ArtReview Summer 2018

Gernot Wieland on the couch

Bruce Nauman 0n the fence Plus Luc Tuymans, Mexican Macabre, Susan Cianciolo

LONDON Angela de la Cruz Bare 27 Bell Street

Carol Bove 8 June–4 August 2018

David Zwirner London

São Paulo Adriano Costa Marcelo Cipis 26/05 – 28/07 2018

Mend e s Wood DM Brussels

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil

Lucas Arruda 08/06 – 21/07 2018

13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info@mendeswooddm.com Image: Lucas Arruda

AdriAn Ghenie “JunGles in PAris” PAris MArAis June 2018 roPAc.net

london PAris sAlZBurG

FRANZ WEST Sisyphos Sculptures

Sisyphos V, 2002 © Archiv Franz West

Gagosian London

ArtReview vol 70 no 5 Summer 2018

Unspeakable things In Stella Gibbons’s 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm, a parody of the then fashionable ‘loam and lovechild’ genre, the constant warning of an ageing aunt is that she saw ‘something nasty in the woodshed’. The ‘something nasty’ is never determined, but becomes symbolic of the unspoken fears, prejudices and festering secrets of the other characters. ArtReview is not going to get totally Freudian on you in this issue (even though there is an image of a donkey undergoing analysis on the cover, a still from a filmwork by Berlin-based Austrian artist Gernot Weiland) but it is using this issue of the magazine to think on the unspeakable (you have been warned).

Of course one could claim that every issue of ArtReview concerns the unspeakable, given that art’s chief remit, arguably, is the visualisation or materialisation of ideas for which words do not suffice (which will often make the art critic’s job a tricky one, but save the sympathy). In the first of two profiles of Bruce Nauman (which ArtReview is publishing in this and its October issue), Martin Herbert discusses the American artist’s 1999 video Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), a work which, in part, ruminates on the artwork as symbolic illustration of a greater idea (though, this being Nauman, the work is as much about what it says it’s about – the artist setting a good corner for a fence – as it is allegory or metaphor). ‘Art can really be anything and that’s what makes it so ticklishly anterior to language’, Herbert notes. The underpinning of linguistic and temporal structure falls away completely in Sanguine / Bloedrood, a new exhibition of Old Masters and contemporary works, curated by Luc Tuymans and

Hidden upstairs

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aimed at redefining the Baroque as the first global art movement. In contrast to the prevailing vogue, the exhibition is designed to be an experience not an essay.

Or at least this is the idea. Nonetheless J.J. Charlesworth got the Belgian painter to describe in words how he aimed at creating a show that sought to promote repulsion and attraction and more generally a sense of instinctive emotion over argument and narrative, while combining works by artists as diverse as Francisco de Zurbarán, Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Zhang Enli and Takashi Murakami.

If Tuymans is taking a theme out of time, then Wieland’s comically anxious work in film and performance looks at the effects of history, memory, tradition and ritual in creating the apparatus by which human power is transmitted and by which it alienates all forms of otherness and ultimately itself.

Fear is the emotion that comes to the fore in Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis’s essay on the horrifying ‘creativity’ of narco violence in her native country.

Recounting the spectacular and gruesome gestures made by drug gangs, as they seek ever-increasingly outlandish methods of murder to ward off would-be criminal rivals, Aridjis asks whether artists could or should ever compete in this game of mawkish aesthetic one-upmanship. As a society, it is easiest to hide what disgusts us: in urbanism this is done literally, by routing sewage underground.

Yet what happens, artist Aaron Angell asks, when the repulsive collected effluent of a city is in turn collected by a museum and put on display in the shape of a so-called ‘fatberg’? What does it say about museum audiences when the filthy exhibit becomes popular? The history of art is as much a history of the ugly as it is the beautiful. In this issue we’ve got one eye on art’s underbelly. ArtReview

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Jean Dubuffet Théâtres de mémoire Through June 29, 2018

510 West 25th Street

NEW YORK

Prabhavathi Meppayil b/seven eighths June 8 – August 11, 2018

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

Claudio Abate

Arte Povera - Roman art scene Curated by Natacha Carron

Claudio Abate, Jannis Kounellis. Cavalli, 1969 Silver print, printed in 2007 120 x 150 cm - 47 1/4 x 59 inches Edition of 7

Matthieu Ronsse

A vine wound around the vaulted grotto ( B S ° )

the early bird catches the worm, 2018 Oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 inches

The butt of the eagle, 2018 Oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 inches

ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS

May 24 — July 28, 2018

GaLeRia FiLoMena SoaReS

ARco Lisboa, booth G01, 17—20.05

10.05—08.09.2018

SLaTeR BRadLey

Ketu

10.05—08.09.2018

LeTícia RaMoS

A GRANDe ONDA

from March—onwards

dan GRahaM

— DAN’s WORlD

Rooftop, Lisbon (PT)

T. +351 218624122/3 | gfilomenasoares@mail.telepac.pt

Rua da Manutenção, 80 | 1900-321 Lisbon | Portugal www.gfilomenasoares.com

Memories of Underdevelopment Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960–1985

Thomaz Farkas, Populares sobre cobertura do palácio do Congresso Nacional no dia da inauguração de Brasília, 1960. Courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles. © Thomaz Farkas / Instituto Moreira Salles Collections

22.MAR.–09.SEP.2018 � MUSEO JUMEX

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA 303, COLONIA GRANADA, MEXICO CITY

PANELS AND SYMPOSIUM: FUNDACIONJUMEX.ORG

Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960-1985 is co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Museo Jumex, with additional assistance from Museo de Arte de Lima. Lead support is provided through grants from the Getty Foundation. Additional support provided through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This project has received generous underwriting support from Maryanne and Irwin Pfister and the LLWW Foundation.

让 - 米歇尔·阿尔贝罗拉 Jean-Michel Alberola

大卫·林奇 David Lynch

克劳迪娅·安杜哈尔 Claudia Andujar

伊萨贝尔·门德斯·达·库尼亚 Isabel Mendes da Cunha

克里斯蒂安·波尔坦斯基 Christian Boltanski

亚历山德罗·门迪尼 Alessandro Mendini

弗雷德里克·布吕利·布瓦布雷 Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

墨比斯 Mœbius

蔡国强 Cai Guo-Qiang

森山大道 Moriyama Daido

马克·库蒂里耶 Marc Couturier

罗恩·穆克 Ron Mueck

雷蒙·德巴东 Raymond Depardon 迪 勒尔·斯科菲帝欧 + 仁弗洛设计事务所 Diller Scofidio + Renfro 高山 Gao Shan

马克·纽森 Marc Newson 克洛迪娜·努加雷 Claudine Nougaret 让 - 米歇尔·奥托涅尔 Jean-Michel Othoniel

胡柳 Hu Liu

阿尔塔瓦兹德·佩雷尚 Artavazd Peleshyan

黄永砯 Huang Yong Ping

胡安娜·玛尔塔·罗达斯 Juana Marta Rodas

胡利娅·伊西德雷兹 Julia Isidrez

谢里·桑巴 Chéri Samba

北野武 / ビートたけし Beat Takeshi Kitano

萨拉·施 Sarah Sze

伯尼·克劳斯 Bernie Krause

横尾忠则 Yokoo Tadanori

李永斌 Li Yongbin

联合视觉艺术家协会 United Visual Artists

Art Previewed

Previews

by Martin Herbert 29

Susan Cianciolo Interview by Ross Simonini 44

Under the Paving Stones: Brussels

by J.J. Charlesworth 37

Horror Show

by Christian Viveros-Fauné 51

Art Featured

Bruce Nauman

by Martin Herbert 66

Luc Tuymans on the Baroque Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 82

Mexican Macabre

by Chloe Aridjis 72

Gernot Wieland

by Mark Rappolt 87

The Fatberg

by Aaron Angell 78

page 82 Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask (detail), 2014, video installation, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Hauser & Wirth, London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, and Anna Lena Films, Paris

Summer 2018

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Art Reviewed

Yoshua Okón, by Jonathan Griffin Tyler Coburn, by Jeppe Ugelvig Charles Atlas, by Sam Korman Harmony Hammond, by Ashton Cooper imannam, by Sam Steverlynck Luciana Lamothe, by John Quin Kudzanai Chiurai, by Matthew Blackman

Exhibitions 104 Adrian Piper, by Cat Kron Agnès Varda, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Latifa Echakhch, by Louise Darblay EVA International, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Becky Beasley, by Mark Prince Let the River Flow. The Sovereign Will and the Making of a New Worldliness,

by Nathaniel Budzinski Torsten Andersson, by Stefanie Hessler Dineo Seshee Bopape, by Oliver Basciano Birgit Jürgenssen, by Skye Sherwin Orgasmic Streaming Organic Gardening Electroculture,

by Lucy Reynolds Rose Wylie, by Kathryn Lloyd Ian White, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, by Oliver Basciano

Books 126 Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent, by Owen Hatherley Sabrina, by Nick Drnaso Infinite Resignation, by Eugene Thacker Michel Majerus: Notizen. Notes 1995, edited by Brigitte Franzen THE STRIP 130 A CURATOR WRITES 134

page 104 Latifa Echakhch, Clown aux masques, 2018, video, colour, sound, 4 min 34 sec. © the artist. Courtesy Kamel Mennour, Paris & London, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan & New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York, and Dvir Gallery, Brussels & Tel Aviv

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ArtReview

YVES KLEIN Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 5), 1962 Estimate £5,500,000–7,500,000

Contemporary Art Evening Auction London 26 June 2018

Viewing 22 – 26 June 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5744 ALEX.BRANCZIK@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYART © THE ESTATE OF YVES KLEIN C/O DACS, LONDON 2018

DOWNLOAD SOTHEBY’S APP FOLLOW US @SOTHEBYS #SOTHEBYSCONTEMPORARY

www.schaulager.org

Organized by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bruce Nauman, Green Horses, 1988, Purchased jointly by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, with funds from the Bequest of Arthur B. Michael, by exchange; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with funds from the Director‘s Discretionary Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee, 2007, Photo: Ron Amstutz © Bruce Nauman / 2018, ProLitteris, Zurich

Art Previewed

is to run into the woods 27

M I LA N PALA Z ZO REA L E 1 3 JU LY 3 0 SEP TEM BE R 2 0 1 8 C URATED BY M ARCO M E NEGUZ ZO

AN EXHIBITION

M E D I A PA RT N E R

Previewed The 12th edition of Manifesta, presented in Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Mirjam Varadinis, Palermo, is unlikely to be as contentious as Andrés Jaque and Bregtje van der Haak – the city some of its predecessors: at the 2014 edition in is going to function as a ‘laboratory’ (yes, another St Petersburg the Russian government effecone) for reckoning how we might all rub along tively censored the show; the 2006 effort to stage on a species-wide level. Spread across Palermo, the self-styled ‘nomadic biennial’ on both sides 30 commissioned works will look at coexistence in the face of cultural difference and – under of the Green Line in Cyprus was cancelled at the broiling sun – climate change, by artists the 11th hour. In terms of edginess, the Sicilian including Maria Thereza Alves, John Gerrard, capital isn’t even a mafia stronghold any more, Marinella Senatore and Cooking Sections. nor will that garish modern legacy be the focus 1 of Manifesta 12. Instead Palermo was chosen Sicily. Cooking. There’s a connection here, but we can’t quite make it. for emblematising current (fraught) questions Crank up Frank Zappa’s 1986 Let’s Move concerning migration and the global polis, to Cleveland, because the Ohio city has gotten since it has been sequentially subjugated by 2 its own expo, the FRONT International: almost every major European civilisation, Cleveland Triennial. (We know of no song moulded by migrants. Hosting The Planetary called Let’s Visit Cleveland Every Three Years.)

Garden. Cultivating Coexistence – cocurated by

In fact the inaugural edition, An American City: Eleven Cultural Exercises, artistic-directed by powerhouse Midwesterner and artist/writer/ curator Michelle Grabner (former codirector Jens Hoffmann left under a cloud last year), goes beyond Cleveland, extending to nearby Akron and Oberlin. The focus appears to be on art as unifying force, in a part of a deeply divided America far from the so-called coastal elites.

That’s apparently going to be explored via solo projects by artists including Barbara Bloom, Kerry James Marshall, Maryam Jafri and Gerard Byrne, a programme called ‘The City as Readymade’ that tours and explores consequential buildings and illuminates the city’s cultural history, a recreation of a 1973 mural by Clevelander Julian Stanczak, as well as group

1 Representation of the concept for Manifesta 12 as illustrated through Francesco Lojacono’s Veduta di Palermo, 1875. Courtesy OMA

2 Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife (still), 2015, 3D motion picture, DCI DCP, 14 min 56 sec. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

Summer 2018

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shows, film screenings, all the usual bells and whistles. We’re already excited for 2021, when we can make some terrible ‘back to FRONT’ jokes.

The Berlin Biennale is here again, it being 3 two years since the last one. Curated this time by Gabi Ngcobo and titled, with due credit to Tina Turner and the Mad Max franchise, We don’t need another hero, the 10th edition aims to refract our current moment of ‘collective psychosis’ while boldly promising not to give a coherent reading of it at all, or to suggest, as per the title, that anyone in particular can save us. Instead Ngcobo persuasively asserts that we need ‘different configurations of knowledge and power that enable contradictions and complications’, and she’s engaged 46 artists and collectives – 74 fewer than previous curators DIS employed 4

last time – to specify how, including Dineo Seshee Bopape, Joanna Piotrowska, Lubaina Himid and Basir Mahmood. Meanwhile, familiar venues such as the Akademie der Künste, Kunst-Werke and the Volksbühne theatre are augmented by the ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics in Moabit, where the young artists are moving to these days. But no Thunderdome.

Ibiza is not well known as a hotbed of contemporary art. Prior to the island’s conversion into a clubbing mecca and general holiday destination though, artists long went there – and some still do – to get their heads together, and plenty of artworld types go too. Ibiza notably boasts a first-rate gallery, Parra & Romero (who also operate a space in Madrid), whose current show pairs Stefan Brüggemann and

Luis Camnitzer. The Mexican neoconceptualist (with dashes of Minimalism and Pop) Brüggemann has long worked with language: one of his best-known projects being a lengthy list of imaginary, or at least prospective, exhibition titles. The German-born Uruguayan Camnitzer, meanwhile, is a first-wave conceptualist with a political slant: one of his key works, Leftovers (1970), involving a geometric stack of cardboard boxes wrapped in bloody-looking surgical bandages, has been read as relating to the torture of political dissidents in Uruguay at that point.

Here Brüggeman’s show extends beyond the gallery into the ruins of an abandoned holiday complex elsewhere on the island, and involves posters and a giant mirror; Camnitzer’s contribution is fragments of a phrase by Walter

4 Cala d’en Serra, Ibiza.

Courtesy Parra & Romero, Madrid & Ibiza

3 Donna Kukama, Chapter P: The-Not-Not-Educational-Spirits, 2017, durational performance within I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not #1, 2017. Photo: F. Anthea Schaap. © and courtesty 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

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ArtReview

6 Susan Meiselas, Youths practice throwing contact bombs in forest surrounding Monimbo, from the series Nicaragua, 1978. © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

5 Olaf Nicolai, La Lotta, 2006, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Uwe Frauendorf / Uwe Walter. © the artist & Bildrecht GmbH, 2018.

Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Berlin

Benjamin distributed to different parts of Ibiza. We look forward to seeing what saucereyed clubbers make of this.

Olaf Nicolai has reached the swanky 5 stratum where he can put on three big institutional shows simultaneously – at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Kunstmuseum St Gallen and the Kunsthalle Wien – but then the German artist’s practice doesn’t lack for reach. Insistently political, heterogeneous but consistently formally tight, it frequently explores human organising systems, forms of control and containment, and modes of speculative liberation and progress. See, for example, a couple of works that invite us to look up: 2005’s Welcome to the Tears of St Lawrence, at the Venice Biennale, asked viewers to gaze into the night sky and observe an

annual summer meteor shower – and perhaps 6 shows like Susan Meiselas’s Mediations, a survey of the intrepid Magnum photojournalist’s to think about the human appropriation of work since the 1970s. Among the Baltimorean’s nature, not least by naming it. A decade later, name-making early works, précising her widealso in Venice, Nicolai occupied the roof of the screen empathy, were photographs of New German Pavilion, calling it a heterotopia and England carnival strippers and their raw milieu using it as a workshop for producing boomerangs; and in between, in 2011, for Escalier du Chant shot from 1972 to 1975 and her images of (Staircase of Song), he had singers on a staircase conflict-racked Nicaragua and El Salvador during the 70s and 80s. (Typically both indelible singing songs about the year’s events, querying and off-the-cuff is Meiselas’s 1979 Molotov Man, the possibility of song to encompass politics. a Sandinista torso-twisting like an Ancient Mentioning three works, we’re not getting Greek athlete, rifle in one hand and Molotov near the scope of Nicolai’s oeuvre – from cocktail made from a Pepsi bottle in the other.) monuments and memorials to publications For almost two decades from the early 1990s, to coating walls with geometric patterns of meanwhile, Meiselas photographed in marble dust – but this tripleheader just might.

Kurdistan, firstly after being struck by the plight A positive side effect of the all-bets-off of the Kurds in the first Gulf War and later approach to museum curating these days is

Summer 2018

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7 Samara Scott, Silks, 2015 (installation view, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 2015). Courtesy the artist

8 Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Untitled (Heptagon), 2016, mirror on Plexiglas, 33 cm (diameter).

Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

travelling deep into Kurdistan and its history, seduction and disgust. At Tramway, apparently inspired by the gallery’s resemblance to open-air creating a layered, informative tableau aimed street markets, arcades, glasshouses, etc, the at human connection. Expect questions of artist is creating another horizontal suspension, whether this is art, and whether that matters, likely a big one given the space’s dimensions, to evaporate fast.

Even by, say, post-Jessica Stockholder that aims to bring audiences close to what she calls the ‘glitching grit’ of contemporary culture.

7 standards, Samara Scott has a catholic notion of what ‘painting’ might be. Yogurt, carpet, plaster, Last year Scott expressed doubts about the food colouring and, yes, paint, to reel off the artworld to The Guardian and suggested she might become a stuntman instead; a cynic might constituents of a glowing semiabstract wall work for Turner Contemporary last year; or fabric suggest that her art has stunt qualities already, softener, wine glasses, oil, costume jewellery but they’re effective ones. and much more in the rainbow-toned liquid Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s 8 suspension she created in a steel container on career spans several different worlds. One of the floor of the Frieze London art fair in 2015. the first Iranians to study in the US after the The work, such descriptions might already Second World War, she went to Parsons School suggest, balances consumerist stuff, often to be of Design, joined the Art Students League literally consumed, on a knife-edge between of New York and came into the orbit of artists

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ArtReview

including Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol (whom she met, before he was famous, in her early career as a fashion illustrator). You can glimpse aspects of those figures’ art in Farmanfarmaian’s stunning sculptural work, which involves intricate mirrored designs, but it’s also unique in synthesising Western geometric abstraction with traditional mirrormosaic patterning found in Iranian mosques.

This retrospective, Sunset, Sunrise, following such late-life landmarks as a solo show at the Guggenheim in New York in 2015 and the opening, last year, of a museum dedicated to her work in Tehran, looks back over 40 years of work. Tracking a career punctuated by several returns to Iran (and the ellipsis of many of her works being confiscated and destroyed during the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution),

it augments the cornerstone mirrored pieces artist to complete it, for viewers to animate its with collages and works on paper, rounding it tableaulike space. Breathing Spell, her show for out with evidence of Farmanfarmaian’s influthe Reina Sofía’s Palacio de Cristal glasshouse, ences: poetry, music, fashion, interiors. This feels like a highly appropriate spot for an artist writer, meanwhile, would like a keyboard shortas concerned with interiority and permeability. cut for the phrase ‘underrecognised female artist’.

That, of course, is too simple for an art-instituBorn in Iran nearly half a century after tion’s copywriters, who say that the building 9 Farmanfarmaian, Nairy Baghramian hasn’t will serve as ‘the premise of a new spatial negosuffered the same uneven exposure. She’s doing tiation with which to explore limits and reflect fine, even if her work radiates with tensions: upon the instability of materials, both inside employing a smartly rebarbative sculptural and out, in public and private spheres’. mix of Postminimalism and biomorphic That Surrealism plus x is an effective formula Surrealism, its emphasis is frequently on a sense 10 is proven elsewhere, meanwhile, by Difference of instability and echoes of the human body, Engine, Lisson’s group show in New York. For or appurtenances for it: crutches, distended decades, Lisson have been known for thoughtfully above-par, often guest-curated summer furniture, lamps. Often the work looks unfinshows, and this one, cocurated by Cory Arcangel ished, as if waiting for something – for the

(who also provides exhibition design) and Tina Kukielski, looks unlikely to sully that reputation.

The other element meeting Surrealism, and specifically meeting that movement’s foundation in the Comte de Lautréamont’s dislocative description of a young boy as the ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’, is digital technology. The original difference engine, of course, was Charles Babbage’s 1832 protocalculator; the name was redeployed for William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s influential 1990 steampunk novel. Meanwhile, the guestlist here is fascinatingly wide-ranging, from Paul Thek to Konrad Klapheck, Carol Bove, Aleksandra Domanović and first-wave Net-art pranksters JODI. So if not an operating table, at least an operating system. Martin Herbert

10 Deborah Remington, Dorset, 1972, oil on canvas, 231 × 220 cm. Courtesy the Deborah Remington Charitable Trust for the Visual Arts, New York 9 Nairy Baghramian, Breathing Spell, 2017, coated aluminium, 42 × 43 × 33 cm.

Photo: Cathy Carver. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

1 Manifesta 12 Various venues, Palermo 16 June – 4 November 2 FRONT International Various venues, Cleveland 14 July – 30 September 3 10th Berlin Biennale Various venues through 9 September

5 Olaf Nicolai Kunsthalle Wien 13 July – 7 October Kunsthalle Bielefeld 15 June – 9 September Kunstmuseum St Gallen 7 July – 11 November 6 Susan Meiselas SFMOMA, San Francisco 21 July – 21 October

8 Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 10 August – 25 November 9 Nairy Baghramian Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid through 14 October 10 Difference Engine Lisson, New York 29 June – 10 August

4 Stefan Brüggemann & Luis Camnitzer Parra & Romero, Ibiza through 7 October

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7 Samara Scott Tramway, Glasgow 4 August – 28 October

ArtReview

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Under the Paving Stones

The post-state of Brussels

by J.J. Charlesworth

Birthday

top Art Brussels main fair above Aperol spritz at Brussels ‘Gallery Night’ openings below Otobong Nkanga, In Pursuit of Bling (still), 2014, HD video with sound, 11 min 59 sec. Courtesy the artist, Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam, and In Situ Fabienne Leclerc Gallery, Paris

Cold beer, warm day. At the Art Brussels press conference, fair director Anne Vierstraete is enthusing about the 50th year of its existence. Set up in 1968 by 11 Brussels galleries as the ‘Foire d’Art Actuel’ (quite simply, the ‘contemporary art fair’), it’s the second oldest art fair in Europe – after Cologne, she points out, with a note of mock deference.

Nineteen-sixty-eight and all that. ‘Contemporary’ art, as I keep reminding myself, is about half a century old. And while I’m not in Brussels to theorise on the philosophical definition of ‘the contemporary’, the nagging question of how contemporary art turns out to be contemporary, but in an increasingly historical way, hangs around as I catch up on the city’s contemporary scene.

If the ‘contemporary’ period gets any kind of working definition (as a general concept, not just an artworld one), it might refer to the time since the advent of globalisation, and particularly the way in which globalisation affects the relationship of the local to the far away. Art Brussels is installed in a set of late-nineteenth-century customs and railway depot buildings just outside the city centre near the old shipping canal. It is evidence of gentrification writ large: a block of postindustrial dereliction elegantly restored and repurposed for events and entertainment. The history of an older imperial Europe echoes indistinctly. But while globalisation might make itself felt in the internationalising mix of the city, in art it’s manifest in the way that artists are reconfiguring the present’s attention to history.

In the fair’s separate special exhibitions hall, the winner of the 2017 Belgian Art Prize, Nigerian-Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga, gets a special presentation; Nkanga’s largescale video projection In Pursuit of Bling (2014) sees the artist in semidarkness, showering herself with handfuls of golden glitter, or handling and eating pieces of rare-earth stones, or twirling sheets of some bronze-sheened, darkly transparent glasslike material, hiding herself in the light reflected in them. It has the hallucinatory feel of those ‘altered state’ sequences you might find in sci-fi cinema of the 1970s, where subjects float and move in darkness, like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) or Sean Connery in Zardoz (1974), or in a more populist register, the video for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (1975). But unlike those posthippies and glam-rockers, Nkanga is black, and plays on how the darkness envelopes her, how she disappears against the blinding light. It’s an ambiguous, ironic visual-poem about Africa’s (unwanted) identity as the perpetually exploited store of raw materials for the West. And of course, it plays on contemporary liberal Europe’s (and perhaps particularly Belgium’s) embarrassment and guilt about old Europe’s dismal history of colonialism in Africa. At the same time, it invents a suggestive, Afrofuturist reclamation of wealth, abundance and adornment.

A postcolonial mosaic Brussels is a postcolonial mosaic of not particularly integrated communities, ethnicities and nationalities. It could even be seen as poststate: capital of a federated country whose two cultural and economic regions, Dutch-

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speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, grudgingly cohabit; it also has a municipal government, now home to a polyglot mix of immigrant cultures, as well as being the political heart of the European Union. And if the Brussels art scene has become more international in recent years, with American, Brazilian and French galleries setting up branches here, these spaces definitely come across as outposts of bigger spheres of artworld influence. While the older Belgian gallerists who turned the avant-garde art of the 1960s into the nascent commercial artworld of the 1970s continue to form the backbone of the Brussels commercial scene and the Art Brussels fair, their local economy is steadily being overwritten by the dynamic of these further-flung interests coming to town.

Critical irony So at Brazilian gallery Mendes Wood DM’s elegant townhouse premises I find the Global South alive and kicking. Here again, the long-term trajectories of postcolonial history frame the show. Veteran Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger’s work since the 1970s has treated the situation of Latin America through the various frames of gender, class and ethnicity.

Geiger uses visual metonym with acute sensitivity – a watercolour Amuleto, A Mulata, A Muleta, Am. Latina (1974) plays on the shape of the continent, morphing from an ‘amulet’, to a ‘mulato’ (mixed race) woman, to a ‘muleta’ (a bullfighter’s red cloth). Ethnicity, class and gender get tangled in Geiger’s photoworks too, for example in the 18 postcards of Brasil nativo – Brasil alienígena (1976–77), in which ‘ethnographic’ images of indigenous women are restaged, pose for pose, by white women, the critical irony being the designation of the Brazilian women of European origin as the ‘aliens’.

Here too is the younger Brazilian Letícia Ramos; these large, densely dark monochrome photographs, whose sombre subjects are mannequins – a hand, a head, a torso – blasted with what might be powerful jets of water. Ramos’s work, according to the notes, delves into the mythos of industrial capitalism, specifically the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who, much as Frederick Winslow Taylor concentrated on speeding up the time it took to do industrial work, pioneered methods of ‘time and motion study’, making the routine processes of workers more efficient by rationalising the actions and movements needed to carry out tasks. But Ramos’s images – like sinister lab experiments – offer a bleak sense of subjugated human bodies dispossessed of their humanity, a subtext of mechanical image-making and mechanised human beings; other images, of grids

below Letícia Ramos’s mannequin-body-part photographs

from top Bella Geiger’s Orbis Descriptio com Mapa Mundi e as 3 Graças, from the series Fronteiriços, 2018, and Brasil nativo – Brasil alienígena, 1976–77

of wavering light-trails hanging in darkness, turn out to be long exposures of human subjects performing the Gilbreths’ codified routine actions – the light-trails being the trace of lights attached to the performers’ otherwise invisible bodies.

An uncanny valley somewhere between art history and contemporary meme culture Not far away from a South American gallery outpost is a North American one. Gladstone Gallery is showing Roe Ethridge. I’m not sure who wrote the handout text, but apparently ‘Ethridge utilizes a hybrid of digital and analogue techniques to denude signification from its source and resituate assumed relations within an uncanny valley somewhere between art history and contemporary meme culture’. Still, this impacted vocabulary somehow manages to signal the intense unpleasantness of Ethridge’s imploded imagery, in which saturated colours give hi-def shape to the weirder artefacts of an increasingly disoriented and mobile mass culture – predictably colourful tulips arranged predictably, a ceramic tchotchke

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Perhaps Marcus Jahmal does, though as an enthusiast, not a eulogist.

Nearby Almine Rech – having extended her Paris gallery first to Brussels, then London in 2014, and then New York at the end of 2016 – is showing this young American painter, whose story is a sort of inverted modernist retro: self-taught, the child of a family of jazz musicians, discovered in a nonprofit gallery in 2016, he turned to painting only recently, we’re told. ‘Primitivism’ might have been one of European Modernism’s routes to renewal, freighted with colonial ambiguity; in 2018 Jahmal’s images are high-colour, brashly painted syntheses of stylistic and mythological cultural cues. Clichés of African, Mexican and Asian iconography – dragonheaded creatures, fiery snakes, leopards and stylised, bare-chested figures of changing skin colour – swirl against landscapes of hot reds and greens.

If cultural appropriation has become one of the more fraught issues in recent debates, then Jahmal seems to sidestep it with his glocal melding of street art and stereotype, while his status as ‘untutored’ artist happily ignores all the institutional self-consciousness that Levine and her generation once grappled with in earnest…

A delirious mix of posthuman technoaesthetics

top Roe Ethridge at Gladstone Gallery above Semiabandoned shopping arcade

of a fat turkey leaking fluorescent green slime, a pink-cowboy-hatted pageant princess grinning like a sex doll against a background repeat of a mad-looking Richard Prince. Ethridge is relentlessly consistent in his view of the mass image (and the mass culture it represents) as rootless, treacherous and utterly unmoored from any kind of truth. Somehow Ramos and Ethridge work at opposites ends of the twentieth century, waving at the same disaster of culture and capital.

Deadweight An escape from Ethridge and up out of the cobblestones of the old town, onto the higher ground of the Ixelles commune (taking a wrong turn through the labyrinth of an almost completely abandoned indoor shopping arcade), I head towards the broad boulevard of Avenue Louise, along which many of Brussels’s high-end galleries have located. On the Rue de l’Abbaye, Xavier Hufkens shows renowned American postmodernist Sherrie Levine, with an austere exhibition of the artist’s strategic borrowings from art history – a child’s coffin cast in bronze relies on the story of the image of a similar coffin overpainted by Jean-François Millet in his prized Angelus (1857–59); single-toned canvases refer to the colours in a wartime painting of poppies by German expressionist Emil Nolde, persecuted by the Nazis. Everywhere Levine is hauling on the deadweight of history – it’s a strange form of remembering, through borrowing and reproduction and spectral reinvention, of a world and a culture fast disappearing in the rearview mirror. Who any longer cares about Modernism as much as Levine does?

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Cultural hybridity speaks of flow and fragmentation, the impulse to turn from the past to the future. Looking out of the tram that trundles through Saint-Gilles, I spot a spraypainted slogan slide past: ‘NO BORDERS NO GENDER’, it declares. Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s show at newcomer Clearing, workshop for peace: nowhere to go: let the song hold us: in a room filled with people with funny names 4, is a delirious mix of posthuman technoaesthetics and philosophising on the future of humanity.

The New York commercial gallery has set itself up a stone’s throw away from the pioneering contemporary art centre Wiels, in a capacious hangar space hidden through a yard beyond the terraced street. Inside the vast gallery are exuberant vitrined sculptures comprising clay models of human torsos and nonhuman forms, glowing decorative glass orbs and thickets of luminous fibreoptic cables. Among these are a repeated glazed grey ceramic form, a model of the thin modernist slab of the United

below Marcus Jahmal, Fuego Verde, 2018, oil stick and acrylic on canvas, 152 × 122 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery. © the artist

Werke aus der sammlung gaby und Wilhelm schürmann

MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1, A -1070 Wien www.mumok.at Nairy Baghramian, Klassentreffen (Detail), 2008, Heins Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath, © Nairy Baghramian, Foto: Wolfgang Günzel

Nations building in New York. The centrepiece of the show is a video, with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 (2017), in which ideas of history, spirituality, ecology, genetic evolution and biological decay swirl around each other. The UN building might look like a throwback to the older Cold War world, but here it has mutated – like everything else in Arunanondchai’s show – into a stand-in for new ways of ‘thinking about the subject of togetherness’. That togetherness, though, is no longer the political togetherness of nation-states, but the togetherness of humans and nonhumans, and of human biology and technology.

This emphasis on human identity in the face of future technologies preoccupies many artists at a time when the question of identity – cultural, social, political – appears to be in a state of radical uncertainty. Globalisation again has had its part to play, unravelling old state, national and cultural boundaries. The new art is transnational and knows there’s no such thing as borders, or gender, or whatever. But crossing the tramlines from Clearing to Wiels (fittingly housed in an old art-deco brewery), history, the past, pushes back in, in an exhibition of work from the time when the truly global contemporary art world was just coming into being. Unexchangeable, drawn mostly from the collections of Belgian collectors and gallerists, goes back to the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 90s to revisit the question of appropriation, originality and authenticity – key debates of the time. From being greeted by Katharina Fritsch’s disturbingly hip pony-tailed Händler (Dealer) (2001), a lifesize polyester sculpture in which one cloven hoof peeps from under the man’s trouser leg, to Richard Prince’s appropriated ‘Marlboro Man’ photograph Cowboys (1991–92), to David Hammons’s arcing circle of glued-together liquor bottles Untitled (1989), to a huge room full of Jim Shaw’s profoundly weird collection of Thrift

below Korakrit Arunanondchai at Clearing bottom Saâdane Afif at Wiels

top Graffiti spotted from the tram

Store Paintings (1970–), Unexchangeable recalls how so many contemporary artists were, for a while, so preoccupied with art’s paradoxical position between exclusivity and ordinary life, poised between commercial rarity and abjection.

Local squabbles Not so much now, perhaps. Art now seems to be reconciled to being part of the bigger flow of cultural commerce, while making critical gestures within that wider cultural landscape. Art now is part of a bigger system.

Fittingly, Brussels will soon get its first major public contemporary ‘art barn’. Brussels’s administrative and political complexity meant that for decades the city had little in the way of public contemporary art institutions. That changed with Wiels’s opening in 2007. Now, Brussels is gearing up for the opening of Kanal. Mooted in 2014 by the BrusselsCapital regional administration, Kanal will establish a modern and contemporary art museum and ‘culture hub’ in the 35,000sqm complex of an old Citroën factory not far from the art fair’s site, by the city’s canal basin. Heavily backed by the region, Kanal has ended up as a partnership with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, as another move in its aspirations towards global expansion. With a year of soft-launch programmes starting in May, the rebuild will take until the end of 2022, resulting in an institution that will dwarf everything else in Brussels. The guileless promotional blurb talks of a ‘vast complex’ and nods to Brussels’s status as the ‘capital of Europe’. Until recently, local politicians were still squabbling about whether ‘Kanal’ sounded too Dutch (rather the French ‘Canal’). They seem to have missed that the older Brussels, of regional communities and national governments, is already fast becoming an anachronism.

Poststate globalisation has arrived, looking like contemporary art.

J.J. Charlesworth is senior editor of ArtReview

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ArtReview

Interview

Susan Cianciolo “It’s as if I am on a strange middle plane of always knowing I already died”

by Ross Simonini

Susan Cianciolo. Photo: Paula Court

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Growing up, Susan Cianciolo was a runner.

Now, as an artist, running has become her philosophy. Here is a natural animal activity that pretty much anyone can do, and yet within that fundamental movement is struggle, risk, visceral exhaustion, ecstatic peaks and the freewheeling sprint of liberation.

From 1995 to 2001, Cianciolo produced 11 collections of her defiant, innovative RUN clothing line, as well as a pop-up restaurant under the same name. (She’s also made RUN structures, RUN money, a RUN Library, RUN Church and on.) The clothes were raw, handmade and tender, and had just the right amount of naivety – all uncommon qualities in high fashion. Every strip of fabric expressed its own idiosyncratic personality, its own movement across the body and its own complicated history. She sometimes commissioned materials from seed to cloth, but more often, her fabrics are recycled, gifted, found.

Likewise, her runway shows played like performance art, staged in parking garages and galleries, and her models, primarily women, were often nonprofessionals or children or, on one occasion, aerialists. Since then, she has referred to the RUN project and its community, lovingly, as a ‘cult’, and she too has achieved a certain cult status from its legacy.

In 2001 Cianciolo experienced psychological burnout and left the fashion industry along with her life in New York. She began focusing on her visual art, which had been quietly running in parallel to her fashion career all along.

The art overlapped with her fashion, both in sensibility and content, and her shows seemed casually to ignore any distinction between the disciplines: dreamlike films of women in her clothes, fashion sketches, magazine collages, geometric watercolours and exhibitions of the clothes themselves, which she often referred to as costumes.

Cianciolo also began showing her signature DIY kits (originally called Fluxus boxes). These ragged cardboard boxes were like care packages filled with fragments from her life and work – a doll, a Polaroid, a moment from a scrapbook, a childlike sculpture of popsicle sticks, a page from her actual diary. Cianciolo has said her work is often inspired by her memories, and these modest vessels play with nostalgia, their contents recalling precious keepsakes discovered in a grandmother’s attic. In fact, like much of Cianciolo’s work, the items in the kits are intended to be used, and the clothing can be assembled at home.

Home is another significant word in Cianciolo’s body of work. Raised in the inner city of Providence, Rhode Island, in relative poverty, Cianciolo learned craft early, making her own clothing whenever possible. These days

she works mostly from home and often involves her ten-year-old daughter, Lilac Sky, in performances and in the making of objects. With designer Kiva Motnyk, she also created RUN Home, a line of housewares that includes quilts, cushions, tapestries, table linens, ceramics and furniture. Like the artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Alison Knowles, Cianciolo elevates domestic labour and humbles the luxurious pretence of fine art.

In 2015, at the age of forty-six, Cianciolo presented her first exhibition in New York in over 12 years: if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite) at Bridget Donahue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

With bare walls and an austere grid of kits on the floor, Cianciolo created something simultaneously delicate and unrefined, sacred and mundane, inviting and mystifying. The show received a waterfall of long-deserved attention and stimulated a new period in Cianciolo’s

“I try to track myself back to my twenties, in my Canal Street studio, Chinatown.

Back then, with all those people around me, those collections were based on visions, but it was different. Now the format is so much clearer.

With meditation, it’s not as if I press a button and it appears, but there are moments where something appears, you know?” career, which has included her second iteration of RUN Restaurant, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and a screening of her films in MoMA PS1’s 2015 Greater New York survey.

I spoke to Cianciolo as she was preparing a new performance and a solo show in Los Angeles. She spoke softly, and found her words through long thoughtful pauses. Her answers were profoundly, refreshingly honest, and afterwards I felt much like I did after seeing her work: I had just experienced the very centre of a human. Later, in an email, she revealed to me that she has never discussed “this part of [her] story” publicly.

a mental breakdown. But it probably was just an overload, too much overstimulation for too long without any breaks.

RS Did it feel like a mental breakdown to you?

SC Definitely. Something went – the wiring was not right when I hit that point.

RS What did you do to get yourself back to some kind of balance?

SC Well, being such an extremist – and I don’t know if this was right – I just cut all my ties completely. Shut down the studio. Let everyone go. Separated from my husband. I moved out to the Albers foundation for three months and lived completely alone on 75 acres, right outside of Yale. Then I went to London and didn’t come back for a year.

RS What were you doing during that period?

SC Making films and a lot of work. But by myself. I didn’t have the big studio any more.

I was travelling and making shows. I stopped working with my agent, but I was still making clothes and presenting them through exhibitions. I was making the kits at that time, which included clothing, but I was calling them games.

RS Was there a moment when you felt that you had moved past the breakdown?

SC Well, I moved back to New York in 2003 and I was a little bit homeless for a while until I settled in Brooklyn. But then an unexpected thing happened. I died and came back to life.

I flatlined. And that changed my life forever until today. Nothing has been the same.

RS How did that happen?

SC I was walking through Prospect Park and I was scheduled, the next day, to have an exhibition of my collages at Sears-Peyton Gallery. I had everything laid out in my little studio in Brooklyn, and I went for a walk in the morning, just to step out of the studio.

And that was it: I was knocked down by this guy on a bike. And he beat me to death with a bicycle chain, and strangled me, and raped me.

And from that day until now, I’ve had to work towards recovering. Mentally, physically – I’ve never been the same. It took years and years and years to walk down the street, to function. And my brain never really recovered.

So when I say my ‘doctors and healers’ – that’s why I have so many. I’ve worked with the best acupuncturists in the world.

ROSS SIMONINI Would you say that you walked away from the fashion industry in 2001?

RS Has anything helped?

SUSAN CIANCIOLO Yeah. When I speak to doctors and healers about it, they say I had

SC Meditation. I don’t know if people notice, but all my work is connected to spiritual theories.

Summer 2018

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RS What’s it like to be alive after dying?

SC It’s as if I am on a strange middle plane of always knowing I already died, so there is nothing to be afraid of – and also being so afraid to know it can happen again, at any moment.

RS How could you stay in New York after that experience?

SC The only reason I’m still here is because I didn’t want to let it beat me. It took me ten years to have the courage to move back to Brooklyn.

Now, my daughter and I have been here for six years. But still, it’s just constant flashbacks all the time. Just little things. Like, when I had my solo show with Bridget [Donahue] in Manhattan two years ago, that was the first time I had a solo show in New York in 12 years. Because my brain believed that I would just die if I did it.

of work. There are a lot of times when we are stuck in the house for endless days and nights, so whatever I make, she makes. I told her yesterday that I titled an edition she worked on as being created by both of us. And I told her she has to sign 100 editions. But she wouldn’t do it.

RS How has motherhood affected you as an artist?

SC I don’t meet many other artist parents. I feel very alone on this island. And it’s busy. I have to make muffins today. And I decided to throw [Lilac] this surrealist birthday. It’s so much work.

I’m always asking myself whether I should have

RS The format of the DIY kit seems to connect with your teaching.

Have the kits always been a part of your work?

SC Always. And that’s funny, because I’ve changed, but in some ways the work hasn’t.

RS Do you remember how the kits started?

SC Those early RUN collections got more and more complicated, and the pieces started coming apart. I wanted the audience and customer to use their own creativity and intelligence to put it back together. That was fascinating to me. The early ones were the do-it-yourself skirt kits, and I made a film about them. Then the collections all became kits: 9, 10, 11. Then, in London, I started showing them as exhibitions.

RS Has this experience radically affected your work?

SC I think that’s why there’s so much isolation now. To get to the work, I need an extraordinary amount of time alone.

RS That’s surprising, because the work seems so communal – the performances, the collections.

SC And it’s a constant question: did I make the right choice to have a child? Should I bring her into this life? Because I’m obsessed with my work, and that’s the world she’s been placed into. And yeah, she ends up helping with a lot

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SC We were poor. Oh, we were. And that must have really affected her. She’s been my whole inspiration to have a good income. It was horrible. She was three, I think, when I finally took the job at Pratt [Institute]. Now I’m on a full-time tenure track.

SC I was hired to teach the senior thesis collection, but I also teach an untraditional class I developed at Parsons [School of Design] about fashion drawing.

SC And when I did that, I was like, I’ve made it! I’ve learned so much about the tricks of the mind. I’ve always been prayerbased, even before all this, but now it’s the main part of my life.

I’ve come to learn that I don’t even know myself.

RS Lilac is also collaborating on some of the work now.

RS I’ve read you talking about your poverty as an artist. Not eating for weeks at a time.

RS What do you teach?

RS Right, the association.

SC Yeah, it’s true. And I even just brought an intern on. And I have another project called RUN Home, and that’s my outlet for community. Anytime someone contacts me, that’s how I work with them, through RUN Home.

But it’s true, my shows are performance-based and community-based. That’s why I have to make sure I have enough time alone. To get into a meditation. My certain zone.

things. Even the birthday party, I tried to do something normal, but we both ended up wanting to do this wild, surrealist thing at my friend’s studio.

RS I’ve heard you say that these collections come from visions, or insights. brought her into this world. It’s different, how we do things, and I hope that’s okay. I did a RUN Restaurant piece for the Whitney Biennial with her, and she’s coming to LA with me for my upcoming show at Overduin & Co. I try to separate, but it all gets mushed together.

I wonder if she’d be better doing normal kid Custom uniform worn by waiters for Run Restaurant Untitled, 2017, an immersive event for the Whitney Biennial, Whitney, New York.

Photo: Paula Court. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

ArtReview

SC I try to track myself back to my twenties, in my Canal Street studio, Chinatown. Back then, with all those people around me, those collections were based on visions, but it was different. Now the format is so much clearer. With meditation, it’s not as if I press a button and it appears, but there are moments where something appears, you know? I don’t know what it is, or how it works, but my teachers tell me that I work with spirits.

So that’s what I follow and, every day, what I pray for – that I can be that vehicle. I mean, it sounds so arrogant to me to put it into

Items from RUN Home, seen in “Though I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not Love, I have nothing” ‘Corinthians’, 2016 (installation view, 356 Mission Road, Los Angeles). Courtesy the artist

Summer 2018

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RUN Prayer, run CAFÉ, run library, 2017 (installation view). © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

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ArtReview

physical words. Who am I to even know?

But that’s why I need more isolation when I’m making the work.

RS Would you say you’re more able to experience those insights now?

SC Well, there’s a show up now at Bard [Fashion Work, Fashion Workers, at the Hessel Museum] of my early work, and when I look at it, it still feels meaningful and intuitive and raw, so I can’t say what I do now is better.

I still wake up every day and don’t know if the next day will come that I’ll hear the answer.

I go into these shows not knowing if it will even work out.

I really believe that if I don’t hear the voice to tell me how to do it, I can’t make the work. I can’t install that show. Like, right now, I had to put a performance on hold because I haven’t heard the voice. People keep asking and I don’t know. I can’t go forward.

RS Everything?

SC Yeah. One of my oldest and closest friends was born and grew up in Jamaica. I’ve visited her many times, and every time I go, I learn about more of the artists from there. For many of them, that was the sole purpose of their work. That was their only living purpose.

RS Making art as a form of worship, ritual.

SC That’s how I think of the performances.

I went to see the show of my older work at Bard and I heard a voice that said, you have to

RS How has the artworld treated you?

SC I just try to not overthink it. I don’t want to know what’s going on. I can’t get to shows.

It makes me feel too uncomfortable to leave my child. It may seem, from the outside, like we’re in the artworld, but we are so out of it. Every night, when there’s something going on, we’re just making the same cookies, over and over again.

That’s the truth.

RS Is that frightening?

SC Yeah. It’s always been scary.

Every time. I’ve learned to have a blind faith in the work. It’s the only thing I live for. And that’s the concern of bringing a child into it.

RS It seems like you used to be a pretty public personality, though, in your twenties.

RS Do you still go to an ashram?

SC When I was married to Aaron Rose [gallerist, filmmaker], that was somewhat true.

But really, I was always the person who said no and worked.

SC That was a place you could bring a child from the day they were born. With most yoga studios, you can’t bring a crying baby. You can’t even bring a ten-year-old. Yoga studios will tell you, don’t ever come back with that child! [laughs] But at the ashram, they let her in. And I started doing kundalini yoga all the time, and it pushed my psyche, and it informed a lot of my work. But now I don’t go to any classes. That’s not what my meditation is these days.

RS In the future, do you think you’ll be continuing the same path as an artist?

RS Do you see your work as sacred?

SC Yes. Yes. RS Are you informed by looking at other historical, sacred work? Do you see your work in that tradition?

SC It’s a good question. I’ve been asking my teachers about this, because recently I’ve been seeing physical manifestations. It will be at the most random time and place. And so I draw those things. I think the work is just made for god.

SC It’s all contained within each piece. But really, one show is one piece for me. That’s how the fashion shows were. And the exhibitions are just a background for the performance. It’s all based on visions. It’s all one thing. But in those two-and-half years since I’ve submerged myself into the artworld, I’ve really had to learn how shows have to break down. How it sells. It’s a business now. I mean, I was so freefloating for so long. I don’t even do titles or anything.

When you start breaking down each thing from a show, it’s so tedious. Bridget [Donahue] usually just makes up the titles, the numbers.

That stuff doesn’t interest me.

do a performance. But I didn’t know how, or what. I had to start studying my old performances to understand. But I know it will be a ritual, a celebration.

RS Do you think a viewer has to experience the film, the clothing, the collage – all of it – to know the full experience? Or is your whole project contained within each object?

‘I think the work is just made for god’: A drawing of physical manifestations seen by the artist

Summer 2018

SC No. The show I’m working on now [for Overduin & Co] feels new and different. It’s wooden geometrical sculptures that came to me in a vision. There’s furniture. There’s a sound component of my [meditation] teacher, because I finally got the courage to ask him if I could use his recordings. It feels like a breakthrough. But is that a cliché? That term? Maybe on the outside it looks the same, but I don’t care what it looks like to anyone else. To me, it feels new.

Susan Cianciolo’s RUN 12: God is a Jacket is on view at Overduin & Co, Los Angeles, through 23 June Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

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Adelita Husni-Bey, from the series “Agency”, Activists, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea. Design Alessandro Gori.Laboratorium :MMXVIII

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Horror Show

Christian Viveros-Fauné looks at four iconic moments in art history in which artists confronted the monstrous 51

Advanced art has condemned barbarism for centuries.

Here, for example, is a quote from the Boston Evening Transcript, dated March 1877, about one particularly committed painting: ‘Turner’s Slave Ship is a picture of moans and tears and groans and shrieks. Every tint and shade and line throb with death and terror and blood.

It is the embodiment of a giant protest, a mighty voice crying out against human oppression.’

For those of you who think that the power of Turner’s nearly abstract canvas simply grew on its audience over decades like a taste for mouldy cheese – think again. When he first saw it at the Royal Academy, John Ruskin, the painting’s first owner, was so impressed with Turner’s antislavery protest that, writing in his 1843 book Modern Painters, he hailed it thusly: ‘If I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this’.

Turner painted The Slave Ship in 1840 as an abolitionist screed, hoping it would catch the attention of Prince Albert when he attended the British Anti-Slavery Conference (after Britain outlawed slavery in 1833, British antislavery activists worked to outlaw the trade worldwide).

Instead, it caught the eye of Ruskin and others

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J.M.W. Turner The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhoon Coming On (1840) Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was master painter of the natural sublime.

A pioneer in the study of light, colour and atmosphere, he cultivated a singular capacity to depict dread, danger, awe and terror.

The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On), 1840, oil on canvas. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Henry Lillie Pierce Fund

ArtReview

who spied in the picture’s composition sublimely fearful echoes of one of the most shameful episodes in Great Britain’s history – the real-life tale of the slave ship Zong.

The Zong took off from the coast of Africa in 1781 loaded to the rafters with human cargo. After veering off course and running short of water, its captain and crew threw 133 men, women and children into the Caribbean. Their logic was both wolfish and mercantile: if slaves drowned rather than died of thirst, the slavers could collect insurance on the cargo. When abolitionists tried to bring criminal charges, England’s solicitor general rejected their claims: no ‘human people’ had been jettisoned, he affirmed, ‘the case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard’.

From the memory of this disgraceful episode, Turner depicted a vision of world-girding rage: a scenario in which, according to Ruskin, ‘the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood’. A solitary glance at the painting reveals two things: the spectacle of awesome nature unchained and an atmosphere of terror as inhuman as any attending photographs of the Twin Towers in flames during 9/11.

Originally titled Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, the picture depicts a three-master being tossed around like a toy boat on a stormy sea. In the picture’s foreground, arms and legs emerge from the water with chains attached – chum to be devoured by waiting sea creatures and toothy beasts. Above the tumultuous proceedings the sun glowers like a giant apparition.

Pointed vertically, its rays thrust a dagger of fulgurant light straight into the heart of Turner’s red-brown sea.

Seventy-nine years after Turner painted The Slave Ship, the poet W.B. Yeats provided the perfect poetic analogue for the Englishman’s depiction of nature-worrying human violence: ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity’. CVF

Nearly a decade after Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968 with a mere 43 percent of the popular vote, nine years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, four years after Lieutenant William Calley received a presidential pardon for killing 22 Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre and three years after the Watergate scandal brought down the nation’s 37th president, Philip Guston confessed his frustration as an abstract painter to Jerry Tallmer from the New York Post: ‘The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it.’

Besides turning from abstraction to figuration in 1971 – setting off an artworld scandal that rivalled the one that broke out when Dylan went electric – Guston penned a suite of ink drawings (plus a single painting) that savaged the man who was formerly considered America’s most detestable president. The drawings were published posthumously (like Goya’s Disasters of War, 1810–20) as Philip Guston’s Poor Richard.

The painting crystallised the repugnance and fury Guston felt for a worldhistorical figure who remains beyond redemption.

Like other artists who confront the issues of their time, Guston learned how to paint from outrage. “One could make a list of all the negative things [that compel me to] continue painting,” he declared in a 1982 documentary, “and [it] would include things like boredom, disgust, all the things you’re not supposed to think about.

It’s not inspiration… but anger.”

Picasso’s 1937 etching cycle Dream and Lie of Franco was a direct precursor; but so was Goya, who channelled both a hatred of superstition and the abuses of Enlightenment reason into prints and paintings that did their share of power-bashing.

Titled San Clemente, after the small California town that served as Nixon’s ‘Western White House’, Guston’s painting portrays ‘Tricky Dick’ as the very picture of rottenness. Made two years

Philip Guston San Clemente (1975) After Philip Guston (1913–80) ditched abstract painting in 1971, he embraced a vulgar, raw and comic realism that increasingly sought to respond to the world and his place in it. Often featuring ominous Klansmen-like figures, his paintings and prints tapped into the general cultural malaise that followed the conventional optimism of the 1950s and countercultural utopianism of the 1960s.

after Nixon’s resignation, it conflates two reported facts about the ex-president. The first is an infamous 1971 photo of him strolling a beach in a stiff dark suit; the second, news that he had developed a painful case of phlebitis, a debilitating but non-life-threatening condition that swelled his leg to twice its normal size.

The resulting picture, which is all hot pinks and shameful reds, features a seaside Nixon – with bloodshot eyes, hairy jowls and penislike nose – looking over his shoulder regretfully as he drags his bandaged limb across the sands.

Besides having a dick for a face, the man is all diseased leg. His bloated and veiny shank stands in for his malignant state. It bursts the confines of his sock and ratty suit much like his criminal activities poisoned the office of the president of the United States. Consider Guston’s portrait of Nixon’s raging degeneracy a cautionary tale of the ravages of political corruption – then and now. CVF

San Clemente, 1975, oil on canvas, 173 × 186 cm.

Photo: Christopher Burke. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy the Estate, Hauser & Wirth, London, and Glenstone Museum, Potomac

Summer 2018

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The online Urban Dictionary has two definitions for the verb ‘to giuliani’. The first, deriving from the infamous assault and torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by New York police officers in 1997, is ‘To sodomize with a plunger’. The second, more blandly, reads, ‘To shamelessly take advantage of tragedy for one’s own personal gain’. These riffs on the reputation of the man who served as New York City’s mayor from 1994 to 2001, and who is now President Donald Trump’s attorney, underscore the effect of brazen political manipulation on works of art: like poor Louima, they rarely survive the fracas intact.

In September 1999, Chris Ofili’s elephantdung-decorated The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) – part of the Brooklyn Museum’s controversial

Chris Ofili The Holy Virgin Mary (1999) Chris Ofili has weathered success and scandal to become one of the world’s most important painters.

His career is proof of the idea that artists are often offered up as canaries in the coalmines of culture.

Where his work was once surrounded in controversy in the US, it is now greeted with rapturous praise.

The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996, acrylic, oil, polyester resin, paper collage, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on linen, 244 × 183 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

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Sensation exhibition (after runs at London’s Royal Academy and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof) – was scapegoated by Rudy Giuliani during his unsuccessful Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. Serving out his final term, the lame-duck mayor, in cahoots with the conservative Catholic League, called the painting ‘blasphemous’ and ‘sick stuff’ and threatened to pull municipal funding unless it was removed from the show. After mounting legal challenges and tabloid headlines – the New York Daily News called the show ‘B’KLYN GALLERY OF HORRORS’ – the museum’s cause prevailed, albeit at a cost to Ofili as measured in US museum exhibitions.

After a pair of Manhattan gallery shows in 2007 and 2009 and inclusion in a group exhibition at Chicago’s Arts Club in 2010, Ofili made a triumphant return to the US in 2014, with a major retrospective that opened at New York’s New Museum before travelling to Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; it featured new experiments with subject, materials, colour and style alongside several lush Afrocentric Pop paintings from the contentious 1990s. The most important of these, with regards to the history of First Amendment rights in the US, is The Holy Virgin Mary.

Ofili’s Madonna is, in the artist’s words, a ‘hip-hop version’ of the highly sexualised renditions of the Virgin Mary on view in museums throughout the world. Large lipped, wide-nosed and unmistakeably black, she is draped in a blue robe that stands against a gold background. The image is adorned with fluttering putti made from collaged female bottoms cut out of pornographic magazines, while clumps of pachyderm shit make up the Virgin’s right breast (as in Renaissance depictions of the suckling mother of Christ, the robe is parted to expose a single breast) and serve as two pedestals on which the painting rests, to lean back against the wall.

Far from being irreligious, Ofili’s is an update of innumerable other Western virgins, including one that predates Christianity by some 28,000 years: the voluptuous Venus of Willendorf, which was earlier this year deemed pornographic

by Facebook’s algorithms. Perhaps in consideration of the Stone Age artist who sculpted the Upper Paleolithic fertility goddess, Ofili turned the body of his twentieth-century Madonna extra earthy with the addition of a few well-placed elephant turds. In case anyone is still shocked, it’s worth recalling Rembrandt’s description of the artist as he who can find rubies and emeralds in the dung heap. CVF

On the morning of 7 January 2015, two Algerian-French brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, forced their way into the Parisian offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo at gunpoint and killed eight members of the editorial staff, a building maintenance worker, a visitor and two policemen in cold blood. The attack had been in the works for years. Among the publication’s capital offences: it had published a 2011 cartoon cover of the Prophet Muhammad with the caption ‘100 lashes of the whip if you don’t die laughing’.

On the day of the murders, thousands of people took to the streets of Paris to express grief for the victims and support for the equal-opportunity blasphemy that has propelled France’s most serially irreverent magazine for four decades (the journal’s mission statement declares that it is against false idols such as ‘God’, ‘Wall Street’ and ‘two cars and three cell phones’).

That message of solidarity quickly spread around the globe via social media. The slogan the crowds quickly turned into chants, placards and T-shirts was the self-subsuming but infinitely hashtaggable Je suis Charlie.

In the days after the massacre, the publication’s skeleton crew of 16 journalists hunkered down in the offices of the French daily Libération on computers provided by the newspaper’s rival, Le Monde. Their purpose: to put together issue No 1178 of Charlie Hebdo, aptly pegged ‘the survival issue’. The edition included 16 pages of new cartoons, previously published articles by two slain journalists and drawings by four of the publication’s fallen artists. Most memorable of all, though, was the anguished, take-no-prisoners cover.

Published on 14 January, the magazine’s cover brazenly sported a cartoon of Muhammad with the French words for ‘Everything is forgiven’ above him. Depicted as a bearded man kitted out in a turban and Islam’s white garments of mourning against a solid green background – the colour of paradise – the figure sheds a tear while looking straight out at the viewer.

The roughly drawn prophet is sketched loosely, in the style of Matt Groening or Charles Schulz, a Charlie Hebdo inspiration.

Muhammad holds up a sign in his sausagefingers that reads: ‘Je suis Charlie’.

Besides reclaiming Muhammad from the jihadists, the magazine’s rendering of the comically disconsolate prophet satirises the infantile desire of fundamentalists to murder satire itself, while additionally casting back to an ancient tradition of French social criticism that includes, among other

Charlie Hebdo Charlie Hebdo Cover No 1178 (2015) Charlie Hebdo ( founded in 1970) defines itself as secular, sceptical, atheist, far-left-wing, antiracist and also ‘a punch in the face’. It’s ‘survival issue’ sold almost eight million copies.

Charlie Hebdo, Issue No 1178, 14 January 2015.

Photo: Guy Corbishley/Alamy Stock Photo

Summer 2018

honourable confrontations between freedom and censorship, the tangle between Honoré Daumier and King Louis-Philippe (the artist got six months in jail for depicting the monarch as a gorging Gargantua).

The cover of No 1178 celebrates nothing less than the right to mock, blaspheme and hold nothing sacred. As a caricature, the drawing hilariously sends up death; as an exercise in free speech, it recalls the rousing words of Medgar Evers: ‘You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea’.

The best cartoons straddle the divide between reflection and provocation. Never was this truer than with cover No 1178 of Charlie Hebdo, which was drawn by Renald Luzier, alias Luz, the magazine’s most prominent surviving cartoonist. In the words of one commentator, Luz overslept to draw another day. In doing so, he gifted the world a rare treasure: a work of art that wrings humour from its own tragedy. CVF

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Exhibition: 8–27 June 2018 20 Cork Street London W1S 3NG Online auction opens 8 June www.artangel.org.uk/ artists-for-artangel

Francis Alÿs Stephan Balkenhol Matthew Barney Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller Vija Celmins José Damasceno Jeremy Deller Rita Donagh Peter Dreher Marlene Dumas

Brian Eno Ryan Gander Robert Gober Nan Goldin Douglas Gordon Antony Gormley Richard Hamilton Susan Hiller Roger Hiorns Andy Holden Roni Horn Cristina Iglesias

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Mike Kelley + Laurie Anderson / Cary Loren / Cameron Jamie / Paul McCarthy / John Miller / Tony Oursler / Raymond Pettibon / Jim Shaw / Marnie Weber

Michael Landy Charles LeDray Christian Marclay Steve McQueen Juan Muñoz Paul Pfeiffer Susan Philipsz Daniel Silver Taryn Simon Wolfgang Tillmans Richard Wentworth Rachel Whiteread

With thanks to: Sotheby’s, Cork Street Galleries, an initiative from the Pollen Estate, Martinspeed, Omni, Paddle8.

Image: Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, How To Make Yourself Better, 1999.

Second Yinchuan Biennale 第二届银川双年展 Starting from the Desert Ecologies on the Edge 从沙漠出发 边界上的生态学 June 09 – September 19 2018 2018年6月9日 – 9月19日 MOCA Yinchuan 银川当代美术馆 Curated by Marco Scotini 策展人：马可 · 斯科蒂尼

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& beg the wolf 65

Bruce Nauman

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In the Good Corner

by Martin Herbert

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all images Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor) (stills), 1999, video, monitor, colour, sound (stereo), 59 min 18 sec. © the artist / Artists Rights Society, New York / DACS, London.

Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

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It’s a few weeks ago and I’m in the garden, perspiring, corkscrewing In his case, it also inevitably scans as recursive. The good corner he a posthole digger downward to bore a trio of one-metre holes for a row set, back in the 1960s, involved cornering himself in the studio. That of fenceposts. Later there will be measured pours of sand and gravel, work established singular concerns: a famously existential locus, a the ceremonial insertion of steel stakes, some angst involving a spirit Beckettian rhythm of repetition that pivoted on itself because, in going level, cementing, a cold beer. But for now it’s basic grunt-work, and round in circles (or walking in a square, or banging the back of his head amid the periodic oaths, two things loop through this amateur handy- against a wall), Nauman was getting somewhere vis-à-vis the human man’s brain. Firstly the old saw, attributed to everyone from an anony- condition, living life as it is. From that foundation he went, of course, mous Zen Buddhist to Tom Waits, that says ‘how you do anything is many other places: into sculpture, neon, holograms, photographs, how you do everything’. Secondly, Bruce Nauman’s 1999 video Setting sound, drawing, installation, printmaking, books, videos of different a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), which happens to make the self- types. By the time, aged nearly sixty, he got to Setting a Good Corner same persuasive point before sailing beyond it.

– which came just before his late-career masterpiece Mapping the Studio I think about Setting a Good Corner fairly regularly, whether doing I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001) – he had very little to prove. Maybe he’d something like this or not. Probably my favourite work by Nauman reached that point in a creative life where the weight of accumulated and one of my favourites by anyone, it exists for me, as most artworks understanding begins to slide towards a need to give back. Nauman, in do for most people, predominantly as a memory. I first saw it, start to this video, is student and teacher at once, good-humouredly sermonend, in a museum group-show somewhere – those details have evap- ising on the necessity of remaining a student. (Even if you’re, say, orated, no matter – suckered by its peacefulness and peculiarity and the greatest living American artist.) He’s not a neophyte, not a gentlephilosophic progression. Sometime later I saw it all again online; it’s man farmer, but someone can help him fine-tune. True for all of us. subsequently been taken down. The video is 59 minutes 18 seconds After a while, it’s increasingly rare to have those experiences where long, one static shot without edits, and documents Nauman, in cowboy something you thought wasn’t art becomes it. Setting a Good Corner does hat and workshirt and jeans, on his Las Madres ranch in New Mexico, that, around the point – different for every viewer, probably – where you essaying a tricky task: laying a triangular array of three wooden fence- think: ‘My God, he’s really just going to film the emplacing of a fenceposts in order to create, yes, a good corner. In a scrolling text at the post’. That’s what you get, authentically, while watching it, that art can beginning of the video, Nauman notes that you can’t have a good fence really be anything and that what makes it so is ticklishly anterior to without a good corner. He’s using three-metre cedar railway sleepers language. It’s only afterwards, when you’re doing something and your as uprights, which have to be perfectly plumb or the whole structure mind drifts back to Nauman and Riggins, that the process reverses: won’t work, and he has carefully that, outside of the museum or It’s increasingly rare to have those experienc- gallery, anything can also be treated selected smooth rather than barbed wire to attach crossbeams, so that as a form of artistry, as philosophy. es where something you thought wasn’t art – as he writes – he doesn’t end up It’s probably easiest to have that becomes it. Setting a Good Corner does that swearing on video. association if you are, indeed, laying The video begins in medias res, two posts already in, shafts sunk a fencepost yourself, but if you work in an analogous spirit – easy there, halfway into the ground, the earth tamped down. Over the course of long as it takes, get it right or the next thing won’t be right – you partake the hour, Nauman – overseen by his neighbour and ranch partner, of the principle. Now, Setting a Good Corner could of course appear hokey, Bill Riggins – gets the third in. He has a similar digger to mine, but cowboy wisdom. But it won’t be owned by such a reading, and as such is of his is bright red (mine is black) and, because he’s smart, mechanised. a piece with Nauman’s flickering word-based neons, the endless equivHe attaches wooden crossbeams and ties them tight, and finally hauls ocation right there in the relationship between title and subtitle, in a green gate. His wife, Susan Rothenberg, drifts in and out; so do everyday diluting highbrow, highfalutin elevating mundane. (You several animals; it’s an ordinary day. At the end of the video there’s think of Glen Baxter’s incongruous cowboys, opening their mouths to another scrolling text in which Riggins gets his neighbourly, compar- opine on Rothko or whatever.) As for precisely why it’s art and not an atively professional say: Nauman did a decent job, he ought to keep instruction video, outside of his making it, even Nauman demurs: ‘It’s his tools where he can find them, his chainsaw could use sharpening. probably the part that I can’t say’.

(In a 2001 interview Nauman noted that he included the Riggins testiThe final twist of the corkscrew, though, is this. Nauman, one day mony because the latter had said, ‘Boy, you’re going to get a lot of criti- in 1999, had some mandatory work to do on his farm, out there in the cism on that because people have a lot of different ways of doing those real world. To make sure he did it right, he took some local advice; and things’.) Then, since the video is on a continuous loop, the work starts by setting up a video camera, inserting a one-hour videotape, looking attentively at what he taped and making a decision, he also got a work over again – because that’s life.

Setting a Good Corner is in Nauman’s long tradition of using a formal out of it. (A big ‘see what I just did?’ flex, another artist might think.) constraint. Here, everything is defined by the given activity: the video You might say Nauman also got a permanently installed minimalist begins when this stretch of necessary and unglamorous work begins, sculpture out of it, given that he says himself that he saw the corner and ends when it ends. That he subtitles said process ‘allegory and as beautiful. And the video itself, while seemingly casual and chancy, metaphor’ is a dust-dry joke – like you’d watch an artist laying a fence- happens to be wonderfully deadpan, instructive and like a spore that, post for an hour and not immediately, desperately think in terms of once ingested, can rise to the surface of the mind anytime the viewer allegory and metaphor – but it’s also accurate. Upfront, Nauman is does honest work later, serving to dignify it, smarten it. That’s a magic talking here about an art of living, of dailiness: patience, preparation, trick. But it’s Bruce Nauman, so we shouldn’t be too surprised. ar establishing a foundation, taking advice, thinking in stages, doing the (literally) boring stuff, over and over.

Martin Herbert is an associate editor of ArtReview

Summer 2018

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Mexican Macabre

by Chloe Aridjis

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Monsters are demonstrative – it’s in the etymology – and their current of human mutilation circulated in the Mexican media. Narco violence incarnations in Mexico display an instinctive knack for the spectacle is not art, yet its graphic mises-en-scène could similarly be read as alleof violence. Since the start of the catastrophic ‘war on drugs’ initi- gories of great sociopolitical disarray, and the decapitated heads as ated by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006 when he sent thou- metaphors for a country without any real leadership.

Two scenarios from the month of April alone illustrate the horror. sands of troops and federal police into his home state of Michoacán, over 200,000 individuals have been killed as the cartels battle among Four weeks after they went missing in Jalisco, three film students themselves for territory (and control of supply routes to the United were found tortured, murdered and dissolved in acid. Investigators States) while a weakened military tries to keep them in check. The say they were mistaken for members of a rival cartel by the Jalisco New ruthless competition between cartels extends into the production Generation Cartel. And in an abandoned vehicle in Cancún, police of images, installations and hyperbole; each has a strong sense of discovered the corpses of five men who had been tortured to death, how to construct a striking visual two decapitated, with their hearts In Vaporización (2001) spectators enter a message, and never stops striving ripped out. The heads were in a sepafor greater effect: faces stitched onto saunalike space only to discover the dense rate bag, hearts shoved into mouths footballs, bodies dangling from sewn shut with wire. mist is composed of particles of water bridges, severed heads rolled out The skulls and bleeding hearts used to rinse corpses in a Mexico City that are ubiquitous symbols in onto dancefloors. Even the language Mexican iconography – from Aztec employed on narcomantas, banners morgue. The dead inhabit the air human sacrifice and tzompantli that display warnings to rivals, and in narcocorridos, ballads that versify crimes into lore, tends to be figu- (skull racks) to the Day of the Dead to the contemporary cult of the rative and allusive, and part of a growing vernacular. The more I read Santa Muerte (Holy Death, a skeleton in robes who is patron saint about what is happening in my country, the more I wonder whether of the disenfranchised and the Mexican underworld) – have always art should even attempt to capture the monstrous and unspeakable formed part of a metaphysics premised on reverence for death and rebirth. Yet the disembodied heads of today, though serving as a when real-life horror far outdoes any construct.

Every day the news serves up gruesome reports of beheadings and warning to others, signal nothing more than chaos and collapse. dismemberments, of a violence and brutality so theatrical that even The state has lost its prerogative, its monopoly on violence replaced the depiction of severed body parts in Francisco de Goya’s Disasters by the anarchic brutality of ‘narco states’ locked in savage battle. of War (1810–20) seems restrained. Indeed, the disseverments of So where does this leave art? Among those Mexican artists who Hieronymus Bosch and Goya are nothing compared to the real images have given voice to the malaise, Eduardo Abaroa’s Destrucción Total

preceding pages Teresa Margolles, Vaporización, 2001, mix of water used to wash cadavers at the morgue, sanitised. Photo: Rafael Burillo.

Courtesy PAC Padigliogne d’Arte Contemporaneo, Milan

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above Eduardo Abaroa, Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 (installation view). Photo: Estudio Michel Zabé.

Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

Teresa Margolles, Papeles, 2003, 98 sheets, fabriano paper soaked with water that was used to wash the corpses after the autopsy, 70 × 50 cm (each).

Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich

Summer 2018

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del Museo de Antropología (2012) imagines the towering monoliths of by immersion in the water used to wash a corpse following autopsy, Mexico’s ancient gods reduced to rubble, in the process deconstructing one sheet per body. In some cases, a bit of hair or fat has adhered the efforts of modern politicians to position themselves as the inher- itself. Arranged into rows on the wall, the papers form an assembly of itors of those indigenous cultures their policies betrayed. Alfonso anonymous postmortem portraits displaying different temperatures Piloto Nieves sculpts ghastly heads and torsos out of found detritus, as of red. Although the blood has stopped circulating, it’s hard not to if evil and depravity were endlessly recycled, and all that changes is the imagine a few swirls of life, the same patterns and tapestries as those form. More optimistically, Pedro Reyes takes guns decommissioned on slides under a microscope. from the drug cartels and transforms them into shovels for planting In Vaporización (2001) spectators enter a saunalike space only to trees around the world, in the case of Palas por Pistolas (Guns for Shovels, discover the dense mist is composed of particles of water used to rinse 2007), or into musical instruments, in Disarm (2013). corpses in a Mexico City morgue. The dead inhabit the air as they are breathed in by visitors, whose One of the boldest artists to enThe more I read about what is happening own outlines are scarcely visible. In gage with the crisis has been Teresa that space the living, too, are threatMargolles. Her work is deeply inin my country, the more I wonder habited by the monstrous, signified ened with disappearance (along whether art should attempt to capture at a remove by the victims’ remains. with the murdered, there are at least Originally from Culiacán, home 30,000 reported missing in Mexico). the monstrous when real-life horror to the once all-powerful Sinaloa Similarly, En el Aire (2003) fills the far outdoes any construct cartel headed by Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ space with shimmering bubbles Guzmán, Margolles trained as a forensic pathologist. From the start, produced from the liquid used to disinfect dead bodies. Each bubble the morgue served as both laboratory and studio – ‘a morgue for me is – fragile, erratic, ephemeral – represents a person. These two instala thermometer of a society’, she once said – but with the rise in violence lations are at once transcendent and perverse; in life, these individacross Mexico she moved into the streets, which provided just as many uals would have dwelled on the margins of society, distant from the cadavers. Here too the human body becomes a site of transformation, culture represented by art galleries; in death, something of them, but Margolles transmutes the evidence into something haunting and sanitised and distilled, drifts around these spaces. ethereal. Gruesome subjects are stripped of theatricality, yet there This is a far cry from the dispassionate approach to Mexican endures a material relationship with the source. horror adopted by some commentators abroad. In the London-based From afar, Papeles (2003) appears to be an arrangement of marbled collective Forensic Architecture’s The Ayotzinapa Case: A Cartography of papers, which upon closer inspection reveal murky emulsions, created Violence (2017), diagrams and coolly laid-out graphs map the fate of

Forensic Architecture, The Ayotzinapa Case: A Cartography of Violence (detail), 2017, mixed media. Courtesy Forensic Architecture

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43 students who in September 2014 were attacked and forcibly disapAfter the conquest of Mexico, the transition from Aztec peared. Within the bare visuals reside aesthetic decisions – colours, cosmology to Catholic faith was eased by the convergence of angles, the spatial distribution of the information. Yet in a country a ‘theatre of death’ present in both religions. Mexican Baroque where a staggering 99 percent of crimes go unpunished, according emerged from the spiritual crisis that set in after the long, fraught to the Mexico Global Impunity Index published by the Universidad process of subjugation that followed, and the altarpieces and church de las Américas, it might seem futile to a Mexican artist to present facades teemed with hybrids and grotesques, mutations and metamortheir reality in such dry, technical terms, seemingly devoid of judg- phoses, excess and fluidity. The monolithic sculptures of pre-Hispanic ment and emotion. civilisations – signs of a certain stability – were replaced by an art that In cinema, a documentary approach feels more apposite than favoured movement over stasis, agility over volume: more fluid and any fiction. Everardo González’s Devil’s Freedom (2017), a night- volatile. Today, a major socioeconomic breakdown in Mexico has given marish chronicle of the drug and rise to new manifestations of the Narco violence is not art, yet its graphic state violence, is an impressive exmonstrous, to visions of physample of this negotiation between ical fragmentation that evoke mises-en-scène could similarly be read disclosure and concealment. The title the finitude of our existence. as allegories of great sociopolitical disarray, refers to something everyone knows: Rather than reiterate the Mexico is a country where evil roams spectacle of a violence divorced and the decapitated heads as metaphors for freely, and the scenes unfold under from metaphysics – any attempt a country without any real leadership the pall of a perpetual twilight. Here, would fall short – some Mexican we meet victims, relatives of victims and perpetrators – hitmen, artists have chosen to engage with materiality. Adopting a more forensic kidnappers, police and military who have agreed to speak about or literal approach to matter, they break it down to wrest different meantheir crimes to the camera. Anonymity is guaranteed by a mask, and ings from the destruction, distillation or recombination of its elements. everyone in the film wears the same flesh-coloured balaclava with This contemporary form of hybridity, which incorporates conflicting holes for eyes, mouth and nose. At first this decision seems theatrical energies and a sense of the fugitive and mutable, may seem worlds apart and contrived, like lucha libre costume stripped of its adornment, from the transubstantiation of matter pushed by the cartels; and yet yet the paring-down of visuals grants the film a genuine complexity everything within this panorama is under constant threat of transforin which archetypes are dismantled. Victims and offenders are made mation, caught up in an inescapable, annihilating, flow. ar to share the same face, which before long inspires in the viewer an all-encompassing empathy.

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican novelist based in London

Pedro Reyes, Disarm (Violin), 2013, metal, 67 × 23 × 13 cm.

Photo: Dave Morgan. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York

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Fatberg A twenty-first-century Cthulhu

by Aaron Angell

a cuneiform tablet. Pains are Many cities around the world taken to emphasise its rocksuffer from a ‘fatberg’ problem, but none other than London like texture and ambiguous has chosen to exhibit one. What composition. In this setting it does this say about the subterralooks like something from Paul nean nightmares of Londoners?

Thek’s Technological Reliquaries (1965–66), in which the late Fatberg! at the Museum of London American artist presented visis the result of the discovery in September 2017 of a clot of wet cerally naturalistic beeswax wipes, grease and human waste, replicas of body parts in sleek longer in length than Tower Plexiglas cases. It also shares Bridge, coiled and sweating beneath Whitechapel Road in the East some of that series’ material semiotics, such as the prophylactic End. The institution has placed on display their recent acquisition of nature of the glass observation chamber, protecting viewer from a piece of this beast, its size limited in order to be able to pass through object and object from viewer. Though if Thek’s butcher’s-window a manhole. The rest was disposed of, dismantled with pneumatic trompe l’oeil were wax made exquisite flesh, then the fatberg is a brutal drills and shovels. Rather than merely operating a prolonged and rendering of human waste into wax or tallow. Indeed, the bulk of the cautionary public service announcement by Thames Water (though Whitechapel blockage was in fact recovered and used for biodiesel, it serves as this too: the utility company has sponsored the exhibi- and a hundred years ago the berg would have been of great value tion), the museum’s introductory wall text justifies the exhibit via to candlemakers, on a par with spermaceti. In this sense it echoes allusions to an apparent public demand to see the freakish offspring the long history of London’s subterranean chambers of shit finding of its constant discharge: a demand to satisfy its morbid curiosity for extramural value. Long before Joseph Bazalgette’s grand sewer network cleaned up London during the mid-nineteenth century, the monstrous.

By means of a hazard tape-accented installation of infographics cesspits were regularly emptied, some of the waste used to fertiand video interviews with sewer workers, Fatberg! endeavours lise the Home Counties (collected by so-called gong-farmers, who to distract from the fact that its sole material content is a clot on nicknamed the waste ‘night soil’), and in the city a cottage-industry a plinth. This is a shame, because this lump of urban excreta has a sprang up extracting nitrogen from faeces, to be used in the producdiscreet presence all of its own. Sitting on granulated charcoal in tion of gunpowder. The fatberg however is primarily exhibited as a a double-skinned glass vitrine, the fatberg is given a cultural artefact. Like a farming bygone nailed to the A 2017 ‘fatberg’ clotting a waste pipe delicate, bonsailike aspect. The room is dark and beneath Whitechapel Road, London. wall of a suburban pub, its use value has moved from the practical to the symbolic. the Whitechapel fragment is lit in raking light like Photo: Thames Water

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Fatberg!, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy Museum of London

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The subterranean arteries of great cities have at times occupied deliberately built underground as secret cells, so the restoration of binary positions in the thoughts of surface-dwellers. On the one the Mithraeum to a spot that is now located seven metres beneath the hand a soil-dark cloaca, fit only for foul effluent and broken rubbish. buildings of subsequent ages is apt. Bloomberg’s theatrical renovaOn the other they are places of transposition and transubstantia- tion (touted as the dreaded immersive experience: a tour of this holy site tion, of beeline travel, economic opportunity and obscure chthonic involves both dry ice and a light show) also includes a sleek display worship. The underground of London, particularly, has long held of Roman artefacts from the city’s many twentieth-century excavaoffensive connotations in the public imagination: we have no tions. Most of these were found in cesspits and rubbish dumps, and romantic labyrinths or baroque catacombs for the dead, and even the like the main aggregate of the fatberg, had been discarded by their Roman sewers, which doubtless existed, have turned to dust. Instead original owners. we have a fearsome place, full of noxious odours and plague pits – the The material contrariness of the fatberg may be what attracts dead piled multistory like bricks. The notable artefacts to be found most. It is poisonous, almost demonically so. It hatched a scum of under London are often coarse flies while conservators were It is poisonous, almost demonically so. in quality: clumsy iron tools and preparing it for exhibition. It roughly turned sycamore bowls. gives off gases still and the walls It hatched a scum of flies while conservators And potsherds, the primary typoof its case are covered in condenwere preparing it for exhibition. It gives off logical measure of the city’s strata, sation. It is made of drugs and are symbolic of a medieval pottery gases still and the walls of its case are covered in disease. Despite the reams of information about the dangerindustry that was probably the condensation. It is made of drugs and disease rudest in Europe, vessels unselfously putrid composition of the consciously retaining the marks of the malleable underground mass lump, it doesn’t appear very disgusting at all however. Rather, it sits on from which they came. the knife-edge separating abjection from delicacy. It has the mineral Three months before the fatberg went on display, Bloomberg feeling of an old, complex cheese, and reminds me of the benign and Space cut the ribbon on the London Mithraeum, the remains of a third- ossified white dogshit that peppered the streets of my childhood century Roman temple dedicated to the ambiguous bull-slaying god (a lost relic of the times when bonemeal was an ingredient of most Mithras, situated beneath the company’s European headquarters. dog food, banned after the ‘mad cow disease’ scandal). It looks cured, Upon its discovery in 1954, the temple’s remains were reassembled not rotten. Sebaceous and crystalline, marine and desert. In fact, ignoring the occasional sprouting pubic hair and nearby on a car park roof, but Bloomberg’s project Fatberg!, 2018, at the bright shard of plastic, the lump could easily be restores the temple to its original location beside the Museum of London. lost river Walbrook. Many temples to Mithras were mistaken for a whale product. It looks somewhat like Courtesy the author

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sewer had its origin further ambergris, the sundried and west, at one point running sea-seasoned sperm-whale bile along Carting Lane in Covent coveted by perfumers, and the Garden. ‘Farting Lane’, as it lump’s surprising, phosphoric whiteness dredges up other was once colloquially known, cetaceous feelings (ghastly whiteness is a common feature of under- is now the location of the last surviving sewer gas destruction lamp world matter: hordes of white crabs and other blind cavern crea- in the country. These were permanently lit Victorian gas lamps that tures are regularly reported in London’s sewer system). In Moby- collected sewer methane in a glass dome before burning it for light, Dick (1851), Herman Melville’s albino leviathan is often presented as with those lining Carting Lane especially nourished by a constant unholy – as the surfacing of a once-vibrant creature that has strayed supply of gourmet waste from the patrons of the adjacent Savoy Hotel. too close to the underworld and thereby been drained of sanguine Like the somewhat novel sewer gas lamps, Fatberg! could also be life and thus turned a ghostly shade. Furthermore, in the zoological seen as part of the peculiarly British refinement of toilet humour glossary written to accompany the unabridged version of the book, that starts in the playground, continues with Viz magazine and ends the older name of the blue whale is given as ‘Sulphur-Bottom’, owing in the acquisition of this decade’s sewer waste by a civic museum. to their yellow-white bellies ‘doubtless got by scraping along the The Museum of London presents the lump as both an ossified relic and as something more than contemporary, a mirror that speaks of Tartarian tiles in some of [their] profounder divings’.

‘Tartarian and chaotic’ was one nineteenth-century journal- digestive and geological time, of clots and blockages in circulation, ist’s description of the new tunnels beneath London. Though we and of the stewarded chemistry of the human body. In the Channel now travel the depths of the city without concern on the London 4 documentary Fatberg Autopsy (2018), analysis of material from a Underground, the original excavations for the Tube regularly different blockage revealed huge amounts of banned gym suppleproduced overwhelming gases and hellish flames, owing to the spon- ments including anabolic steroids. The berg also speaks of the impertaneous combustion of the vast amounts of methane seeping through fect functionality of the city as an extended organism. Rather than the soil. As mentioned, though their discovery is surprising and over- flow or float, the fats that make up the fatberg stick to the walls of whelming, fumes and rotten waste have always been harvested. London’s circulatory system; unable to break down naturally, they Things grown or thrown underground always find some eventual use. require human intervention, and will keep those upstairs busy for Soon after passing the Mithraeum, the buried years to come. It is a raw material awaiting both A sewer hunter, eking out a living by searching in the Walbrook crosses Cloak Lane, where an open physical and metaphorical transformation. ar sewers for anything he could sell. From an original sewer once fed into it (‘Cloak’ from ‘cloaca’, the engraving in Harper’s Story Books by Jacob Abbott, 1854. writer Peter Ackroyd notes). This branch of the Aaron Angell is an artist based in London Courtesy World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

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Bloodlines Luc Tuymans curates a major exhibition of historical and contemporary art tracing the legacy of the Baroque Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

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With the Flanders region of Belgium launching a two-year tourism initiative promoting its ‘Flemish Masters’ – Rubens, Bruegel and Van Eyck – Antwerp focuses on Rubens, who lived most of his life in the city. But to give the art-historical festivities a contemporary angle, Antwerp’s Royal Museum and M KHA turned to Antwerp’s best-known living painter, Luc Tuymans, to come up with his take on the Baroque. The resulting mix of work by Old Masters and contemporary artists opens this month at M KHA, in an exhibition titled Sanguine/Bloedrood.

ArtReview met the artist to find out about visual power, violence and why the Baroque was the first global art movement…

AR How does this mix of contemporary works with Old Master paintings illustrate your take on the Baroque?

LT The juxtaposition might at first seem awkward given that, in my view, the Baroque was one of the first global art movements.

As an early expression of Western imagebuilding, it migrated and colonised different cultures. So, to trace the Baroque’s trajectory from Rome into Spain, for instance, we have The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian [c. 1650]

by Francisco de Zurbarán, while a Michaël

ArtReview Why a show about the Baroque, and why now?

Luc Tuymans Sanguine came about because the reopening of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, was delayed until 2020. My initial response to being invited to come up with a concept to fill the gap was that I would not work with the ‘leftovers’ of the museum, but that I would deliver a show in which contemporary art would make up the largest part. But I didn’t instigate it – just as I didn’t instigate any of the shows I’ve previously been invited to curate.

I set out two parameters: the first was that we get Five Car Stud [1969–72] by Edward Kienholz, which depicts an execution [of a black man by a group of white men, at the centre of a circle illuminated by the headlights of their parked cars]. My response to this cruel – and very current – image was a painting which is not necessarily Baroque but which is at the far end of the period: Francisco de Goya’s Los Tres de Mayo de 1808 [1814].

The second was Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath [c. 1610], which is in the Villa Borghese. Caravaggio is the ultimate counterpoint to Rubens’s take on the Baroque: darker, less mythological and more intrusive. Of course, we didn’t get it. But we went to Rome to film the painting so that it can be projected onto the M HKA building.

We are definitely getting one Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard [c. 1594–95], and hope to secure The Flagellation of Christ [1607].

So, ideally, we would have a very early Caravaggio and a later Caravaggio in the one show.

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As well as work by painters (including Jan Van Imschoot and Marlene Dumas) with a clear connection to the Baroque, there will be some awkward elements, like the Thanatophanies [1955–95], a series of 30 lithographs of mutilated faces by On Kawara.

They relate to the fact that the Baroque has a lot to do with visual impact. In fact, the Baroque was very ill-defined until the nineteenth century – when people like [the pioneering Swiss cultural-historian] Jacob Burckhardt decided it was a movement – and the term was often used negatively, including with the implication that it was a form of propaganda.

AR The Baroque came out of a compromise between the Catholic Church and the populace. That political moment leads to a new relationship between power and pleasure, in which the Church attempts to recapture the potential of pleasure and awe as a form of power…

LT It was the Church trying to convince the populace. And in that sense, Caravaggio was of ultimate importance, his sense of urgency and ability to move out of the frame. While in this part of the world, especially with Rubens and Jordaens, there is the element of indulgence in the flesh. Van Dyck is a little more reserved, producing the first great psychological portraits. But this is not an art-historical show; it is a show based on a purely visual experience, which I hope to be able to transfer to the spectator.

AR Many of the contemporary works are a lot harsher in attitude…

Borremans will hang between a recently discovered study by Van Dyck and a painting

by Adriaen Brouwer.

above Luc Tuymans.

Photo: Alex Salinas preceding pages Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72, mixed media installation, dimensions variable.

Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio.

Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

ArtReview

LT Sigmar Polke’s La Lanterna Magica [1995] comes very close to a contemporary idea of the Baroque, dealing with the idea of politics and alchemy. David Tretiakoff’s works on rice paper, which draw on images of people in the Middle East setting fire to themselves, are made with the burning end of a cigarette. This marriage between violence and beauty was a proposition of the Baroque.

The Baroque’s major asset was its adaptability. It could move fast, adapt to different cultures and retrieve elements from these cultures. That’s an emphatic aspect of culture in recent decades, without a single avantgarde or a clear movement, propelled by the market more than anything else. Rubens

might almost have invented public relations, and the Baroque is interesting in terms of entrepreneurialism in art as well as the mechanisms of image-making.

AR Do you see a parallel between aesthetic power and social power?

LT Absolutely. Five Car Stud is a key work in this show and it’s notable that, when it was shown at LA MOCA in 2011 after 40 years ‘lost’ in a Japanese collection during which it was not exhibited, it was shown in the basement.

We are going to reconstruct the dome in which it was first shown [at Documenta 5, in 1972] and place it in front of the museum.

The subject matter is still extremely sensitive, and it shares with Los Tres de Mayo the theatricality, the brinkmanship of looking, of perceiving the image and experiencing it. All those things are within my idea of the Baroque.

El león de Caracas [2002], a video by Javier Téllez, is another prophetic work. Venezuela is now a shambles. These fake policemen carrying the symbol of Caracas – the lion, in this case a stuffed lion – through its shantytowns show how symbols and images relate to power, especially in South America, where the Baroque had a public impact.

AR There seems to be a split between works which have an element of ecstasy or euphoria, like Takashi Murakami’s maquettes for the sculpture The Birth Cry of a Universe [2014], and those in which human bodies suffer, without necessarily being redeemed.

LT Murakami is misunderstood. I know him quite well, and I think he’s quite a cynical artist. As with On Kawara, who made his images in 1955 after the H-bomb, Murakami came up with the idea of the ‘superflat’ to represent how we see destruction, but using imagery that could be merchandised.

So, I didn’t opt for a fully realised Murakami sculpture, but rather the preliminary maquettes. I wanted to retrieve the idea of artistic process, to make people understand that art isn’t just about accepting the overpowering effect of seeing an image, or the richness of the material, it’s more complicated.

AR Going back to the roots of the Baroque, there’s the problem of religious power and the nature of human experience. It’s so diverse because it opens up a new period of human self-understanding.

I wonder if that’s a critical reproach to the present.

In terms of it being a thematic which has importance to a bigger contemporary debate, how would you see this as an intervention, or a statement about a problem in art now?

LT I see it as a statement against the fact that the artworld – and I’m part of it, by the way – is becoming increasingly corporate. There is also the problem that institutions in Western Europe – which are still dependent on government subsidies – are largely incapacitated in terms of acquisitions, given the distorted prices for contemporary art. Curating these shows is a way for me personally to create a different proposition, less about a time period than about ideas.

LT We’ve become much more democratic in our perception of culture, and how it’s experienced, and how it became both more inclusive and more exclusive. That’s the contradiction in it: the availability of it, the scale on which it propels itself and the impact that it makes – or doesn’t make. I wanted to put that in opposition with the Baroque – this grand, overbearing monster – in terms of its impact on the world, which was on a far greater scale than the Renaissance.

AR The Baroque developed as an attempt to recapture the power of the sensual and the experiential – it produced a new kind of liberty to think about human experience. As a painter you’re known for a hard view of contemporary reality and the relationship of images to history. When there is suffering in the contemporary works you’ve included here, like the Kienholz piece, the question is whether there is any recovery from it, any ‘redemption’.

AR Is there a sense in which this is also to point to kinds of negative spectacle, as opposed to a kind of positive spectacle?

“The times we’re living in are interesting, not to say Rococo. We’re going from the Baroque’s global vision to an isolationist perspective on the world, which is dangerous. But the Baroque also established the possibility for the artist to fail productively and a particular form of narcissism” LT I don’t think so. The times we’re living in are interesting, not to say Rococo. We’re going from the Baroque’s global vision to an isolationist perspective on the world, which is dangerous. But the Baroque also established the possibility for the artist to fail productively – as in Rembrandt’s late self-portraits – and a particular form of narcissism. These were artists not just trying their best but determined to excel. Rembrandt has that element of doubt. Caravaggio doesn’t, but makes up for this through the exquisite violence of the imagery, the urgency of it.

AR I am curious about the idea of pleasure and affirmation and its relationship to power. It’s not something we associate with contemporary artists, although we increasingly question the artist’s relationship to power.

Summer 2018

LT There is positive possibility in the way the show reactivates Old Masters, and makes clear to people that art is not only concerned with itself, should not be understood by a timeline marked out in decades. These works were clearly made to surpass those limits, which relates to the point I want to make about the Baroque as overwhelming.

AR Why Sanguine as a title?

LT Blood symbolises life, cruelty, damage… and the colour red dominates Baroque art.

But we’re not showing Hermann Nitsch, we’re not going literally into the blood!

AR I’m struck by the presence of damage or death in the contemporary works, which is quite different to the more morally sustained image of suffering in the Old Masters. At one level, the old humanist culture has a strong sense of the predicament of human life, but there is also a sense of the positive and the energetic: you get as much of that in Caravaggio as you do violence and death. I wonder if this contrast relates to your broader sense of pessimism in the contemporary period?

LT That might be one of the more major juxtapositions. There is a sense of ‘that was then, this is now’. As for humanism – we live in such dystopian times, it’s not even funny. Most of the utopian visions have deleted themselves in a way that makes it not even feasible.

AR So there’s no way back?

LT No – there’s back-and-forth, rather than no way back. We cannot ignore the impact this imagery still has when seen today. The Baroque created so many images which still continued to be entangled in our society.

Sanguine/Bloedrood, curated by Luc Tuymans, is on view at M HKA, Antwerp, through 16 September, and at Fondazione Prada, Milan, from October to February

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Gernot Wieland

by Mark Rappolt

In 1945, Allied forces, about to occupy Austria, were issued a guide to 13 on that street was where Franz Kafka once lived. As he walked the country and its people. ‘It is no good expecting Austrians to be past the property and obsessed about it he became ‘closer’ to Kafka punctual and reliable, as we understand those terms,’ it reads. ‘They (even adopting what he imagined to be his walk and his ‘Praguish’ are not made that way. They will be quite sincere when they promise accent), ending up convinced that the author could only have written to do something; they will be equally sincere when they apologize for what he did because of the fact that he lived in this particular house. not having done it. But they will have a sense of “style”.’ The guide as (There’s a sense here, as there is in much of Wieland’s work, of Gaston a whole reduces the people to a type, defined by the geographic space Bachelard’s famous description of Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo as a they inhabit (the country looks like a shoe and its western border is person whose deformities are shaped by the building he inhabits, the ‘quite a small stream’), the climate of that place (‘hard to describe’) and relation between the two being ‘like a turtle to its carapace’ and posing its sociopolitical history (it has only been a ‘self-contained country’ the issue of whether or not an animal is shaped by its environment since 1918 and ‘therefore there has not been much time for Austrians or cage.) Later, Wieland reports, he discovered that there is another to get the feeling of being a nation’). It’s these restricted, prejudiced Grunewaldstrasse in Berlin and that it was on this street that Kafka ideas of identity and the way in which it is constructed that the Berlin- had actually lived. Ultimately, the Kafka Wieland had constructed was a fiction based on a misunderbased Austrian artist Gernot Wieland Facts, fictions and how they are instru- standing, doubtless influenced by the seeks to confront in his work. Though the previous statement in itself repreauthor’s own fictions, and tethered to mentalised in art as in life lie at the nothing resembling a fact. Although, sents a limited view of his recent output slippery heart of Wieland’s work at a certain point, Wieland’s Kafka was of expansive lecture-performances and films. He does, however, have a definite sense of ‘style’, one that juxta- a fact, as far as the artist, possessed by the writer’s shuffle and talking poses fact and fiction, horror and humour, profundity and bathos, in tongues, was concerned. and a sense that art and artmaking can be at once useless and useful Facts, fictions and how they are instrumentalised in art as in life in navigating between these poles, but either way can play a role in lie at the slippery heart of Wieland’s work. He might have made up the entirety of that Kafka stuff, the street address aside. Although his humanity’s search for its place in the world.

In the performance Speaking in Places (Ink in Milk) (2017, which generally emotionless, somewhat monotonous delivery in the perforpresents a schoolboy’s traumatic account of a fellow male pupil being mance, combined with his Germanic accent, help to enforce the sense, shamed for coming into class wearing lipstick, through to the village’s psychologically (but based on no essential truth), that facts are in the obsession with forming their bodies into healing crystals in order air. Thievery and Songs (2016), a 23-minute film that won Wieland first to expunge their sorrow over his eventual death), currently being prize at last year’s Mostyn Open, entwines the story of Hilde Holger, made into a film, Weiland describes how, shortly after a pioneering Jewish dancer who fled Austria for Bombay Thievery and Songs (still), moving to Berlin, he discovered that he lived around the in 1939, with the story of the artist’s great-aunt’s bondage 2016, video, 22 min 40 sec. corner from Grunewaldstrasse and that house number to a cruel and violent Austrian farmer (as told to him by Courtesy the artist

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his father), a folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, a therapy memory define us or do we define our memories? In both cases the one session, the perceived relationship between NASA and Leonardo da nourishes the other like an Ouroboros gnawing its own tail.

Vinci, that between religion and postwar Austrian art, the question of The relation of art to artificiality is something that Wieland to what extent the past informs the present, the extent to which the pursues in all his work. In Thievery and Songs, the artist recalls the experiences of childhood shape the form of an adult, and the relation- much-discussed connection between actionist performance and the Catholic Mass (while digressing on the fact that you are allowed to ship of character to place.

At the core of this tightly interwoven ball of problematics is an eat the body of Christ in the form of the host, but not allowed to chew exploration of how people and the power they wield shape environ- it); in the lecture-performance Depression in Animals (2016, in which ments: the Anschluss and with it the arrival of the National Socialists the artist examines depression in animals as a transference of human in Austria creates an environment that can no longer provide sanc- problems and a sign of humankind’s estrangement from nature) he tuary to Hilde Holger. When the artist’s great-aunt is sold to the describes the stuffed animals in an Austrian classroom as being ‘like farmer (who loses all his ‘property’, including his wife, to a ‘good’ an art installation’. All of which leaves you questioning what is more farmer over a game of cards in the prewar era, before returning as a absurd, the art or the customs and traditions it imitates. And if it’s the member of the Nazi Party to take it back) he shapes her identity and latter, then what does that say about the society we inhabit? In Thievery existence. A Hitler-Eiche to which the artist and his brother played and Songs, the artist recounts the folk tale ‘The Town Musicians of Mendelssohn as an act of childhood atonement (for the sins of Austria) Bremen’, in which four domestic animals – a dog, a cat, a donkey and a is wiped from the landscape and has been replaced by a shopping rooster – having reached the end of their ‘useful’ lives on a farm decide centre when he revisits as an adult. The Berlin psychiatrist that the to go to Bremen and become musicians. Along the way they stop at a artist consults concerning his dreams of imaginary landscapes, whose house populated by robbers. To scare them off and take the house for meaning Wieland can’t interpret, demonstrates an obsession with his themselves, the animals stand one atop the other, leading the thieves patient’s Austrian dialect and his having lived in Vienna, the home of to confuse them for a witch, a judge, a giant and an ogre. To a story Freud, even as his patient exhibits mounting anxiety and anger while that ends with the animals living happily ever after, Wieland adds an he seeks to reframe the session around the artist’s own problems, all Orwellian coda: after a while the animals can’t decide who should be on top of the other; they go to therapy to resolve their issues; therapy the time sweating on the couch.

The narrative is accompanied by a series of illustrations: Plasticine doesn’t help so they go their separate ways. Their occupation of the house and what followed, Wieland animations, childishly naive paintBy the end of the film the image of a wav- suggests, is a parable for Occupy Wall ings, textbook illustrations, scientific-looking emotional diagrams that ing man comes to mean comfortableness, Street. Although given that ‘The Town attempt to make sense of the therapy Musicians of Bremen’ was collected in friendliness, discomfort and hostility session, photographs belonging to Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1819, perhaps the artist’s father and a filmed performance of a dancer (in a dress the fairy tale is more truthfully a precedent. that might approximate some of the costumes worn by Holger). At Ultimately it’s not just the interhuman dynamics of power and times they introduce visual links between the various narratives, at hierarchy that the artist seeks to confront, but also humanity’s specieother times their childlike execution serves to highlight the absurdity sism and dominance over the rest of the world. At the beginning of of those narratives, while at other times still they’re presented as Thievery and Songs, the artist describes feeling that he is in reality a evidence of the purported facts of the tale. For example, we’re shown snail and only attempting to fit into human society. ‘I eat your food a man waving his right hand as pictured on the plaques that accom- and pretend I share your taste. I talk and show affection, and imitate panied NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 probes into outer space during the a normal life,’ he proclaims, all the while suggesting that ideals of early 1970s. The artist claims to have confused these messages for human society are as much a performance as his artwork. At the end extraterrestial life with Leonardo da Vinci’s illustration of Vitruvian of the film he confronts his dreams about landscapes he doesn’t recogMan (c.1490), an ideal image that he then obsessively perpetuates nise and cannot interpret saying, they are ‘the opposite of fear and I (we’re shown several childhood drawings) so that any man he draws do not exist in them’. Oh and by the way Wieland does have a habit of is pictured holding up his right hand. This image crops up again, in being punctual and reliable.

Plasticine form, illustrating the artist’s discomfort during the therapy Mark Rappolt is the editor-in-chief of ArtReview session and, as the narrative turns to National Socialism, has uncomfortable echoes of the infamous Nazi salute. By the end of the film the image of a waving man comes to mean comfortableness, friendliness, Gernot Wieland will perform the lecture Depression in Animals at OGR Torino on 5 June. The film Ink in Milk will be shown as part discomfort and hostility: everything and nothing at the same time. of Shame at Künstlerhaus Bremen, 30 June – 26 August. The artist’s Gernot’s imagery in general comes to operate in such a way as to leave work is also included in Zeitspuren at the Kunsthaus Centre d´art you questioning whether it’s the ‘plot’ that gives meaning to objects Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, 9 September – 18 November presented or the objects that give truth to the plot. And similarly, does

opposite page Thievery and Songs (stills), 2016, video, 22 min 40 sec.

Courtesy the artist

Summer 2018

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these and preceding pages Ink in Milk (stills), 2018, forthcoming film.

Courtesy the artist

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BRIDGET RILEY the complete paintings

Compiled with the input of Bridget Riley herself, this landmark publication brings together 656 of the artist’s works made on canvas, board, and the wall and major large-scale commissions from the late 1940s to 2017.

Edited by Robert Kudielka with Alexandra Tommasini and Natalia Naish £495.00 t 5 volumes, slipcased t Available June 2018 For more details, please visit www.bridgetrileyartfoundation.org or www.thamesandhudson.com

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Introducing British Artists to Japan

Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2018 Kate Groobey Keith Milow Mark Neville Daiwa Foundation Japan House 13/14 Cornwall Terrace London nw1 4qp dajf.org.uk

Keith Milow, I Feel the Earth Move, 2018

8 June – 13 July 2018 Mon – Fri 9.30am – 5.00pm

Supported by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Te Papa gratefully acknowledges the gift of the Brian Brake Collection by Wai-man Lau.

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by Alvaro Siza and Ambrosi-Etchegaray.

Art Reviewed

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Adrian Piper A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 MoMA, New York 31 March – 22 July Adrian Piper has not set foot on American soil for over a decade – not since the Americanborn artist/philosopher, who moved her primary practice to Berlin in 2005, discovered the following year that she’d been added to a US watch list for ‘suspicious travellers’ (a blanket designation, the criteria for which the Transportation Security Administration has never fully revealed). Active since the mid-1960s, Piper has garnered a reputation as among the most politically uncompromising of artists to emerge – and more crucially, maintain urgency – over the past five decades.

That this methodical and intellectually rigorous artist came into maturity and established a place for herself within New York’s 1960s Conceptualism, a movement founded on theoretical premises followed to their logical ends, is perhaps not surprising. But the career she went on to carve out would both defy elements of the movement’s logic (specifically, its emphasis on objectively defined aesthetic experience) and upend numerous contemporary artistic conventions – primary among them, that ‘serious’ political art is best served cold and dry.

Piper’s work presciently addresses a host of intersectional disparities in a manner that is somehow also precise and personal, as well as visually engaging. While overdue, MoMA’s retrospective is well timed, coinciding with a moment of increased attention to historically marginalised artists, particularly those of colour. As this sweeping installation, which covers the museum’s entire sixth floor – the most space MoMA has ever given to a living artist – demonstrates, another likely reason for decades of institutional slights is Piper’s resistance to categorisation, as evidenced by her continual shifts between modes of display – among them street performance, two-dimensional work in the forms of

photocollage and drawings on newspaper and installation. Several of the earliest works on view here – including Nine Part Floating Square (1967), a multipart work composed of a grid of nine square canvases, each divided into nine cells, some of which have been gessoed to suggest a smaller interior square – call to mind the graphic and formational strategies of Piper’s mentor and friend Sol LeWitt. But yet another explanation for Piper’s previous exclusion from the canon is the explicitly confrontational nature of her later works, however disparate in form they appear.

Piper’s work of the 1970s, born of the artist’s frustration with the limits of conceptual strategies to address the real and pressing issues she saw around her, particularly the US invasion of Cambodia and activism building domestically around antiwar and women’s-rights efforts, would take an increasingly urgent tone.

In 1973 Piper debuted a performative alter ego she dubbed ‘The Mythic Being’, embodied by the artist herself. A black male character with aviator shades, a large curly head of hair and a moustache who walks the city streets reciting fragments from the artist’s adolescent journals, this persona was initially imagined as a means by which Piper might experiment (as she described it in the 1973 performance-based video The Mythic Being) with “systems and internal expectations versus external audience perceptions” via a physical entity separate from her own. The project evolved into an extended meditation on this anonymous figure’s status as a black man (and implicitly, viewers’ reactions to him as such). Yet like all of Piper’s output, it can’t be encapsulated as a commentary on any given facet of identity politics.

Rather, she shows us how the strangeness of this figure, who dons male garb but has Piper’s slight physique and high voice, who swaggers while chanting intimate thoughts, draws our

facing page, top The Mythic Being, 1973, video (excerpted from Peter Kennedy’s Other Than Art’s Sake, 1973), 16mm film transferred to video, colour, sound, 8 min. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin

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attention to the very assumptions we make about the Mythic Being as we attempt to ‘place’ him. Crucially, as the video makes clear, she is also very funny in this role, her mordant, deadpan delivery well suited to the New York City streets, puzzling even the most jaded of its denizens.

The remainder of the show is equally resistant to categorisation. Moving chronologically through the galleries, one is able to observe the artist’s shifts between various visual strategies throughout the years. Form is never primary here, but rather a means to an end.

Piper picks and chooses the vehicles best suited to the particular needs of the works themselves.

One particularly arresting example is Black Box/ White Box (1992), a dual set of immersive interiors. Made in the aftermath of the infamous observer-filmed police battery of Los Angeles cab driver Rodney King and the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers involved, these two enclosed structures provide intimate viewing stations in which to confront archival video and audio from the incident and its subsequent political fallout (including, in the ‘white box’, a chilling clip of President George H.W. Bush decrying the “brutality of the [rioting] mob”.) Meanwhile, in the ‘black box’, an audio recording of King’s statement to the press following the acquittal plays alongside a lightbox featuring his brutalised face, which abruptly shuts off to present the viewer with his or her own reflection.

The installation is bookended, in the foyer where the exhibition begins and ends, by a 2007 video of Piper dancing in a plaza in Berlin. Here, as in the Mythic Being works, she plays with incongruity. But now it’s the image of Piper herself, an older woman unabashedly enjoying her physicality and her ability to activate and take up space, that’s revelatory.

Cat Kron

facing page, bottom Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, 1981, pencil on paper, 25 × 20 cm. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin

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Agnès Varda UNE CABANE DE CINÉMA: La serre du Bonheur Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris 14 April – 9 June The first female director ever to receive an honorary lifetime-achievement Oscar from the Academy may jokingly describe herself as “the dinosaur of the French New Wave” to anybody listening, but she won’t let her work become extinct just yet. With the widespread digitisation of cinema over the past decade, the ninety-year-old Agnès Varda has been hoarding 35mm release prints of her films, which movie theatres no longer store for use. Before the advent of digital cinema packages, feature films were distributed in the form of five to eight rounded metal boxes, each containing 300mlong reels. The auteur of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) clearly knows a thing or two about recycling, and she’s been transforming such obsolete materials into architectures for viewers to inhabit since 2006.

Upon entering her third show at Nathalie Obadia, visitors are invited to pass under Arche de cinéma (Cinema arch, 2018), made out of 156 empty rusted reel containers labelled with the titles of some of her films and others by her late husband, Jacques Demy. Next, UNE CABANE DE CINÉMA: La serre du Bonheur (A CINEMA SHACK: The greenhouse of Happiness, 2018) nicely echoes the gallery’s glass roof, under which it is installed.

The large metal structure’s walls, windows and

doors are entirely covered with colourful translucent strips from a full copy of Varda’s Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1965). Brief extracts from this film, which touches upon a notion of, indeed, happiness, are screened alongside.

Viewers unfamiliar with the plot can glimpse Belgian actor Jean-Claude Drouot playing a husband and father of two who finds extra love in another woman’s arms. Eventually confessing his affair to his wife (played by his real-life spouse), he unspools the delightful theory that it doesn’t in the least subtract from their shared happiness, but instead adds to it. While it isn’t clear how excited she truly is about the maths, especially because her window-dressing role mainly consists in catering to her man’s needs and nodding at his every word, she is tragically found drowned soon after. For his part, skipping the mourning that would distract him from his bliss, he replaces her with his mistress and life goes on as if nothing had happened.

Unless you’ve been dying to see an extended talking version of Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863), which directly inspired Le Bonheur’s impressionist settings, there is a high chance that you’ll find – as I did – its dialogue insuf-

ferably corny. Ironically, the film was originally 18-rated, this being a few years before the sexual liberation of the late 1960s. The supposed amorality of Varda’s scenario, which actually relates more to the possibility of polyamory than infidelity per se, was as passionately decried as her stunning cinematography was praised: it earned her the Jury Grand Prix at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.

Deploring the lack of happiness in today’s society, and feeling nostalgic for the 1960s, Varda told the French public radio France Culture that she wanted to revive something of that golden era’s utopian vibe. While she is adamant that she could not, nor would want to, make such a movie now, she hopes that the viewers would find – if only momentarily – simple joy in her radiant shelter. Like its greenhouse shape, some fake potted flowers displayed inside were further inspired by the film’s opening scene, which was shot in a dazzling field of sunflowers in midsummer. Hearing her describe her exhibition as “a radical passage from cinema to exhibition”, though, I can’t help thinking that not only have moralities changed a lot over the years, but so has what it means to be radical. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

UNE CABANE DE CINÉMA: La serre du Bonheur, 2018, metal structure with 35mm prints of the movie Happiness (1964) and mixed media, 325 × 430 × 300 cm.

Photo: Bertrand Huet. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris & Brussels

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ArtReview

Latifa Echakhch The Mechanical Garden Villa Sauber, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco 20 April – 28 October At Villa Sauber, one of two venues of Monaco’s national museum, Latifa Echakhch taps into the principality’s history and image as a romantic and exotic place, simultaneously indulging in a form of nostalgia for Monaco’s belle époque while poetically revealing the place’s constructed, artificial nature. The villa – one of the last remaining shrines to Monaco’s architectural golden age of the early 1900s, now virtually vanished amid the ever-moredense urban landscape of the Larvotto district – and the museum’s collection prove to be essential sources of inspiration for this show.

For it, the Moroccan-French artist has transformed two floors of the villa’s galleries into theatre sets, featuring scenography representing romantic landscapes, fragments of nature and classical ruins, painted on cutout plywood boards. Taking inspiration from details of sets

by Alphonse Visconti, designer at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo between 1903 and 1938, these decors are unpopulated, seemingly waiting for us to inhabit them and, moving through them, go beyond the illusion to confront the boards’ blank black backs.

Given the exhibition’s title, one might expect these static landscapes to move mechanically on- and offstage, yet the machine-driven

component of Echakhch’s ‘garden’ actually resides in the accompanying videos in each room. Drawing on the museum’s iconic collection of nineteenth-century automata (which, donated by French collector Madame de Galéa in 1972, prompted the creation of the institution itself), these short videos each star one of said automata performing alongside its electric replica (these were created during the late twentieth century for conservation purposes).

They are intimate portraits of these mechanical chefs-d’oeuvre and their doubles as they perform their usual routines, shot in closeup and from varying angles to reinforce the illusionistic performance: we peek over Pierrot’s shoulder as he writes a letter to his dear Columbine, or spy from the side the illusionist in action, becoming accomplices to his tricks.

Two of the automata filmed by Echakhch remind us of a more contentious history, though, one inextricable from the period of these automata’s creation and the century that followed. The Pasha, repeatedly smoking its narghile, and lightly dressed Zulma, the snake charmer, attest to a nineteenth-century taste and market for orientalism and the colonial stereotypes in part popularised by such objects being displayed at world fairs and salons. The artifice

here, beyond the mechanics at play, involves the construction of the exotic: as something imposed on an ‘other’ (stereotyping as a form of cultural subjugation), but also as a conscious, self-imposed strategy for a place like Monaco to brand itself as a cultural tourist destination.

This becomes evident in the last room, where a series of paintings reproduce postcards of Monaco’s Exotic Garden – one of its most famous attractions – which opened in 1933.

The brushstrokes are approximate, echoing that of the theatrical sets, and the paint has been scraped in some places to reveal a layer of concrete underneath it. Like the black-painted backs of the sets that betray the decor’s artificial nature, the uncovered concrete – seemingly emerging from the canvases – tarnishes the idyllic vision painted over it.

Artifice is everywhere in The Mechanical Garden, yet even when uncovered, it never seems to reveal much beyond the well-known realities of a place like Monaco. Ironically, it seems Echakhch herself fell into the trap of the very narrative she set out to deconstruct; for all the poetic experience it offers, The Mechanical Garden lacks the critical perspective that would have allowed it to go beyond a mere scratching of the surface. Louise Darblay

Sans titre (Le jardin exotique), 2018, mixed media on canvas. © the artist.

Courtesy Kamel Mennour, Paris & London, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan & New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York, and Galerie Dvir, Bruxelles & Tel Aviv

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EVA International Various venues, Limerick 14 April – 8 July While aggressively constructing the image of an outward-looking nation, above all in an economic sense, Ireland remains much less motivated by the wellbeing of its women.

The constitution’s dehumanising Eighth Amendment, introduced in 1983 to grant a foetus equal rights to its mother, has meant thousands of women have been forced to travel to other, more humane jurisdictions to access abortion. Some, like Savita Halappanavar, have died, denied lifesaving terminations because of the country’s now largely tokenistic Catholicism. As I write, we are about to vote in a referendum that would repeal the amendment; but I am yet to meet anyone sufficiently foolhardy to assume it will pass.

The question of statehood is one important strand to the 38th edition of EVA International, which takes place in the small western city of Limerick. With Colombia-born curator and critic Inti Guerrero at the helm, this iteration – without subtitle, so as to emphasise its International-ism – features 56 artists and collectives over five contrasting venues; a further satellite exhibition, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, bolsters the biennial from Dublin.

EVA’s lodestar, kicking off the biennial at the Limerick City Gallery, is an allegorical painting

by Seán Keating, Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out (1928–29), depicting construction of the nearby Ardnacrusha hydroelectric dam, and with it

Ireland’s conflicted embrace of modernity; this then sets off a much wider, and at times unwieldy conversation about power, dams, colonialism and – as with the Eighth Amendment – how these state decisions invariably play out on the level of individuals.

The strongest work on show in Limerick takes place at the two largest venues, the LCG and the vacant condensed-milk factory, Cleeve’s, on the northern shore of the river; two of the smaller venues, the Limerick Clothing Factory and 6 Pery Square, are dark and grotty, possibly chosen by necessity rather than suitability for contemporary art exhibitions. At LCG, a pair of biting expressionist oil paintings by Rita Duffy, Siege I (1989) and Siege II (1990), alongside John Duncan’s photographs of Unionist bonfires, temporary monuments to resilient intransigence (Bonfires, 2008), act to highlight the fragile peace of Northern Ireland and, as Brexit looms, to call for the imperfect but still preferable status quo. Elsewhere a small, miraculous painting by the late Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun, les diables rouges (1964), details the construction of the Aswan High Dam as a sea of blood, siphoned from the collective body of its citizens. Here, the relationship between state power and its people is porous and metabolic; in Nigerian artist Uchechukwu James-Iroha’s startling series of black-and-white photographic portraits, likewise, citizens are physically

plugged in, tangled up in skeins of electrical wiring or chained to generators. Like Irish women at the present time, here the person is valuable only insofar as they reproduce, in a measurable, economic sense.

EVA is at its strongest at Cleeve’s. Asserting the venue’s centrality, Sanja Iveković’s figurative sculpture of a pregnant Nike, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001), rises up from its central yard to puncture the city’s modest skyline, carving up the traditional masculinity of public space for a revolutionary, irrefutable womanhood.

In contrast to the other venues, all of the artists here have been allotted vast amounts of space, with particularly strong works by Irish artists Isabel Nolan, John Gerrard, Adrian Duncan and Fergal Ward. Banners made by the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment – well-worn from recent protest marches, as well as the funereal procession through Limerick’s streets on the biennial’s opening day – are shown alongside video testimony from people directly affected by the amendment. The inclusion of this necessary activist work means the exhibition is brought firmly back to the stark question now being put to contemporary Ireland. And, while more diffuse treatments of internationalism and power recur over the course of the exhibition, it is via this local context that Guerrero’s EVA International is most coherent and urgent. Rebecca O’Dwyer

John Duncan, Glenbryn Park, Belfast 2004, 2008, photograph, 100 × 120 cm.

Courtesy the artist and EVA International, Limerick

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ArtReview

Sanja Iveković, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001, gilded polyester, wood, inkjet print.Photo: Deirdre Power.

Courtesy the artist and EVA International, Limerick

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Becky Beasley Depressive Alcoholic Mother Galeria Plan B, Berlin 27 April – 9 June Smallish, well-crafted geometric objects, concealing their interiors and evasive of your attention. Greyscale images of such things.

Objects often booklike and, because of the chatter of literary allusion their maker surrounds them with, bookish. These are the staple constituents of Becky Beasley’s art. If they appear to cultivate their isolation, her sensitivity to how they form connections with one another is pitched at a level of anxiety. This connectivity is a metaphor for how meaning is created, as in the syntax of a sentence or through the networking of culture. Heightening the point, Beasley frequently uses modular structures associated with types of art – minimalist sculpture, modernist formalism – that abjure language or any form of narrative.

The most primal narrative mode, and the opposite pole of Beasley’s art, is first-person autobiography. Brocken II (2009) is a strip of planed walnut, affixed to the wall and split by hinges into sections that dangle like an arm from a torso. Its length equals the span of her father’s outstretched arms. Two forms of representation – literal and metaphorical – are conflated; that the literal (the measure) denotes, rather than merely implying, what is not present is an ironic play on twentiethcentury art’s preoccupation with its formal autonomy. The subtitle quotes a text on the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, known for his mordant irony, and the sculpture is

part of a series evoking alternative physical postures in its various configurations of the hinged modules. Beasley makes associating objects a formal dance. If her work is vulnerable to the question of whether its parts are too much less than the narrative of their sum, it also poses that question itself.

Autobiographical artworks have begun – in her recent shows – to plot an autobiographical narrative. Narrative challenges formalism, as the series, the multiple or the parts of an oeuvre breach the frame and point to the collective condition of installation, which is also where space meets the ambulatory viewer’s time. Beasley makes the ‘postures’ assumed by her objects echo our movements, as if the work were turning the tables on us. Rotating from the ceiling one cycle per minute is a cast of a branch blown from a tree in a 2014 storm (Bearings (IV), 2014). It is both a clock’s second hand and a mystical diviner, seeking, perhaps, the past it connotes, the gallery it spans or the original branch, absent found object to its present cast. Angled like a fishing rod or erect phallus, it signifies desire; and desire is duly recorded in a pair of posters, at once notices of her past exhibitions and textual fragments, in which Beasley addresses her partner while recalling the beginnings of their relationship. The posters connect notice to narrative, but a dotted line divides them, as if despite their proximity Beasley’s private

self may have to be torn away from her artistic persona, as one kind of language that does not belong with the other.

The branch suggests that time be apprehended spatially and space temporally. Its rotation becomes that of a revolving postcard rack (Flora, A Life, 2013), or several works that picture landscape from different angles, or at different times. Manhattan Island is mapped at 3am and 3pm, its gridded greys corresponding to density of population (Oscillating City, 2016), while three colour photographs show the garden of a house in Kingston-upon-Thames where Eadweard Muybridge spent his last years, in whose grounds he is rumoured to have dug ponds to create a scale model of the American Great Lakes. Beasley has photographed the outdoor pool from three angles: an analogy for Muybridge’s 360-degree photographic record of San Francisco in 1878.

Muybridge’s imaginative leap across the Atlantic corresponds to the gulf Beasley bridges, in the gallery, between the cerulean of his pool and the cyan of the parallel lines she has stained into sheets of old bed linen using a cyanotype process (Spring Equinox, Morning (Floorboards), 2017). The lines suggest their own geographical and imaginative crossing; both the here-and-now of the formalist present and a causal trace of the winter light in Beasley’s Sussex studio, which ‘exposed’ their cyanide solution and made it blue. Mark Prince

Flora, A Life (detail), 2013, revolving postcard rack, 12 postcards, 165 × 31 × 31 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist and Galeria Plan B, Cluj & Berlin

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ArtReview

Let the River Flow. The Sovereign Will and the Making of a New Worldliness Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Oslo 12 April – 3 June On entering Let the River Flow, one encounters a lithographic print, 1852 (1981) by the Sámi artist Keviselie, aka Hans Ragnar Mathisen. An object resembling a pen nib cuts a line from top to bottom down the middle of a face. One half is blue and confident, the other red and screaming.

The nib, which sits at the bottom of the page, pointing back up to the two halves, looks like a church spire, the numbers 18 and 52 on either side of its base: power, religion and language slicing through time and identity.

Let the River Flow is the culmination of three years’ research by OCA into contemporary art by the Sámi, an indigenous minority living across parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia (a territory called Sápmi). The show collects work by over 20 artists linked to the Áltá-Guovdageino Action, a 1978–82 protest against the damming of the Áltá river in northern Norway, where many Sámi live. The dam was built, but the protest and associated initiatives helped foster Sámi solidarity against ‘Norwegianisation’, a government policy forcing the assimilation of the non-Norwegian speaking Sámi and Kven populations that lasted to the 1980s. Keviselie’s 1852 sets the tone, recalling an uprising in that year wherein a group of Sámi killed a local liquor merchant and whipped the village priest. The leaders were executed, but the event resonates in Sámi and Norwegian history.

The exhibition’s layout spirals: numerous birchwood display modules are suspended on ropes from the ceiling of OCA’s converted riverside space, radiating in a fragmented circular motion. The materials and arrangement nod to duodji, usually understood as Sámi craft. Let the River Flow argues for a notion of duodji in which artmaking and art objects are inextricable from sociality and spirituality, part of everyday life. Iver Jåks’s Sámi Culture Against the Grain (1979) is a small toollike sculpture of wood and reindeer horn and skin. It twists as if Jåks let the woodgrain lead his carving, until its shaft abruptly hits a rough block at the base.

In 1978 Jåks was instrumental in forming the Sámi Artist Group, which foregrounded the integration of contemporary art with Sámi traditions, and many of the works in Let the River Flow are by the founding alumni. Aage Gaup’s vibrant wooden sculpture interprets the flows and stops of yoik, a Sámi vocal tradition; Britta Marakatt-Labba’s textiles picture encroaching threats to life and landscape; Trygve Lund Guttormsen’s vivid paintings and prints show parliamentary gatherings. The historical heart of the show, though, is a wall featuring an archive of newspaper clippings, photographs, publications, posters and other ephemera from

the Áltá-Guovdageino Action. It shows the intimacy and smallness of the activist – and by extension, Sámi – community compared to the massive forces building the dam.

The Sámi Artist Group established a hub for activist meetings in the small village of Máze. Mai-Lis Eira and Elle Márjá Eira, from the younger Sámi artist collective Dáidadállu, update this legacy in two related videos: Mai-Lis’s 6 February 1981 (2018) mixes archival footage of the Sámi hunger strike that took place in protest outside the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo in 1979 with recent interviews of the participants, looking at the legacy of that moment now. Elle Márjá’s Don’t Fuck With Me (2018) is an aggressive pop music video reinterpretation of those events, but displaying an edge of disillusionment with the current results. Those events made a mark, but the problem remains. Though the Sámi now have a parliament, it is limited in power.

The spirit felt through the show is simple, not new, but exciting: top-down power is always potentially violent, separating us from creating and belonging. Let the River Flow provides a number of tactics to fight against that alienation: find comrades through a shared practice, never let your history be dismissed, take your legacy seriously. Nathaniel Budzinski

Aage Gaup, Sculpture I and Sculpture II / Bázzi I ja Bázzi II, 1987, mixed media, 66 × 78 × 274 cm. © the artist / BONO, Oslo

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Torsten Andersson Ny tyngdkraft, ny epok Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm 14 April – 19 May That Torsten Andersson, who passed away in 2009, has not been the subject of a significant exhibition for a decade – other than the annual exhibit his foundation has organised since 2010 at his residency in Benarp, 60km northeast of Malmö – might be a legacy of his fabled eccentricity. Legend has it that when Hans Ulrich Obrist and other members of the curatorial illuminati visited his studio, they found Andersson burning all his paintings in the yard.

Rather than focusing on the cult around the person, Nordenhake’s show presents a distilled selection of works made between 1977 and 2006, following a break in production between 1966 and the mid-70s. À la Lee Lozano’s Dropout Piece (1970), Andersson withdrew from the artworld after a quarrel with the academy in Stockholm, where he worked as a professor. The painting Gravsten (Tombstone, 2005) is inspired by this experience, which left him, in his own words, ‘totally isolated, completely abandoned’. The work depicts a light blue rectangular solid on a lighter azure background, seemingly being swallowed by a wavelike, or tomblike, darkblue shape. The structure resembles a headstone, or possibly the academy building, and carries the artist’s name, the word konstnär (artist) as well as the dates of his birth and the 1966 withdrawal.

Porträtt av en målning – Bild av skulptur (Portrait of a painting – Image of sculpture, 1980–89) follows the lineage of Joseph Kosuth’s formative conceptual installation One and Three Chairs from 1965. In Andersson’s painting, the Derridean poststructuralist conundrum of signifier and transcendental signified is explored on canvas in the form of a painting of a sculpture, with the word skulptur written on it, leaning against a sculpture – all painted.

The exhibition also features two depictions of stick sculptures, from a series titled Pinnaskulptur (both 2005–6). Abstract geometric shapes composed of red, purple, yellow, green and blue lines emerge from a white canvas. The painted outlines are traced by furrowed marks, accentuating the peculiar structures’ protrusion into the viewer’s space. Any attempt at Renaissance perspective is thwarted. These impossible objects – more illogical than any M.C. Escher staircase – are best described as delirious Mondrian structures. One of the Pinnaskulptur canvases bears the handwritten letters ‘DNA’, alluding to the shape of the threadlike chain of nucleotides, or possibly to the artist’s search for the essential building blocks of painting.

Quite different from the other works on display is the painting Kansersjuk skulptur (Kancer-sick sculpture, 2000), with the inscribed title looming beneath the upper-left edge of the canvas, purposefully misspelling

Ny tyngdkraft, ny epok, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg.

Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

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the Swedish word cancersjuk. Painted on a light-yellow background is a chair with a purple upholstering that resembles a body. The contours of the fleshly furniture are smudgy, almost wavering, as if depicted in a moment of gene mutation. Andersson never had cancer, and rather than as autobiographical reference, I read the work as another comment on the nature of painting.

Several other paintings of sculptures, sockets and shelves are on view, such as Tygskulptur (Fabric sculpture, 2001–02). The latter depicts a form, resembling an overturned bench, with a red top and a white substructure covered with a grid of green lines or – as the title suggests – wrapped in a chequered fabric.

Andersson’s art is fun (yes, fun!), witty and quirky. The exhibition grants a glimpse into the eclectic work of an artist who visibly loved painting and was curious to explore it as a language. Experimentation occupies an important place in his practice, guided by painterly urgency, perhaps even impatience.

Most of the canvases on view have been remounted by the gallery and estate, with piercing marks remaining from having hastily been installed by the artist with nails. They are covered with footprints; Andersson does not seem to have cared much about the pristine. For him, what counted was exploration.

Stefanie Hessler

Dineo Seshee Bopape Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev 24 February – 13 May Soil is an emotive material, packed with symbolism: that much is obvious. And in Dineo Seshee Bopape’s single-installation exhibition, there is a lot of it. Two interconnecting galleries filled with the stuff, a central gully of compacted soil running the length with small earth-cut steps flanking either side. On these rest more soil, moulded into small sculptural forms (mostly cubes and crosses). Along the path, one must navigate several geometric raised islands, all with further cookie-cutter mud shapes, together with a few candles and a dozen or more wooden bowls. A domed mud-roofed wooden structure stands at the furthest end of the space.

The South African artist first introduced this now-signature material to her work at the Marrakech Biennale in 2015. There she paid homage to Azania, an apartheid-era liberation song that includes the lyrics “From Cape Town to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar… Azania, our land, we will get it via bazookas”. For that work the artist included soil samples from the quartet of places named in the song, the four peripheries of Africa. The dirt in Kiev is Ukrainian. It might

be easy therefore to think of the current land conflict in the east of the country, of questions of ownership and identity (in Donbass and Crimea, where Russian is the most common first language, a bloody covert war is being fought between Ukraine and its aggressive neighbour).

I’ve seen a similar work by Seshee Bopape before, at another biennial, this time in 2016, in São Paulo: there my mind turned to questions of colonialism, and the land rights of the Amerindian people. Seeing her sculptures in these different geographical contexts – and seeing how they easily slide into speaking of different political conflicts – could lessen their impact.

This commission by the Pinchuk Art Centre is a result of the artist winning the 2017 edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, juried by a retinue of air miles-collecting super-curators.

Could Seshee Bopape just be the perfect artist to provide requisite ‘glocal’ signifiers, her sculpture able to adapt chameleonically to whatever domestic issue is most pressing?

Yet the overall effect of walking through this work – and very seductive it is too – is that

of interrupting a ceremony or ritual to a god or gods unknown. From the earth, shoots sprout. There is something deeper, perhaps more mystical about this setup; less earthbound, ironically, than the geopolitical reading (spurred on by those song lyrics) that I’ve taken from the artist’s previous work. Instead, this untitled installation leads one beyond political squabbles to notions of Mother Earth, of birth and death, and of our eventual return to the ground. If this makes the work seem unappealingly hippyish, it should not. As the environmentalist George Monbiot points out, ‘Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters, making them available to plants’. A teaspoon of earth apparently contains more microorganisms than there are human beings, and all of them essential to our continued existence: the artist is using a material that is at the forefront of green struggle. This then is still a deeply political work: just one in which the politics goes beyond the human.

Oliver Basciano

Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Maksym Bilousov & Valentina Tsymbaliuk.

Courtesy Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev

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Birgit Jürgenssen Nocturnal Light Alison Jacques Gallery, London 17 April – 19 May That transformation was a lifelong concern for the late Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen is apparent in her recently reappraised work from the 1970s: high heels emerge like weaponised nipples from unexpected places on her body, vaginas sprout in the crevices of books and shoes morph into animals. This taster of the artist’s output from the 1980s and 90s, however, reveals how her direct takes on female identity and metamorphosis evolved into something dreamier and more abstract. The suffering housewives of her earlier drawings, photos and performances are replaced by shapeshifters, as in a swirling New Age-y painting of a moon goddess (in Three sources of nocturnal light (Angel, Moon, Torch), 1987) and a photo-diptych of crumpled fabric shining like molten gold (Untitled, 1988).

This diverse body of work is united by its nocturnal atmosphere. Scenes in paintings and photographs are illuminated by milky moonlight or amber dawn, or more often by the harsh electric lighting that gives shadowy, cheaply shot film noir its identity. This makes

it less of a surprise – given her feminist allegiances – to discover in Jürgenssen’s writings that she was a fan of Raymond Chandler.

His novels, which she loved for their directness and irony (and presumably despite their gender archetypes), fill a bookcase designed by the artist and inlaid with photos of eyes, mouths and lights. They lend the neighbouring Untitled (1996), a grid of 12 photos in which a nude woman is silhouetted against a window, a sinister, detective-story vibe. Inside and outside are muddled: am I her lover watching from across the room, or a voyeur documenting her movements from the street? Though her stretching limbs suggest a semaphore-style code, she remains an unknowable outline.

This interest in dissembling binaries – self and other, object and image, dark and light, soft and hard – is a constant theme of the exhibition. Photos are placed within sculptures that underline both their illusionistic and physical properties, and add a tactile dimension. In a series of untitled triptychs (1988–90), prints are wrapped in gauzy fabric

(so their imagery is partially obscured) and set in steel frames. Elsewhere, a hinged metal case opens to reveal, on one side, an image of a flower, and on the other, its darkened reflection. Titled Narcissus and Echo (1991), it emphasises reflections of reflections of the world via photographic and mirror images, suggesting a self-enclosed system in which the image has become disconnected from reality.

Given her early challenge to the gap between socially imposed feminine ideals and women’s experiences, these boxes might suggest art as a space free from life’s constraints.

The four 1988 Untitled (Body projection) photos that, lining a corridor, both open and close the exhibition, take the muddling of perceived boundaries further still. Using simple projections of insubstantial shadows and light, Jürgenssen’s skin becomes the surface for a constellation of stars, tiny bouncing kangaroos, writing and abstract blobs. Melding with other signs, her body cannot easily be read as ‘woman’. It’s as if such categories dissolve before our eyes. Skye Sherwin

Untitled (Body projection), 1988/2009, colour photograph, 50 × 70 cm. © the estate of the artist.

Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London, and Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna

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ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE Chelsea Space, London 25 April – 25 May Under the stewardship of Karen Di Franco, Chelsea Space has in recent years staged an ambitious exhibition programme that belies the gallery’s modest size. Its discursive and speculative approach, informed by its proximity to Chelsea Art School and an archival sensibility, is reflected in the group show Orgasmic Streaming Organic Gardening Electroculture, which takes its flamboyant title from Carolee Schneemann’s Parts of a Body House (1968–72).

Schneemann’s often overlooked conceptual text unfurls as a large scroll from the gallery wall, beside which stands Annea Lockwood’s 1966 prepared piano, once believed lost and now replete with its plastic honkers and painted hammers. This is the first of her ongoing series of Piano Transplants, through which the composer rethinks the act of musical performance, and the role of the instrument, by burning and burying pianos. The compelling photographs and scores of these ‘transplants’, also exhibited here, emphasise the connections between writ-

ten text, spoken language and bodily action that run through all works in the exhibition.

Schneemann’s texts and Lockwood’s provocative scores, along with those of other Fluxus pioneers such as Alison Knowles and the Japanese composer Mieko Shiomi, whose Spatial Poems (1965–76) dot the walls, are placed in dialogue with contemporary explorations of what the curators (Di Franco and Irene Revell) described to me as “the space between reading and performance”. Films, scores and actions by Ghislaine Leung, Charlotte Prodger, Beatrice Gibson, Claire Potter and Tai Shani (the last three of whom were commissioned to create work for this show) generate compelling intergenerational relationships. For instance, Schneemann’s visceral invitation to the reader to enter imaginary rooms defined by bodily organs (the Liver Room, the Genitals Play-Erotica Meat Room) finds embodied echoes in the fleshy kingdom of Shani’s virtual-reality narrative The Old Haunted House of Terrifying Terror (2018).

The visual score finds a more covert register in the texts, hidden between the folds of a trans-

lucent dust sheet hanging from a single pin in the wall, that await activation in the performance of Claire Potter’s Playhouse (2018). The gallery’s large plate-glass window, rendered opaque by a coating of yoghurt, attests to a score already followed in Leung’s intervention Colour Hides the Canvas, Moulding Hides the Frame (2013). This play on what is spoken and heard, and how ideas are transmitted, also informs Gibson’s filmed recitals by the influential queer poets Eileen Myles and CAConrad. The quiet female narrator of Prodger’s looped video Compression Fern Face (2014) evokes another artist from an earlier generation, through her intensely detailed descriptions of Dennis Oppenheimer’s 1970s eponymous videowork.

In its combination of archival evocations and contemporary actions, this dense play of different voices could easily have been disorientating. But the idea of the score was, for Knowles, Shiomi, Lockwood and Schneemann, open to interpretation and experiment, and in their generous spirit this exhibition invites free movement and unexpected reflections. Lucy Reynolds

Claire Potter, Playhouse, 2018, ink on polythene, typescript on adhesive plastic, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Chelsea Space, London

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Rose Wylie Lolita’s House David Zwirner, London 20 April – 25 May The girls who preen and pose in Rose Wylie’s paintings – with their beachball faces, jointless limbs and childsize feet – seem unaware of their own physical instability. They are, according to the exhibition handout, informed by Wylie’s recollections from the 1970s of her neighbours’ teenage daughter. Painted again and again, in different iterations, ‘she’ is an accumulation of the artist’s memories, misrememberings and external associations: vivid and brash but always about to collapse.

Across the 22 exhibited paintings and works on paper, Wylie’s recurrent colours of cornflower-yellow, lipstick-red, plaster-pink and mud-brown are applied interchangeably to skin, hair, clothing, automobiles and animals.

In Lolita and Selffie (2018), a girl with yellow hair – wearing a matching, protruding bandeau top and skirt – poses for a black box held in her hand. Her features are squashed into the top half of her face, which comprises a circular piece of paper stuck onto the canvas so it overlaps her

hairline, her skin a light pink against the nauseous green of her neck, stomach and legs.

She stands against a background of Wylie’s block-letter scrawl, illegible except for the repetition of ‘SELFFIE’. In the bottom righthand corner of the canvas, ‘LOLITA’ is written boldly in purple, underlined and bordered, like a teenager marking the territory of their diary.

Set out like a storyboard across three canvases, Lolita’s House, Plaster Pink (2018) presents different variations of a scene in which Lolita washes a car parked in the driveway. In each tableau, the girl is naked and small, her back dimples carved out like the sound holes of a violin, while annotations describe the processes and failures of Wylie’s memory. Her reconstructions (con)fuse fact and fiction, as though melted together in the heat of one of the sweltering summer days on which her teenage neighbour earned the name of Vladimir Nabokov’s seductress and victim.

Wylie’s paintings collapse her own specific recollections with the symbol of the teenage

Lolita and Selffie, 2018, oil on canvas, 182 × 166 cm.

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London

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girl, conflating Lolita’s actions with a more contemporary form of exposure: the selfie, or the constant, virtual representation of the self. Reclining in midair, these girls embody the nascent self-awareness of our adolescent years.

Wylie’s paintings bear the traces of her life in the studio: footprints, pawprints (presumably from a pet), pencil marks, notes, markings and calculations. Yellow Girls, Diary Page (2018) – a small variation of the largescale, nearby painting Yellow Girls (2017) – consists of sketches collaged and drawn onto pages of a date reference guide, listing common and leap years between 1800 and 2050. The pages are overwritten with Wylie’s notations, including references to artist Jimmie Durham, suggested titles for her 2017 Serpentine Galleries exhibition and the email address of a Tate curator.

In all their various guises, balancing on pinpoints and staring out of the canvases, Wylie’s young girls embody the expansive possibility and fallibility of memory. Kathryn Lloyd

Ian White Any frame is a thrown voice Camden Arts Centre, London 19 April – 24 June How might we understand a life? Influence is hard to measure, if we even wanted to; and ‘legacy’ feels like such a corporate, profitoriented word these days. But such a question hangs over Ian White’s posthumous exhibition Any frame is a thrown voice; the British writer, curator, teacher and artist passed away in 2013, with this exhibition focused on his layered, mischievous and often collaborative artistic output, showing documentation of several performances and restaging some of his multimedia installations. The impossibility of such an attempt to capture the originals is a perfect irony, given that White’s work in the ‘first’ place was deliberately fragmented and knowingly elusive, often including strategic quotations, personal asides and screenings of other people’s work.

The show wears this irony on its sleeve: as soon as we walk in, we’ve already been staged as performers in the work Democracy (2009–10/ 2018). On the wall, a slideshow of seemingly random photos flick by; four screens around the room show different versions of the performance by White that originally accompanied the slideshow, slowly (for example) bending and unbending his legs. Part of each instance of the work includes tuning in to the BBC World Service as a live soundtrack; when I walk in, several images of well-groomed gardens are

given a voiceover by a Nigerian woman who has taken up archery to fight Boko Haram.

We, in this case, are the unwitting performers of this reenactment, though we might not, as White does in every other case around us, end each performance with our trousers down around our ankles, shuffling awkwardly forward. Nearby, a vitrine is filled with a set of notebooks, their written content blocked out with black marker. As a hint, a typed anecdote alongside describes designer Karl Lagerfeld’s antipathy to archives: ‘I am supposed to do – I’m not supposed to remember!’

White’s writing and curatorial work helped to articulate the artist’s moving image work of the 1990s and 2000s; while I witnessed only a few of his performances before he passed away, this show highlights the playful prodding at textuality, theatricality and materiality that shaped his thinking. The Neon Gainsborough (2002–03/2018), originally an event performed at London’s Cubitt Gallery, undermines a slideshow of Thomas Gainsborough’s work with a video of hastily scrawled wry and vulnerable observations.

White’s collaborations with Jimmy Robert shape the majority of this exhibition, with Robert reworking their 2004 performance 6 things we couldn’t do, but can do now as a careful installation of drawings, photographs and

writings. On one screen, Yvonne Rainer runs through her choreography Trio A (1978), while on another we see Robert and White do their own, stuttering version in front of a crowd in a Tate Britain foyer. On the wall, White’s notes describe some of the rehearsal process, focusing mainly on hiding, and not losing, his nicotine patch. White’s writing, dispersed around the show, is mostly delivered in short, shifting sentences that treat intimate anecdote on the same level as critical commentary, but have a meandering quality that succeeds in conveying the digressive nature of our own minds: nobody is ever fully focused, fully here. So being here, looking at photos and videos of these choreographed, annotated past moments, becomes more like standing between two mirrors, witnessing ghostly echoes of instances going off into infinity. White seems to have been aware of such a future state – that his structural re-placements, juxtapositions and regurgitations would build a haunted house.

That hypothetical house, in any case, might be one such means of understanding influence, as cinema dissolves into a fractured future of handsets and streaming services and his ideas continue to feel relevant, providing a set of instructions and structures that others might continue to occupy and rearrange.

Chris Fite-Wassilak

Any frame is a thrown voice, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Camden Arts Centre, London

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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Intensité Assouvissante Corvi-Mora, London 13 April – 16 June In Corvi-Mora’s entranceway, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has hung, in cramped rows, a series of 30 photographic portraits from her ongoing Apparitions series (2012–). Self-portraits – but not quite – they show the artist disguised as iconic figures from Edgar Allan Poe to Bob Dylan to Marilyn Monroe. The artist strikes a pose, hams it up (Gonzalez-Foerster has acknowledged the debt to Cindy Sherman, though one feels there is more affection in her depictions than in the American artist’s grotesque archetypes). Installed among them is a red-tinted mirror, placed so the visitor may greet their reflection. And that is pretty much all there is to Gonzalez-Foerster’s solo show, an artist otherwise known for her largescale, often theatrical installations. Turn the corner into the main space and the gallery is empty of objects other than a potted palm seedling, no more than a few centimetres high, enjoying the sunshine on the windowsill.

On the wall and ceiling however are little islands of writing, applied in vinyl, five discrete paragraphs in total (Textbau, 2018). Read them clockwise and one can follow a stream of anxious

consciousness ruminating on the damage man is inflicting on Earth, a longstanding subject for the artist (her 2008 installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for example imagined London in the aftermath of an environmental disaster). ‘how does it feel to be human, an invasive group which destroys its environment in a systematic way, lost landscapes, dry gardens, birds and insects gone,’ it begins (the lack of capitalisation at the start of the sentence a trait of these texts).

Assuming these words are authored by Gonzalez-Foerster, and reflect her true feelings, the source for her apparent anxiety seems to be guilt, a suspicion that artists are only exacerbating the planet’s environmental problems through their production of objects. ‘why is it more important to think about art than take care of plants or living things. in what way is art adding something to biodiversity or rather threatening it?’ GonzalezFoerster writes. ‘like destroying a forest to build an opera in which a forest might appear on stage.’ She has a point: her work, for example, was shipped to nine different

La Loge (Numéro Rouge), 2018, 30 framed c-prints, mirror, paint, 249 × 213 × 212 cm. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

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exhibitions in 2017, from Shanghai and Berlin to Saskatoon. That’s quite a carbon footprint, feeding the artworld’s appetite, before even considering the energy put into the production of new work.

Yet this is not the only way in which this exhibition is troubled by art. The text goes on to define art as not only representing one’s consciousness (a mode of self-reflection for both the artist, which brings me back to those photographs of Gonzalez-Foerster’s presumed heroes, and the viewer, which brings me to the mirror) but as something toxic to the artist’s health. In the runup to an exhibition (or nine), art becomes, in the same way humans are a plague on the planet, a disease that ravages Gonzalez-Foerster’s every waking moment. ‘i can’t really decide if i should continue to develop the (art) monster,’ she concludes.

This largely dematerialised essay-as-show, then, reads as the artist’s response to a crisis of conscience, born out of the realisation that we have aligned art with a capitalist mode of production, a fever, both physical and mental, that has swept the world. Oliver Basciano

Yoshua Okón Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles 28 April – 26 May Despite the dismaying evidence of recent political discourse in the US, it is still hard to believe that people like this actually exist.

In Yoshua Okón’s two-channel video installation Oracle (all works 2015), we are bouncing across the Arizona desert in a pickup truck with a portly man who looks a little like George H.W. Bush, and who interrupts his own demented diatribe about the consequences of messing with him with random bursts of one-handed automatic rifle fire, blindly out of the window.

“Yeeee-haw!” he whoops.

What has got this man so riled up, we are told in the press release, is the illegal entrance of unaccompanied children from Central America into the United States. It is presumably these children he’s addressing when he warns, “You mess with us and you mess with fire! And you’re not going to like that. Because you’re opening up hell!” The Mexican-born, US-educated Okón worked with – collaborated with, even – a nationalist militia called the Arizona Border Defenders, who were happy to restage a protest for his camera, carrying ‘STOP INVASION’ signs down an empty dirt road, and three others who chased their identical white Ford pickups in

a dusty ring, Stars and Stripes and Gadsden flags flapping behind them. Later, schlubby men in untucked shirts and baseball caps attempt an inept homage to Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, except their wobbly plastic flagpole won’t hold straight in the wind. The metaphors write themselves.

As with much of Okón’s videowork, the protagonists are doubly framed: by the artist and also by their own roleplay, by their eagerness to show him (and, by extension, us) who they are, their fragile self-images often shaped by pop-cultural tropes and clichés. In the exhibition’s second half, a video installation titled The Indian Project: Rebuilding History is based around a segment Okón directed for a television station in Skowhegan, Maine, featuring members of the town’s chamber of commerce who explain Skowhegan’s ‘Indian’ history and then cringemakingly perform their interpretations of Native American ceremonies. All are apparently white, and most are elderly, save the chamber’s earnest director, who wears a smear of war paint on each cheek. “This is our culture, folks, truly,” says one lady, omitting to mention that Skowhegan was the site of merciless genocide

against Native Americans. She points to the “world’s tallest Indian” statue, and the high school’s Indian mascot, as evidence of Skowhegan’s affinity with Native culture.

Two idioms come to mind: ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ and ‘give ’em enough rope and they’ll hang themselves’. I eventually feel uneasy chuckling at the caricatures in Okón’s films, and about my own personalised venting of ideological scorn. After all, it is not these aberrant individuals who are the cause of the United States’ current malaise, but the ancient and ingrained systems that produce them; why else would elderly, or rural, or less educated communities so often harbour such misguided beliefs?

The title Oracle – ostensibly the name of the tiny Arizona town where Okón’s work was filmed – acknowledges this only obliquely.

The tech multinational Oracle Corporation has long maintained ties to the CIA, and here its logo appears in place of a title screen. The gesture nods weakly at a much richer story to be told: the disconnect between the geopolitical micro and macro, and the irrelevance of the individual within the unstoppable swells of transnational capital. Jonathan Griffin

The Indian Project: Rebuilding History, 2015, single-channel video installation with HD flat screen monitor, acrylic on raw canvas, artificial plants, low voltage Fresnel lights, carpet, wood benches.

Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy the artist and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

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Tyler Coburn Remote Viewer Koenig & Clinton, New York 20 April – 27 July For a number of years, artist-writer Tyler Coburn has practised a rigorous archaeology on communication, warfare and surveillance technologies, discovering obscure analogue prehistories that often intersect with the speculative realm of visual art. Surely this is an important endeavour in a time when Big Data, asymmetrical warfare and biometrics feel even more abstract the more widespread they become: who really grasps the information Google holds on us – or the spatial politics of drone bombing? But rather than summon the clarity of conventional media scholarship, Coburn presents these histories through a method of artistic defamiliarisation (following Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky) where everyday technologies are made strange as they are read alongside theories of the body and of the psyche.

In Remote Viewer Coburn engages the parascience of telepathic visual communication.

This practice received a significant boost in Western popular culture in 1930 when Mary Sinclair was presented as an exceptional medium by her husband and writer Upton Sinclair in his short book Mental Radio. Receiving a series of ‘mental broadcasts’ from kilometres away,

Mary attempted to duplicate simple pencil drawings by hand, which she reported came to her ‘in fragments, as if I saw it being drawn by an invisible pencil’. Retrieving these drawings from archives, Coburn animates them in a video projected onto a dimly lit wall, where they appear as cryptic, illusionistic writings drawn in light (Remote Viewer (animation), 2018). The drawings’ abstract and spectral rendering of the contours of bodies and objects extends to a crinkled MDF object painted a polished white – made in collaboration with Bureau V and resembling a kind of bed linen – that quietly occupies the centre of the gallery floor (Remote Viewer (object), 2017). Along with a short contextualising text by Coburn, placed at the gallery’s front desk (Remote Viewer (takeaway), 2018), these items make up the entire presentation.

Of the 290 drawings by Sinclair, only 65 were considered successful copies of the originals, but this was enough to attract the attention of Albert Einstein (who authored a foreword to the German edition of the idiosyncratic study) and feed the growing cultural obsession with parapsychology, shared at the time by both the artistic avant-garde and the military (the former

term, of course, is itself drawn from warfare).

Automatism became a popular surrealist technique that sought knowledge not in the paranormal but in the unconscious, but shared by the two was the attempt to visually index the abstract or unknown. During the Cold War, the US military launched a secret intelligence unit to investigate the potential applications of extrasensory perception in military and domestic settings, partly in response to rumours that the Soviet Union was training ‘psychic spies’.

Their remote viewing programme, building on Sinclair’s experiment, would not have been the first instance of weaponising the human psyche – in his text, Coburn traces a long history of psychics being deployed in warfare – yet it serves as a stark prefiguration of present-day drone technology, which allows for the visualisation of remote targets with increasing precision.

As such, Coburn constructs a poetic and uncanny analogy between the interfaces of the mind, the body and the machine – three apparatuses whose workings have historically been understood as distinct – but one that ultimately is hardly legible in his formal presentation, even to the most initiated of audiences. Jeppe Ugelvig

Remote Viewer (object), 2017, high-density MDF and semigloss paint (detail), 115 × 355 × 15 cm. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges.

Courtesy the artist and Koenig & Clinton, Brooklyn

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Charles Atlas the past is here, the futures are coming The Kitchen, New York 28 March – 13 May In 2003, already three decades into an influential career as a filmmaker and video artist, Charles Atlas was hired as a consulting director for Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, a US TV show produced and aired by the Public Broadcasting Service. A generation of viewers has been exposed to the lives of working artists by Art21, and Atlas’s legacy, which he built over four seasons with the programme, is exemplified by the circa-twominute introductory monologues he directed for season two. Merce Cunningham does a tap-dance solo to illustrate ‘Time’, that season’s third episode. Comedian Margaret Cho shares her irreverent philosophy in ‘Humor’. And for ‘Stories’, director John Waters delivers the line: “I love collecting art, because it makes other people insane.” Far from creating anodyne public television, Atlas provoked viewers in campy set-pieces with video effects such as colour blocking, parallax scrolling and wacky wipes – and his palette was always slightly off. Art21 was a regular feature of my college art-education, and though my professors most often meant to illustrate specific techniques (eg woodworking), the show actually intimated another, better lesson: be generous, because the best mysteries reveal how they’re made.

Atlas’s video portraits for Art21 manage to spotlight art’s (and artists’) most enigmatic features, without losing any fun or approachability. His exhibition the past is here, the futures are coming confirms how his combination of openness, cheeky wit and love for spectacle made him the perfect champion of artists in the American television arena. His back-catalogue runs deep, and the front galleries grant a refresher to video

from the past 40 years. There are classics such as the mockumentary Hail the New Puritan (1986), starring dancer Michael Clark, and other dance documentaries produced for television; some of the works pick up from his time as Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s resident filmmaker. Video never looks better than on box monitors, at least that’s the feeling in the midst of four viewing stations that fill the foyer and first gallery. It’s a setup that shows off Atlas’s full range of abilities as a video artist working with dance. I was captivated by Rainer Variations (2002), a technically complex documentary that layers the choreographer’s videotaped studio experiments with interviews Atlas specially shot and overdubbed for the piece. Motivated by Rainer’s skill at picking things apart in a deadpan manner, Atlas finds his through-line in her attempts to teach her minimalist composition Trio A (1978) to the drag performer Richard Move. There is simply nothing minimal about Move, and his interpretations are a foil to Rainer’s humour and touching reserve.

The two installations in the main gallery continue Atlas’s ode to video. The first, appropriately titled The Years (2018), is a five-channel installation that revels in montage. For this work, Atlas has segmented his entire oeuvre across four screens, leaving the fifth channel for footage of four young women standing in place.

Each of the other monitors is dedicated to one of the last four decades, and as the footage scrolls from one work to the next, cross-channel comparisons facilitate an intergenerational conversation about fashion and style, using the kids in the fifth channel to ground the piece

in the present. With its historical focus on bodies in motion, The Years also archives a world lost to HIV/AIDS. The second installation, 2003 (2018), looks back as well, but with a more sphinxlike approach to the passage of time. A tapestry of video portraits blankets the main gallery’s entire rear wall with footage of Atlas’s peers, collaborators and friends, alongside images of former secretary of state Colin Powell and of military strikes in Iraq taken from cable news. The juxtaposition captures a recent generation’s alienation, though the year 2003 is too recent to elicit pure nostalgia (or adequate hindsight), and too distant to feel entirely relevant to the present moment. Revisiting these relationships 15 years later, though, celebrates how time seldom proceeds in a straightforward manner.

The exhibition also includes a ‘variety show’ called The Kitchen Follies. Performances range from drag to dance, vogue to slapstick, community theatre to one deliberately horrifying monologue, and feature both new and old collaborators, with Atlas controlling live video effects on monitors overhead. A phantasmagoria of bodies and souls have been mixed and remixed at Atlas’s position behind the camera or editing table, and the exhibition and after-dark performance medley demonstrate how he has remained a vital contributor to the downtown scene for the last 50 years. Only here or there do we ever get a glimpse of the artist himself, though. Which is why I cherished The Kitchen Follies’s opening number. Halfway through, Atlas generously shows us who’s behind the spectacle, when he gets out from behind his video-mixing station to dance. Sam Korman

2003, 2018, four-channel colour video installation with sound, 36 min (installation view at the Kitchen, 2018). Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Harmony Hammond Inappropriate Longings Alexander Gray Associates, New York 19 April – 26 May The centrepiece of this exhibition of little-seen Harmony Hammond works from the 1990s is Inappropriate Longings, a significant installation composed of three large paintings and a water trough filled with brittle leaves. The words ‘GODDAMN DYKE’ are etched in red pigment into the leftmost panel, a direct reference to the brutal murder of a woman whose killer left the same epithet on the wall of her house.

Hammond made the piece in 1992, the same year that US politician Pat Buchanan gave his infamous culture-war speech at the Republican National Convention, decrying “radical feminism” and “homosexual rights”, two things that Hammond has spent her career championing. “It is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s Country,” Buchanan railed.

Outside of Buchanan’s brimstone quotation, the phrase ‘God’s Country’ has been used to describe many sites around the globe, but generally refers to ‘areas that are sparsely populated, with wide expanses of nature’ (Wikipedia).

Such a description is apt for the broad stretch of land between Galisteo, New Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona, terrain crossed by the artist monthly on eight-hour drives between her home and

her teaching job at the University of Arizona.

Along the way, Hammond would stop at abandoned farmhouses, where she tore up strips and sections of the linoleum flooring found there.

That linoleum is incorporated into many of the works in this show. The material certainly invokes the Western farmhouses where it was found, as well as 1950s kitchens across the country, doubly calling to mind the nuclear family. In that these works are constructed from fragments of failed domestic spaces, the linoleum collages and paintings fracture our ingrained narratives about rural America – they both foreground the possibility of violence in supposedly idyllic sites and insert evidence of queer bodies into the storied American West.

Untitled (Form of Desire) (1992) is a combinelike mixed-media piece in which Hammond has adhered strips of black and burgundy linoleum onto black paper along with sexy, gloopy drips of latex rubber and a severed ponytail of her own blond hair bound with black tape, giving it a whiplike quality. In ripping out the linoleum from farmhouse floors and regluing it in new configurations, Hammond has claimed the material for her own means and to tell her own

Untitled (Form of Desire), 1992, mixed media on paper, 108 × 75 cm. © the artist / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

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stories. Through the insertion of her hair and the allusion to the queer forms of desire indicated by the title, Hammond embeds personal and queer narratives into both the symbolic landscape of the American West and the material tropes of the modernist avant-garde.

Another significant material in this body of work is straw – an additional symbol of the American rustic. Untitled #1 (1998) is composed of four stacked layers of rectangular slabs of hay.

Along with the adhesive used to congeal the hay strands, patches of red paint are worked into the surface, evoking the look of matted blood in the hair of a broken skull. Hammond, in fact, likens the straw to hair, insisting on an invocation of the threatened and harmed body in an ‘abstract’ work.

This show is a sobering reminder that the age of gay marriage is also the age of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, and that assimilationist politics have not evaporated the threat of violence. Hammond’s work is a timely battle cry to tear God’s Country apart, linoleum floor by linoleum floor, and out of the debris, make something on one’s own terms.

Ashton Cooper

imannam Pivô, São Paulo 8 April – 2 June Pivô is housed between the ground-floor shops of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Copan building and the apartments above. Climbing the spiral staircase, one is forced to stoop beneath a low ceiling. While its perfect finish suggests a permanent fixture, it is in fact a minimalist intervention by Laura Lima, one of three artists showing work here, who by adjusting the ceiling’s height reinforces the already peculiar sense of space in this curvilinear venue.

Ana Linnemann’s intervention The invisibles (number 12) (2017) is also site-specific and easily missed. At regular intervals, electric sockets, installed, as one would expect, a few centimetres above the floor, rotate through 360 degrees.

It’s an entertaining, if easy, gimmick. Her installation The studio’s table (2018) is cleverer and plays with the function of the building as a residency space. In a constellation of plywood planks and hinges, sometimes supported by books, she presents various elements,

occasionally mechanised, that refer to her artmaking process: a pencil and paintbrush are attached to a motor, automatically drawing a circle or twisting around in the air; a teacup is sliced in two – one half red, the other blue.

In Incapacitated Room (2018), Lima also turns her attention to the processes behind exhibitionmaking. She has constructed an elevated room used as an extended office by gallery staff, whose feet are revealed by a small horizontal gap. It’s a playful way of showing the work that normally happens beyond the view of visitors.

Veteran Anna Maria Maiolino presents installations and sound pieces, but the majority of her works shown here are videos with a strong DIY-aesthetic dealing with daily life.

Earlier videos have a more explicitly political dimension, and serve as a commentary on Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–85). In-Out (Anthropophagy) (1973–74) shows a closeup of a man’s and woman’s mouths covered in tape,

expressing the impossibility of free speech under censorship. The 16mm film A Day (1976–2016), meanwhile, edits together footage shot during a day out in Rio de Janeiro, alternating images of monkeys with soldiers parading, a satirical juxtaposition that speaks for itself.

By adding the Portuguese translation of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), which is printed on vinyl and stretched out on one of the gallery’s tilting walls, Maiolino not only emphasises the architecture, but uses a century-old poem – which famously ends, ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper’ – to evoke powerlessness and gloom, a pessimism that chimes with Brazil’s political climate today. Switching between the political and the personal, the outside world and the studio practice, the presented works share a poetic lightness, united in a difficult venue that is – both spatially and conceptually – used in an intelligent way. Sam Steverlynck

Laura Lima, Incapacitated Room, 2018, wood, iron and paint. Photo: Everton Ballardin.

Courtesy the artist and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo

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Luciana Lamothe Ensayos de abertura Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires 7 March – 21 April Luciana Lamothe makes sculptures out of humble building materials such as plywood, iron piping and scaffolding clamps. Here she ditches the planks to make a set of nine works from only pipes and bolts, six of which are mounted on white blocks. Of the three others, Curtain (2017–18) hangs from the ceiling: more than 30 rusted iron pipes attached in a vertical arrangement by steel scaffolding clamps. It’s an iron curtain you can walk around and peer through, so perhaps more like a colossal set of Venetian blinds.

The work is a reminder that barriers, even if seemingly impenetrable, can be circumnavigated. Lamothe corrodes the ends of each pipe with acid; the inorganic material is transformed into biomorphic shapes. From a distance these degraded pieces of metal look in parts like rotting tree branches, in others like spent leaves about to fall. Get nearer and the shards look almost edible, like chocolate flakes. But closer

still the impact is more gruesome – tiny bits of metal soldered to the scarred slivers that look like ants feeding on a decomposing windpipe.

Punctual (2017) is a three-metre-tall pillar that stretches from the floor to the ceiling to meet a Doric capital. Seen from afar this might resemble a model skyscraper – a stack, like the Barbican in London with its balconies, or more organically a spine, as with Santiago Calatrava’s Turning Torso in Malmö, with its spondylitic vertebrae. It is made solely from iron piping, cut so that curved triangular teeth protrude threateningly from the central column. The wallmounted work Untitled (2017) takes a single iron pipe that has been incised in a spiral, the cut resulting in another viciously sharp dentition.

The single helix resembles a model of RNA or a banded snake stiff with rigor mortis.

A paradox arrives with Flancito (2018), a rectangular construction in which parts of the iron pipes are cut into jagged, lightning-bolt

forms. These are as menacingly sharp as the protective devices atop property walls here in paranoid Buenos Aires. But these cutouts can also be imagined as an interconnected chain of dancing figures. And that title refers to something sweeter too – the crème caramel desserts the locals love and whose burnt surfaces are the colours of the degraded pipes. Two more untitled works from 2017 feature circular structures that complement one other, the first resembling a gigantic hair roller, and the other a Medusa’s head of writhing snakes.

Lamothe’s new works are significantly smaller than her previous architectural interventions but possess a similar aura of incipient danger. These unnerving constructions seem at odds with Argentina’s consumerist culture, the excesses of which can be found in properties guarded from the public by the heavy gates and wall spikes that these metal sculptures resemble.

John Quin

Flancito (detail), 2018, iron pipes, 178 × 90 × 90 cm.

Photo: Nacho Raspara. Courtesy the artist and Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires

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Kudzanai Chiurai Madness and Civilization Goodman Gallery, Cape Town 12 April – 12 May According to philosopher Bernard Williams, Thucydides made ‘military, economic, and geopolitical assessments of what must have gone on in the Trojan War’ by reading Homer.

In the work of the Zimbabwean Kudzanai Chiurai, as for many southern African artists, art and national history have always been closely linked. Under colonialism, the British South Africa Company, Ian Smith and Zanu PF, art in what is now Zimbabwe has often served to document and to protest, a repository of history as much as an object of disinterested aesthetic contemplation.

Curated by fellow Zimbabwean Candice Allison, Chiurai’s Madness and Civilization is a restaging of several exhibitions held in Zimbabwe during the past two years and includes two photographic series, one mixed media drawing series and a video. The photographs and video are a case of old wine in new bottles. Genesis [Je n’isi isi] IV (2016) and We Live in Silence VI (2017) are staged hyperrealist photographs of dominant main figures

– a white man in the first case, a black woman in the second – flanked by two shirtless and subservient miners. They are reminders that, in southern Africa, the privilege of corruption is no longer exclusive to white men.

It’s a familiar observation among the farflung Zimbabwean diaspora, and the images suffer from the simplicity of their message.

The drawing series, titled Madness and Civilization and numbered I–XI, with its reference to Michel Foucault’s 1964 work by the same name, collages texts torn from colonial-era publications and images of racist segregation. Fake letters, supposedly handwritten by Foucault and quoting some of his anti-Enlightenment writings on madness, are pasted among the snippets. Chiurai has drawn and scribbled across these collages, defacing his own aesthetically flawless and structured photographic practice.

What draws you in is not their overall effect – messy, seemingly antiart – but the police brutality, inequality and a society without

justice. Reading and viewing these fragments brought back memories of the horror of opening, some years ago, Olive Schreiner’s protest novella Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) to the picture of whites, from Cecil John Rhodes’s British South African Company, hanging Shona men from a tree. Nor were Marlow’s words from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) ever far away: there was ‘no method at all’ to this colonialism: it was simply ‘robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale’.

As Conrad suggested, any reasonable person would realise that to identify the colonised as ‘criminals’ is absurd. Yet Foucault’s critique of reason – and the rational method – confuses the picture. In these images and texts, the power of colonialism is apparent in the wielded club, the gun and the physical brutality rather than in the imposition of Enlightenment systems of knowledge. But while the objects in this exhibition might not bear out the theses proposed by the inspiration for its title, they are nonetheless revealing. Matthew Blackman

We Live in Silence VI, 2017, pigment ink on fibre paper, 130 × 174 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

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Books Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent

by Owen Hatherley Allen Lane, £16.99 (hardcover) During the giddy first years of Tony Blair’s government, the public square in my provincial hometown was redeveloped as part of what Owen Hatherley describes as the ‘Europeanisation’ of Britain’s urban spaces. Yet the attempt to bring Continental café-culture to a rainy medieval settlement on the Welsh borders was only partially successful, and the latest scheme to reinvigorate a depressed town centre takes a different tack: the replacement of three shopping centres with one vast indoor mall.

This movement away from perceived European ideals of communal living towards a model based on private investment and commercial consumption – repeated across the United Kingdom – has left an architectural record of the broader shift in attitudes that culminated in Brexit. In this series of essays on the architecture of Europe’s smaller cities, Hatherley reads the built environment as an expression of the political, social and economic forces that shape a society and the lives of its members. The superior design of Hamburg, Rotterdam and Łódź presents convincing evidence – if any more were required – that the break with our neighbours was another victory for those who would sacrifice the quality of life of the many to further enrich the few.

The potted histories of these and other cities are told through erudite, witty and wide-ranging

studies of their most demonstrative buildings.

The book’s title hints at Hatherley’s predilection for the postwar, pancontinental, socialdemocratic Modernism to which Kraftwerk gave musical expression, as well as his tendency to begin his tours at the train station, the architecture of which can generally be relied upon to reveal something of the society that built it. He visits the ‘iconic’ buildings liable to be included in online lists of landmarks to see before you die, but is most engaging when considering the less celebrated housing projects, cultural institutions and municipal buildings that are the best indicators of the esteem in which a society holds its ‘ordinary’ residents.

Hatherley’s admiration for the European cityscape, and the political principles it embodies, is neither blind nor universal.

The desecration of Skopje, in which a hastily assembled collection of bombastic pseudoclassical monuments obscures a radical architectural legacy, offers depressing evidence of how nativism, despotism and, frankly, stupidity manifest in a city’s bricks and mortar, glass and steel. It contrasts with Sofia, where disparate but complementary architectural styles suggest a city that has been willing and able to integrate different cultures, eras and religions into its self-identity. Nor is he afraid

to read architecture in ways that might seem contrary to his own politics: when invited by a leftist magazine to rail against Hamburg’s gentrification, Hatherley cannot suppress pangs of jealousy that the docklands of his native Southampton were not redeveloped with such consideration and care.

The only British entry is Hull, picked out because the decline (in architectural and other terms) of one of the country’s great cities – a history acknowledged by its term as the UK’s ‘city of culture’ last year – embodies how consecutive governments have forsaken what he identifies as the basic principles of urban planning: accessible social housing, a fair rental market, housing regulations that protect the poor, an integrated public transport network, a labour policy premised on retraining rather than deskilling and a decentralised local government not in thrall to developers.

That these ideals might seem like pie in the sky to millions of Britons explains why Hatherley so laments the decision to leave the European Union. But it also illustrates why the residents of towns and cities such as Hull elected to deliver, as the author puts it, ‘an enormous fuck you to a political class that felt it could abandon at worst, patronise at best, an entire city and its population like this’. Ben Eastham

Sabrina

by Nick Drnaso Granta, £16.99 (hardcover) As a portrait of contemporary America, it doesn’t get much grimmer or more vérité than Sabrina, a 200-page graphic novel about grieving: both the vivid, scalding sort and the kind that accrues around a lifetime of disappointment. Anger and depression are here too. A sense of powerlessness. Sabrina herself is gone, however – last sighted a block from home one evening – but her absence propels a handful of storylines.

The quiet hero is Calvin, a ‘boundary technician’ working nightshifts behind computer screens in a military complex in Colorado. Calvin’s wife and child have moved to Florida, though Calvin plans to attempt a reunion once he’s discharged; in the meantime he lives in an unfurnished

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rental, does a bit of gaming and has little contact with people outside of work and fast-food settings. It is into this unpromising environment that Sabrina’s boyfriend, Teddy, a childhood friend of Calvin’s, now nearly catatonic with loss, arrives in the aftermath of her disappearance. And then the news gets much, much worse: a video of Sabrina’s slaying surfaces online, and like exceedingly horrific stories from recent American history – Sandy Hook comes to mind – enters into a ‘post-truth’ vortex, where a reasonable-sounding demagogue promotes the whole thing as a ‘false flag’ event: a tragedy staged by the US government to strip citizens of their rights. Chicago-based Nick Drnaso’s

ArtReview

drawings compound an overwhelming sense of doom, capturing alienating characteristics of contemporary life – the isolation of the automobile, the tract housing and strip malls, online culture, meaningless work – and spreading it through sombre washes and a gloomy half-light across the panels of his story. With anomie as a baseline, and the catastrophe of Sabrina laid over the top, the ability of those most directly affected by the murder to carry on renders them heroic.

Drnaso’s quiet, insistent focus on this group, and his ability to stir our profound empathy for the lives they are living, against the backdrop of a world gone mad, elevates this story to the level of literature. David Terrien

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Infinite Resignation

by Eugene Thacker Repeater, £12.99/$17.95 (softcover) At first glance Infinite Resignation seems to be a high-end toilet book, a collection of original and assembled philosophical-poetic fragments, short essays and aphorisms to be stored next to old copies of Viz and leafed through at random.

However, it’s advisable to read the flowering of its ‘efflorescent grumpiness’ in sequence, as Thacker’s tussles with the ‘quasi-philosophy’ of pessimism accumulate detail. Pessimism – here a transient point or double-bind between suicidal despair and optimism, philosophy and mysticism, tragedy and farce – can, we learn, be moral, physical, metaphysical and even cosmic.

‘I am a pessimist about everything, except pessimism,’ Thacker writes, and shortly after: ‘There is no philosophy of pessimism, only the reverse.’

Nonetheless Infinite Resignation serves as an engaging introduction to Thacker’s patron saints of pessimistic thinking – ‘Laconic and sullen… perhaps they need us more than we need them’ – chiefly, Nicolas de Chamfort, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emil Cioran, Søren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, Miguel de Unamuno and above all Arthur Schopenhauer. In some senses the entire book is both a dedication and ongoing response to Schopenhauer, who is both rendered in preposterous vignettes (a tragic courtship attempt involving a bunch of grapes; being pelted by school children with balls on his daily walks) and treated with seriousness.

‘If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie

of Western culture – the preference for existence over non-existence.’ As Thacker notes, quoting Schopenhauer: ‘at the end of his life, no one, if he be sincere and at the same time in possession of his faculties, will ever wish to go through it again’. Under Schopenhauer’s shadow, Thacker’s pessimistic fragments self-reflexively worm through the pointlessness of philosophy proper, of life as a disenchanted writer and of writing itself. Somewhat unusually given its frequent references to pathology, there is also an invigorating lack of reference to psychoanalysis.

Existence/nonexistence for Thacker is also entwined with the probing of the human in relation to the nonhuman that has preoccupied his work to date (including the New York-based academic’s cult 2011 In the Dust of This Planet).

Stemming from weirder brands of dark ecology, the book branches into the tantalising prospect of eradicating the pestilence of humanity in favour of a-world-without-us and/or general selfabnegation. This is one of many similarities between Thacker’s pessimism and the (disturbingly purist) aspects of mysticism – but as it cannot fully commit to either absence or mysticism, it wallows around them without resolution. This noncommittal attitude is perhaps Infinite Resignation’s greatest strength, though: it exemplifies in its form and content what could be called a pessimistic style. Aphoristic fragments are not short for wisdom’s sake, rather they are short because of ‘laziness, listlessness’, Thacker

admits. ‘The pessimist harbors no ideals concerning literary craft of “finding one’s voice” as a writer. There is only what suffices, what is finished enough, what can be left off, cast away, abandoned when it physically hurts too much to write so much and to sit for so long.’ Paying homage to Nietzsche’s ‘style as illness’ and Schopenhauer’s ‘style as intolerance’, Thacker’s championing of everyday tedium as an aesthetic is a refreshing addition to the contemporary resurgence of interest in the possibilities of the hybrid essay form. The book also repeats itself at points and perhaps goes on too long – but shouldn’t it?

One notable absence in Infinite Resignation is references to women writers. This is the domain of the dispirited male academic who pities and laughs at himself in turns. The exception is a short paragraph on Clarice Lispector’s surreal visions of plankton and insects. And yet, Lispector’s influence seeps through the book almost as much as Schopenhauer’s via Thacker’s interspersed short poetic sentences on strange undersea worlds of stars and plants, often the only counterpoints to the seething disappointment of pessimism: ‘Written in the Hall of Mosses.

Thought wanders in eerie shapes, growing in unexpected, verdant directions. Slowly, imperceptibly, it covers the entire surface of the brain. It drapes itself like a viscous and dazzling early morning moss.’ But, horror, the loo roll has run out again. Lucy Mercer

Michel Majerus: Notizen. Notes 1995 Edited by Brigitte Franzen Walther König, €45 (hardcover) ‘Fuck the intention of the artist!’, read one of the slogans printed on Michel Majerus’s monumental skateboard ramp if we are dead, so it is (2000). In this light, some might think that scanning and reprinting the artist’s notebooks – and providing transcriptions in German and translations in English – rather misses the point. Many, however, will find the opportunity to read his mind irresistible, especially given that his life and artmaking were cut dramatically short by a plane crash, in 2002, when he was only thirty-five.

In 1995, having graduated from the arts academy in Stuttgart three years prior, the Luxembourg-born artist was living in Berlin and preparing for no less than five solo exhibitions, including his first ‘midcareer’ retrospective at Kunsthalle Basel. The three notebooks

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included here (out of 12 written that year, and published in conjunction with a three-part survey exhibition of his rarely shown early works organised by his estate) reveal an artist particularly self-conscious about his own production and place within art history, questioning both his role as a painter and the viewer’s relationship to his paintings, and incessantly comparing himself to the ‘dead suckers’ – a phrase he used for the artists he admired, both living and dead (George Condo, Georg Baselitz and Andy Warhol among them) – whose work he so often appropriated.

As with his own work, where pop and youth culture merge with art-historical references, there is no hierarchy to the material included in his notes (it ranges from advertising slogans to grocery lists, from exhibition sketches to

ArtReview

personal assignments – ‘analyze the extent to which a conceptual idea like the ones B. Nauman, Sol LeWitt… had, might be decisive for my development’), making for a frenetic read.

Majerus’s work, with its embrace of the selfevidence and ‘apparentness’ of contemporary visual culture, has often been cast as purely ‘intuitive’, editor Brigitte Franzen notes in an accompanying essay, and in challenging this consensus, the book is a valuable art-historical resource. As for these notes being an indispensable ‘key’ to ‘unlock[ing]’ his work, however, as Franzen later disconcertingly suggests (did it need unlocking?), this reviewer was filled with glee to find question marks punctuating the transcription, like last scribbled obstacles resisting interpretation. Louise Darblay

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Gernot Wieland, Thievery and Songs (still), 2016, video, 22 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 27, 65 and 103 come from ‘Anaphora as a Coping Mechanism’ by Ocean Vuong (published in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2017)

on pages 127 and 132 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Summer 2018

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A Curator Writes Summer 2018 Years ago, I used to be somebody in the world of curating. I made seminal exhibition proposals such as Live in Your Bed, an updated 1980s take on Harald Szeemann’s conceptual art exhibition but this time featuring Julian Schnabel rampaging in pyjamas. Then there was Magiciens de la Pomme de Terre, a cunning reworking of Jean-Hubert Martin’s sprawling global-art exhibition but this time featuring farmers who were growing rare varieties of Ireland’s favourite crop corralled into performing traditional dances and playing wind instruments made by Jeremy Deller.

Given this pedigree of ideas it was a surprise when I received the missive all curators fear. One morning in June, a black-edged envelope plopped into the hallway of my small Bloomsbury flat.

I didn’t even bother opening it. I knew it could mean only thing – the examination of one’s credentials from the secretive Institute of Curators that comes in advance of being unceremoniously curatorially defrocked. Not one curatorial chap is reported to have survived in the profession after these examinations and I didn’t feel confident that I would be the first to buck the trend.

As I walked to the Institute the following Monday, I still felt slightly aggrieved. I’m the first to play the white man and admit that a number of my foreign exhibitions have backfired. Um Bongo, Um Bongo, They Make ‘Art’ in the Congo! was badly misinterpreted. Of course the Walloons couldn’t get enough of it, but, all told, its three-year run at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium did me more harm than good. Yet to be questioned and in all probability thrown out of the profession to which I have devoted my life was not something I thought would ever happen to me. I worked myself up into such a lather striding down The Mall that for a moment I didn’t notice that Anthony, the usual doorman of the Institute, had been replaced by a strikingly tall person of colour wearing a cocktail dress.

She looked me up and down and tapped an iPad, a device by which Anthony would have been horrified.

“I’m here for a meeting at the Institute…”

“I know who you are,” she replied in a surprisingly deep baritone and led me inside. “Head to the shared thinking space where all decolonised views are welcome.” She pointed over her left shoulder to a set of double doors.

“You mean the members’ bar?” I asked politely.

She looked horrified and her Adam’s apple visibly wobbled.

“There are no members any more. We are a gathering. A shifting collective of overlapping intersectionalities with only inadvertent hierarchies that we immediately dismantle.”

I nodded uncertainly. Was this part of the examination? I had no idea what she was talking about. From rumour I had heard these defrocking ceremonies involved the likes of Roger Buergel and Adam Szymczyk and other high priests of curating asking complex questions about the history of our noble profession and one’s contribution to it before telling those being interrogated to hand over all their curatorial gadgets and marching them out to join the awfulness of civilian life. I shook my Tesco bag and all the curatorial gadgets it contained.

I gathered myself and entered the hallowed room.

It is fair to say that the sight that greeted me was not what I was expecting. The wooden tables and dark velvet chairs had disappeared.

The William Morris wallpaper was nowhere to be seen. Instead the

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walls were covered by mirrored glass backlit with LEDs shining a vivid pink. The serious coterie of curators I was expecting was nowhere to be seen. In one corner was a reading group clutching copies of Donna Haraway’s 2016 Staying with the Trouble. A couple discussed the materially driven situation of blackness. In another part of the room, a group loudly talked about their experiences as future-crafting creative facilitators. One of them broke away and approached me.

“Prince once told us not to hate him ’cause he’s fabulous. But what does it mean to be fabulous? Can acts of fabulousness be political gestures too?”

I panicked.

“I’m here to hand in my badge. You know, my curating badge.

And all my curatorial gadgets.” I fished around in the Tesco bag I had with me and pulled out a Filofax.

“Here, take it.”

She took the Filofax gently, as if it was some sort of alien object.

“Here is a microaggression,” she muttered. In its bulging pages were scribbles about exhibitions that I had envisioned but would never make, lists of artists who I wanted to interview but would never talk to. I had no idea what was going on around me, but I knew that as that old fraud Lacan said, I was in the process of becoming what I should have been.

A relic, a barely remembered figure shambling around private views on an autumnal Wednesday evening discreetly drinking as much free white wine as possible. Well, it is still a life. I Kurator

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