Intoxicating minds since 1949
Contamination
Chim Pom
Haute Joaillerie, place Vendôme since 1906
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Rubis flamboyant transformable necklace White and pink gold, diamonds, one cushion-cut ruby of 25.76 carats, 18 oval-cut and cushion-cut rubies for 30.40 carats.
NEW YORK
Wael Shawky The Gulf Project Camp
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Camino Real, 1968 (detail). Felt, 116 × 105 ¾ inches (294.6 × 268.6 cm)
Anni Albers
September 10–October 19, 2019
David Zwirner
New York
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KARA WALKER
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Ohne Titel (Gitter und Schlangenlinien um “T”) (Untitled [Grids and Wavy Lines Around “T”), c. 1939 (detail). Oil and colored paste on canvas, 22 ¼ × 9 7/8 inches (56.5 × 25 cm)
Paul Klee 1939
September 10–October 26, 2019
David Zwirner
New York
H A R T U N G + A R T I N F O R M E L
1 O CTO BER 2 01 9 - 1 8 J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 27 ALBEMARLE STREET L O N D O N W 1 S 4 H Z MAZZOLENIART.COM
ArtReview vol 71 no 6 September 2019
Contamination As ArtReview is going to press, a short emailed notice from the organisers of the 16th Istanbul Biennial containing a practical point of order has arrived in its inbox. One of the planned venues for the forthcoming exhibition, the city’s 600-year-old shipyards, would no longer be a venue due to the discovery of and subsequent need to remove asbestos from the site, which consequently delayed its planned renovation. This kind of problem is a very twenty-first-century one for art (ok, maybe it’s more precisely a late-twentieth-century one, but no one likes to show their age and ArtReview’s publisher is always going on about wanting things to feel ‘fresh’ and ‘contemporary’, even though there are no such things in this rotten world where everything comes back to haunt you, or, just simply comes back, all the time, endlessly, like it’s all just the same, and so who cares when things happened, really? Who even knows what’s real? And – you know – the publisher and the pressure… well, it kinda gets to us all, right?), stemming from art’s move out of the ‘white ideal space’ famously described by Brian O’Doherty (in that 1980s book Inside the White Cube that we all had to read at art-critic school, but didn’t really because the premise seemed so obvious and simple to someone who had grown up in that context where white cubes simply were…), into venues that come loaded with their own contexts, histories and narratives. It’s not always clear to ArtReview whether or not the art housed therein is supposed to be enhanced by these residual narratives, to feed off them, or whether they are there to provide sufficient interest so as to disguise the fact that the art itself contains none. The trouble is that none of its contributors ever tell ArtReview the truth! ArtReview remembers when the Arsenale in Venice only housed the ‘emerging’ art, the art that no one was sufficiently convinced by to allow its presence within the hallowed space of the white cube; these days everything gets soiled. There’s even a thing called The White Pube. That’s all ArtReview’s ‘young friends’ go on about these days; n reviews n art thoughts n so on…
Consume
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Talking of ‘young friends’, ArtReview can’t count the number of times it’s stumbled through the back alleys, parking lots, industrial estates of a city, searching out whatever ‘interesting’ venue a curator has discovered to host art (these days it seems to be outer space, which might be a bit tricky to get to using an Oyster Card). All of which is a total reversal of O’Doherty’s note (made with reservation) that ‘the ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art”.’ (ArtReview is using Google for this. What it said about not reading still stands.) But that’s what happens to the old; the new comes around and kicks it where it hurts. That’s why ArtReview doesn’t allow shoes in the office. It is no coincidence that the rise of non-white cube art venues coincides with art’s febrile expansion into disciplines earlier considered discrete. Art is an invasive species devouring whatever abuts it – from music to journalism, architecture and design to theatre. To what extent this contamination of discipline is two-way is a matter of debate. But who cares about that?… oh… right… the contributors… Yes, them! Publisher said to be nice. Errr… On the flipside perhaps their job has got harder as artists demand ever-greater expertise in a wider range of fields. That might apply to viewers too (in terms of the difficulty and a wider range of fields). ArtReview’s not sure why its reviewers keep on making out that they are different from them (the viewers, not ArtReview). Of course there is also a danger that as art expands to cover… well… everything, the whole notion of calling something ‘art’ could just collapse into meaningless nonsense (on the subject of which, ArtReview sees the International Council of Museums is considering changing its definition of a museum from an institution that ‘acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity’ to ‘polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue…’ – ArtReview thought it had trademarked that one. You’ll be hearing from ArtReview’s ‘people’ museum people, oh yes you will!), but a state of collapse is where things get interesting, as ArtReview’s healthcare provider is always telling it. Enjoy being infected… but not by anthrax. ArtReview
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INAUGURAL EXHIBITIONS
Fred Wilson Peter Hujar David Hockney Loie Hollowell Alexander Calder Opening September 14, 2019 New York
PARIS ERIC DUYCKAERTS LIONEL ESTEVE THILO HEINZMANN
HANS HARTUNG
SHANGHAI AUGUST 30 − OCTOBER 20, 2019
NEW YORK BERNARD FRIZE LESLIE HEWITT JR
HONG KONG BARRY MCGEE
SEOUL TAKASHI MURAKAMI SHANGHAI HANS HARTUNG NI YOUYU
T1989-U44, (detail) 1989. 130 x 195 cm | 51 3/16 x 76 3/4 in. Courtesy the artist & Perrotin
TOKYO EMILY MAE SMITH
Art Previewed Breakfast with... Yoan Capote 22
Folly Finding the present in the past by Mark Rappolt 32
Tall Tales Pierre Rouve and Blow Up by J.J. Charlesworth 26
The Interview Keren Cytter by Ross Simonini 34
Canon Fire Who is losing the us culture war? by Jonathan T.D. Neil 28
Coming Up Ten shows to see this month by Martin Herbert 42
Sounding Off Enjoying the silence by Patrick Langley 30
Art Featured The Age of the Monologue by Chris Fite-Wassilak 50
The Beat Goes On by Daniel Hunt 74
Rayyane Tabet by Mark Rappolt 58
Dayanita Singh by Fi Churchman 78
A Drunk Pandemic by Chim Pom 66
September 2019
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Art Reviewed Sara Cwynar, by Megan N. Liberty Steven Parrino, by Sam Korman Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel Francois, by Scott Indrisek Jonathas de Andrade, by Stefanie Hessler Grada Kilomba, by Ela Bittencourt Dale Frank, by John Quin
exhibitions 90 Kathy Acker, by Kevin Brazil Kiki Smith, by Oliver Basciano Tuomas A. Laitinen, by Mike Watson Rebecca Horn, by Lauren Elkin Frances Stark, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Graham Lambkin, by Moritz Scheper Céline Condorelli, by Max L. Feldman Manchester International Festival, by Ben Eastham Rezi van Lankveld, by Dominic van den Boogerd Momentum 10, by Louise Darblay Nocturnal Creatures, by Fi Churchman Kirstine Roepstorff, by Aoife Rosenmeyer bank, by J.J. Charlesworth Leo Mock, by Jonathan Griffin
books 116 The poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, by Rachael Allen Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, by Johny Pitts, reviewed by Ismail Einashe Zeichnungen, by Peter Handke, reviewed by David Terrien In Print, by Ben Eastham back page 122
page 103 Erik Öberg, Wither into claws, 2018, mixed media. Courtesy the artist (as seen in Momentum 10)
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ArtReview
Breakfast with
Yoan Capote Mixed fruit skewers, eggs, cheese Tropical countries have a broad diversity of fruit, so I love mixed fruits in my daily diet, especially in breakfast
I have a studio in a small farm which is full of trees and where I get a big number of fruits My family helps planting vegetables and raising animals for our own consumption
Obviously I buy the bread and the cheese in stores in Havana. I don’t remember the kind of cheese in the photo Eggs sometimes come from my farm
Courtesy the artist
The Havana-based artist has an exhibition at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano this autumn (through 6 January), where he is showing a series of painted sculptural seascapes embedded with fishhooks
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ArtReview
Betye Saar
Betye Saar: Call and Response Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles September 22, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window The Museum of Modern Art, New York October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020
robertsprojectsla.com
ROBERTS PROJECTS
CARRIE MAE WEEMS Over Time Carrie Mae Weems, The Tate Modern, 2006 present © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
GOODMAN GALLERY JOHANNESBURG 7 September - 5 October Frieze London Booth A8 Regent's Park 3 - 6 October
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Art Previewed
It is easy to sympathise at a distance 25
Sophia Loren with Pierre Rouve at Elstree Studios, Hertfordshire, during the filming of The Millionairess (1960, dir Anthony Asquith). Photo: J. Wilds/Keystone/Getty Images
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ArtReview
Tall tales
J.J. Charlesworth looks back on a time when art criticism was glamorous
It’s 29 December 1962. Britain is in the grip of that winter’s ‘Big Freeze’: heavy blizzards have swept the country and almost a metre of snow has fallen on Central London. Petar Ouvaliev, Bulgarian émigré and regular contributor to Art News and Review, is marrying his English fiancée, Sonia Joyce, at Chelsea Register Office. Getting there on time has become a problem. So Ouvaliev does what anyone else would and borrows Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s Rolls-Royce (with chauffeur). He’s been working on the production of the star couple’s film The V.I.P.s (1963), and as Joyce later recalled, ‘since [Burton and Taylor’s] “liquid lifestyle” meant they never awoke before the afternoon, he knew that the car and chauffeur would be back ready by the time they would need it’. Ouvaliev, better known in Britain by his adopted name, Pierre Rouve, is on a roll. Exdiplomat, art critic, broadcaster for the bbc World Service’s Bulgarian section, theatre director and lately film producer (having coproduced the 1960 hit The Millionairess with Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren), Rouve is the embodiment of the deracinated emigrant intellectual – urbane, cultured, polyglot, a consummate connection-maker. His life story is shaped by the forces of the Cold War. During the Second World War he serves in Bulgaria’s diplomatic service, finding himself in London as the land of his birth turned to communism and joined the Soviet Bloc. In December 1948 he abandons his post and applies for leave to remain in the uk, where he lives as a ‘stateless person’. To make ends meet, he starts writing for French and Italian art magazines. His sister, art-historian Dora Ouvaliev, lives in Paris, and has started filing reviews of the art in Paris for the new Art News and Review, which launches in February 1949. Soon, Rouve’s criticism is a mainstay of the publication, alongside writers such as Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham and David Sylvester.
As a critic he writes grandiloquent texts loaded with sweeping judgements on the shortcomings of contemporary art. Not far below the surface is a sensitivity to art’s historical migrations and the shifting geopolitical context of his time. Abstraction and figuration, for Rouve, are compromised by the political side-taking of East and West; in a 1953 review praising painter Prunella Clough he writes of ‘the social isolation imposed on modern art by what seems like a combined operation between the Kremlin and the Daily Mail on one side, and the artist’s hypertrophied egotism on the other’. Born in 1915, he is one of the last generation of travelled, bourgeois European cosmopolitans, before Europe is split by the war and then the Iron Curtain. Rouve’s criticism is that of an Old World humanist, standing up for aesthetic wholeness in the face of a postwar world that he sees busily reducing human beings to cogs in a cybernetic machine. Unlike his contemporaries Banham and Alloway, he’s no technophile; in 1964, closing his report from the Ljubljana Print Biennial, in Eastern Bloc Yugoslavia, Rouve asks, ‘If man must not be a bundle of reflexes, why should he be a sum of mathematical equations? Between trances and computers where do we stand?’ Also unlike writers such as Alloway and Banham, critical voices closely tied to the fortunes of contemporary art in the postwar, Rouve’s criticism is but one strand of his more eclectic, improvised, oddly glamourous trajectory through the 1950s and 60s, as he takes up whatever opportunities an entrepreneurial, stateless exile can find. His connection with Carlo Ponti, Loren’s husband (and an avid art collector), brings him his most important film credit – Rouve becomes executive producer on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director’s cryptic thriller about a fashion
September 2019
photographer in London at the height of the ‘swinging 60s’. In a scene early on in Blow-Up, Thomas, the David Bailey-esque protagonist, takes a break from the shoot he’s working on to look in on his neighbour, a painter called Bill. Bill is a modern artist. He paints abstract paintings – canvases filled with fine dots, like sprayed paint. Bill is modelled on real-life English painter Ian Stephenson, and the paintings Bill shows Thomas in the movie are indeed by Stephenson, selected by Antonioni when he visited the artist at his studio before shooting for Blow-Up began. The connection is no doubt Rouve. A year or so earlier, Rouve has written a cover feature on Stephenson for The Arts Review (as the publication has been retitled) of 24 December 1964. There, he writes euphorically of Stephenson’s dissolution of form into colour and, ultimately, light: ‘Light veils and unveils. And Stephenson now paints this twofold movement of the invisible from which forms emerge… Colours coalesce in fragile configurations, forms flutter in transient tensions. And our eye scans time.’ Rouve wants to put the viewer in control, at the centre of things. But it is Antonioni’s fictional Stephenson, Bill, who better captures the ambiguous, paranoid existentialism of 1966: “They don’t mean anything when I do them, just a mess,” he says to Thomas, explaining his paintings. “Afterwards I find something to hang on to… Then it sorts itself out, and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story.” Naturally Rouve was never far from the detective story himself. In 1970 he attempted to help Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov find work in the British film industry, without success. On 7 September 1978 Markov was assassinated in London by an operative of the Bulgarian secret service (almost certainly with the assistance of the kgb), using a pellet of ricin fired from an umbrella.
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What to make of the intertwining controversies surrounding the Whitney Museum’s harbouring of (now former) trustee Warren B. Kanders and the (too-white) critical reception of its biennial exhibition? Are these just epiphenomena of the national derangement that goes by the name of Trump? Or are they tremors of something deeper, a shift in the plate tectonics of art and politics in the us? What is for sure is that we are in the midst of a new culture war, but one in which it’s unclear, as yet, who are the righteous and who are the reactionaries. Take the Kanders controversy: on one side stand the defenders of the museum – the Whitney in particular, but museums and cultural institutions in general – and what we can call the American model of museum funding, whereby a wealthy elite both ‘gives and gets’ substantial sums of money to their institutions of choice in return for social status and public recognition. The intent of such largesse, whether altruistic, aspirational or instrumentalised, is the stuff of society gossip. But from the perspective of the museum, that’s beside the point; the mission justifies the money. Upon realising that the money Kanders was giving to the Whitney was coming from his ownership of companies that produced, among other things, the tear gas used against migrant families and asylum seekers at the us–Mexico border on 25 November of last year, a large number of the staff at the Whitney signed a letter to the museum leadership ‘asking for Warren Kanders’ resignation’. The letter also demanded that the museum provide a ‘clear policy’ on ‘Trustee participation’, to which was added a nota bene asking, rhetorically, whether
Canon fire
Jonathan T.D. Neil wonders who’s losing the culture war
Protesters occupy the lobby of the Whitney Museum in New York to demand the resignation of Warren Kanders, 5 April 2019. Photo: Perimeander / licensed to Creative Commons
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ArtReview
or not there was a ‘moral line’ to be drawn on such participation, before drawing that line at having museum staff ‘afflicted’ by trustees ‘whose work or actions are at odds with the museum’s mission’. Now, for the curious, I recommend reading the Whitney’s mission; it’s unclear how Kanders’s work or actions could be at odds with it. (You can find the museum’s mission statement on the publicly available Form 990 tax returns required of all nonprofit institutions in the us; oddly, it’s not reproduced on the museum’s website.) Nevertheless, the signatories of the letter raise the key question that most defenders of the museum have been asking: where is that moral line? What makes some money immoral and other money not? Money from guns? Not acceptable. But bulletproof vests? How about money from cigarettes? No. But what about electronic cigarettes? Real estate developers that gentrify but also build low-income housing? A fossil fuel company that also builds wind farms? The strategy here is again rhetorical, for once you’re in the business of drawing up a list of morally acceptable monetary sources, you’re either sliding down some slippery slope to the pecuniary inquisition or hazarding moral compromise and contradiction. Which is why the ‘moral line’ question is really a false one. Answering it isn’t the point; all that matters is asking it. On the other side of this controversy, the future of the museum (the future of all arts and politics and, well, the future of the future itself) is tied up with the project or process of decolonisation. For some context, consider the op-ed that Olga Viso, the former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, published in The New York Times last spring. ‘Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Next Wave’ reckoned with a different controversy from a year prior concerning Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012), a sculpture that aggregated replicas of gallows that had been used in us state-sanctioned executions. The largest execution, of 38 Dakota men, had taken place in Minnesota in 1862. Scaffold was originally shown in Europe, where its lethal referents could be read abstractly. The Walker acquired the work in 2017 as a marquee piece for the museum’s sculpture garden, where the Dakota community in Minnesota could entertain no such abstractions. After considerable protests, negotiations and media campaigns, Scaffold was removed from the museum’s grounds and dismantled. In a further gesture of what Viso would identify as ‘empathy’, Durant transferred to the Dakota elders his intellectual property and moral rights to Scaffold, at once a gift and, if not a destruction, then a disavowal of his art. Viso places this episode within a wider history of struggles by museum professionals,
artists and activists since the 1980s to ‘expose’ the ‘power structures of white establishment culture, corporate America, and the federal government’. The art market is indicted as an additional ‘colonizing force’, such that today, according to Viso, there are ‘two incompatible art worlds: one committed to inclusion, artistic freedom and change, the other driven by money and entitlements’. (Incompatible? The last 200 years of artmaking would suggest the opposite.) Viso ends her piece with the following entreaty: ‘The next wave of decolonizing America’s art museums must succeed, because to lose our capacity for empathy in a democracy is not an option’. Viso is not wrong, but for the partisans of decolonisation, it’s not our ‘capacity’ for empathy that is central, but rather who is owed it. According to Decolonize This Place, one of the engines of activism at the centre of the Whitney protests, decolonisation is a ‘perspective’ that, properly deployed, recognises ‘that the settlercolony of the United States was founded on the theft of land, life, and labor over 400 years’, and thus decolonisation ‘necessitates’ the ‘abolition of prisons and police, borders and bosses, empires and oligarchs’, what is elsewhere identified as the ‘dynamics of contemporary racial capitalism’. Though both Viso and Decolonize This Place position racial justice as crucial to the decolonial project, the latter is careful to point out that racial and ethnic identity cannot be taken as a proxy for a commitment to decolonisation. And yet race and identity remain, if not central, then at least priority categories for the ‘solidarity between struggles’ that Decolonize This Place describes as its ‘work’. Why else quote Xaviera Simmons’s 2 July call in the pages of The Art Newspaper for ‘whiteness’ to ‘undo itself’, a call that was meant to challenge how ‘white art critics’ had been ‘condescending and dismissive’ of the art in the Whitney Biennial? Simmons’s ‘undoing’ was echoed just a couple of days later, and more explicitly, in the pages of The New York Times by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, who, in ‘The Dominance of the White Male Critic’, decry that identity and state that the members of its persuasion ‘ought to step aside and make room for… writers of color’. (But wait. Wasn’t Holland Cotter’s review of the show glowing and justly sensitive to much of the art’s new politics of form? Wasn’t it Linda
top Poster designed by Kyle Goen for Decolonize This Place, 14th Street subway station, New York. Courtesy Decolonize This Place above Tear-gas canister manufactured by Safariland, found at the Mexico–us border, 25 November 2018. Photo: @VetsAboutFace / Twitter
September 2019
Yablonsky in The Art Newspaper and Nadje Sayej in The Guardian and Debra Solomon on wnyc who dismissed the show’s lack of radicality?) Nevertheless, if racial and ethnic identity are inextricable from the process of decolonisation, then the process should require that every player be so identified. Which means that, in response to Decolonize This Place’s question, ‘What are we willing to sacrifice?’, the uncomfortable but wholly accurate answer (but not the only one) would be: a rich Jew, who supported Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president, and whose business interests and place on the Whitney’s board of trustees had been reported back in 2015 – two biennials ago. And yet. I don’t believe that the partisans on either side of this controversy want to traffic in racial animus or cynical rhetoric, not the partisans of pragmatic reform (cleaner money, higher pay, more ‘inclusion, artistic freedom, and change’), nor the believers in the beloved community that will come after capitalism’s demise (after decolonisation, after ‘money and entitlements’, after Kanders). But racial animus and cynical rhetoric is what we have. Righteousness and reaction are what we’re feeding on. And there is shockingly little empathy to go around. It’s a culture war. And everyone is losing. Jonathan T.D. Neil is a contributing editor of ArtReview
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I recently treated myself to a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. I should have done it years ago. They have improved my life immensely. As one irate Amazon reviewer pointed out, in a fit of buyer’s remorse, the headphones don’t quite cancel noise, not entirely. That would be impossible. After visiting an anechoic chamber at Harvard in 1951, John Cage observed that, once external sounds had been removed, he could hear the low hum of his blood and the high whine of his nervous system. (The latter is controversial: it may have simply been tinnitus.) ‘There is no such thing as silence,’ he concluded of his revelatory encounter with quiet. It hasn’t stopped scientists attempting to engineer it. As the irate reviewer notes, my headphones don’t cancel. They dampen, mitigate, soothe. This act of sonic subtraction, which has done wonders for my ability to focus on work or zone out during long commutes along grinding train tracks, is revealing in itself. The ambient disarray of our acoustic commons subsides at the click of a button. In its absence, I hear, perhaps paradoxically, the sound of noise-cancellation at work – a process in which unwanted sounds are more or less erased by soundwaves of equal amplitude but inverse phase. (A process of addition, then, rather than subtraction: of sound destroying sound.) The result is a high-frequency residue of normal hearing that, to my ears, has an unmistakably dry quality. It makes me think of iced Campari, a bitter, crisp drink for the ears. I’ve recently become preoccupied with sound and how it influences – saturates – my experience of basically everything. It’s partly a belated effect of growing up with a pianist grandmother, sitting at her side while she taught me Chopsticks, observing her hands as they crossed the keys, and understanding that the soft hinged clack of the action being pressed was as satisfying to hear as the notes they summoned. And it’s partly a result of living in 2019, when spending two seconds on social media, tuning in live to the latest Westminster meltdown or hearing language itself further debased with every fresh wash of the news cycle fills me with a desire for noise-cancellation on a global scale. I’m working on this piece at the library, or trying to, when a school group in matching hi-vis tabards bursts into a full-throated, borderline atonal rendition of Baa-Baa Black Sheep in the picture-book section behind me. (Sorry, kids: the sheep drowned in a flood, you will inherit a ruined earth.) I flick the switch – ah, that crisp hiss – and my head is suspended in a private, sound-proofed
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Sounding off
Patrick Langley enjoys the silence
A scientist performs an acoustic experiment in the Bell Labs anechoic chamber, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1947. Photo: Eric Schaal
ArtReview
booth, a black box for the mind. The kids are still there, but it’s hard not to feel affection for their exuberant, Johnny Rotten-ish howls, now that the edge has been taken off. Becoming aware of a reduction in noise makes me more aware of what I’m missing – the remainder that refuses to be erased. This, I realise now, is what makes sound so exciting for me, and such a headache for curators: its spooky refusal to stay in the frame. It’s always going places it shouldn’t, leaking, seeping, infiltrating, however hard we attempt to suppress it. It careens around corners, leaks from monitors, wobbles through walls. The German word for sound art – a loose, slippery term for a bunch of practices that blur the distinctions between music and art, concert hall and gallery – is predictably evocative here: Klangkunst. The word itself reverberates. Sound clangs in ways we don’t always expect. I was reminded of all this the other day, while standing in the genteel confines of a Mayfair gallery, frowning at the fleshy smudges and crimson smears of an abstract painting. A car with a thumping sound system drove past. Its subwoofer was so loud I would have needed a Richter scale to measure it. The gallery was physically affected by sound, perhaps even structurally compromised. Windows hummed in their frames. Pictures buzzed on their hooks. These noises blended with the drone of the aircon unit above the entrance, the clack of desktop keyboards behind the front desk, the hum of fluorescent tubes, the sigh of traffic muffled by glass, the squeak of Nikes on polished concrete, the invigilator clearing his throat, all of it overlapping, interfering, blending, causing me to project a state of momentary confusion onto the painting itself. The car drove past. A monkish hush resumed. Which was the more conducive state, I wondered, to appreciating that (or any) painting? I don’t think of the car and its weapons-grade sound system as having intruded on my pure, solitudinous contemplation of a visual object, because such purity, like silence, simply doesn’t exist. Sound is integral to the experience of art. You can’t cancel the noise, just reduce it. Listening conditions looking, and vice versa. Perhaps the two are inextricable. Here’s a quick test: are you looking at this sentence, or hearing it in your inner ear? Patrick Langley is the author of the novel Arkady (2018) and an editor at art-agenda
Backing our most precious resources: the arts For over 50 years we’ve been proud to support the arts across the UK. We partner with four world-class UK institutions; British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House and Royal Shakespeare Company. bp.com/arts
A quick internet search for Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, suggests that the most asked question Googlers have in relation to the ancient seat of the Duke of Devonshire is: ‘What was filmed here?’ Proof perhaps that today, in the age of Downton, Britain’s stately homes, no longer the centres of rural life and national power that they once were, really do exist more purely in the realm of fantasy than reality. But of course this, despite the material displays of Old Master paintings, overstocked libraries, baroque silverware, jewellery collections and stainless-steel cucumber slicers, was always the case. The original house and garden were constructed during the Elizabethan era and featured a flurry of terraces, walled gardens, fountains and ponds. And over the centuries that confection has been continuously refined, expanded and reconstructed. During the eighteenth century the estate was manicured by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to create a then-fashionable ideal of a ‘natural’ environment: vistas derived from history painting and trees imported from the us. So perhaps it’s in the spirit of tradition as much as innovation that fashion, fantasy, art and America are at the heart of the latest transformation of Chatsworth’s grounds. American Rachel Feinstein is the first artist-in-residence on the estate, as part of a collaboration between Chatsworth and the Gucci fashion house. (Though perhaps it’s important to note that beyond its Baroque encrustations, Chatsworth’s holdings do incorporate more contemporary acquisitions, by artists such as Lucian Freud, Michael Craig-Martin and Edmund de Waal.) It’s the latest iteration of Gucci’s expanding engagement with the visual arts (which has included the staging of last year’s Maurizio Cattelan-curated exhibition The Artist is Present at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and support of the Italian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale) that focuses on crossdisciplinary sources of inspiration. In keeping with that, Chatsworth is the first of Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele’s ‘Gucci Places’, a series of sites around the world (accessible also via an app) that have inspired the fashion house (Chatsworth was the location for Gucci’s Cruise 2017 advertising campaign) and that it, in turn, wishes to open up for exploration by a general public. Whether or not this brings the fantasy of Gucci clothing closer to a kind of reality is an open question, as is the implicit notion that such programmes allow audiences to share in the creative process. Perhaps it’s simpler to believe that they articulate the logical truism that nothing comes from
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Folly
Mark Rappolt finds a country house that offers echoes of Britain’s present, not just its past
Rachel Feinstein, Britannia, 2019 (installation view, Chatsworth House). Photo: Samuel Keyte. Courtesy Gucci
nothing, even if the marketing departments of most fashion houses will also want to tell you that each new season brings something new (which, of course, is also the base narrative of much art history, so let’s not get snooty about this). Having done her residing during the summer and autumn of last year, this summer Feinstein unveiled two works located in and around Chatsworth’s grotto (constructed at the end of the eighteenth century to look like a mound of boulders and feel, like any fantasy, simultaneously natural and designed) and inspired by the landscape and collections of
ArtReview
the estate on which she lived. The powdercoated aluminium sculpture Rococo Hut is part of Feinstein’s Folly series (2014–): a tribute to the eighteenth-century fetish for garden follies and, in its theatrical set-like form, a reminder of the role of artifice in the construction of every worldview. It’s a mood-setter perhaps for the main event, which, in turn, appears in Chatsworth’s own grotto-folly in the form of Britannia, a ceramic sculpture reminiscent simultaneously of Renaissance representations of Venus, a character from one of Watteau’s fêtes galantes and an enlarged version of the kind of biscuitware sculptures of classical deities or more lurid ceramic representations of neoclassical iconography that littered wellto-do domestic interiors in eighteenth-century Britain, not least Chatsworth. There’s a clear sense of eternal returns. Britannia was the Roman name for Great Britain, later (during the second century ce) personified in the form of a goddess armed with a trident, clad in flowing robes and sporting a Corinthian helmet and shield. By the nineteenth century, as the British Empire took shape, she’d added a lion to her arsenal. There’s nothing native to the iconography, but what could be more British than an identity founded on appropriation, falsehood and illusion? Feinstein’s version, while suitably neoclassical, is equally expressionistic, with bright harlequin colours dripping off Britannia’s theatrically dressed body (the colours inspired by a rainbow Gucci dress, the form by pre-Imperial representations of a less martial, more feminine Britannia) and her helmet replaced by a feathered hat, as she strides out of a rococo shell, the fruits of the land sitting where more traditional representations might depict the spoils of war. Half-coloured, leaning forward, there’s something mutant about this Britannia: she looks as if she’s becoming something rather than representing anything. Ghostly and decadent, out of time, but somehow in place, a regressive dream from Britain’s past, emerging like a fashion-conscious hermit from a musty cave. Ultimately where Feinstein most succeeds is in the way she encourages two simultaneous readings of the work: the first as a tribute to the diverse and fantastic formal creations that have passed into Chatsworth over time and space; the second as an artificial structure housed in an artificial geology, in an artificial landscape, representing an artificial ideal of an artificial place. Ironically, it’s the last of course, that most reflects this country’s contemporary reality, its modern folly; its retreat to the cave. Rachel Feinstein’s Rococo Hut and Britannia are on public display in Chatsworth Gardens, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire
Keren Cytter. Photo: Albert Fuchs. Courtesy the artist
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The Interview by Ross Simonini
Keren Cytter
“It’s a privilege to work on such unimportant things for such a long time in such a serious manner”
The homepage for Keren Cytter’s website presents, in white text on black, a simple story: ‘Anke just went fishing. / She left her parents at home. / The rest she carried in a plastic bag. / The day was hot and warm.’ Like much of the Tel Aviv-born, New York-based artist’s work, the writing feels both universal and inscrutably specific. Its tone sneaks between dry humour and stone-faced flatness, casually inviting you into its world and then pushing you away with sharp, stubborn opacity. If clicked upon, though, each word in this folktale serves as a hyperlink into Cytter’s sprawling body of work: moody photographs, meticulous and vibrant drawings, experimental novels (A-Z Life Coaching, 2016, etc), picture books that aren’t exactly for children
(The Brutal Turtle, 2018, The Curious Squirrel, 2015) and many, many videoworks, for which she is best known. Even among her filmic output, the diversity is astonishing, including animations, music videos and short films that sit somewhere between amateur melodrama and documentary. Cytter pointedly provides no context for the work, and the resulting effect is of a vast, bewildering labyrinth of collage, an online abyss that viewers must navigate on their own. For me, this chaos of media was so varied and so beguiling that I sought a centre, something that might ground me amidst it. I found one when I considered the implicit personality behind the work: wry and playful, withholding in some ways but also generous in
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terms of production and energy. Cytter’s interviews, too, are rich with character: a strongminded artist, unwavering in her opinions and bold in her responses. At times, the work also seems to encourage this personal reading – photographs of her social life (Museums of Photography, she calls them), cinematography that trembles with the handheld touch of its creator, drawings of the artist’s intimate living space (the Panoramas series, 2014–). But as I learned in the following two-week email interview, Cytter vehemently rejects this interpretation, and tells me so in multiple ways. I wanted to accept her answers, and yet I pushed back, because even her refusal felt consonant with the contrarian mind behind her work.
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It’s not about me ross simonini Is your social life a form of art? keren cytter My private life has nothing to do with art. If I’m making an event with my nonprofit ape [Art Projects Era, cofounded with Antonio Grulli], I try to create, with the participating artists, a certain style, narrative or atmosphere. And I’ll never relate my behaviour towards my friends and family to art. I think life with all of its failures is much more precious and important than any form of entertainment. I don’t want to live or behave in a calculated way, just to please, or attract the attention of, an invisible viewer. rs Is your art a form of entertainment? kc I consider all arts, not only my work, as a form of entertainment. What else is it? By entertainment I don’t mean funny or grotesque but any combination of form, shape, colour or sound that creates an interest in the mind of the viewer. rs Is there a Keren Cytter persona in your work? kc No. I hate the idea of it. Less persona makes better artwork, better for the viewer and better for me. I think the less there is of me, the more interesting the work. Less branding, less sellout and the more content that is free of egoistic marketing strategies, the better. rs Do you think the presence of an artist in their work is inherently branded and egoistic? kc Yes. I think it will always reduce the quality of the work because it just reiterates the myth of the artist. A good work needs to create an interest and make you think. When it’s just one piece in a puzzle of a greater narrative that revolves around the creator, there’s a certainty already. You know what you are looking at and where it belongs. It’s not new. You have fewer questions. We already know that this person is making the artwork, it doesn’t need to be pointed at over and over again. It’s just another act of marketing. rs So would you say the element of mystery is important to you in art? kc Hmm. It’s not mystery that’s important. You can know who the artist is, but the work shouldn’t serve the artist’s persona. A work of art should stand for itself and accumulate itself, without leaning on other elements or serving ideas, attitudes or personas.
Values
of humanity there is corruption. It’s easy to fall prey to this – you need to create objects that sell, or are at least liked. Without legitimacy from the establishment there won’t be any value to your work and you won’t be able to support yourself. So it’s very easy to become corrupted by this process. It’s part of survival. rs Is selling inherently corrupt? kc No, it’s good. That’s the way to make a living. The problem is that the market is not regulated. Because the market’s not regulated, the works have no cultural value and they function as a currency. Yet the language about and around them describes them as culturally important. It’s like saying that the $20 bill is worth that value because of the quality of the sketch of Andrew Jackson or the position of the numbers on the note. This creates a lack of trust in the evaluation of art and of course in the art market by people looking for culture.
“I like watching movies that are related to popular culture and not to contemporary or modern art. I like art films. I don’t like video art. When I say art, I mean what I consume in galleries and museums, not in cinemas and on tv” It also forces museums to purchase art that has no cultural value. Instead they look for work that has financial value because of the popularity and the distribution of the expensive images (expensive work gets more attention than cheap work). Not to mention that galleries looking to represent an artist look for one that produces expensive work, more so than an artist that produces work with cultural value. This degrades the cultural significance of what museums and galleries show. rs How do you define cultural value? kc It’s a very long and complicated answer. It’s like asking, how do you define an intelligent sentence? I don’t think it’s only a matter of taste. It’s a question related to aesthetic style and history, not to mention psychological and social effects. There are books about it. rs Which books?
rs Are artists corrupt?
kc There are many books about culture and art history. I see them in other people’s libraries.
kc Yes, a lot of artists are corrupted. In all layers
rs Do you try to make work with cultural value?
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kc Lol yes. rs Why do you make art if you don’t like it? kc I enjoy doing it. I don’t like looking at it. rs Does other people’s art bother you? kc Art doesn’t bother me. It’s just not so interesting. I like to look at some paintings but not enough to go to a gallery and look at them. Unless my friends are the ones that are presenting them. There are so many stimulations in the world, intellectual and emotional, and art is a bit poor in this area. It’s not emotionally complex like a novel or a feature film and definitely falls short of real life and real heartaches. On an intellectual level it’s more interesting to read [Israeli-American psychologist] Daniel Kahneman or watch documentaries that explain different perceptions throughout history than to stare at a grey cube with a press release explaining its transcendent quiet harmony.
Not contemporary art rs Do you watch movies often? kc I don’t go to the cinema. I watch movies on Netflix or on YouTube. I usually draw when I watch them. Things I’ve watched lately: Wild Wild Country, Chef ’s Table (all seasons), The Umbrella Academy (all episodes), Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, The Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, documentaries by Errol Morris, documentaries about the American Civil War, the American Revolution, the Romanovs, Napoleon, the French Revolution and different ancient civilisations. rs Did you enjoy those? kc Yes, but they are not contemporary art. I thought you were speaking about art before. I don’t read books about art. I read fiction. I like history. I watch documentaries about it. Not art history. I like watching movies that are related to popular culture and not to contemporary or modern art. I like art films. I don’t like video art. When I say art, I mean what I consume in galleries and museums, not in cinemas and on tv. All art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art. rs What fiction do you read? kc I read random books. In the last six months I’ve read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom [2010], Passing by Nella Larsen [1929], Family Pictures by Maya Arad [2008]. And a nonfiction book, a biography of Catherine the Great by Henri Troyat [1977]. rs Generally, how long does it take you to make one of your films?
both images Vengeance (stills), 2012–13, hd video, colour, sound, seven episodes, 15 min (each). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
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mop (Musuem of Photography) (detail), 2012–13, 800 Polaroids, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
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kc Around a couple of months to write the script, two days of shooting, a couple of weeks to edit. rs With such a quick shoot, is the process like a performance? kc No. A performance takes two months to write and a month and a half to rehearse. I shoot fast because the script is very tight and there are no improvisations. The camera and the actor’s movements are all written down in the script. rs Do you find being an artist stressful? kc Not at all. It’s super fun. Like being professionally unemployed. When I work on videos I spend a lot of time at home trying to think about a script that actually only I understand the necessity of. And when I draw I do it at home and it’s like therapy. It’s a privilege to work on such unimportant things for such a long time in such a serious manner. rs How is drawing like therapy? kc It doesn’t demand much concentration. It’s very relaxing. It’s a relief from almost any kind of problem or difficulty I have in my daily life. It’s repetitive and demands a certain kind of calm. Maybe drawing is not the same as therapy, but it’s definitely therapeutic. It can also be boring sometimes, then I watch tv series and documentaries while I draw. rs Are you drawing the inside of your home these days? kc I used to draw my apartment a lot. Now I draw images I find on the Internet.
Complicated and unpopular rs Do you mostly spend your time in New York now? kc Yes. rs Why did you move here? kc I had a boyfriend in Berlin, and after we broke up I didn’t feel so good, I needed a new environment. I heard there is an artist visa that I can get and live in the us, and a month later I started the procedure. rs Has the move affected your work in any way? kc Yes, in Europe I already had a comfort zone – I used to exoticise European culture, change languages (German, French, Dutch, Italian) and rely a lot on the atmosphere. After moving to New York, I had no reason to do that. I could have done the same to an American style that I had done in Europe, but American culture and films are too dominant to be exoticised.
I also counted before on people reading the subtitles and accepting bad scripts as being ‘different’. But now I don’t have subtitles, and I have to think of a way to make a valuable script in English. The whole structure of the videos changed. I have gone back to the idea of using different languages, not as an exotic element any more but instead as a political tool. rs Do you think of your screenplays as a kind of literature? kc No. They don’t stand alone. rs Why did you publish them as a book, then? kc In order that whoever reads it will understand how I form my videos, but not as a substitute for them. rs What did you mean just now when you said ‘political’? kc I made a movie (Object, 2016) in my apartment in New York, the characters representing different forces in political and historical power structures. They are all abusing a woman who
“Maybe drawing is not the same as therapy, but it’s definitely therapeutic. It can also be boring sometimes, then I watch tv series and documentaries while I draw” represents women and minorities – eternal victims. That was one of the reasons I decided that the video would be in Russian, because I think Russia is the most dominant crushing force in the world right now. Another example might be the video (Des Trous (Holes), 2018) I shot in Israel last year and narrated in French. I felt distant from my friends and family, and that I had become arrogant like a European colonialist. That was the reason I chose French: I associate it with colonialism. rs Since you work with political ideas, are you concerned that your work may take the form of propaganda? kc No, it’s too complicated and unpopular to turn into propaganda. rs Is promoting a political viewpoint in your work a way of inserting yourself into the work?
Killing time rs Can you point to a specific work where you wanted people to feel and think like you? kc Maybe. For example, in Killing Time Machine (2018), I tried to create a video that would be physical (on a theoretical level) like a machine. I first chose the number of shots and their placement in the room. I decided it would be 36 framed scenes that would start from the viewpoint of the ceiling, make three points on each filmed wall (there are four walls), then from the middle of the room – three points on each wall (12 points in total) and then on the floor – 12 shots – and back again – repeat the same shots. So 72 shots in total. Then I thought that next to every wall will be a character. Four characters in total. It looked to me like cogs operating a machine. Then I had to create a plot that will create the illusion that it is operating the shots (although the shots were operating the story). The video is in a loop. The viewer can then watch it until the end of time, until s/he’s dead. The plot is about four conmen arriving at a wake (after a funeral), and in the first movement (36 shots) they pretend to be the descendants of the man who died. When the shots repeat themselves (some of them are even rewound to emphasise the repetition), the conmen reveal their true identity. And the actors reveal their real names, just to compare acting to deceit. At one moment some of the actors are saying that it’s a ‘killing time machine’. Manning a machine that kills time, and explaining the order of the shots. The longer you watch it, the closer you’re getting to death. So I wanted people to be aware that time is passing, and that whatever they are watching is all false. Nothing is real, but they keep watching a video that deliberately takes away time from their life. Killing them slowly. A bit like smoking. And there’s also smoking in the video. So that was more of a thought, and not much of a feeling. rs Is that a political video? kc No. A solo show by Keren Cytter, Sex is not an option, opens at Beverly’s, New York, on 12 September; her work is currently on view as part of Momentum 10, Moss, Norway. She will premiere a theatre piece at Kunstverein Düsseldorf this autumn Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California
kc No. I wouldn’t like to insert myself, but I would like people to feel and think like me.
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Fair for Modern and Contemporary Art
12 – 15 September 2019
Flughafen Tempelhof Hangar 5 and 6 Tempelhofer Damm 45 12101 Berlin artberlinfair.com U6 ParadestraĂ&#x;e
2 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #1), 1969, graphite and acrylic on paper. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles
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Vivian Greven, Leea, 2017, oil on canvas, 120 × 110 cm. Courtesy Setareh Gallery, Düsseldorf
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Ugo Rondinone, Vocabulary of Solitude (detail), 2014, mixed-media installation. Photo: Studio Rondinone. Courtesy the artist
ArtReview
Coming up by Martin Herbert
A biggest retrospective in 20 years; the biggest show of painting ever; all-out jolliness; and an ongoing European excursion
Met Breuer, New York 24 September – 12 January
Taking the pulse of contemporary painting has It’s a long time since 2 Vija Celmins had to been in vogue in recent years: the more expanprove herself: now in her eighty-first year sive frameworks include moma’s The Forever and a half-century into her career, the LatvianNow: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World born, longtime us-based artist is at the coro(2014) and the Hayward Gallery’s Painting 2:0: 1 Expression in the Information Age (2016). Now! nation stage, and like, say, Ed Ruscha, she’s one of those artists upon whose excellence Young Painting in Germany – is a bigger show most people with eyes agree. To Fix the Image than those – 53 artists and in Memory, which spans some 120 works, is un500 works across three venues Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden, (with the highlights touring to likely to dent her reputation. It’ll be a primer Kunstsammlungen in philosophical quietude, in using seemingly the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Chemnitz – Museum simple means to open onto huge ruminative in 2020). Though it’s also, as Gunzenhauser, 19 plateaus: rippling oceans, night skies, moons, you might surmise from the September – 19 January spiderwebs. Celmins’s silkily monochromatic title, not as internationalist. art, which emerged out of an engagement Aside from all the participants being from with Pop and Photorealism, and also dips Germany, the show aims at surveying the venerinto sculpture, drawing and print, always able practice of painting according to two other borders on abstraction, and continually tilts constraints: there’s no truck with ‘expanded metaphorical. Most of all, what it conveys painting’ – no installation, no multimedia – is awestruck atmosphere, seeming to contain and all the participants were born during the vastness within a single meditatively rendered late 1970s or after. Germany, as is well known, image, and also, harkening back to the ‘allhas produced successive waves of major painters over’ technique of Abstract Expressionism, for a very long time: here’s an opportunity to to present each scenario as a fragment of a see what the next upsurge – if it is one – looks much larger whole, almost randomly chosen, like, via figures including Cornelia Baltes, so that gravitas runs up against a strange indifFlorian Meisenberg, Jana Schröder and a large ference, something like that of the universe number of artists who, admittedly, I haven’t looking back at us. previously heard of.
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Vocabulary of Solitude could be an alternative summation of Celmins’s work. Instead, it’s the 3 centrepiece sculpture, from 2014, of Ugo Kunsthalle Rondinone’s retrospective in Helsinki, Helsinki, featuring 45 versions of the Swiss artist’s 17 August – leitmotif: sculptures of hyperrealist, 17 November serious-looking clowns, going through a range of mundane daily activities, from breathing to dreaming to farting to peeing. These lachrymose figures, carrying on their lives midway between gaiety and depression, are stand-ins for you and me as much as are Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, and are typical of the Swiss artist’s work in shuttling between binary states. The show as a whole is perked up by a number of his rainbowthemed works, the subject retailing its myriad meanings: the window decal love invents us (1999) and the polychromatic text work (and show title) everybody gets lighter (2004) have an upbeat vibe, but then we’re bumped back downward with a scatter of empty clown shoes. Given these dynamics, Rondinone’s work often operates best at scale, where his shows can feel as if they contain a lot but are still somehow emptied out – or maybe that’s just a glass-halfempty writer talking, and, like the thousand Finnish schoolchildren who’ve lined one room
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with floor-to-ceiling drawings of, yes, rainbows curatorial statement doesn’t mention any the ‘sunshine and noir’ tendency of the city’s artists, perhaps because those figures included (the latest iteration of your age and my age and the artists during the 1980s and early 90s. More are considered as ‘contributors’ and cross all age of the rainbow, 2014–), you’ll come away with latterly, he’s pivoted to dreamscapes and interkinds of disciplines. The project also enfolds afterimages of kaleidoscopes of colour. nal monologues. Expect, here, alongside scads 4 Speaking of which, Lari Pittman is having and continues the antifascist, transfeminist, of canvases, the occasional sculpture and antiracist ‘Parliament of Bodies’ discursive his biggest retrocollaborations with the various venues, Bergen Hammer Museum, Los Angeles platform originated by Paul B. Preciado and spective in 20 years: likes of experimental 5 September – 29 September – 5 January Viktor Neumann as the public-programmes some 80 paintings novelist Dennis 10 November aspect of the last Documenta. Aside from that, and 50 works Cooper. The latest Bergen Assembly has gone all expect ‘contributors’ ranging from Alexander 5 on paper. So it’s going to be rich, because one out for jolliness by calling itself Actually, the Kluge to Imogen Stidworthy, Banu Cennetoğlu painting by the Los Angeles artist (and, as the Dead Are Not Dead. It not being Halloween yet, to Hiwa K to Francisco de Goya (who?). press materials are keen to point out, revered ‘It was always my intention to take facts that really could be a positive statement, and teacher) is enough to keep you going for a while. indeed the latest edition of this triennial in and kind of contaminate the shit out of them,’ Pittman is an effervescent maximalist, packing 6 the salubrious Norwegian city is intended as a Kaari Upson told Flaunt his canvases with cannily interlocking phantasKunstverein cumulative prod for us to reassess our relationmagazine earlier this year, magorias of imagery and ornament, and surfing Hannover ship with the no-longer-living and consider in the runup to her inacross categories: his work has an effervescence 7 September how, or in what form, they stay with us. Beyond clusion in the Venice to it, reflecting its roots in a time when la artists – 17 November that, it’s heftily philosophical in a way that Biennale. The American were reclaiming decoration, but also – having Kunsthalle Basel can’t easily be summarised here (Jacques Derrida artist’s European incurreflected on the aids crisis and racial violence 30 August – 10 November sion continues with a pair and Judith Butler come into it), and the lengthy – a heaviness that is placed in conversation with
4 Lari Pittman, How Sweet the Day After This and That, Deep Sleep Is Truly Welcomed, 1988, mixed media on wood, 244 × 488 × 5 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles
6 Kaari Upson, Silicone Leftover (5 gal), 2015, urethane, acrylic pigment, spraypaint, aluminium, 65 × 24 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist; Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London & Hong Kong; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles
5 Elin Már Øyen Vister, the history of the circle speaks, performance as part of The Parliament of Bodies: Parliament of Bitches, June 2019, Bergen. Photo: Nayara Leite. Courtesy Bergen Assembly
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7 Gabriel Kuri, Untitled (scratch lotto oysters), 2019, mixed media, 150 × 100 × 6 cm. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin 8 Clare Woods, Own Life, 2019, oil on aluminium 150 × 150 × 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London, New York & Hong Kong
of institutional shows, and furthers her multimedia transubstantiations of memory. It seems not insignificant that the San Bernardino neighbourhood in which she grew up was later devastated by wildfire. Her best-known work, the multitiered (drawing, sculpture, video, performance) The Larry Project (2004–11), used and reimagined elements of the life and effects of a man who lived on her street, and her new works are based on elements of her parents’ home and other houses and trees on the road, often involving latex casts as the basis for moulds and estranged further through technical processes, including shimmering veils of colour. At the same time, though, Upson expands this beyond a mere inability to return to or fully understand the past: her work, the Kunstverein Hannover asserts, ‘directs a dissecting artistic look at herself as a representative of a white social class and its abysses’.
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Wiels, Brussels 6 September – 5 January
‘Doublethink’ is, of course, George Orwell’s Gabriel Kuri, who term for ‘the power of holding two contradictory has lived in Brussels for 16 years, is finally getting his first hometown institutional exhibition. beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and believing both of them’. If this At Wiels, sorted, resorted will play to the Mexican Simon Lee, hasn’t been used as a framing artist’s strength: gathering a heterogeneous glut London device for painting before, of materials from here and there and arranging 6 September it’s surprising; in any case, them according to his own organising principles. – 6 October Clare Woods has alighted Here, his categories are paper, plastic, metal and 8 construction materials. Kuri’s process across these on it as the title for her debut solo exhibition 60 works serves, to some extent, as a reflection at Simon Lee. It’s a strong fit. Woods, who started out as a sculptor, has since the mid-1990s on the fluidity of value: in the past, through formalised display, he’s transmuted everything practised a particularly materialist mode of from oysters to lottery scratch-cards to drinks painting: beginning by focusing on landscape cans, skips to rocks to receipts. But he’s also in and shifting her attention to the human body, she’s continually made works where image conversation with Surrealism, and a good deal and paint are in counterbalance. For everything of his work – which encompasses sculpture, you look at, you’re equally aware of the stuff collage, installation and photos – operates through unlikely juxtapositions and symmetries, from which it’s composed; for every figurative making ordinary objects hum with newfound reference, half the painting seems to be dissolvstrangeness, grace and fundamental visibility. ing into abstraction, the colours somehow both
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sumptuous and queasy; and everything she whether functionality is a determining factor in paints – figures, flowers, mirrors – is treated with those categories, looks savvy, history-aware and the same quizzical distance, filtered through very good. It tracks back to modernist figures process. The result is probably less doublethink such as Eileen Gray and Robert Mallet-Stevens than sextuplethink, and darkly pleasurable. and early combinations of art and architecture in search of the ‘total artwork’, and explores Maths nerds! What’s a forgetful functor? That’s right (I open Wikipedia), ‘in the area of how this ideal has influenced successive waves category theory, a forgetful functor “forgets” of artists. The artists here engage with design, the designers skew towards a nonreproducior drops some or all of the input’s structure or properties “before” mapping to the output’. bility that has artlike overtones, the architects Or it’s a thing that moves something from prioritise a tailored use of materials for individual needs. Expect figures and groups includone category to another. But that’s not all: ing Nina Beier, Marcel Broodthaers, Diego it’s also a notion that’s now been borrowed Giacometti, Martinez Barat Lafore Architectes, by an artist-curator, Benoît Le Plateau, Van Wassenhove Atelier and the legendary Maire, to add intellectual Paris ‘ceramics from a private collection’. gravitas to a show about, 19 September Enough maths; looping back to where indeed, category switching. – 8 December 9 ok, that’s snide. Foncteur we began, German class is in session. d’oubli, which specifically looks at the relation- 10 Kreislaufprobleme, Croy Nielsen, ship between art, design and architecture and literally meaning Vienna 13 September – 12 October
circulation problems, constitute a perennial, almost in-joke excuse when German workers don’t want to go to work. As guest curator at Croy Nielsen, though, Anna Gritz is using the phrase with serious intent: inspired additionally by a slippage of language in a short story by Rita Valencia – where a woman says ‘bag’ instead of ‘back’, seeing her body as a container of pains – and by Ursula K. Le Guin’s identification of the bag as the first cultural device, she’s assembled a show in which meaning circulates problematically, uneasily, between bodies and bags. Expect her six artists (Leda Bourgogne, Liz Craft, Stuart Middleton, Liz Magor, Ser Serpas, Angharad Williams) to variously adumbrate socioeconomic pressures on the body, explore mistranslation, transmute found objects. Of the various shows in Vienna’s annual ‘curated_by’ season, this one looks like our bag.
9 Cooper Jacoby, Bait (Red Admiral), 2017, mixed media, 56 × 36 × 36 cm. Courtesy the artist; Freedman Fitzpatrick, Paris & Los Angeles; and Mathew Gallery, New York
10 Ser Serpas, stones throw, 2017, mixed media in plastic bag, 14 × 38 × 27 cm. Photo: Annik Wetter. Courtesy Croy Nielsen, Vienna; and Truth and Consequences, Geneva
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Celebrating London’s architecture, Barbican Centre. Photograph: Dan Tobin Smith.
Frieze London & Frieze Masters 3–6 October 2019 Tickets at frieze.com
Art Featured
I value more the kind word 49
The age of the monologue by Chris Fite-Wassilak
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In a world in which personal perspectives are presented as universal facts, and any pretentions to ‘authority’ seem speculative, the voiceover has become a ubiquitous component of contemporary video art. Is that a critique or a consequence of these rabble-rousing times?
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preceding pages Tai Shani, Semiramis, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Jules Lister. Courtesy the artist and The Tetley, Leeds
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above Helen Cammock, Shouting in Whispers (detail), 2017, hand-pulled screenprints, 100 Ă— 70 cm. Courtesy Void Gallery, Derry
ArtReview
“Imagine an impossible room,” the voice tells you. “A room that’s everyone is angling to speak over, on top of or past each other. But impossible to inhabit, and thus to observe. Can you see it? No door, not to each other. Everyone is talking, then. But is anyone actually no windows, no ins and outs, and no fourth wall – absolutely no listening? fourth wall.” The clipped male voice, narrating James N. Kienitz The voiceover is a classical voice of authority: like a public speech Wilkins’s short film This Action Lies (2018), speaks over a black-and- it provides the easiest and most economic means to deliver, and white image of a Styrofoam cup full of steaming coffee. It’s the only control, a story. Just think of the straight-up documentary narraimage provided during the half-hour, pun-laced rant on appearance tion of William Raban’s Thames Film (1986), or the more literary and reality. It describes itself as an “apology” for the “production and narrator of Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ trilogy (1994–2010), calmly consumption of movies”, but instead ends up describing the history relating his titular character’s esoteric mapping of the uk. But several of Dunkin’ Donuts advertising slogans, the interruptions of new artists, including Kienitz Wilkins, Cammock, Prodger and Shani, are parenthood and the thought experiment above, concluding, “It’s not currently grappling with it as the primary means by which to underreally about observation, you see, aside perhaps from observing the mine that authority, and as a vehicle through which to ask if there’s limits of your own mind”. Like many of the American artist’s films, any way to escape the echo chamber of the monologue. Throughout This Action Lies is defined by its narrator, a dominant voiceover that their work, the voice is used to pointedly diverge from the images manoeuvres smartly on top of relatively static imagery, mocking presented to us, creating a tension that meanders, manipulates and the tropes of mainstream cinema (drama, tension and that gravelly, mutates what it is that we think we’re experiencing. male movie-trailer voice), all the while making ironic use of them. At one point in Shani’s epic Dark Continent: Semiramis project His description of the imaginary room also neatly depicts our own (2018), we encounter another imaginary room: “The chamber has relationship as the audience to much of current artists’ video output: no windows. There is only a small door to enter through. Inside, the looking in through the imaginary window of the screen, our vision ceiling and walls are horror vacui,” painted in “an arcane flesh-tone palette of peach, flush, rose”, all looking over a torn dress splattered guided by a narrator. The current predominance of voiceover in artists’ video has with blood. Such carnal, Gothic imagery runs across the 12 episodes been several years coming. We can trace its lineage back through of Shani’s project. But most definitively of Semiramis is that all 12 the singular narrators of oral storytelling traditions and the novel, parts – each dedicated to a single character, among them a vampire, a cube of flesh and a mirror – are and the supposedly matter-of-fact narrated over the accumulative voiceover of documentary film. But In the age of monologue, everyone five hours by a single female voice. the proliferation of video art since is angling to speak over, on top or past Originally a series of performances the 1960s wasn’t accompanied by a each other, just not to each other at the 2018 Glasgow International deluge of voiceover. It’s a more refestival, recorded and since exhibcent phenomenon that has come with a dawning awareness of infinite perspectives and relative ited as videos, the whole thing is staged on a surreal tableau of floating truths, which found its popularity in art at some point after Kevin columns and giant hands: the fictional city of Semiramis, built and Spacey’s voiceover from the grave in American Beauty (1999) and the inhabited by females. Although actors physically embody the various bbc-newscaster-turned-conspiracy-theorist tone of Adam Curtis’s characters, they remain silent and mostly still, the voiceover providing The Century of the Self (2002). the main animating impulse, in the form of soliloquies submerged in It’s no longer one aspect used to highlight the particularities of the perspective of each character in turn, describing pulsing desires experiencing the moving image, like the offscreen director of John and psychosexual transformations, revelling in sensory contradicSmith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (1976); it’s now the default. At the time of tions. Despite all these points of view, touching on references ranging writing, a quick survey finds art by Jamie Crewe, Alex Da Corte, Wong from Christine de Pizan’s medieval feminist text The Book of the City of Ping and Zoe Williams on display in London using the method, while Ladies (1405) to Beyoncé lyrics, the uniform narration has a flattening recent works by Ed Atkins, Lawrence Lek, Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth effect: warm, but still aloof and steady, with the measured formality Price, Fiona Tan, Bedwyr Williams and Rehana Zaman readily come of Greek theatre. This is, perhaps, part of the point: the narrator of to mind, as well as last year’s Turner Prize winner, Charlotte Prodger, Semiramis is an unapologetic corrective, a direct takeover of the classic and 50 percent (Helen Cammock and Tai Shani) of this year’s Turner narrator role; speaking over all the supposedly objective male narranominees. Danish-Iraqi artist Masar Sohail won the 2018 Dorothea tors of the past. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), philosopher and gender Von Stetten Award with his short film Republic of tm (2016), in which a theorist Judith Butler described a ‘strange scene of love’. Attempting young man imagines setting up his own utopian state in a forest – all to parse the psychological workings of French Marxist theorist Louis told with a ridiculous accent impersonating Scarface’s Tony Montana. Althusser’s concept of interpellation, she found concealed a masoThe voiceover is, in skilled hands, of course used for a reason, as a chistic desire for being directed, scolded and lectured by the authorimeans to reflect on authority, presence and subjectivity; but its popu- ties, so that a person’s existence be given the most basic sign of recognilarity is also symptomatic of a wider cultural moment. The rise runs tion. Althusser had proposed interpellation only summarily in a 1970 parallel to that of clickbait op-eds and online rants, of blatantly biased essay, as the mechanism through which individuals were folded into newscasters and populist rallies that all coalesce to create a fractured, ideological systems: being hailed, called to, and, in turning to acknowlkaleidoscopic sense of noninteraction. In the age of monologue, edge the call, becoming enmeshed in a hierarchical relationship. In his
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above James N. Kienitz Wilkins, This Action Lies (still), 2018, video, 32 min. Courtesy the artist
preceding pages Tai Shani, Semiramis, 2018, installation and performance at Glasgow International 2018. Courtesy Tramway, Glasgow
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ArtReview
limited writings on the subject, interpellation is presented as a sort of as The Long Note (2018), draw directly on documentary film methods, straitjacket we put on ourselves: an inescapable self-entrapment. Or, in incorporating talking-head interviews alongside extended sequences the tongue-tying way Althusser described it, ‘a subject by the Subject where Cammock speaks over footage, at times as herself, occasionally and subjected to the Subject’. The voiceover is a form of interpellation: as others. The Long Note focuses on making known the key role women by listening to it we are imbricated into a temporary contract with the played in the Northern Irish civil-rights movement. In the penultispeaker, submitting ourselves to its world – but through that, if we mate scene of the video, she speaks both to and for one of the women apply Butler’s theory, potentially finding some way of having our own involved: “And you were young, and you wanted to be inspired, and contours recognised. Butler questioned where the person being hailed you were angry, and you were starting to realise you wouldn’t make sits in all this: ‘Who is speaking? Why should I turn around? Why this right if you didn’t find yourself a part of what was happening”. should I accept the terms by which I am hailed?’ Althusser had died in Cammock’s voiceovers present a fractured self that jumps between 1990, disgraced after murdering his wife in a bout of severe depression; various ‘I’s and ‘you’s, embodying and making heard a range of voices. but it seems within the idea of interpellation Butler found embedded The ‘you’ also becomes the audience, putting us on an equal level as questions of choice, responsibility and civics, how we might converse whatever ‘I’s and ‘they’s that make up the stories we’re told; it becomes or cooperate through or despite the ideological codes we negotiate and our own responsibility to find ourselves a part of what is happening. are imprisoned by within every social encounter. The sheer mouldVoiceovers attempt to create a consensus of a reality between the able potential of our existence, she concluded, exceeds being entirely speaker and the listener, however fleeting or fabulist. Consider the doubling, punning unreliable narrator of Laure Prouvost’s films, trapped in such a bind – but the bind remains all the same. Such contradictions run along the open seams of the recent speaking about her fictional grandfather in Wantee (2013), or Lindsay video installations of Charlotte Prodger. As the narrator states in Seers’s search for her missing sister in It has to be this way (2009). Stoneymollan Trail (2015), “we always, we always, we always have a Throughout Kienitz Wilkins’s work, there is an obsession with the story”. It’s just in how we tell them, the means and tone through which ‘real’, and an insistence on trust, imploring that we believe what the these stories are shared, that open up the fact within the fiction: that antsy narrator is telling us. “I’m trying to tell the truth, nothing but authority is a negotiation. In her work SaF05 (2019) at this year’s Venice the truth this time,” he states in his short video that also mimics a selfBiennale, a film crew and guides ostensibly attempt to track a female conscious film pitch, Indefinite Pitch (2016). Each generation of movinglion that has been displaying male image makers adjust their version tendencies. Like most of Prodger’s of realism according to what will The means and tone with which stories videos, though, the footage consists impact on the audience, from cinéma are shared open up the fact within the primarily of travelling – hiking, vérité to Dogme 95, and there’s a fiction: that authority is a negotiation driving, the view from a train or aircertain relative realism in the popuplane – while the voiceovers act like larity of voiceover as reflective of our a wayward attempt at affixing thought to these passing places. Lists current culture, where the monologue traps us in a closed-off, impenof technical details are contrasted with confessional disclosures, as if etrable room. Though as Cammock, Kienitz Wilkins, Prodger and reading from a notebook that has a filmmaker’s shot list on one page Shani suggest, the conscious emphasis on voiceover isn’t just a postand intimate diary on the other. A snow-covered hill rolls by in front modern tool, nudging at the fourth wall, but both a means and an end of us, as the narrator recalls showing a friend pictures of a sculpture for particular articulations and negotiations of how we understand on her phone at a party, accidentally scrolling too far to an image of gender, race and our own agency in social contracts; how we hear and her lover, “on our bed with a clear glass butt-plug inside her”. The listen is just as important. Academic Jacques Bidet, writing on Butler’s disclosure to us parallels the shocked moment, an unexpected erup- take on interpellation, describes it as ‘amphibolous’ – capable of two tion of privacy into the open. But between Prodger’s disjointed dicta- meanings – that the call isn’t just a one-way directive, but multivalent; tions and wanderings is a trusting entreaty: that we assemble our it can also be misheard, misinterpreted and misused. Which perhaps own version of the character that the various parts of the video might makes it like any other speech act; but this isn’t just about learning to represent, and perhaps recognise that we, as entities sharing time and put up with people droning on and on. These artists’ uses of voiceover space, are only similarly assembled from such incidentals. don’t offer a solution or an escape from the age of monologue, but are In the work of Helen Cammock, this issue multiplies, spreading a conscious sounding-out of its limits and strata, using the monologue along historical fault lines. Her videos, prints and installations to ask us what, if anything, is the appropriate response. ar demonstrate a preoccupation with how to give voice to those who have been overlooked or forgotten; and to multiple, contradictory Work by Tai Shani and Helen Cammock is featured in the Turner perspectives. There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I (2016) is narrated entirely Prize at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 28 September – 12 January; by the artist, the script culled from interviews with activists and Charlotte Prodger’s work can be seen at the Venice Biennale, through workers, and from readings by black writers such as James Baldwin 24 November, and in Palimpsest, Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland, and Jamaica Kincaid. Stories of the Nicholas Brothers, whose dance through 13 October; James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s solo show is at Spike moves made people like Fred Astaire famous, or of the sixteenthIsland, Bristol, through 8 September century heiress Beatrice Cenci, who murdered her abusive father, are given space to resurface in the present. More recent works, such Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer and art critic based in London
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Rayyane Tabet A history of things by Mark Rappolt
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The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio once described the writer Alien Object, will go on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Georges Perec as someone who ‘looks to the side in order to reject the New York this October), but rather a more general material culture fixed view, the voyeur’s squint, and to drift from object to subject, constituted of artefacts that tend to slip by us in the white noise of from things to the general rumble of an epoch’. The same might be the everyday: rowboats, fonts, postcards, pulp fiction, radio reports of said of Beirut-based artist Rayyane Tabet. Taking formal inspiration football matches, corporate logos, bars and brewery products have all from overlooked and often banal objects, wrapping them in personal been subjects of his art. anecdotes and supernational histories, he makes the kind of artworks A 2018 exhibition at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin was titled that you don’t so much look at as drift through before coming out the Hidden in Plain Sight. One of the works on show was Road Trip (2018), a other end at someplace unexpected and distinctly other than where collection (assembled over several years) of almost a thousand tourist you started. postcards arranged in a friezelike structure across the gallery walls so Like history itself, many of the objects he presents or evokes exist as to describe a journey from Baalbek in Lebanon to Piazza Carignano in a state that oscillates between relevance and redundancy, and in Turin (where one of Noero’s two galleries is located) via all 20 reveal both subjective and objective truths. Take Steel Rings (2013–), for regions of Italy. It also follows the story of the Veltro font, designed example: it’s a sequence of 39 10cm-wide rolled-steel rings arranged in 1931 for Turin’s Nebiolo foundry. The font became affectionately in a line. At first glance, it’s a precise and elegant formal experiment known as ‘Mussolini’ because of the formal resemblance of its capital but not a particularly novel one: the kind of exercise in seriality we M to that which began Il Duce’s signature. Despite the association might recognise from art-historical guides to Conceptualism and and Mussolini’s downfall, during the postwar era and well into the Minimalism. Look closer and each of the rings is engraved with a 1960s Veltro was the primary font used on tourist postcards across the distance and location in longitude and latitude, marking a specific nation (and incidentally, the primary font used on cards published by place along the now defunct Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Steel Rings is Azione Cattolica, which has its own somewhat problematic relation often presented alongside Tabet’s wider research into the structure, to the Italian dictator) and each of the postcards on show in Road Trip. making that connection obvious without recourse to Googling, maps “It was very strange for me to think that the leading font for Italian or geolocation devices). Built in 1947, by an alliance of us oil compa- postwar postcards is literally the handwriting of Mussolini,” Tabet nies, the Tapline, as it is known, spanned 1,214km, pumping oil from recalls, “but that’s when I feel that things are able to slip out of their eastern Saudi Arabia to Lebanon via Syria and Jordan, the last leg a original context and somehow survive. My proposition is that they detour from what was originally a end up writing their own history. They straighter line, forced upon its builders “I never intend the narratives or anec- are the product of a particular time and by the partition of Palestine and estabcontext and intention, but they overdotes as explanations of the works, lishment of the state of Israel (the line come that by appearing innocent: it’s and the works are not illustrations of was originally planned to terminate in just a font, it’s able to survive its history Haifa): proof, if it was needed, that the and to keep circulating, so much so that these texts. Maybe there’s a slippage map is never the territory. That seemits history gets completely evacuated that happens in between the two” ingly innocent formal experiment from its form.” Although, by the time starts to morph into a description of global politics and economics, Tabet has handled those things, their history is returned. Despite the the circulation of resources and international trade. Tapline survived fact that he deliberately presents the narratives that frame his work the Six-Day War (1967) and Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights separately from the objects themselves, neither descriptions nor (through which a section of the pipeline runs), but not the first Gulf captions, they seem to travel with you around one of Tabet’s shows, War (1990–91), at the onset of which it was abandoned as a result of to the extent that you’re never quite sure whether you are reading an Saudi Arabia’s opposition to Jordan’s support of Iraq (the section object through a story or a story through an object, whether the narrabeyond Jordan had closed in 1976 for reasons more closely connected tive animates the form or the form animates a concept. Although, in to economic viability). Now it snakes uselessly through empty deserts the present era of weaponised information, you are certain that someand by the sides of more useful roads, rendered redundant by shifts in thing or someone is being manipulated along the way. the very geopolitics that had shaped and enabled its construction in “I’m interested in that tension,” Tabet says with a seeming innothe first place. Tapline stands today as what Virilio would have recog- cence. “I never intend the narratives or anecdotes as explanations of nised as a ‘symptom’ of history, of the time and circumstances that led the works, and the works are not illustrations of these texts. Maybe to its creation. The identification of symptoms, of course, can be the there’s a slippage that happens in between the two. The texts are either very factual or very personal. On the other hand, the object is result of both subjective and objective points of view. “I’m interested in the question of whether we could create a the opposite.” In this case the object is just a font, although without history told by objects and materials,” the artist says, riffing off the direction it might just be a collection of old postcards from a time theme of an objective truth. “A lot of the time those last longer than before phone cameras and instant messaging that you might find people and are able to overcome moments of violence and margin- today in any Italian bric-a-brac shop. alisation in a way that people cannot.” When he talks about objects Tabet grew up in Lebanon, studied architecture at The Cooper and materials, he doesn’t necessarily mean the kind of objects and Union in New York and then sculpture at the University of California, materials that are designated as special and are San Diego (where he worked closely with the preceding and facing pages Steel Rings, 2013–, collected by museums (although these form the British sculptor Anya Gallaccio). The process 39 of 1,213 rolled steel rings engraved basis of more recent works, such as the ongoing of research into the history and properties of with location details along the Trans-Arabian Fragments, 2016–, the latest iteration of which, a site (the notion that a building comes from Pipeline, 78cm diameter, 10cm width (each)
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something more than the imagination of an architect combined is so overwhelming that you’re left wondering whether his restoration with the constraints of a brief) in New York has stayed with him, as of such contexts is designed to reveal a symptom or to present a cure. has the sensitivity to the wider properties of materials that he devel“History is obsessed with periodisation,” Tabet explains. “At the oped in San Diego. end of a historical period everything ends. But if you look at it through “My interest in architecture started as a child,” Tabet remembers. the lens of objects or the history of architecture or design, these things “I came of age during the early 1990s, when Beirut was being recon- keep on going. We are still living in buildings that were built long structed. In formal terms it was a very interesting time. The city had before the period in which we live. We adapt and modernise them, but been gutted and I hadn’t experienced it before the war” – which ended the logic of the space is still dictated by the time period in which it was in 1990 – “so I could only experience it as form without function. designed and built. How do we finetune our perception to be aware of those moments? At a certain point you Different types of buildings from different realise it’s all around you. I always joke eras all stood next to each other as partial “I always start with what is that whenever I’m invited to do a show ruins and all of them read as contempoaround me at this moment. I know I always start with what is around me at rary to each other. For me these forms this moment. I know there’s something were playful encounters that were part of there’s something around this around this place that will help me tell a the same field. But as the city started being place that will help me tell a story” story.” He is, of course, looking with a sidecatalogued and restored, gradually there was a clear path around the Roman baths, ways view. the modernist buildings had been renovated and they fell into cateYou might well ask, at this point, whether or not, if Tabet’s sculpgorisations that made them no longer part of the same field. To me tures are so dependent on the narratives or anecdotes within which that was kind of a shame, because in a very perverse way the war had they are wrapped, there is any real purpose to the creation of objects in put them in a dialogue that had not been possible before and would and of themselves. In reality aren’t they just a series of empty forms? no longer be possible now. Previously they had displayed a form that Another example of contemporary art’s overwhelming tendency to make something out of nothing without substantially adding to the could overcome their own history.” There’s no doubt that one of the most intriguing elements of ‘nothing’ at all? That, Tabet says, is where ‘you’ come in. Tabet’s displays is the way in which they seem to assert and deny the “With sculpture and installation,” he explains, “you’re in the historic context of objects at one and the same time. At times this sense presence of an object, and that puts you in the present, it’s able to
facing page The Sea Hates a Coward, 2015, wooden oars, rope, pulley, 441 × 21 × 21 cm. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion
above A Short History of Lebanon (detail), 2018, cedar wood, six modified books, 134 × 420 × 30 cm. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion
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transcend the personal to transfer to you. Even though a lot of those already, even if only subconsciously, knows how the game works). stories and those objects [in my work] can be broken down to very “1987, 2012, 2019” – when the work will be shown as part of a survey particular narratives that stem from the personal or a precise experi- exhibition at London’s Parasol Unit – “that’s my timeline,” he ence, the medium of sculpture and the installation form, by spatial- continues. The timeline of the object, which involves trees being ising those encounters, allows you, who probably has not gone felled, types of wood being carved, leisure, labour and general movethrough any of those experiences or moments, to be within them.” ment around and across seas, “is very different. The stories are located The Sea Hates a Coward (2015) is perhaps one of Tabet’s most in time very clearly, but the objects are timeless.” personal works. It’s a pair of giant oars (almost 4.5m long), towering Friday, September 1, 2006 (2006–19) is a foundational work in this above you and suspended from the gallery ceiling. Their scale aside, regard. It’s the front page of that day’s edition of The New York Times. the objects seem banal: ‘innocent’, as Above a caption reading ‘A River of Rubble “This encounter with these obTabet would put it. Then you find out that From the War in Lebanon’, it features a the oars belonged to a boat that Tabet’s jects puts you in that world. Even photograph of a column of rubble-filled trucks heading towards the sea following father had hired in 1987 as part of a failed though those stories don’t relate the ceasefire in the Lebanon War of that attempt to flee with his young family from Lebanon to Cyprus at the height of to you, the experience has already year. The story connected with the image is the Lebanese Civil War. In 2012 the family elsewhere (page A8), presumably because made you connect with it” discovered the abandoned boat, complete it is not that important. “That photo is not with its original oars and anchor on the beach at Jbeil. The tale seems the classic from the region,” Tabet explains, “there are no people, it’s almost too tall to be true, and the presence of the oars in a gallery objective – just trucks full of rubble dumping their contents into the a consequence of history, chance and none of the above. “We get to sea. The encounter with that image refocused my attention to think where the oars come from, but this encounter with these objects that maybe what I thought of previously as a nostalgic attitude to hanging in the room that are so much bigger than you already puts history is in fact an ever-present condition.” ar you in that world. Even though those stories don’t relate to you, the experience has already made you connect with it,” the artist Rayyane Tabet: Encounters is on show at Parasol Unit, London, says, rather like a magician explaining his trick (although anyone 29 September – 14 December; Alien Property is on show at the who has been to more than a few contemporary art exhibitions Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 30 October – 18 January
above La Mano de Dios, 2016, adapted radio transmitter, sound, 3 mins 46 sec (loop)
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facing page Friday, September 1, 2006, 2006–19, issue of The New York Times, 69 × 56 cm
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all images Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg
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Phot o by: Rob Connor, Michael Pollard
D esign by: Hide nori Yoshioka
Population in Manchester increased after the Industrial Revolution, but the city was not well sanitized and many people died. Walker’s Croft was determined to be a burial ground in 1815, as it was located in the suburbs, near the church, and near the workhouse.
This tunnel is located under neath Victoria Station, where about 40,000 people were buried during the 19th century. Many victims of cholera were buried here.
Court esy of Manchest er Libraries, Information and Archives
Walker's Croft's graveyard is essentially a mass grave. In each hole there was a layer of dead bodies. It must be noted that not all bodies buried here died from Cholera.
Welcome. This is Walker's Croft, and Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom are brewing beer here.
This location is very important for this original beer ‘A Drop of Pandemic’.
The usual mass grave was 50 to 60 burials in one hole, but in the case of the cholera outbreak In 1833, it was decided to use soil made available from the excavations of new sewers to cover the existing graves, thus creating a new layer of available burial space and allowing 100 burials in one hole. Friedrich Engels called the cemetery ‘the pauper burial ground’.
In this sense, this place, Walkers Croft, is a graveyard for poor people who were the victims of the social system based on factories, capitalism, labour and cities.
Manchest er Eve ning News
By the mid 1840s, some factories were built around Walker's Croft, which required the development of trains as a means of transportation. Victoria Station had its opening ceremony only 12 years after the cholera epidemic.
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Shuttleworth and Edwin Chadwick were made public, that the gover ning authorities took notice of the need for sanitary improvements. Both men had made a connection between high death rates, poverty and a lack of adequate sanitation. The average life expectancy of a labourer was 22.
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With the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism, cities were rapidly growing and the notion of hygiene was virtually non-existent. The victims of this bad hygiene were poor people.
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According to a 2013 article, many dead bodies were found during the development of the city's tram network.
Court esy of Manchest er Libraries, Information and Archives
There were no sanitation measures in the city and air pollution was serious. Manchester had the worst living environment in the UK, and it was nicknamed "odor town." They also did not have a suitable system for disposing of human waste with several houses sharing a single toilet. It was not until the reports of concer ned social investigators, such as Dr James Kay-
Many doctors and scholars said the city needed a sanitation system, but the Manchester gover nment ignored it for a long time.
In Japan, cholera was brought from overseas in 1822, and a major outbreak occurred in the mid 1800s as the country’s capitalism developed. In Japan it was treated as a mysterious disease from a foreign country. This deadly disease was characterized with the face of a tiger and the body was drawn as a monster with the testicles of a raccoon.
In this sense, the cholera pandemic could be a synonym for “the pandemic” of labourers and factories. It became a global pandemic as trading spread around the world.
By the start of October 1832, death rates had begun to fall. John Snow, a doctor from London who was working in Soho, had begun to make the connection between contaminated water supplies through sewage and cesspools near drinking wells and cholera. In London, he began to map everyone who contracted cholera within a specific radius and all the cases centred around a water pump. In September 1854, he presented his results to local officials and the pump was removed and the cholera outbreak in that area subsided.
John Snow, 1856. Cr edit: Wellc ome Colle ction. CC BY
Court esy of Manchest er Libraries, Information and Archives
He also noted that those who worked in a brewery and drank beer instead of water did not get cholera – he assumed that they had drank that much beer, they did not need another drink. Beer was regarded as more hygienic than water, because the water used to make it was boiled in a brewing process.
Their debut project was ‘Super Rat’, which is displayed here. Super Rat is a nickname of the rats in Tokyo, coined by Tokyo’s pest control. They have become immune to poison, used to traps, and become even smarter and stronger, and increased explosively in the city.
Small beer was often drunk at breakfast, it was much more palatable than the water, and at only 1-2% alcohol volume was a very socially acceptable drink to choose and which often would be prescribed to people when ill.
The incubation period is only for several hours, and after infection the bacteria grow again and again. Symptoms caused by it are mainly vomiting, diarrhoea, hypothermia, expression is distorted, skin is dry due to extreme dehydration, the hand becomes "washer's wrinkles", face is called "cholera face" It looks like a peculiar old man. It is said that many people died in a few hours to a few days after contracting it.
Rats can be carriers of disease, which makes them a symbol of unhygienic wild animals living in big cities.
A twenty-three year old Viennese women, depicted after contracting cholera in the first European epidemic in 1831. According to the original caption, this image shows her only an hour after contracting the disease, she died four hours later. Because bodies tur ned blue, cholera was called ‘blue fear’ and frightened people. I mentioned ‘pandemic’, but the rapid growth of cholera bacteria could be likened to the disease pandemic
Chim↑Pom is an artist collective who started their activities hanging out on the streets of Shibuya, the cultural hub of Tokyo.
They didn’t go to art school, except for female member Ellie, and learned their skills by working various temp jobs including construction work. Because of this background and relationship with streets, they have always had a deep interest in urban development and infrastructure, focusing on the filthier, darker, and underground side of society that people hide away from - like trash and pests (and death).
However, Chim↑Pom sees these Super Rats as resilient, ever-evolving creatures, and considers this work as a kind of self-portrait. The taxidermied rats resemble Pikachu, an iconic character from Japanese manga and anime culture. For A Drunk Pandemic, the ground and underground are connected and displayed together with a model representing sewer infrastructure.
During the epidemic, there were many cholera patients among labourers, poorer and older people, and richer people thought of them as immoral. This led to an idea of cholera as equal to immorality. In order to fight this ‘immoral disease’, the living environments of these ‘immoral people’ needed to be improved. It is said that a hygienic revolution started from this type of thinking.
This is a video work depicting Tokyo sewage under neath a manhole. The title is ‘Asshole of Tokyo’. A manhole which is an entrance to a sewage is indeed an asshole of a city. At the same time, this title references Chim↑Pom’s position within Japanese society.
Given that Chim↑Pom’s practice largely deals with urban issues and the question of morality––what is considered moral, and immoral, and why––we hope it’s more clear why they became interested in the history of this tunnel.
The consumption of beer was a popular pastime for the working classes, with the public house being at the heart of the community.
Four types of beer editions are being brewed- Pale Ale, Ale, Dark Ale and an Unapproved edition. In the brewing process, wort is extracted and mixed with wheat and hot water in the barrel, resulting in steam and the smell of hops emitting from the vessel., and add pop and smell while boiling in this barrel. The hop is from Japan. Cholera is bacteria, and yeast is bacteria too. They have lived with people. Sometimes they bring deaths and sometimes benefits to us. As I said earlier, beer was drunk in order to prevent cholera. We are in a constant the fight between the bacteria of cholera and beer and this is part of what we are exploring here.
This is a public toilet converted into a pub. Apart from selling beer, the pub in the time of cholera also had multiple uses including a place to hold official business such as coroner’s inquests. It was also a place where organisations were formed, such as burial clubs, insurance companies and friendly societies- that had practical and social functions.
Now, you are going to taste A Drop of Pandemic at this public toilet. The first pint is free. A member of Chim↑Pom will serve you. You can urinate at this toilet, too. Your urine will be used for ‘Piss Building’. Pub's name is Pub Pandemic
Because typical symptoms of cholera are severe diarrhoea and dehydration, cholera, beer and toilets have a strong relationship with each other. At the time of the outbreak of cholera, all the sewage flowed from the gutter on the road to the river, causing various infectious diseases.
This is the Drop of Pandemic brewery. You can taste this beer at the end of the tour but the only beer that you can drink is the "Environmental Health Approved Edition", which required us to temporarily cover the place with a tent. What is being created now is the "Environmental Health Unapproved Edition" without a tent, which isn’t legally regarded as consumable. The beer we will give you is very safe.
The beer, bricks and drunk people which secretly multiply here will come out of this burial site to the outer world like zombies.
These are cemented bricks made from the urine of the people who have drunk beer here, and it is a part of the Chim↑Pom project called ‘Piss Building’.
Bricks are neutral materials for buildings, walls and even streets. They are diffused from the factory to every part of the city as one of the foundations of any construction process. Chim↑Pom brings the bricks made here to places around the city where repair and maintenance are needed.
The beat goes on by Daniel Hunt
As Brazil mourns the death of a pioneer of Bossa Nova, ArtReview looks at how, in the face of government oppression, the dialogue between the country’s music and art scenes has kept a spirit of resistance and diversity alive 74
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In 2003, with the election of Lula da Silva, the Brazilian singer American left at that time. This is demonstrated in the concrete poem Gilberto Gil was made Brazil’s minister of culture. The country ‘Beba Coca-Cola’, by Décio Pignatari, in which the most iconic logo of was by then leading a wave of leftist governments that swept Latin us imperialism mutates until it ultimately spells ‘cloaca’, or ‘cesspool’. America, and was advocating for greater regional integration – in In 1968, at the annual Festival Internacional da Canção, a music festival in defiance of the United States. By incentivising cultural production São Paulo, Caetano appeared onstage with John Dandurand, a singer through tax breaks for big companies, spawning an explosion in from San Francisco band The Sound, and rumours, categorically new Brazilian art, movies and music, Gil’s ministry became key to a denied then and now by Dandurand, spread that the American was a progressive nation-building project, and Brazil’s own soft power. Yet cia asset, tasked with informing on his Brazilian friend. Veloso was jeered that night while performing his anticensorship the shadow of authoritarianism descended once more in one of the cruel symmetries that litter the history of the world’s fifth most popu- anthem É Proibido Proibir, with sections of the audience hurling projeclous country. Miguel Reale Jr, son of the politician who oversaw the tiles and turning their backs on the stage, provoking the singer into a Institutional Act 5, a law which heralded the darkest days of censor- tirade that went down in history: “So this is youth who says it wants ship during Brazil’s twentieth-century military dictatorship, would to take power? Do you have the courage to applaud a song this year, draft the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, da Silva’s successor, thus the same kind of song that you didn’t have the courage to applaud ending that project. The election of Jair Bolsonaro to president last the year before? You are the same youth that will always, always kill year, cemented the return to far-right government that Gil had spent tomorrow the old enemy who died yesterday… if you are the same in a lifetime fighting. politics as you are in aesthetics, we’re done for!” The musical movement had been founded upon what was already In his milestone manifesto of 1928, poet Oswald de Andrade laid down a marker for the decolonisation of Brazilian art through the happening in the visual arts. Hélio Oiticica’s exhibition Tropicália, at rejection of European forms, and a call to embrace the innate, the Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna (mam) in April 1967, gave pre-Cabral; ‘the land of Iracema’. The anthropophagic manifesto the movement its name. An installation featuring two improvised was riddled with words and concepts from Tupi-Guarani, the prev- structures, one titled Penetrables pn 2 ‘Purity is a Myth’, and the other alent indigenous language of Brazil’s Atlantic coast (which one is pn 3 ‘Imagetical’ (both 1966–67), shown with Roberta Camila Salgado’s silently tutored on through the maps and road signs in present day ‘poem-objects’, set among sand and vegetation, a pair of tropical birds, Brazil: Ipiranga, Ipanema, Copacabana, Ibirapuera). Yet even this much- banners from Oiticica’s Parangolé series (1964–79) and a small televiquoted text hides a culture war. While de Andrade was using Tupi sion set. It captured the Brazilian innate of de Andrade, the clichés of Brazil and the urban aesthetics of concepts to argue ‘against urban scleHip hop remains the most politicised roses, conservatories, and speculaBrazil’s expanding favelas. tive boredom’, Brazil’s green-shirted Veloso took this and rendered musical movement, with rappers fascists, the Integralists, were approa postmodern expression of the increasingly vocal against the far-right priating the language into their Brazilian innate, an electronic aural slogans, bearing banners and shrieking ‘Anauê!’, Tupi for ‘You are interpretation of de Andrade’s 40-year-old vision. It invaded the my brother!’ This historical curiosity would signify a new phase in theatre scene, with the groundbreaking work of Teatro Oficina, in particular de Andrade’s own O Rei da Vela (1933) and Buarque’s the struggle for Brazil’s soul that would last a century. De Andrade’s anthropophagical philosophy reached music in the musical Roda Viva (1968). Tropicália was where social liberalism, a form of Tropicália, a style that devoured the European and North satirical, critical nationalism and an outward-looking internationAmerican sounds of the time, rendering them through the Brazilian alism would meet; aesthetically novel, politically divisive and ideoinnate, combined with the new domestic genres such as Bossa Nova. logically confusing. Thus they found themselves under fire from the Pioneered by João Gilberto, Bossa Nova had defined a musical moder- nationalist left, the right and the regime itself. Performances of Roda nity far beyond Brazil’s borders. But what Gilberto, who died in July Viva in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo were attacked by gangs allied to aged eighty-eight, had originated, while conceived under democracy, the Costa e Silva government (1967–69), the actors forced to flee their was not merely a sound, a style or genre, but a form of aural resist- dressing rooms in various states of undress. ance that would come into its own during the dictatorship years Writing in 1970, critic Roberto Schwarz notes that ‘at the same transmuted into the output of artists such as Chico Buarque, Nara time as they frequently complained about their confinement and Leão and Caetano Veloso. Yet divisions quickly emerged between their impotence, leftwing intellectuals had been studying, teaching, the figures within the two styles of music. Veloso would accuse the publishing, filming, discussing, etc., and without realizing it had Bossa Nova performed by Buarque, despite the criticism contained contributed towards the creation, within the petit-bourgeoisie, of a within it of the regime (the artist was forced to flee to Italy in 1969), massively anti-capitalist generation’. Over time, anthropophagy had of being culturally conservative. Many Bossa Nova musicians, such proliferated and coalesced into a platform for cultural resistance. as Carlos Lyra, Sérgio Ricardo and Leão, were members of Brazil’s Political messages were hidden by the artists of the era, yet, despite communist party, the nationalist pcb, and heroes of the Marxist all the metaphor, code and double entendre, which had been used to Nationalists in the growing student movement. They regarded circumvent government censorship during the early dictatorship, the regime would began to identify Tropicália Tropicália as having imperial connotations in facing page its American and British influences. as a threat. As the censorship bit, with the introCaetano Veloso performing at the These suspicions dovetailed with a delibduction of Institutional Act 5 in 1968, its reperthird Popular Music Festival, São Paulo, erate, strategic rejection of learning English, cussions on the scene were dramatic. That October 1967. Photo: Brazilian National which was commonplace among the Latin December, as prophesised by Veloso in his song Archives / licensed to public domain
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Alegria Alegria a year earlier, both he and Gil would be imprisoned, after which he exiled himself to London; of their collaborators, designer and musician Rogério Duarte was arrested, tortured and eventually interned in a mental institution, while poet and songwriter Torquato Neto killed himself in 1972. At the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, conservatives complained that the Tropicália and Bossa Nova acts – both Gil and Veloso performed – did not represent Brazil, and that it should instead have featured Sertanejo, an inert but popular form of country music. But despite moral, intellectual and physical damage, the two movements aligned aesthetically and philosophically to establish a hegemony over the intervening decades. Schwarz has posited that while it ‘may be in the nature of culture to contest the use of power, it has no means of taking power itself. What use is ideological hegemony, if it’s not translated into immediate physical force?’ Yet, in 2019, those looking for forms of resistance in Brazil are still able to find it within the music scene. During the spectacular distraction of the Olympics, a group called Teto Preto dropped their debut, Gasolina. Gloriously stark, the song captured the frenetic moment Brazil was experiencing. A videoclip released by the band featured one of its members, performance artist Koutana, dancing, writhing his half-naked body in front of a line of São Paulo’s Military Police in an unstaged intervention at a protest on Avenida Paulista. As the smoke cleared, the lines of a coming cultural battle were already evident. There were physical attacks on exhibitions and police raids on theatre productions around the country. History was repeating itself. Events were cancelled, sponsorships withdrawn, and the ensuing polarisation was being used strategically by the far right; every protest for freedom of expression was further evidence of ‘communist’ intellectual degeneracy. In response, Renata Lucas launched rejuvenesça! (2018) at São Paulo’s Casa do Povo, with a manifesto that criticised the Brazilian art establishment for its inaction, accusing the Bienal de São Paulo of seeking ‘to remain neutral in the face of barbarism, behaving as if nothing was happening around it’.
Teatro Oficina, which was by then hosting evenings of resistance music, revived and updated Roda Viva. Joyously defiant, with an ironic hymn of ‘privatisation, property, salvation!’, it is an urgent satire of neocolonialism and neoliberalism, adapted to comment on the effect of social-media manipulation on Brazil’s politics, and the importation of evangelical religion, as it descends towards a literal flesheating finale. Like the late 1960s from which Roda Viva came, it is a profoundly pessimistic moment for Brazil. For those privileged enough, barely a conversation passes without mention of leaving the country, its wealthy and bourgeoisie taking flight. Hip hop represents the most politicised musical movement in the new conjuncture, with rappers such as Racionais mc’s Mano Brown increasingly vocal against the far-right government. Elsewhere, artists such as Letrux, through their public manifestations against Bolsonaro, suggest a unanimity of dissent across popular music. In the face of a government crusade against ‘progressive culture’ not just reminiscent, but actively inspired by the repression of the late 1960s, collectives such as Batekoo and Helipa lgbt+ are examples of where the sharp end of dayto-day politics meets creativity and community organisation, throwing parties that are both socially inclusive and acts of solidarity. Agora somos todxs negrxs? (Now we are all negrxs?), a 2018 exhibition curated by Daniel Lima, summed up the prevailing feeling among artists operating in Brazil’s current political atmosphere, seeking ‘to deconstruct the triple trauma of colonization (extermination of native populations, slavery and religious persecution) through the micropolitical power of art by dismantling stereotypes in a battle for life against extermination forces. A dispute to rebuild our history and our world our way’. As Brazil’s de facto civil war nears its 520th year, and the country faces its most sombre days since the dictatorship ended, new emerging forms of resistance arrive, often with a spirit born of its innate anthropophagy. ar Daniel Hunt is a writer and producer based in São Paulo
Renata Lucas, Upper Floor, 2018, presented as part of rejuvenesça! at Casa do Povo, São Paulo. Photo: Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy the artist
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top Koutana performing in Teto Preto’s music video for Gasolina (2016), dir Laura Diaz
above Promotional photograph of collective África Plus Size Brazil for Batekoo’s festival, 2016. Photo: Bruna Mantovani
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Dayanita Singh Nothing is static by Fi Churchman
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“I call myself an offset artist,” says Dayanita Singh. Anyone who follows contemporary art closely knows her as one of India’s leading photographers. Yet, as we talk over a video link (she is in New Delhi, the place of her birth and a city she has called home, periods of study in Ahmedabad and New York aside, ever since), she makes the statement with an ease and certainty that I can only imagine comes from decades spent trying to figure out where she fits within the traditional parameters of being a ‘photographer’. And, to be fair to her description, the printed book is her primary exhibition format. Although Singh grew up surrounded by the photographs and family albums made by her mother, Nony Singh, who is also a photographer, her initial studies were in the field of typography, fuelled by an ambition to create new fonts that would better reflect the diversity of languages spoken in India. It was, appropriately, a book, and more specifically an assignment to produce one during her first year at university, that led her to the medium with which she is now identified. She tells me she thought that if she could quickly photograph the famed tabla player Zakir Hussain during a concert in Bombay for this homework, she could then spend the rest of the evening partying in the city. It’s a story she’s well versed in telling: an organiser at the concert told her not to take the photos, then pushed her away. She fell
in front of a hallful of people and was left humiliated. Yet the second part of the story reveals something about Singh, not as a photographer or artist, but as a person: her tenacity and defiance of expectations, both professional and social, that would drive her practice for the next four decades. “I went outside and I waited for Zakir Hussain to finish the concert,” she recalls. “He came out and I put my hands on my hips, and I said, ‘Mr Hussain, I’m a young student today. Someday I’ll be an important photographer, then we will see.’” She was eighteen at the time, and after accompanying Hussain on tour for the next six winters, in 1986 she produced her first photobook, titled after her subject, as her final degree project. The photographs in that book became more than a series of concert shots, instead forming an in-depth study of Hussain – with images of the musician during his practice sessions and concerts set alongside intimate scenes at rest and with his family, captioned with Hussain’s handwritten notes and printed alongside excerpts from interviews between Singh and the tabla player. “I realised if I could just say ‘I’m a photographer’, then I could go wherever I liked. I could travel with whomever I liked. I didn’t have to be answerable to anyone. I just invented the role of photographer
preceding pages Pothi Khana, 2018 (installation view, Carnegie International, Pittsburg, 2018)
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above Montage 1, 2019, black-and-white montage, 78 × 78 cm (framed)
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for myself so that I could be free and not get boxed in by marriage or family or gender or artform or nationality. I hate all of that.” When she decided to study at New York’s International Center of Photography, Singh asked her mother to use the money that had been set aside for her dowry to pay the school fees. Nony, keen that her four daughters be financially independent, granted her eldest daughter Dayanita that wish. This independent streak, encouraged by her affluent and comfortably liberal upbringing, freed her from the social constraints of the time. While she studied the work of, as she calls them, the “American masters of photography” (she means the likes of William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld and Garry Winogrand) she says that none, bar Robert Frank, had a direct influence. Instead, inspiration came, and continues to do so, from music and literature. “I use literature to get out of photography,” she is fond of saying. She mentions Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) – specifically the first in the series – in which the poet writes that a work of art will be good when it arises out of a necessity to create, and finds inspiration in the personal and the everyday. That line of thought translates to the pictorial work of Singh, who additionally chooses to give less importance to the individual
photograph as a work of art, treating it more as a raw material, like ink or paint, that can be applied to an object. “Photography in itself is just not enough,” she says. “We have to do more with it. I knew from the beginning that the book was at the heart of my work. That’s all I wanted to do.” By calling herself an offset artist, Singh sets herself apart from the categories of ‘photographer’ and ‘publisher’, but at the same time situates the output of both those professions within the artworld. Further, as the dominant form of processing large print-runs, offset printing is a cost-effective way of making books that allows Singh to experiment with the way it might be bound – as well as challenge how art, especially that which can be printed to demand, is ultimately valued in the context of that artworld. But when she says the book is at the heart of her work, Singh’s development of the form suggests that it’s more than just the primary output of her practice. It seems essential. As if the book is not just a means of presenting her work, but represents something that, for Singh, is alive and evolving, expanding the medium of photography beyond the frame of the image. We discuss the current position of photography within the artworld and she is quick to criticise how contemporary photography
Montage 2, 2019, black-and-white montage, 79 × 79 cm (framed)
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exhibitions are “fossilised”, stuck in the mode of showing photo- make those forms myself.” Instead of the traditionally printed and graphic prints on a wall. She says when she first began showing silver bound book, she began to make teak boxes. Singh started with Kochi gelatin prints in wall-mounted frames, she felt stifled: “There must Box (2017), a collection of 31 photographs printed on card and kept be other ways of sharing that work. We cannot follow the dictate of a within a box that has a window cut out on the front to display just one museum or a gallery space on how photography has to be seen.” of the prints at a time. When presented at an exhibition, 31 boxes are This frustration at the lack of innovation in the medium, coupled on display, each showing a different photograph resulting in countwith the desire to change how photography is experienced in museum less combinations, but Singh also has in mind the way someone might spaces, has led Singh to eschew that conventional method, and instead choose to show it in their own home; whether they have one box or find ways to fill the negative spaces of a gallery with her book objects, three, that someone becomes the curator of their own miniature exhiboxes and museums. “I love the book, but I also love the museum space, bition of Singh’s works. By transferring agency to the viewer, Singh, and I wanted to find a way between the two – a third space. So I started apart from choosing which images to include in a series, relinquishes to make my book objects,” she says. “I always felt that I wanted the control over how and in what order the viewer interprets them, and in book to be the exhibition. I wanted to slip the book into the frame so this sense reduces the importance of the subjects of her photographs. that people would know that even if ‘We’re constantly changing as “I didn’t have to be answerable to anyone. people, nothing is static, so why they can only see one image, I have shouldn’t the work change with a whole symphony that I created I just invented the role of photographer us?’ Singh said in 2013, referring around that image,” she explains, for myself so that I could be free and to Museum Bhavan during an interreferring to File Room Book Object not get boxed in by marriage or family (2013), an exhibition series that is view with The New York Times. It’s an ideal she applies to all of her works. the product of File Room, a book pubor gender or artform or nationality” lished the same year. It’s the first For her most recent box series, Box book Singh published with a series of different covers, each bound 507 (2019), commissioned by the Geoffrey Bawa Foundation to celewith a different colour cloth and showing a unique image – a format brate the 100th anniversary of the Sri Lankan architect’s birth, Singh that was followed by Museum of Chance Book Object (2015), which was tells me that by making her own alterations to an offset printer (“You published with 88 different photographs that appeared on the front could say I remove two layers from the print”) so that the resulting and back covers in random pairs – a decision that places those books images are rendered more like pencil drawings, she has been able to somewhere between a unique art object and a mass-produced edition. further remove her presence from her photographs. At the opening reception, Singh recalls, “Most people were like: ‘It In 2012 Singh presented her first ‘museum’, also bearing the title File Museum, in which black-and-white photographs of the paper doesn’t even look like Dayanita’s work’. I was really happy. If 20 people archives of government and municipal offices are presented inside the had come and said, ‘This is amazing’, I would be worried because I windows of a large teak structure that can be opened up via hinged would think that I didn’t really make a step forward or a step away panels to reveal smaller structures that make up storage space for yet from what I was already doing.” more photographs (there are 140 in total) from the series inside. It’s a This pursuit of new forms, of making a step forward, has led to homage to archiving, storing and arranging, and one that also reflects her latest work – a collection of photographic montages. Each work on Nony Singh’s practice of photographing and collecting pictures of in the series is built up of architectural photographs that are strucfamily and friends. Dayanita prefers not to show work chronologically turally composed in a manner that reads as an actual building, until you realise that you’re looking at but instead draws from her own “If 20 people had come and said, interiors spliced with exteriors in extensive collection of photographs a way that appears seamless. Cut taken since the 1980s. Since then, her ‘This is amazing’, I would be worried pieces of black-and-white photo‘museums’ have expanded to incorbecause I would think that I didn’t really graphs of columns, windows, porate desks, stools and even a bed make a step forward or a step away facades and sections of rooms are (Museum Bhavan, 2013, and Museum set alongside each other, the gaps of Shedding, 2016), all of which can be from what I was already doing” and spaces between their locations safely enclosed by the main structure. Her most recent installation, Pothi Khana (Archive Room, 2018), made barely visible by the thin lines that divide them. Singh has was shown at the 57th Carnegie International, and consists of modular written before about the inspiration she takes from Japanese writer columns that contain images taken inside an archive of paper wrapped Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (1929), in which he describes into cloth bundles, desks piled high with documents, shelving units the merits of darkness in architecture, as a method of introducing the and filing cabinets, accompanied by wooden stools. Singh intends to unknown or mysterious, as an element that obscures – and that mode show this work at an upcoming solo exhibition in London, but, ever of thinking translates to the way the montages leave you accepting looking for new ways in which people might experience her work, has the strange new spaces that you, as a viewer, are drawn into. decided to reconfigure it. It’s part of what makes it difficult to pinpoint the subjects of her Searching for new ways to present her books – ways that mean photographs, and Singh is adamantly against offering any kind of they can be shown outside of the museum context – Singh launched straightforward narrative. To try to describe any image in depth would Spontaneous Books as an unconventional ‘pubbe to single out or elevate it beyond the others, facing page and the longer you spend with her works, the lisher’: “If the forms don’t exist for it to be File Museum, 2012, one large and three small more you realise that the photographs in each displayed the way I would like to display it, I can structures, 140 archival pigment prints
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book, object, museum or box should be considered as if they were a Singh often uses musical terminology to describe her practice, collection of everyday records, a messy and chaotic mixture of people, and when I mention that the way her work slips between different forms of presentation, finding its own space somewhere between places and experiences, fact and imagination. Circling our conversation back to past influences, she tells me a book and exhibition, or how the photographs hide any concrete that apart from the Swiss-American Robert Frank (who produced narrative, or the way she evades being categorised as an ‘artist’ or the documentary series The Americans in 1958), she didn’t really ‘photographer’ by calling herself an offset artist reminds me of the look to other photographers. Instead she credits her best friend microtones found in various musical traditions – the unnameable of three decades Mona, a eunuch she met who lives in a graveyard ones that slide between each note of a scale – she smiles and says, “That very intense training from Zakir, and about whom she made a book titled Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), which evolved and being around musicians for six years, “My training is really how to be from a photojournalistic assignment allowed me to find my own microtones. an artist, how to live the life of an into a more intimate portrayal of her But I’ve also written about the empty artist. The focus, and rigour, and friend’s difficult life. She says she finds note, the khaali. It’s a gap between two inspiration in the way Mona has chosen notes, but it’s also a note. It has its own disappointment, all of that” to live “outside of the system” – that place. I don’t usually get into it because system which dictates societal ‘norms’. And of course, Hussain, who it’s difficult to explain. The secret really is in withholding, like a great Singh refers to as her mentor and from whom she learned about musician knowing when to stop and how not to reveal the whole sequencing, pace, tone and perseverance. “I think classical music thing. It’s what’s unsaid, and if I could say it, then why bother photobecame the biggest influence and I would say my training is not as a graphing it?” ar photographer. My training is really how to be an artist, how to live the life of an artist. The focus, and rigour, and disappointment, all of Work by Dayanita Singh is on show at Frith Street Gallery, London, 20 September – 9 November. Zakir Hussain Maquette, Singh’s that, I learned from Zakir. He made sure that I stayed with photogfirst photobook, is republished by Steidl on 26 September raphy,” she explains.
above and facing page Museum of Shedding, 2016, 73 framed photographs, teak, museum acrylic. Photo: Stephen White.
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all images Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
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I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1 May – 4 August
this column, from top Atalia ten Brink, Empire of the Senseless (still), 1988, courtesy Atalia ten Brink and lux London; portrait of Kathy Acker, San Francisco, 1991, photo: Kathy Brew; Kathy Acker reading Fairy Tale Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Raw Eat and Kathy goes to Haiti at Western Front Vancouver, 1977, courtesy Western Front Vancouver
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ArtReview
this column, from top Kathy Acker and the Mekons live at Freedom, 1966, digital transfer from hi8 video, courtesy Stuart Curley; Kathy Acker at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1987, Š ica, London; portrait of Kathy Acker, San Francisco, 1991, photo: Kathy Brew
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Kathy Acker was reborn as the artworld’s favourite sexpositive feminist. When about eight years ago I attempted to read every book she ever published as part of research for a phd, Acker was an almost forgotten relic of the worst kind of postmodernism, remembered, if at all, as a cautionary tale of overdosing on Foucault and believing that everything, even cancer medication, is an instrument of ‘power-knowledge’. By the time I finished, I wasn’t sure if the impression of rereading the same texts was a product of my own boredom or the fact that, by the end of her career, Acker was plagiarising herself. But I did feel that a bored confusion was just the kind of response she would want to elicit in anyone seeking to embalm her in literary history. Two books have played a role in her recent critical and – relatively speaking – popular revival: Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker (2017), a biography that barely disguised its distaste for the subject, and Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), which negotiated the narrator’s ambivalence about marrying into the British establishment by appropriating the persona of ‘Kathy Acker’. That these books were about Acker as an individual, rather than Acker’s work, provides a clue to why the artworld seems more obsessed with Acker’s persona than with Acker’s writings.
Why get to grips with some frequently bleak and rebarbative ideas about sex, violence and the pleasure that comes from domination, when you can just as easily signal your sexual dissidence by dropping knowledge about Acker’s scandalous life? Did you know she was a stripper? I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker at the ica is another instance of treating knowledge of Acker’s life as substitute for her work. It is curating as hagiography, dedicated to convincing you of the art-historical significance of Kathy Acker. Downstairs, a wall displays a giant timeline charting the publication of her works, while plywood walls create a labyrinthine maze that runs up onto a second floor, stocked with video screens and vitrines containing her manuscripts for Great Expectations (1982), or her copies of books like Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), complete with Acker’s handwritten notes. This curatorial technique – suggesting that every scrap of writing is a unique trace of Acker’s literary genius – is jarring in the context of a writer who spent a career attacking notions of artistic originality and authorial unity. ‘I knew I wanted to plagiarise,’ Acker once explained, ‘to see if, rather than trying to integrate the “I”, if you could dis-integrate it and find a more
comfortable way of being.’ It comes down, she said, to the fact that ‘I don’t like the idea of originality’. The extracts from her work displayed in huge texts on the gallery walls invite us, in contrast, to ponder the originality of texts like this rip-off of Rimbaud: ‘I’ve been so fucking patient / That I’ve forgotten / Reality: / How bad he treated me.’ If these displays don’t convince us of Acker’s facility with rhyme and metre, they do prove the truth of her admission that: ‘I honestly thought I was writing the most unreadable stuff around’. The exhibition is not totally disloyal to Acker’s ideal of disintegrated authorship. It also aims to show her affinities with other artists and writers, some from her own lifetime, but mostly those working today. Some of these connections make sense, albeit in a very literal way, as in Every Ocean Hughes’s Untitled (David Wojnarowicz project) (2001–07), a series of selfportraits of the artist in a Wojnarowicz mask. Overall, the curators present her work as having its greatest contemporary influence on artists and writers who work with the aesthetics and discourses of queerness: Candice Lin and Patrick Staff’s Hormonal Fog Study (2016–19), a device for distributing hormones in the air; Jamie Crewe’s Pastoral Drama (2018), a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in stop-
I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker, 2019 (installation view). Photo: readsreads.info
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both images I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker, 2019 (installation view). Photo: readsreads.info
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motion animation. Writers like Isabel Waidner and D. Mortimer are certainly innovative figures, and they are committed to working outside both commodity capitalism and the imaginative world of heterosexuality, yet these are two things that Acker showed little interest in challenging. Situating Acker within a lineage of queer artists is odd because she was clear on the kind of art with which she felt her greatest affinity. ‘When I did Don Quixote,’ she said, ‘what I really wanted to do was a Sherrie Levine painting. I’m fascinated by Sherrie’s work.’ But an exhibition considering Acker within the legacy of appropriation would force us to see her in light of Levine’s 2011 admission that ‘we didn’t know the neo-avant-garde of the 80s would be used like it was to provide coverfire for Reaganomics,’ or shadowed by Richard Prince’s sale – then disavowal – of a photograph of Ivanka Trump’s Instagram. The complicity between appropriation and commodification is one legacy of Acker’s practice today, and it is telling that this legacy – disenchanting but historically informative – has been shunned in favour of a vague curatorial haze of liberating queerness.
The framing of Acker as somehow queer is doubly odd in that it occludes what this exhibition reminds us is the source of Acker’s greatest insights as well as her greatest limitation: her single-minded obsession with bourgeois heterosexuality. One wall text shows that from the beginning of her career, in Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973), she was creating a mythology wherein ‘I [began] to live solely according to my desires’. Nowhere are these desires better encapsulated than in one of the dream maps reproduced on another wall: ‘I want to be the mermaid, the seducer of men, but I’m not’. In that dream map, for all of the polymorphous physicality of characters’ bodies, the object of her sexual desire, as it is in all her work, is the ejaculating penis. There is no greater document of the terrifying claustrophobia of this kind of heterosexuality than The Blue Tape (1974), a video of Acker and Alan Sondheim discussing their relationship. “Power in relationships,” Acker says at one point, “is giving sexual pleasure.” Acker wanted to have that power, not to undo the system that makes power the only mechanism through which men and women can desire one another.
Across the exhibition, we see no women as objects of desire – apart from Acker herself, posing naked for Sondheim’s gaze; we see no models of kinship between women and men outside of heterosexuality; just the fantasy of Acker as Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), outside all social bonds and free to make her own desire the law. This is the Acker that even this exhibition cannot repress. As I left, I passed one video screen showing Acker’s vagina while she masturbated, and another where Acker, shaven-headed and pierced, read one of her pirate stories for Channel 4: “Mary Read fell in love with a real man. I make my own laws, I make my own sexuality.” Acker didn’t want men to love her; I’m not sure she even cared if they liked her. She wanted to create her own body, pierced and bald and muscled, and to bend men’s desire to that creation. Acker, quite simply, wanted to fuck men and to write about fucking men, over and over, in the selfish pleasure of repetition. That women like this are still something to be embarrassed about, to be buried under the fog of a desexualised notion of queerness, is a true lesson of her revival, of which this exhibition is the guilty culmination. Kevin Brazil
Excerpt from Blood and Guts in High School, by Kathy Acker, 1978.Courtesy the estate of Kathy Acker
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Kiki Smith Memory Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra 18 June – 30 September High up the steep track from Hydra’s port, standing on the roof of the old slaughterhouse looking back to mainland Greece, is a goat cast in copper. This animal, unlike its fur-andblood brethren who can be occasionally spotted sauntering around the Saronic island, sports a scaly, fishlike tail. The slaughterhouse serves as the diminutive project space of the Deste Foundation, and the goat is a sculpture by Kiki Smith. The goat is joined by a merman, depicted two-dimensionally in cut and engraved copper, who shelters from the sun inside the grey stone building; a mermaid; a few cats; and an owl, all likewise perched in the shadows. They meditate upon a couple of icons: a font, also in copper, containing a pool of water; a lamp hosting a beeswax candle. Each of the merpeople are engraved with constellations. Stained-glass windows add to the contemplative atmosphere, and a series of blue-and-white flags, heralding the dusty path up to this remote (at least for an art institution) location, also boast diagrammatic designs alluding to astrology. A goat with a tail is the sign of Capricorn. The work is not a departure for Smith. Since
the mid-1990s, in a career that has spanned sculpture, etching, painting and weaving, the American artist has mined ideas regarding the symbolism and mythology of animals, touching on alternative belief systems. Astrology, and astronomy, have been recurring interests (mermaids and cats are also a mainstay), science and quasi-spiritualism coexisting. This show proves no exception, yet the location imbues a heightened intensity – I saw it as the sun was setting over the sea. After dusk the real stars came out. It was all very romantic. Before the seventeenth century, or the Age of Reason, there was little distinction between the measuring and mapping of the universe – astronomy – and the use of those observations to calculate the apparent effect of the stars on events on earth, ie astrology. (Many of the early advances in astronomy were financed through the latter, mostly through the patronage of the royal courts.) Man was made of the universe, created by God from dust on the sixth day, so it was logical that the movement of the cosmos and the actions of man were inextricably linked – that one could be understood through the
other. Smith seems to agree. Which is where the rub of this viscerally affecting show lies. Astrological beliefs – to which Smith has confirmed she is sympathetic in interviews – minimise human agency. That’s an age-old observation: Edmund in King Lear (c. 1606) says astrology ‘is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars’. Yet when questions of humanity’s effect on climate change are being put up for spurious debate, and an antiscience, antiexpert rhetoric is being ramped up by populist blowhards, these seemingly harmless beliefs take a more sinister hue. Rather than the universe controlling our lives through the movement of the stars, it is we who are in charge of (terrestrial at least) nature. And we’re not doing a very good job of it. True, if a 97 percent consensus on manmade climate change within the scientific community fails to spur industrial-scale action, an artwork won’t either: yet if art is to be more than foppery, artists have a responsibility to play their part in resisting a new age of unreason. Oliver Basciano
Kiki Smith: Memory, Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra. © the artist. Photo: Eftychia Vlachou
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Tuomas A. Laitinen Habitat Cascade Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art (wam), Turku 14 June – 25 August The term ‘habitat cascade’ describes a phenomenon whereby one species unwittingly creates a living environment for another, which then provides the home for a further lifeform, and so on. Tuomas A. Laitinen’s exhibition of the same name is centred upon five twisted cylindrical glassworks designed to house octopuses: collectively titled Proposal for an Octopus (2019), these are displayed on two low black Perspex plinths in a room illuminated by a violet neon light. Standing no higher than 35cm each, the twisted tubular forms suggest largescale transparent arteries protruding from bulbous bodily organs. This inference is partly enhanced by Laitinen’s accompanying soundscape, Cryptospores ( for Glass and Voice) (2018), which evokes the calls of whales together with the movement of wind and water and the sound of glass being gently struck. The furthest of the two plinths also incorporates a video, played via a screen embedded into the plinth’s surface, in which an octopus
swims and wraps itself around another glass sculpture. As the creature probes the artwork with curiosity before momentarily entering inside it, a feeling is conveyed of two radically different worlds meeting. Ultimately, the octopus’s tentative movements around and inside the work of art raise the question of whether anything of our creative language can be understood by nonhumans. Can a ‘habitat cascade’ be described in any sense as a ‘cultural cascade’? If not, we are ultimately alone. Not that this would dissuade humans, like Laitinen, from projecting anthropomorphic traits onto animal behaviour. Reflections on the complex and sometimes elegant movements of the octopus led the artist to make a script executed in blown glass, here titled Tentacular Tongue (2018), which registers as a kind of tentacle-written Cyrillic alphabet. These pseudo-letters, no more than a few centimetres in height and width, are placed alongside the plinths, and their form is repeated in animated passages of the video, where similar
letters move in formation, mimicking the octopus’s ‘arm’ movements. A third plinth, joining the first two to complete a triangle, supports a number of deep blue tentacular glassworks. Collectively titled Haemocyanin (2019), these form part of Laitinen’s ongoing research into the mythological associations and material properties of copper, an element found in octopus blood due to the presence of the eponymous protein instead of haemoglobin, giving it a blueish hue. This work, along with the installation itself, contributes to the artist’s ongoing research into ‘porosity’ as alternative to binary modes of thinking in which objects, species and humans are rigidly categorised. The habitat cascade, seen in this light, is exemplary of how species can live and be perceived alongside one another despite their differences; as such, Laitinen’s work here, though pinned to one genus, raises wider issues pertinent to our moment of endemic division and ecological catastrophe. Mike Watson
Proposal for an Octopus #1, 2019, glass sculpture, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and wam, Turku
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Rebecca Horn Theatre of Metamorphoses Centre Pompidou-Metz 8 June – 13 January Rebecca Horn’s 1994 installation Kafka Zyklus (Kafka Cycle) consists of three vitrines containing relics of old Europe: a leather suitcase, an umbrella, a pair of shoes, bits of bramble and grass and dried flowers, a feather. Atop the display cases are mechanical books that open and close slightly as if being manipulated by a phantom reader settling into a more comfortable position. Some texts in what might be German, Horn’s native language, are scrawled in Sharpie; from right to left across the glass cases, these become indecipherable scribbles. You get a similar feeling from this retrospective as a whole. It begins with a sampling of Horn’s well-known early work: the Berlin Exercises videos (1974–75; a series of nine short films in which the artist explores the relationships between body and space in her studio), the body extensions and the videos that go with them (Einhorn, or Unicorn, 1970–72; Cornucopia [Séance für zwei Brüste], or Cornucopia, Seance for two breasts, 1970), Die sanfte Gefangene (The Feathered Prison Fan, 1978) from Der Eintänzer (The Gigolo, 1978), excerpts from Horn’s films La Ferdinanda (1981) and Buster’s Bedroom (1990).
But like the scribbles in Kafka Zyklus, as you read across the exhibit, the further you get into Horn’s career, the less legible it becomes. Theatre of Metamorphoses is running in parallel to a show of her work called The Body Fantasies at the Museum Tinguely in Basel (5 June – 22 September), which includes some of the other early performance works and Horn’s turn towards kinetic sculpture later in her career. The Metz show, while containing much of the early work for which she is famous, has some glaring holes. Where is the blood circulation machine? Where is Paradise Widow (1975)? Where is the face-pencil mask? The answer, alas, is Basel. And it doesn’t bring us up to date on what Horn has been doing lately: the most recent work is from 2005. Any gap is plugged instead by surrealist works by Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray and Brâncuşi, drawn from public and private collections. The curators’ insistence on these antecedents sometimes grates: Horn’s work doesn’t need that kind of scaffolding to be understood. Occasionally it’s useful, as with the section that traces her interest in the
bounded body to dadaist and surrealist poetry and illustrations. Oppenheim, whose powderblue gloves with veins drawn on the back (Handschuhe [Paar], 1985) are juxtaposed with Horn’s Fingerhandschuhe (Finger Gloves, 1972), might appear especially important given she was Horn’s mentor; though in this case, considering that Oppenheim’s gloves came late, the influence goes in the other direction. (Of course, Oppenheim made work with gloves well before Horn, but these are not in the Metz show.) Other connections are more tenuous. Glad as I was to see Claude Cahun’s Autoportrait comme Elle dans Barbe-Bleue (1929), there’s no way that photograph was an ‘influence’ on Horn, who was already an established artist by the time Cahun’s work was rediscovered during the 1980s and became widely shown during the 1990s. So Theatre of Metamorphoses feels like a thesis show reading Horn through Surrealism. But for those less familiar with her work, it’s asking them to imagine a narrative on the basis of a few provocative, brilliant fragments. And then it’s asking them to travel to Switzerland to get the rest of the story. Lauren Elkin
Der Eintänzer (The Gigolo) (production still), 1978, 16mm film, colour, sound, 44 min 1 sec, featuring Horn’s Die sanfte Gefangene (The Feathered Prison Fan), 1978. © Adagp, Paris, 2019
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Frances Stark lonely and abandoned on the market place Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 28 June – 17 August I cringe when I think about lending my books to anyone else. Crowded with comments, suggestive underlines and telltale asterisks, they threaten to give me away. If sharing the contents of a library leaves you equally vulnerable, then Frances Stark’s lonely and abandoned on the market place is borderline reckless. In a series of recent canvases, Stark paints passages from books on the subject of empire and, in particular, American imperialism: writings by Henry Miller, Edward Said, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, among other men, and herself. Resembling a set of perversely analogue Instagram posts (#amreading), the show presents reading as something increasingly displayed and shared as a means of fashioning and communicating our personal brands. Locating this person, this author/reader, is the central task of an exhibition that asks visitors to trace associations between one text/ painting and the next, following Stark’s proxy as they read about yuppies and tumbledown hotels, tv and Guantanamo Bay. While reading
about imperialism, however, this figure is always insulated from its real-world effects: one painting, for example, shows Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary (2015), two white pages floating against a pitch-black background broken up only by the glow of a cosy winter fire. Elsewhere, a pair of monochrome paintings shows a cartoonish female figure reading 1491 and 1493, the two-tome account of American colonialism by Charles C. Mann. She assumes the same mildly surprised pose in each, implying a reading process that is neither active nor discernibly transformative. Writing in his fabled 1931 essay ‘Unpacking my Library’ – from which Stark’s exhibition title is culled – Walter Benjamin described the library as a site of aesthetic pleasure and frisson, probably the least significant of which derives from reading. There are detours in this show too: one canvas shows a sidelong, alluring view of Dishonest but Appealing, the 2013 book-object Stark made in conjunction with the magazine
Parkett, while another juxtaposes two painted parrot figurines with the promotional text published alongside her nomination for the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize. Two smaller mixed-media canvases, Chain Brain (black) and Chain Brain (pink) (both 2018), contain no text at all. Brain forms hewn from the drag of painted chainmail on canvas, their inclusion seems to suggest empire is as much an internalised condition as something belonging to the outside world. For Benjamin, the library mattered because it offered the possibility of rebirth: not just of the collected and preserved books, but of the reading subject themselves. Stark’s recent paintings, by contrast, appear as self-conscious, counterintuitively static fragments of a reading life. How to capture the thought of Baldwin in a tweet, an Instagram post or even, for that matter, a painting? While acting out a contemporary, digitally driven sharing reflex, Stark’s paintings demonstrate the urgency in becoming much more than our reading selves. Rebecca O’Dwyer
Reading Edward Said’s, ‘Representations of the Intellectual’, from 1994, 2019, acrylic, tinted gesso, gesso, ink and Sumi ink on canvas, 112 × 145 cm. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York
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Graham Lambkin Mushroom Captivity PiK Deutz, Cologne 1–29 June Though I have only vague memories of Graham Lambkin’s performance during his 2016 show at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, I seem to remember a captivating, idiosyncratic mixture of music and sound, timed structures and chancy interrelations, apparently typical of the British artist and his diy-folk/electronic/field recording band The Shadow Ring. I also remember being happy not to have missed it, since the exhibition aligned with these live moments, which the stagelike display and the few drawings would have struggled on their own to communicate. All the more surprising, then, that Lambkin’s new show is superbly effective even if, like me, you missed the opening performance. That’s maybe due to its focus on his drawing practice, with only a reductive soundtrack of drips and scraps of conversation to remind one of Lambkin’s interest in sound. The emphasis on visuals might, one suspects, be grounded in the practice itself, which has gained a new kind of traction during the last two years, from which all the drawings and collages stem. Always good, Lambkin’s drawings now all but pull the rug out from under you. The large-format and unframed first drawing, encountered on the wide plywood display panel wrapped around the room’s central pillars, shows its titular Shipwreck (2018) as a detailed, Kafkaesque sewer system of Gothic gargoylelike beings, a machinery
of sorts whose levels support each other like a complex ecosystem. The mood is reminiscent of Alfred Kubin, but its detailed composition is worked more cleanly than the latter’s worldat-the-abyss fantasy. Shipwreck nevertheless oozes an apocalyptic mood, mostly due to the watchtower looming above a scene whose surroundings have literally been erased. Are we encountering an apocalyptic scenario, though, or are we already postcatastrophe? By digging into the details, we see objects on the verge of being animated and, vice versa, living things on the cusp of turning into objects, as well as beings that defy clear categorisation as flora or fauna. The press release cites American academic Anna Tsing: ‘When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.’ The blend of despair and hope inherent to this dry, factual quote is most strongly reflected in the small-format, intimate coloured-pencil work The Water Clock (2019). Framed by dark violets, seemingly either at sunrise or sunset, two swans lie in a sleeping embrace. Their bodies, in turn, provide contours within which Lambkin shows plants and animals in an eternal mortal combat that is, at the same time, a lifesupporting cycle. One might have to go back to John Everett Millais for a comparably melancholic interrelation of death and security.
Calon, 2018, 114 × 84 cm, pencil with collage elements on Cansun Mi-Teintes 160gsm stock
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One of the most impressive works here, Calon (2018), a midsize drawing faintly tinted with ochre, ultramarine and crimson, initially presents itself as an all-over figuration recalling Sue Williams. Looking closer reveals a matrix of animated matter that exhibits extremely dynamic plate tectonics: again and again, Lambkin clusters figures/beings/matter into surfaces that are assembled into a fragile whole. This effect is heightened by a nearinvisible collage technique, adding a slight dimensionality to the drawing. The result is surely to be understood as an ecosystem in which every disparity between creatures and earth is erased. No wonder, here, that humans don’t play a motivating role. Anyone familiar with Lambkin’s oeuvre might, in seeing this show, briefly be alienated by how much the planned precision of his drawings contrasts with his openness to the aleatory in music. Yet close inspection reveals how welcoming these works are to processual accidents: whether residual scraps of tape from masking off, forearm- and fingerprints, or tears and scratches, everything is productively used, happenstances enhanced. Apparently holism, for Lambkin, is not only the guiding concept for his imagery but, appropriately, enfolds his entire working process. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Liam Tickner
Céline Condorelli Equipment Significant Other, Vienna 29 May – 21 September Artist/architect Céline Condorelli brings both sides of her practice to bear on Equipment. She does not, however, simply reproduce architectural work in a gallery, letting the transformative power of the white cube do all the work. Rather she asks how contemporary art can be politicised – and become more generous – by using ideas about public space taken from architecture theory, where questions about our shared social world come first. So Condorelli has made a series of ‘play sculptures’ inspired by structuralist architect Aldo van Eyck and socially engaged urban planner Jakoba Mulder. The duo produced radical, minimalist children’s playgrounds for Amsterdam’s postwar housing projects, and here Condorelli repurposes their plans for play spaces located in parks, squares and derelict sites between destroyed buildings. Play sculptures, according to van Eyck’s concept of ‘tools for imagination’, should not have a specific, standardised function. Though they might look like uneven parallel bars, for example, they should not be used for gymnastics or exercise alone. They should instead stimulate children’s creativity by encouraging them to take an active part in their own play as they explore how they could use each object. Condorelli’s inkjet print Study for Tools for Imagination (The playgrounds and play objects of Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam, 1947–1968) (2017)
shows black-and-white pictures of these playgrounds, of which no fewer than 734 were built in the Dutch capital. Captions in red typeface explain Mulder and van Eyck’s aims, and the photographs are overlaid with diagrams of their ‘simple vocabulary of geometric shapes’, clarifying how the playgrounds fitted into the urban landscape. Tools for Imagination (1:1) (2019) offers four steel-tube, full-scale reproductions of the play sculptures, painted grey, blue and red and placed variously on the gallery’s limited floorspace or on the wooden seating area out on the street. Set at odd angles in relation to each other, with long curved edges and bars at different levels, they encourage not strict bodily discipline but the expansion of children’s creative potential. The viewer can easily imagine children contorting themselves – and their own imaginations – using these objects to fit their bodies instead of purposes that some clueless grownup designer has decided in advance. Equipment reflects how van Eyck’s designs offer children the freedom to think and play in two ways. First the viewer is allowed, though they’re unlikely to do so, to touch and use the sculptures themselves. Secondly, while two of the sculptures are inside the ‘official’ exhibition space, two others sit on top of some outdoor furniture in the street where a parking space
would usually be. Not only does this exploit Vienna’s relaxed laws about street furniture during the summer months, but keeps the show at least partly permanently open in an area with limited recreational space, and disinhibits people from leaning on the work. Finally, More Permanent than Snow (1:200) (2019) comprises several smaller polyurethane and sand sculptures, turning van Eyck’s isometric drawings into something resembling children’s toy building blocks, and Proposals for Qualitative Society, Spinning (1:10) (2019) is a oneoff printed vinyl record playing from a turntable. Condorelli’s achievement in Equipment is to show how van Eyck and Mulder’s designs encourage us to lead qualitatively different lives. They are not just pointing to a world of greater freedom where there are just more things available to us, but expanding the horizons of how we think, act and relate to others. Though the show is conceptually dense and exposes viewers to complex research material, it does not beat them into submission. One ends up engaging with these works in the same way that children could use van Eyck’s play sculptures. While children’s play has no purpose beyond sheer joy in the moment, there is one clear use for the objects in Equipment: asking what kind of world we should want to live in and how we might shape it. Max L. Feldman
Tools for Imagination (1:1), 2019 (detail), steel tubing, paint. Courtesy Significant Other, Vienna
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Manchester International Festival Various venues 4–21 July Beer is good for you, I learned during my tour of the mass grave that Chim Pom have transformed into a makeshift microbrewery for Manchester International Festival. I might even owe my life to it. The Japanese collective’s A Drunk Pandemic (all works 2019) takes for a starting point the cholera epidemic that spread through Britain’s squalid cities during the Industrial Revolution, linking it to the viral spread of capitalism by the same trading routes and reimagining this nineteenth-century cholera pit as a labyrinthine underworld entered by crossing an underground river. The work responds to the discovery that beer offered a healthy alternative to the contaminated drinking water through which the disease was transmitted. This prompts an elaborate scenography of production and waste, life and death. And so, in a dark underground chamber, a member of the group sits in a white hazmat suit patiently pressing bricks bound together with urine ‘donated’ by beer-swilling visitors and arranging them into piles that allude, my polite psychopomp tells me, to those built by the woman who guards the Buddhist underworld. Drinking my own complimentary beer in a converted portable toilet, before making my contribution to the work, I reflect on the fact that, just a few miles north, in Preston, my ancestors sailed through the epidemic. Presumably because of all the beer they were dutifully drinking. That other parts of my family-to-be were in west Ireland, plotting against the empire, or somewhere in Germany, a few decades away from doing the same, makes me suspicious of claims such as that made for Tania Bruguera’s School of Integration at Manchester Art Gallery. This series of workshops, according to the official information, will draw ‘us’ nearer to ‘those who’ve made this city their home, inviting us to discover and embrace the diversity in our midst’. That ‘us’ implies a golly-
gosh attitude to the fact that metropolitan cities are built by people who came from elsewhere and seems to presume that their cultures should be showcased in museums for ‘our’ edification. I should qualify this scepticism by saying that I enjoyed the lesson in Singhalese for which I had signed up, delivered by Fathima, who teaches English as a second language in the city, and don’t doubt the wellmeaning behind the project. But the feeling lingered that such initiatives are preaching to the converted if they’re not substituting a trip to the museum for meaningful engagement, or worse, insisting against its stated aims that these cultures are ‘other’ to an imaginary ‘native’ culture that is unconsciously assigned official status. Either way, it seems to me that Bruguera’s Arte Útil is infinitely more convincing when it goes out onto the street and into communities. At the Whitworth, Ibraham Mahama’s photographs offered an alternative mode of address to issues of violence and displacement. Laid out on maps, the forearms of migrant Ghanaian labourers reveal rudimentary tattoos listing their families and hometowns, so that they can be identified in the event of a fatal accident at work or on the roads. These works are at the centre of an exhibition featuring sculpture, installation and photography that in different ways engages formally with the effects of displacement and disempowerment. An altogether different kind of emigration is made possible by Laurie Anderson and filmmaker Hsin-Chien Huang’s selfexplanatory To the Moon. The premise behind this immersive virtual-reality journey to our barren satellite is strikingly similar to Antony Gormley’s recent Lunatick (2019), which, by using data from nasa to simulate the lunar surface, delivered a scientistic interpretation of the experience of being in space (if it looks like the moon, and sounds like the moon,
it must feel like being on the moon). By contrast, Anderson and Hsin-Chien’s infinitely more affecting work uses a variety of creative means – sound, symbolism and narrative – to imagine the psychological effects of a shift in perspective that reduces human civilisation to the status of dust clinging by static to the surface of a distant balloon. Human loss is figured against cosmic scales, bringing to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s desire, in Speak, Memory (1951), to ‘measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae’. Adam Thirlwell and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Studio Créole attempts to demonstrate that literature, too, can move across time and space. This theatrical attempt to stage the experience of translation sees seven authors read in their native language from platforms dotted around the auditorium. A simultaneous live translation is relayed to members of the audience via bone-conduction headphones (they transmit sound through your jaw) that leave the ears free to hear the original stories, which are also being interpreted – in the sense of being physically acted out – by the actor Lisa Dwan. In doing so, the work dramatises two different attitudes to the way in which language is translated – analogous (at a stretch) to the literal and lyrical approaches taken in Lunatick and To the Moon – and attempts to bring them together, at the same time as it delivers a story through a combination of spoken language and physical movement. It’s a bewildering experience, in the best possible way, because it forces the listener and watcher to hold a variety of different languages, voices and modes of expression in their head at the same time. Of all the lessons delivered by a festival that brings visual art, performance, dance, literature, music and combinations of the above from around the world to Manchester, this might be the most valuable of all. Ben Eastham
facing page, top Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, To the Moon, 2019 (installation view, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester). Photo: Michael Pollard facing page, bottom A reading by Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o (left) translated live by Josiah Mureithi (right), as part of Studio Créole at Manchester Academy. Photo: Chris Payne
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Rezi van Lankveld Drifting Constants Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam 25 May – 27 July Not one of the odd forms depicted in Rezi van Lankveld’s seven recent paintings can be clearly identified; yet somehow, looking at them, one often can’t help thinking of summertime. Most nudgingly, the vibrant red and white stripes of Luifel (all works 2019) evoke a sunshade (as, indeed, the Dutch title suggests), and if Half High represents anything at all, it might well be a doughnut on a sandy beach on a bright morning. However, these interpretative descriptions only take us halfway down the switchback road established by van Lankveld’s works here: her paintings display their capricious forms and seductive colours elegantly, but make sure their true identity remains veiled. The implicit sunniness may even be partly a function of the season in which they were shown. Quite possibly the artist herself does not really know what has originated on these small canvases. In her structured openness to the unforeseen, signposted by the show’s title, van Lankveld has applied paints and mediums in manifold ways. Pools of colour poured onto the linen, partly washed off and covered with paint again create picture planes of great complexity; background and foreground seem to swap places at random; indications of various
scales mingle while avoiding any coherence. In the relatively downbeat Thrillseeker, hairy textures and nebulous hazes in rainy greys add up to some sort of cloudy spectre studded with bodily orifices. One might recognise a pig’s snout in its features, marked with pink and blue. Possibly the thrillseeker is a reflexive emblem for the painter, who seeks nothing but self-surprise. When words fall short, Surrealism and the unconscious are usually not far away – in this case, more specifically, the legacies of the movement apparent in René Daniëls’s work from the early 1980s. The Dutch painter, still highly influential on younger practitioners of the medium, experimented with a pictorial equivalent of the so-called écriture automatique. Like Daniëls, van Lankveld tries to bypass control, making way for unpredicted images that, in turn, spark unprecedented sensations: the technique, evidently, still has life in it. Birthday, one of the strongest works in the show, delineates the fluffy contours of a decorated and perforated body. Patches of eggplant purple have been painted over with creamy whites, leaving thin dark lines visible at the edges. It’s hard to describe the strange attraction
of the image, which seems festive as well as troubling. A crazed phrase Salvador Dalí once uttered (with regard to art nouveau) comes to mind: a terrifying and edible beauty. These new paintings, previously shown at Reset, in Gotem, Belgium, are unquestionably more accomplished than van Lankveld’s earlier work. Formerly laborious and somewhat mannerist mark-making has given way to fresh and seemingly effortless brushwork, more clarity, more detail. Gone are those stark black contours that gave the colours in her older works the luminosity of stained-glass windows. Light and shadow behave independently, former lovers now estranged from one another. A powerful generative force seems to be at work, a dynamics of fluidity and coagulation, suggesting the collision of disparate worlds and the metamorphosis of one thing into another, with a nagging feeling of absence as a recurring presence. Walk away and come back, and the paintings seem to self-replenish, sprouting previously unseen aspects. Works best characterised in paradoxical terms – intending to avoid intentions, anticipating the unexpected, controlling coincidence – they present van Lankveld in full bloom. Dominic van den Boogerd
Birthday, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm. Photo: Gert-Jan van Rooij. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
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Momentum 10 The Emotional Exhibition Various venues, Moss 8 June – 9 October We’re taught to associate emotions with messiness, for want, I presume, of a better or more intelligible rationale for the complexity of our feelings; so as I head to Moss, just south of Oslo, I’m hoping that Momentum 10’s curators might be conjuring some form of clarity from the confusion that I would generally associate with ‘The Emotional’. Walking to the biennial’s two main venues, I pass a poster promoting the event: ‘Sex, rationality, urbanity and unemployment’, it reads; I’m not sure my dreams will be fulfilled. As I enter those venues – an industrial kunsthalle and the local art gallery – the prevailing atmosphere is one of nostalgia: half of the works by the 29 participating artists on show appeared in previous editions of the biennial (some reappear in their original form, some are adapted for this tenth anniversary). Given that only three of the ‘new’ works on show are literally new, the self-congratulatory, nostalgic vibe soon feels like it has invaded the entire exhibition. Though that’s not to say the exhibition lacks works that are worth reconnecting with. Today (1996–97), Eija Liisa Ahtila’s three-screen video installation, experiments with multiple-narrative construction to relate the psychological angst of a family drama.
Pauline Curnier Jardin’s video Coeurs de Silex (Hearts of Flint) (2012), set in a French suburban town that was bombed in 1944, is an absurdist tale populated by archetypal characters (an ally, an occupier, their ‘bifaced’ child, a sorceress, etc), which sets the traumas of occupied France against the reality of the banlieue: “Do you think it’s easy? I’ve been here 140 years,” the occupier, interviewed at night in a bleak street, confesses in German. “All I want is integration,” he continues, leaving me unsure whether to laugh or cringe at this grotesque anachronism. Also confronting histories of violence, Stine Marie Jacobsen’s Direct Approach (2014) asks people to pick the most violent movie scene they’ve seen, and films them as they reenact it as the victim, perpetrator or bystander, encouraging participants (and viewers, by proxy) to dig into their own internalised perceptions of violence. Though videoworks predominate, some of the more poignant examples of art’s ability to emote are sculptural: Erik Öberg’s strange still lifes (Wither into claws, 2018), amorphous shapes that evoke lifeless swans on which mould or mushrooms have grown, are beautifully foreboding; made of entirely synthetic materials created by the artist, these works appear here
as tentative studies of the effect of textures, shapes and colours on our mind and emotional states. Relying on material associations (or contrasts) too is Christodoulos Panayiotou’s marble table standing against a wall, the top of which has been vandalised with the word ‘Bastardo’ (Bastardo, 2017) – its freshness and crudeness in stark contrast to the host material’s aura of luxury and permanence. As a whole, however, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the biennale’s celebration of its twodecade history gets in the way of any articulate proposition (that art deals with or can elicit emotion is as loose as it gets). Compiling a ‘best of’ works from previous editions, however good some of these might be, makes the exhibition feel disjointed and self-referential, not to mention at times frankly disappointing (the performative and sculptural Scandinavian Pain, 2006, by Ragnar Kjartansson, originally set up in a barn in the forest outside the gallery, is only represented via a small photograph). This feels like a missed opportunity to deal in more depth with a subject that is perhaps too often dismissed as unserious; the emotional, surely, is too complex to settle for wistfulness and messiness. Louise Darblay
Christodoulos Panayiotou, Bastardo, 2017, marble console, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
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Nocturnal Creatures Various venues in Whitechapel, London 20 July “This is good,” T_ says, chewing on a mouthful of halloumi wrap. “What is it again?” “It’s a ‘food intervention’ by Michael Rakowitz,” I explain. “He makes work out of date-syrup tins and wrappers.” T_ shakes his head. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “He did the Fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square?” Another shake. “This is from his cookbook.” According to T_, anyone who knows anything about cookery passes as a competent human being, so he nods his approval and we agree that it’s one of the best ‘gallery foods’ we’ve tried since sampling a selection of smørrebrød at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. “How’s it an intervention again?” he asks. I shrug, and take another bite. If, by ‘intervention’, Rakowitz meant to confound the bar staff at the Whitechapel Gallery’s refectory – who seem overwhelmed by a few orders, sprinkle dried mint onto the dry surface of the wrap, and proceed to deliver to tables in no decided order – then I suppose he has succeeded. But the wrap was good: few crumbs remain of the toasted flatbread that encased slabs of melted salty halloumi in a sweet sticky date syrup and tahini sauce. We stare at the flakes of mint left on the plate for a moment. “Shall we carry on?” So far we’ve experienced the works of three of nine artists participating in Whitechapel Gallery’s programme for this year’s edition of Nocturnal Creatures, a one-night arts festival: at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Emma Smith has installed 40 speakers, each of which broadcasts the peals of a different bell from around the world (among them Big Ben and the Liberty Bell), all of which were forged at the site (Calling Time, 2019); Elaine Mitchener performed Teares (2019) at the Whitechapel Gallery during which she sang composer John Dowland’s 1610 In Darkness Let Me Dwell in
canon with a recording of the same lyrics – also sung by Mitchener – as a response to Helen Cammock’s film Che si puo fare (What can be done) (2019), which is shown on loop at the gallery as part of Cammock’s exhibition; and of course we just ate the Rakowitz. If you think the setup sounds a bit like Art Night London, then you’re not far off. Nocturnal Creatures, now in its second year, is a product of the Whitechapel Gallery having hosted the former in 2017. Returning for one evening (6–11pm) a year, the event sees both private and public buildings open their doors to artists who present siteresponsive works. While Smith’s installation and Mitchener’s performance speak directly to the contexts in which they’re shown, activating the disused industrial site of the foundry or sung in harmony with Cammock’s film (which is a study in lamentation through music and voice), Nocturnal Creatures is still a hit-and-miss project, with some of the sites either drowning out whatever installation is on display or providing the principal interest themselves. Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s sonic installation Before: Flight (2019) is overwhelmed by the echoing atrium of the White Chapel Building offices, resulting in a racket of reverberations that cause any sound to be indistinguishable from noises emanating from the general public; it’s more fun to watch the mixture of reactions to Laure Prouvost’s eavesdropping opera singer and Ruth Ewan’s feminist jukebox, mirrors and beermats that have been installed at two local pubs, as art enthusiasts and people who simply searched for something to do that evening in London listings magazine Time Out (media partner of Nocturnal Creatures) arrive in clusters to be side-eyed by the regulars of those establishments.
facing page, top Tabita Rezaire, Peaceful Warrior, 2015 (installation view, Masonic Hall, London). Courtesy the artist and Whitechapel Gallery, London facing page, bottom Emma Smith, Calling Time, 2019 (installation view, Whitechapel Bell Foundry, London). Courtesy the artist and Whitechapel Gallery, London
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We finish our tour at Tabita Rezaire’s video Peaceful Warrior (2015), which is on show at a former Masonic Hall (now used as a private events space) located in the Andaz Hotel by Liverpool Street Station. In the middle of the hall, with its leather-seat-lined walls, marble columns, ornamentation, gilded surfaces and a domed ceiling painted deep blue and embossed with golden zodiac signs, a screen that looks like it fell off a giant iPhone dominates the space. Through it plays a video of the artist moving around in a shiny pink leotard against a computerised backdrop of ovaries, pyramids, whizzing lights and rainforests to mystical instrumental sounds, while phrases like ‘If you fux with me, I will fux with you’ and ‘Release your yonic power through womb movements and unapologetic pride’ appear onscreen. On its own, it’s difficult to decide whether the fiveminute video is less an artwork and more a selfhelp tutorial that might appeal to the kind of audience that adopts bubblegum-coloured micro-fringes, pool sliders and postinternet aesthetics. But putting personal biases aside, situating this video in a space that was traditionally male-only, and which has now become a mainstream entertainment venue, is a win for Rezaire. Gyrating among animated wombs, the artist’s ‘peaceful warrior’ makes a mockery of such institutions by flaunting female sexuality, putting the site and the video in tension with one another. It’s this single critical and subversive pairing that just about prevents Nocturnal Creatures from becoming a prosaic event that relies on odd sites to generate public interest in art. Having stared at our surroundings and watched the looped video a couple of times, T_ nudges me and says, “Shall we get dinner at Tayyabs?” It’s 10pm and I nod. When in Whitechapel… Fi Churchman
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Kirstine Roepstorff ex cave Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich 30 May – 8 September ex cave completes Kirstine Roepstorff’s trilogy of investigations into darkness, following her contribution to the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and an exhibition at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in 2018. This low-lit exhibition starts in a single gallery on the third floor before taking over all of the fourth: first up, Path Into Cave No. 3 (2019) offers a series of steps onto a raised, concrete-surfaced platform for a closeup view of geometric drawings in cast concrete relief. Altogether, the viewer will steadily discover, the exhibition consists of more than 50 works by the Danish artist made since 2009, as her practice has long been in pursuit of this gesamtkunstwerk: wall reliefs, collages, freestanding sculptures in concrete and brass and a large tapestry commission previously shown – in daylight – in Venice. Throughout, the exhibition architecture and sculpture are inseparable; concrete walls, suspended divisions and newly constructed chambers embed the artworks, and the contours of heaped gravel on the floor tip us towards the works. The second section’s passage of galleries is accessed via a ramp that rises up to tighten the entrance, enhancing the rabbit-hole feeling. Inside it’s dark, as one might anticipate, in varying pitches in different rooms: a soft darkness in which colours emerge slowly, but make their presence felt, and brass glints. If the eyes are
challenged, the gravel all around is an unfamiliar tactile and auditory stimulus and encourages hushed viewing of the sculptures we navigate, with the occasional little squawk of appreciation – of the unexpected delight in walking from a medium-grade gravel onto a finer one, for example. Through the delicate staging of light, sound, architectural form and poised installations, Roepstorff immerses and bewitches her audience to the extent that it’s difficult to cast a sober eye on the material she is employing and what specifically she might be saying with it. There is more at stake than a rewrite of darkness as a fruitful viewing environment. The title suggests the dim space we’re occupying is a move beyond the cave where hominids first painted, yet Roepstorff plays with forms that are reminiscent of early – ‘primitive’ – cultural expression, like the tall, slender, totemlike sculpture Mother, a nest for sparrows (3) (2018), even while they stand cheek-byjowl with scads of fair-faced concrete, with its association with modernist architecture in particular. An architectural line of enquiry is further manifested in her use of brass, rods and narrow fins especially, alone and embedded in concrete, appealing details that flirt with the appearance of utility: a fine brass curve attached to the surface of Nox Sleep in known
ex cave, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Stefan Altenburger. © ProLitteris, Zürich. Courtesy Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich
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wumbs No. 12 (2019) might be a handle or just a grace note. Yet at the same time, unadorned walls and half walls that densify the structure of the darkest chambers of the exhibition imitate a building only in the making. Her collages combine different photographic sources and distinct kinds of documentation: Notes Of Density #2 (2009) unites an illustration of different mineral stones, the bloody scene after an assassination attempt and a basalt column landscape, while at the same time being a formalist composition. The works comprising the Unbreaking Time (2013) series are based on black-and-white photographs of a magician tied up in ropes, which Roepstorff has adorned with highlights in pearls, brass and fabric. At the show’s furthest point the lighting lifts, the revelation being a number of smaller sculptures presented on plinths and in a broad niche. At the apogee is Horizon (2015), a brass pole a metre-and-a-half long resting on two wooden blocks. It might represent the edge of the visible earth, but it equally rings with the contained menace of a displayed weapon. It shares this implication of danger with the roped-magician works, suggesting that illumination does not necessarily bring understanding. With ex cave Roepstorff counters the path to enlightenment with a seductive muddying of notions. Aoife Rosenmeyer
bank Summa Piper Keys, London 1 June – 7 July ‘galleries “all owned by rich people” shock’ screams the headline on the cover of a 1997 edition of The bank, bank’s tabloid newspaperstyle satire of the London artworld, here blown up to poster size at Piper Keys. In 1990s London, bank was a funny, fiercely critical artist group whose artworks, diy gallery shows and publications mixed punk, left-ish politics, institutional provocation and artworld satire. Spoofing the working-class posturing and loose money of the ‘yba’ decade as much as the liberal etiquette of the publicly funded British art establishment, bank accrued both notoriety and the disdain of many of the more career-minded in the scene who couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just behave and play the game. Members of the group (Simon Bedwell, Milly Thompson, John Russell and Andrew Williamson) have followed their separate paths since it broke up in 2002. Summa presents reproductions of The bank covers and ‘information’ posters, and paintings from the series Field of Dreams (1999), made for the group’s inclusion in the 1999 eastinternational (an annual exhibition staged in Norwich that ran between 1991 and 2009). Since east was a ‘provincial’ exhibition with the confidence to reach out to an international art scene (which made for much
of its significance through the 90s and 00s), bank’s contribution played on the politics of art’s awkward claim to universalism: shuffling across expansive, Mark Rothko-like canvases of ethereally glowing orange, pink, yellow and purple are multitudes of ‘matchstick men’ figures, in the style of English self-taught artist L.S. Lowry: little workers who recede into a floating horizon on which loom cartoonish factories, their chimney stacks billowing smoke. Detached from their original context by 20 years, the paintings still project bank’s caustic, desolate attention to how the realities of art’s context – political and social – clash with art’s aspiration to offer transcendent escape from those realities (the Rothko-ish sublime) or purposeful engagement with them (Lowryesque social realism). Lost in the acid haze of the paintings, the little people inhabit a landscape devoid of anything but the chug of distant factories, in a world constituted by the sign of art’s ultimate freedom (abstraction). Neither Lowry’s world of British heavy industry, nor Rothko’s existentialist transcendence survived much into the postindustrial 1990s, during which the contemporary artworld in Britain blossomed. And bank had a peculiar knack for laying bare the conflicts
of class, politics and aesthetics while never excluding themselves from the picture. What the Field of Dreams paintings gnaw at has to do with the deflated ambitions of an increasingly administered and institutionalised artworld: a ‘bank poster’ (shown alongside at east), headlined ‘Hey! We are the little guys just like you!’, ingratiates itself outrageously to its ‘provincial’ readers (‘not for us wild nights spent snorting cocaine and indulging in group sex orgies’), at the moment when art (in the uk) was being converted into a government tool to make the little people better citizens. Alongside, sharing out the derision, is The bank’s memorable cover from 29 September 1996: ‘chisenhale – why?’ mocks the obscure raison d’être of the publicly funded art circuit – ‘why is the chisenhale? Does it have to and is the display of culture necessarily a good thing?’ It’s fitting that a little independent gallery should recall bank’s homeless, crash-and-burn institutional critique, since the art institution tends to have a selective memory of its critics. As the press release quotes the group: ‘it’s about time these works were bought by a public collection like the Tate or Arts Council’. If the hand won’t feed you, you might as well keep biting it. J.J. Charlesworth
Field of Dreams 1, 1999, acrylic and pigment on canvas, 366 × 221 cm. Courtesy the artists and Piper Keys, London
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Leo Mock …and still somehow m+b, Los Angeles 21 June – 30 August Back in January 2018, in China Art Objects’ fair booth at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, I saw some paintings by an artist then unknown to me that I liked. I remember an island, moody cloudscapes, bruised colouration. I asked the gallerist Steve Hanson about them, and while I don’t recall much of his vague response, I do remember that he couldn’t help me identify the historical painting one of these reminded me of. (I worked it out later: it was Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, 1880.) Paintings by the same artist are currently on view at m+b; his name, according to the press release, is Leo Mock, born 1964 (no spring chicken, then), in Los Angeles, where he still lives and works. Upon questioning, the gallery assistant conceded that at least two parts of that press release were inaccurate. The artist, he said, has just departed Los Angeles for Mexico. And his name is not Leo Mock, it’s Steve Hanson. China Art Objects, a beloved mainstay of the Los Angeles gallery scene since it opened in 1999, has not had an official exhibition according to its website since late 2017, when it gave up its Culver
City premises. I missed Mock’s exhibition there in May of that year; only now that the Los Angeles gallery has closed has Hanson emerged from the closet of pseudonymity. China Art Objects, founded with Giovanni Intra, Peter Kim, Amy Yao and Mark Heffernan, was originally an artist-run space that professionalised to keep up with its commercial success. Now setting up in Mérida, Yucatán, the gallery plans to focus more on residencies and events (and also, inevitably, art fairs) than exhibitions – a return, perhaps in part, to its spiritual roots. So, what do the secret paintings of an art dealer look like? The first thing to say is that there is no trace of dilettantism about this work. Mock’s output is thematically focused, and deeply developed. The paintings at m+b, done in oils, oil stick and charcoal, are consistent with those exhibited in 2017: abbreviated beach scenes, in which strips of dusky rose, sage green, maroon and jade define the land and the sea, while flat-bottomed clouds pile up pregnantly in the sky above. Compositions are simultaneously punctuated and pinned together by the
Anchor, dragging, behind, 2019, oil, oil stick and charcoal on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist and m+b, Los Angeles
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pole-thin legs and feet of giant (and usually off-canvas) figures, sometimes flat on their backs and sometimes stooping over, as if Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures had been reimagined by Philip Guston. On the occasion that we glimpse the heads of these disconsolate alien beings – as in Anchor, dragging, behind (all works 2019), where one shelters beneath another – they are rendered as huge solid discs, surrogates for a sun that never appears. Titles, including the title of the show, …and still somehow, add to the atmosphere of worry and doubt. I enjoy reflecting on how Mock/Hanson’s practice messes with the narrative framework of artistic emergence, fruition and maturation that most galleries spend their time finessing. Does he fall into the category of gifted amateur or seasoned artworld insider? Does his career as a dealer help or hinder his career as an artist? What about the other way around? Hanson’s late public efflorescence lends a pleasing circularity to the story of China Art Objects, a gallery never overly concerned about conforming to standard models. Jonathan Griffin
Sara Cwynar Gilded Age Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (ct) 9 June – 10 November ‘The new is already on hand so we don’t even need to wait / But does newness have any meaning at all if it brings no new truth in its wake?’ This is one of many handwritten lines of text scrawled across Sara Cwynar’s archival pigment print A Rococo Base (2018), which explores how our immersive (digital) image culture instils and feeds our search for newness – a nearly meaningless term today, with ‘new’ lasting merely minutes. Drawing on the excess of the late-Baroque era, the print depicts a densely layered collage of neon Post-it notes, pictures of fashion sneakers and jewellery, makeup advertisements mixed with three-dimensional makeup tubes, hotel keys, phone cords, perfume bottles, pens, paperclips, pictures of models posed in studio, red roses, slices of artwork by Rubens, Koons and Picasso, and images of ancient sculptures, all against a bright green background. Woven between these references is Cwynar’s handwriting, lines of media theory mixed with her own, such as the observation, ‘Baroque is the closet to our current time, there is stuff everywhere’. For those familiar with Cwynar’s prints and videos, this work is recognisable for its expression of surplus – visual-verbal sensory overload
that captures how the visual language of commercial advertising cultivates an almost nostalgic desire for an ephemeral newness. Gilded Age brings together a diverse range of her work, including her earliest work, the artist book Kitsch Encyclopedia: A Survey of Universal Knowledge (2014), prints from her ‘Avon Presidential Bust’ (2017) and ‘Plastic Cups’ (2014) series, her wallpaper 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings (2016) and a selection of her films exploring Western beauty standards such as Tracy and Me & Xtina V.2 (both 2019). Her work smartly engages in a constant loop of signification, images of images that convey the referentless nature of internet culture; it is not the thing itself that matters, but the image of the thing. For an artist whose work is rooted in interrogations of digital desire, Cwynar’s process is surprisingly analogue. She prints out enlargements of her source images or her own studio photographs, lays them on the floor and places objects and other printed images on top, writing directly on these surfaces as she goes. She then photographs these physical collages, sometimes with several rounds of rephotographing and printing. Sometimes she enacts a similar process using a magnetic board – the evidence of which
is visible in 141 Pictures of Sophie 1, 2, and 3 (2019), in which metal corner magnets cast shadows across the added images. Cwynar is often visible in her films, moving in and out of the frame, rearranging props and people. Me and Christina (2019) depicts a photoshoot with Christina Aguilera lounging in a classic odalisque pose against a green drop cloth. Playing in the same loop of short videos is Me & Xtina V.2, a split-screen video that includes excerpts from Me and Christina alongside a video of Cwynar behind the camera. While Me and Christina is over 18 minutes long, V.2 is just over a minute. And while it may appear at first that we are getting a look behind the Aguilera shoot, Cwynar stands by a red curtain, and as the camera angle pans past the curtain, we see Cwynar filming herself in a mirror, a behind-the-scenes of the artist making a video we are not shown. It creates a sense of authenticity to her work that is in fact at odds with her subjects, and is itself manufactured. Cwynar’s work offers the illusion of seeing behind the curtain only to reinforce the multitude of ways that our increasingly saturated and manufactured image culture belies the truthiness of images we continue naively to look for. Megan N. Liberty
Tracy (Pantyhose), 2017, dye sublimation print on aluminium, 76 × 97 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York
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Steven Parrino Paintings & Drawings, 1986–2003 Skarstedt, New York 13 May – 19 July An exhibition – no, even a single painting – by the late Steven Parrino instils the same excitement I felt when I discovered the artist’s work nearly 15 years ago. I was at the tailend of my teens, a wannabe artist, and Parrino, who equated American Minimalism’s notion of presence with the aggressive, deskilled immediacy of punk music, offered a compelling example to follow. At Skarstedt, then, I am amply provisioned: paintings dating from the second half of Parrino’s four-decade career are evenly distributed across the gallery’s two floors, with a groundfloor gallery dedicated to a series of collages. At nineteen I would have said this was my favourite show. Early on, Parrino understood the freedom that painting offered as an outré medium. This exhibition demonstrates that he was especially drawn to the monochrome, as well as to a material engagement with painting, as in the tondo skeletal implosion #2 (2001). For this work, Parrino painted the canvas, torqued it counterclockwise around its fixed centre-point and stapled it back in place. The result resembles a puckered orifice – mouth or asshole, take your pick. His paintings revel in the perverse contrast between a given form and its distortion, but Two Slots (1987) shows how surgical precision also allowed him to get under painting’s skin. Here Parrino cut a pair of symmetrical slots in the candyapple-red surface, adding to the colour study’s rigid uniformity. Yet the repetition and machinelike regularity from which the painting derives its satisfying composition also suggest the cinch used to tighten a saddle around a horse.
The show is gorgeous. Even the literalminded Blue Idiot (1986), a rare text-based painting, is on display. I am initially happy, but before long, something sours for me. The exhibition takes place nearly 15 years after Parrino died, aged forty-six, in a motorcycle accident, and though sales failed to sustain him during his lifetime, prices for his work skyrocketed immediately after his death – the stench of money having drawn vultures to his corpus. The fallout from this market speculation has been severe: in order to sequester him in a sales-friendly conversation about abstract painting, exhibitions put on by blue-chip galleries – the estate also works with Gagosian – divorce his paintings from the more interesting and stubbornly iconoclastic aspects of his career. The reality is that Parrino turned up in many unexpected places. His headshot is part of David Robbins’s Talent (1986), the painter’s bushy unibrow on full display alongside Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and other art stars of the 1980s. He featured as a nameless club-wielding menace in Ericka Beckman’s Super-8 film Hit and Run (1977). And together with painter Jutta Koether (on keyboard), Parrino (electric guitar) formed one half of the noise band Electrophilia. In 2001 Parrino smashed a series of gypsum boards against a wall and called it 13 Shattered Panels ( for Joey Ramone). I suspect that Stockade (Existential trap for speed freaks) (1988–91), an enormous black monochrome resembling a torture device, presented grandly above a staircase at Skarstedt,
was also meant to evoke Ramone’s (and by association, Parrino’s) badboy legacy. Stocks, with their element of punishment and public humiliation, certainly convey Parrino’s attitude towards form, but the work’s distant positioning here prevents us from experiencing the simultaneous lure of a glossy black enamel that invites touch and an imposing scale that repudiates proximity. Taken in historical context, the work also represents the generosity between Parrino and his peers; his close friend Cady Noland asked permission to use the pattern, and as her recent retrospective at Frankfurt’s mmk attests, many of her most iconic works make use of it. It’s possible that I’ll always have a visceral reaction to Parrino’s work. Even his titles, such as Screw Ball (1988) and Bentoffkilterslime (1995), evince the skin-crawling violence embedded in the American idiom. Yet the exhibition leaves his legacy maimed. To me, a work from the artist’s Death in America (2003) series offers an instructive parable. Death in America #6 consists of two crumpled, unstretched silver canvases lying on the floor – a double suicide? – as a wallbound silver monochrome looks on impassively. Whether routine formal investigation or staged studio detritus, in this painterly whodunnit a crime seems to have been committed. An artist’s fate is attached to his art, but with this work, Parrino seemed to anticipate that there would be a final twist – one last betrayal. Only someone this devoted to art could see what was happening so far in advance. He knew they needed a fall guy for their greed. That they’d try to pin the crime on him. Sam Korman
facing page, top Paintings & Drawings, 1986–2003 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Skarstedt, New York & London facing page, bottom Death in America #6, 2003, acrylic on canvas and gesso, with two paintings painted and wrinkled placed on the ground, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Skarstedt, New York & London
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Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François The Song of the Arapongo Bortolami, New York 28 June – 9 August These two Belgium-based artists are such adept collaborators that it verges on mind-meld; they’ve shown in tandem before, most notably at the 45th Venice Biennale, in 1999. Here, their Song of the Arapongo, a gallerywide installation of objects, architectonic elements and sculptural pieces, is a seamless environment. Ann Veronica Janssens has long been curious about how reflected light and vibrant colour can subtly alter an environment, working with materials both ethereal (like mist) and tangible (rectangles of treated glass, propped against or hung on the walls). Here her contributions are understated and slight. A series of circular, cut-glass sculptures are placed throughout the gallery’s grand, skylit space. An alluring triple-stack of coloured glass – a chunk of radiant pink sandwiched between two slabs of electric yellow-green – faces off with Michel François’s Dancer Ring (2018), a 28cm-diameter reproduction of jewellery that he encountered in Rajasthan. Both artists do their part to create an ambience that tugs between the soothing and the tense. Janssens’s largest piece is the easiest to miss: a scattering of multicoloured glitter streaked across the floor. From one angle it
resembles a coating of salt or silt, washed up by the tide; shift position and it unveils a rainbow sheen, like oil on water. Ultimately the exhibition operates as an elegant whole, with Janssens’s minimalist impulses (which can arguably verge on the decorative) complicated by the show’s dramatic centrepiece: François’s Hétérotopie 2 (2019), an elaborate reconstruction of an architecture originally encountered in India. The work is dotted with hazy clues. Two rough walls, joined at a 90-degree angle, form its backbone, one of them interrupted by a corrugated metal gate that leaks a pale purple ooze onto the floor. A spongelike form is affixed to the other, leaving a trail of blue paint in its wake; nearby, an enormous cigarette rests atop a cinderblock. Other elements complete the curious scene. A pair of tattered, bronzed sandals; a sliced-and-diced leather jacket, chunks of its surface scissored away; an all-black soccer ball, constructed using the pared sections of that same jacket. This frozen moment of abandonment is rich territory – it’s impossible not to imagine who might have occupied, or fled, this space – and also intriguingly at odds with the polite beauty of Janssens’s work.
Equally intriguing is François’s Trousers (1991), a pair of tiny-waisted men’s pants filled with plaster and positioned, upside down, within a concrete enclosure. The ‘legs’ are tied off at the ankle with lengths of rough twine, giving them a bulging, overstuffed effect that is more sausagelike than human. This work’s strangeness, its lack of resolution, seems almost aggressively out of place next to Janssens’s sculptures, with their seductive, material beauty. And yet tucked away on the back wall, Janssens intervenes with a print that adds her own further layer of enigma to this exhibition. The Skeis… (2019), with its white text on a sky-blue background, mutates text appropriated from a 1950s meteorological journal. Each word is jumbled, as if rendered by the world’s clumsiest typist, turning a straightforward description of climate conditions into a found poem. Its opening lines can stand in as an apt description of this collaborative show, with its shifts in tone and emotional weather: “The skeis took on starnge / cloors; terhe was an ereie / srot of lgiht, fololewd in / smoe palces by amlost / copmltee dakernss...” Scott Indrisek
The Song of the Araponga, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Kristian Laudrup. Courtesy the artists and Bortolami, New York
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Jonathas de Andrade One to One Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 13 April – 25 August I first visited Northeast Brazil in 2013, and on that trip I learned about the Museu do Homem do Nordeste (The Museum of the Northeastern Man) in Recife. Founded in 1979 by the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, it was initiated with the goal of representing lusotropicalism, the now debunked idea that the Portuguese were more ‘benevolent’ colonisers than other nations, because of their supposed capacity for harmonious relations with the colonised. Also in 2013, Jonathas de Andrade created a work bearing the name of the museum as a title. Consisting of fictional advertising posters for the institution, it pointed to the latter’s inherent sexism, racism and anthropological bias. Recife was the first slave port in the Americas, and the wider region of Pernambuco a principal producer of sugar. Its culture is still today considered different from other regions in Brazil. It is economically precarious and at times stigmatised, at times romanticised. Yet unlike the rest of the country, the North and Northeast voted for the Workers’ Party in the 2018 election, which was defeated by Jair Bolsonaro, whose politics currently threaten the livelihoods of indigenous populations and other minorities. De Andrade’s exhibition One to One is, typically of his work, influenced by the Northeast of Brazil – he was born in Maceió and has lived
in Recife for many years. Entering the gallery space, the viewer is greeted by a gathering of 120 T-shirts installed at torso-height on wooden rods. The different coloured shirts making up Suar a camisa (Working Up a Sweat, 2014) bear company logos and are stained with dirt, paint and sweat. (De Andrade obtained them by offering workers in Recife money or his own shirt in exchange.) The garments bear the traces of manual labour, of living bodies that cannot be reduced to statistics, and also a hint at homoeroticism, poking again at the stereotype of the strong male worker of the North. From today’s perspective, the vacuity of the shirts also calls to mind missing bodies, a result of the violence that the Bolsonaro administration engenders against people of colour, women, the queer, the poor. On the wall behind is Um pra um (One to One, 2019), an irregular grid of narrow clay bars outlining the floorplans of urban dwellings close to the train tracks in Recife. The tiny scale of the absent buildings is dwarfed even more by the lifesize T-shirt in front. José Esparza Chong Cuy’s curatorial decision incisively highlights the cramped living spaces of the workers. Nearby is Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti (da série Infindável Mapa da Fome) (Hunger of Resistance – Kayapó Menkragnoti Foundations (from the series Endless Hunger Map,
2019), consisting of 42 maps of an indigenous territory in the region of Pará in Northern Brazil. For this de Andrade collaborated with women of the Kayapo community, who painted traditional patterns onto colonisers’ representations of land formerly belonging to them. Also installed on the wall are photographs of the women’s hands, both makers of marks and symbols of protest. On view in the last room, meanwhile, is Jogos dirigidos (Directed Games, 2019), a 57-minute-long work couched in the aesthetics of an educational video. It was filmed in Várzea Queimada, a town with a disproportionately high population of deaf people. The community doesn’t use the official sign language, but invented their own. Here, as they tell each other stories and laugh, subtitles sporadically translate the mimes to words, for instance ‘to ride a horse’ or ‘to eat’. One to One is a political exhibition at a moment in time that is threatening to minorities not only in Brazil, but in many places around the world. The rigidity of maps deriving from the Global North and the modest housing grid are contrasted by the (absent) bodies in the shirts, and the bodies that are different in Jogos dirigidos. Amidst the threat of further biopolitical escalation, de Andrade’s sharp and topical show turns to defiance through small gestures and joy. Stefanie Hessler
Jogos dirigidos (Directed Games) (still), 2019, hd video, colour, sound, 57 min. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
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Grada Kilomba Disobediences Pinacoteca de São Paulo 6 July – 30 September In her book Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008) Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba frames everyday racism against black people as a trauma that, in an instant, throws those on the receiving end straight back to colonial times. To counteract this violence, Kilomba, who trained and practised as a clinical psychologist, advocates storytelling that posits knowledge not as learning acquired in academia, which traditionally excludes people of colour, but rather as the embodied experience of marginalised persons – a psychoanalytic approach that draws on Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, mythology, first-person testimonies and Kilomba’s own experiences of racism. Poetic Disobediences similarly seeks a counternarrative centred on the marginal and the repressed. Occupying the corners of Pinacoteca’s second floor, this show frames the museum’s main exhibition, Art in Brazil: A History at Pinacoteca. The latter uses the institution’s collection, displayed in a temporary show, to chart the evolution of Brazilian art from the colonial period to the 1930s. Prominently sited on the margins, Kilomba’s sculptural works, together with two looped videoworks and a multichannel projected installation, serve as a riposte to the representations of Brazilian national character found in the collection: moving from one corner to another, having to traverse the main galleries to see
Kilomba’s work, creates an overwhelming impression that the centre cannot hold. Table of Goods (2017) comprises a pile of red soil, embedded with clumps of chocolate, sugar and coffee, and candles around its circumference. The heap is reminiscent of a termite mound, and the idea that this work might be an eruptive, disruptive occurrence is apt: the main exhibition celebrates white entrepreneurs and European immigrants as bearers of progress, and romanticises white farmers. Black Brazilians, on whose labour the economy was founded, do not figure in Art in Brazil’s portraits until the 1930s. Kilomba’s mound not only evokes slavery on Brazilian plantations through the presence of the economic fruits of their labour, but also, via its installation at the edge of the gallery, recalls quilombos, the hinterlands in which the black community’s resistance was cultivated by runaway slaves. The candles also suggest the sculpture as a thing of ritual, evoking black Brazilian spirituality, which was forced underground in the nineteenth century – an act of disobedience, to which the artist refers in the show’s title, and of which the surviving contemporary quilombos are a reminder. The European academic painting tradition, emulated in the nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Brazilian art academies, was enamoured with ancient mythology.
Illusions Vol ii – Oedipus (detail), 2018, two-channel digital video installation. Courtesy the artist
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Snuck amidst examples of such paintings in the permanent collection, Kilomba’s two videoworks radically reinterpret Greek mythology. Kilomba follows Freud in treating the myths as representations of latent disorders, but she shifts the context from psychoanalysis to postcolonial studies. A two-screen projection, Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo (2017), is particularly evocative. On the smaller of the screens, the artist retells the myth, while on a bigger screen, actors, all of whom are black, reenact the retold story through dance and pantomime. In her retelling, Kilomba notes that she sees in Narcissus’s self-love a metaphor for the arrogance of white people and the imposing of their values and ideals of beauty on other races. This message is pointedly affirmed in the historic works hung in the adjacent rooms, featuring numerous iterations of the idealised white female body, and one painting depicting a young black girl’s distant adoration of a fancy white doll. Kilomba’s video, by contrast, posits blackness as the universal standard. It circles back to Kilomba’s book, in which she reflects that, unlike white narcissism, or the white Oedipal complex that projects white fears onto black bodies, and creates a split white subject, black narcissism can be restorative and insists on the integrity of the black body. As in her writing, Kilomba, in her art, affirms marginality as central. Ela Bittencourt
Dale Frank Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 13 June – 6 July Art and vulgarity. Here’s the painter John Olsen quoted in Robert Hughes’s first book, The Art of Australia, from the revised edition published in 1970: ‘I can rejoice in it. [Vulgarity] has enormous vitality… one has to be prepared to be a bit corny.’ Such a throwback reference would be inappropriate here were it not that, on the evidence of this show, Dale Frank has a similar mindset. Now in his 60th year, he isn’t afraid of his work being thought mushy or, as some of his titles and addenda to his 2d works suggest, risqué. There are paintings here made from acrylics, tinted varnish and epoxyglass resin on Perspex. These are abstractions where loops and smears mesh like the aftermath of wiping a mirror with Mr Muscle, their shiny colours recalling Quality Street sweet wrappers. Purple and viridian streaks collide with washes of cobalt blue and malachite green; preening visions as brazenly shameless as a strutting cockatoo. There’s a retro-psychedelic feel reminiscent of lava lamps or the mid-1960s back-projections for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Painting on Perspex isn’t new, of course, and the spiky works of the Chicago Imagist Jim Nutt
have more clout, more daring. In the press release Frank makes the flashy assertion that such reflective surfaces show ‘the image of something that happens somewhere else’. He sees the reflections as a means to escape full knowledge of what the work is, that it ‘exists only when you are not looking at it’. Well, that really is a bit corny. Two paintings feature sculptural additives: View over Milano (all works 2019) is spotted with cock rings, while View over Rovaniemi features butt plugs that project threateningly, missile-fashion. Frank’s more indecorous titles, meanwhile, are a lazy reviewer’s dream given their word count. One of the shorter ones goes: Cheryl always had the habit of farting every time she coughed which she thought no one noticed. They deliberately offer no clues as to the meaning of the paintings themselves, indeed they fatally distract. Poor Cheryl, you come away thinking. In the centre of the main space sits The Lovers, a vitrine with human bones lying in a bed of refined sugar. We are not told the provenance of the remains; this seems indecent. The skeleton is ‘reconfigured’ to appear like a Siamese twin
with two skulls. Above it sits a faux Murano creation, glass tree shapes with baubles of coloured fruits. This, then, is an inexplicable scene from the life of a double monster. In another corner sits the gross Allied on-ramp public liquid Nitrogen making machine (urinal for men), a combine featuring an Ikea stool, catheter bags and what looks like real piss. Two videos are also shown: tinder and the end of a perfect day have something of Throbbing Gristle’s wilful perversity about them, a sleazy fascination with furtive sex and horrific murders. Dale clearly loves to subvert and spike his sometimes-beautiful creations with a gratuitous ugliness, but this burlesque seems dated. Such antics designed to wind up puritanical ‘wowsers’ are old hat. This appears to be luxury art for the luxury market; seductive as the Lamington cakes the locals love, but just as sickly. Olsen’s conversation concluded: ‘The power of Australian society is its vulgarity’. Sadly, Frank’s ribald, retrograde work here comes over as archaically adolescent, as daring as a whoopee cushion. John Quin
Dale Frank, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Luis Power. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
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Books Mei-mei Berssenbrugge A Treatise on Stars New Directions, 2020
Empathy New Directions, 2020
I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems University of California Press, 2006 Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry has addressed mother-daughter relationships, animal-human relations, ecological collapse and nuclear physics, taking intersecting influences from visual art, philosophy, critical theory, music, geology and Buddhism. The Asian-American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-school-associated poet has always, as the title of her forthcoming collection A Treatise on Stars reaffirms, taken a broad view. She has also been consistently ahead of her time. ‘Fog’, first published in her 1989 collection Empathy, soon to be reissued by New Directions, considers a changing human relationship with the environment via an implicit (and now voguish) critique of Enlightenment separations: ‘Hundreds of millions of years ago, days were many hours shorter. / All things, sounds, stories and beings were related, and this complexity was more obvious. It was not simplified by ideas of relationship in one person’s mind.’ Meditations on gargantuan time scales and the relation of ‘all things’ – ‘slow-whirling galaxies’ and ‘paths of energy’ make an appearance in ‘Fog’ – are interrupted by everyday concerns: memories, husbands, clothes, emotions. The effect is to remind the reader of the limits of human perspective, specifically when considering ecological phenomena (fog, ‘solid ice’, lava, mountains and clouds). These wide panoramas and skewed timelines are wrestled into the numbered sequences of the poem, where Berssenbrugge develops a set of philosophical questions through long lines of verse that initially appear gently abstruse. Yet meaning is patiently delivered through the atmosphere she generates, one that refutes, ultimately, a unified point of view: ‘She can describe for you the phenomenon of feeling her way through the fog. For whom does she describe this? / What ignorance can her description eliminate?’ ‘Fog’ – the metaphoric vehicle for this disseminated perspective – holds ‘the power to make the space continue beyond the single
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perception’. Fog’s material particulars are the key to this complex trope. It is an obfuscating and diffuse substance that is also reflective of frustration, a ‘veil of fog’ between the narrator and a ‘sunlit bank of leaves’. As such it provides the perfect allegory for Berssenbrugge’s opening-up of perspective. It is tactile yet ungraspable, and so the narrator realises that any kind of ‘realism’ can only be framed in the ‘contradicting ambition of her consciousness’. This challenge to a single perception, alongside her preoccupation with ecological spaces, means Berssenbrugge surpasses other ‘ecopoets’ (and, it should be added, artists) who do little more than ape the language of ecotheorists. As human perspective and privilege give way, through her critique, to a radical interconnectedness between animals, objects and people, so Berssenbrugge engages formally with our increased awareness that even the bacteria in our guts and the lice living in our eyebrows will be changed by the plastics embedding themselves in rock formations and our bodies. This dismantling of the human gaze is a careerlong philosophical and ecological agenda for Berssenbrugge, most of whose books were published by small art presses and are now out of print (a situation that New Directions is helping to resolve). Nest (2003), Four Year Old Girl (1998) and Concordance (2006) – her collaboration with artist Kiki Smith – were issued by Kelsey Street Press. By its own description, Kelsey Street ‘was founded in 1974 to address the marginalization of women writers by small press mainstream publishers’, and its roster includes Bhanu Kapil, Barbara Guest and Renee Gladman, progressive writers who also draw on visual art, critical theory and the sciences. Neglected by the mainstream in their early careers, they are now recognised among the most important poets of recent decades. Berssenbrugge’s own impulse to connect extends to her working practice: simply, and cutely, her collected poems is titled I Love Artists (2006), and she has collaborated with her hus-
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band, Richard Tuttle, alongside Smith and others. The influence is apparent, in A Treatise on Stars and Empathy, in her close attention to images, interrogating any kind of ‘given’ or clichéd visual trope. Lines such as ‘observation is grainy; people, dogs, trees are mosaics, a crystalline lattice of interacting bits’ display a healthy distrust of the representational, without sacrificing sincerity or compromising the power of the image. The critic Edward Schelb has written that Berssenbrugge ‘often composes with a book of Chinese philosophy or literature and a volume of critical theory simultaneously open on the table’, and she admits to this fragmentary, scavenging compositional mode: ‘I gather quotes from disparate selected books, cultural criticism, philosophy, Buddhism, and daily life, a few hundred notes.’ Endocrinology, a collaboration with Smith that tackles the timeless poetic theme of endocrine dysfunction, communicates the effect a contaminated environment can have on a body by corrupting the borders separating text and image (Berssenbrugge was made ill from exposure to a pesticide). The thin, pink, skinlike Nepalese paper on which the book is printed lends it the look and feel of a body: this is poetry that moves beyond text into materiality. A Treatise on Stars is Berssenbrugge’s most ambitious collection yet, less rooted to a familiar landscape and with its gaze fixed on the sky. Yet the book’s unashamedly cosmological focus does not free its narrator from consciousness of her limited perspective: she asks, looking up at a constellation, ‘what is the structure of this connectedness’. And even now, our inability to grasp the ways in which we are inextricably interrelated with the world, and the anxiety that results from this, remains at the front and centre: ‘I struggle for understanding beyond environmental fears and grief.’ These books of poems, which decentre the human perspective in a damaged landscape, resonate in an era of climate crisis. Rachael Allen
This dismantling of the human gaze is a careerlong philosophical and ecological agenda for Berssenbrugge September 2019
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Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by Johny Pitts Allen Lane, £20 (hardcover)
Johny Pitts takes us on a trip through a black Europe from which we rarely see and hear; when we do it is usually framed through a narrow, problematising lens. Pitts, a Sheffieldborn writer, photographer and broadcaster, who set up www.afropean.com in 2013 with similar aims, sets out to explore the ‘beauty in black banality’: in alluring, crisp prose he shines a light on the everyday lives of black people in a number of European cities, among them Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. At a time when the populist right is on the rise throughout the continent, this is an important project. His journey, taken over several months, and his interviews with the people he meets along the way are a means of testing whether or not the term Afropean – first coined in 1993 by Marie Daulne, the Belgian-Congolese lead singer of Zap Mama – is a cohesive idea that can bind Europe’s diverse black populations. When Pitts first heard the term, he writes, ‘it encouraged me to think of myself as a whole and unhyphenated: Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living in and with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or blackother. That being black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.’ The European Union estimates that there are at least 15 million people of African descent living within its borders, most of them in France, the uk, Italy and the Netherlands. For one thing at least, Afropean is a starting
point to examine the present conjuncture in Europe: not only in terms of what it means to be black in Europe today, but also to test whether we are at the cusp of a black identity that can be said to be pan-European. To explore these deeper histories of black people in Europe means to uncover histories in which black bodies have been invisible, marginal in the continent, and present too, in which black communities experience insecure lives blighted by social deprivation, unemployment and racism. But black people in Europe are a very diverse group: what connects the second-generation Afro-Cuban-Swede Lucille in Stockholm, with Mozambican-Portuguese Nino in Lisbon, both subjects Pitts meets on his journey, with Becky, the young woman trafficked by the Nigerian mafia to work in a brothel in Sicily, whom I interviewed last summer in Palermo? Beyond their shared blackness, a narrative is needed that can amalgamate these different individual histories and circumstances into an open and inclusive identity that, as Pitts writes, does away with the need for hyphens. While it may be a starting point for us to reflect on black Europe today, it is not clear that ‘Afropean’ does that job. Pitts’s text does not delve into a number of important aspects of the black experience in Europe. Not just how conditions for newly arrived migrants from Africa will be very different to those settled on the continent, but also the roles played by Christianity and Islam in shaping black communities, and what it means to be queer and black, to name a few. Nor does he much acknowledge intergenerational tensions
that exist within black communities. The writer is, to be fair, honest about these intersectional shortcomings from the outset, admitting that the journey could never be exhaustive for all sorts of practical and economic reasons. For me then ‘Afropean’ needs to exist alongside ‘the black Mediterranean’ – a term first coined by Italian academic Alessandra Di Maio in 2012 that drew inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Since then it has sparked international interest in the relationship between Europe and Africa – and how much of this history is rooted in violence and oppression. At its heart ‘black Mediterranean’ is a means by which to examine the realities at Europe’s borders, to not treat the continent as an enclosed space, but one that is porous and rooted in histories of slavery and globalist mass extraction – a history in which black bodies have been brutalised to make Europe rich. These are histories denied as often as they are forgotten; they are histories of colonialism rarely discussed outside academia. Europe, unlike America, has all too often refused to confront the history of brutal racism and colonial plunder that is integral to the stories of migrant arrivals from Africa today. In former European colonial powers today such as Italy and Belgium there’s a collective amnesia over how these histories may shape a pan-European black identity. And all the while European countries have not sought to decolonise in order to create a new gaze on black bodies in Europe, a gaze in which black agency, not displacement or suffering, is the central component of their identity. Ismail Einashe
Zeichnungen by Peter Handke Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, €39.80 (hardcover) Zeichnungen, or ‘drawings’, is a collection of 110 finely penned, fragmentary images taken from the margins of notebooks used by Peter Handke, one of the most successful, prolific and confounding authors in the German language of the past 50 years. Sporadically dated, from 2007 to 2017, most are hand-notated with a detail or two about what is depicted, and perhaps where the drawing was made: ‘The hour between swallow and bat, Aranjuez’; ‘Nocturnal facade, Versailles St Louis, and the wonderful swelling’ (I am translating with the assistance
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of Google; the book, including a short prefatory essay by Giorgio Agamben, titled ‘Zettel und Bilder’, notes and pictures, is in German). Other subjects include a dead mole, a clay beehive resembling a human heart, ice crystals on an airplane window, the pattern of a sleeping child’s hair. Inked in blue, black, red, green and/or yellow, some dense to the point of obscurity, others sketchy, the drawings have been removed from the fuller context of the notebook page and reproduced at close to actual size, with a generous surrounding of white
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space to focus our attention on these images as images. For this Austrian literary figure, who has explored, obsessively, the limits of written and spoken language in novels, plays, screenplays (including Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, 1987), poetry and essays (and who has courted controversy through, for example, a prominent defence of the actions of Slobodan Milošević), Zeichnungen presents a disorienting if not quite faithful transition from words to images, and is perhaps of greatest interest to the Handke superfan. David Terrien
In print ‘Artistic integrity’ and the 12 horses of Jannis Kounellis – a guide to new writing in art and beyond Confusion around such basic liberal institutions as free speech has ‘fogged’ our vision, writes Nick Fraser in Say What Happened (Faber, £20), before proposing that the ‘truth-telling’ of documentary film might help disperse the murk. Yet, as his history of the genre – spanning David Attenborough, Leni Riefenstahl and much in between – makes clear, even the simple-sounding act of ‘saying what happened’ requires the speaker (or filmmaker) to construct a narrative around it. This won’t be news to cultural historian Perry Anderson, who tells us in the foreword to Brazil Apart (Verso, £16.99) that he is engaged in a ‘study of the political life of all the major powers of the world’, for which ArtReview wishes him all the best. Spinning off from a project that becomes more depressing by the day, the former editor of the New Left Review writes this timely history of the onetime beacon of democratic socialism in South America. It was Perry’s brother, Benedict, who coined the phrase ‘imagined communities’ to describe the nationalisms fostered by print capitalism and exploited by demagogues like Jair Bolsonaro. But, this print magazine would hastily add, the invention of the press also assisted in the formation of transnational communities including… the artworld! Martin Gayford’s The Pursuit of Art (Thames & Hudson, £16.95) takes you on a tour of its sites – visiting Marina Abramović in Venice, tripping to Beijing
with Gilbert & George – and invites you into an inner circle you might, on reflection, have second thoughts about entering. It’s a different journey than that imagined by Cézanne, who in a letter to Monet affirmed that his own ‘chimerical pursuit of art’ was best undertaken by remaining in exactly the same place. Indeed, as Gayford’s chapter openings make clear (‘High above the Atlantic, I saw Ellsworth Kellys everywhere…’ / ‘In 2007, I flew 1,200 miles north… to look at a collection of twenty-four subtly different varieties of water’), the globalised artworld was really made possible by cheap air travel, the nightmarish consequences of which are hinted at in Quentin Blake’s latest watercolours. The postdiluvian landscapes in Moonlight Travellers (Thames & Hudson, £16.95), through which ghostly figures drive winged creatures and spindly machines, offer further evidence of how productive dreams can be for artists. But they tend to make asses of writers, and so credit to the professionally lugubrious Will Self for crafting a narrative to accompany Blake’s twilit drawings. Death also hangs over Selçuk Demirel and the late John Berger’s What Time Is It? (Notting Hill Editions, £14.99), which combines Demirel’s witty surrealist drawings with snippets from the late author’s writing on time. It might be said that culling sentences from their context risks reducing parts of a complex whole to platitudes, but on the other hand it makes for a nice toilet book. Less obviously well adapted to a little quiet thunderboxing is Joan Kee’s Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (University of California Press, £50), which considers how artists have ‘engaged with the law in ways that signalled a recuperation of the integrity that they believed had been compromised’ by state institutions. If you can recover from the idea that artists have integrity, this wide-ranging
volume offers insights into issues (of certification and distribution, for instance) that shaped Conceptual art. The final chapter of Kee’s book is addressed to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work, which also crops up in T. Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through (Coffee House Press, £12.99). Rather than a case study for legal issues of ownership, community and authenticity, though, Gonzalez-Torres provides a hook from which Fleischmann hangs meditations on sexuality and identity. Which, now ArtReview writes it down, doesn’t sound so different. Readers bored by the literary trend for autofiction might shy away from another essayistic first-person novel, but Fleischmann steers between the rocks of artless confession and tiresome shadow puppetry on which the genre so often flounders. Sylvie Weil’s Selfies (Les Fugitives, translated by Ros Schwartz, £11.95), which imagines the thought processes of female self-portraitists through history, shows the young pretenders how it’s done. Established selfie-takers will no doubt be aware of how their followers on Instagram are liable to interpret their body language (‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘vapid’). But if you’re just starting out, ArtReview recommends Desmond Morris’s Postures (Thames & Hudson, £24.95), in which the veteran surrealist and zoologist (the only person, to ArtReview’s knowledge, to have held senior positions at both the ica and London Zoo) explores the cultural histories of body language. This vastly entertaining study encompasses footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović (Morris was also once on the board of Oxford United fc), whose repertoire of pantomime machismo includes a ‘threat-face intense enough to intimidate most rival players’ – along with papal ‘glove-slaps’ and crying baby sculptures from the ‘mysterious Olmec civilisation’. The 12 horses that Jannis Kounellis installed in Galleria L’Attico in 1969 were, in terms that could equally be applied to the ponytailed football God, ‘a fecundating force [that] embodied the totality of an approach to art that believed in creative fertility, to the point of inseminating a traditionally rigid womb’. Germano Celant’s introductory essay to Kounellis (Fondazione Prada, €76) shows little interest in ‘defogging’ the practice of contemporary art. But the sculptures, paintings and installations herded together in this covetable book suggest that sometimes – just sometimes – the work can speak for itself. What’s more, it might even say something true. Ben Eastham
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Delicious!
Courtesy Yoan Capote (see page 22)
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on the cover om Artwork by Chim P and Hidenori Yoshioka
Words on the spine and on pages 25, 49 and 91 are from A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
on page 116 Illustration by João Fazenda
September 2019
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How does contemporary art contribute to our awareness of big issues? Sometimes like this: in the latest project to feature contemporary art and outer space (there have been a few), the African Art Space Project will commission an artist from Africa to create an image, to be applied to the nose cone of an Ariane 5 rocket launcher. Blasting off in 2021, it will deliver a European meteorological satellite into orbit, which will observe the African continent and collect meteorological data about how Africa is being affected by global warming. If you’re wondering how anyone will see an artwork on the nose cone of a rocket that will be travelling at 25,000kph and then be jettisoned to plummet to earth, you’ve missed the point. According to the project’s initiators, African Artists for Development (aad), a foundation set up by French art collectors Matthias and Gervanne Leridon (they’re passionate about contemporary art from Africa), the work will be toured across Africa before being fired into space. It’s a symbolic act, the first work of African art in space, a ‘powerful symbol of the continent’s artistic power’, incarnating the ‘image of a modern, ambitious, optimistic Africa that takes us beyond the stars’. Space is a strange place to want to send contemporary art, though it doesn’t stop artists (and art collectors) wanting to do just that. Yet maybe what art in space does best is show up the tensions of the artworld’s attitude towards it being a visible, influential culture, with access to the most elite levels of economic, social and cultural power. And, like misfiring rocket launchers, it produces its own spectacles of disappointment. Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector, a 30m-long diamond-shaped balloon compacted inside a satellite, was launched into space on 3 December 2018. Unfurled, the work would have been visible from earth. According to its commissioner, the Nevada Museum of Art, Orbital Reflector would help ‘change the way we see ourselves… and our place in the world’. For Paglen, this purely artistic gesture would encourage the world to ask ‘serious questions about who controls space: Does anyone own it? And who ultimately decides how it is used?’ As it turned out, due to the us government shutdown of early 2019 (caused by Donald Trump’s standoff with Congress), the tiny device that would have deployed the work couldn’t be given authorisation by the Federal Communications Commission. Running out of power, it now floats lifeless in Earth orbit. But regardless of their success or failure, these art-in-space projects stand in uneasy rela-
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Space Junk(et)
Pioneer 10. Courtesy nasa
tion to the power and privilege that enables them. Ironies abound, since while these projects may raise big questions, such questions are full of equally big social and political issues that show up art’s relatively slow and secondary ability to respond to them. After all, we should all want a ‘modern, ambitious and optimistic Africa’. Who wouldn’t? But what that really demands is an economically vibrant, prosperous and wealthy Africa, and that might mean a few more co2 emissions, to eradicate human poverty and want from this poorest of continents. Meanwhile, Ariane 5 rockets are launched from French Guyana, a country in Latin America, remember, that is still an ex-colonial territory of France, is still run as a department of the French
ArtReview
state and uses the euro as its currency. Fine words by wealthy French art collectors about the ‘power of African art’ don’t resolve the still-existing power relations between the powerful West and the weaker African continent. (Maybe, too, a project to send a work of African art into space would have had better optics if it wasn’t funded by donations of artworks by African artists.) Paglen’s Orbital Reflector – launched on one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets – is also full of unintended ironies. Musk’s SpaceX company has the vaunting ambition of making space launches cost effective, so that his personal ambition of seeing humanity colonise Mars will be more achievable. Yet in today’s more downbeat and self-critical culture, humanity going to space is often seen less as a noble and optimistic vision of humankind and more as an opportunity for humans to pollute the cosmos with the same shit with which they’ve littered Earth. As T.J. Demos grumbled in a recent issue of e-flux journal, Musk’s ‘libertarian entrepreneurialism’ is another aspect of ‘a growing “colonial futurism” premised upon the neoliberalization of outer space… set on off-planet resource mining, terraforming other planets, and extending property claims far into the galaxy’. For Demos, ‘with the neoliberal corporatemilitary-state complex determined to occupy and settle the very place that certain Afrofuturists have long sought as a destination to escape colonized Earth, such starry-eyed fantasies are quickly becoming grim futures’. Artists often reflect and project the preoccupations and anxieties of their moment. Now artists worry about the environment and colonialism. The first artwork on the Moon, Fallen Astronaut (1971), by Belgian Paul Van Hoeydonck, memorialised the 14 Americans and Russians who have died in the attempt to explore space. It still embodied the sense of human significance in that project. Damien Hirst got to Mars before Elon Musk, his spotpainting-derived panel attached to the Beagle 2 Mars explorer in 2003. Its cheery cynicism said little about space and more about Hirst’s thirst for self-publicity. The greatest work of human culture in space, if it still exists, isn’t even an ‘artwork’. It’s the information panel bolted to the side of the Pioneer probe launched in 1972. Marked with schematics of Earth’s position in the universe and stylised images of a man and a woman, it’s not an attempt to communicate with ourselves, about our own worries, but to others, to say hello. J.J. Charlesworth
December 5 – 8, 2019 Photograph taken at Miami Children’s Museum