take Barrão’s Multi Elephas (2009), in which a herd of stately items of bathroom furniture – as the elements are broken down and elephant figurines are piled on top of each other. Each of the original rebuilt into strange new arrangements that nonetheless retain their animals has a similar pose (though they vary greatly in colour and, original DNA. to an extent, size). As a viewer we can recognise the species despite This fundamental objecthood of ‘things’ – of how we recognise Barrão’s dismembering and remixing of their parts, a fact that perhaps their inherent qualities – is further addressed in Barrão’s most recent allows us to think on ideas such as the ‘one and the many’ and of how work, in which he casts everyday items in epoxy resin, assembling much something can mutate or evolve yet maintain its original state them in various combinations and juxtapositions. As the resulting of ‘objecthood’ throughout, whether that be the ageing of the human sculptures are then painted white with enamel, they resemble archebody or an ornament that has succumbed to Barrão’s splicing. types of familiar forms. Vainosmal (2015–16) features an owl and Think of (and pity too) the Nellie in Boca do Mato (Forest Entrance, a human skull, both motifs stripped down to the barest details needed 2009), whose head has been replaced by a cumbersome mountain to recognise them as ‘an owl’, ‘a skull’. The three identical drills in of green and yellow chinaware, while a small Buddha rides its neck. 3 em 1 (2016), attached one on top of each other, are like diagrammatic There are further existential questions at stake here. Can an elephant line drawings of drills in their nonspecificity of make and model, be an elephant without its trunk (or ears or eyes)? Even without this with many of their distinguishing details removed: the Platonic fundamental body part, we recognise this partial form as belonging to ideal of a drill. The three books piled architecturally in I, II e III (2015), Elephantidae. Indeed, the question of the existence of essential object- devoid of title, author and other such information, become symbolic hood is most obviously raised by those sculptures in which quotidian of all books. When exhibited en masse, floor-, wall- and pedestalitems have been deployed, for their deployment makes redundant any mounted, the details and individuality erased by the uniform white, use-value they may once have had. Works such as the Morretão (2014) they come across not as a gallery of ‘things’ but as something that series, towers made up of several coloured cylin- TV Cara (Face TV), 1984, television set and latex paint. exists in a moment prior to that thingness: drical porcelain blocks, which are in fact the a gallery of ur-things. ar Photo: Rafael Adorján

ArtReview

3 em 1, 2016, epoxy resin and synthetic enamel, 47 × 25 × 19 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega all images Courtesy the artist and Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

September 2016

Shrinking horizons Luiz Roque’s short films address gender, the art-historical canon and Brazilian history in ways that conjure both the past and a dated vision of the future while skirting the present. Is a darker turn in his latest work the sign of an intruding dystopian now? by Kiki Mazzucchelli

Luiz Roque’s 2013 film Ano Branco (White Year) starts in the year 2005. The setting is a conference hall in an unidentified European city. “What interests me about testosterone is to use it as a political drug,” says the moustached actress who plays the role of queer academic Paul B. Preciado, while proceeding to apply a dose of Testogel on her arm and describing the chemical effects of the substance on her body. Preciado, who has been transitioning since 2014, has published extensively on the political control of bodies by the pharmaceutical and pornographic industries through the commodification of desire, having coined the term ‘pharmacopornographic capitalism’. The first part of the film is entirely dedicated to the fictional lecture delivered by the character – her lines taken from Preciado’s essay ‘Gender and Sex Copyleft’ (2006) – concluding with the statement that “The revolution will start with the appropriation of our bodies as essential sites for pleasure, free of restrictions and copyright”. Cut to 25 years later, and a computerised voiceover informs us that the World Health Organisation no longer considers transsexualism a psychological disorder. In Roque’s utopian sci-fi tale, a beautiful transgender woman is the last person to be analysed by the health authorities before all treatment centres for sex-change disorders are closed down for good. We see her lying naked on a hospital bed as a low-tech robotic contraption – a mannequin head mounted on a mechanical arm – scans every centimetre of her modified body. The closing scene is a frontal shot of the woman’s naked torso and head superimposed by glistening circles of green light, like a goddess signalling that the gender revolution has finally arrived. The seven-minute-long Ano Branco was commissioned by the Mercosul Biennial, based in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is Roque’s longest work to date – most of his films come in under the five-minute mark. It is also exceptional in that the storyline is much more discernible and linear than in other works, where meanings are exclusively

generated through the expressive power of images. Often shooting with analogue technologies (Super 8 or 16mm), the artist creates beautifully textured cinematic compositions that suggest a temporal shift to another historical moment – either the past, or the future as imagined in the past – to weave open-ended narratives that loosely touch on ideas of imagined modernities and the postgendered body. Roque’s explorations of the plasticity of image and cinematic composition are more clearly manifested in works like O Novo Monumento (The New Monument, 2012), shot in black-and-white 16mm. The film opens with an onscreen quote from the essay ‘Nine Points on Monumentality’ (1943), written collaboratively by architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, artist Fernand Léger and architect Josep Lluís Sert, in which the authors claim that monuments can only exist in times when there is a unifying consciousness and culture. We then see two young men standing on a vacant lot dressed in what looks like tropical-Mad Max attire ornamented with mirrors, bones and chains, who start to perform coordinated vogue-style moves to the sound of a tribal tune. Roque’s camera captures details of the surrounding rural landscape and briefly dwells on the rippled surface of a lagoon, an old farm pavilion and a solitary owl perched atop a branch that sticks out of a tall-grassed field before stationing in front of a warehouse. The gate slides open to reveal a square form bisected along a curved vertical cut: it is, in fact, a small-size replica of an untitled monument by Brazilian neoconcrete artist Amílcar de Castro (1920–2002) situated at the busy Praça da Sé in central São Paulo and possibly one of his most recognisable works. The sculpture is now on the back of an old truck that drives along a dirt road surrounded by bushes, while being followed by three unlikely escorts on motorbikes who wear full motocross gear, until it disappears at the horizon. In the next sequence, the sculpture has mysteriously materialised in the middle of a remote field, a bit like

ArtReview

Ano Branco (still), 2013, HD video, 7 min

September 2016

above and top O Novo Monumento (The New Monument) (stills), 2013, 16mm film transferred to video, 5 min 35 sec

ArtReview

the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The film ends with scenes from a celebration of sorts in the streets of Belo Horizonte – the city in which de Castro lived and worked for most of his life – with the two costumed performers from the beginning dancing alongside members of the public. In O Novo Monumento, Roque envisions a fictional origin-myth for Brazilian society based on a work by a latemodernist artist who, in spite of his local fame, remains virtually unknown outside of his home country. By choosing de Castro instead of one his more internationally renowned contemporaries – Lygia Clark or Hélio Oiticica, for example – the artist shows a willingness to expand the scope of mainstream art-historical narratives, at the same time as overlapping meanings associated with Neoconcretism with the futuristic-primitive gay connotations of the ritual performed by the vogue dancers. Ultimately, the new monument in the film is the product of a ‘unifying consciousness’ that is grounded not on military success or religious beliefs, but on the ideas encompassed by an artistic movement whose characteristic unorthodox experimentalism helped redefine the limits of art. While in Ano Branco Roque imagines a future where bodies are free from gender-normative power structures, and with O Novo Monumento he envisions a society unified by the principles of the mid-twentiethcentury artistic movement that blossomed in a period of great optimism and cultural inventiveness in Brazil (abruptly cut short by a military coup in 1964), in the work MODERN (2014), ideas around modern art and the postgendered body are brought together. Also shot in black-and-white 16mm, this short film, produced during a residency at Delfina Foundation in London, takes Henry Moore’s iconic 1938 sculpture Recumbent Figure, a reclining female body carved in light-brown stone, as a starting point. MODERN revolves around the encounter between a black replica of this sculpture and a character based on the legendary performer and nightclub host Leigh Bowery,

who used his own body as a canvas to create exaggerated silhouettes. Fully clad in a vinyl catsuit, with disproportionately large hips, pointy breasts and one monstrous elephantine foot, the performer plays a game of seduction with his ‘double’ as he moves to the sound of soft electronic music. By alternating carefully crafted shots that explore the details and textures of his subjects’ bodies, Roque seems to be interested in highlighting the visual correspondences between Moore’s abstracted organic figures and the distorted forms and exaggerated silhouettes created by Bowery, and in how both can be perceived as transgendered. But more than that, the nonhierarchical approximation between an artist consecrated by the establishment and the underground performer who died prematurely of an AIDSrelated illness promotes a subversive clash between the disparate cultural values associated with Moore and Bowery. In mirroring the modern master with the contemporary gay icon, Roque addresses the relative absence in mainstream art-history of artists who weren’t white, straight and male, hinting at one of the many silenced histories of art still to be written. Keeping with his investigations on gender, Roque is currently working on HEAVEN, a new film commissioned for Live Uncertainty, the next edition of the Bienal de São Paulo , which opens in September. A sequel to Ano Branco, the work is set in a dystopian future when a new type of orally transmitted virus starts to affect transgender communities. This bleak premise represents a departure from the idealistic tone that characterises the artist’s earlier pieces, although it may well be a reflection of Brazil’s obscure political times, when LGBT groups have become one of the main targets of rising conservative forces. ar HEAVEN will be on view at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo: Live Uncertainty from 10 September to 11 December

MODERN, 2013, 16mm film transferred to video, 5 min 35 sec all images Courtesy the artist and Sé Galeria, São Paulo

September 2016

ArtReview

Three Years On The Artistic Legacy of Istanbul’s Gezi Park Protests by Sarah Jilani

September 2016

What do a pop-up library, a penguin and a whirling dervish in a gas As protests in solidarity with Gezi Park spread to other major mask have in common? They were three of the many manifestations Turkish cities from 31 May, police retaliated with water cannon, pepper of creative political parody during the 2013 Gezi Park protests in spray and – shockingly – the occasional live round, clearing the park Istanbul. A turning point for both the city’s creative energies and its on 15 June. Showcasing a peaceful agenda via artistic expression was relationship to art and politics, Gezi marked a subtle but lasting para- no longer a deterrent to state force, nor worth the risk. In the immedigm shift in the contemporary Turkish art scene. This summer was diate aftermath of the clear-out, art was instead used both to memothe third anniversary of weeks of sit-ins; protest art, including mass rialise the spirit of the sit-in, and to find alternative forms by which performance and graffiti; slogan-chanting; and clashes with police in to continue to protest. An image captured by Reuters photographer Taksim Square (next to Gezi Park). What began on 27 May 2013 as an Osman Orsal of a young woman in a red summer dress being pepperovernight sit-in of 50 people hoping to stop two bulldozers at Gezi sprayed at point-blank range became one of the most pastiched Park – a last patch of public green in the heart of the city, which the visuals of the protests, while Erdem Gündüz began a performance government decided in 2011 to turn into a shopping arcade, styled of civil disobedience on 17 June. Standing still in Taksim Square for as a seventeenth-century Ottoman barracks – erupted into protests six hours, he stared at the decrepit Atatürk Cultural Centre (once the that saw an estimated 3.5 million Turks, many with no prior polit- home of the Turkish State Opera and Ballet, now in its eighth year out ical affiliation, participate in some way. Liberal students from secular of operation). Others soon joined him in what became known as the families, back for the summer from Ivy Leagues, found their perspec- ‘standing man’ protest: a dilemma action that left onlooking police tives challenged by the working-class youths protesting very real unable to respond to a demand for the barest of public rights – to take hardships alongside them. One journalist – a group often derided, up public space. Gündüz shared the Václav Havel Prize for Creative together with writers and academics, in Turkey’s atmosphere of anti- Dissent with Pussy Riot the following year. intellectualism (back in 2013, Turkey had surpassed Iran in its numThree years on, though, it is easy to conclude that state response ber of jailed journalists) – led Friday prayers at the park for protesters was sufficiently overwhelming that artistic protests at Gezi now seem from an anticapitalist Muslim league. Antigovernment slogans to have been of little consequence. And to an extent that’s true: art chanted by fans of Turkey’s three major football clubs could be alone does not change reality. But it can make the contradictions and heard alongside the demands of women’s- and LGBT-rights groups. commonalities within our reality apparent. The residual energies A period of social amalgamation, more productive than what any of the Gezi protests translated into a lingering social camaraderie affiliated Turkish political group had and a shared urban memory, which Art did not hold the water cannons at managed until then, was occurring. has found expression in the post-Gezi Calls were for a lessening of thenbay, but it did communicate the largely artistic life of Istanbul. prime minister (now president) Recep In a Turkish governmentality that positive spirit in which Gezi started, and has demonstrated increasing intolerTayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarianism; an served to highlight the overreaction and ance towards any form of criticism, end to unchecked urbanisation plans; the reclamation of public space; and intolerance of the government’s response Turkey’s arts have seen a corresponding democracy beyond the ballot box. increase in obstacles since 2013. And yet The fundamental tools of protest in Taksim Square sometimes they have also undergone the kind of creative and critical regeneraresembled Occupy, with its tents, libraries, alfresco lectures and tion that collective politicisation and trauma of this scale can bring performances; and sometimes they resembled the 2011 Tahrir Square about. State suspicion (and all too often, ‘encouragement’ to cease and protests in Cairo, with their heated clashes between police and desist) of creative activity and public gatherings has increased in the protesters. Although ground was most effectively gained through acts aftermath of Gezi. The Ankara orchestra was pressured to remove the of physical resistance and civil disobedience, art was a supplementary government-critical and globally acclaimed Turkish pianist Fazil Say tool that boosted morale, communicated defiance and demonstrated from their programme. The 2015 Istanbul International Film Festival the right to public space. The music, literature, art, comedy and dance saw 12 filmmakers pull out over a censorship row when the Turkish that took place during the Gezi sit-in put a human face on the action. Ministry for Culture prevented the screening of a documentary about But at the time this had more than mere aesthetic value. These collec- Kurdish militants. SALT Beyoğlu, perhaps the busiest of the organisative creative activities, and their sharing via social media, recorded the tion’s spaces, on the pedestrianised Istiklal Avenue, has been closed peaceful nature of the protest, which challenged the parallel-running since this past January, apparently for ‘technical reasons’, but allegnarrative of the state: that the protesters were trained troublemakers, edly as a result of government pressure. In March, a group exhibiprovocateurs. Art did not hold the water cannons at bay, but it did tion titled Post-Peace, the winning entry in a curatorial competition, communicate the largely positive spirit in which Gezi started, and was set to explore the contemporary condition of war; the gallery, served to highlight the overreaction and intolerance of the govern- Akbank Sanat, cancelled the show and issued a vaguely worded statement’s response. Memorable manifestations included tongue- ment about a ‘troubled time’ and the delicate political situation, in-cheek antiestablishment graffiti (‘Tayyip, Winter Is Coming’); while attempting to mitigate what many people would view as an act German pianist David Martello’s nighttime concert in the middle of of censorship by claiming that, in Turkey, ‘exhibitions, concerts, and Taksim Square; an impromptu performance of a whirling dervish performances, are being cancelled every day’. wearing a gas mask; and countless humorous Twitter memes (the Although frustrating and often intimidating, such clampdowns aforementioned penguin was a particular favourite – state television on freedom of expression have not put a chokehold on the arts. had broadcast an Antarctica documentary instead of the first night of Nonprofits and arts initiatives have proliferated, seeking loopholes to avoid charges of insult (a common precept for state intervention), the Gezi protests).

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preceding pages Taksim Square, Istanbul, 19 June 2013. Photo: Italo Rondinella this page, from top The funeral of Didar Sensoy, 5 September 1987, photo: Ibrahim Eren Archive; Barıs Doğrusöz, Paris time: ‘The map and the territory’ (video still), 2012–14. Both from How Did We Get Here, SALT Beyoğlu & SALT Galata, 2015

September 2016

Ahmet Öğüt, Silent University, 2012–, autonomous solidarity-based education platform by asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. Courtesy the Silent University

ArtReview

brushing up on their legal knowhow, foolproofing the legitimacy of obscured beneath a divisive political rhetoric within the societal their actions, and garnering private support when squeezed. The Saha consciousness. The impulse therefore to go back and interrogate these Association, one of several homegrown NGOs, has become an impor- so-called divisions is another legacy of this period. This was perhaps tant facilitator, supporting Turkish artist Halil Altındere at the 9th Gezi’s least solid yet most important effect, and one that lent itself best Berlin Biennale and curator Fatoş Üstek at the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. to artists themselves. The identity- and memory-oriented themes of Presenting visual arts, performance and interdisciplinary public the last two Istanbul Biennials, recent archive exhibitions like SALT’s programmes, Bomontiada in Istanbul gives visitors a say in its use; How Did We Get Here (2015) and events like the !f Istanbul Independent alongside its contemporary art gallery Alt and customisable audio- Film Festival – which began live streams to Yerevan, Ramallah and visual space, it hosts Atölye Istanbul, an interaction and creativity Diyarbakir – suggest Turkish curators and creators have continued to platform for anyone seeking to bring projects and prototypes to life. draw inspiration from the functions of art throughout Gezi: collective Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts remembrance, documentation and social awareness. Internationally in Turkey, publishes and circulates legal-rights guides for museums, established Turkish artists still draw strong influences from the creanonprofits and individuals. tive dissent and social questions that so defined the early Gezi period The private patrons that lend today: it was perhaps the single most The residual energies of the Gezi support to many cultural organisaimportant piece of context to know tions in Turkey also recommitted to when approaching this year’s Istanbul. protests translated into a lingering their sponsorships after Gezi. Since Passion, Joy, Fury show at MAXXI in Rome, social camaraderie and a shared urban the end of the welfare state during or Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s and Ahmet Öğüt’s memory, which has found expression the 1970s, the arts in Turkey have works on national identity and landstayed afloat almost entirely thanks scapes at Manifesta 11. in the post-Gezi artistic life of Istanbul to the support of generations of This amalgamation of private and private benefactors, so in most ways this is nothing new. But a pledge nonprofit cultural stewardship, a socially engaged mood among from Turkey’s family-owned Fortune 500 conglomerate Koç Holding, artists and a growing public consciousness of urban space and shared of another decade’s worth of support for the Istanbul Biennial, was memory can certainly be traced as a ‘Gezi effect’. Yet it is one that is still a welcome assurance – along with their continued funding of increasingly challenging to sustain as Turkey’s recent political instamany exhibitions, major contemporary art centres like Arter and bility reenergises social polarisation. Looking back, the dilemma of the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Meanwhile, Sabancı the ‘standing man’ and the symbolism of the ‘woman in red’ now Holding, Turkey’s second-largest corporation, declared it was taking seem defining of this fast-burning but arrested legacy. The seismic on the restoration of the politically charged Atatürk Cultural Centre changes Turkey has undergone since the failed coup attempt on 15 near Gezi Park in June 2013, shortly after Erdoğan assured the press July mark this latest political shock as the ultimate determinant of that, “God willing, the [ACC] shall be demolished” to make room for Turkey's direction now – one ever further from the hopes at Gezi’s first the ill-fated Ottoman barracks. peaceful sit-in. Art can always remain a vehicle whereby Gezi’s effects As the Gezi protests drew attention to Turkey’s broken polit- on civic action, social inclusion and collective political engagement ical structures, lopsided urban gentrification, social polarisation are remembered – but three years on, Turkey is in such a place that and increasingly undemocratic future, they joined dots previously neither art nor an inspiring legacy can surpass our fear to dissent. ar

Halil Altındere, Homeland (still), 2016, HD video, colour, sound (lyrics by Mohammad Abu Hajar). Courtesy the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul

September 2016

Protest, not profit by Raimar Stange

‘Artivism’, in which art and activism combine to question and disrupt existing structures, is often by its nature temporary and collective, resulting in a form that is difficult to categorise, situate or give a value to. Does this make it more effective – or less? 94

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‘Ambiguous images had led to the forgetting of Being, and to the Rockefeller family from the board of MoMA, on account of its attitude belief that a shift in imagination effected actual changes of Being,’ towards the arms industry and the Vietnam War. One year later, also criticised Carl Einstein after he himself had supplied, more than 15 at MoMA, and with heavy symbolism, the group laid a funeral wreath years earlier, the theoretical foundation for Cubism in his legendary before Picasso’s legendary antiwar painting Guernica (1937). As hybrids 1915 monograph, Negro Sculpture. With these words, republished in his of performance and political demonstration, both actions are typical posthumous 1973 volume Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (The Fabrication examples of GAAG’s artivist work, which also included the writing of Fictions), Einstein became one of the first to advocate forcefully for of manifestos, such as those on the precariousness of being either a activist art – art that would go beyond the mere production of aesthetic female or black artist. Taken together, they constitute an attempt to images and sculptures and explicitly strive for ‘actual changes of deconstruct the allegedly apolitical yet, in fact, hegemonic character Being’. Still today, however, ‘artivism’ goes largely ignored by the art of art museums, with the intention of exposing how these cultural establishment: although a modest number of exhibitions may feature institutions again and again provide space for consensus-driven art it, galleries ignore its existence and the big art journals tend not to and recreational fun for a lucky few while acting as profitable money address it. In light of the status quo of activism, artist/writer/activist launderers and foci for financial investment. Gregory Sholette, borrowing from theoretical physics, chose the term Occupy Museums, the artist collective that grew out of Occupy Wall ‘dark matter’ – describing a state in which something is evidently Street in 2011, carries on the work of GAAG by also targeting the instipresent but not visible – as the title for his 2006 book on activist art tution of the museum. In the words of its initiating member, Noah since the 1920s. Sholette clariFischer (writing in the Fall 2015 issue of the online jourfies that activist art over almost nal Field), the ‘global network the last hundred years, but especially since the 1960s – connecting museums, auctions, globally yet for the most part art fairs, and biennales functions as an informal networkoutside the art establishment – was exceedingly engaged and ing channel for a global capitalpolitically relevant, and didn’t ist class while the image of this content itself with the creation luxurious lifestyle and high production aesthetics are danof ‘autonomous’, ie purposegled before the noses of the less and self-contained works produced by only one artist. 99% as the ultimate sign of aspiration’. The group focuses As opposed to art that is easmore and more on criticising ily exhibited and sold, the this highly asocial quality of focus here is on temporary and museums, which, in many incollective actions and processes stitutions, also manifests itself that seldom find a way into the in the precarious working concanon of bourgeois art history. This form of artistic work ditions for their supposedly promises neither cultural nor less-qualified employees. In 2012 the group’s actions incommercial value; rather, it included camping for several tervenes critically and discordantly in sociopolitical and months at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art during the economic structures. Protest, not profit; and, needless to say, this is problematic for our now fully 7th Berlin Biennale. At KW, one of Berlin’s primary stations on the postmodern art pilgrimage, where more-or-less hip art is discussed commercialised system of art. Take, for instance, the activist artworks created by the New York and undergoes a subsequent upvaluation on the art market, the collective Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), which, during the late group organised a programme that was purely discursive in nature – 1960s, provided the blueprint for the artivist actions we know today, speeches, discussions, workshops – yet managed to initiate aggressive such as those by the groups Occupy Museums and Gulf Labor in artivist actions like the ‘raid’ of a Deutsche Bank affiliate in the style of the US, Russia’s Pussy Riot and Germany’s Zentrum für Politische anarchist street theatre. During last year’s Venice Biennale, Occupy Museums teamed with Schönheit (ZPS, Center for Political Beauty). GAAG was founded by Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche and carried on until voluntarily disbanding Gulf Labor in occupying the Peggy Guggenheim Collection for several in 1976. On 18 November 1969, four of its members gathered in hours, an action that received enormous media attention. The idea was the lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern to raise critical consciousness of the inhumane above Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava Art and appeared to slit their stomachs with working conditions under which Guggenheim knives. Red blood poured from packets hidden and Studio Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Rojava, Abu Dhabi is currently being constructed in the 2015–16, design of the inside of the roof of beneath the activists’ clothing as they ‘expired’ United Arab Emirates. Another dimension to the new public parliament in the the city of at the no-longer-pure high altar of art. Beforethese activities in this context is the 2015 publiDerîk (northern Syria) hand they had distributed flyers throughout cation of the book The Gulf: High Culture / Hard facing page Occupy Museums action at the Labor. In light of the work by Occupy Museums the museum demanding the resignation of the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, June 2012

September 2016

above Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, Erster Europäischer Mauerfall (First Fall of the European Wall) (detail), 2015. © and courtesy Zentrum für Politische Schönheit preceding pages Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and Studio Jonas Staal, New World Summit, 2015–16, celebration of the construction of the new public parliament and surrounding park in the city of Derîk (northern Syria). Photo: Ruben Hamelink

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and Gulf Labor, which is highly critical of the system and has been debates, which are seldom staged without a fair share of controversy, introduced here only briefly, it is thus beyond comprehension that leave the participants quite obviously at loggerheads with actual Claire Bishop, in her essay ‘Black Box, White Cube, Public Space’ neoliberal policy. (2016, published on Skulptur Projekte Münster’s website), used thorThe artistic work of the ZPS collective in Germany also refutes oughly ignorant argumentation to describe artivism as affirmative Bishop’s polemical assertions that activist performances in the safe, and neoliberal: ‘After Occupy Wall Street in 2011, performance has politics-free space of a museum are in retreat in order to be ‘in tune migrated into the safety of the museum, rather than take place on the with neoliberal politics’. The group’s action Erster Europäischer Mauerstreets. In tune with neoliberal politics, this work tends to be organ- fall (First Fall of the European Wall, 2015) is a prime example. Precisely as official Germany was readying itself to celebrate the 25th anniversary ized around consent rather than dissent.’ Today, other artivists are no longer locating their political of the fall of the Berlin Wall, ZPS removed 14 Wall crosses – which had artistic work in the context of institutional criticism, but instead are been installed in honour of those killed along the Wall during the Cold deliberately positioning themWar – and repositioned them selves outside the art establishat various locations along the ment, as did the Dutch visual external border of the EU. On artist Jonas Staal with his the group’s website, photos participatory project New World were posted of white crosses Summit (2015–16). Since 2012 he and dark-skinned refugees behas organised alternative parhind barbed-wire fences, some liamentary forums that conat border installations in Bulvene in various locations across garia and Greece. The camthe world to debate, from varpaign set out to highlight the ious perspectives, the status refugee situation at the borquo of ‘our’ democracies. For ders of Europe, where the First instance, the ‘Terrorism ConWorld is building new walls to keep out the misery that is so gresses’ address, in part, provocpervasive beyond its sphere of ative questions that can be influence. After all, since 2000 simplified as: what is terrorism close to 30,000 people trying and who is actually a terrorist? to reach Europe have died, Neither question is as straighta good portion of them in the forward as it may perhaps seem at first; the official lists Mediterranean Sea. of sought-after ‘terrorists’ in In an interview, ZPS Germany differ significantly spokesman Philipp Ruch exfrom those in France and the plained this symbolic action US, and each country’s defiinvolving the 14 Berlin Wall nition of ‘terrorist’ stems not crosses: ‘The “white crosses” from ‘objective’ circumstances, collectively left the city’s govbut from variously configured ernment quarters to escape the power relationships. commemoration festivities... In an act of solidarity, the Most recently Staal erected a ‘parliament building’ in the victims fled to their brothers autonomous Kurdish region of and sisters across the European Union’s external borRojava, in northern Syria, where ders, more precisely, to the he organised a conference on future victims of the wall.’ Of ‘stateless democracy’. The aucourse, the media response to tonomous region served as a sort of concrete, ideal case for a concept of democracy that, among other this aggressive action was immense, and legal consequences loomed. things, shows that it ‘is no longer demographically limited’ (Staal). The ultimate effect, however, was the collective’s success at presenting The participants invited to such forums of the New World Summit and discussing an urgent political problem before a broad public, include representatives from autonomous civil-rights movements, and – much like the actions by Jonas Staal – doing so without accept‘terrorists’ (ie people on the terrorist list), political scientists, lawyers ing and affirming the omissions and politically correct pleasantries and journalists. In an artistically structured setting – replete with that seem to be prescribed for such discussions. Not least through specially designed flags – the conference memthis sort of ‘aggressive humanism’, as Ruch Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, termed it, today’s activist art is seeking to expebers heatedly debate a differentiated set Erster Europäischer Mauerfall of topics for days, focusing (to paraphrase podite – to quote Carl Einstein again – ‘actual (First Fall of the European Wall) (detail), 2015. litical theorist Chantal Mouffe) on a conflictchanges of Being’. ar Photo: Patryk Witt. Courtesy Zentrum filled depiction of the globalised world. These Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes für Politische Schönheit

September 2016

Ignasi Aballí

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Murmur of the Everyday by George Stolz

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Hojas (Leaves) (1978) consists of hundreds of dried tree-leaves cut into be called ‘paint’). And yet despite its committedly freewheeling, rectilinear shapes and arranged into a loose grid pressed between ecumenical approach, Aballí’s work does not slip into the trap of two framed sheets of glass. It is an impressive object, the sort of thing calling attention to its own eclecticism. To the contrary, at its best it that can stop museumgoers in their tracks: an earth-toned, semi- operates, regardless of specific medium or format, on multiple levels diaphanous, textilelike study of colour and texture. That its author, of discourse – perhaps it will offer a conceptually oriented mining of fifty-eight-year-old Ignasi Aballí, had never exhibited this work the fruitful tensions among image, object and language, or a shrewd before last year’s sprawling survey exhibition at Madrid’s Reina Sofía handling of the dialectic of intentionality in the artmaking process, museum, where it could be seen tucked away in a corner, is rather or an oblique and unstrident institutional critique, or any combisurprising, for Hojas presages to a remarkable degree the core con- nation of the above – while remaining almost shockingly simple in cerns around which the Catalan artist’s oeuvre would develop over execution. As a result, it comes off as clear rather than clever, wise the following decades: the search for ways by which to bring the rather than overwrought. impulses of a painter to the image-making process without recourse For instance, during the 1990s Aballí made a number of works to the act of painting or even to paint itself; the incorporation of entitled Luz (Light) that sprang from his observation of the way unconventional materials imported directly from the ‘real’ world the Mediterranean sunlight in his studio in Barcelona weathered into the art object; and a skilful harnessing of the poetics of tran- anything and everything exposed to it. In response, Aballí propped sience, decay and ephemerality. Above all, Hojas announced what cardboard sheets on the wall opposite the studio’s high windows. would become an intensely thoughtful artmaking practice struc- Over the course of months the light slanting through the windows tured on the process of paying attention to the abundant yet elusive discoloured the cardboard into a floating minimalist grid of surprisminutiae of daily life – or in Aballí’s words, to the “murmur of ingly precise rectangles: the yellowed shadows of the window’s panes thus become a painterly yet literal manifestation of all that, in the everyday”. In developing this practice, Aballí has employed an eclectic range fact, remains of the day. In Papel Moneda (Paper Money) (2010), Aballí of materials, including dust (“dust is a very complex substance – it obtained banknotes that had been removed from circulation and contains everything,” says Aballí), sunlight, typewriter correction shredded by the Bank of Spain. Aballí filled framed, vitrinelike cases fluid, newspaper clippings, corrosion, lead type from obsolete printers’ with the valueless shreds so that they presented textured, near-monoshops, scuff marks, books, found photographs and numerous other chrome studies – literally the ‘colour of money’ – while also invoking objects. His range of media is similarly broad (and, understandably, the fraught, charged and yet alarmingly tenuous symbolism undersomewhat resistant to rigorous classification): lying all legal tender. Aballí’s scrutiny of above Imagen Texto (Exhibition Continues), 2012, the negligible and overlooked has even Aballí’s preferred formats include photography, digital print on photographic paper, 70 × 50 cm extended to the invisible, as in his languagevideo, installation, drawing, language-based preceding pages Listado (Pintores) III and based works, often installed in exhibition works on a variety of support structures and Listado (invisible), both 2010, digital prints spaces on windowpanes or Plexiglas sheets, even paintings (with or without what might on photographic paper, 150 × 105 cm (each)

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Hojas, 1978, trimmed tree and plant leaves on wood, glass, 100 × 70 cm

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Listado (Personas) III, 2010, digital print on photographic paper, 150 × 105 cm

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that straightforwardly enumerate the gaseous components of the that distinctly recall the yellowed patches of sunlight in the early Luz series, and yet at the same time speak to a distinctly different set of common and all-embracing substance we refer to so easily as ‘air’. “Ignasi begins from the core idea of reduction: trying to find a issues. Nonetheless, Aballí is still probably best known (particularly single, humble element from the greater field of signifiers floating outside of Spain) for the series of works generally titled as Listados around out there, and presenting that element in a way that it (Lists) that he created between 1998 and 2015. In these works Aballí stands for everything associated with it,” comments Dan Cameron, clipped headlines each day from the Spanish newspaper El País, then an independent curator who has included Aballí in various groups grouped the isolated phrases based on their content: for instance shows over the past 20 years. “When he made his first light pieces death tolls, forms of currency, ‘-isms’, professions, nationalities, in the 1990s, he was pointing to the particular light that entered the monetary quantities or units of temporal measure (just to mention space and illuminated the works, but also to the central role light a few). One Listado refers to kinds of drugs; another, to the numbers plays in a painting.” of missing people; and another simply to Aballí’s scrutiny of the negligible numbers of years, ranging from one to 14 “In the 1990s there was a moment when things were very open, when artbillion. The decontextualised headlines and overlooked extends to the ists in different places were able to take are arranged into columns, unembelinvisible, as in his language-based the practices of conceptual art and lished and unadorned, and then scanned, works on the topic of what we create new ways of making, especially of enlarged and printed on photographic paper; the resulting artwork sometimes image-making,” says João Fernandes, the refer to so easily as ‘air’ builds into a kind of modular, verbless deputy director of the Reina Sofía, who curated Aballí’s retrospective at the museum. “Ignasi, coming out poetry, while at other times induces a jolting glimpse of daily reality, of Barcelona, belonged to that generation and has dealt with all a fast-track psychic bridge between the word and the world. those concerns. But he’s also developed a very personal vocabulary “Ignasi is deeply interested in mortality, and to the ways our of materials and objects, a very personal process that uses time and constant exposure to waves of information and images numbs us to daily life, a very personal economy of the image based on visibility the realities behind them,” says Cameron, who is including a version of Listados in the 13th Cuenca Biennial, opening in late October in and invisibility.” One of the characteristics that has distinguished Aballí’s work Ecuador. “The Listados are a good example of how great tragedies, over the course of his career has been its capacity to incorporate broad sociocultural disruptions and mass phenomena are reduced stylistic shifts that not only accommodate but renew the perduring to objectified figures: 50 people, 1,000 people, 50,000 people, etc. base concerns; in other words, Aballí’s work is not unpredictable, Although one death seems less than 50,000 deaths, it is simply the particularisation of a category that humans but it is often surprising. For instance, Páginas Páginas I, II, III, IV (detail), 2013, book pages, (Pages) (2013) presents vitrines full of neat rows 4 vitrines, 250 × 60 × 90 cm (each). Installation view, are naturally fascinated by: how other humans die, where and in what numbers.” of pages torn from ageing books in installations Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid, 2013

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above Papel Moneda, 2010, €50 note shavings, iron, glass, 150 × 150 cm facing page Desapariciones I (detail), 2002, 24 digital prints on photographic paper, 169 × 119cm (each). Installation view, Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2002. Courtesy the artist; Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid all images except page 107 Courtesy the artist and Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid

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“I try to avoid the material, handmade quality of collage, to take a work that is so clearly rooted in text and shift it into the realm of the image,” Aballí says of his Listados. “And as photographic images, I wanted to construct them so that they are images of reality: a photo about death; a photo about money; a photo about time.” While Aballí cites visual artists such as On Kawara, Michael Asher, Christopher Williams and Christopher Wool (and, more fundamentally, Duchamp) as references for his own practice, he also cites filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson, and writers such as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and, above all, Georges Perec. Indeed, Aballí’s proclaimed allegiance to the “murmur of the everyday” clearly echoes Perec’s quest for the ‘infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual’. And in fact a key work in the arc of Aballí’s career – arguably the project that first consolidated his position in the Spanish artworld, where he is revered – was Desapariciones (Disappearances) (2002), a series of fictional film posters and a related video based on Perec’s film projects and named after Perec’s novel La Disparition (A Void, 1969). In writing La Disparition, Perec imposed on himself the ‘lipogrammatic’ constraint of completing an entire novel without ever using the letter ‘e’ (the most common letter in the French language). Thus Perec’s tour de force is built around an absence, while in Aballí’s Desapariciones, absence also acquires generative force, for the majority of the films that the ‘posters’ purportedly announce were never made and are thus absent from the existing world of celluloid. Aballí’s meticulously crafted images are visually plausible and credible, and yet they are fabrications of his own devising, fictions about unrealised fictions, hybrids of existence and nonexistence; and yet they themselves are incontrovertibly (and rather delightfully) real. Ultimately, Desapariciones is as much in keeping with the ingenuity of Perec’s writing as it is with Aballí’s own focus on the interplay between reality

and fiction, between written language and visual art, and between appearance and disappearance. Aballí’s studio, which he has occupied for nearly 30 years (he moved in soon after completing his studies at the University of Barcelona under the mentorship of Catalan painter and printmaker Joan Hernández Pijuan), is in the feisty, gritty Raval neighbourhood of central Barcelona. The studio itself lies deep within a nineteenth-century building that was originally a piano factory and still bears the signs of its industrial origin: a shadowy, cavernous, large-stone entrance; wide-slatted and heavily worn wooden stairs and floors; high ceilings with numerous exposed, weight-bearing ceiling beams; vast windows that don’t quite shut properly and cannot be fully cleaned; and a consequent propensity for dust. The space is cluttered but orderly – for instance, Aballí archives his trove of clipped newspaper headlines in old wooden cigar boxes, perched precariously one atop another. Absent is the clean, meticulous, minimalist formal aesthetic characteristic of much of the work. And yet on closer inspection the studio, with its age, its accumulations and its draughtiness, reveals itself to be an entirely understandable abode for the development of Aballí’s particular kind of minimalist, noninterventionist ethic; it is a place in which other processes – of light’s colouration and discolouration, of the accumulation of dust, and above all of the passage of time – might be allowed to run their own murmuring course, at their own pace and in their own way, whether or not at the service of art. Which, of course, they will do anyway. ar Ignasi Aballí: Infinite Sequence can be seen at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, through 2 October. Work by the artist will also be included in the 13th Cuenca Biennial, on view in Ecuador from 21 October to 31 December

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Bosco Sodi The Mexican artist brings something of a chemistry experiment to works that evoke the continental and the planetary by Mark Rappolt

‘You will take the photographed surface of Mars for an abstract painting,’ the artist Kurt Schwitters pronounced in 1926, ‘maybe by Kandinsky’, he added. Had the great German collagist been writing 90 years later, there’s a fair chance he would have found that artistic equivalent to the surface of the red planet in the work of Mexican Bosco Sodi. Particularly if he had seen the massive, six-panel painting Pangaea (2010), created for an exhibition in New York’s Bronx Museum. The title of that work derives from Alfred Wegener, who formulated the theory of continental drift at around the time of Schwitters’s text. It describes a unified supercontinent of the carboniferous period. As with most of the paintings Sodi has created over the past decade, Pangaea features a dense, cracked surface constructed of layers of pure pigment (in this case a deep red and orange), sawdust, wood pulp, natural fibres and glue. Much like recent images of the surface of Mars, the work is something that offers up an impression of an easygoing and essential familiarity, simultaneously tinged with a certain alien exoticism and sense of the unknown. Overall, it appears like some sort of spongey, volcanic landscape-in-formation, coloured (presumably) by derivatives of cinnabar or iron ore. Sodi’s father, as it happens, is a chemical engineer. Schwitters was writing about Martian imagery (in a text titled ‘Kunst und Zeiten’) in the context of his developing an argument that art is something innately around us, a creation of nature and chance, waiting only to be uncovered and framed by the artist: ‘The task of the artist is to recognise and limit, to limit and recognise,’ the German continued rather remorselessly. Like a developer of Las Vegas casinos, an artist should focus on their ‘vision’; like a movie director, they needed to train themselves to know precisely where and when to make a cut. (OK, perhaps Schwitters himself would have chosen examples that did less to imply that art was part of the entertainment industry; but hey – he lived then and we live now.) The German was also writing in the buildup to a dispute with Wassily Kandinsky about whether it was a theoretical or natural approach to form that should be the basis of art. Form, Schwitters argued in i-Zeichnungen (1926) is ‘the frozen instantaneous picture of a process’. And in an age in which most art is held up tight within the grip of

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theoretical supports, one of the pleasures of Sodi’s work derives from the fact that, when it comes to form, his thinking lies firmly within the Schwitters camp. Indeed, by anyone’s standards, Sodi is disarmingly casual when it comes to describing his own painterly process. “It’s not about control,” he often says; rather it’s about celebrating ‘chance’ and ‘randomness’. “It’s much more about the process than the outcome,” he told critic Jennifer Parker earlier this year. In keeping with the concept of Pangaea, Sodi operates a multicontinental practice. He has created work in studios in Brooklyn, Mexico, Berlin and Madrid. More recently he has been spending time in Japan. Work created in each location (these days primarily Brooklyn and Mexico) is completely different as a result of specific local atmospheric conditions, in a way that combines the particular (or site-specificity) and the universal without subjecting those qualities to the debates about colonialism, postcolonialism or national or identity politics in which most art today tends to dress itself. In that sense, Sodi’s works are truly an effect of nature, rather than culture. Of course, what Sodi doesn’t make clear in a statement like the one above is that the process that allows the operations of chance to occur in his work is the result of a certain amount of discipline. Various concentrations of water within the layers of Sodi’s painting can affect the degrees of cracking, even if the precise detail of that cracking is by its nature unpredictable; decisions with regard to pigment (both in terms of quantity and quality) are also conscious decisions. The artist provides a chemical framework, the reactions that happen take care of themselves. In that regard, each work has something of the nature of a chemical experiment. Perhaps, even, given the way his works appear, it would be truer to describe them as geochemical experiments. “I wanted the viewer to feel like they’d entered a cave,” the artist told writer Lowenna Waters when describing the sensation he was aiming at when installing a spring show of iridescent paintings and gilded sculptures at London’s Blain / Southern gallery. In addition to the paintings, Sodi had installed a series of variously sized rocks gathered, by hand (owing to the size, weight and awkward shape of some of the stones, in practice they were hauled by around 20 hands)

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above Yūgen, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy the artist and Blain / Southern, London & Berlin preceding pages The artist at work in his studio, Red Hook, New York. Courtesy Bosco Sodi Studio

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from the Ceboruco volcano in Mexico. The rocks were then fired for three days (causing a number to explode) and the survivors covered in 18-carat gold. He’d painted the gallery walls a deep, mineral purple to synthesise that cavelike effect. Yet the purple also had an imperial feel, and combined with the gold, it created the kind of heavy atmosphere of an environment that might be the equivalent of entering, say, Nero’s rock garden. If the Roman emperor had been a student of Zen philosophy and karesansui. The Blain/Southern exhibition, titled Yūgen (a somewhat untranslatable Japanese expression evoking the deep emotional response to aesthetic creation), pointed also to one of the more intriguing developments in Sodi’s recent work: a self-conscious awareness of the (high) commodity value of the objects he creates, and of the market that exploits that value. As much as they are expressions of (relatively) chance natural processes, in the very human environments in which they are displayed, his rocks and his paintings are objects of desire. And certainly in the overheated art-market that preceded the adjustments of this year, that desire has been intense. But if there is a sense of humour in the artist’s exposure of this dichotomy (Sodi will talk about his pleasure in sharing beers and fried chicken with the labourers who haul his rocks, even while sharing a formal gallery dinner in a fancy urban restaurant with a bunch of urban collectors; and while on the one hand he is gilding natural forms, on the other he is exploiting natural materials to produce unnatural forms in the shape of simple sculptures composed of 50cm-high cubes of fired Mexican clay), there is a serious side to it too. In 2014, the artist invested some of the proceeds from his artistic endeavours in the establishment of the Casa Wabi Foundation (its

name derived from another Japanese concept, wabi-sabi, centred on humility, which sees in the appreciation of beauty an acceptance of the impermanent and incomplete), located near the town of Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, Mexico. Housed in a complex designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the foundation’s programme includes an artist residency programme, outreach projects with the local community (which until now has had a relatively limited contact with art, particularly in its contemporary manifestations) and an investment in sustainable living (much like Sodi’s artworks, and perhaps the clay cubes in particular, this is best described as the promotion of a symbiotic relationship between nature, its resources and social and cultural living). In keeping with his pan-continental influences, the artist is currently developing a new residency programme located in Tokyo. After all the previous talk about natural form, it will seem contradictory (if not ridiculous) to locate Sodi’s work within any kind of theory. And yet in terms of his activities, both as an artist and as some-one attempting to add his voice, and point of view, to the way in which art is institutionalised in its relations to society and culture, it would be true to say that Sodi’s output is the result of exercising a strong philosophy of practice. And without any Heideggerian overtones, that philosophy pertains to art as a being rather than merely a presence in the world. ar Bosco Sodi: Cubes is on view at Eigen + Art, Berlin, through 27 August. His exhibition Malpaís can be seen at 143 N. Robertson Blvd, Los Angeles (presented by Paul Kasmin Gallery, Brandon Davis Projects and Jose Mestre) from 25 August to 8 October

Clay cubes in the artist’s studio, Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, 2015. Courtesy Bosco Sodi Studio

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TATE MODE RN 6 J U LY – 3 0 O C T 2016

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE T H E E YA L O F E R G A L L E R I E S

Media partner

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With additional support from the Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition Supporters Group and Tate Patrons

Hamish Young Excavation 17.09.16 – 20.11.16 Preview 16 September 6—8pm www.collectivegallery.net Carrara marble quarry, 2016. Courtesy the artist.

美的颠覆 - 意大利当代艺术的洞见

CHALLENGING BEAUTY Insights of Italian Contemporary Art OPENING

2016.7.16 ( 周六 ) 15:00 Sat.

策展人 : 罗兰·艾格 / Curator : Lorand Hegyi

艺术家：罗伯特·巴尼尔阿里杰罗·波提保罗·卡内瓦里皮奇·坎内拉古列尔莫·卡斯泰利布鲁诺·切科贝利桑德罗·基亚弗朗切斯科·克莱门特恩佐·库基贾尼·德西吉赛普·戛洛乌戈·吉莱塔雅尼斯·库奈里斯费利斯·勒维尼尼古拉·德·马里亚卡拉·马蒂马里奥·梅尔茨阿尔多·蒙迪诺农西奥米莫·帕拉迪诺玛丽娜·帕里斯吉赛普·佩诺内米开朗基罗·皮斯特莱托皮尔路易吉·普索乐萨尔沃毛里齐奥·萨维尼马里奥·斯基法诺弗朗西斯科·塞纳马克·特里

ARTISTS: Roberto Barni Alighiero Boetti Paolo Canevari Pizzi Cannella Guglielmo Castelli Bruno Ceccobelli Sandro Chia Francesco Clemente Enzo Cucchi Gianni Dessi Giuseppe Gallo Ugo Giletta Jannis Kounellis Felice Levini Nicola de Maria Carla Mattii Mario Merz Aldo Mondino Nunzio Mimmo Paladino Marina Paris Giuseppe Penone Michelangelo Pistoletto Pierluigi Pusole Salvo Maurizio Savini Mario Schifano Francesco Sena Marco Tirelli

学术论坛 / ACADEMIC FORUM 2016.7.15（周五 / Fri.）16:00

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侨福芳草地当代美术馆·北京（北京市朝阳区东大桥路 9 号侨福芳草地 D 座 10 层 Parkview Green Museum·BEIJING (L10, D Tower, Parkview Green, No.9 Dongdaqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China 100020)

T: (8610) 5662 8568 E: art@parkviewgreen.com www.parkviewgreenexhibitionhall.com

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9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag Various venues, Berlin 4 June – 18 February The Berlin Biennale is a highly reactive affair. The 8th, which Juan A. Gaitán steered two years ago, was sober, history-minded and a 180-degree pivot away from the 7th, Artur Zmijewski’s brave but scrappy political sit-in. The 9th is another screeching handbrake turn. With Berlin positioning itself as start-up central, inviting bleeding-edge New York art/fashion/media collective DIS as curators makes some sense. What they’ve offered up via The Present in Drag, though, feels like a four-venue wake (plus a boat ride up the River Spree) for brinkmanship-style artistic approaches that track neoliberal culture’s impact so closely, with the aim of making it hypervisible, that they are sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing. Except, perhaps, that the real thing – unlike some of the artists here – isn’t asserting autonomy while branding itself relentlessly in the face of the very precarity it analyses and emphasises. ‘The 9th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art may or may not contain Contemporary Art,’ wrote DIS during their teaser campaign. And, indeed, if you start the tour at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste before crossing the city – taking in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Feuerle Collection and the ESMT European School of Management and Technology along

the way – then virtually the first thing you see is a showroom, by Liberian-American designer TELFAR, of purchasable biennale-branded goods: a uniform, basically. Shortly after comes Debora Delmar Corp.’s green juice bar, because Berlin needed another of those. Start from the KW Institute, and you’re confronted with Los Angeles fashion label 69’s denim beach chairs in the courtyard. It’s not that you can’t necessarily lounge, shop, sip or, thanks to Juan Sebastián Peláez’s giant courtyard-based cutout, look at a horrible neo-Surrealist digital collage of Rihanna consciously. But one is reminded that several of the bona fide artists at this show’s core – shock troops of our present’s discontents such as Josh Kline, Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin – have, in interviews, repeatedly had to broach whether admitting there’s no ‘outside’ position to inhabit can be distinguished from complicity, and the answers have not been satisfying. (As has been suggested, such art may come more naturally to a generation whose social media doesn’t include a ‘dislike’ button.) Kline, an expert condenser of ambient anxieties, provides one of the show’s affective highlights: Crying Games (2015), set in an artificial desert in the KW Institute’s basement, is a video experiment in real-time face-swap technology

that finds aged avatars of Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush and Tony Blair tearfully apologising for the last Gulf War. But Kline still feels part of a gang that’s run and exhibited together extensively in recent years, whose moves are familiar; he’s one of the best artists here, yet not someone whose name I particularly wanted to see. At the Feuerle Collection, a windowless and spotlighted concrete bunker whose lack of mobile reception feels like an artwork itself (the inverse of Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum’s installation of a Tor network at Akademie der Künste), a colour-coded spread of literally dozens of Yngve Holen’s Evil Eyes (2016) runs down one wall. OK, so these Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’ windows augmented with coloured blown glass, resembling totems sold globally to ward off the mythic ‘evil eye’, add up to a schematic aeroplane that conflates global mobility and bad vibes, old tech and new. But this is an aptly sited pick-your-favouritecolour parade of product, too, from an artist also selling ‘Hater Blocker’ contact lenses through the biennale’s website, evidently fine with milking the experience economy. On the facing wall, Josephine Pryde’s suite of photographs, featuring hands (that by-now post-Internet

TELFAR, TELFAR: RETROSPECTIVE, 2016 (installation view, Akademie der Künste, Berlin). Photo: Timo Ohler. Courtesy the artist

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iconographic chestnut) touching things, similarly makes its point at about the third iteration. Her antic train on a track, chugging past and manned by viewers or invigilators, is a solid distraction; but you leave this space – past Guan Xiao’s adept, burnished, haptichectic updates on the assemblage tradition – feeling like you’ve been in a walkthrough advertisement for someone’s soon-opening collection space. And you have. Talking of ads, the dalliance with altcommerce reaches a nadir in Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s New Eelam (2016), a mockup hipster apartment space (chairs that say Kraftwerk on them, for example) centred on a video infomercial for the aforementioned project. This, after first upraising Amazon as a political project that has collapsed the distinction between communism and capitalism (by automating labour, mostly), pitches what is essentially a property-bond scheme in cool cities. It doesn’t appear to be a joke, and it seems necessary, for counterpoint, that photography by Calla Henkel/Max Pitegoff, whose work has been critical of Berlin’s gentrification, is placed nearby. The layout of the works, to be positive, is mostly strong; the core themes twist cleanly in and out of each other. The specific, if unspoken, theme of ‘Fucking Hell, Everything’s Utterly Fucked [pause] Digital Technology’ is thoroughly essayed by Jon Rafman’s View of Pariser Platz (2016), where one dons

a virtual-reality headset on the balcony overlooking the eponymous site, adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate. Figures rain from the sky, marble sculptures of creatures ingesting others pulse grotesquely on the balcony, you fall fathoms down into the ocean. But it’s closely proximate to the site of Ei Arakawa’s performance How to DISappear in America (2016, memorialised on video), a highly collaborative spinoff/ staging of Seth Price’s eponymous book and one whose uppermost level is the open-ended virtues of sociability and collaboration, qualities that might yet pull us out of the mire. And then I AM A PROBLEM (2016), Will Benedict’s music video for a Wolf Eyes song, a hacked version of the Charlie Rose talkshow that features a horrific alien incarnation of the spirit of capitalism, (seemingly) returns us swiftly to Utterly Fucked territory. The ESMT European School of Management and Technology, a distractingly spectacular socialist-realist edifice housing a business school, houses cut-out flame works by Novitskova at her most will-this-do, dumped in a lobby; Simon Denny’s series of commissioned pitches for blockchain businesses; and an overblown installation by GCC, featuring a sculpture in another artificial desert and pondering a Middle Eastern state-imposed imperative to be happy. The KW Institute section is excellent by contrast. It feels like a show, and it has some of the best works, including Camille Henrot’s Office of Unreplied Emails (2016), a faux atelier featuring

washy, ice-cream-coloured paintings of animals on easels and, scattered on the floor, oversize emails from ecological action groups and calligraphic replies by Henrot, which turn personal very quickly and, as the title asserts, received no reply, situating the vulnerable human agent at one end of the Internet’s impersonal welter of appeals to feeling. I lingered here because, ironically, I didn’t feel in the presence of someone acting above the fray while right down in it, someone making the artistic equivalent of a shruggie. I felt confusion, despondence balanced by energy and light, the need to think something through, aesthetic nous in play. The oldest artist in the biennale, the outlier in a very generational project, is Adrian Piper, seemingly mobilised by the curators for gravitas as well as for being an American lengthily based in Berlin. For what it’s worth, she seems to have sized up the curators and decided to give them something not even new, yet oddly fitting. Her works here mostly wait at the end of stairwells and doorways, and primarily constitute signs on closed doors that say ‘Howdy!’ It’s friendlyish but there’s a power play; and somehow, in a context of art that has much to do with the smiling face of control, this feels right. Hi, and bye. And as you say goodbye, amid governing futility and a few streaks of light, a net positive slides into view. Given the Berlin Biennale’s history, the next one won’t be anything like this. Martin Herbert

Will Benedict, Comparison Leads to Violence, 2013, poster, offset print. Courtesy the artist; Balice Hertling, Paris; Overduin & Co., Los Angeles

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Pure Fiction Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris 10 June – 22 July Wandering through Pure Fiction, one quickly realises that no story connects the 30 works displayed over the gallery’s two floors. Aesthetically, the exhibition is as heterogeneous as its group of 11 artists, namely Henri Michaux, Pierre Klossowski, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Filliou, Giuseppe Penone, Josef Strau, Lili ReynaudDewar, Michael Dean, Ed Atkins, Win McCarthy and Bunny Rogers. What they have in common is merely biographical: all the artists have written books, which is presented as an instance of leading ‘a double life’, although one might rightfully argue that writing isn’t a dirty secret, contrary to other possible penchants. Anyway, alongside the artworks, a collection of 26 books – ranging from poetry to novels – is available for the viewers to leaf through, whereas the press release specifies that ‘no work in this exhibition is required reading’, further stating that each on its own is ‘pure fiction for the imagination’. So rather than considering the artists’ books for my next reading group, I chose to summon the ‘power of their visual languages instead’ and thus hopefully come up with a storyline otherwise lacking here. Hanging at the entrance, The, A Novel, Robert Filliou (c. 1976) provides the perfect metaphor for the task at hand. It consists of a shallow cardboard box, on which is handwritten the work’s title, and which only contains a smaller copy of itself, a conceptual mise en abyme ready

to receive the viewer’s imagination – or a novel within the novel, figuratively speaking. After all, as Marcel Duchamp said, the beholder completes the picture; but figuring out a story for the overall show isn’t that easy. Broodthaers’s pastel drawing Le Motif (1973), which simply represents a painter’s palette, sums up the problem: the exhibition’s motif has yet to be composed. I found myself almost immediately hopeless, while contemplating McCarthy’s Always these few raindrops and / never the storm / always a partial view (Winnie’s view 28–30) (2015), a picture of the artist’s eye inside a tear-shaped piece of glass surrealistically leaking from a pipe fixed to the wall, whereas Dean’s X (Working Title) (2015), a human-sized, X-shaped sculpture covered with fat red concrete tongues, triggers thoughts about speaking in tongues. Divine inspiration would certainly help the beholder here. That said, when it comes to liberating the imagination, using drugs – as Michaux did – may be more effective. Under the influence of mescaline, he painted ghostly figures emerging from chaos, such as the one in the untitled watercolour (from 1981) that is included in the show. Klossowski’s Auberge de la comète II (1984), an exquisite erotic drawing involving two naked men on a bed, also gave me a note-to-self to try a brothel one day: I recently heard that such places inspired the greatest breakthroughs in

painting, and I imagine the experience could unblock art criticism too. Walking down the stairs, I’m distracted by a long white ribbon that Rogers attached to the first floor’s handrail, and which falls straight to the basement. It nearly causes me to stumble on the same artist’s Jodie Doll (Blue) (2016). Naturally I plan to strangle this creepy handmade doll (in a tale I’m titling Murder at MGG). Meanwhile, any thirst for blood is temporarily quenched by Reynaud-Dewar’s My epidemic (a body as public as a book can be) (2015), three huge theatrical white curtains, the bottom of which the artist dipped in red ink. Finally, while I despairingly consider resorting solely to personal ramblings like those legible on the giveaway posters Strau has provided, my gaze meets two wicked eyes – Penone’s mirrored contact lenses in his slide projection To reverse one’s eyes (Rovesciare i propri occhi) (1970), which stare at Atkins’s Untitled 3 (2014), a mixed-media panel inspired by Ouija boards. In the middle, a standalone sentence carved into a Plexiglas sheet offers the only possible conclusion to this tragic review: ‘Life is utterly miserable because of you personally,’ whom I believe to be this so-called curated show, while I’ve been torturing myself to find a fictive angle here. Although it brings exciting new faces to Marian Goodman, it sheds no light on their unconnected works, and that’s a true story. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Robert Filliou, The, A Novel, Robert Filliou, c. 1976, 2 cardboard boxes, wire and pastel, 66 × 40 × 15 cm. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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¿Cómo te voy a olvidar? Galerie Perrotin, Paris 10 June – 30 July Jorge Méndez Blake’s Una biblioteca de literatura inglesa 1 (A library of English literature, 2016) presents an eight-by-four grid of roughly A3 black frames, each one containing a differently coloured sheet of paper. Upon each sheet a book title is printed: The Complete Illustrated Works, An Anthology, Collected Poems, etc. Each title is at once highly specific and totally generic, suggesting a library of great works that, when stripped of their authors’ names, become as banal and interchangeable as the basic frames they are mounted on: as if they had been bought straight out of an Ikea catalogue. Borrowing a lyric from popular cumbia group Los Ángeles Azules, the title (which translates as ‘How could I forget you?’) of Galerie Perrotin’s latest exhibition is intended less as a thematic summing-up of the works therein and more to act as a Proustian refrain evoking the two-year period curators Anissa Touati and Peggy Leboeuf spent in Mexico (‘from Michoacán to Chiapas and the Yucatán…’) to research it. In fact, the 16 mostly young Mexico-based artists arrayed throughout Perrotin’s two Marais addresses are so diverse

in their approaches that anyone would be hardpressed to come up with something snappily descriptive. But if one were to find a red thread through at least some of these works, one might point to this very question of identity and difference, the unique and the generic. For instance, four sculptures by Tania Pérez Córdova present between themselves something like a distributed, off-the-shelf individual. Talking to a person in a group of people (2015) consists of a marble shelf jutting from the wall about a metre above the ground. Twelve tiny pools drilled into the shelf contain six pairs of coloured contact lenses. Who, it seems to ask, do you want to be today? On the opposite wall, Voice (2013/16) consists of a cracked white porcelain rectangle with, embedded into its top right, a mobile-phone sim card, suggesting at once a lost possibility for communication and a repository of memories in the form of photos and old messages – albeit memories strongly determined by the forms and practices of the technology itself. A third work, Una persona poseída por la curiosidad (A person possessed by curiosity, 2015), consists of a large earthenware

bowl stuck concave to the wall, suggesting a kind of ear into which one might speak (the shape will distort the sound of your voice if you do). But only just visible, right in the middle of it, is an impression from a credit card (not, I can just about see from the name, the artist’s own). Is this a case of identity theft? Fritzia Irízar’s works revolve around the curiously phallic icon of the Phrygian cap, a peaked hat with its top drooping forward, associated, since Europe’s early-modern era, with the concept of freedom. But Irízar’s freedom is clearly fragile, represented by a short looped film (Untitled (Holding Breath), 2016) in which breath steams up a windowpane, revealing the cap already drawn there, only for it to quickly fade away as the mouth withdraws; or by a crudely patchworked bronze bell suspended from a mechanism that repeatedly charges it towards the wall. More frail still: it turns out the association of the Phrygian cap with liberty is an error, born of confusion with the pileus, a hat worn by freed Roman slaves. A case, then, of mistaken identity. Robert Barry

¿Cómo te voy a olvidar?, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris, New York, Hong Kong & Seoul

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Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age Mumok, Vienna 4 June – 6 November Again and again, albeit slightly less in the past decade, painting has been pronounced or left for dead – declared no longer relevant in a digitised world; its format mere collector fodder; its language, like poetry, increasingly incomprehensible to younger viewers who grew up on Conceptualism but thrive on Instagram (or Instagram packaged as Conceptualism). Yet painting has consistently expanded its self-definition, has integrated new technologies into its production and reflected the material’s digitisation despite or perhaps because of its two-dimensionality and history. Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age – here in its second incarnation; Mumok coproduced the exhibition with Museum Brandhorst in Munich, where Painting 2.0 ran earlier this year – attempts to address these themes through many, many paintings and painterly objects, produced in Europe and the United States since around 1960. The show’s ambition is obvious in its exceedingly long artist list (more than 100); three curators (Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer and David Joselit); and complex categorisation strategy. On Mumok’s ground floor, the first of three exhibition ‘chapters’ (all with multiple subchapters) is titled ‘Gesture and Spectacle’ – and jumps right in with the Martin Kippenberger installation Heavy Burschi (1989–90), a Plexiglas and chipboard dumpster filled with the detritus of paintings that Kippenberger had copied by his then-assistant Merlin Carpenter, who then documented and trashed them. It’s a perhaps too-obvious statement on the ‘death’ of painting and rehashed Benjaminian ideas of copy versus original, but sets a provocative stage for the rest of the work in this introductory space, much of which deals with Situationist notions

of spectacle and commerce (ostensibly indicators of our digital age). Yves Klein glows in blue under the curatorial category of ‘Mediated Gestures’, Louise Fishman’s ‘Angry Women’ (1973), a feisty series of text-based canvases expressing the anger of women using their names, is an example of ‘Protest Art’. And 1980s art stars Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat are set as paragons of ‘Expression as Pose’. The theme of the next two floors, ‘Eccentric Figuration’, grapples with how the body still resonates in the digital age. This section is a delight: among two-dimensional works depicting body parts by Amy Sillman (Fatso, 2009, and Nose Job, 2014–15, are both cartoonish looks at corporeality in a palette of green) or Philip Guston (Head, 1977) are, for example, a large-scale installation in ladders, textiles and text by Ree Morton (Signs of Love, 1976); films by Joan Jonas, Sillman and Maria Lassnig; and Eva Hesse’s sculptural An Ear in a Pond (1965), which tentatively reaches beyond the picture plane. Lee Lozano gets a miniretrospective here, her paintings acting as ‘Prosthetic Bodies’ (yet another subcategory). The most striking of these is a riff on Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) – in Lozano’s untitled 1962 work, a gloved hand reaches towards a coin-insert slit between a woman’s opened legs. The show’s final, top-floor chapter, ‘Social Networks’, explores pre-Zuckerberg collectives like (sigh) Warhol’s Factory, documentation of and works by the 1970s New York-based feminist collective A.I.R. Gallery, a section covering the 1980s Cologne scene (minus Kippenberger) and 1960s paintings by German ‘capitalist realists’ – Konrad Lueg, Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Sigmar Polke – postwar West Germany’s take on Pop art. Newer works

facing page, top Nicole Eisenman, Beer Garden with Ash, 2009, oil on canvas, 165 × 208 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. Photo: P. Schälchli, Zürich. Courtesy the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

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here seemed a lot less social and more about literal networks, like Seth Price’s inkjet-oncanvas calendar paintings from the mid-2000s (appropriated fonts and colours now appear incredibly dated), or Where the Energy Comes From 1 (2014), a figurative canvas depicting a European electrical socket by Jana Euler. To be sure, a survey exhibition of this size needs structure. But as timely as the themes here are, the chapters and subheadings feel too didactic and prescriptive (isn’t every work of art made since 1960 a reflection of the Information Age in some way? And: were these artists concerned with such matters when these pieces were created?). The exhibition material claims that the physically open architecture allows for cross-interpretations, but in this iteration of the show the maze of temporary walls lets seminal works slip through the cracks – amazingly, despite the bolt of blue, I missed the ground-floor Klein the first time through. The exhibition’s title also brings up the perhaps unanswerable question: if this is Painting 2.0, what would Painting 1.0 be? Anything pre-Postmodernism? It’s nonetheless a treat to see so many rarely seen works and work groups, many by oft-underrepresented women artists (beyond the aforementioned are Lynda Benglis, Monika Baer, Isa Genzken, Niki de Saint Phalle, Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Murray and Laura Owens, to name a few). Perhaps the best way to view this show would be to take the categories less as a prescription than a loose guide. Worth meditating upon is Nicole Eisenman’s Beer Garden with Ash (2009), a neo-Expressionist riff on the café scene, an art-historical evergreen. Only its central figure is illuminated – by the glow of a mobile phone. Kimberly Bradley

facing page, bottom Philip Guston, Head, 1977, oil on canvas, 177 × 216 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. © Estate of Philip Guston

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Basim Magdy The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin 29 April – 3 July Leaving Basim Magdy’s exhibition, I project my mind into the future, wondering what it might look like, with Brexit fallout, Trump, Orlando and the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile marking, at the time of writing, an uncertain, bleak current moment. Magdy’s films, photographs, installations and drawings speak of a world in which utopias, future visions and new beginnings are also tainted by an unpredictable, downtrodden present, which in itself is a rerun of the past. Magdy is the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle’s ‘Artist of the Year (2016)’ and this, his first solo institutional exhibition, is the result of that accolade. The words (on a wall text) with which he introduces the show – ‘There is nothing special about our time… We are just naïve enough to re-enact the same mistakes that were made so many times before’ – preempt works that explore an intrinsically flawed world. A 240 Second Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (With Coke, Vinegar and Other Tear Gas Remedies) (2012) features 160 colour slides synchronised using two Kodak slide carousels. Images of buildings being levelled and rebuilt have been soaked in the eponymous liquids, producing chemical reactions that dye the celluloid cyan, green and pink. This stained cycle of destruction and renewal suggests protest, defeat and regeneration, and it can be enjoyed in beautiful Technicolor. A strong narrative and storytelling thread runs through the trilogy of films (all 2014) that are on show and into the newly commissioned

photographic work An Apology to a Love Story that Crashed into a Whale (2016). Here, an ordered grid of 64 overexposed images depict natural scenes (clouds, the seashore, snow-capped mountain ranges, archipelagos), buildings and ancient monuments that meander through vibrant hues of purple, pink, red, yellow, green and blue. Overlaid texts poetically describe men’s and women’s different perceptions of life, resulting in a sense of disconnection between the sexes. Elsewhere, quiplike but nihilistic analogies describe how cauliflowers recall nuclear explosions, artichokes represent forgiveness, clouds reflect oppressive fires and landscapes offer investment opportunities. Reality is depicted as an undefined space that can be individually shaped, but which ultimately leaves us isolated and misunderstood. Within the 16mm films, image, text and sound are interwoven or ‘float together’ to tell dreamlike, enigmatic tales of individual or collective action. Again, they consistently employ processes of film pickling and light leaks, and in The Dent, abstract dots and drips flicker atop images. It tells a melancholic story of a town bidding to host the Olympic Games. Featured are an absurd black-and-white-striped elephant and a couple who achieve and lose fame after purchasing fake dinosaur eggs from a travelling salesman. Perhaps most poignantly, the World Trade Center is described crashing down: ‘they realized that unlike the lives that were lost, capitalism was here to stay’ and ‘loosing [sic] all that is to be lost for their basic

rights… nothing will be won’. Revolution seems doomed to perpetual failure. Magdy, who is based between Cairo – where he was born in 1977 – and Basel, has witnessed uprisings in the fight for new societies. However, his work does not reflect an Egyptian context; instead, he employs a lens that considers a universal cycle of hope, revolution and abandonment. Elsewhere in the show, acrylic and gouache drawings such as The Last Day of Written History (2011) depict dystopian sci-fi images, a large outdoor cinema screen proclaiming ‘The Future Is Your Enemy’ as asteroids plummet to earth, while the installation In the Grave of Intergalactic Utopia (2006) sees an astronaut caged in an animal coop, surrounded by hay and watching a film of sheep grazing. Aspirations are grounded, if not ridiculed. So what does the future hold? According to Magdy, the world will never change and is rooted in inequality and cycles of hope and failure. But by merging a dreamy sense of memory, imagination and individual perception, his art also feels complex, beautiful and, at times, funny: so I’m in, whatever. The text work Clowns (2014) sums up the seemingly prevalent mood (if you’re British, as I am): ‘After much contemplation and debate the clowns that run this degenerating society agreed that there was only one way to explain the status quo to the masses: they are clowns too, which leaves everybody without an audience.’ So, hello Brexit, goodbye EU; it’s been fun; hopefully we can do it all over again someday. Louisa Elderton

An Apology to a Love Story that Crashed into a Whale (detail), 2016, 64 c-prints on Fujiflex metallic paper, 48 × 72 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Deutsche Bank Art, Berlin; Artsümer, Istanbul; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; and Hunt Kastner, Prague

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Olga Balema Motherland Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam 13 May – 18 June Even if the work by the American-Ukrainian artist Olga Balema is often grubby, rusty or stained, that very grubbiness has been a continual source of fascination. That’s true, too, of the seven new works presented here under the title Motherland. Part of a larger group of works – others of which are being shown concurrently at the Swiss Institute in New York – these are neo-Surrealist hybrids that comprise old school maps treated with latex, pigment and acrylic paint, stuck onto which are latex breasts. In Mothers Nature (all works 2016), the most fully accomplished work at Galerie Fons Welters, a geographical map more than two metres wide titled ‘DIE SOWJETUNION NACH 1939’ (The Soviet Union after 1939) shows the red realm and its sphere of influence, from the Iron Curtain up to the Bering Strait. The map, as is pointed out with pedantic precision, was published by Justus van Perthes in Darmstadt and was drawn to a scale of 1:4.800.000. Here, the communist ideal state is inundated with pools of semitransparent yellow latex, rendering the map splotchy and lumpy. The former empire in which Balema was born (in Lviv, 1984) has been transformed into a squelchy quagmire.

A scattering of female breasts rises up, from Turkmenistan, Kamchatka, Siberia, the Arctic Ocean. They droop and flop dolefully. The drama surges in Necessity is the mother of all invention, painted on a map of the European ‘KRISE DER DEMOKRATIE (1919–1939)’ (Crisis of Democracy (1919–1939)). The European continent lies hidden under a thick layer of bottle-green latex, as if the map itself has become a landscape, a dark forest. At the top, where the latex has been ripped off, pale pink paint features, suggesting that the map might just as well be a peachy baby skin. Other works have been painted onto maps representing the era of the Reformation, the topography of Africa and European postwar integration politics. These superannuated attempts to chart the chaos of world history create a sense of fatalism. No map proves equal to the constant chafing of cultures. Balema seems to emphasise this by attacking the dry pedagogical materials with pools of liquid gloop. Borders, countries and territories drown in a deluge of sticky rubber; their names become illegible, useless, ultimately nonsensical. The sagging breasts reinforce the notion of despondency and futility.

In Everybody and their mother the school map has been covered in a layer of lavender paint, superimposed onto which is a red shape outlining the contours of an arid wilderness, and once again a latex breast. The work is suspended free in space, allowing you to walk around it and view all sides, but this adds nothing. All works in the exhibition are frontal in nature and shown to their best advantage when they hang on (or better still, are suspended in front of) the wall, so that the deplorable condition of the cockled surface and solidified latex is clearly visible. How to interpret this unpleasant, absurd Cronenbergian fusion of body and map? Does the unnatural, tumouresque festering of breasts signify illness and decay? Or does it symbolise the imperturbable procreation of all organic life? The mother breast that feeds new life is associated with the mother country which, in part at least, determines who you are. Both formative forces appear close to exhaustion – the breasts no longer produce milk, civilisations are ruined by drought and famine. Balema offers us a grim view of the world stage and at the same time appeals to the primitive urge of primordial life. It’s all so hideous that I can’t take my eyes off it. Dominic van den Boogerd

Motherland, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

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Superstudio Superstudio 50 MAXXI, Rome 21 April – 4 September As the title suggests, this exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Florentine Radical architecture practice Superstudio; on show is an overview that spans metaphysics, ecology, social critique and practice. The display, curated by Gabriele Mastrigli, was conceived alongside Superstudio’s founders, Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and Gian Piero Frassinelli, who joined after the group’s formation in 1966. It was together with another influential Florentine design group, Archizoom Associati, that members of Superstudio (now grown to include brothers Roberto and Alessandro Magris, as well as Alessandro Poli) developed the term Superarchitettura (Superarchitecture), holding an exhibition of the same name in Pistoia (also in 1966). Both in design and architecture, the group pursued a practice that aimed at a critique of the dry functionality of modernist architecture since the Bauhaus. What Superstudio 50 highlights is the extent to which Superstudio appears retrospectively to have foreseen – perhaps unwittingly, even – the nature of twenty-firstcentury living. This is conveyed at the exhibition’s entrance via the display of architectural drawings from two series of works, entitled Macchina per Vacanze (Holiday Machine, 1967–8) and Il Monumento

Continuo (The Continuous Monument, 1969). The former body of works, such as Una ‘macchina per vacanze’ a Tropea (Sulle bianche scogliere di Dover) (A ‘machine for holidays’ in Tropea (On the White Cliffs of Dover)), consists of drawn-upon photomontage featuring huge industrial constructions that augment the natural landscape. These vast and brutal hypothetical machines, designed to improve coastlines by controlling tides, point to the folly of humanity’s attempts to supplement the planet’s natural resources and rhythms. Similarly, the Il Monumento Continuo series hypothesises one seamless architectural structure that spans the world. This construction, devoid of ornamentation, appears in drawings and prints alongside historical monuments and town housing as both an idealised form of democratic architecture and a provocation aimed at modernist architecture’s preference for utility over formal qualities. Such an ability to critique modernist architecture and its tendency towards homogenisation while hinting at its positive potential can also be seen in the lithographic print Il Monumento Continuo: New New York (1969): the scenario features a sleek glass structure that appears to both engulf and frame New York City. Its undulating mirrored surfaces leave the viewer

Il Monumento Continuo, New York, 1969, lithography. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Rome

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questioning whether such minimalist perfection would really complement both nature and the history of architecture, or whether its sheer formlessness would serve only to impose a slick manmade aesthetic upon the natural world. The notion of a ‘continuous monument’ per se appears to hint at a level of global interconnection we take for granted in the era of the Internet. Similarly, the film Vita (Supersuperficie) (Life (Supersurface), 1972) envisages a world where we live alongside nature in nomadic encampments replete with power supplies attached to a vast grid spanning the landscape. Adjacent to the aforementioned film, the installation Microenvironment Supersuperficie (1971–2/2000) creates in mixed media a 1:1 model of such a grid, replete with power adaptors that look uncannily like the multisocket plug adaptors that we today find ourselves plugging our laptops, tablets or phones into at any given opportunity, whether in a bar, library, airport or indeed anywhere a plug socket might plausibly exist. We have never been so ‘connected’, though one might equally say we have never been so dependent. Superstudio 50 allows for reflection upon an important period in the recent history of architecture, yet its strength as a show resides in its ability to lead the viewer to reflect on the present, and where we go from here. Mike Watson

Francesco Vezzoli Villa Marlene Nouveau Musée National de Monaco 29 April – 11 September The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco’s Villa Sauber is, for the span of this summer, Villa Marlene. Visitors are plunged into the fiction that Marlene Dietrich lived in the belle époque building, surrounded by portraits of herself by the greatest artists of her era. ‘Original features’ are restored to the galleries, floors are stripped and varnished, and low light coming through the filtered windows illuminates some extraordinarily garish paintings: if Francis Bacon took Marlene in fedora as subject the outcome would, apparently, have been the Allen Jones-esque Francis Bacon’s portrait of Marlene Dietrich on a pool (After Francesco Vezzoli) (2016). Other paintings of the German-American actress, commissioned by Francesco Vezzoli from copyists of the St Petersburg school, include an unsurprising Tamara de Lempicka knockoff, while there is also a blue Matissestyle collage that echoes Dietrich’s famous pose from her breakthrough film, The Blue Angel (1930). Cooler notes are struck by recreations of Salvatore Scarpitta’s sculptures for the 1933 film The Song of Songs, in which Dietrich played the muse for a sculpture she subsequently destroys, and Gobelin-made tapestries in

which motifs from Anni Albers works are framed by her husband Josef’s square forms: Untitled (Marlene Redux: a True Hollywood Story! Parts Two–Four) (2006). Vezzoli cites Maximilian Schell’s 1984 documentary Marlene, a portrait of the ageing actress interviewed off-camera, as his key inspiration for this exhibition, and it provides one link to Anni Albers. The latter’s name appears in the documentary’s short credit list, which suggests that she is the diminutive figure who appears inexplicably in a few short scenes with Schell. She too was a Dietrich contemporary and a German national who moved to the US to continue her artistic career. This show constructs a myth of glamour or stardom, piece by piece, that might be flawless if the visitor were previously ignorant of Dietrich. It’s perfectly sited in a rare handsome villa amid the charmless skyscrapers of Monaco, a principality that worked so hard to concoct its own mythology in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dietrich constructed her own story too, modifying her biography as necessary. Yet despite the female subject at its centre, the exhibition remains empty and impersonal. More than just Marlene, Vezzoli is illustrating the need for iconic figures per se.

He takes it to extremes, picturing himself, for example, like an absurd matinee idol on the exhibition’s poster, a reworking of the original advertisement for The Song of Songs in which Vezzoli takes the place of actor Brian Aherne to embrace a (now weeping – signature Vezzoli trope) Dietrich. The mockumentary Marlene Redux (2006) apes the E! True Hollywood Story format to portray Vezzoli as an unpleasant and manipulative man who dies while pursuing projects of questionable artistic value, driven by his hunger for proximity to his idols. If the adoration Dietrich engendered is difficult to understand today – if she seems icy and odd in comparison with today’s overempathising stars – Vezzoli clearly knows something about the nature of fame. There is catharsis to be found in identifying with actors, who are vehicles for countless fans’ transference. Whether or not these people are complicit in their own fame or crave that attention is irrelevant, for the adoring public need a carapace onto which they can project. In Villa Marlene Vezzoli renders his idol even more of a vacuum; no longer reality but a myth in the hands of the artist who tirelessly reinterprets it. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Villa Marlene, 2016, digital print on paper. Courtesy the artist

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Kirill Glushchenko Our Days are Rich and Bright VAC Foundation at Polkovaya Street 3, Moscow 29 April – 3 July ‘After noticing me taking pictures, a little girl about five years old drew my attention to a box and offered me to capture some pigeons who were unwell.’ So reads the translated English caption that accompanies an image of said birds in Kirill Glushchenko’s handmade softcover book about the Russian city of Ulyanovsk. It’s a moment of intimacy amid the more impersonal, grainy black-and-white photographs of homogeneous concrete housing blocks that fill most of the pages of this and the nine similarly photo-heavy publications that form the backbone to the young Russian artist’s first solo show. Each book is focused on a different former Soviet or Eastern Bloc city – Pskov, Riga, Dresden and Tallinn among them. Adding short stories and other selected texts to the images, Glushchenko provides, as with the vignette of the pigeons, glimpses into ordinary lives. This ongoing project – for which the artist makes one or more three-to-four-day trips to each city, taking a still film camera and an old tape recorder – follows both the methodical process and the aesthetics used by the Soviet

state to produce city guidebooks during the 1960s and 70s. Such books, examples of which are also on display, were a showcase for the extensive housebuilding programme during those decades, but Glushchenko’s publications – and the context in which he presents them – are multilayered, mixing elements of fact and fiction, past and present, and highlighting contrasting notions of public and private, emotional and contained, openness and obfuscation. This is quietly impressive work. Installed within an empty space in a light-industrial factory in a district of Moscow that once contained many publishing houses (a large neon on the roof declares the building to house Glushchenko’s own eponymous publisher, ‘Glushchenkoizdat’), each publication is presented within its own reading area, above which the relevant city’s name is spelled out in neon. Here visitors can sit and read the books, peruse the accompanying postcards and listen on headphones to the ambient sounds of that city playing on a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. Like the books, this experience elicits feelings of both intimacy and eavesdropping, an unease

heightened by the slowly turning reels of the tape machine and its associations with interrogation and surveillance. Similar ideas of private and public are subtly subverted by a second body of work, based on the found diaries of a bus driver named Nikolai Kozakov (1932–2005), in which their author records his loves, longings and everyday activities. In publishing these as a book, Glushchenko again reveals a desire to show what goes on behind closed doors and concrete facades. Photographs and film of Kozakov, which the artist obtained from his widow, add a documentary feel, but sound booths emanating excerpts from the diaries read out by a well-known (in Russia) TV presenter are another twist on expectations, mismatching the often emotional content to a voice pitched to deliver a more propagandist message. With only some of the written texts and one audio excerpt currently available in translation, to non-Russian speakers much of this detail again becomes obscure, but not so the artist’s desire to gently reveal personal stories and hidden histories. Helen Sumpter

Pages 20 and 21 from Kirill Glushchenko’s volume on Riga, in Our Days are Rich and Bright, 2016. Courtesy VAC Foundation, Moscow

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Ian Cheng Forking At Perfection Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich 20 February – 16 May How are we to aestheticise agency, or capture it as material? While many artists look to practices such as performance that engage the body to communicate agency (or more likely a lack thereof), Ian Cheng creates his own hermetic digital worlds in which viewers can watch the entire, oftentimes embattled lifespans of their many digital denizens. In Cheng’s show at Migros Museum, Forking At Perfection, these worlds take the form of two installations, one a projection (Emissary Forks At Perfection, 2015–16), and another an interactive environment using the Google Tango tablet as a guide (Emissary Forks For You, 2016). The former reads like video to the untrained eye, but is in actuality software developed by the artist. Cheng calls these worlds, built on videogame engines, ‘simulations’ – imagine a videogame that plays itself, which viewers watch unfold in real time. Emissary Forks At Perfection is set in the far-distant future in a nature preserve, in which Shiba Inu dogs are bred to act as empathetic conduits to our present-day humans. The term ‘forking’ within the title Forking At Perfection comes from software development, and refers to the development of a product that ‘forks’ off into another, rogue direction at the behest of a designer tasked with innovating a product at a subordinate level distinct from

the main development of the product. (Take for example the development of a chat client like Gchat within the larger framework of an email service like Gmail.) Depending on its success, this innovation may or may not be reintroduced into the official software. In Cheng’s simulated environment, the Shiba Inu frequently forks or duplicates itself in moments of stress, creating one dog that takes the brunt of stressful situations while another goes about its business unencumbered. Eventually, the two might merge again, creating one ultimately holistic, ‘perfect’ character. Though Cheng’s simulation casts dogs as protagonists, these environments are meant to reflect our own, very real and human struggles. Emissary Forks For You is installed in a white cube punctuated by thick black lines painted on the walls and floors that read initially as monochromatic alien hieroglyphics. Visitors are given Google Tango tablets, which are equipped with an internal gyroscope and infrared and regular cameras, and look much like regular handheld tablets. On the tablet, the Shiba Inu from Emissary Forks At Perfection asks you to follow it in its world, prompting you to walk through the gallery until the tablet recognises one of the hard edges painted on the wall or floor. Once there, the dog rewards

you with an encouraging comment and the distinctive sound of a dog-training clicker. After walking around an otherwise empty gallery for 15 minutes, I realised that this is a playful role reversal, as well as recognising how absurd I must look following a virtual dog around a gallery, essentially being trained by it. The Shiba Inu thus begins to read as a cipher for artificial intelligence – a friendly yet conniving organism that, in this case, trains us as much as we train it. Notably, Cheng develops his simulation software first and then finds homes for it in various hardware technologies, tweaking them to suit his chosen device. Cheng oftentimes develops his software to utilise technology that has already been widely adopted, such as a handheld tablet or even a smartphone – take for instance his iOS app recently released by the Serpentine Galleries (Bad Corgi, 2016). Cheng’s technological populism speaks to the artist’s resistance to fetishising new, sci-fi-esque, state-of-the-art hardware (eg Google Glass in years past or Oculus Rift today), such fetishising unfortunately so often the norm in museums. Rather, Cheng uses our everyday technologies to give us a familiar lens through which to consider the age-old question: how do I not just survive, but thrive? Karen Archey

Emissary Forks At Perfection (detail), 2015, live simulation and story, infinite duration. Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; and Standard (Oslo)

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Liverpool Biennial 2016 Various venues, Liverpool 9 July – 16 October A lot can change in two years. Opening in the summer of 2014, the loosely themed international group exhibition at the centre of the eighth Liverpool Biennial (a mainstay of the event’s structure) was a sprawling show of new and older works, overseen by two curators under the title A Needle Walks into a Haystack. Nominally about subverting convention, it was installed in the atmospheric shell of a former school for the blind. Twelve months later the building reopened as a 200-cover bar and kitchen. Like its host city, the biennial seeks to renew itself. For 2016 there aren’t two or even three main curators but a curatorial faculty of 11. There isn’t one theme but six ‘episodes’, each focused on an idea of narrative fiction or journey through time and place. Commissions in response to this framework by 44 international artists are shown in different groupings across 22 venues plus public spaces, with each venue posited as a form of porous portal through which elements converge. Some artists have works in more than one episode,

many artists have multiple works in more than one venue and some venues are showing works from more than one episode. If it sounds overcomplicated, it is – but if you get into the spirit of it, this idea of layering and repetition does actually succeed in bringing the whole biennial together. So where to begin? The ‘Ancient Greece’ episode, mostly at Tate Liverpool, which takes the city’s rich architectural history, in particular its neoclassical buildings, as a reference is a good place to start. Andreas Angelidakis’s 3D-printed sculptures and accompanying film reimagine Ancient Greek vases as architecture. There’s Mumbai-based Sahej Rahal’s installations of half-formed rough clay figures and shapes that suggest both fossilised artefacts from an ancient civilisation and primeval forms of life emerging from a new one. There’s a colourful ceramic wall relief by Betty Woodman with motifs that also refer to pots or vessels. And there’s a huge marble knee, a fragment of classical statuary from National Museum Liverpool’s antiquities

collection. In the spirit of the biennial, this is a work that has genuinely time-travelled, from the fourth century AD to today. Small piles of leaves and litter also appear to have blown in from somewhere. This is part of another work, by American artist Jason Dodge. Collected over many years this ephemera is another archaeology of sorts, explained by the title of the work, What the living do. The explanations of other episodes are both a little looser and more overlapping. There’s ‘Chinatown’, about migration and in particular the city’s established Chinese population, ‘Children’s Episode’, about the ability of kids to blur fiction and reality, and ‘Monuments from the Future’, for which artists have been asked to imagine what a monument made to the Liverpool of the not-too-distant future might look like now. ‘Flashback’ relates to the idea of a rupture of the present by the past, and then there’s ‘Software’, which in this context means performance, in terms of scripts, scores and choreographies.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Dogsy Ma Bone (production still), performance, 12 June 2016 at Cains Brewery, Liverpool. Photo: Mark McNulty. Courtesy the artist, Liverpool Biennial and Sadie Coles HQ , London

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The school for the blind may be gone as a biennial venue, but the next stop on the journey, the art deco style former ABC Cinema, closed since 1998, provides a similarly atmospheric, almost pitch-black setting for a group of ‘Flashback’ works. These include stuttering film clips by Samson Kambalu, and Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s film 1922 – The Uncomputable. Shown on a large screen, 1922 is the latest instalment in a series of theatrical films telling the story of a Terminator-style future where the machines have taken over. Its portentous narration sits perfectly against the dilapidation of the building’s peeling gilt interior. At the film’s end the lights come up, revealing other works in the space, including a small pile of litter. Moving on to the former Cains Brewery, also a reclaimed building, there’s another large installation by Sahej Rahal as well as film and sculptures by Dubai-based collaborators Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Crudely constructed from foil, paper, paint, fabric and plastic objects, their low-fi figurative sculptures (each its own character) were sent to Liverpool from Dubai with artworks from the artists’ own collection (by Robert Mapplethorpe, Rosemarie Trockel and others) hidden inside

them. These smuggled works are also on display. It’s the broader theme of migration that puts this under ‘Chinatown’. Also at Cains is Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s Dogsy Ma Bone (2016), a performance documented on film, and the main commission for the ‘Children’s Episode’. Filmed among the boarded-up properties of Toxteth, Chetwynd’s signature improv-style, politically minded cultural mashups – this one combining Betty Boop’s A Song a Day (1936) with Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928) – is given a new twist by being performed by local kids, rather than Chetwynd’s usual gang of grownup friends and acquaintances. It’s counterintuitive, but it comes across as more serious as a result. Onwards to the boarded-up terraces themselves, the focus project of 2015 Turner Prizewinning architectural collective Assemble, and another location the biennial has used for the first time. Two large outdoor sculptural commissions, under ‘Monuments from the Future’, work particularly well. Made from the same perforated sheet-steel used to board up the nearby houses, Alisa Baremboym’s dome-shaped structure contains a flesh-coloured sculpture. It’s a clever extension of Baremboym’s ideas about organic and synthetic hybridity that, as the holes in the tin sheet are frustratingly just too small

for the human eye to focus through, relies on a camera lens stuck against it for viewers to get a glimpse of the work inside. Lara Favaretto’s huge rectangular granite monolith, which sits in the middle of the street, looks like the perfect imagined monument, but could equally be part of ‘Chinatown’. It has a small slit through which visitors can post money. At the end of the biennial the monolith will be destroyed and the money given to a local refugee charity. Back to the city centre and the Open Eye Gallery, where there’s another sculpture by the Dubai-based collaborators, another small swirl of litter and a work by Koki Tanaka that perhaps best articulates the biennial’s ideas about narratives past, present and future. Following a restaged walk through the city with some of the now middle-aged teenagers from Liverpool who took part in demonstrations against the UK’s Youth Training Scheme programme in 1985, Tanaka filmed interviews with them about their views and experiences then and now. The subtext to their discussions, about how important it was back then to be able to join an active, vibrant labour youth organisation and gain a political education, is a reminder of just how different things are in the UK now. Helen Sumpter

Lara Favaretto, Momentary Monument – The Stone, 2016 (installation view, Welsh Streets, Liverpool Biennial). Photo: Joel Chester Fildes. Courtesy the artist and Liverpool Biennial

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The Science of Imaginary Solutions Breese Little, London 10 June – 17 September “It looks so modern,” we say of an ancient object in a museum, an implied compliment that sets the contemporary as the standard by which everything old is measured. The recent curatorial trend of the scrambled historical timeline, where the ancient and contemporary share a common space, embodies the observation. At its best, the conceit exemplifies Susan Sontag’s ‘erotics of art’, where objects shake loose their contextual shackles and discover unexpected affinities. At worst, it unfairly privileges the contemporary, casting ancient artists as unwitting early adopters. The Science of Imaginary Solutions succeeds by showcasing living artists whose work is archaeological in spirit, probing the ancient and modern past through antique craft traditions. The result, a sequence of overlapping dialogues between the old, the new and the very old, achieves a genuine historical suspension, a joyful temporal confusion. The past isn’t even past. The exhibition’s title comes from Alfred Jarry’s definition of ‘pataphysics, a protoSurrealist parody of post-Enlightenment

empiricism, which has obvious curatorial implications, happily mostly dodged here. Subverting the taxonomy of the traditional museum display may be old hat now (hey, they’re doing it themselves), but the exhibition doesn’t dwell too much on it, beyond the polite inclusion of master practitioner Marcel Broodthaers’s Les Animaux de la Ferme (1974), images of cattle breeds from an agricultural publication retitled with the names of car manufacturers. The most compelling works on display operate within a collapsed chronology, reframing the iconography of the past as open-source data. In Steven Claydon’s Convolute (2012), a plinth redolent of a 1980s bank lobby supports a sculpture of two conjoined bearded faces, like gothic prophets, cast in resin and bamboo fungus. Seen in the company of the Neolithic grinding basin placed alongside, the work’s physical specificity reads both as parody of material culture and melancholy reflection on its own listless historical moment. This is curating as speculative fiction: things as they might be, or might have been.

The Science of Imaginary Solutions, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Tom Horak. Courtesy Breese Little, London

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Katie Schwab’s ceramics (2016) redo modernist designs by Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi via slip-trailing, a prehistoric technique revived in the seventeenth century. Excising the originals’ allusions to modern technology, Schwab decouples style from its own history, letting the collision of materiality and form open up counterhistorical possibilities. David Thorpe’s two paintings (both 2012), their surfaces built up in sand, clay, lime and dung in wattle and daub (a process used in ancient wall making), pit the blunt fact of their quiddity against the illustrative delicacy of the quasi-botanical designs painted onto them. And when the ancient and current literally share a single space, in a vitrine combining Ruth Ewan’s bronze dinosaur, cast in 2013 from a toy found in the Freedom Press bookshop in Whitechapel after a firebomb attack, with ancient bronze brooches depicting abstracted beetles and birds made in the twilight of the Roman Empire, it’s as though nothing ever changed, or ever will. Ben Street

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today South London Gallery 10 June – 4 September Curated by Pablo Léon de la Barra, this exhibition focuses on the second part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative (a threephase collecting-cum-curating project started in 2012, inviting curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa for a two-year residency resulting in the acquisition of a range of works from each region by the Guggenheim). It features works by 40 artists from 14 countries, and ‘focuses’ on works created between the 1960s and 2014 (a rather loose understanding of the title’s ‘Today’). Pan-continental art surveys are risky curatorial ventures; in putting them together, curators often find themselves working the ground between an overly harmonised plurality of voices and contexts, and a ‘multiculturalist’ trap that limits the curatorial discourse to cultural diversity, often resulting in juxtapositions of works that seem too disparate to interrelate. In the main, the works on show here seem to have been selected for their ability to fit an expected discourse on Latin America thematised around politics, conceptualism, Modernism and the tropical. Most of the works in the main space of the gallery are both ideological and formal reflections on Western-dominated (art) historical narratives, yet their arrangement tends to promote the formal associations alone, defusing any subversive potential. The fruits spiked on the hooks of a 1953 Charles and Ray Eames Hang it

all coat rack (Colombian Gabriel Sierra’s Hang It All, 2006) face São Paulo-based Erika Verzutti’s totemic bronze sculptures, made of moulded tropical fruits and flowers heaped on top of each other. Cuban Wilfredo Prieto’s wheelbarrow of soil, from which protrudes a single plant the artist took for a five-kilometre walk around a Caribbean island (Walk, 2000, winking at practices of artists such as Francis Alÿs and Robert Smithson), features next to Columbian artist Wilson Díaz’s green neon sign Movement of the Liberation of the Coca Plant (2012–14). Also on view are some more explicitly political works. Political oppression and state censorship are at the core of Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana version), recording a 2009 performance for the Havana Biennial in which she invited people to take the stage and speak uncensored for one minute (her ensuing attempt to restage the piece on Havana’s Revolution Square was interrupted by the Cuban authorities). Carlos Motta’s listlike posters titled Brief History of US Interventions in Latin America Since 1946 (2005–09) are presented alongside a video of Chile-born, US-based Alfredo Jaar’s LED animation This is Not America: A Logo for America, which in 1987 appeared in lights on the display screens overlooking the Times Square US Army recruiting station. Riffing on David Bowie’s 1985 song of the same title and Magritte’s ‘This is not a pipe’ painting (The Treachery of Images, 1928–29), Jaar’s sign shows an outline map of the US emblazoned with the statement:

‘This is Not America’. North–South politics is also the subject of Venezuelan Javier Téllez’s brilliant video One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida) (2005), presented across the road from the main gallery on the ground floor of a disused fire station). Casting people with mental illnesses and learning difficulties who wear animal masks and hold signs with slogans protesting their own social marginalisation, the video captures a disturbing, carnivallike protest staged by the artist in the border city of Tijuana that climaxes with a stuntman being cannonballed across the Mexico–US fence. Blurring the line between participatory event and documented performance, the work’s force resides in its ambiguity and the ethical tension at play here (is this exploitation?), provoking in the viewer a necessary – but fruitful – unease. Although the MAP initiative may feel like the Guggenheim is climbing on a bandwagon, there is something laudable about opening the art-historical narratives constructed by art museums like the Guggenheim to art being produced beyond northern art centres (better late than never). However, the effort can find itself truncated if the works are merely used to reinforce well-trod narratives, rather than complexifying and enriching them with new perspectives. Believe it or not, not all Latin American art is about identity politics. Although these conversations are still relevant ones, they are not new, and what’s missing here are the ones that are happening ‘today’. Louise Darblay

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, 2016 (installation view, South London Gallery, 2016). Courtesy: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the South London Gallery.Photo: Andy Stagg

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Jim Hodges Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 10 June – 23 July Did Freud ever visit a foundry? Traditionally, in the lost-wax method of casting, the wax original is heated in the mould, drained off and replaced by molten metal – the initial positive ‘repressed’, in psychoanalytic parlance. The analogy is germane, I feel, to Jim Hodges’s sculpture Skin (all works 2016), a white painted bronze cast of an area of forest floor roughly three metres in diameter that occupies the first room of Stephen Friedman Gallery. Hodges’s initial positive is made of rubber instead of wax, which explains why the tree stump at the centre and a nearby boulder have wilted, undermining the verisimilitude. The transitional phase of the sculptural process is thus more conspicuous as trace influence, in a manner that is similar to the way in which childhood experiences can – according to Freudians – resurface in adulthood as neuroses, the ‘skin’ with which the crumpled bronze sheet is coated also echoing its floppy inception. Although the Boyle Family’s ‘earth studies’ (painted facsimiles of the urban ground) spring to mind as precursors, Hodges’s friable realism creates something more dreamlike, the eye travelling over stones, twigs, nutshells and broken bits of bark without fully endorsing the simulacrum or discounting it as joke-shop effect. It’s a clever and compulsive

work, somehow straddling the natural world and its recapitulation in the human mind, the distortion caused by idiosyncratic adjustments to the generic casting process mirroring the way in which memory distorts the ‘truth’ of an original experience. In the rear space are two large oil paintings, Nez Perce 1, Sideways, in memory of Wally Tworkov and Nez Perce 2, Sideways, the former hung sideways on the wall and the latter laid horizontally on a black plinth in the middle of the room. Both depict views through a forest as though from the perspective of someone emerging into a clearing. It’s difficult to say whether the pale wash of the background is a body of water that lies just beyond the forest’s perimeter, or something else, and this uncertainty gives the paintings a narrative charge. The titular ‘Nez Perce’ refers to the Native American people indigenous to the Pacific Northwest territory of the US. Are we looking through their eyes? Or those of a white settler? The unconventional orientation of the paintings might even suggest a conflict between indigenous and European perspectives. In both cases, the luminosity of the palette is further heightened by the quality of the light in the gallery, whose black floor absorbs so much from the skylights above that

Skin, 2016, painted bronze, 292 × 325 × 38 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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the canvases appear to glow: phosphorescent portals into the history here invoked. Across the road, in the gallery’s second space, are two series of drawings: No title (winter notes) # 1–35 presents 35 charcoal studies laid out seven apiece on five long wooden plinths, while in an adjacent room the 21 studies comprising No title (winter notes) # 36–56 are hung on the wall in a seven-by-three grid. ‘Arboreal scenes’, ‘bacteria’ and ‘firework displays’ are just some of the things I jotted down to fix the subject of these scratchy, enigmatic compositions, which recall Gorky, Kandinsky and Auerbach. Winter notes implies a seasonal theme, and the regimented display structures certainly have a calendrical feel. This repetition is key, emphasising stylistic motifs that recur across the series over the status of any single drawing. So is the refusal of sequential order: some drawings – particularly the more heavily worked studies – look like effacements of neighbouring ones, while others seem to depict evanescent phenomena somehow readable as both views through a microscope and rural vistas. The more you look, the more it seems that these are not so much separate drawings as different stages of a single drawing ‘event’ that flips between the macroand the microcosmic. Sean Ashton

Making & Unmaking Camden Arts Centre, London 19 June – 18 September Among the 70 artists whose works are included in fashion designer Duro Olowu’s Making & Unmaking is Anni Albers. In 1938 the pioneering Bauhaus artist published a text titled ‘Work with Material’, in which she wrote: ‘Life today is very bewildering. We have no picture of it which is all-inclusive… We have to make a choice between concepts of great diversity. And as a common ground is wanting, we are baffled by them.’ Almost 80 years later, those words and the anxieties they describe ring startlingly true in Britain’s current political climate, as does the premise of Olowu’s exhibition, which, through the diversity of its inclusions, both examines and celebrates individuation and difference with an all-embracing self-assurance. Bringing together artists who have a multifaceted and rich affiliation to fabric and textiles, the exhibition includes works that originate from around the world and over a period of time that spans from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. While, for Olowu, the exhibition’s title refers to the physical processes involved in artmaking – described as ‘the personal ritual of the artist’ – its repetitive back and forth could also evoke the mechanical operation of a weaving loom, as well as the continual evolution of identity that clothing and fashion can facilitate. Executed in myriad media (textiles, painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, jewellery), the works are arranged in a number

of sometimes surprising but consistently compelling groupings, addressing subjects such as cultural identity, sexuality and the representation of the body. The rhythmic repetition in the work by the aforementioned Albers, whose revolutionary practice repurposed textiles as an abstract artform, is both complemented and countered by artists working in the wake of her legacy today – for instance, Brent Wadden, whose wavelike tapestry DREAMIN’ (diptych) (2016) sits strikingly above Polly Apfelbaum’s Compulsory Figures (1996), an expanse of floorbased pairs of coloured velvet sheets whose two-dimensional simplicity belies the poollike depth they appear to possess and offsets the intricacy of the above weaves. Ideas of camouflage and masquerade are also in abundance. Lorna Simpson’s recent, acerbic collages – which combine photographs of African-American women taken from Ebony magazine with documentary images of (mainly Westernised) world history, ruthlessly examining the impact of culture and memory upon multiracial identity – feel more dangerous beside Dorothea Tanning’s nightmarish painting Glad Nude with Paws (1978), or the photographs of Surrealist (and Second World War resistance-fighter) Claude Cahun. Cahun produced a series of self-portraits examining the performance of gender by the body, its clothing and its context, and famously declared

‘under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.’ Elsewhere, a selection of Neil Kenlock’s photographic portraits of the domestic life of African-Caribbean communities during the 1960s and 70s are accompanied, disconcertingly, by a 1949 drawing of some furred abstracted limbs by Louise Bourgeois, a pair of Chris Ofili’s Afro-Muses (2005–6) and a beautifully ascetic portrait by Meredith Frampton. A number of Lynette YiadomBoakye’s reclining males nonchalantly join this unexpected selection, hung, salon-style, over a series of densely patterned wallpapers. Olowu’s exhibition unpicks the function and position, within numerous socioeconomic circumstances, that clothing and textiles have had on the construction of history and identity (be that individual, national or international). The diversity and inclusivity of his choices engenders a powerful and eclectic collage with exuberant abundance. The exhibition invites a complicated but joyous journey of encounters, creating exchanges between the national and the international and between the past and the present. By emphasising connections across borders and histories, with equal reverence for artists regardless of their nationality, gender or sexuality, the exhibition feels, in times such as these, like a hopeful and redemptive step forward. Laura Smith

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tie The Temptress To The Trojan, 2016, oil on linen, 120 × 160 × 4 cm. Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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This Is A Voice Wellcome Collection, London 14 April – 31 July The first ‘voices’ that greet you on entering the Wellcome Collection don’t sound human; rather they belong to some sort of avian dawn chorus. Move further inside and a cluster of seven screens reveals their source: not birds, but people engaged in quotidian activities – sitting in an armchair or a bathtub, waiting for a doctor’s appointment or driving. But they are making the sounds, and the disjunction between audio and visual is disconcerting. Marcus Coates’s Dawn Chorus (2007) is a multichannel film installation of people mimicking slowed-down birdsong that is subsequently modified to match the pitch and speed of early morning bird calls; the result – at once enchanting and eerie – reverberates throughout the exhibition. But here is also where the almost-meditative part of the journey through this exhibition ends: these chirping human-birds, the slow thrum of the circular breathing exercises present in the piped-in recording of Joan La Barbara’s 1974 composition Circular Song and the polyphonic singing of the Bayaka nomadic pygmies of Central Africa in a field recording by Louis Sarno are soon drowned out by a cacophony of incongruous voices, cackling laughter and sounds from myriad other works that vie for

the ear in the next exhibition space. Around a corner, straining to be heard, a tiny monochrome Jochen Gerz is yelling “Hallo!” on a video monitor. Knees buckling with the effort, he shouts for about 19 minutes before his voice gives way and the performance stops. The desperation to be heard becomes palpable as the undulating utterances emitting from headphones and spilling across the exhibition space clamour together. A display case features two smaller elements from much larger projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan on the subject of voice detection in surveillance technologies – a photograph of a man painting a wall with a topological design from the series An Unspeakable Act (2012) and an unbranded foil packet of crisps from the artist’s A Convention of Tiny Movements (2015). This editing does not do justice to the original works, however. In order to fill in the missing context, the curators show these excerpts alongside a nonart exhibit: a laptop upon which Layered Voice Analysis (a programme developed by Israeli company Nemesysco for use in lie detection) plays through a plastic earphone. Instances such as this often confuse the visitor, in the main with unproductive results.

Video still of a 1973 performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I, 1972. Courtesy BBC Motion Gallery and Getty Images

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What are we seeing: art or museum artefact? Yet the cases of medical instruments, John William Waterhouse’s oil painting Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1905) (the latter’s disembodied head still singing), nineteenth-century illustrations of respiratory tracts, Imogen Stidworthy’s topographic mapping of the Geordie accent, Asta Gröting’s ongoing project The Inner Voice (1993–) (in which performers, benevolently caressed by a ventriloquist’s puppet, discuss their anxieties): all merge into a magnetising curatorial manifestation of Mladen Dolar’s book A Voice and Nothing More (2006), a key reference point for the show’s organisers in which the philosopher investigates the voice as a conduit between the self and the outside world. On a screen overlooking the rest of the show hangs Mouth, played by Billie Whitelaw, from Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972). It is the archetypal disembodied voice; the restlessness of the mind and its tendency towards cyclical patterns of thinking are hard to make sense of, both familiar and terrifying. As the sinister, high-pitched cackle pierces the show, and echoes of other voices fill the negative spaces, you leave uneasy – wary, even – of the vibrations of your own vocal cords. Fi Churchman

Paul Lee Layers for a Brain Corner Maccarone, Los Angeles 21 May – 12 August Maccarone’s enormous Los Angeles space is a strange place in which to encounter the work of Paul Lee. Working at human scale, Lee has made a career of humbling the familiar tropes of Minimalism, transforming hard lines, weighty volumes and large scales into objects saturated with the light from naked bulbs or made entirely of bath towels. His towels have functioned as plinths, as monochromes, as Robert Morris-like wall hangings; they have been stacked in corners, stripped down into Fred Sandback strips and, channelling Robert Smithson, intermixed with rocks. Lee has much in common with Felix Gonzalez-Torres or Jim Hodges, who use devices from Minimalism to conjure memory, eroticism and even a votive, reverential air in their work. However, Lee’s new exhibition seems less personal and more like a perceptual game, using a number of preset building blocks (tambourines, washcloths, large towels and canvases of variable sizes) to deploy sequences of paintings

and wall works that are uniform in effect but can be broken down and examined in their local details. The basic units remain the same, but colours shift, shapes expand and contract, and the thickness of canvas varies. Objects double, map onto each other and interact. The paintings work wonderfully in groups, communicating with each other, celebrating their small differences. A wall of predominantly black works meditate on a single theme: Thinking About It Then Knowing Now (all works 2016) and Corner could be two ways of saying the same thing, as both feature a tambourine pinned in the corner made by two black rectangles. Yet neither of these works is far from the yin and yang balance of Either Side of the Night, or of Touch Painting. The paintings communicate so well with one another that it is difficult to know if any individual work on its own would have much purpose or effect at all. In addition to the paintings, the space is filled by giant works made of bath towels,

like Lung and Mind Mountain, which feature the towels stripped down to their edges and dyed in black ink, and occupy the walls like early Hélio Oiticica geometries writ large. As with the paintings, measurement and balance are central. These works are intent on finding a resolved equilibrium among what can at first look like a random scatter. It is with a certain amount of deadpan humour that one work, titled Washcloth Weight, suggests that a single black washcloth serves to counterbalance a large grouping of stacked cantilevered frames (themselves made of bath towels). Human associations are not nearly as easy to find in this show as in Lee’s early work, but perhaps that is a good thing. One wonders why Lee’s proceedings are now so earnest, so rigorous and balanced. It is as though his world is tightening, the air growing thinner. Something new is definitely at work here; it will be fascinating to see it evolve further. Larry Wilcox

Layers for a Brain Corner, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Maccarone, Los Angeles

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Neïl Beloufa Democracy Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles 11 June – 30 July Who are you? Or rather who do you think you are? Or even who do you think you’re supposed to be? What changes when somebody’s watching, the cleverness you display in your media avatar, the difference between what you wish you were and who you really are? In his videos and installations, Neïl Beloufa is always playing with this permeability between fiction and reality, with the performances that come with living up to what we think we are or should be. In his videos, actors often make up what they think their characters should be doing, sometimes performing fictive versions of themselves. The fact that their performances are self-consciously constructed is never absent from the spectators’ view, from the cinema lights that sometimes appear unhidden on his sets to the elaborate frames and screens he concocts to display the videos. Every part of what was made and how it was made is on view, down to the empty boxes of cigarettes that were smoked during the installation. A whole set of wallworks here, Chutes d’Atelier (2016), is just things made

of scraps from Beloufa’s studio: leftovers from other works. A whole (albeit small) house, made from rebar and translucent resin, frames the video Data for Desire (2014). The house comes complete with all the accoutrements of domestic life, from a television and computer to a broom and dish-drying rack. These things that we own and that own us articulate a role we play as active members of modern life, shaping us and our day-to-days with their symbolic value. As rebar constructs, the house and all its objects are totally useless, just cheaply reproduced simulacra of the real thing, and all wholly empty. The whole is less like a glass house and more like those old Dutch homes with huge front windows that allow everyone to see what you own and how well you’re performing your role in society. The video depicts two groups of six twentysomethings: a ‘pseudo-scripted’ party of flirting resort-town workers in Canada, and student mathematicians in France trying to get an algorithm to predict who will fuck whom at the party, all of this interspersed

with spooky scenes of life in the resort town: tourists snapping pictures of white-tailed deer and elk eating foliage next to giant satellite dishes. The natural and unnatural rub against each other in long, languid shots. Alongside all the studio-scrap wallworks, a video titled World Domination (2012) is projected on a huge mechanical dinosaur, a fake fossil made according to what the artist vaguely remembers a dinosaur is supposed to look like, composited from pictures he saw online. The video depicts nonactors pretending to be world leaders trying to decide how to solve their political problems by invading other countries, nuclear options hinting at possible extinction. The things they say sound like the kinds of things uttered by politicians, but listen closely and they don’t actually make any sense. Not so different, really, from what politicians actually say while they perform their roles as politicians, like a reality-TV star running for president. Little wonder that Beloufa titled his show Democracy. Andrew Berardini

Democracy, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy the artist and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

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Benjamin Carlson Park View, Los Angeles 9 June – 16 July What more obvious subject could there be for a painting that deconstructs the mechanics of representation than a still life in front of a window? The window, as a picture within a picture, traditionally stands as a proxy for the painting – the painting’s self-image, as it were; the still life has for centuries been a convenient armature for everything from allegories of mortality to investigations into optical perception. Benjamin Carlson’s five still lifes in front of windows swerve between obviousness and subtle surprise. My sense is that Carlson is interested equally in the values of both. These are paintings of the mainstream, the middle ground, the everyday. Any picture that includes vector clipart of apples alongside the Apple Inc logo is aiming for a fairly wide margin of popular recognition. That particular work, however, is one of the most complex in the exhibition (all works Untitled, 2016). On a square canvas, Carlson has convened an assortment of clipart apples and

found photographs – a metal table, a basket, a concrete wall, more apples – which he has imprinted via inkjet transfers and, in places, overpainted with oil, acrylic and Flashe. Behind the table, to the right, is a window framing an utterly flat wallpaper pattern of painted leaves. To the left is what looks, at first, like a mirror, except it does not reflect the table in front of it. Rather, it is a painting of the same table, differently arranged in some respects, and with another still life painting hanging behind. That Apple logo, centre-left, is, for me, an apple too far. Despite its winking cleverness, it presses an undeniable point: like overlapping windows or icons on a desktop, no part of this painting impinges on another part. Nothing touches. By contrast, another painting has the opposite effect, in that it is hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins. This one is nearly monochrome, in black oil, acrylic and charcoal on a washy blue and grey ground. Again, there is a table in front of a window that might actually be a painting; on the table,

beside wine glasses and a bottle, is a transfer clipart strawberry next to another strawberry drawn in charcoal. Into one wine glass, Carlson has inserted a (presumably found) image of a tiny mermaid, arms folded and reclining in the charcoal-coloured drink. Disjunction and alienation are so much a part of our daily aesthetic intake, especially in digital media, that to reproduce their effect as a painting is less striking than creating a coherent visual experience despite its internal dissociation. The standout work in the exhibition is also monochrome, depicting a loosely drawn vase of flowers and takeout coffee cup beside two clipart apples on a tabletop. Through the windowpanes, trees are lightly sketched in charcoal and paint, but the graphic stars in the pale sky above are black. From the darkness under the table, two pairs of white crescents peek upwards, as if hiding from this topsy-turvy world. They needn’t be afraid. After a while it comes to seem quite normal. Jonathan Griffin

Untitled, 2016, oil, acrylic, Flashe and inkjet on linen, 86 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist and Park View, Los Angeles

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Michael Rakowitz The Flesh Is Yours, The Bones Are Ours Graham Foundation and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago 18 May – 13 August Tracing and assembling fin de siècle architectural decor and cultural artefacts from cataclysmic events of the era, Michael Rakowitz unmasks the enduring imprints of collective trauma. For this exhibition, he constructs a reliquary and a craftsman’s workshop dedicated to the sordid history of the Armenian genocide, relating historical events and sites in Istanbul to others in Chicago. Across two locations, the Graham Foundation and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Rakowitz compares the skeletal structures of urban societies with the exploitative or abusive circumstances via which they were created. The aspect concerning Istanbul was initially conceived for the 14th Istanbul Biennial, which took place amid the 100-year anniversary of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians who were enslaved, starved, systematically murdered and subject to forced migration were persecuted on account of their religious and ethnic background, and to this day, the Turkish government refuses to issue a public apology or admit that any ‘genocide’ took place. Over the last century, Armenian cultural histories, including those of the architectural and artistic contributions presented in Rakowitz’s exhibition, have been repressed and silenced. Recent studies in epigenetic and intergenerational trauma, specifically focused on descendants of survivors and escapees of the Armenian genocide (and on Holocaust survivors), are proving that such traumas can

cause actual changes in genetic code, and as a parallel, Rakowitz relates the genetic mutations of emotional and physical stress reactions from such experiences through structural imprints of remnants from the built environment. The ‘genetic’ code in this case, though, comes in the form of designs for art-nouveau plaster panelling produced by Armenian craftsman Garabet Cezayirliyan, his Turkish apprentice Kemal Cimbiz and the modernist Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, also known for his extensive use of art-nouveau ornamentation. Working with the Armenian community in Turkey (and descendants of the genocide’s survivors), Rakowitz created rubbings of building decorations designed by craftsmen such as Cezayirliyan. Layers of these transferred imprints on gauzy paper (combined with others from Chicago’s own architecture) hang loosely from the edge of the ceiling in Rhona Hoffman’s gallery, intricate designs cascading down the wall in coloured variations of black, grey, blue, green and red. Four vintage wood-and-glass vitrines, such as Cosmology For The Flesh Is Yours, The Bones Are Ours (2015), contain anthropological fragments such as Ottoman bullet moulds; an image of Turkish troops showing off the severed heads of two Armenians; a photograph of a disembodied Native American head ornamenting the neo-Gothic Woolworth Building (once called the ‘Cathedral of Commerce’) in New York; and dog bones collected from the island of Sivriada, where 80,000 dogs were brought to

starve and die to make way for Istanbul’s modernisation – a mass killing that predated the human genocide. These objects are each accompanied by handwritten notes and drawings on the vitrine’s glass surfaces, detailing their lineage as catalytic touchpoints connecting commerce, gentrification, institutional racism and murder. The ground floor of the Graham Foundation contains an installation with more decorative panels arranged in grids on the floor and stacked against the walls as Rakowitz found them in Cimbiz and fellow craftsmen’s workshops. Copies of art-nouveau panel designs are combined with patterns Rakowitz created using animal bones. Upstairs, more rubbings, plaster casts, image artefacts and animal remains lie on a worktable. These offer insight into the specific source materials and traditional production process used in Turkey, incorporating glue made from pulverised animal bones to strengthen the plaster moulds. The cycle of death is not only applied onto the decorative panels, but also integrated into the very substance allowing them to exist. By teasing apart the ghostly remnants of these structural, social and cultural histories, and revisiting their linkages, Rakowitz resets the path for understanding how such traumatic events and legacies endure. Actions have consequences, but if we want to build a better future for ourselves and learn from the disgraces of history, this is something that we, as humans, must not forget. Arielle Bier

The Flesh Is Yours, The Bones Are Ours (detail), 2016, installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: RCH/EKH. Courtesy the Graham Foundation and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

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Ed Ruscha Ribbon Words Edward Tyler Nahem, New York 6 May – 1 July AUTOMATIC PUSSY. Or SKYTOWN 3 FORKS QUIT EYE CHOP. Or LIQUIDS POLICY PALM. Or, my favourite, CYCLE ULTRA OXIDES. These are words from Ed Ruscha’s Ribbon Words drawings, each word a drawing unto itself. The combinations aren’t Ruscha’s but Dieter Buchhart’s, who curated this show at Edward Tyler Nahem and so deserves credit for the combinatorial poetics. One imagines it – the show – is destined to reappear, almost fully formed, in some future Ruscha retrospective, gathering as it does more than 40 of the artist’s word-drawings dating from 1966 to 1973. ‘Poetics’ is a key term, or problem, that Ruscha has always contended with, because he has never simply offered words alone – when he offers words, and not, say, books, photographs or stains; or books of photographs, or photographs of stains – but words thickened up by paint and pigment, or in closeup, or given dimension, as he does in this series of drawings, by rendering the words as if they were constructed from a band of some kind of tape

(masking?) or ribbon (of paper?) that has been bent and folded to form letters. Which isn’t entirely true. The earliest works in the show, AUTOMATIC and PUSSY (both 1966) don’t appear as trompe l’oeil ribbons, but as single lines of script, yet they don’t look as if they have been simply written either. For example, the dark graphite script of PUSSY is thick against its gradient of grey background; it has been rendered, or drawn, as in ‘drawn out’ – attention, in other words, has been paid. AUTOMATIC is more awkward, its script more handwritten, or handmade, and less well looped. PUSSY could have been machined, but ironically, AUTOMATIC could not. Almost all of the other words in this series are ribbons that appear as if they are resting upright on a surface, such as a tabletop (whose edges are invisible), so that we see and read the word from above (and often to the left) but get a sense of its dimension from below, because we are seeing what amounts to the bottom of the letters rather than their tops. If nothing else,

rendering the words this way positions us, or situates us, the viewers, in a particular place with respect to the words. It gives them a physicality, which conflicts with their capacity to signify as the words that they are. And that’s the point. Ruscha’s words are never themselves, never transparencies to meaning or significance – this is their poetics. They are at once too alone and too accompanied by extratextual visual incident, at once too much and not enough. ULTRA and CYCLE (both 1970), for example, appear to rest on luminescent pastel surfaces across which they cast shadows (here Ruscha is using gunpowder instead of graphite). CYCLE is rendered a bit larger, and so appears closer to the picture plane, but ULTRA is shown with a lot of room around it, and so there is some distance between us and it, but not so much as to be extreme, which ‘ultra’ would certainly suggest. The word drawings, in other words, are never illustrative, and that’s much of their appeal. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Hollywood, 1970, gunpowder and pastel on paper, 58 × 74 cm. Courtesy the artist and Edward Tyler Nahem, New York

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Radcliffe Bailey Quest Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 28 April – 23 June Upon entering Quest, an exhibition of mixedmedia works and sculptures by black, Atlantabased artist Radcliffe Bailey, and learning from the press release that it’s meant to ‘plumb the depths of American history in an attempt for a fuller understanding of, and a healing from, this shared past’, one has the impulse, especially in the current political climate, to be generous in one’s criticism. The show opens with Rocking (2014), a massive canvas coated in splashes of black paint, purple and blue glitter, and what is best described as moon dust. It serves as a sort of map. Arrows point to names of places such as Georgia, Haiti, Jamaica, Ghana, Spain and the Congo. In the glittery murk, one can make out human footprints and perfectly round orbs that represent the waxing and waning moon. In the centre, a white rock mounted on brackets resembles a human skull unearthed from an archaeological dig. Given the glitter, the map could be described (with tongue in cheek) as a very gay rendering of the transatlantic slave trade; or perhaps a diagram of the disparate roots of the artist’s own family tree. Subsequent works draw comparisons to pop culture in general. 67/68 (2016), a gorgeous diorama in a wooden cabinet, holds an antique

table upon which lies a white fur, a decanter of whiskey, a bottle of Murray & Lanman Florida Water cologne and two cigars on a white enamel ashtray. Next to the table is a bagful of dried palm fronds. On the inside walls are tacked photographs of a Spanish-moss-covered road, the pews in a chapel and an African wood carving. A gallery attendant told me that many of the artefacts and references in the show are personal ones. The diorama could thus memorialise one of Bailey’s forbears, but it could just as easily be a set piece from the 1948 film Key Largo, in which Humphrey Bogart plays a toughtalking Second World War veteran standing up to a bunch of mobsters marooned in the Keys during a hurricane. The point being that the work doesn’t unearth any deeper understanding of the place (Florida) and the time (the late 1960s): it merely recreates a Hollywood fiction, albeit with a black man instead of a white one. Works like Zion Crossing and Mika Flame (both 2016) mine the history of minstrelsy. Known for wearing a top hat and tailcoats, and playing the fool in front of white audiences, the minstrel has all but disappeared from contemporary culture because of its racist origins. In Zion Crossing, a wall-mounted assemblage,

Before Cisero, 2016, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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he is wrapped in a canvas that features the markings of railway tracks; in Mika Flame, his clothing hangs in another cabinet diorama. But what does either work say besides that the minstrel existed, and is a part of a history of which, as a society, we are or should be ashamed? If the show uncovers anything new about American history, it is the intersection of black male identity with that of kitsch. Before Cisero (2016), a mixed-media installation, includes a framed photograph of a black man in earlytwentieth-century garb. Before him, on the ground, is a wooden chest, out of which spills broken green glass, which is beautiful, and matches the flamboyant mood of the glitter in Rocking, and the squares of gold leaf covering the glass on the cabinet in 67/68. Artists such as Rashid Johnson and Rashaad Newsome have utilised kitsch to explore the identity of the black male queer in a culture dominated by hyper-hetero rap stars like Jay Z and Kanye West, who themselves love kitsch, albeit in the form of diamonds, Kardashians and murdered-out Maseratis. What are the roots of kitsch in black male identity? This question is raised, but unexplored, in Bailey’s otherwise staid exhibition of glittering cabinets of little curiosity. Brienne Walsh

Christopher K. Ho Grown Up Art Present Company, New York 13 May – 26 June “Patriarchy is what contemporary art needs,” declares a woman’s Sino-British-accented voice in I Endorse Patriarchy (all works 2016), a twospeaker soundwork that flanks the entrance to Christopher K. Ho’s exhibition Grown Up Art. With a matter-of-fact cadence, she asserts that patriarchy is an effective model “to counter pervasive indeterminacy”, which is here associated, by both the voice and the artist, with the diluted backwash of postmodernism. This sentiment casts unfettered relativism as Grown Up Art’s bête noire. To take a position, according to this work, is a radical, urgent and necessary act in the twenty-first century. The polemic Ho adopts in his show is that fatherhood, and a certain type of patriarchy, could be a model for redirecting politics towards a more socially responsible and desirable reality. In the wilfully didactic Joseph as Model, a six-channel video installation of animations and infographics, Ho projects his vision of patriarchy and how it can serve artistic discourse. In one animation, a pyramid of books, including Twilight (2005), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) and several versions of the Bible, glides by like the opening crawl of Star Wars (1977). In another, Ho collates two opposite representations of fatherhood: Harrison Ford’s in Ender’s Game (2013; duty above all, love for one’s child is relegated) and John Cusack’s in 2012 (2009,

love for one’s child above all, duty is relegated). In a third, we are presented with an organisational diagram that tracks what it identifies as the negative and unintended consequences of postmodernism, such as pluralism, the ‘prosumer’ and, more specific to the field of art, relational aesthetics. The third diagram is visualised as a radiating triangle, and counters the pervasive indeterminacy that birthed pluralism and the prosumer by presenting a tripartite solution founded on pragmatism, responsible subjecthood and reinstitutionalisation. The ostensible randomness of this installation’s subject matter ultimately reveals Ho’s willingness to scour various strata of culture, nimbly moving from critical theory to kitschy pop culture in order to define this new patriarchy. Considering the title of the piece, a direct reference to what the artist describes as the biblical ‘foster father’ of Jesus, who accepted his supportive and compassionate role, the criteria for Ho’s patriarchy are wholeness, discipline and a willingness to work within and for a preadministered system. According to Ho, the deliberate and incremental change enacted by the responsible ‘subject-already-formed’ is more effectual than the oppositional politics of the insurgent ‘subject-in-formation’, which is why the snail becomes Ho’s metaphor of choice. The stained

glass sculptures of Institution stage the gradual metamorphosis of a cube into a snail shell. For Ho, the cube signifies the platonic ideal, the transcendent aspiration of the youthful, romantic genius that the artist and his ‘art dads’ – fledgling artist-fathers who have traded their radical politics for playdates – realise they are no longer (nor were ever). The snail, in turn, produces a golden spiral on its back over a lifetime, a product of earthly pragmatism and patient progress, which Ho, in his affiliated writings on the project, identifies with parental values. Ho marshals subject matter that is alien to, and some might even consider off-limits in, contemporary art: fatherhood, the Bible and belief. Like white privilege, Ho’s exhibition suggests that patriarchy is unavoidable in our world, and the work persuasively proposes a modest form of it as an antidote to indifference or, at the other end of the pendulum swing, reactionary discourse. As global inequality increases and structural racism persists, we could choose to wallow in ambivalence or to insist on revolutionary idealism absent concrete demands. Grown Up Art would have us maintain faith in institutions that we think are worth saving and positively to rework the world through them with diligent and responsible uses of power. Owen Duffy

Institution, 2016, stained glass, palladium leaf, table, drawings and wooden clamps, 732 × 76 × 140 cm. Photo: Mike Garten. Courtesy the artist and Present Company, New York

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Evan Robarts Super Reliable Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York 23 June – 29 July Evan Robarts’s solo show employs materials the artist used between 2011 and 2013 in New York City, when he worked as a building superintendent. With his arsenal of fabric mops, Hydrocal plaster, hoses and linoleum, Robarts presents a series of paintings and two sculptures (all works 2016) that test the elastic functionalities of these materials, transforming their basic characters into figures for the city’s real-estate woes and the tenants of the buildings he looked after. Two works act as a prelude to Robarts’s narrative: The Wave (one of a series of ‘line drawing’ sculptures), and L Train No. 1, a horizontal strip of linoleum tiles on which the artist has drag-painted liquid plaster with a mop. In the former, a rubber hose is coiled through three sheets of tinted glass, the resulting shape mimicking a ‘wave’, presumably a reference to New York’s influx of young creatives and their associated tide of gentrification. A similar theme is picked up in L Train No. 1, where Robarts deploys a river of white plaster to thematise his daily commute home from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The stuttered stops and starts of

paint, indicating clearly Robarts’s movements with the mop, build up a tense energy as we read the canvas from left to right. What starts out as a thick, opaque pool of paint eventually becomes translucent, revealing more and more of the dark panel underneath – an explicit note, perhaps, on the changes in race (from white to people of colour) that are seen on a single L-train ride. Nine luminous abstract paintings of plaster on linoleum tiles surround another of Robarts’s line drawings, titled Broadway Junction. Each painting is titled after an apartment unit designation – Tenant 3R, Tenant 1R, Tenant 1L – and the rote futility of Robarts’s former occupation comes through in the often barely visible footprints that mark the canvases. During the creation of these pieces, Robarts stomped on the tiles, sometimes letting the footprints remain, sometimes immediately mopping thick slops of plaster over them – like a super tirelessly mopping a corridor in which tenant after tenant comes marching through, or rather like the real-estate slumlords who care little about the occupants they ‘clean out’ through evictions and neglect.

Yet there are signs of subtle resistance too: within the tight yet vigorously splashed calligraphic strokes of plaster are corralled blobs of paint that mark areas where the oily linoleum has rejected the mop strokes. Robarts also breaks up the monotony of his singlecolour paintings by, for example, mixing in black, yellow, blue, red and green linoleum tiles in Tenant 1L, or the two pristine and unpainted blue tiles in Tenant 1D. Broadway Junction features two layers of wire-mesh glass (also called ‘security glass’) installed in the centre of the space, which adds to the disruption of Robarts’s mopping routine evident in the canvases. Through these semiwarped windows, we inspect, a little voyeuristically, the figurative outlines of Robarts’s paintings – his ‘tenants’. We are both privy to these individuals’ domestic situations and aware of their entrapment behind the gridded conforms of the glass, which promises just an illusion of security from the gentrification and oppressive routine that is illustrated so portentously in The Wave. Ysabelle Cheung

Tenant 4A, 2016, Hydrocal on linoleum mounted to wood panel, 152 × 122 cm. Courtesy the artist and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York

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Nasreen Mohamedi The Met Breuer, New York 18 March – 5 June The work of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) seems both a textbook example of the complex fusion of intellectual, cultural and personal experience that constitutes international Modernism, and an ideal opportunity, particularly as one of the inaugural offerings at the newly opened Met Breuer, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to demonstrate how it might expand both the museum’s and the public’s understanding of the ‘global’, the ‘local’ and the ‘individual’. Born in Karachi before the partition of the subcontinent and raised in Bombay, Mohamedi followed a degree course at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London between 1954 and 1957, and studied printmaking in Paris during the early 1960s. She travelled extensively in the Gulf (her family maintained a business in Bahrain); spent time at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, a centre of the avant-garde in Bombay; and taught at the prestigious Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda from 1972 until 1988. She worked almost exclusively on paper and predominantly in greys and blacks. During the 1960s she made drawings and watercolours in which spidery lines articulate plantlike forms, or soft-edged planes abut and overlap.

The influence of Paul Klee and Henri Michaux, as well as of Indian painter V.S. Gaitonde, with whom she was close, is clear. In 1970 she began drawing vertical and diagonal lines across horizontal registers, creating complex illusions of spatial rhythms and perspectival shifts. In later works, parallel lines, often on the diagonal, appear to float in an indeterminate pictorial space. Mohamedi’s break into geometric abstraction was sudden and anomalous, especially in India, where modern art was mostly figurative. Her work is clearly self-referential and personal – with particular pathos, as she suffered from Huntington’s disease and struggled to draw with precision. Any resemblance to ‘Western’ minimalism seems to be coincidental. Eschewing social and geographic clichés of centre and periphery, the Met survey presents the oeuvre in corridorlike spaces with wall texts emphasising its chronological and formal development, arguing, in effect, that it must be taken on its own terms. Those terms are set not only by the work’s physical presence but also by its context. While Mohamedi, according to several catalogue essays, spoke little about her art and left little archival material, she did

keep diaries rich in clues as to her wide-ranging erudition and personal spirituality (she was widely read in European philosophy and Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic religious texts). Entries include mentions of the Zen gardens of Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, and of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Irwin, as well as aphoristic snippets such as ‘full moon a perfect circle complete serenity’. She also took photographs of, among other subjects, desert landscapes and Mughal monuments that reveal an intense interest in light and shadow, perspective and line. The catalogue explores some of this material, but aside from a brief reference to Sufism and Islamic aesthetics in an introductory wall text, formalism drives the show. Mohamedi’s photographs are scattered through the galleries and appear more as modifiers for the drawings than as an aesthetically complete and complementary pursuit. Three diaries are also displayed, but in low cases, which makes them difficult to see. Their contents remain almost completely unexplored. These curatorial decisions evince an old-fashioned reading that limits understanding of the work to a small-bore, teleological pursuit of pure geometric abstraction. Joshua Mack

Untitled, c. 1975, ink and graphite on paper, 24 × 24 cm. Sikander and Hydari Collection

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Chelsea Culprit Miss Universe Yautepec, Mexico City 7 July – 9 September Chelsea Culprit’s Miss Universe reimagines the titular parade of competitive objectification as the psychic mise-en-scène of a strip-club locker room, strewn with all the defences, reconciliations and intimacies needed to survive the pressure to perform. In paintings and larger-than-life sculptures of backstage dancers in thongs and bras, Culprit works to dismantle the basic-arithmetic economics of desire: more is more is more. Eschewing the soft-focus of finish-fetish, she presents stubbly figures made of painted cement, high-density foam and sand, with rough skin, thick calves, extra arms and platform dance shoes that while theoretically meant to elevate them, visually weigh them down. Though the women are offstage and indifferent to our gaze, I struggle to see them as liberated figures, even in these moments of locker-room intimacy. A sculpture of an almost faceless woman in a silver plastic dress with ‘tickle-window’ cutouts reclines, endlessly pouring herself a Red Bull through a fountain pump in the can. Titled Tired of Being Tired (all works 2016), her exhaustion defines her. A few feet away, the dwarfed flame of a votive candle flickers in the Elephant Man-like hands of Her Fire, a woman frozen in the act of trying to light herself a menthol cigarette. Behind both women a painting proclaiming GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS mimics a flashing neon sign in

a window covered with tinfoil security bars suggesting a prison or a circuit. Think Peter Halley gone to the porn shop. Using the skin trade as an allegory for labour in general, Miss Universe offers no illusions of a world where women are safe and comfortable to self-actualise as they choose. There’s exhaustion in here, as well as pathos, hunger and confusion. Self-tanner is slathered, lipstick applied, extensions clipped in, caffeine, nicotine, taurine and sugar guzzled and huffed. They may not be performing, but these women are preparing to work. Culprit’s mixed-media paintings on canvas further her exploration of the difficulty in women’s labour politics to have a pizza and eat it too. Rendered in the red colour of peepshow lights, her figures’ limbs are jammed into the corners, taking up all the space of the window-size picture plane with their big colour, furious movement and cheeky jokes. In Double Happiness, a woman with two sets of breasts struggles with chopsticks while attempting to eat a Chinese takeout, the packaging branded with the Chinese logogram for marriage. In Cheeseburger in Paradise we see a contortionist endeavour to eat the Jimmy Buffet pun off the grill menu at every strip joint with a fluorescent ‘Paradise’ sign blinking over the door. Niche preferences and advertisements aside, chimeras of eros generally don’t settle down to a Big Mac or pour themselves a Red

Bull, as their imagined lack of need or agency is crucial to the escapism of the business of fantasy. The presence of fast food in Culprit’s paintings and its detailed rendering as focal point disrupts the spell of the stage by reinforcing her subjects’ humanity via their hunger and their hurriedness. Yet not one of these cement or painted women completes the action she is setting out to do: her cigarette is unlit, they aren’t actually eating, the drink never meets her lips. Is Culprit commenting on the cracks in a system that encourages women to ‘lean in’, yet rewards them with a 21.7 percent pay gap? Is she holding caucus on the Sisyphean effort of just getting by? Or is she simply revelling in the emotional complexity of in-between moments? Miss Universe attempts to tap into the tragedy of a club once the lights have been turned up and the magic blown out, but while Culprit may be showing craft-be-damned four-metre-tall sculptures of strippers, they are more mannerist than grotesque, shocking or even monumental. However, the earnestness with which she recasts her protagonists as unglorified, unsentimental workers trying to get through a shift is her most powerful through-line. They seem to ask: if labour dictates value, and if gender, like labour, is performative work, what is the value of the effort that goes into putting on labour’s performance? Is invisible work worth less just because it’s invisible? Kim Córdova

Fake Twins with Fake Tans (detail), 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: PJ Rountree. Courtesy the artist and Yautepec, Mexico City

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Arquivo Ex Machina Itaú Cultural, São Paulo 16 June – 7 August The 150 archive photographs assembled from institutional depositaries across Latin America at Itaú Cultural arrive at the end of a dialogue between the curators and a host of outside researchers, curators, collectors and artists. Ultimately the works push us to question whose history the collections in which they normally reside seek to catalogue and describe. A set of portraits by Juan L. Muñoz Reyes, dating from 1900, contains all sorts of caricature for example. A Bolivian dwarf is dressed in a succession of traditional local outfits and placed in absurd tableaux, including one in which he is mounted ridiculously on a toy horse. Likewise the ‘intrepid explorer’ pictures from the 1920s by Japanese adventurer Rikio Sugano, seen beadily examining a pineapple on a plantation, and self-consciously contemplating a skull in a looted Nazca graveyard. Here, too, are some of Latin America’s defining twentieth-century moments: a 24-photograph set of highly staged Mexican Revolution images, mainly attributed to Hugo Brehme; and a melancholy series of photographs by the Portuguese photographer João Pina, taken between 2007 and 2012, portraying the lengthy aftermath of Operation Condor (actioned from 1975), in which six South American countries collaborated murderously to rid the region of leftwing opposition, imprisoning, exiling and executing tens of thousands of political dissidents. But the key to Arquivo Ex Machina lies in two sets of photographs, the apparently

straightforward documentary nature of which soon crumbles to be replaced by a sense of surprise and shame. The first, a set of lifesize portraits by José Domingo Laso Acosta, reproduced from an original 1920s collection owned by Ecuador’s ministry of culture, is beautifully backlit on a succession of square columns, and depicts women and young people from Ecuador’s corner of the mighty Amazon region. They stand passively facing the camera, black hair cut short and bowllike, or in fringes for the women, wearing rough-fabric garments or occasionally bare-chested. We peer at them, trying to interpret their expressions; but the faces are unreadable and our gazes bounce back at us blindly. And there’s the rub. They have been industriously catalogued and presented for inspection; and despite the empathy and solidarity we imagine in our twenty-first-century attentions towards them, in truth, we can manage little more, still, than to objectify their otherness. Indigenous peoples exactly like these still inhabit South America’s forests, including a dwindling handful of socalled uncontacted tribes, occasionally glimpsed, alarmed, in aerial or long-lens riverbank photos that are just as perplexing as these. Do we have the right to look at them for our pleasure and stimulation? What does our fondly imagined empathy matter, when deep in the Amazon, Brazil’s Munduruku, for example, are right now in peril, confronting the earth-moving machinery wrecking their rivers and forests?

Adding to the confusion, adjacent to the lightboxes is a set of five photographs by the same photographer, whose works were recuperated by his great-grandson, the artist Coco Laso. They are apparently uncomplicated streetscapes of Quito shot between 1911 and 1922; yet on closer inspection it is possible to see how they have been painstakingly manipulated by their photographer, Laso Acosta, to present a fake version of Ecuador’s capital, in which far from offering up the country’s indigenous people for the colonial gaze, the photographer has simply erased them altogether. Quito is shown as a city populated by bowler-hatted gents and fine ladies in long white dresses. Look closely at the ‘ladies’ and you realise that most are crude manipulations, their flowing gowns nothing more than deceitful scratches onto the plate, obliterating the traditional dress, and presence, of the people of the Ecuadorian Altiplano. Look closer still and you see ghostly presences on the streets: the outlines of indigenous people who have been excised from the images completely, in a ‘work of perfect patriotism… clean and free from those groups… which make everything look ugly’, as the archive inscription reads. The experience of soaking up the vivid presences of the lightbox Indians, on the one hand, and the impact of their sudden, brutal absence – ethnically cleansed, most efficiently, in silver salts on glass – on the other, is confusing, provocative and ultimately sad, or enraging. Claire Rigby

José Domingo Laso Acosta, Plaza del Teatro Sucre – Quito, 1911. Courtesy Archive of the Ministry of Culture and Patrimony of Ecuador, Quito

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Books

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ArtReview

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner Fitzcarraldo Editions, £9.99 (softcover) ‘I live in the space between what I am moved to do and what I can do.’ Thus, the awardwinning poet and acclaimed novelist Ben Lerner neatly describes his vision both of the role of the poet and of the necessary location of the poem itself. With The Hatred of Poetry Lerner joins a long canon of defences, but he presents us with a strategic double-bluff by focusing upon the hatred of the form. This contempt has a paradoxical relationship with the continuing existence of poetry. In fact the essay constitutes partly a ‘defense of our denunciation of it’. The task of the reader of poems must be to strive to read with a ‘perfect contempt’. Let’s be clear: for Lerner, the problem with poetry is poems, not poets. He portrays the poet herself as a presumptuous and tragic figure, unavoidably diminished by marginalisation and the inhuman scale of her transcendent impulse. She is doomed to compromise infinity with finitude in the form of the poem that must be erected within the ‘inflexible laws and logic’ of reality. Poetry cannot breathe in this atmosphere, but poems, like things fallen from a great height to their death, exist to figure the virtuality the poet has perceived. Poets themselves embody this failure. This is the ‘bitter logic’ at the heart of the art, and Lerner makes it clear that ‘Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible’. There is no such thing as a genuine poem, but there are many that floodlight the gap between the actual and the virtual, thus successfully extending ‘a place for the genuine’. The regular pronouncements of the death of poetry serve to emphasise ‘the Utopian ideal of Poetry’ by bemoaning the poem’s lack

of direct connectivity with this ideal. It becomes the responsibility of the poet and the reader to ‘burn the actual off the virtual like fog’. After presenting Plato’s exile of the poet from the Republic to make way for philosophy, Lerner catalogues various groups of poetry haters, and we see their grumpy faces stepping up each in turn. One such group is the ‘get a real job’ camp, who disdain the uselessness of poetry, saying, ‘Do actual work instead of virtual work’. There is ‘a cultural anxiety about our capacity for alternative making’, and as such, poets are hard for society to visualise. Thank goodness Lerner is writing novels too. The poet’s ‘real job’, if she takes this advice, is of course teaching. In teaching she is further resented because the transference of such learning cannot be properly measured, and universities themselves get the blame for the nonuniversality of poetry by making their poets self-conscious about generalisation. Lerner conducts some light and logical poetic analysis of poems that are reflexive about contempt. Among the poets that hit the spot are those that fall silent. Oppen and Rimbaud famously quit writing (Oppen returned to the art stoically: ‘Because I am not silent, the poems are bad’). Poems structured almost into being something else enact Lerner’s personal ‘doing what I can do’. Claudia Rankine’s lengthy depersonalised antilyric form accesses virtuality in the ‘felt unavailability of the traditional lyric’. Charles Olson sidesteps the abject matter of the poem itself by representing it with virgules ‘/’, making it appear to hover ekphrastically within

another medium. Dickinson’s ‘weird’ dissonance and her ‘–’ dashes seem to represent the very point of sublimation, of disappearance into the ideal. ‘The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise –’ Lerner quotes the words of the poet protagonist of his novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) twice in full: ‘I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them in quoted prose, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem.’ Lerner is most comfortable making his key points metaphorically, and eventually his prose narrative voice takes over and we finish up with something similar to the experience of his fiction: what he’s really getting at is the experience of the moment when the lights go down before the cinema presentation or when a firefly dances over a bad outdoor orchestra. These relatively expansive last pages actually feel like a prelude for something larger. A shorter version of this work first appeared as a Diary in the London Review of Books, and there remains an appropriate sense that it will continue to grow now that he has got past the preliminary business of silencing the haters. The Hatred of Poetry is a generous and accessible ‘essay’ into a specific point of detail for Lerner, who cherrypicks from academic texts like the practitioner he is. In his ‘bitter logic’ we are presented with something undeniable and well and truly alive about poetry that he simply feels readers and detractors really should know about: guys, this is the key issue for #poetry #today (for me). Ian Whitfield

Towards a Conceptual Militancy by Mike Watson Zero Books, £9.99 / $14.95 (softcover) For critic and theorist Mike Watson (a frequent contributor to this magazine), art offers a final, desperate lifeline out of a system where capital and surveillance have combined to enslave the world’s human inhabitants. His calm argument may shock those of us focused on the compelling sideshow of current events: underlying it all is immutable, unanswerable capital. Reading Towards a Conceptual Militancy is a bit like heading into the cinema to escape summer’s midday heat, finding oneself in an engrossing mindfuck of a film about the end of the world and then, at the end, instead of riding the credits gently back to the present, having to search a newly

altered reality for relief. This relief is to be found in the author’s distinctive strain of fatalism, a not-joyless resignation that says we are beyond saving, but that we have to try something, and that that something is art. Art, whose effectiveness, if any, will stem from its very uselessness. If Duchamp can point at a urinal and declare, ‘This is art’, what’s to stop us from declaring ourselves, ‘spontaneously and in the moment’, as free political subjects? For one, it’s entirely contrary to fact, given the system we are prisoner to. Now how about we make this declaration as an art statement, one not subject to ‘actual freedom existing in reality’? For Watson,

September 2016

conceptual militancy is the only way ‘to question the system that taught us to think’: to use art’s powers of deception and irrationality to glimpse the illusion of another reality, and from that fleeting insight to think our way to actual political freedom. The author presents this strategy and the immediacy of its deployment as key departures from failed leftist gambits of the past, with their promises of deliverance from the grips of capital indefinitely delayed. Conceptual militancy will fail as well, Watson almost cheerfully admits, but because we will have expected it to fail, we’ll find it easier to get up, dust ourselves off and try again. David Terrien

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Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson Verso, £12.99 (hardcover) The world of Marxist literary criticism is not one this reviewer would normally dive into for fun. Few people would. Unless someone pushed them. Yet this combination of one of the most influential theorists of the postmodern writing about the late, greatest American crime writer has much to offer. And for those of you still wearing a grimace, this is a slim volume. Moreover, it’s of interest to those of us who claim, as does anyone who riffles through a magazine like this one, to be visually minded, because the nature of its subject – detection – is fundamentally about perception (most prosaically of clues, traces, etc). Fredric Jameson’s focus then is on how Raymond Chandler’s characters see, how they make themselves seen and, more broadly, how we manipulate (as artist/author or viewer/ reader, through, for example, deceptions and red herrings) what we show the world. And yes, Jameson figures Chandler to be operating in an embryonic surveillance culture. But more interestingly, the focus on perception allows

Jameson to present Chandler as ‘the painter of American life’: for, in addition to the above, Jameson notes that Chandler’s stories are constructed from fragmentary scenes, rather than the grand arching narratives of great literature. Edward Hopper, Pop art (experience informed by ‘cultural and ideological objects’ rather than by experience itself) and Monet (for his serial paintings of haystacks and cathedrals – the view of objects and environments at a variety of times and from a variety of perspectives) are invoked as models. If all that evoking of types makes Jameson’s Chandler sound like a writer who works to formulas, the theorist is more than OK with that. It’s not a result of a lack of imagination, Jameson argues, but rather a reflection of a burgeoning consumer society that – in the empty spaces and objects with which it surrounded itself – fundamentally suffered from a lack of imagination itself. And the tricky task of highlighting that emptiness while nevertheless orchestrating the thrills, shocks and spills we expect from

a crime novel, Jameson argues, is something at which Chandler excelled. Naturally, Jameson’s text, a synthesis of previous texts on Chandler written between 1970 and 1993, contains many of the themes at which Jameson himself excels: an analysis of culture as something that reveals itself through space rather than over time, the interrogation of style from the viewpoint of social history and the problematics of reading an eroded distinction between public and private space. Oh yes, and there are a number of passages within Jameson’s text itself that no one would call an easy read. Nevertheless, in its analysis of matters such as nostalgia, genre and codes, the distinctions between the common mass and the uncommon elite, and perhaps most importantly, how art can depict a lived experience that is increasingly mediated rather than lived in any traditional sense, Jameson delivers his readers something Chandler himself always aimed to give his audience: ‘something other (and better) than what they wanted’. Mark Rappolt

Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint Edited by Defne Ayas Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, £15 (softcover) Qiu Zhijie’s Tattoo 1 (1994), in which the artist is photographed with the Chinese character for ‘no’ painted in red ink across his body and onto the wall behind him, has become one of the most iconic works of contemporary Chinese art. The latest stage in the artist’s exploration of signs, codes and systems is Qiu’s ink-based art maps, which reimagine domains in which boundaries between objective and subjective, past and present, fictional and real are wiped away. But just as cartography can never achieve complete objectivity, neither are Qiu’s art maps based entirely on his wilful artistic subjectivity. Instead he pursues a solid representation of universal values and realities. Consisting of four texts, this booklet, recently published in Europe and out this month in the US, builds on Qiu’s 2012 exhibition at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, in order to focus attention on four of the artist’s maps, viewed in detail and from a variety of angles and methodologies. Art historian Eugene Y. Wang contextualises The Map of Reactivation against a rich historical background, followed by an article from curator Charles Esche that compares The Map

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of Utopia with the type of map one usually sees in science-fantasy literature. Curator Chus Martínez dialectically analyses The Map of Total Art with knowledge, empathy and language. The book ends with a personal take from the artist duo Bik Van der Pol, who narrate a story that connects The Map of Inter-city Pavilion, an unnamed collector and that collector’s community. It is difficult to discuss Qiu’s works without mentioning the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, both in reference to the all-encompassing worlds he maps and to his work as chief curator for the 9th Shanghai Biennale, in 2012, where his Map of Reactivation became the conceptual basis for the entire exhibition. Indeed, ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ might be the most frequently used word in this book (well, after ‘Qiu Zhijie’ and ‘map’). And yet none of the four maps the writers consider is rendered in its totality (a foldout poster of a fifth map, The Map of the Third World, is included); rather, we are presented with fragments accompanying the analytical texts, with the result that any overarching narratives are cut up. Moreover, as hard as it apparently is to avoid invoking the word gesamtkunstwerk, it is, on the evidence

ArtReview

here, even harder to come up with anything new to say about its application. Even the seemingly rebellious ‘anti-gesamtkunstwerk’ methodology proposed by Wang is not so much a new notion as a new name for an old thing. In an introductory text, Defne Ayas, director of Witte de With, acknowledges the inherent awkwardness of such a Western reading of Chinese contemporary art and the paradox of an art market that desires Chinese art to be both specific and universal at the same time. And yet in many ways Qiu is the ideal type of Chinese artist for the Witte de With or other institutions and biennials. The universality embedded in his works (in spite of the Chinese references they contain), and his mild political stances (if there are any), make him a safe choice both inside and outside China. Just as a construction such as ‘anti-gesamtkunstwerk’ can never separate itself from the thing against which it is defined, the exhibition and the book never overcome the problems mentioned above, but in this case, perhaps that is a consequence of the very nature and methodology of Qiu’s works (and of course the global art market at large). Shuang Li

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For more on Emma Talbot, see overleaf

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Contributors

Kiki Mazzucchelli is an independent curator, editor and writer working in São Paulo and London. She is currently a member of the curatorial team for SITElines.2016: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas at SITE Santa Fe, which runs through 8 January. This month she writes on the work of Luiz Roque. George Stolz is an independent critic and curator based in New York and Madrid. This month he profiles the work of Ignasi Aballí. Oliver Basciano is editor (international) across ArtReview and ArtReview Asia. He sits on the board of trustees at the Elephant Trust and in 2017 he will chair the jury of the Artes Mundi 7 art prize. This month he writes on the work of Barrão and interviews Jochen Volz.

Sarah Jilani is a British-Turkish freelance writer and critic based in London and Istanbul. Her byline has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Economist and The Independent. An MSt graduate of the University of Oxford, she is also an independent researcher in postcolonial film and literature. This month she analyses the artistic and political legacy of Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests. Pat Kilgore is a rootless New York-born art photographer (with exhibitions in New York and Rio de Janeiro) now living in Rio. For him photography is not only a way to see the world but a way to see the ways of seeing the world. He is continually looking for the meaning of it all in the forests of Brazil. This month he photographs Barrão.

Contributing Writers Karen Archey, Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Arielle Bier, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Ysabelle Cheung, Matthew Collings, Kim Córdova, Owen Duffy, Louisa Elderton, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Sarah Jilani, Shuang Li, Maria Lind, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Claire Rigby, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Ed Schad, Laura Smith, Raimar Stange, George Stolz, Ben Street, Dominic van den Boogerd, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Ian Whitfield Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Pat Kilgore, Emma Talbot, Anna Vickery

Emma Talbot (preceding pages)

“I don’t refer to myself as a comics artist,” Emma Talbot explains. “But I’m happy with the way my work crosses over various boundaries between languages – graphic narrative, painting, sculpture – that might have been categorised more tightly in the past.” Among her work, Talbot’s paintings of multiple images and her accompanying texts record the imaginative workings of her mind’s eye and have led the London-based artist to national and international exhibitions and acclaim. As well as exhibiting in this year’s John Moores Painting Prize exhibition and making the shortlist of the 2016 MAC International Ulster Bank Prize, Talbot was invited to participate in a group show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, entitled Comic Tragics: The Exploding Language of Contemporary Comic Art, for works by nine narrative artists that move ‘beyond the super hero to the super personal’. After suffering a major loss, Emma Talbot experimented in 2008 with making architectural cutaways of several scenes on the same canvas, reconnecting to her childhood drawings. Like an opened doll’s house, the facade of a house or apartment block is stripped away, its exposed floors of rooms resembling rows of panels, its storeys suggesting stories. This diagrammatic device has been applied by, among others, Chris Ware in Building Stories (2012), Will Eisner before him

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in The Spirit (1940–52), harking back as early as William Heath’s cartooning in 1825–6 for The Glasgow Looking Glass. Talbot titled one such multipanelled painting Story Without Words, because this story was too painful to express in text. “I conveyed two stories concurrently, one of me and my husband meeting, becoming parents and looking after our sons, and the other of him getting ill and dying.” This death, Talbot recalls, affected her life and art fundamentally. “At first, I just couldn't work. I threw away all my paint and paintings. Then I started to make drawings, which were deliberately weedy, and I didn't care what they were like, but I ended up really feeling interested in them. My whole work completely changed. It was actually very liberating, but it was a very painful process.” Adding words evolved from this period when she was making very free, open watercolours on paper, with no expectations of showing them. “I always wrote a lot in secret but was very unconfident about showing anyone text I had written, so it felt brave to be direct and write things in paintings.” The results are mappings of intimacies, sharings of confidences that are nonlinear and nonsequential, in words and pictures, associated but random. Talbot explains: “The texts are equal to the images, but act more like a voiceover of my thoughts running alongside images of

ArtReview

memories.” Talbot often places these visualverbal mixes onto evocative backgrounds, whether her painted versions of domestic carpets or a printed curtain, or currently mostly onto silk fabric. “Whatever mark I make on the surface is made on raw material, so you can't remove it. This brings a built-in immediacy that allows for lots of spontaneity.” ‘Time After Time’, her latest piece, made specially for print in ArtReview, relates to recent experiences with her eldest son, aged seventeen, on the brink of adulthood. For Talbot, “the images are about the journey he has to go on, alone, to become an independent person, and how as a parent I have to stand back, while remembering all the years of love and care in bringing him up as a single parent”. Taking a mother’s perspective, Talbot was struck by the Ndebele tribe’s initiation rituals for boys, who are taken to a secret location in the mountains to undergo various initiations into manhood. While away, their mothers wear headdresses called ‘long tears’. In this piece, Talbot wanted the background painted on paper to suggest tribal patterns, “as well as a mashup mountain of psychedelic and confusing spaces. Oh, and teenage felt-pen doodles.” Talbot reprises these themes, and the title from the Cyndi Lauper song, for her solo show at Petra Rinck Galerie, Düsseldorf, opening in September. Paul Gravett

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ArtReview is printed by The Westdale Press Ltd. Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (ISSN No: 1745-9303, uSpS No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom. The US annual subscription price is $64. Airfreight and mailing in the USA by Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica NY 11431. US Postmaster: Send address changes to ArtReview, Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA An editing error in the summer issue of ArtReview resulted in the partial misattribution of a quote in Jonathan T.D. Neil’s Point of View. The following are the words of the author, not those of Scott Hamrah: ‘I’m sure Brooklynites guffaw at this as they ride the L train to a Straub and Huillet screening in the basement of an old Polish butcher, where they will eat organic edamame grown on a tenement rooftop in Queens, drink craft beer and scratch their beards.’

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September 2016

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A Curator Writes September 2016 “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…’” It’s not often that one hears Kenny Schachter intone Yeats, I think, as I discreetly tuck into my starter of escargot and oak leaf. However, on reflection, I have to admit this is exactly the type of provocation I had in mind when I had the idea of a gathering – perhaps a salon, even – that would bring together leading curators and writers to do readings in response to the crisis that is Brexit. My humble home the Hôtel de Rambouillet, me the Catherine de Vivonne of Catford. “‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’” There is a polite round of applause. I polish off a snail, push my seat back and rise. “Thank you, Kenny…” “Kenneth,” the louche writer and private dealer corrects. “I’ve changed my name on Facebook and now I’m going to do it IRL.” “Quite so,” I reply and applaud him for ten seconds. After a suitable pause I continue speaking. A Slav or a Tatar sighs. “And now, for my reading.” I very deliberately take off my Gieves & Hawkes linen jacket to reveal a T-shirt printed with the imagery of one of Wolfgang Tillmans’s anti-Brexit posters. I draw my hand slowly from my right breast to my left breast across the words. “No man is an island,” I intone gravely. Many of the group put down their snails and applaud, although I notice Hans Ulrich Obrist grimace: an expression worthy of Caravaggio’s Medusa. Beneath his grey jacket with subtle pinstripes I think I can spy a different Wolfgang tee. Then I gesture down to the second line and simply mouth the words, “No country by itself.” Several of the curators stand up to shout the words and applaud. I think Maria Lind might be weeping. Tino Sehgal is making notes. As I take my seat, Kasper König rises to his feet. “I shall now read Liam Gillick’s article on Brexit, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in early July. In the spirit of what the British public have voted for –” there is a slight pause as the great man extracts some oak leaf from between his teeth “– I shall read it in English.” I take a large gulp of the Château Lamothe-Cissac 2009 and close my eyes gently as he begins. My pleasant doze is rudely interrupted after what seems a few seconds by Kasper whacking me round the chops. “This relationship, however, is not dialectical!” “Too right, Kasper, you never buy me flowers!” I blurt out. He stares at me hard. I notice the other curators and writers clapping and realise he must have come to the end of Gillick’s crucial text. “So what Gillick is saying is that interventions like Wolfie’s were ultimately irrelevant?” asks the handsome young director of Nottingham Contemporary. His eyes shine bright. I stumble to my feet again. “Nonsense! Wolfgang’s posters were vital,” I counter, sticking my chest forward once more to highlight the profound words on my shirt.

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“I put a number of them up in the window of my flat in Bloomsbury. And the editor (international) of my magazine tells me that many were seen around Broadway Market…” God, I haven’t been this pumped up since that night after the Pattaya Biennale back in 2013. “I saw one in the Marksman!” interjects the enthusiastic new curator from the Whitechapel Gallery. “Exactement!” I add. “I think Gillick’s assertion that the British working class do not think along the same lines as Nicolaus Schafhausen is key,” says the director of Modern Art Oxford. “But does anyone think along the lines of Schafhausen?” I plead. “Enough of this,” shouts König. He lunges at me, upsetting the plates of freshly baked madeleines that have been served up during my slumber. “Watch the madeleines, you oaf!” I yell. But it is too late. König is upon me. “You can’t do much in a stuffed shirt!” he yells, tugging at the T-shirt. In a terrible moment of clarity, I recognise the line as the precursor to the naked wrestling scene in Ken Russell’s searing 1969 romance, Women in Love. But instead of tearing off his clothes or – thankfully – ripping any of mine, the great curator gets out a marker pen that he has previously secreted about his midriff and scrawls across my T-shirt. “Sehr gut!” he says after a while and gets up. He grabs me by my nape and somewhat indecorously hauls me up. “Esteemed colleagues, friends, foes…” He fixes Francesco Bonami with a steely look, who in response chews a piece of miniature sponge cake slowly and with purpose. “I give you the dialectical!” I look down at my T-shirt. König has scrawled ‘Brexit’ over Wolfie’s fine – but I now realise, idealistic – words. König and I both bow in all directions with deliberately unsynchronised movements to emphasise the neverending dialectical process. The room bursts into wild applause. I pop a madeleine into my mouth and reflect that the struggle has only just begun. I. Kurator

INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR OF BOGOTÁ OCTOBER 27 - 30, 2016 ARTBO.CO

Contents Art Previewed

Art Featured

Art Reviewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 37

Barrão by Oliver Basciano 76

Exhibitions 118

Points of View by Oliver Basciano, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Jonathan Grossmalerman 45

Luiz Roque by Kiki Mazzucchelli 84

Osiris, god of the dead, on the return of painting Interview by Matthew Collings 54 Jochen Volz Interview by Oliver Basciano 58

Three Years On: The Artistic Legacy of Istanbul’s Gezi Park Protests by Sarah Jilani 88 Protest, Not Profit by Raimar Stange 94 Ignasi Aballí by George Stolz 100 Bosco Sodi by Mark Rappolt 108

9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag, by Martin Herbert Pure Fiction, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel ¿Cómo te voy a olvidar?, by Robert Barry Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, by Kimberly Bradley Basim Magdy, by Louisa Elderton Olga Balema, by Dominic van den Boogerd Superstudio, by Mike Watson Francesco Vezzoli, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Kirill Glushchenko, by Helen Sumpter Ian Cheng, by Karen Archey Liverpool Biennial 2016, by Helen Sumpter The Science of Imaginary Solutions, by Ben Street Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, by Louise Darblay Jim Hodges, by Sean Ashton Making & Unmaking, by Laura Smith This Is A Voice, by Fi Churchman Paul Lee, by Larry Wilcox Neïl Beloufa, by Andrew Berardini Benjamin Carlson, by Jonathan Griffin Michael Rakowitz, by Arielle Bier Ed Ruscha, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Radcliffe Bailey, by Brienne Walsh Christopher K. Ho, by Owen Duffy Evan Robarts, by Ysabelle Cheung Nasreen Mohamedi, by Joshua Mack Chelsea Culprit, by Kim Córdova Arquivo Ex Machina, by Claire Rigby

Books 152 The Hatred of Poetry, by Ben Lerner Towards a Conceptual Militancy, by Mike Watson Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, by Fredric Jameson Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint, edited by Defne Ayas

THE STRIP 158 A CURATOR WRITES 162