ArtReview Summer 2022 by ArtReview

Pointing the finger of blame at others since 1949

It’s not me, it’s you Buck Ellison Blind Detectives Family Fantasies

Martha Jungwirth, Ohne Titel (detail), 2022. Oil on boad (book back) 59.7 x 44.7 cm. © Martha Jungwirth / Bildrecht, Wien 2022. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi.

Martha Jungwirth

All Will Fall

London June—July 2022

UGO RONDINONE

BURN SHINE FLY

SCUOLA GRANDE SAN GIOVANNI

EVANGELISTA DI VENEZIA

APRIL 20 – SEPTEMBER 17

ILANA SAVDIE In jest

8 July – 11 September 2022 White Cube, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ

N. DASH

June 25 - November 6, 2022

S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium Represented by Mehdi Chouakri Gallery - Casey Kaplan Gallery - Zeno X Gallery

리히터 다니엘 미치광이웃 나의

6. 23 – 9. 28

Image © Daniel Richter, 2022 Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul Deichtorhallen Hamburg/ Falckenberg Collection Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

스페이스K 서울 SPACE K Seoul 07802 서울시 강서구 마곡중앙8로 32 32, Magokjungang8-ro, Gangseo-gu, Seoul, 07802, Republic of Korea 02-3665-8918 www.spacek.co.kr spacek_korea

Gagosian London

Adam McEwen, Untitled, 2020

HAUNTED REALISM

ArtReview vol 74 no 5 Summer 2022

The Good Old New Normal When ArtReview launched back in 1949, its front covers were dedicated to selfportraits of the artists it featured in its pages (of which – the pages – there were not many, so each issue tended to feature a lengthy appreciation of one artist; the rest would be dedicated to news and reviews, in keeping with the magazine’s title at that point, Art News and Review). Often the portraits were produced specifically for the magazine. A double-down if you like on the magazine’s presentation of artists as modern-day heroes when it came to rethinking art’s embeddedness in the reshaping of culture and society in the postwar and postcolonial era. Of course, you could argue that the process of creating heroes was to some degree a throwback to the art-historical traditions of earlier eras and, inasmuch as it extended the concept of artists as lone geniuses, a contradiction to any attempt to position art at the heart of any form of social rebuilding. But in a way it was, and is, an accurate reflection of the way art engages with different and often contradictory value systems: those dictated by the market and those dictated by the social implications of creating. Not that artists don’t have a habit of dictating (or attempting to dictate) themselves. Fastforward to now and errr… nothing’s changed: these are the overlapping value systems that ArtReview continues to navigate, giving you the lowdown on individual artistic practice and attempting to connect that to wider social and intellectual movements in the world at large. And it still, occasionally, has portraits of individual artists on its cover (the one on this issue is by an artist, not of an artist, by the way). Although ArtReview does like to think it’s learned a thing or two along the way. Even if, at times, it’s not sure exactly what.

Contemporary

All of which is a somewhat roundabout way of telling you that this issue is dedicated to the ways in which artists and curators are rethinking their role in a wider social environment. Whether it’s Buck Ellison (it’s one of his works on the cover) looking at the way in which portrait photography moulds the image of its subject and its viewers, Katia Kameli’s examination of the lacunae in the documented history of Algeria, Prem Krishnamurthy rethinking the role of curators in terms of care and transformation, the role of ocean studies in thinking the same or the photographs of Wendy Red Star, which mash up the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘traditional’ in a reimagining of the traditional (ha, ha) Crow Fair parade. Of course, being fond of contradiction, ArtReview also has space for the curious paintings of Richard Bosman and the even more curious visions of what it means to be an artist today. And a look towards what nfts might tell us about old and new ways of seeing. So on the one hand, after 73 years, ArtReview is still working on working things out. On the other hand, it’s seeing scope for transformation both in the practice of art and in the way in which art responds to and imagines new futures for the communities of which it is inevitably a part. Right now, for ArtReview at least, it’s back to scavenging, while appearing to critique, ideas from 1949. C’mon! Recycling is all the rage right now. That’s the only way you can combine new and normal. ArtReview

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Fe rr in i nd ra sa es Al

Silvia Rosi

Illuminating paths in contemporary art

Namsal Siedlecki 24.06 — 20.11.2022

Art Observed

The Interview Bonnie Camplin by Ross Simonini 26

page 26 Bonnie Camplin, Open Luminous Green, 2018, acrylic on paper. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Glarus

Art Featured

Buck Ellison by Jonathan Griffin 36

Prem Krishnamurthy Interview by Mark Rappolt 64

Katia Kameli’s Algerian Novel by Louise Darblay 42

Oceanic Imaginaries by Erik Morse 68

Disintegrating Bodies by J.J. Charlesworth 46

Richard Bosman by Brad Phillips 74

A Float for the Future Artist project by Wendy Red Star 53

page 46 Beeple, Everydays: Gigachad, 2021, nft jpeg. Courtesy the artist

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 86 Virginia Overton, by Cal Revely-Calder Youssef Nabil, by Digby Warde-Aldam Fiona Connor, by Cat Kron Tremblings, by Juliet Jacques Vera Molnár, by Charlotte Kent Toshiko Takaezu, by Owen Duffy Grace Ndiritu, by Pádraic E. Moore Karen Lamassonne and Aurora Pellizzi, by Oliver Basciano Carrie Mae Weems, by Emily McDermott Petrit Halilaj, by Mitch Speed Wanda Pimentel, by Oliver Basciano Berlin Gallery Weekend, by Martin Herbert

Girl Online, by Joanna Walsh, reviewed by Anandi Mishra Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, by Bénédicte Savoy, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective, by Paul Martineau, reviewed by Cat Kron Time Is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by David Terrien Smashing Statues, by Erin L. Thompson, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak Isolarii editions, reviewed by Cal Revely-Calder scumb Manifesto: Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books, by Justine Kurland, reviewed by Fi Churchman

page 90 Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Silent (detail), 2016, video installation, 7 min. Courtesy Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, and Marcelle Alix, Paris

backpage 110

Art Observed

In the truth 25

Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Bonnie Camplin

“The world is a lot weirder than we’ve been taught in school”

For half of her life, Bonnie Camplin has been at work on a project to understand the nature and structure of reality. She began with her own subjective experiences of mental health and continued to explore a range of esoteric subjects including Celtic ritual, quantum physics, extrasensory perception, experimental theatre, so-called abnormal or anomalous psychology, military science and femtotechnology [smaller than nano]. She’s spent 25 years syncretising this research into a unique, fascinating theory of perception, ontology and the spiralling nature of time and space. The British-born Camplin, who is in her early fifties, has primarily expressed these ideas through drawing and painting. Initially she worked with refined representational draughtsmanship and gradually distilled her marks to scribbles, stick figures and theoretical propositions, produced while in a trancelike state.

For her, art is a communion with the immaterial – what she calls a “gnostical modality” or a “dimensional gate” – and the objects she exhibits are simply the material residue of those transmissions. Her other earthly byproducts have included films, music and photographs. Her early work also involved acting, dancing and staging happenings in nightclubs around London’s Soho. She has collaborated with Paulina Olowska, played in a band with Mark Leckey and exhibited with Matt Mullican, one of the few artists with whom I might tenuously compare her practice of lifelong inner exploration. In recent years Camplin has focused on pedagogy. Her later exhibitions took the form of workshops and experimental research facilities, such as in her 2015 Turner Prize show The Military Industrial Complex. Many of her most adventurous

Summer 2022

interests, such as the holographic universe and terrain theory, have been articulated in lucid, exploratory lectures. Since 2018 she has stepped entirely away from making physical, capitalist “output”, instead focusing her energy on more direct interaction with the “beyond-human world” and her interactions with students as a teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London. For the following interview, Camplin called me on video from her flat in London Bridge. She had recently returned from her second home, in Cumbria, where she lives off-grid in a yurt on the edge of an ancient forest. She answered all my questions with a cool, gentle composure, even while discussing the most wild, controversial hypotheses. The conversation lasted for over two hours and felt bountiful in every moment, energised by Camplin’s intellect and grounded by her preternatural sensitivity.

No Longer an Atheist ross simonini I noticed that you often use the word ‘survivor’ or ‘survival’ when discussing your work. Is this a central concept for you? bonnie camplin Yeah. It means that I’m a perceiving organism in the process of survival. And I think for me survival, creativity and love, they’re all the same movement. I’ve been through art school and I’ve been around some very, materially speaking, privileged people. And I don’t come from material privilege. I come from intellectual privilege and mental-freedom privilege, so for me it’s all about trying to survive and stay free, to stay sane and be whole. I’m also a bit of a prepper. My dad was a total prepper. And the whole ‘mad’ (Mutually Assured Destruction), the threat of all-out nuclear destruction, was a thing that was just pumped out constantly by the media through the 70s and the 80s, the Cold War, so we lived with this constant rhetoric about ‘Duck and Cover’, tomorrow, every day could be your last day! Because the whole world could just be obliterated by ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’. rs Is the survival instinct crucial to the art that you’ve made? bc Yeah. On many levels. The only reason I ended up doing art was because in religious education we were supposed to read and

demonstrate our comprehension in writing, but I would get that done quickly and spent the rest of the time drawing pictures. And so my religious education teacher said, “Oh, you’re going to do art” and I said, “What else am I going to do?” Art is also a really good story or ruse for avoiding the mental health system. If you’re an artist, you’ve got a cover story, haven’t you? Whereas if you’re just a sort of eccentric person with too many ideas, you’re potentially a candidate for the psych ward… At a certain point I was on the edge of that candidacy, even though I’m actually a very, very sensible person. It’s kind of like, where are you? Where’s your harbour when your life doesn’t have any kind of plan? But I do think the gallery system is a conspiracy against the artist. It’s not a harbour. It’s not a safe place for artists. It is a sanctioned space, and I’ve been trying to minimise my interaction with it and still be able to have some good conversations with some good people. I also wonder what kind of professionalisationspecialisation, relegation and reduction and/or capture kind of effects it has on spiritual power. Do you feel that? rs Yeah. I see two parallel paths with art. You could call them the material and the immaterial, or the cynical and the earnest. It’s easier to reject one path and embrace the other totally, but for me the challenge is to walk both at once.

bc That is a good way of putting it. Being multilingual. I guess I’m saying that galleries don’t really support you in a way you might fantasise that they should do when you’re in art school. And it’s just that all I want to do is to do whatever I’m doing. And I haven’t made a drawing in over two years, because I haven’t felt the need. rs Have you turned down many shows? bc Maybe three years ago my gallery said, “Let’s do a show” and I said, “I want to hold a series of conferences in the gallery space. Where we really get into this thing about nature reconnection and creativity, perception and cosmos and natural law and land rights.” But my gallery wanted objects. So fair enough. rs It’s been four years since your last exhibition, right? bc In 2018 I did a show in Berlin called Free-will Presupposes Full Disclosure [at Ebensperger]. That included the spiral drawings. That was amazing because I actually met [quantum physicist Werner] Heisenberg’s family and they saw my spiral cosmogony diagrams. I got to see them seeing my drawings! So those drawings are the last thing I did, and I was so massively focused and downloading a lot when I made them, and I just feel that I can’t really top what I did with those drawings. I think they’re brilliant! rs What about the drawings was so successful?

Untitled (detail), 2018, felt tip on paper, 15 parts, 20 × 30 cm each. Photo: Ludger Paffrath. Courtesy the artist and Ebensperger, Berlin

ArtReview

bc I just had total clarity and focus. It was literally like a lifetime’s work of asking about the structure of reality. And I was able to pull it all together. I synthesised [naturalist and philosopher] Viktor Schauberger’s principles with [artist and writer] Dr Walter Russell with the Ra Material downloads [transcripts of communications from the Venusian group-entity Ra, published 1982–84], specifically the ‘Probability Vortexes’ and the ‘zero-point’, with my own insight and all this that I’ve been completely obsessed with since I had a near-death experience when I was twentyfive. Before then I was an atheist. And then after that I wasn’t an atheist anymore. And I had this experience of time and spirals and the zero-point, and I’ve been trying to really understand that ever since. So that’s 25 years of obsessively researching about physics and motion and specifically spirals. And I just feel like I really cracked it, and I haven’t really done any drawings since.

Supposedly Fringe Theories rs The way you talk about art is through the lens of science. Are you interested in art without science? bc I very rarely go to see art. I’m also privileged, as I do get to see a lot of art because of my job. I’m not disinterested. It’s just that I don’t really have time to go to art shows. I’m just obsessed with certain things and it’s not art.

rs Has that always been the case for you? bc Pretty much. Yeah. rs So art was always a way to research and synthesise scientific paradigms.

They’re actually the ones who are doing the real research. Because they’ve got the confidence now, whereas 10, 20 years ago you really had to prove how rational you were just to be credible.

bc Yeah, but not just ‘science’ – also other knowledge systems. And it’s taken me years to find my way to the actual scientists who I feel have the actual goods, because, for example, Einstein doesn’t. He thought the speed of light was a constant, but it isn’t. And through a lot of my research into very dark stuff, military special-programmes stuff, what is apparent to me is that they’re not doing Einstein. They’re using weird, obscure, supposedly fringe theories such as those of Walter Russell, Dr Rupert Sheldrake and the like. That’s who they’re into because the world is a lot weirder than we’ve been taught in school.

rs Which is a peculiar requirement of artists.

rs How do you reconcile teaching inside the artworld that you resist?

bc Yeah, that was brilliant.

bc Well, we have new minds coming in every year and they’re changing things. Pedagogy is a two-way street, isn’t it? I’m finding that a lot of them aren’t even interested in galleries. They set up these little shows, and it’s a lot more fluid and a lot less aspirant. Also, ‘spirituality’ is no longer a dirty word as it was 10, 20 years ago. So, there are these psychic girls that come through. They’re not marginalised now.

bc Yeah. I mean, criticality is key, but ‘critique’ less so. These are two different things, aren’t they? So, I fucking love my job. I wouldn’t give it up for the world and it gives me a lot of pleasure and I meet these great souls who come through. And I do have great conversations. And then, I’ve been trying to reword the public materials for our programme of study, actually, so as not to suggest that the gallery system is necessarily the ultimate destiny for an artist. rs I heard you held a workshop on remote viewing when you taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt…

rs … and a trip to a boot factory. bc That visit was part of a trip to the Polish mountains near Krakow that was [Jerzy] Grotowski-inspired. He was the experimental theatre director from the 60s who was really into quantum theory and perception and revitalising all these kinds of like mastery tradition stuff with his actors, bringing it all down to the archetypical. Paulina Olowska, a Polish artist and

Untitled (detail), 2018, felt tip on paper, 15 parts, 20 × 30 cm each. Photo: Ludger Paffrath. Courtesy the artist and Ebensperger, Berlin

Summer 2022

dear friend, she lives near there and she actually organised that trip to the boot factory for us. So that was just like a school trip. At Städelschule they have so much money that I had a personal assistant, and I would get him every month to organise field trips to factories and so on. And then I got the elbow from Städelschule. I just got kicked out. rs Because of these field trips? bc No; they just didn’t like me. Their paradigm seemed quite old-school to my mind, even though there were a lot of amazing students. It seemed to be kind of ‘dining out on its past’ of certain artists who had a certain cachet at a certain point in time; also the Frankfurt School etc and with Marxism as the chic doctrine. I wasn’t very famous and they do like to have establishment ‘names’ on the books there. The reason it’s free to study there is because the banks sponsor the school. And the banks will only sponsor if they’ve heard of the names on the faculty. But they hadn’t heard of me!

Living in a Hologram? rs I’ve heard you used the phrase ‘the invented life’ to describe your work. What does that mean? bc Oh, that’s not even my phrase. So, in the 90s I was in nightclubs where I was doing my

creativity. That was the context. I was doing it for about 11 years. Me and my closest pals, we were all from non-materially-privileged backgrounds and so it’s a real precarity situation and we’re in financial poverty a lot. But we’re doing the best club nights and going to all the best parties and everything. We looked amazing and raw and so on, but we didn’t have a lot of cash. If we ever did have loads of cash it would be in a plastic bag ’cause we had done a good club night. And we were sitting around and doing that thing where, you’re really just trying to affirm and encourage yourself and each other along. I can even name the people, Sarah Churchill and Andrew Aveling. And we said, “We don’t have a plan, we just live in the moment of the invented life because we are literally having to make it up as we go along. We don’t have financial support. We don’t have a destiny. We might not even make it.” We didn’t think we were going to make it to age thirty. We all thought we were gonna die. That’s what we had in common.

aren’t, you actually are. And so now I have a bit more grounding in those esoteric principles about the holographic nature of reality – and how it’s not a static thing. So now I can do a little bit more of an impeccable attitude, rather than a kind of under duress attitude, does that make sense?

rs And you did nearly die, right?

rs As what?

bc Yeah, I did have a near-death experience. But it’s also an attitude to life, which is now how I would understand that everything is sacred. Everything is alive. You’re creating it from moment to moment, even if you think you

bc Well, I would say I was probably brought up with a homegrown pagan-animist cosmology from my father, who was more of a space cadet, more of a Toltec than my mum, who was more of a staunch atheist, rationalist pragmatist. These

Marcus Brown, 1988, two c-prints, 62 × 53 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Glarus

ArtReview

rs Something like animism? bc I’m of that tradition, I would say. rs Can you say more about your near-death experience? bc Well, at a certain point I tried to commit suicide. I took an overdose and went into a coma and it’s a miracle that I survived, apparently. And I just had this massive epiphany during the experience, and it had everything to do with the nature of time. There was some kind of ‘spiralised-transactional-pass’ event that took place. I don’t know if I got swapped out or something, but something… spiralised. I just basically realised that the universe is conscious, that I’m part of it. And so I sort of got shot out the other side, kind of born again.

epic time, 2018 (installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus). Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Glarus

Summer 2022

Semantic-capture-device at Zero-point, 2016, direct-to-substrate on painted panel, 208 × 99 cm. Courtesy the artist and Michael Benevento, Los Angeles

ArtReview

rs Your contract with art, at that point, had been fulfilled.

would be the closest things I had to a model of the universe. So I was born again, not as a Christian, but as animist, I suppose. rs And had the suicidal compulsion faded? bc Gone! Gone!

Everyone’s an Artist rs You said you were swapped – bc I was swapped out in an instant from someone who wanted to die to someone who wanted to live. But really, someone who wants to die is not really someone who wants to die. They’re just someone who’s in a lot of pain and confusion, and they’re motivated to take a leap. I think it’s because I didn’t want to go mad. I knew I was going mad, but I didn’t have the courage to go mad. So, I chose. I was choosing death because I couldn’t stand being here anymore. I was very sensitive. I could feel the evil in things and I didn’t know how to protect myself from it. So yes, in an instant I went from that to just being on this massive quest. A Gnostic sort of quest. That was 25 years ago. rs And it sounds like you feel as if you, in some ways, arrived at the end of your quest with that show. bc I think you’re right. I think you’re right. A 25-year project.

bc Right. I mean, never say never, and the wider project is ongoing, but I feel that everything is changing and for one thing, every human will realise they are a born creator. So, the idea of an ‘artist’ in the professionalised sense, in the sense of an artist as ‘special case’, I think that will fizzle out. And all humans will realise that they are born creators, and therefore the meaning of ‘artist’ will change. So, I don’t know what the artworld, ie the gallery system, is going to do moving forward? rs How you are inventing your life going forward? bc I think it’s becoming more and more the case that my creative focus is primarily in psionic interaction with the rest of nature. Also, living off-grid is high maintenance, and meaningful physical hard work is very grounding. But at the moment I’m also having these telephone conversations with an artist who goes by the name ‘The Beat Messenger’ where we’re doing quite a lot of visioning and mining thereof. We think it’s highly likely that she may have been in these unacknowledged ‘milab’ [military abduction] programmes where gifted children were identified and tracked and taken off to the side and then involved in highly esoteric military research programmes.

And then I have this thing about the 200-acre wood next to our home off-grid in Cumbria. The forest was the primary metaphor for the mind before computers came along. And what I’m trying to do is to internalise a mental map of this particular forest, the topography of it. I wanna model that forest mentally without the use of pen and paper, but physically walking it. You can easily get lost in there; it’s undulating and rocky, ancient and intelligent. rs You are building a kind of memory palace. bc Yes. So, I want to model it but not in an exoteric/exterior way, only in an interior way. As a learning aid, for one thing. As a model for contemplating the nature of neural networks and the nature of thought. I want to go deep into what technology really means when it isn’t hijacked by… rs Hardware? bc Yes. There are subtler technologies of the mind we can work with, which is sort of what making an art object is anyway. It’s a mimicking of that potential. And so I wonder, if there’s no relegation to the sanctioned ‘artworld’, if there’s no gallery system, then what will artists be doing with the technology of their mind in nature? Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

Untitled (detail), 2018, felt tip on paper, 15 parts, 20 × 30 cm (each). Photo: Ludger Paffrath. Courtesy the artist and Ebensperger, Berlin

Summer 2022

Oltremarino 6 - 150x200cm - Oil, Resin & Pigment on Canvas 2022

Contemporary Art

Los Angeles, California, 90067 novakart.com

Art Featured

Pain 35

American Freaks Buck Ellison’s photographs capture the codes of the 1% and how the 99% might see them by Jonathan Griffin

The handsome blond man in the photograph reclines on a wrinkled Persian rug, an arm’s length from the camera. His smiling eyes gaze fondly into ours. Maybe he’s about to say something. But what? Other details catch the eye: he has one finger in a book – Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832) – and he wears a wedding ring. His stonewashed denim shirt is embroidered with the corporate logo of saic – ‘An employee-owned company’ – and he sports a rugged-looking digital watch. His forearms are scratched. On the brim of his baseball cap, in permanent marker, is written the word ‘prince’. What else might you want to know about this picture? It is an artwork by the artist Buck Ellison, currently on view in the Whitney Biennial. Ellison is a Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer who works for the most part in what you might call a commercial idiom: well-lit, immaculately composed and often staged still lifes, portraits and narrative tableaux. The title of this photograph is Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts, Price Includes Uniform, Never Hit Soft, 2003 (2021), and it depicts Erik Prince, former Navy seal and founder of military contractor Blackwater, at home on his Wyoming ranch in 2003. The man in the photograph is actually a professional actor, cast by Ellison for his close resemblance to the young Prince. The work is part of a series titled Little Brother (2021–22), which, through dramatic reconstruction, attempts to flesh out a fuller portrait of a mysterious figure usually vilified by liberals. Prince’s older sister is Betsy DeVos, the Christian conservative billionaire Republican donor appointed by Donald Trump in 2017 as his supremely underqualified education secretary, a position she used to roll back protections for transgender and bipoc students, as well as survivors of sexual harassment, all while generally undermining America’s public education system. Prince himself reluctantly entered the public eye in 2007 when Blackwater mercenaries shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in the Nisour Square Massacre in Baghdad, injuring 20 others. He receded from view for a while, but later became a shadow adviser to Trump, who returned the favour by pardoning four convicted Blackwater operatives before he left office. There’s more, though. In 2003, just as Blackwater was receiving its first major government contracts, Prince’s wife, Joan, was dying of

cancer. Before she died, Prince began an affair with his children’s nanny, Joanna, who attended Joan’s funeral pregnant with Prince’s child. In 2003 Prince was thirty-four, the same age as Ellison when he took these photographs, a fact that suggests the possibility of affinity between the artist and his muse – despite Ellison calling him, in the Whitney’s exhibition didactic, ‘a snake in the grass’. Ellison goes on to wonder whether or not ‘a camera allows us to desire, or to be curious, or to feel empathy towards a figure like this’. Those are three quite distinct impulses, all worth unpacking. Curiosity is the easiest to deal with. As with many members of America’s ultrawealthy, white upper-classes, there are remarkably few photographs in public circulation of the young Erik Prince. Despite wielding inordinate political power, the Princes (as with dynasties such as the Sacklers, the Kochs, the Mellons and the Rockefellers) use their extraordinary wealth to constrict their public profiles, staying mainly out of sight as individuals even while their family names are everywhere. Curiosity is a natural response. Empathy is another matter. Ellison has said that he began thinking about empathy as a possible response to his photographs around 2018, when he was making his first depictions of Betsy DeVos. In Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984 (2019), a pregnant DeVos is speaking forcefully into a telephone while her husband listens in. Not exactly a likeable character, perhaps, but then likeability is a problematic expectation of powerful female figures. During DeVos’s fraught tenure under Trump, Ellison was struck by the misogyny laced through the vitriol directed at her. Empathy, it is often said, is sorely lacking in American public discourse. This is by now such a truism that certain provocative thinkers have built careers by arguing against empathy. There’s not much of a case there, except to parse the distinction between cognitive empathy, which allows you to understand why someone thinks and feels the way they do, and emotional empathy, which allows you to feel what they’re feeling – the latter a poor guide, critics say, to reasoned moral decision-making. Plus, it’s exhausting and depressing. Ellison’s pictures are mainly concerned with cognitive empathy, which he facilitates by an admixture of informational signposting and

ArtReview

Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts, Price Includes Uniform, Never Hit Soft, 2003, 2021, archival pigment print, 102 × 135 cm

Summer 2022

Untitled (Christmas Card #6), 2017, archival pigment print, 102 × 135 cm

The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 1975, 2019, archival pigment print, 153 × 202 cm

narrative suggestion. (His photograph Erik with Kitty, Blackwater to home. In the predominantly white, predominantly privileged Training Center, Moyock, North Carolina, 1998, 2019, showing a flak-jack- contemporary artworld, the (often textual) codes in Ellison’s work eted Prince cooing over a ginger kitten, is an arch conceit, and an excep- speak most clearly to those already proximal to the lives and lifestyles tion.) The density of data within an image such as Fog, In His Light We he describes. In his titles, references to investment structures and Shall See The Light, Raintree 23 Ltd Ptnr, Excess Distribution Carryover, If Any, specialised tax forms might only be fully grasped by the collector 2003 (2021) is akin to one of Ellison’s still lifes or collages, in which arte- class. But that does not mean they are entirely unfamiliar to other facts and print ephemera combine to make a kind of abstract portrait. viewers. (Ellison commented to me that no one who has visited his (His titles, too, are often forms of notational collage.) On the barn wall studio has ever had to ask what lacrosse is, even though it is played behind a grinning, shirtless Prince are snaps of military buddies and only at a handful of elite boarding schools and colleges.) Thoroughbred horses, a postcard of women in traditional Dutch While Ellison’s work specifically pertains to a slim demographic costume (the Princes hail from a part of Michigan inordinately proud of the United States, as with so much American culture it is, on some of its heritage), a baseball cap from Prince’s alma mater, Hillsdale level, recognisable worldwide. The aesthetic appeal of his photographs College, a private conservative college that has opted out of federal is so deeply embedded in the popular psyche that it can easily pass unacknowledged, reinforced by centuries of affirmative action policies, and books on the Ellison’s work is not defined Austrian School of free-market economics. portraiture of European aristocracy and None of which is particularly appealing, decades of photos of relaxed white families by its disdainful identification aesthetically or otherwise, except for Prince in bank ads and clothing catalogues. of some abhorrent ‘other’, but himself, whose muscular torso offers a visual Ellison’s work fixates on typologies and by its description of something rhyme with the glossy flanks of the horses generalities: the ways in which certain behind him. As with so many of Ellison’s kinds of people look and behave; the ways embarrassingly close to home images, Fog, In His Light… demonstrates the in which patterns repeat themselves. In persistence of desire, even when appended by distasteful circumstance. Performance Fleece (2018), one of his most austere series, he photographs Long before he pictured Prince and DeVos, Ellison was mining this vein, a hearty blond man modelling a range of fleeces from Vineyard Vines making images that speak to a viewer’s libido, or avarice, or social aspi- (a brand of ‘preppy casual clothing’ based in Martha’s Vineyard). The ration, or reflexive notions of beauty, before disclosing their contextual tropes of consumer advertising are inseparable from the tropes of contaminations – often through the text of their titles. A series of photo- class identification and aspiration. graphs of frothing white surf, Coastal Access Line, Carbon Beach, Malibu, Constancy and repetition are, for Ellison, at once formal strategies California (2015), was taken on what is known as Billionaire’s Beach, and thematic concerns. Again and again, his photographs show us the where oceanside mansions have historically blocked public access to the smiling face of America’s steadfastly enduring structural inequality, water. Another series, featuring extravagantly healthy vegetables and an inequality mirrored even in the putatively self-critical structure of flowers, actually shows, the photographs’ titles reveal, the gourmet its artworld. ar produce of gardens in various California private schools. Is it satisfying or dismaying to learn that Ellison himself attended Work by Buck Ellison is on view in the Whitney Biennial 2022, one of those schools? His work is not defined by its disdainful identiWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, through 5 September fication of some abhorrent ‘other’, but by its description of someJonathan Griffin is a writer based in Los Angeles thing, for the artist and for many of his viewers, embarrassingly close

Sunset, 2015, archival pigment print, 102 × 127 cm

ArtReview

Fleece (Spinnaker), 2018, archival pigment print, 64 × 51 cm all images Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

Katia Kameli’s Algerian Novel A visual history of the unseen and the unspoken by Louise Darblay

‘There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other,’ radical theorist Frantz Fanon wrote in A Dying Colonialism (1959), to describe what violence settler colonialism did to Algerians’ sense of self. ‘It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured.’ This year, Algeria (and its former coloniser) celebrated 60 years since it reclaimed its independence, and while the trauma of colonisation is giving way to a more peaceful memory, the country’s ensuing attempts at a nation-building project have been plagued by corrupt politicians, military interference, censorship – and a bloody civil war. Decades of regressive and repressive politics led to an unprecedented countrywide protest movement, the Hirak, which in 2019 took to the streets to oppose President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s candidacy for a fifth presidential term and demand the reform of the whole political system into a democratic one. The contested election of Abdelmadjid Tebboune as president that same year has resulted in an increased crackdown on the movement, with the arrest of hundreds of activists, journalists and politicians. This conflicted relationship of Algerians to their postcolonial history and the country’s ongoing identity crisis pulses through FrancoAlgerian artist Katia Kameli’s documentary video trilogy Le Roman algérien (The Algerian Novel). Presented in Kameli’s survey show, Elle a allumé le vif du passé, at Marseille’s frac last summer as a three-screen installation, the work felt like a remarkable attempt at representing – both in form and content – this complex history and the way national narratives continue to shape the present. Shot between 2017 and 2019 – during the early stages of the Hirak – it starts in the streets of Algiers, where, since 1986, a makeshift kiosk stands as an unofficial historical guide to Algeria’s past. Pegged on the barred windows of a building is a mosaic of vintage black-and-white and colour postcards and reproductions of historical photographs, among them images of the city during the colonial era and representations of Algerian women in traditional Bedouin or Berber outfits. These are displayed alongside portraits of male politicians, including a young Bouteflika,

Fanon and other heroes of the Front National de Libération (fnl), the revolutionary movement that led the liberation war. The first chapter explores this archival display as generative of discourse, through interviews with locals, passersby and historians who offer fragments of national and personal histories. We see some of them scrutinising this wall of imagery, some pointing or leaning closer to examine a particular image, or enquiring about one with the kiosk’s owner, or simply reminiscing with relatives or friends. “Why is there an opportunity for such a permanent stand in the centre of Algiers?” one woman wonders, observing that it is near to impossible to find current postcards of the city anywhere in Algiers (“We don’t get any tourists”). The answer might be found in some of the other comments, recorded and overlaid on closeup shots of the stand’s activities. “I know the names but not the faces, as there are no pictures in history books,” we hear one woman say in Arabic as she peruses an album of political portraits; a man, who introduces himself as a coin collector and a regular of the kiosk, tries to reclaim what’s depicted: “Eighty percent of what you see here is heritage – in spite of its colonial aspect, it’s Algerian”. Another woman, meanwhile, offers that the stand appeals because it “flatters our nationalism”. The nonchronological display presented at the kiosk fills in some gaps but leaves others blank, attesting to a conflicted history marked by state censorship and collective trauma: one woman points to the difficulty of finding any images of the Algerian Civil War (1991–2002), a period that came to be known as the ‘Dark Decade’ as a result of the brutality and terror that defined a conflict between the government and various rebel Islamist groups. Meanwhile, postcards being a colonial import, there are only a handful of representations of precolonial buildings or views of the city as it was before its transfiguration during 132 years of occupation. Another glaring absence in the national tapestry is that of female political figures, which Kameli seeks to redress in the subsequent chapters of her ‘novel’. Narrated by Marie-José Mondzain,

ArtReview

Le Roman algérien, 2017–19 (installation view, Elle a allumé le vif du passé, 2021, frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille). Photo: Laurent Lecat

Summer 2022

an Algerian-born French art-historian and philosopher, the second chapter takes the form of a metacritique in which she offers commentary on the first film and unused interview rushes with two women: Algerian writer and feminist Wassyla Tamzali, and writer and former fnl member Louisette Ighilahriz. We watch her watching from a screening room – shot from behind in her velvet seat; standing by the screen, overlaid with the projection; or in a side closeup of her face, the glint of the screen reflected in her pupils – as she analyses this material, adding another narrative layer to this kaleidoscopic story. The effect of this curious mise-en-abyme is reflexive and deconstructive: it invites a critical distance on the artist’s own work, while playfully mirroring the way images can generate different narratives and interpretations that aggregate in layers. Bringing an academic like Mondzain into this narrative exercise also reminds us that history and historiography are ever-evolving projects that need to be constantly renegotiated and questioned. The trilogy’s most apparent deconstructive impulse is its attempt to rewrite women’s role within the country’s history and collective imaginary. Their erasure from history, and iconography, is reflective of their political status as secondary citizens in Algerian society since the introduction of the 1984 ‘family code’, which placed them under the legal guardianship of their husbands and fathers. Although years of activism and pressure on the government led to a revision in 2005, the code – based on Sharia law – remains in place today. In the rest of the chapter, we watch with Mondzain as Tamzali offers sharp political analysis of historical photographs and introduces the stories of women revolutionaries such as Zohra Drif and Djamila Bouhired, while Ighilahriz’s testimony attests to the role of women in the diffusion of the first Algerian flag during the revolution, describing how, having glimpsed the flag on one occasion, they clandestinely reproduced versions of it from memory and distributed them to “mobilise our comrades”. The flag, sewn together from different parts, becomes a metaphor, on the one hand, for the construction of a collective imagination

through many voices and stories, and, on the other, for the cinematographic montage itself, as Mondzain observes in another reflexive layering of narratives. As photographs of protests from the revolutionary period come to the fore, the slight variations in different handmade flags become apparent, yet do not seem to alter the unifying potential of the emblem: “There are probably as many flags as there are Algerians,” Mondzain says, “yet they can probably only be brought together if the collective imaginary contains an ideal flag.” More flags are waved, this time shot in colour, in the third chapter, where past and present history collide. Shot in 2019, it interlaces documentary footage of the early stages of the Hirak with another image-based dialogue between Mondzain and the photojournalist Louiza Ammi. The two unpack the narratives contained in Ammi’s images, who notably documented – illegally – the aftermath of massacres during the Dark Decade: a woman mourning amidst hundreds of freshly dug graves; a man looking up in horror as he covers the face of the woman alongside him, with carcasses of bombed cars around them and a police officer standing guard in the background; Mohamed Sahnoun, un ambassador of Algeria, standing in the ruins of a bombed house, looking in disgust at what lies beyond the camera. Building throughout the film is a tension between the public and the journalists they expect to be telling their stories. Ammi remembers that the day she took the photograph in the cemetery, a survivor unloaded on her, reproaching her for not having been there to bear witness to the massacre itself: “At the time there was only the private press,” Ammi says, adding that tv news stayed away from such events; “they preferred to open [the news headlines] with the death of Diana and didn’t talk about this”. Later in the film, Ammi is on a balcony taking snaps of the crowds of (mostly male) protesters flooding the avenue below, chanting slogans like, “You have built prisons, you will all end there!” The camera moves between Ammi and the crowd, and we see protesters look up with their fists raised

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– “Press! All Accomplices!” they shout – as Ammi waves her index Kameli’s ‘novel’ is a reckoning with a troubled, messy history that finger in contestation. Not me, she seems to say, as though uncon- is at once epic in its scope and understated in its delivery. The overall vinced of her ability to challenge a mistrust rooted in decades of experience is a filmic equivalent to the situationist dérive, a sinuous journey that takes us through images, timelines and registers. The state censorship. Using montage to allow for narrative association, one sequence work’s historical impulse is arguably one shared by other contemdraws a connection between the figure of the late feminist novelist poraries hailing from Algeria or its diaspora: Zineb Sedira’s exploraand filmmaker Assia Djebar and women activist groups today. tion of Algerian postrevolution cinema at this year’s Venice Biennale Djebar, who worked with Fanon for the newspaper El Moudjahid comes to mind. But where Sedira’s film offers a reading of history seen documenting the life of women refugees in Tunisia and Morocco, through the personal and autobiographical, Kameli’s documentaryis conjured here by images from her films and through the words of style collage of images and voices seems more concerned with the a cinema critic that, like Mondzain’s, (de)construction of collective memory. Its rather unique metastructure, meanfunction as a metadiscourse. “This is the Kameli’s ‘novel’ is a reckoning while, speaks to the critical potenfirst time we have seen the story of the with a troubled, messy history that tial that resides in the act of looking, war of liberation, told through the eyes, is at once epic in its scope and and how it might offer resolution to a the testimonies of women,” he notes of conflicted postcolonial identity – and, The Nubah of the Women of Mount Chenoua understated in its delivery ultimately, a way out of the sociopolit(1977). “That’s her main idea, it’s to give back a body to memory… memory becomes a voice and a woman’s ical dead end in which the country now seems stuck. body.” Moving through a semiotic analysis of some of the symbols Viewed three years after the Hirak, the third chapter has somein her films, he notes how this particular film illustrates all the hope thing of a bittersweet flavour – of failed revolutions, disillusionthat Djebar had for the future of women, who had fought for equal ment and unrealised futures. Yet it also suggests that if the moverights during the revolution: “She thought that they were going to ment of history is relentless, so are people’s resilience and resistance. free themselves,” he says in a nostalgic tone, before adding, “There The Hirak might have dwindled under repression, but journalists was no family code then.” The video cuts to a group of women protest- continue to speak out, activists to protest and artists to make art. “My ing during the Hirak uprisings – one of many who call for a joint revo- singing always speaks of freedom. I intercede for the women martyrs lution, combining the demand for a democratic state with the fight and for the living, may God relieve them of oppression!” recites the for gender equality – holding up a banner featuring the faces of fnl slam-poet Ibtissem Hattali in French in the final scene, as she and an women revolutionaries and feminist activists. They remind us that accompanying guitarist sit on a beach at dusk. The words are taken no revolution will be achieved without equality, and leave us with a from Djebar’s film, yet here her voice resonates with the collective feeling of gloom: yes, Djebar’s feminist legacy of resistance lives on, voices of Algeria’s revolutions past and future, reuniting in one hymn yet 50 years later the egalitarian, democratic the fate of women and the nation. Switching this and facing page Algeria she envisioned and fought for feels to Arabic, she intones: “A day will come when The Algerian Novel – Chapter 3 (stills), 2019, hd video, like a distant dream. I will be free. I will be free.” ar 45 min. © Katia Kameli, adagp

Summer 2022

Material Girl vs Material Reality by J.J. Charlesworth

What the reaction to Madonna’s new nft collaboration reveals about the status of human-centred reality 46

ArtReview

this and facing page Madonna and Beeple, Mother of Creation (stills), 2021, three nft video artworks. Courtesy the artists

Summer 2022

The development of nfts as a platform for a kind of feral, chaotic of the augmented, porn-adjacent image of the idealised body Madge experiment in visual culture has produced some strange works of late. adopts as her avatar. But there’s perhaps another aspect to it, one that The recent nft collaboration between pop queen Madonna and nft incorporates these body politics into something bigger. Something to king Mike Winkelmann – the artist known as Beeple – being one of do with the perverse nature of corporeality as such, as it figures in the them. The three videos that comprise Mother of Creation (2022) aren’t phantasmagorical imagery of millennial digital art. exactly subtle. In three different, vaguely dystopian science-fictional Maybe it’s a necessary paradox of this millennial digital imaginary settings, a reclining, naked Madonna cgi avatar gives birth to things that the human body should be one of its defining visual tropes, even other than human babies: a great, verdant tree, quickly covered in while being represented in a state of transformation, transposition lichen and blossoms; a cloud of fluttering amber butterflies; and and disintegration. Digital avatars have an uncanny relationship to perhaps strangest of all, a cohort of metallic centipede robots. All to be the physical body, standing in for it in virtual space, the correspondauctioned as fundraisers for women’s charities, on nft site SuperRare. ence between the two never really guaranteed. The real and its repreAccompanied by languid voicesentation, in a visual culture in which overs by Madonna reflecting on being If there’s a contemporary condition to be rendered simulation now presents a woman, lover and mother, on being found in these hallucinations, it speaks to us with objects that appear more real than the real thing, no longer have a the “source of existence”, her videos the disintegrating relationships we have one-way relationship of dependence have been met with incredulity and not a little pearl-clutching, with one scanbetween one and the other. to everything material and corporeal dalised Hyperallergic opinion-writer Computer simulation that underhuffing as to whether or not Madonna was ‘potentially rich enough to stands light, reflection, movement, weight, inertia, fluid dynamics just donate to charity without making literally everyone look at her and other emergent and organic processes is no longer representavagina’; the assumption being that such a spectacle was a bit shocking tion. It’s a subtle if psychologically powerful shift in what we see in and gratuitous, even by meme-culture standards. images and what we know of the real, material world. If visual culture The shrill tone of reactions both on social media and in the art could long depend on the technical medium to give us a visual clue press might be taken as the usual pop-culture circus that still attaches to an image’s status as representational or imaginary – the texture to the Material Girl – celebrities ‘doing’ art are never taken too seri- and surface of painting, say, or the line of drawing, or the grain of the ously on either side. But in terms of its imagery, it’s not alone in the photograph, or even the primitive renderings of early cgi – the new history of art by female artists putting a feminist slant on celebrating digital images abolish all of that. Beeple’s Infected Culture, one of his female corporeality – Monica Sjöö’s seminal painting God Giving Birth infamous Everydays series from 2020, is a cynically comic rendition (1968), Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979) and Helen of this predicament, of how millennial visual-culture devours the Chadwick’s Of Mutability (1986) come to mind. historical past of images and imagination: in some marshy no man’s So something else, other than a kind of squeamish misogyny or land, two figures in hazmat suits attend to the gigantic, battered and anticeleb snobbery, bugs the reaction to Mother of Creation. For sure, it apparently dismembered head of what might have been a cartoon may be that millennial culture is less impressed character, if it weren’t for the bloody entrails Madonna and Beeple, Mother of Creation with this boomer feminist take on womanhood, exposed where the side of its head has been torn (still), 2021, three nft videos. nakedness and procreation, or more intolerant away. The head is recognisable as that of Pikachu, Courtesy the artists

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Beeple, Everyday: Infected Culture, 2020, nft jpeg. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

lovable anime mascot of the Pokémon franchise since its inception still, well, mattered. A manifestation of this is the strange appearance of Graeco-Roman statuary in the simulated worlds of artists such as in 1996. If there’s a serious point to Beeple’s silliness, it’s in how Pikachu – a Daniel Arsham’s nft-issued video Eroding and Reforming Bust of Rome product of the laborious hand-drawn techniques of the late-twentieth- (One Year) (2021), which depicts a classical bust of a helmeted figure, century animation studio – is here recreated as if it were a real creature, set in a what might be a modern-day Japanese interior, with sliding made of flesh and viscera. The irony is that this corporeality is not only screen doors opening onto a manicured garden. Over the course of the product of the skill-less virtuosity of Beeple’s cgi rendering apps, an hour the bust slowly disintegrates, cavities gnawing into its shape to reveal crystalline nodes embedded in the white sculpture’s matebut also the erasure of the line between imaginary and real worlds. cgi culture, at its most mainstream, is obsessive about its own rial, before the process reverses and the bust re-forms. (Mineralogical version of reality, leaving such ironies as Beeple’s well alone. James innards are a signature effect of Arsham’s main line of eyecatching, Cameron’s portentous Avatar (2009; its sequel, Avatar: The Way of collector-friendly sculpture, which repetitively present cast rendiWater, is due for release later this year), a morality tale about extra- tions of consumer objects in states of erosion and decay.) terrestrial beings living in harmony with their environment and Material reality, in these simulated fantasies, is always past or threatened by the predations of an ugly, militaristic and acquisi- future, mineral or organic. It’s an image seemingly fixated on the tive humanity, loads up on ecological and pro-indigenous sentiment fullness and presence of the body and of material stuff, a kind of reduced to nature-good-modern-humans-bad banalities. What sets obsessive substitute for its intangibility and its absence of a referent Avatar apart from its cyberpunk-philosophising predecessor The in the real world. If there’s a contemporary condition to be found in Matrix (1999) is how it establishes the virtual-reality element of the these hallucinations, it speaks, faintly, to the increasingly dislocated story (a human is projected via telepathing machine into the body of and disintegrating relationships we have to everything material one of the aliens) as something corrupt and inauthentic embedded and corporeal: with things and how they’re made; with the nature of work and production; with consumption and our culture’s detewithin reality rather than as the opposition of real and virtual. Avatar may be an absurd fantasy, but its naturalism is more than riorating faith in wealth and ‘too much stuff’; with the desire for just its high-end visual rendering. Eventually the human gets to fully authentic, undamaged organic nature; and with peoples’ increastransfer his consciousness into his indigenous avatar, by the power of ingly estranged encounters with other people and their bodies, media magic tree; another dying character’s consciousness is transferred ated by screens and, in the end, pornography – that terminal form to the planet’s holistic ‘mind’. Mind-body integrity is restored, and of displaced embodiment. Madonna’s recourse to an alter ego that then superseded in an Edenic resolution in which consciousness and produces organic nature from her own body, against the backdrop of matter are merged and indistinct. the three settings of Mother of Creation – one a lush Eden, the others This turns out to be a win for the virtual over the material world, a collapsing urban world and a sinister techno-medical laboratory even if it’s clothed in visions of a lush, organic, physical reality. The more – insists on a kind of primordial centredness for the human body. this virtual visual genre develops its capacity to simulate the world, Maybe this centredness is what doesn’t sit well, at just the moment when human beings’ older connections with the more it fetishises a spectacle of matter. Maybe Avatar: The Way of Water (still), material reality are disintegrating into images it’s also why many of the tropes of the simulation 2022, dir James Cameron. © 2022 and in which the human is steadily disappearing genre are nagged by reminiscences of the ‘old courtesy 20th Century Studios. days’, the times before simulation, when matter from view. ar All Rights Reserved

ArtReview

Daniel Arsham, Eroding and Reforming Bust of Rome (One Year), 2021, nft single-channel video with sound. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

June 16–19, 2022 Photograph taken at Kunstmuseum Basel

A Float for the Future by Wendy Red Star, as told to Fi Churchman

following pages The Crow Fair [held in Montana each August] was a symbol of subverting that attempt to make Akaawe (Six); Axpiluupe (Twelve); officially established in 1904, organised by Indian the Apsáalooke assimilate, as well as a challenge Duhpaapilake (Twenty); agent Samuel G. Reynolds, a white us governto the ‘American’ identity that’s so bound up Axpichiaxxo (Fifteen); Hawate (One). All works 2021, fabric with ment worker who resided on the Apsáalooke with car culture here. archival pigment photograph, 51 × 71 cm (Crow) reservation. In its attempts to restrict the One of the beautiful things about Crow Fair is its intense vibration and total saturation of Apsáalooke nomadic way of life, the government wanted all native people to assimilate into us society; one of the ways overwhelming colour. A professor at art school once told me I used was to introduce farming as a means of self-sufficiency, but also to too much colour. But these are the colours I grew up in, and that I’m prevent the movement of the Apsáalooke. Reynolds began to organise accustomed to. The vehicles are adorned with richly patterned blanan event based on the popular format of a county fair – in which local kets, quilts and traditional regalia – including elk-tooth dresses people would bring their harvest and cattle, their prize animals and [Axpichiaxxo (Fifteen)]. The regalia is usually made from wool, which is crafts. Knowing that this alone would not encourage participation hot and itchy, so a lot of the time people will be wearing softer satin from the Apsáalooke community, Reynolds suggested incorporating fabrics beneath. It’s these fabrics that form the backgrounds of A Float elements of native culture. One of those activities became the parade for the Future. Incorporating both the outer regalia and the clothes that takes place each morning, symbolising the movement to a new underneath is a way of acknowledging the identity of the Apsáalooke camp and recalling a time when the Apsáalooke were able to move people, not just in terms of how we celebrate publicly, but also, in some ways, it’s a window into what’s normally hidden or less visible; across the Plains. One very important aspect of the Crow community is that no our public and private selves are set side-by-side. And that idea of one person can brag about themselves. Each of the pictured vehicles visibility is important, not only in terms of material culture, but represents a family and there are clues within every float that tell you of language too. The Apsáalooke language is at threat of becoming about who this family is, like maps of identity. You might notice the extinct. So I try to create bodies of work that include the language, banner pitching for the reelection of Senator Conrad Stewart for Black whether it’s incorporating the names of Crow figures into titles, in Rock District? He’s not in that vehicle, but that’s his family, who are 1880 Crow Peace Delegation (2014), or in the practical use of numbering parading on his behalf. It’s like a loophole, so even if you can’t elevate the series for A Float for the Future. Part of my work is about calling up yourself, your family or your clan can do that for you. the language to preserve it in some way. The one with the war bonnet, Hawate (One), is my family’s float. Crow Fair is now a cultural revival and a way for us to fully The bonnet was made by my grand-uncle Clive Francis Dust, Sr immerse into the Apsáalooke culture and be proud of it, to share and [whose Apsáalooke name was Baahinnaachísh], to represent the Red teach our future generations what it means to have this heritage. In Star family; he was always coming up with ideas for us to create things order to move forward and maintain the culture, we need to have that could be utilised in the parade (all of my grandma’s handmade access to the materials that institutions across the country and even shawls are up there, too – she was an amazing maker). It’s not just a in Europe have in their holdings. That needs to be poured back into float that people are sitting on, but a way of recognising the impor- the community where it belongs, so that we can reunite and reeducate ourselves about who we are as a people. So that we can reunite tance of family. A lot of the time, people outside of the culture who want to see the with our history. ‘authentic’ native person are really wowed by the sight of native people on horses. But for me, growing up, I would get such a kick out of seeing Wendy Red Star: Delegation was published by Aperture Monograph in May 2022. An exhibition of Wendy Red Star’s work, these cars that are fully adapted into floats, dressed up with pride and which represent each of our families. Now I see that these parade vehiAmerican Progress, is on view in the Anderson Collection at cles are really indicative of the resilience of our culture; they’ve become Stanford University, Stanford, through 28 August

Summer 2022

Prem Krishnamurthy Fronting Up Interview by Mark Rappolt

Postponed by a year due to the covid-19 pandemic, the second edition of front, the Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art, opens to the public this summer. Put together by a curatorial team led by artistic director Prem Krishnamurthy, front 2022 is titled Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, which itself riffs off the opening line of a 1957 poem by the American writer and social activist Langston Hughes, who had spent part of his childhood in Cleveland. Internationally known for his

work with the design studio he founded, Project Projects (which in 2018 became Wkshops), Krishnamurthy is also known for his work with the exhibition space P! which he founded in New York. Based in Berlin and New York, he additionally works as an artist and author (among other things of the everchanging electronic book P!DF) across a variety of media, and as an independent curator. Among a number of other workshops and community-based fora, he organises

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Commune, an ‘emergent workshop that practices artistic tools for social transformation’. front 2022 will feature over 70 international artists across 20 museums and other venues in Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin. ArtReview caught up with Krishnamurthy to explore some of the thematics of the exhibition, among them care, collaborative working practices and connecting artists to local communities, and to discuss the role of curators and artists in the postpandemic world.

artreview What does front mean to you? prem krishnamurthy That has changed over the course of my multiple engagements with it. The relationship began when my design studio [Wkshops] developed the graphic design for the first edition of front in 2018, which was a very different mode of engaging with it. I had never visited Cleveland before that project began, but through it I got to know the city a bit. By then I had already been working in Pittsburgh on the Carnegie International for a number of years; so for me it was an encounter with another Rust Belt city and I was able to use this comparison and contrast to try to make sense of that. When we [Tina Kukieski and I] started work on the second (and current) edition, it was still before the pandemic – we started really thinking about it in late 2018. We looked at the landscape of Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin, and out of that, quite organically, came to the idea of thinking about art as a form of transformation and healing.

history, but with a lot of institutions, infrastructure and smaller-scale, bottom-up models for community building. AR How do you think art can act as part of a process or form of healing? There’s a long history of culture being deployed as a signifier of actions that aren’t actually being performed by the people who should be performing them – whether it’s government on various scales or society more generally. As a screen, in a way, that makes us all feel better, without any real problems being addressed. PK That was a question I asked myself in the first months of the pandemic, amidst the first lockdown. I thought, what is the point of art? We have these much larger problems. We have systemic racism, we have white supremacy, we have a failure of social systems. We have a lack of infrastructure, particularly in the us, that cares for people. What can art actually do?

AR Doesn’t every curator ‘use’ the things they include in an exhibition?

AR It’s interesting that you came to that already before the pandemic, during and after which issues of care in relation to art have come more prominently to the fore. How did that mode of thinking come about? PK It emerged from the context of observing that this was an area of the country that once enjoyed a great degree of prosperity and wealth, produced by industrialisation and the availability of labour, but which in turn led to a lot of environmental destruction, alienation and widespread social problems. Though all of that industry has largely left the region, what you now see is a concentration of healthcare and biotech as the main employers. But equally you also can find an embedded history of care in Northeast Ohio. Alcoholics Anonymous having started in Akron [in 1935], and in Cleveland you have Art Therapy Studio [founded in 1967], which is one of the first independent art therapy organisations in the country. That’s to name just two, among a wide range of community-based and religious organisations. So we were thinking about an odd mixture of real exploitation and a really challenging

practice, can be something that’s healing, liberatory and transformative. Second, on the collective scale. Here I’ve really been informed by Audre Lorde and others, in thinking about the role of pleasure, the role that sharing joy between people – and other beings – can play. The basic premise is that aesthetic pleasure actually offers a strategy to bring people together across difference. At its most fundamental form, we are considering music and dancing and how those forms are so rooted in every human culture. They form the basis for creating community. The opposite to this is people wearing headphones on the subway nowadays; contemporary society is very atomised, especially now, even behind our Zoom screens. So, for me, there’s a glimmer of hope there – directly in joy, in movement. From the beginning the show included a lot of dance-based works; projects that are public and include music and use music. I mean, not to ‘use’ music because that sounds too instrumentalising.

It was a real crisis both personally and curatorially for me. But where it led is to an exhibition that will try to test out some welldeveloped hunches and to see what sticks. We’re working from the idea that art can transform and heal on multiple scales, but in different registers. Sometimes people have an unrealistic expectation that art can make everything ok. It can be a community agent and also be beautiful, and all of these other things at once. We are approaching this issue by framing art as a transformative healing force on three scales. First, at the scale of the individual and how the making of art on an ongoing basis, as a daily above Jacolby Satterwhite, Dawn, 2021. Photo: Cleveland Clinic. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York facing page Prem Krishnamurthy. Photo: Peter Larson

Summer 2022

PK Yes and no. Hopefully it’s a mutual effect: you both include them for a particular reason, but then they also do something you never expected. The third scale is where I’m looking to the future, but where I also have more questions. In many ways the show for me personally is just one step; it’s already becoming clearer to me that afterwards I’ll need to ask new questions. At this third scale we’re asking how art can speak with power. How it can art be transformative on a structural level? For the last 500 years, more or less, artists have sat at the same table with the people who hold power – economic, social, political and spiritual power – particularly within a European context. This proximity gives them direct access to those vectors of power. In tandem artists are able to work in a speculative way, to rethink systems, or to test out new ways of being. A part of me is a utopian optimist who believes that because of those two factors artists have the opportunity to at least nudge some of our larger systems in one direction or another. There are artists in front 2022, such as Cooking Sections or Cassie Thornton and others, who are

working in this more systemic way. We are also emphasising collaborations between artists with communities and institutions that otherwise wouldn’t happen. I think every exhibition, every artwork, everything, has to create its own kind of publics, its own intersecting group of people who come together around it. AR Is that your job as artistic director? PK Well, yes and no. I wouldn’t say it’s my job. This is the funny thing: I’m the artistic director, but I’m the artistic director of a triennial that includes over 25 venues run by more than 15 different institutions, all with many different curators working at them. I think my job is to offer some tools or strategies for how each institution can work towards that. It’s much more of an exercise in modelling, almost a pedagogical role, but one where I’m learning at the same time as I’m trying to be as transparent as I can about the process. Here’s a prime example: one of the projects that has already opened, but continues to unfold in other formats, is a collaboration between Jacolby Satterwhite, the Cleveland Clinic and the neighbourhood of Fairfax, a historically black neighbourhood in Cleveland on the east side of the city. Jacolby had never worked on a public art project before; the clinic had never worked on a public project with an artist with this kind of approach. Neither one of them had ever tried to do something with the neighbourhood directly. My role ended up being almost like a facilitator. I organised Zoom community meetings. At times when there were frictions in the conversation between the commissioner and the artist, I stepped in to help mediate that conflict and then share how I approached this role so that hopefully next time they could do it themselves.I think it’s almost more about multiple methods and prototyping than it is about a singular solution. AR Do you think that’s how you see the role of the curator in general or just in this specific instance? PK I’d like to see that as the role of the curator in general, but my approach – like anyone else’s – emerges out of my biography and past experience. I come to curating from the field of design, where ultimately I’m just as interested in the

exhibition and how people experience that as I am in the processes that we employ to develop the project. An exhibition is just one step in a string of prototypes; then it continues in all of these other ways. Sometimes when people think of curators, they think that the curator’s job is just to talk to the artist and figure out how their work is commissioned, developed and presented. Whereas I believe the curator has to stand with the artist, but also try to negotiate with other communities and with larger concerns – planetary concerns, social concerns – and try to triangulate between them all.

PK I’ve always been much more interested in performance than in representation. I’m interested in how things land, how they’re embodied and how people experience them and enact them. I’m much less interested in showing a problem. AR Do you think that leaves you and the artist with more of a responsibility than it would do were it just in galleries or just about representation? PK Probably. Once you get out into the world, for example, with any of the projects we’re doing in public spaces, they have so much more at stake. When we invited Julie Mehretu to make a massive public mural in downtown Cleveland (which will not be open for the triennial this year, but is starting during the exhibition and will open next year), she came to visit Cleveland. In one of the first meetings, she said, “This is a big responsibility. If I’m going to make a permanent mural, which will be on a 100-foot wall for a long time, I need to make sure that this thing is not just an alien that drops in. It needs to interface with people.” We actually had about a year and a half of dialogue, of talking through the project with her, her studio, connecting her with different people, connecting with different histories of Cleveland, and making sure that it actually does make sense. AR So with the example of Julie Mehretu you have works opening after the run of the triennial. Did you think a lot about the life of the project and the afterlife of the show?

AR It seems a lot of what you’ve been talking about concerns the nature of representation in a way, and the idea that there’s a point at which it’s not necessarily helpful to focus on representation, but to try and move that into a kind of reality. Is that something you feel you’re trying to do with this exhibition?

Cooking Sections, Climavore – On Tidal Zones, 2017– (installation view, Isle of Skye). Photo: Nick Middleton. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

PK Yes, that’s always been part of the thinking. It just seems harder and harder to justify – on any number of levels – putting the entire expenditure and investment of time, energy, money, labour into making a thing that exists for three months. Over the last several years, especially after running P!, my exhibition space in New York, I’ve been preoccupied with how exhibitions always have a prelife and an afterlife. They come out of something and then they have something that emerges afterwards. It’s much harder for institutions to think that way, because they operate in a different temporal framework, but this particular philosophy was built into our curatorial framework from the start. There are projects

like Julie’s, for example, as well as by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, who has been working since 2019 on a long project with the Cleveland Public Library. She’s been developing works with branch libraries and young artists. Part of these works will be in the triennial and part of that will extend beyond the triennial’s official close. Julie is curating an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is the first time they’ve mounted an artist-curated show. It presents some of her work and reveals some of her thinking and references across a range of work from nearly every department. This becomes the starting point to launch the public process of the mural, which will be done next year. Then there are other artists like Cooking Sections, whose project involves a three-year fellowship with regional farmers that will take place after front 22. This focus is also a very personal response for me. It comes out of my own experience, making fast-paced exhibitions in New York that are meant to be consumed by art people, critics, collectors, in a very easily digestible way. It has made me realise that for myself, at least, I need to try to practise a slower form of curating or slower exhibition-making that builds into its process an idea of what might happen in the future, without being prescriptive. AR Did you ever think with the theme that you have that ditching the cultural institutions entirely and using the social, medical and other designated caregiving structures would be more interesting? PK It definitely crossed my mind. But the way the triennial is structured is an important factor. Its partnership model is in collaboration with a core group of cultural institutions, which did not significantly change from the first edition; though, then, part of the remit of each edition is to try and expand that challenge, redefine the sites and contexts of the show. Cassie Thornton, for example, is creating an installation at the National Museum of Psychology in Akron. Part of her project includes a set of workshops and programmes that go outside of the art context. They are focused on a distributed peer-to-peer health model, The Hologram, that thousands of people in the world are already practising,

but she’s using Akron as an opportunity to continue to prototype it and share it with new communities there. Another project that excites me, because it can do something very compactly, is by Cory Arcangel, who was born in Buffalo and went to school at Oberlin College in the conservatory. He is creating an algorithmically generated visual score-based composition for carillon bells, and then the carillon players at the McGaffin Carillon at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland will simply interpret and play it immediately. There is a whole network of other carillon players throughout the world who will also perform at the same time. This is a very lightweight project, an ephemeral gesture. The main people who will hear this particular work in Cleveland are in-patients at University Hospitals. It’s a very different audience.

focused on artists working nationally or internationally who related to Cleveland in a particular way. Yet we knew that our intention was to strengthen the local artistic community. That imperative became even more important during the pandemic. Another thing is we emphasised collaborative projects of different kinds even more. Jacolby’s project, which I mentioned, started during the pandemic. It built on the idea that, even if we couldn’t travel to Cleveland directly, we could connect Jacolby remotely with artists in the city so that they could work together on a community-based project. It also resulted in projects like that by Sarah Oppenheimer and Tony Cokes. They had never met before we introduced them through Zoom, and then they developed a project in conversation with each other. So the pandemic didn’t radically change the focus of the show since we had already developed its theme and focus, but I think that it tweaked and sharpened our methods. Plus, it gave us an extra year, which meant we could pursue certain longer-lead projects. Some of these longer-term ideas probably wouldn’t have taken place if we’d opened a year ago. AR Given the longer-term nature of the process, should we expect a highly finished body of work in the exhibition?

AR How much did your thinking about the show change during lockdown and in relation to the pandemic? PK The largest change was to reconsider how it would take root locally. Which may sound odd because I couldn’t travel to Cleveland for a year and a half during the pandemic and most of the team was working remotely. But that was the period in which Annie Wischmeyer, front’s curator on the ground, conducted over a hundred studio visits remotely with various artists based in Cleveland and in the region. This led to a series of new commissions and invited artists. In the first phase we were

Cory Arcangel, Hail Mary (detail), 2022, American microblogging and social-networking service (Twitter), artist software, carillon(s) and carillonneur(s). Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

PK C’mon, you know the deal! Somehow things always are done when they need to be done. Some things will be polished, others still rough around the edges. But to be honest, I hope that we don’t see only totally smoothed-out, buttoned-down presentations. As Murtaza Vali, who is part of our curatorial team and curating the presentation at the Akron Museum of Art, said during one of the discussions with the museum, “A triennial ought to be propositional”. A show like this, with so many different parts and partners, will inevitably be a little bumpy. But the beauty is that it opens up questions, and hopefully engages you in the process. That’s what the format is meant to do, not to just show up and say: here is a slick, easy-to-digest product. Every exhibition is the rehearsal for the next exhibition. front International 2022, The Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, is on show at various venues, 16 July – 2 October

Water, Water, Everywhere Why is the age-old practice of oceanic thinking once again rising to the surface? by Erik Morse

ArtReview

‘The ocean provides a model to accommodate change and unpredict- bios. Such changes are clearly visible in the aquatic-themed works ability, to sway back and forth between, and ultimately to transcend, of contemporary multimedia artists such as Superflex (Flooded numerous disciplines,’ writes curator Stefanie Hessler in her essay McDonald’s, 2009, and Dive-In, 2019), David Gumbs (Water & Dreams, ‘Tidalectic Curating’ (2020). Proffering a radical premise for an alter- 2014), Julien Creuzet (mon corps carcasse…, 2019) and Elise Rasmussen native artistic practice, one that looks towards an aquatic, rather than (The Year Without a Summer, 2020). telluric, form of posthumanism, Hessler invokes a term first coined by Critical ocean studies’ water-borne imaginaries, however, have Barbadian writer and poet Kamau Brathwaite to describe a singular ventricles that stretch back far beyond a twenty-first-century ecoontology linked to the ocean’s tidal movements – in his words, ‘the poetics. In fact, much of the current artistic fascination with these ripple and the two tide movement’, which leads, above all, to a rejec- imaginaries is indebted to a premodern worldview, in which climate tion of ‘the notion of dialectic’ (and its three-part structure of thesis, was often associated with a sublime, and leaky, volatility. In Gumbs’s experimental film, for example, a antithesis and synthesis). More Much of the current artistic fascination fluid collage of vivid, computerimportantly, Brathwaite’s thinking generated colours and effects overallows for a construction of identity with water-borne imaginaries is indebted that moves away from traditional laid on video of tide pools and slowto a premodern worldview, in which motion droplets of liquid produces anchors in time and place, to propose climate was often associated a sensation of immersive virtuality a new, fluid form that crossed oceans – what might be called the image of and continents. It’s this thesis that with a sublime, and leaky, volatility thinkers and curators like Hessler digital wetness. Yet Gumbs’s technogravitate towards. As she says, by following the thought of Brathwaite uterine fantasy is largely indebted to Gaston Bachelard’s 1942 text of ‘one may find oneself immersed in a hybrid worldview… from the the same name, in which the mercurial French philosopher conceives oceans, with their surfaces… as much as in their depths’. of a ‘water mind-set’ that distinguishes between an ancient ‘Heraclitean Hessler’s exploration of what has become more generally termed flux’, and the Socratic metaphysics that dominated Western thought ‘critical ocean studies’ or ‘blue humanities’, by scholars such as for centuries. ‘[Water] is the essential, ontological metamorphosis Elizabeth Deloughrey (who, along with Hessler, spoke at the Oceanic between fire and earth,’ he writes. ‘[It is an] element more feminine and Imaginaries conference held in March at the Stedelijk Museum more uniform than fire, a more constant one which symbolizes human Amsterdam) and Philip E. Steinberg, signals a compelling, aquatic powers that are more hidden, simple and simplifying.’ For Gumbs, as turn in posthumanist critique of the last decade, and one that had been for Bachelard, the water mindset is closely linked with an atavistic and absent throughout large swathes of twentieth-century theory outside maternal reverie, an experience that precedes the modern’s emphasis the narrow purview of the environmental on conscious thought and contemplation. activist movement. But the current exothermic above Jean Vigo, L’Atalante (still), 1934, feature film Despite its reputation as an urtext on transformations to the world’s hydrosphere water (Bachelard’s Water and Dreams is the facing page Elise Rasmussen, The Year Without have drastically rewritten the material imagisecond in a four-part collection he published a Summer (stills), 2020, 16mm film transferred on the elements), the philosopher’s work is not nary of water and its relation to the terrestrial to 4k video, four-channel sound, 20 min 5 sec

Summer 2022

ahistorical; rather, it is rooted in a Romantic tradition of climatology and hydrophilia, which often employed the theme of water to blur the edges between artistic innovation and private fantasy. This lineage includes the Surrealist-inspired, painterly films of Jean Painlevé, Jean Vigo and Jean Epstein; the proto-Oulipo novels of Raymond Roussel; the nautical, poetic-prose of Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Michelet; as well as the musical impressionism of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Lili Boulanger. They helped to prologue what Deloughrey (2020) would describe as critical ocean studies’ ‘rich maritime grammar’ of swirling interdisciplinarity. Rasmussen’s film The Year Without a Summer is similarly rooted in a Romantic-era history of water and climate, drawing comparisons between the global crisis of the Anthropocene and the colonial-era crisis instigated by Mount Tambora’s 1815 eruption on the island of Sumbawa. The subsequent anomalies in aerosols, cold temperatures and rain lingered over Earth for years, with food shortages reaching as far afield as Ireland and Switzerland, while inadvertently helping to inspire the late-Gothic tradition in literature and painting. The emergence of murky seascapes and cloudscapes, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men by the Sea (1817) and J.M.W. Turner’s 1816–18 sketches (later published as The Skies Sketchbook), created at the height of Tambora’s atmospheric fallout, show how the century’s increasing fascination with a water mindset was softening boundaries between traditional landscape and colour field, figuration and abstraction. This would reach its culmination in the liquiform abstractions of James McNeill Whistler’s Thames nocturnes and the lacustrine impressionism of Claude Monet. ‘[Maritime mythologies] show us… that the 19th century was an epoch of great speculations about the elements,’ German theorist Peter Sloterdijk writes in Neither Sun nor Death (2011). He points to the expansion of colonialism and the technologisation of shipbuilding for the era’s changing relationships to the sea, in which ‘the sublime was remodeled into the Titanesque… [A]n ocean… appears as a giant

matrix, an immense test tube, as an immeasurable incubator.’ It is this contest between Titanic mastery and dissolution that characterised a Romantic poetics of water, or what cultural historian Howard Isham (2004) calls ‘oceanic consciousness’. As the paradigm of that mastery, the ship appeared not only as an image of colonial-era technology but also that of safe enclosure, a finite habitat against the vast, liquid unknown, according to Roland Barthes (1957), for whom Verne’s Nautilus submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) is man’s ideal, seaward living room. In this sense, the iconography of the ship continues to appear in contemporary works like Superflex’s mesmerising Flooded McDonald’s, a film in which a fast-food restaurant’s self-contained interior is slowly submerged in water, sending all of its trademark scenography, food and plastic wrappings into a swirling vortex. As a miniature parable of a cataclysmic weather event, it also evokes the Romantic fantasy of the sinking ship on turbulent seas, a particularly popular Dutch subgenre of painting further dramatised by both Turner (The Wreck of a Transport Ship, 1810) and Friedrich (The Sea of Ice, 1823–24). Or in the followup, Dive-In, the group erects a coral reef-like megalith in the water-parched Coachella Valley and projects underwater images taken from onboard Dardanella (the research ship of tba21Academy, founded by art collector and activist Francesca ThyssenBornemisza, and of which Hessler was a curator, 2016–19), thus creating a cinematic aquarium on the desert floor. While the project suggests both the deep history of the valley’s Lake Cahuilla and the future ruins of an apocalyptic sea-rise, it also recalls eighteenth- and late-nineteenth-century panoramic devices like the Eidophusikon (which often exhibited seascapes) or Hugo d’Alesi’s Maréorama. D’Alesi’s protocinematic tourist attraction was erected for the 1900 Paris Exposition and allowed visitors to sit in a lifesize cruise ship, where they could view a hydraulic backdrop of the Mediterranean shore scrolling across the deck accompanied by artificial fragrances and mechanical soundscapes of sea travel. Like Verne’s vision of

above Superflex, Flooded McDonald’s (still), 2009, red, 21 min. Courtesy the artists preceding pages Superflex, Dive-In, 2019 (installation view, Coachella Valley). Photo: Lance Gerber

ArtReview

the Nautilus, d’Alesi aspired to craft a floating living room for the Romantic’s oceanic consciousness. Verne’s descriptions aboard the Nautilus also hinted at the nineteenth-century’s orientalised visions of Eastern waters. In the second section of Twenty Thousand Leagues… he writes of the Indian Ocean’s surface as largely uninhabited by ships or sailors except for a floating graveyard of bodies that flows from the Ganges. Despite this, the sea itself is filled with plentiful treasures waiting to be discovered; and sharks, from which Captain Nemo saves a helpless Indian oyster diver, declaring him an oppressed compatriot. This depiction by Verne was based upon a prevalent, Eurocentric travel narrative that reduced the Afro-Asian world’s cultural and commercial infrastructures to an undifferentiated tribal paradise ripe for harvesting. In fact, the Indian Ocean’s trade winds and early shipping technologies had created a littoral network that contested European imperial power in both size and innovation, and contained its own oceanic imaginaries. It was only by the nineteenth century that European traders, buttressed by vast militaries and indentured labour, were able to gain control of South Asian shipping routes and attain global dominance of the oceans. Not coincidentally, the nineteenth century also saw the invention of the historical category of the ‘Indian Ocean’ by Europeans, according to Indian Ocean studies scholar Rila Mukherjee (2013). It is along these same lines that creative mapmaking works like Yonatan Cohen and Rafi Segal’s Territorial Map of the World (2013) and Izabela Pluta’s Oceanic Atlas (vanishing) (2020) reimagine the apparatus of Western cartography in stratifying the borders between land and ocean, home and antipodes, West and East. The European ship was also deeply implicated in the abhorrent activity of the Atlantic slave trade, which reached its zenith at the end of the eighteenth century but contributed to much of the wealth, technology and ideology of the nineteenth-century nation-state and those banana republics of the Caribbean archipelago that served as colonial fiefdoms. The Romantic’s oceanic consciousness contained the

repressed memory of African bondage. This is examined in FrenchCaribbean artist Julien Creuzet’s video mon corps carcasse…, which uses digital animation to simulate the ongoing poisoning of Martinique’s tropical landscape through the contemporary plantation system, imaging the fluid absorption of toxins through the population’s bloodstream. Here, the microscopic liquidity of the black colonial body draws an explicit link between what Hessler, citing both British theorist Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and queer studies scholar Macarena GómezBarris’s The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), describes as the West’s extractive capitalism and the historical dispossession of the Middle Passage, in which millions of Africans were forced across the Atlantic as chattel slaves. In Creuzet’s film, as in the work of fellow French-Caribbean poet and critic Édouard Glissant, the Romantic water mindset must shed its Western fantasies of fixity and power, and embrace an archipelagic ethics of creolisation if it is to become truly tidalectic. Critical ocean studies absorbs all of these rivulets of water-based imaginaries in an effort to reconsider their place in the contemporary, terrestrial world. With the increasing glut of water-themed exhibitions and scholarship, it appears the nineteenth-century oceanic consciousness has reemerged as a twenty-first-century water mindset. But the former’s fantasies of immersion and abstraction have also prefigured the impending climatological crisis and a new, drowning mindset in which the human ship floats precariously on a rising sea. ar Elise Rasmussen’s The Year Without a Summer (2020), Izabela Pluta’s Oceanic Atlas (vanishing) (2020) and Superflex’s Dive-In (2019) are on show in Oceanic Thinking, at the University of Queensland Museum, through 25 June Erik Morse is a writer based in Texas

Julien Creuzet, mon corps carcasse… (still), 2019, hd video with sound, 7 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist and High Art, Paris

Summer 2022

Richard Bosman by Brad Phillips

Is this what it feels like to be an artist? 74

above Barnett Newman Studio, 2010–11, oil on canvas, 198 × 122 cm facing page The Blind Detective on Thin Ice, 2012, oil on canvas, 97 × 56 cm

DB Cooper’s Gamble, 2019, oil on canvas, 142 × 91 cm

Bad Kitty, 2019, woodcut, 60 × 43 cm

Knife, 2015, oil on canvas, 74 × 48 cm

Oven Fire, 2017, monoprint, 47 × 36 cm

I’m Canadian. Like all Canadians I was raised on American entertainIn an email exchange, Bosman cited noir films and the works of ment media. I watched American news. I watched American television. Joseph Conrad as further inspiration. Early on, he introduced into his I watched American movies. American media both entertained and paintings a character called The Blind Detective, who is literally that: educated me, showed me what the world was and how to live within it. a gumshoe in a trench coat, replete with dark glasses, a cane and a America, in many ways, is my very favourite movie. It’s a multi- pistol, attempting, somewhat haplessly, to solve crimes he’s clearly genre epic, with a particular talent for depicting action, comedy, ill-equipped to investigate. In The Stabbing of The Blind Detective (1981), Bosman’s hero points his gun at a handcuffed, blindfolded woman, romance and horror. When I first encountered Richard Bosman’s work, it seemed unaware he’s about to be knifed in the back by a sinister hand as if I’d found an artist whose paintings were the storyboard for intruding on the leftward edge of the canvas. In The Blind Detective in this most incredible of films; someone who understood just how the Hall of Mirrors (2012), the protagonist, pistol and cane at the ready, noir America is, with its historical cast of sleazy characters, cynical is confronted by seven reflections of himself, none of which he can scenarios and emphasis on personal over communal prosperity. Or see, ostensibly trying to catch a criminal he’s simply outmatched by. at least that’s how some psychogeographic component of Canada, In The Blind Detective on Thin Ice (2012), the same figure walks across a crippled by both an inferiority and superifrozen pond, directly towards a sign cauBosman paints many subjects, ority complex, characterises our southern tioning him to cease walking, which he of course cannot see. Beyond being beautineighbours, whom we’re both fascinated many scenes and many moods, by and judgemental of. fully painted – Bosman’s seemingly casual, but those that seem absent from expressive brushwork belies a deep aptiMany immigrants to North America learn English by watching soap operas. Soap his body of work are peace of mind, tude for realism – these paintings are funny while also being poignant and sad. operas compress language into its most funserenity, safety and relaxation damental, juicy elements, by using meloOver the course of his career Bosman drama to tell personal and dynastic stories. When learning a new would move from a faux-naive style into a more loosely rendered, language, words related to survival are the ones you must grasp first; realist figuration. His themes, in turn, migrated away from crime (or words like danger, love, help, fire, police and emergency; all components of piled further hardships on top of crime) but not from calamity and disaster. One series of paintings presents the interior of a car, the a noir, melodramatic vocabulary. Bosman was born in 1944, in Chennai, India, was raised in Egypt rearview mirror the central point of the image, often showing the and Australia, and settled in the United States in 1969. This informa- driver holding a gun, or engaged in other crime-related or life-andtion, when I received it, was instructive, and makes further sense after death scenarios. This sort of perspective is only ever seen elsewhere you learn that much of Bosman’s early work was inspired by, and based in film, and film motifs have indeed become increasingly apparent in on appropriated images from, Hong Kong comic books from New Bosman’s work. York’s Chinatown: detective stories, and tales of the fictional Judge Dee, Over the last two decades, not only film but the sea disasters of a magistrate from the Tang Dynasty. In this way Bosman is operating Conrad’s stories, and notions of man versus nature (and domesticity), within a Möbius strip of translation and language acquisition by way of have also increasingly informed his paintings and prints. A sampling motifs and types imbued with drama, action and romance. It reminded of the range: DB Cooper’s Gamble (2019) depicts the famed skyjacking me of how my Chinese doctor in Vancouver learned English by watching bank robber plummeting through the sky, away from the plane he’s the classic American soap opera As the World Turns (1956–2010). just leapt from. Knife (2015) is a beautifully composed, somewhat

The Blind Detective in the Hall of Mirrors, 2012, oil on canvas, 66 × 97 cm

ArtReview

Taishō-era-Japanese-print painting of the central third of a man in a business suit, grasping a bloody knife in his right hand. Bad Kitty (2019) is a woodcut print of a woman’s hands, holding aloft a black cat whose paws are dripping with blood. Dryer Fire (2017) is a monotype of a frightening domestic scene, wherein a clothes dryer has burst into flames. Similarly in Oven Fire of that same year, an oven is engulfed in flames. Bosman, as the tabulation above might suggest, paints many subjects, many scenes and many moods, but those that seem absent from his body of work are peace of mind, serenity, safety and relaxation. In this way, informed perhaps by the fact that I myself make and exhibit paintings, I’ve come to view his work as all related to the life of the artist. People cling to boats in rough water; figures grasp at branches on the sides of cliffs; they, like The Blind Detective, stumble around in a world of confusion, searching for meaning and safety. The life of the artist is a turbulent one, beset with danger and instability. The human battle to conquer, or survive, the elements is not dissimilar to the artist’s battle to conquer, or survive, an encounter with a blank canvas. Bosman has made multiple paintings of people climbing out of crashed cars in snowstorms, and while it may seem melodramatic, there’s a certain relatability there; artmaking can sometimes feel like trying to make sense of, and recover from, an unexpected disaster. By using these melodramatic motifs and campy portrayals of life lived on the margins, he is, in a way, just painting the biography of a working artist. This connection in turn is made clear, and beautiful, by the selection of works in Bosman’s summer show at New York’s Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, guest-curated by Matthew Higgs, the longstanding director of White Columns. Spanning the years 2009 to 2016, the 19 paintings in the exhibition are explicitly all about other artists: depictions of their studios, their living quarters and their ‘doors’; paintings of doors named after artists, standard doors seen in homes that look as if they’ve been painted by the artists whose names are attached to them in the titles. So Yves Klein Door (2016) is door-sized (183 × 81 cm) and depicts exactingly the handprints, breast- and belly marks familiar from Klein’s famous Anthropometry (1958–62) paintings. Piet Mondrian Door (2016) is angular and austere,

while Basquiat Door (2016) replicates the telltale crossed-out text and scrawled bright colours of the artist’s paintings. The paintings are at once great trompe l’oeils, homage and a beautiful way for an artist to experience what it may have been like to work like an artist whose work they admire. What painter doesn’t want, at some point, to try making a Barnett Newman painting? Bosman permits himself to do so in Barnett Newman Studio (2010–11). The left side of the slim vertical painting depicts a fan, stool and telephone in the artist’s studio; the right depicts a zip painting in progress. Rothko’s Studio (2011) is an almost photoreal painting of a ladder and the putative back of a Rothko painting (the back of a painting being a somewhat mystic concern among painters), while two other canvases in the exhibition plainly just depict the backs of paintings themselves: one a Marsden Hartley and the other unattributed, both beautiful ways to deal with abstraction and the occulted. Filling out the show, meanwhile, are paintings of James Ensor and Philip Guston’s studios; whether they’re based on fact or imagination doesn’t matter. Slipping into someone else’s shoes might, in the circumstances of Bosman’s practice, constitute a kind of relief, or it might be another form of conflict. Probably the latter, for having only discovered his work five years ago, and having exhibited paintings myself for close to 25 of my 48 years, what I find most compelling in his pictures is the sense of unrelenting struggle. This resonates in a deep, psychic and physiological sense – the blank canvas as adversary, the career as monumental pugilism. All told, Bosman seems criminally underknown. Hopefully this new exhibition will shine a light on his work, and validate that which he’s depicted so poetically, and humorously, over these many decades; man’s almost unceasing struggle to combat anything and everything: from crime to climate, kitchenware to contemporary life. ar Richard Bosman: Painters Painting will be on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, 28 July – 10 September Brad Phillips is an artist and writer based in Miami Beach

Philip Guston Studio, 2009, oil on canvas, 122 × 168 cm all images Courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York

Summer 2022

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Is all you’ll find 85

Virginia Overton Animal Magnetism Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London 7 May – 31 July These objects look like relics from a civilisation we never knew. There’s a wall of thick brass tubes, striated with nature’s marks; a pair of steel semicircles, poised on a slender point; a group of thin steel planes welded into the shape of an animal. Several of the works are torqued: the huge timber planks of Untitled (Arc) (all works but one 2022) are wedged between ceiling and floor, and whatever the metal rod in Untitled (2014) originally was – part of a gantry? – it’s now bent back upon itself and affixed to a wooden plank. Animal Magnetism is, as usual with Virginia Overton, a show of sculptures drawn from

objects she’s found and reworked. She has a constructivist soul, and her favoured materials, from timber to metal, are deployed at Goldsmiths cca. With exposed brick walls around you, and concrete underfoot, the gallery’s basement resembles a workshop; the American artist’s ‘indoor sculpture garden’ (as the curators term it) is inspired by its unpolished, unfinished air. A breezy experimentalism reigns, as Untitled (chime for Caro) recycles Sir Anthony’s offcuts into a giant rack of chimes, while Untitled (sculpture on table) could be a small tribute to John Chamberlain, the prince of twisted steel.

Untitled (rumination), 2022, steel, sheepskin, 128 × 116 × 76 cm. Photo: Ollie Hammick. Courtesy Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London

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Occasionally there are flickers of menace. The curves and arcs, up close, are palpably charged with force, while Untitled (good boy) resembles a nightmare dog, its head distended to a point. Upstairs, the Tank Gallery is sunk in near-darkness, broadcasting Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) on a slowed, ominous loop. Two mirrored works spin equally slowly, one pendant and one on a plinth, casting shards of light on the floor and on the viewers passing through. Just beyond this space, in the open air of the Courtyard Gallery, a hard-angled steel duo are enclosed by towering, studded walls.

When I emerged from the dark, the sky was ashen, there were distant sirens and those works were being spattered by rain. Suddenly the ambience was richer: less postindustrial blankness, more the dread of a survivalhorror game. I’d have liked to sense more of that menace: it casts these objects’ impermanence as sinister, not merely a fact. Overton’s work can seem elusive in how it anticipates critique: you can’t brand its placement or its form disharmonious, because it’s too aloof for criteria. When seen from a certain angle, or framed suggestively, these sculptures flare with temporary life – but then they withdraw, as if bored of attracting your eye and then rebuking it. Several hedge their bets: untitled (little guy), for instance, is neither untitled nor a figurative work. Overton is relaxed about

all this. She disassembles her sculptures after her exhibitions close, and recycles their pieces in something new. Back in 2013, she even claimed – in a quip to the curator Fabrice Stroun that has since become too well known – that an object of hers, whether by the road or in a gallery, was the ‘same thing’ either way. Yet her artworks aren’t abstract designs, and it isn’t the ‘same’ situation if time and space have changed. I’m looking at sculptures in South East London, not steel shards in the American scrub. Objects don’t have moods: they conjure them. One observer might look at Overton’s ‘good boy’ and find its ungainly body cute, while another might stare at its featureless face and feel alienated, discontent. The gallery space won’t help to resolve things, as it provides Overton with too neat a surround:

its industrial look suggests a luxuriance in possibility. See the sculpture one way, or see it another: it may be repurposed soon anyway. But Overton’s best work has both site-specificity and individual poise: her floating glass orbs in the Venetian lagoon, for instance, are among the triumphs of the Biennale this year. By contrast, Animal Magnetism is averse to delicacy, and often tends to the mute and cold. The sculptures start to withdraw as soon as you begin to suss their virtues out: stay quiet, pareidoliac. Being caught in surmise is par for abstraction – that may be one purpose of nonfigurative art – but it’s rare that you find an exhibition so insistent on inconclusiveness. Meanings, like monsters, are things we dream into being; the reality, Overton reminds you, is merely a game of wood and steel. Cal Revely-Calder

Untitled (Arc), 2022, whitewood and fixings, 650 × 550 cm. Photo: Ollie Hammick. Courtesy Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London

Summer 2022

Youssef Nabil Memory of a Happy Place Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris 19 March – 7 May In 2003, aged thirty, the Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil left his homeland in search of creative freedoms unavailable to him under the Mubarak regime. He has since made his self-imposed exile the central theme of his art, mythologising it in photography and video. His touchstones are the technicolour fantasies of the golden age of Egyptian cinema that flourished from the 1940s to 1966, after which the country’s film industry was nationalised and effectively muzzled. In Nabil’s hands, these films become stand-ins for a lost era of cosmopolitanism and relative openness in Egypt, and a template on which to style himself as the star of his own film. The dozen or so hand-coloured screenprints on display (dated 2016–21) find him, by turns,

staring down at his own sleeping likeness in a Mexican mission; sleeping rough in Central Park; and pictured from behind on a Greek beach, staring out towards the horizon. Elsewhere, in a handful of photographs from 2021 that look for all the world like stills from a particularly kitsch pop video, Nabil appears as a spectral transparency, blending into backdrops of fiery sunsets and wine-dark seascapes. If his appearance – clad in white or blue djellaba, head shaved – casts him as ‘other’ to his surroundings, it is an otherness defined by Orientalist thinking: if, say, a 1950s Hollywood costume designer had sought to style an actor (or, more likely, extra) as ‘an Egyptian’, they could hardly have done so more lazily. Nabil, however, seeks to reclaim the stereotype.

The Visitor, self-portrait, 2021, handcoloured gelatin silverprint. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris & Brussels

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Nostalgia, both for the aesthetics of pop culture past and in its literal sense as, loosely, ‘homesickness’, hangs heavy over everything here. As if to flag up the Homeric allusions of the term, the show’s sole videowork, The Beautiful Voyage (2021), even has Charlotte Rampling (the latest in a series of film-star collaborators including Tahar Rahim and Salma Hayek) reciting Constantine Cavafy’s 1911 poem ‘Ithaca’ as she reclines in a hotel bathtub. Daft as his maximalist imagery might seem – the influence of knowingly camp 1990s fashion photography is unmistakable – events in Egypt since Nabil’s departure give it an unsettling poignancy. You can only wonder how a genuine Youssef Nabil feature film would turn out. Digby Warde-Aldam

Fiona Connor My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs Château Shatto, Los Angeles 19 March – 7 May In a room high above street level, one-to-one replicas of club and storefront doors from Fiona Connor’s Closed Down Clubs series (2017–) stand at attention, guarding an otherwise empty gallery. The New Zealand-born artist has staked her claim in her adopted city of Los Angeles with remakes of these hyperlocal indices of urban transience. She initially worked from community message boards – which she duplicated down to their push-pinned business cards and tear-away adverts offering lessons in English and guitar – before moving to the doors of shuttered venues and businesses. The easy, open-ended poetics of Connor’s project has made the artist a favourite of critics and creative peers in her la and Auckland circles, whose goings-on she regularly folds into the fabric of her work through large-format ‘classifieds’ and other printed takeaways in which they make cameos. Some of the doors on view have been exhibited over the past five years, while others

were fabricated just a few months prior to this show. However the scuffs and corrosion of their surfaces suggest significantly longerterm use; plastered to these supports are notifications (recreated via silkscreen on paper-thin aluminium sheets) of ownership change or ‘indefinite closure’, often heartrendingly relayed in handwritten script or typed invitations to ‘keep up with us online’. The works are continuously swapped in and pulled throughout the show’s duration, a conceit that serves the artist’s interest in flux and seriality, which has elsewhere bled into a distribution service for small-press publications and a yearlong exhibition series in her apartment. Despite the sombre circumstances of their referents, the obelisklike pieces suggest less the finality of burial markers than evidence of the activity of an outsized circulating archive. In keeping with this show’s archival theme, its checklist includes

the original’s location and an exhibition history for each copy. While Connor’s overarching project is tethered to the mapping of intersectional social networks, the titular dance clubs of her sculptures cannot be divorced from the dual implication of invitation and obstacle, as if they are gatekeepers robbed of their parties. The pleasures of bodies grinding in darkness may be largely past, and this timely new iteration of Closed Down Clubs both commemorates these communal spaces and freezes their thresholds at the cusp of erasure so as to place their memories in continuous circulation. Whatever barrier to entry these clubs may have presented while open, in this half-life their doorways are invested with a more egalitarian ethos in which their ‘behinds’, thus emptied out, invite in – albeit with the inevitable provisions their referents imply. Cat Kron

Closed Down Clubs, Circus of Books (detail), 2018, commercial aluminium-frame glass doors, silkscreen on coated aluminium foil, vinyl, surface coatings, 212 × 106 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles

Summer 2022

Tremblings Nouveau Musée National de Monaco 25 November – 15 May Tremblings, drawn from a collection of works acquired (between 2010 and 2021) by the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, provides a curious, fragmentary history of Western social-justice movements throughout the 2010s, featuring 17 artists from 12 different countries. The exhibition takes its title from Martiniquais postcolonialist philosopher Édouard Glissant’s idea for an anti-imperialist museum, aiming to present multiple voices and diverse representations in a ‘place where places in the world are brought into contact with other places in the world’. It features paintings, sculpture, installations and videos by noted Black artists such as Arthur Jafa, Steve McQueen and Yinka Shonibare, as well as a number of works dealing with queer or trans identities, the body and popular culture, in a show riffing on Glissant’s

assertion that ‘trembling thinking’ is ‘the attempt at real knowledge of what is happening in the world today’. Australian Helen Johnson’s Marginalia (2015) paints an abstract image, which in its style and use of colour recalls recent Aboriginal painting without appropriating its distinctive dotted compositional form, over a canvas covered with graffitilike drawings and writings about Western culture and ideas, relegated (for once) below an indigenous artistic form. The work introduces the seminarrative approach, incorporating abstract means for figurative ends – with graffiti affirming Derrida’s insistence that adornment and art cannot be separated, in a piece in which adornment and art have a symbiotic relationship – that is deployed in many of the works on show. Marginalia also

Brice Dellsperger, Body Double 35 (still), 2017, 2k video, colour, sound, 4 min 38 sec. © adagp, Paris 2022. Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville

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hints at how the works included here predominately look back to twentieth-century art and culture for their aesthetics, in several cases, such as Arthur Jafa’s The White Album (2018), explicitly referring to postwar film and music, but in fact respond far more to nineteenthcentury histories of colonialism, racism and homophobia in their politics, struggling to counter these lingering prejudices. Two (outstanding) cases in point are Candice Breitz’s Alien (Ten Songs from Beyond) (2002) and Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Silent (2016). Effectively capturing Glissant’s concept, Breitz’s installation presents various immigrants to Berlin singing popular German songs: it takes a moment, watching each one, to realise that the voice is not that of the person on screen, as the vocals drift out of sync with the image. Together,

the ten channels create a cacophony of sound, a confusion analogous to that felt by immigrants trying to learn the language and culture of a new country. Boudry and Lorenz’s Silent puts Venezuelan singer Aérea Negrot – a trans woman of colour – in public settings behind many microphones, as if doing a press conference. Negrot performs John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), pointing at how, historically, minorities of gender, sexuality and race have rarely been allowed a public voice. When she finally sings, her voice is soft and deeply sensual, indicating the possibilities that could come with better representation. Ironically, the video’s climax is a little quiet, and the noise from another video in the adjacent room bleeds in throughout. This adds another level, however, to Cage’s insistence that his piece was intended to focus attention on ‘everyday’ sounds rather than the composition itself, and drew me into another piece showcasing queer beauty: Brice Dellsperger’s Body Double 35 (2017), part of a series (begun in 1995) in which he recreates movie scenes frame-for-frame, with

his ‘body doubles’ playing every role. Here, Dellsperger casts trans women in a restaging of a scene from Robert Greenwald’s box-officeflop musical Xanadu (1980). Soundtracked by the Electric Light Orchestra, they dance in ornate dresses, lit up by neon-pink outlines: we sense the development and wider public emergence of trans identities over the last few decades, especially in contrast to Nan Goldin’s small black-and-white photograph of drag queen Colette dressed as Sophia Loren from 1973 – the only premillennial work here. Jafa’s The White Album, composed largely of footage found online and examining racism and the far right in the us, takes us to another place, as per Glissant’s directive – specifically, the YouTube culture of ‘incels’ and white supremacists, as well as the real-life spaces where they act, often lethally, on their beliefs. It is left to Katinka Bock and Latifa Echakhch, from Germany and Morocco respectively, to engage specifically with Monaco, which (as the world’s second smallest country) produces little art of its own: they both

use the Jardin Exotique, opened in 1933 using plants first imported from Mexico in the 1860s and then grown in Monaco, as their basis. Both artists defamiliarise the plantation – Bock by making molten bronze moulds of cacti and Echakhch by painting a postcard of the garden onto a canvas covered with concrete, parts of which subsequently fell off, leaving a fractured image. Echakhch’s crumbling depiction of the Jardin, which in actuality is (of course) kept in pristine condition and is currently being renovated, reminds us that we’re in one of the wealthiest places on Earth, which is perhaps why class critique is more implicit than explicit in the featured works, with questions around racism, xenophobia, colonialism and transphobia foregrounded instead: that said, the works in Tremblings provide a powerful and genuinely international compendium of recent, socially engaged art, in line with Glissant’s dictum, even if Monaco itself is not as much a part of the cultural exchange as it perhaps could have been. Juliet Jacques

Latifa Echakhch, Sans Titre (le jardin exotique), 2018, acrylic paint and concrete on canvas, 206 × 156 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Kamel Mennour, Paris & London; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan & New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York; and Galerie Dvir, Brussels & Tel Aviv

Summer 2022

Vera Molnár Variations Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine 2 April – 27 August Vera Molnár is a pioneer of generative art whose work has, for six decades, influenced artists exploring the potential of autonomous systems, machines and rule-based procedures for the production of art. Included in this year’s Venice Biennale, Molnár is emblematic of how women in computational arts have been marginalised, even within a field of art that has itself been historically sidelined. The revival of interest in generative art, driven in part by the recent explosion in attention directed at nfts, provides some context for why it’s only now, aged ninetyeight, that the French-Hungarian is being recognised in the us, where her first major solo exhibition emphasises the seriality of her work and provides a deeper understanding of this form of art. In the opening gallery works from the 1960s and 70s – when she cofounded groups like Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (grav) and Art et Informatique in Paris – present both rule-based drawings and playful experimentation with the computer. The hand- or computer-generated

gestures in these works establish the forms and procedures that would define her work, but also point to her irreverence towards declarations of the presence or absence of human intentionality in using a machine. The linear progression in Hypertransformations 1–7 (1976) reveals Molnár’s humour as she uses the machine to produce increasingly off-kilter squares, thereby undermining the supposed regularity and fixity of computers. Hommage à Barbaud (1974) consists of a square formed by nine concentric squares, arranged in rows of three, that deteriorate over six progressions into a final lively mess reminiscent somehow of jazz; the French composer Pierre Barbaud’s use of computers in the production of experimental music had inspired Molnár with the potential of the machine before plotters or printers could produce satisfactory visual outputs. (Dis)Orders (1974) introduces colour – red was Molnár’s favourite – while in 36 Squares, 8928 quadrilaterals: Pleasure Geometries (1986) the mutation is obscured halfway through, so that things settle

Variations, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine

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in the middle of the series before getting disrupted again. Within the form of the simple square, Molnár offers philosophical musings on the passage of life, a romp through our attempts at order and a graceful attention to the fragility of established structures, both geometric and, implicitly, social. Other works in the exhibition include a wall of 37 points connecting a thread (based on Descente, a 2013 installation in Germany) and a disparate set of six works (ranging from 1988 to 2017) using representation and abstraction in the four titled Portrait of My Mother and a repetitive scribble in the two Lettre de ma mère. Molnár’s practice has recently won acclaim; this show reinforces her position, revealing the complex of interests and attitudes she brought to an engagement with the machine. Her embrace of computer- and handmade work is apt in our moment of increasingly hybrid lives. Molnár’s many decades of work extol how the machine may yet express a particularly human experience. Charlotte Kent

Toshiko Takaezu James Cohan, New York 15 April – 7 May Hawaii-born ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu, who died in 2011, saw no difference between ‘making pots, cooking and growing vegetables’. And so she gently swept away modernist claims for art’s autonomy; for her there was no separation of art and life. It’s a curious outlook, especially for an artist who transformed humble clay vessels into Abstract Expressionism-in-the-round, helping, in the process, to elevate craft to the beatified realm of art. In this first solo exhibition of her work in New York since her death, a dozen or so of Takaezu’s vessels float in consonance, each suggesting remarkable variety, achieved through Zen-like acts of perfection via repetition. Takaezu called her stout, rounded vessels ‘moons’, small heavenly bodies shaped from earth. While this show is a minute representation of the artist’s prolific output, spanning

the range of scales at which she worked, both in moon pots and her more oblong, missilelike ‘closed forms’ (all Untitled). Some moon pots are no more than 15 cm in diameter, and others resemble torso-size asteroids – otherworldly, fire-hardened chunks. Some works are handformed, others reveal in their ribbed surfaces the centrifugal force of the potter’s wheel. A small spout sprouts from the top of many pots, a diminutive clay nipple that permits the gas generated during firing to escape. Takaezu exalted her work through glazing. One particularly fine example drips with the strawberry milk of a pale mauve glaze, cascading down to meet a rippling horizonline of charcoal. Through peripatetic experience, the pot’s surface becomes a colour-field painting in miniature.

Liberated from the picture plane, Takaezu’s compositions evoke the infinite contemplation of scholar stones, those rock formations that Chinese literati enjoyed for the sheer pleasure of aesthetic contemplation, and exported to other countries. Another of the works is covered in a creamy glaze, with hints of rust seeping through to the surface. Takaezu dashes a sweeping black calligraphic line that curves around the pot’s spherical surface like a serpent, the outline of a mountain ridge, or Franz Kline-esque gesture. Many of the moon pots contain a small ‘rattle’. It’s a paper-covered clay bead that, after burning during the firing process, clinks and pings, serving as a gentle reminder of the shape of space. The interiority of form becomes just as significant as the skin of a thing; an unseen universe, somewhere between East and West. Owen Duffy

Untitled, c. 1990s. Photo: Izzy Leung. © and courtesy the estate of the artist and James Cohan, New York

Summer 2022

Grace Ndiritu Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction Arcade, Brussels 27 April – 11 June The title of this show is taken from the ongoing series of collages and assemblages that Grace Ndiritu has produced since 2015, collectively dubbed Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction. This opus’s key ingredient is the printed jetsam of hyperconsumerism, fashion ads and images from news magazines: these fragments she alters in distinctive ways, including the application of paint in tropical pastel hues that extends to the gallery walls. As such, Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction displays a compulsion to dissect and scrutinise the dysfunction of late capitalism. Particularly evocative details here: a photo of an Ebola doctor in a hazmat suit (from a Time magazine cover) embellished with a Matissean green leaf; a cnd sign made from sequins pasted upsidedown on a photo of Cara Delevingne, alongside a newspaper clipping stating that ‘threat of terror attack in us and Europe remains statistically low’.

The works in this exhibition, and indeed all of Ndiritu’s multifaceted output (which extends to video, photography and performance), are shaped by an engagement with reclaiming the ritual function of art and exploring the potential of magico-religious practices. Her mission can be situated, accordingly, within the Beuysian tradition of artistas-shaman, hinted at via two videoworks in the basement that offer a crucial foil to the environment upstairs. Both entitled Community, one from 2014 and the other dated 2012–15, these comprise footage shot (sometimes surreptitiously) by Ndiritu while living within ‘intentional’ New Age communities that cohered around spiritual or ethical convictions. In one video a group of Hare Krishnas engage in ritual dance in a makeshift temple; the other explores a complex of jerry-built dwellings in an eco-commune.

Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy Arcade, London & Brussels

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Experiences in these spaces assisted Ndiritu in honing what she describes on her website as ‘non-rational healing methodologies’. These practices inform another ongoing project, Healing the Museum (2012–), an iteration of which forms part of Ndiritu’s current residency at smak in Ghent. This endeavour, more akin to institutional exorcism than institutional critique, fuses historical research into collections and film screenings, but also actions of an ardently hippie ilk, such as group meditations and collective healing ceremonies. An awareness of the various strands of Ndiritu’s output transforms, in turn, one’s reading of the Arcade show. What might ostensibly appear as anticonsumerist agitprop is revealed to be totems of a broader syncretic system with a radical intention: to emphasise ethics, sharing and participation in order to reinvigorate a moribund gallery context. Pádraic E. Moore

Karen Lamassonne and Aurora Pellizzi Desire Appears Suddenly Instituto de Visión, Bogotá 23 April – 15 July Tufted, peachy wool marks out a strong-shouldered-woman’s torso reflected in a murky pool in Aurora Pellizzi’s textile work, Rising (2021); the woman’s arms stretch out to either side against a hazy blue embroidered background. Below the water’s surface, the body is mirrored in muted yellow and black threads. The stance in the Mexican artist’s work recalls one of the dozens of nude photographs of women by Karen Lamassonne, New York-born and who came to the fore during the 1970s. In one, a woman wearing a cheap transparent rain-jacket, but otherwise naked, throws open the purple curtains of a sash window. The incoming light all but silhouettes the nude figure. Both artists deal with body politics: while the woman in Lamassonne’s Rainy Day Woman (1978, all photographs reprinted 2022) reveals

her body to anyone passing the window, and further photographs, equally shot with simmering tension, depict women in states of domestic intimacy (the bath, the shower), others go further in their exhibitionism. The female subject of nel foro (1978) stands in the ruins of the Roman forum, her skirt lifted above her head to reveal her pubis; in Luna en Ampurias (1983) a woman stands topless on the moon-bathed site of Empúries, the ancient Mediterranean city; and in yet another photograph, Paris (1978), in a park exposing her buttocks. These fall more into the realms of protest than erotica, though; a sensual nudity used to confront patriarchal culture passed down since time immemorial. Body parts feature heavily too in Pellizzi’s textile works, which offer a colourful contrast to the noirish photography: Reposada (2020) is

a closeup of a breast, the nipple as red as a cherry; it’s complemented by a square of naturally dyed threads stitched into huge teeth-baring lips (LoL, 2020) and another embroidered as a single wide long-lashed eye (Transfiguration, 2020). Yet despite the vibrancy of palette, Pellizzi’s work also confronts a world dominated and endangered by men, not from the position of victim, but in defiance. Presented in isolation, these body parts are unsettling, and placed alongside Lamassonne’s work, the exhibition recalls what the feminist film theorist Barbara Creed described as the ‘monstrous feminine’, a confident female sexuality that threatens societal norms and is too often rejected or vilified. In Pellizzi’s oversize body parts and the older artist’s confrontational nudity, the pair offer a feminist rejoinder that spans generations. Oliver Basciano

Karen Lamassonne, nel foro, 1978/2022. Courtesy the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá

Summer 2022

Carrie Mae Weems The Evidence of Things Not Seen Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart 2 April – 10 July ‘Hope doesn’t mean denying […] realities,’ the writer Rebecca Solnit once said. ‘It means facing them and addressing them by remembering’. This statement resonates with Carrie Mae Weems’s first survey in Germany, which collects over 30 bodies of work from the last 35 years into an intensely emotional display focused on the violence carried out against, and traumas carried by, people of colour, women and socially disadvantaged groups. Beyond the work itself, however, a primary significance of this show lies in its location: Germany is a place where antiracist awareness, discourse and direct actions seem to lag behind those in, say, the United States. Just last year, for example, a satirical show broadcast on a public Bavarian television

channel featured a comedian in blackface, which also remains a relatively accepted ‘costume’ during carnival celebrations in southern parts of the country. In this context, Weems’s visual language becomes an ever more powerful tool. The show – the title of which is borrowed from James Baldwin’s 1985 book-length essay on what are known as the Atlanta child murders of 1979–81 – opens with The Jefferson Suite (1999). Four largescale sepia-toned photographs portray the backs of four people, each superimposed with a red a, t, g or c, the first four letters of the human dna strand. The work alludes to the idea of what defines, on an essential biological level, a human, as well as to humanity’s quest to scientifically understand themselves. But the

title adds a second layer of meaning: with the help of a dna test, former us president Thomas Jefferson was proven, in 1998, to be the father of at least one of his enslaved sister-in-law’s children. Other pieces, such as works from the series Constructing History (2008) and Museums Series (2006–ongoing), speak to the construction of the world and its definition of the beings who inhabit it. For the former, Weems worked with students to reconstruct historic moments of political violence, from the assassinations of Black activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr to the bombing of Hiroshima. No matter the reenactment, the backdrop remains the same: a white wall with

Constructing History (Mourning), 2008. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

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two illuminated blank rectangles next to drawings of a white woman and a white man, and, in the centre of it all, a clock. It’s a reminder that histories are indeed constructed, primarily by presiding (white) bodies, and that the notion of time itself is of the essence, as histories can – and often should – be continually reconstructed. In Museums Series, Weems stands, with her back to the camera, in front of various imposing institutions in Europe and the us, from Dresden’s Zwinger to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. At once separate and intertwined – hung here on opposite sides of freestanding walls – the two series question the creation and preservation of history, as well as the bodies it welcomes or casts out. Elsewhere, works such as From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96) foreground the artist’s use of textual poetics. In From Here… she appropriates nineteenth- and twentiethcentury photographs and daguerreotypes of

enslaved Africans and African Americans originally deployed to support racist theories, especially those of Swiss researcher Louis Agassiz, who, among other white Western so-called scientists at the time, claimed Black people were inferior. Weems rephotographed and enlarged them, tinted all but two red and sandblasted texts into their framing glass. Over an image of a naked woman, reclined with legs apart: ‘you became a playmate to the rich’. Beside it, a portrait of a woman and child: ‘and their daughter’. On four images showing people from the waist up: ‘you became a scientific profile’, ‘an anthropological debate’, ‘a negroid type’, ‘& a photographic subject’. The piece offers critical awareness of the images’ origins, the red filters reinforcing that these people were violently dehumanised and Weems’s texts echoing this sentiment while simultaneously restoring their humanity.

It seems hardly a coincidence that the colour red – seen here in photographic filters, texts, and two giant, tinted windows, among other places – acts as a literal roter Faden (‘red thread’, meaning ‘throughline’ or ‘common thread’) throughout. Red: the colour of love, of anger, of life and blood, war and courage; a colour with equally devastating and beautiful associations. For when violence is expressed through beauty, it is enrapturing – and it is precisely in this threshold that Weems’s work, and this exhibition, comes alive. Her practice and this overview not only remember but confront acts of violence against humanity through a soul-crushing beauty. And through this beauty, a sense of hope is instilled – not that things were, are or even will be ‘ok’, but one that speaks to specific possibilities, that demands action, in the United States, in Germany, in every country around the world. Emily McDermott

Museums (Zwinger Palace), 2006–, © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Summer 2022

Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano with Annette Frick Die Blüten von Berlin Chert Lüdde, Berlin 19 March – 28 May There’s an endearing albeit delicate backstory to Chert Lüdde’s first show in its new space in Schöneberg. We’ll get there. But first, the exhibition’s internal dynamics, which offer more than enough to feel and think about, context aside. Rife with giant fantastical creatures, Petrit Halilaj’s work was always a bit cute for my taste. But those tastes are here thankfully adjusted, as his and Alvaro Urbano’s collaborative work vibes in an offbeat manner with Annette Frick’s historical photography of Berlin’s queer community. Several gigantic sculptural flowers descend from the ceiling, their green and yellow carpels splashing into space. This piece, Halilaj and Urbano’s 10th of May 2016 (Cherry) (2020), made from painted canvas over a metal armature, could shelter a large animal. And, indeed, two raccoon costumes huddle nearby, leftovers from a performance. Something like magic emits from Halilaj, Urbano and Frick’s clashing registers of

tenderness and their respective modes of uncanniness. More giant flowers hug the gallery’s ceiling, watching over Frick’s silver-gelatin photographs. While Halilaj and Urbano’s sculptures are like the remnants of a force majeure of pure whimsy, Frick’s photos, from the 1990s and early 2000s, lift the curtain on flamboyant backstage action, and a hurried viewer could mistake them as much older. In Tima und Chrille (1996) two male-presenting individuals get gussied up. One clasps the other’s necklace, both wear makeup and the first figure’s hairy forearms hang over a crinoline that resembles fluffy pastry. Portrait of Susanne Sachsse (2002), meanwhile, twists surreal; a fur-masked model faces the camera at quarter angle. Pearl necklaces stream down the front of their torso. The background is brushed with shadows. The mask and beads, in turn, are a passage into the backstory. Chert Lüdde’s new location previously belonged to legendary

Die Blüten von Berlin, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and Chert Lüdde, Berlin

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costume-supply store Deko Behrendt, which went belly-up in the partyless pandemic. Halilaj and Urbano incorporate this history, here including drool-eliciting colourfield paintings made from wallpaper found during the renovation. The paintings buzz with plucky shapes and lush textures, and nod to affichiste artist Jacques Villeglé: their torn edges, and paper scraps that have flaked off on the floor nearby, teasingly suggesting a ligature between art and life. It’s precisely this exhibition’s playful use of the building’s and the neighbourhood’s history that raises a tricky question: should we understand Chert Lüdde’s takeover as a gentrifying displacement, or a more benign turnover, within the city’s natural evolution? Neither art nor the bourgeois bogeyman killed Deko Behrendt, but a virus (in collaboration, probably, with dysfunctional public policy). In any case, the pattern is familiar: one cultural treasure’s death is another’s life. How’s that for bittersweet pleasure? Mitch Speed

Wanda Pimentel Os Anos Noventa Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo 7 May – 11 June Heleninha Roitman was driven to drink by a manipulative mother, and for years she was too unwell to exhibit publicly. Nonetheless the beautiful artist, all big hair and sultry looks, continued to paint, channelling her addiction, marriage breakup and estrangement from her son into a series of darkly cinematic canvases. In their flat, graphic composition and brooding style, Roitman’s work reflects her character and the sense of gendered claustrophobia in the domestic scenes she chose to portray. They are also not, strictly speaking, by her own hand. Roitman was a character in an iconic Brazilian telenovela, Vale Tudo (1988–89), and while she herself may have been a fiction, the artworks that appear onscreen weren’t mere props, but were lent directly from the studio of Wanda Pimentel.

The late Pimentel was a student of Ivan Serpa and synthesised his hard-edge geometric abstraction into what became known as New Figuration. While an exhibition at masp, São Paulo, in 2017 concentrated on her Envolvimento (Involvement, 1968–84) series, in which scenes of domestic life are rendered in a bright lurid palette, the six paintings gathered in Os Anos Noventa (and painted after her soap opera outing) have a much more subdued colour and atmosphere. Pimentel’s rebuttal of the patriarchy and consumerism, however, remains constant. In Roupa (Clothing, 1996), typically painted in acrylic on canvas, with the artist’s sharp lines and invisible brushwork, a gloomy fenced path leads up to a room piled messily with clothes. A play perhaps on the sexist adage that a woman’s work is never done. In Untitled (Monuments series)

(1994) a monument is seen in silhouette, the fact that it is a male figure still apparent despite the gloom; in Untitled (vitrine) (1996) a man’s jacket is encased in a glass box, like a mausoleum. Even in death, the works seem to say, men dominate. An untitled work from 1995 is one of the best of these enigmatic works: a nightmarish close crop of a car grille and lights, seen as if at the point of impact. It is the keenest expression of the violence that underpins much of Pimentel’s work. Roitman was a pastiche of the tortured artist, her traumas personal and melodramatic, yet there’s a reason Pimentel’s work befitted the character. The real artist’s angst was a societal one, in which women were boxed in, encouraged only to play the role of wives or consumers. Her paintings were a means to break from that script. Oliver Basciano

Sem título (Untitled), 1995, acrylic on canvas, 120 × 200 cm. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

Summer 2022

Gallery Weekend Berlin Various venues, Berlin 29 April – 1 May The timing of this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend was evidently a no-brainer. Its 52 officially participating galleries – plus all the other venues that smartly synced their openings, from scuffling off-spaces to institutions – unveiled new presentations right after the opening festivities of the Venice Biennale. This, of course, invited art-addicted collectors and unwearied international art aficionados to keep partying, spending and, on occasion, soaking up more work by Surrealism-inclined women artists (we see you, Meyer Riegger, with your Meret Oppenheim and Eva Kot’átková shows), while bathed in the loquacious afterglow of the first big art event in a while. The organisers’ sneaky plan to seed the Veneto’s clouds before welcoming guests to a suddenly sun-splashed Berlin appears to have worked nicely, too. And at one early opening at least – for the Italianate group show Opera Opera at Deutsche Bank’s Palais Populaire (the exhibition touring from Rome’s maxxi) – Aperol spritzes were again poured out, in case anybody missed them. Mostly, though, the galleries stayed classy, some offering up relatively thorny and slow-burn fare. Galerie Buchholz, across two spaces, delivered a characteristically oblique and context-free suite of murky, occulted, X-ray-like monochrome photographs by Trisha Donnelly and a febrile, omnidirectional roomful of early works (from 1967–78) by fellow Bay Area nonrationalist Martin Wong, somewhere between funky, lopsided, browntoned Pop and Blakean rapture: ceramics of angels, winged Coke bottles and laughing coyotes, line drawings of vernacular American architecture and scroll-like text works. At Esther Schipper, David Claerbout’s two glacial videoworks could be patiently parsed in visual terms – one presented a plane in a hangar, the other a plaintive meld of archival and reconstructed imagery of urchins and down-at-heel adults – though the dense thematic, something to do with the hemispheres of the brain, was even slower to clarify itself. The components of Claerbout’s show that collectors, as opposed to institutions, were likely to snap up were accompanying drawings featuring the same imagery plus faintly self-conscious, aide memoire-like scribbled notes about the films’ production. This canny format, recalcitrant moving-image plus impulse-buy goods, was redoubled in Konrad Fischer’s Bruce Nauman show, where

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the black-and-white video Practice (2021) got its Berlin premiere. While inspired by a contract signed by a Canadian government representative and marked with an ‘X’ by a Blackfoot chief who seemingly couldn’t write or read, it finds the octogenarian artist running an elegiac, late-style variation on his repetitiveaction wheelhouse as his own body slows, his puffy paw tracing one laborious movement on a scarred table over and over. Upstairs, the gallery – digits evidently uppermost in the mind – saw fit to accompany this with a saleable ragbag of seemingly any smallish work available by Nauman featuring hands. If you weren’t shopping, at this point you might have thrown up your own. Other galleries and their artists skewed, at a tumultuous time, to grounding and even soothing variations on the familiar. At Barbara Wien, Haegue Yang offered manipulable globular objects festooned with miniature bells plus some tight, satisfying cut-paper collages; at Max Hetzler, Thomas Struth offered familiar yet often downright luscious evidence that he’s not yet done photographing front-facing family groups or incomprehensible, gee-whiz tangles of cabling and electronics at cern. And if you thought that the venerable Thomas Bayrle, here inaugurating a new space for the historically expansionresistant Neugerriemschneider, was going to pivot away from print-ready compositions made up of myriad miniaturised images that speak to latter-day humanity’s almost mystical relationship with industrial production, then I have the proverbial bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. There was, nevertheless, scratchier fare on display elsewhere. Joan Jonas’s overhanging field of Vietnamese bamboo kites, activated in the mind by their animist title, Draw on the Wind (2018), dominated her show in the relatively new, low-slung space Heidi. At the Berlinische Galerie, Nina Canell’s show centred on the self-annihilating Muscle Memory (7 Tonnes) (2022), a large, floor-based expanse of seashells that the viewer crunches under their feet, ideally while considering that such natural material, ground up, is a core element in concrete and thus our urban reality. At Tanja Wagner, Anna Witt set up sometimes live, sometimes recorded, and rarely wholly restful detournements of autonomous sensory meridian response, aka asmr, oriented towards amplifications of soft sounds made by destroying something, eg a dried-out plant.

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Tension, destruction, the desire for calm: these conditions, particularly now, are the backdrop for daily life, though at this Berlin Gallery Weekend they were often the deep background. Despite displaced people arriving daily at the city’s main train station and flags of solidarity draped over museum facades, not so many participants here felt duty-bound to say anything about Ukraine, and uneasy justifications might easily offer themselves: it’s been a tough few years market-wise and we need to make some money, art isn’t about daily politics, etc. Sterling Ruby and Sprüth Magers, who are probably both doing fine, broke the conspicuous silence that dominated commercial spaces: while showing ceramics and oversize textile works inside, the American artist plastered windows with a yellow and blue purchasable edition (reading, and sending an itch to the brain, ‘was war won’) aimed at benefiting Be an Angel eV, a charitable organisation working with refugees, many of them now coming from Ukraine. Supporting the same org was the recently reopened Neue Nationalgalerie, which not only launched a Barbara Kruger show – her trademark boldface text installation covers the floor, effectively invisible if you’re passing by, and includes the endlessly timely George Orwell line about totalitarianism and the boot stamping on someone’s face forever – but presented a week of daily performances of Crimean-born artist Maria Kulikovska’s 254. Here, for an hour at a time, in a sanctioned reconstruction of her samizdat, arrest-causing performance in 2014 at the opening of Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg, Kulikovska lay on the steps of the institution wrapped in her country’s flag, like a covered dead body. (The title refers to the number she was given after Crimea was annexed and she became a refugee in Kiev.) Such gestures of solidarity and awareness and fundraising aside, much of what was on display during this Gallery Weekend swung, predictably, in a wholly different direction. There were the pleasures of the known and unknown; the expected cascades of figurative painting; the repeated sight of artists pursuing their long-term hermetic obsessions; the citywide spectacle of a commercial art scene pulling together and piggybacking. And, amid all of this, the compound – and complicated – illusion of business as usual. Martin Herbert

top Maria Kulikovska, 254, 2022 (performance view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin). Photo: Bernd Borchardt. Courtesy the artist above Martin Wong, Untitled (Coyote), 1969, ceramic, 43 × 16 × 22 cm. Courtesy the artist’s estate and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

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Books

Girl Online: A User Manual by Joanna Walsh Verso, £10.99 (hardcover)

Written as a type of a manifesto, Joanna Walsh’s short book nevertheless retains the form of a conversational meditation. Walsh’s writing is acutely personal and raises questions that speak to the existence and agency of a woman negotiating cyberspace while juggling identities as a girl, mother, writer, etc in real life. Moreover, it explores the nature of female identity online and the extent to which every online woman is reduced to the status of being a girl. Girl Online comprises a series of reflections – almost reveries – ‘thought experiments’ and paraphrased and expanded tweets that explore girlhood, female camaraderie, writing online, sex and the nature and meaning of work. And in spite of the promise of the book’s title, the context for these is both on- and offline. ‘To lay claim to pain is to lay claim to experience. It is also to have the option to claim experience only as pain,’ Walsh writes of the exigencies of being online for all women. The pain she refers to here is the pain of being online, the pain that comes from being seen. Although given the book’s (current) form as an offline product, Walsh clearly has some translating to do. Her writing here then incorporates various online styles – programming language, diary entries, tweets, emails, with a smattering of lyrical prose – the relative informality of which have the added effect of making the book immensely approachable for a wide range of readers. In addition to these, Girl Online brings together literary techniques more resonant with the memoir format. There are ample instances of rhetorical repetition, experimental narratives, attention devoted to real-world objects (‘books, clothes, small household objects, small decorative objects’) and theory. But for Walsh this avoidance of any one particular convention is more than an aesthetic choice. Through Girl Online, Walsh delivers playful and lived-in observations about the online world. ‘Sometimes, like anyone else, I google myself to find out who I am,’ she writes about how she uses the internet both to see herself and to philosophise about what she sees. In this mode the book feels like a series of pronouncements, to be used as an explorer’s guide to the various experiences and limitations of being

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a woman online. She delves into the lives of girls and women online with a keen attention not to their emotions but to the strangeness of the entire project of ‘being’ online. ‘If a woman’s all context, a girl is all concept,’ she theorises. She is referring not just to the bloggers, writers and artists online but also to those who lurk, anonymously, on the fringes, perhaps looking for a way in or perhaps just looking. In recreating these experiences on the page Walsh opens the gates to introspection and avoids the iciness associated with the cyberfeminism of the likes of Gloria Steinem; moreover, her personable tone allows readers space in which to remember their own experiences online. ‘In the “attention economy”, attention can be paid even when no subject is looking,’ she writes in the chapter ‘Screen Goods’. It reminded me of an experience with which we are all familiar: the way that each time I read a news article online, pop-up ads from the page follow me to various ecommerce websites and apps even though I’ve not clicked or, in most cases, even looked at them. It’s almost as if once I’ve been privy to them, the ads and their ghosts will forever haunt me in the online highways and byways. Girl Online is as much about questions as it is answers, with Walsh diving prismatically into her subjects: about screens she writes, ‘ok, a screen is a good, as in a commodity, and it is utile – good for something. But is it good in itself, or good for anything or anyone else? Or is it good for nothing, being the locus of much of my “useless” as well as “useful” time?’ Through these queries she also makes it clear that the reader should turn to herself and not Walsh to find any answers to these and related questions. In doing so, Walsh encourages readers to contemplate, meditate and philosophise a way to their own answers. When Walsh writes about Paris Hilton’s Instagram photograph of herself ‘dressed for Halloween as sexy Alice in a blue satin minidress, her pinafore morphed into a waitress’s apron’, she invokes an important question that jumps out of that image: ‘She is holding a tray bearing a drink. Is it for her or is she a server?’ Meditating on this, Walsh writes, ‘Women have always been at the interface of communication technology: from

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telephonists and telegraph operators to “computers”, the early coders whose key-tapping associations with secretarial work tagged the profession female’. Here she connects a very contemporary, modern idea with something that goes back into time, linking up both the contemporary and the modern, online and offline. It’s this kind of grounding or contextualising that she does repeatedly throughout the text as a way, one might argue, of keeping things ‘real’. By way of these points of entry Walsh examines the relationship between the user and the used, the looker and the one being looked at, in the context of both the internet and femininity more generally. ‘Onscreen,’ she writes, ‘woman defaults to girl – for who has more power to manifest via the pure appearance that is screen mode?’ The internet demands that women present as girls, youthful, ageless and resembling any other of the of numerous ‘girls’ that have been floating online for years. But if Walsh suggests that the internet confuses her with one of them, then it is true too that the internet encourages her to do the same. Then in no time a woman becomes a girl, and it doesn’t matter if a particular face belonged to a generation, a revolution or even a person, it’s just an appearance, a representation without any representee, just a shell. ‘Some people say the internet is not describable,’ writes Walsh. ‘This is perhaps because it is performable.’ This holds a mirror to the semiotic and discursive ways of the internet where we are almost always doing things: browsing, sharing, making TikTok videos, playing games, chatting, listening, learning, working, watching, travelling, reading and so on. From Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, to Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Girl Online draws itself into the cohort of internet literature (oxymoronic as it sounds) that has only been increasing. Girl Online adds a distinct layer to this. In its ‘extremely online’ format it begs to be read as both an extension of the internet, and as a page off it. And in doing so, Walsh is able to ascribe to the internet something more vital, something more wholesome. A point of departure from its ongoing mythologisation and a place where readers can actually know what it’s like to be online. Anandi Mishra

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Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat by Bénédicte Savoy Princeton University Press, $29.95 (hardcover) ‘Nearly every conversation today about the restitution of cultural property to Africa already happened forty years ago,’ declares art historian Bénédicte Savoy, in her conclusion to Africa’s Struggle for Its Art. As a result of that, you might think that there’s no reason to read this book, but it’s an incisive and eye-opening history of the first restitution debates that developed from the mid-1960s through to the mid-80s. Drawing on the research that Savoy and Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr conducted for their influential 2018 report, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, this book tells the story of the decades during which African countries first tried to establish their claim on objects taken from the continent during the colonial era. Many of those objects ended up in the museums of the colonisers – principally Britain, France, Germany and Belgium – whose officials conspired to frustrate, delay and close down the debate on restitution. Savoy sets out the unedifying mix of paternalism, postcolonial defensiveness and straightforward (but nevertheless coded) bigotry that motored this, but which was outwardly clothed in high-minded concerns for ‘universalism’, the defence of scholarship and the care of objects for posterity. Diving deep into the archives of museum and government correspondence – especially those of the then-West

German Federal Republic – she reveals the biases of an older generation of museum and cultural officials (one or two of them, in West Germany, former card-carrying Nazis) who were alarmed at the growing clamour for restitution and the platform provided by the international institutions of the un and its cultural arm, unesco. Savoy frames her account in terms of collective amnesia, in which ‘the restitution debate of the 1970s and 80s disappeared from collective memory’, its revival in recent years a ‘return to the historical stage of something that had been repressed and cannot be ignored again’. But this is only a handy psychological metaphor, so it’s worth wondering why the mid-80s should serve as the cutoff point, not least because the SarrSavoy report itself continues to track the official resistance to restitution in European institutions well into the 2000s. What frames this period more credibly is that it represents the end of the Cold War. Savoy’s account isn’t really a political history, yet traces of that bigger political dynamic shadow the narrative – the concluding chapter, notably, recounts the major exhibition organised in 1985 by the Nigerian National Museum, of works from its own collection, in partnership with the Staatliche Museen in East Berlin, the capital of the gdr. Ironically, Savoy’s model for an equitable partnership of museums would be found in anticapitalist

Eastern Europe; for a rare occasion, an African institution took charge of the curatorial narrative, controlled what works were shown and led the public programme of a European institution. But what this highlights is that the ‘same conversations’ happening today occur in a radically different world to that of 40 years ago. Then, African claims for restitution were part of wider anticolonial politics that radicalised a ‘Third World’ intent on economic growth and political self-determination as much as cultural self-definition. Western-museum defensiveness reflected the postcolonial and Cold War antagonisms of the West in keeping the political aspirations of the ‘Third World’ (and the Eastern Bloc’s influence there) in check. Today, though, a neoliberal, globalist generation of Western leaders is attracted to restitution as an ethical win, which offers the moral and diplomatic high ground, but generates little other political pressure from an Africa still at the bottom of the global economic pile. While insisting that all the arguments have been won, Savoy betrays a frustration with having to win the argument all over again, even though restitution has now become a football between virtue-signalling Western elites internationally and culture-war controversies at home. All while unequal relations of economic and political power between Africa countries carry on regardless. J.J. Charlesworth

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective by Paul Martineau Getty Publications, £40 / $50 (hardcover) Among the numerous elements that clouded the critical reception of Imogen Cunningham’s photographs during her lifetime – their maker’s gender, her era and her proclivities – the most damning may have been their beauty. In a career that spanned seven decades, Cunningham (1883– 1976) created a body of work both impressive in its range and notable for the clarity of its aesthetic vision: portraits in which pools of shadow give way to silvery light that plays across planes of the face, piscine lips of petals cropped to the edge of abstraction, pedestrians doubled and obscured by paned glass, the textures of life wrought large and small. Her disparate subject matter prompted Getty curator Paul Martineau to enlist Cunningham expert Susan Ehrens to help tackle the catalogue for a retrospective.

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Ehrens supplements Martineau’s essays with texts delineating the artist’s early work and her mature contributions to photography as a ‘Modernist Pioneer’. In later years Cunningham found herself a lodestone around which younger artists orbited, befriending and encouraging Dorothea Lange and Ruth Asawa among others, which encouraged observers like Brett Weston (her peer Edward Weston’s son) to dismiss her as a great mentor rather than a great doer – a claim this comprehensive book takes pains to correct. Martineau and Ehrens provide cogent responses to detractors like Ansel Adams, who accused her of technical imprecision (Cunningham was a professionally trained chemist with a curious mind and delighted

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in happy accidents), and the digs at her sartorial quirks (which never seemed to follow, say, Dalí). However, neither fully examines the extent of the artist’s slipperiness with regard to modern (then understood to be synonymous with objective) photography. While pushing the photograph ever further from ‘straight’ documentation, she retained a profoundly subjective allegiance to what is beautiful that implied an investment in her subjects extending beyond the frame. Even as she successfully pitched a series of portraits of famous ‘ugly men’ to Vanity Fair in 1932, she remained committed to quite literally highlighting what was aesthetically pleasing in all of her subjects. Beauty, in art as in life, is never met entirely without scepticism. Cat Kron

isolarii by various authors Isolarii, £12 (softcover) Before Venice had cruise ships or an art biennial, it made its own fantasies. The isolarii, or ‘island books’, flourished there from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: they were a freewheeling blend of reportage and invention, chronicling distant parts of the Mediterranean through maps, pictures, hearsay, poetry and facts. Like gossips buoyed up by one another, the isolarii were the companionable sort. One book would give way to a second when its authority ran dry: you’d be reading about Constantinople, and on mentioning Cyprus or Malta, the writer would point to a peer who’d covered that ground before. For the last two years, I’ve been enamoured of isolarii, a subscription series of books coedited by India Ennenga and Sebastian Clark, a duo based in New York. It ‘revives’ the Venetian genre: these new isolarii, each volume declares, ‘form an archipelago of today’s most avant-garde figures and groups’. (The series is capitalised, but not the individual books.) There are six so far, of different lengths and types, from Russian feminist poetry to an investigation of salmon farms. Though they don’t explicitly cite each other, the ‘archipelago’ metaphor is meant to conjure a fuzzy link: just as the fauna shared by a chain of islands might change gradually across several coasts, so the isolarii share family resemblances.

The appearance of the books intrigued me first: they’re identically sized, and small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. As with any kind of cuteness, this is a ploy. Ennenga and Clark had the idea for the series when the latter was reporting on the assembly lines of Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer; in an email, Ennenga tells me that their books mimic “the number of words per line, and the text-size, of an iPhone”. Archipelago, for instance, a series of dialogues between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Édouard Glissant (introduced by Trinh T. Minh-Ha), has 219 pages, but only 80 to 100 words on each. The editors wanted to play off the “tactile, repetitive iPhone gestures” that our hands perform all day. “We’re not Luddites,” Ennenga adds, “but we’re resistant to the automation of thought.” Anyone who values thinking might make a similar claim – the process can never be wholly automatic – but the isolario mimics our devices’ size in order to swap their function out. The internet never stops gazing back at us, and addiction is the ruin of attention: you can put down your phone with ease, but it’s trickier to focus on what you take up in its stead. Since they’re books, your movement through an isolario is linear, a steady backdrop that the writer distends to weave your attentions into a tapestry. It’s an exercise for unlearning the

mental mechanics of the endless scroll. Yevgenia Belorusets’s Modern Animal (2021), for instance, is about how people and beasts share an earth: it shuttles between stories, lectures and ‘transcripts’ (and yet, of what?), as well as photographs of birds. It seems to pick up the environmentalism of Salmon: A Red Herring (2020), a project report by Cooking Sections, then pass its dialogues onto Archipelago, in which Obrist and the late Glissant talk pensée archipélique. (By contrast, the weakest book is Street Cop, 2021, a dystopian graphic novel by Robert Coover and Art Spiegelman; there’s fun in its mix of gritty policier and futuristic milieu, but it’s too light a read, and has little to say to its stablemates.) The purpose of the series isn’t strictly codified. As you read, you move between points, exploring and gathering; it’s experience as additive flux. In Archipelago Glissant emphasises that ‘creolisation’, his long-term prescription for social cohesion, is different to multicultural life: what he advocates isn’t ‘a state of identity’, but ‘a process that never stops’. On Ennenga’s phone, meanwhile, one note about isolarii is headed ‘systems for adventure’, as if ambition were itself a technology. Compare the smartphone to a mechanical siren, promising novelty but keeping you trapped. Stay on your island, your iPhone whispers; don’t go looking for something new. Cal Revely-Calder

scumb manifesto: Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books by Justine Kurland Mack, £60 (softcover) On 3 June 1968 Valerie Solanas walked into The Factory and shot Andy Warhol for stealing the script to her play Up Your Ass. A year previously she had published scum Manifesto, a roiling declaration of men’s uselessness, impotence and abject nature, and a damnation of the violence they perpetrate against women (a damnation, too, of the ‘insecure, approval-seeking, pandering male-females’ and ‘Daddy’s Girls’). Solanas’s manifesto for the Society for Cutting Up Men concludes that the only reasonable action to take is to kill all men. Perhaps leave some for ‘breeding in a cow pasture’, but only until such a time as they can be replaced by machines. After rereading this radical feminist text, photographer Justine Kurland took to her

own library of photobooks, pulled out each one published by a male photographer, and proceeded to snip, slice and cut away at the photos. She recompiled these into a series of 116 collages, each arranged on either the inside or the outside of the now-empty, splayed-open book covers, many of which sport severed binding materials and other evidence of the violence done to them. Accompanying the photos are five texts (including one by Kurland), ranging in style from literary prose (Renee Gladman’s ‘We Were Cuts Cutting’) to more straightforward essays on the history and development of collages made by women (Marina Chao’s ‘Cunts with the Kitchen Knife: Notes on Feminist Collage and Torn Paper’).

Summer 2022

None of the male photographers’ names are mentioned; the only clues are in some of the collages’ titles (Los Alamos Revisited, America by Car, The Animals). Some of the sources are more instantly recognisable: the images of daily meals and monotony of wood-panelled rooms and tabletops indicates American Surfaces, while a row of Victorian portraits of young girls, each with their face cut out, is reminiscent of Reflections in a Looking Glass. But those photographers are cut out of scumb, like their photos are cut out, and then mashed back together into a nameless reconstituted mass of body parts, signs, landscapes, bits of ‘everyday life’. This is a work of catharsis, an exhale before the real work begins. But what is the real work? Solanas put it best: ‘Dropping out is not the answer; fucking-up is.’ Fi Churchman

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ArtReview

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, £14.99 (hardcover) That time is a mother – and a ‘muhfucker’, in case you were wondering – is an observation that appears about halfway through Ocean Vuong’s second collection of poetry (following Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016). At once casual and world-weary, melodramatic and self-evidently, heartbreakingly true, this assertion inflects each of the 28 poems included here. Many of them are set in wintery working-class Connecticut, around which Vuong grew up and which provided the setting for his 2019 semiautobiographical novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The poems describe domestic abuse, factory jobs, addiction, suicide, love and desire as experienced by the boy who has become the poet, the son of the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American serviceman. Time Is a Mother is also filled with longing for lost or never-existing worlds, while exploring the possibility of (re)creating them, of altering trajectories with words alone: ‘all I have to do is write/the right words & I’m/beside you (again) but’, Vuong writes in ‘Dear T’, that trailing but encapsulating the possible limits of his power to rewrite what is done. The T in ‘Dear T’ is a teenage boy lying beside the narrator in a field of snow, smiling not in happy exhaustion but because he has been thrown from a wrecked Mazda (or that is how I read it – references across poems aid in the sometimes

forensic picking-apart of interlocking narrative lines) and is coming to terms with the knowledge that ‘the stars/are just stars & you know/ we’ll only live once/this time’. Which doesn’t stop the writer from hoping, in the face of all evidence, that ‘maybe I can build a boy/out of the silences inside maybe/we can cease without dying fuck/without tears falling’. Another shocking pileup of love, steel and self-invention is summoned in a poem titled ‘American Legend’, this time imagining the author causing the car in which he and his father are travelling, a ‘Ford big enough/for us to never/ touch’, to roll over, flinging their bodies around inside with such force that amid ‘the sudden/ wetness warm/everywhere, he slammed/into me &/we hugged/for the first time/in decades’. Bringing the family dog into the story, Vuong crafts a tale from the most maudlin of details, in which his father sends him forth as a writer (‘… put it/down on the page, son, he said/one night, after telling me/why he did what he did/ with his life, shitfaced/on Hennessy’), in which the dog escapes certain death (briefly sniffing the older man’s cooling body before heading off ‘into the trees, into her second/future’) and in which Vuong himself ‘walked from the wreck/ till the yards became/years, the dirt road/a city’. Explaining himself, and the transformation of his life onto the page and out into the world, he

concludes, ‘I did it to hold/my father, to free/ my dog. It’s an old story, Ma./Anyone can tell it.’ This is misdirection on a couple of fronts. The older, primal story Vuong has to tell is that of Rose, his mother – named right there in the collection’s title but disguised, typically, in an ironic turn of phrase that masks the deeper, the almost unspeakable. In ‘Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker’ he charts his mother’s decline into illness and death through the record of her online purchases, one of the final entries showing up as ‘Birthday Card – “Son, We Will Always Be Together”, Snoopy design’. ‘How you say what you mean changes what you say,’ he writes in ‘Not Even’, remarking on the phonetic similarities (and thus potential for confusion) between the Vietnamese words for love and weakness. This pitching of tone is Vuong’s formal play, deployed virtuosically across these poems: a syncopation with which the poet, writing like a patient on oxygen, pauses to breathe midclause, breaking a sentence into two images, two thoughts and two meanings, transforming violence into a caress, family trauma into the birth of a child, the child into a poet. ‘… Ma my art these/corpses I lay/side by side on/the page to tell you/our present tense/was not too late’, he writes in ‘Dear Rose’, the penultimate poem in this indispensable collection. David Terrien

Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments by Erin L. Thompson ww Norton, $25.95 (hardcover) Growing up, I would regularly head to Stone Mountain with my family for picnics and to catch the weekly show. Carved into the large lump of granite are three men on horseback, and every week green lasers projected onto the sculpture would animate them as they rode triumphantly into an illusory horizon to Elvis’s rendition of Dixie. Art historian Erin Thompson dedicates an entire chapter to Stone Mountain in her readable and richly researched examination of American monuments, detailing the aspects of the site that were hidden by such a spectacle: the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, depicting three leaders of the Confederacy, took three sculptors 50 years to complete and played a key role in the revival of the kkk at the start of the twentieth century. It is set in a park built and maintained by

free prison labour. It is protected by state law. And yet, as Thompson shows in dozens of examples, monuments aren’t a marker of any grand history but an outcome of particular negotiations of power and money that then tried to naturalise themselves into the landscape. Starting with the destruction of a statue of King George III in New York in 1776, parts of it melted down to make bullets for the American campaign against the British, Thompson’s is an eye-opening whistle-stop tour: from the Confederate monuments put up across the South almost half a century after the Civil War had finished, often at points of civil unrest, to remind white southerners where their allegiance, and obedience, should lie; and the wave of Christopher Columbus statues erected

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during the 1920s and 30s, as part of a concerted effort by Italian Americans to assert themselves as part of America’s expressly white heritage. ‘Monuments were often built as part of a war of stories,’ Thompson notes. Or, as one interviewee who helped topple Minneapolis’s Columbus proclaims, ‘Tearing down our history? No – we’re exposing it!’ Despite the book’s title, Thompson reveals that most of these monuments are still standing or have been restored, protected by arcane laws that have only tightened in response to increasing requests to move them. It’s depressing but invigorating reading, and a template for parallel studies needed everywhere as stories, and histories, are necessarily rewritten. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover Buck Ellison, Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton,

Words on the spine and on pages 27, 39 and 89 are from Careless Whisper, 1984, by George Michael/Andrew J. Ridgely

Dallas, Texas, 1984, 2019, archival pigment print, 119 × 87 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Yesterday we killed off the cows. A small herd, but, nevertheless, let no one accuse us of not doing our bit to save the planet. Or at least doing our bit to keep its temperatures within tolerable limits. Now is the time for rumination, not ruminants! The time for actions, not words! (As Greta once told us.) As to the cows, we’re not going leave them lying there; we’re going to eat them. All 30 of them. Nose to tail. From our calculations, based on 170g servings three times a day, each cow should last around 423 days (or around 14 months). So we should be done with the lot in a little over eight years’ time. Our sometime-friends Jordan and Mikhaila put us on to the fantastic health benefits of that kind of diet (although obviously we’ve had to unfriend Jordan after what happened with Winston), and we expect to lose seven pounds in weight every two weeks (because our flatmate Alan did). So we’ll be expecting to lose 1,461 pounds by the end of it all.

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Aftertaste

Boiling the Artichoke by Francis Bouvard and Justin Pécuchet

Obviously, we’re a little unhappy about the 30 600l freezers we’ve had to buy and the eight-year running costs: we also want to stop this fossil-fuel madness (Greta again)! But we’re going to treat any energy the freezers consume as ‘green’. After all, we’re only culling the cows and going on the carnivore diet to set ourselves up on the path to vegetarianism. Once the cows dry up, we’re going to follow the way

of the root, the way of the leaf. Not that the cows would literally dry up, we’re getting top-quality freezers (as our pen pal Carrie once wrote, ‘A refrigerator is a good reflection of someone’s personality’, and we’re definitely top quality), although now that we mention it, perhaps some drying could complement the freezing and help us save the planet a little bit more than we’re already saving it. All we’d need to do is to spice (we recommend a mix of vinegar, coriander and pepper) and salt the meat, hang it in a cool space with good air circulation (that bit’s important) and leave to dry – give it a quick squeeze now and then and it’ll be done when there is very little give. Our friends Liz and Jessica taught us that last bit. What you’ll end up with is a staggering specimen of desiccated deliciousness, a wizened wonderfulness, a shrivelled scrumptiousness, a pocketsize paradise. But we digress. Back to the ways of the root and the leaf. In these ways we’ll be helping to stop animal cruelty and spread compassion. We say this not simply to inspire others, but also to explain how we came to be here. Not here in the big sense. Here on the back page of an art magazine. An art magazine that’s been trying to make food important again. To make the processing and consumption of victuals meaningful as well as functional. Symbolic of something. To make greed good (as Michael used to whisper to us). We noticed that the art magazine had been leaning towards vegetarianism over the past few months – borscht, Eaton mess, Guinness cake – and with Cook on holiday this month and us being dedicated vegetarians, we volunteered our services. We know what you want, we got it! As our friends Mariah and Busta used to scream in our ears every morning. So here you go. Take an artichoke. Cut off the stalk. Boil it until the leaves at the base come off relatively easily. Remove from the water. Allow to cool. Serve with passion-fruit vinegar or hollandaise sauce. If those are hard to find, use mayonnaise as an alternative. Thank you.

June une

Art Fair Art Ar rt Fa F Fai air 13.–19.6. 202 2 ! , n o i 0B t a c e9 o l ld rass o w nst el e N ehe as Ri 58 B 40

VI, VII, Oslo Arcade, London & Brussels Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam Christian Andersen, Copenhagen Downs & Ross, New York Établissement d‘en face, Brussels Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam Fabian Lang, Zurich Foxy Production, New York The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Parisa Kind, Frankfurt Red Tracy, Copenhagen Sentiment, Zurich Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam Sydney, Sydney

Special Projects: DARP (Derbyshire) PROVENCE (Zurich) Gina Folly presented by June Art Fair Janina McQuoid, presented by June Art Fair with the support of Projeto Vênus, (São Paulo) Juneart.io, curated by Jared Madere june-art-fair.com @juneartfair @juneart.io

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