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Neïl Beloufa Otobong Nkanga 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 11/05 – 24/11 2019 Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham 20/02 – 10/05 2019 Iulia Nistor Scena 9, Bucharest 19/04 – 18/06 2019
Michael Dean St Cartage Hall, Lismore 30/03 – 19/05 2019 Otobong Nkanga TextielMuseum, Tillburg 24/11 2018 – 12/05 2019 Mariana Castillo Deball With de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam 25/05 – 25/08 2019 Paulo Nazareth ICA Miami, Miami 16/05 – 06/10 2019 Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 16/11 2018 – 12/05 2019 Rockefeller Center, New York 25/05 – 28/06 2019 Lucas Arruda Nina Canell Palazzo Grassi, Venice 24/03 – 15/12 2019 Otobong Nkanga Matthew Lutz-Kinoy Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah 07/03 – 10/06 2019 Lucas Arruda Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo 09/05 2019 Luiz Roque CAC Meymac, Meymac 17/03 – 16/06 2019
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Row Row, 1982. Oil on canvas in two parts, 110 × 78 ¾ inches (279.4 × 200 cm)
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Lee Mingwei, The Tourist, 2003, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Anita Kan. © Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin
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ArtReview vol 71 no 4 May 2019
State of the nation As any assiduous reader of ArtReview knows, it is particularly interested in the relationship between art and life. Now ArtReview is not about to rehearse the age-old (or at least going back to the advent of modern art) arguments concerning art for art’s sake versus art that serves a social function, namely because ArtReview thinks these arguments miss the fundamental point that art cannot escape ‘real’ life because it’s a product of it, even if ‘life’ is not its primary subject (ArtReview is reminded of a competition that was held in Communist Poland in 1950 that called on the submission of artworks that might, variously, demonstrate ‘the technology and organisation of cattle slaughter’, ‘the nationalisation and mechanisation of the industrialised pig farms’ or ‘bull and swine breeds in Limanowa, Nowy Targ and Miechów’, all subjects dear to the Soviet overlords). You will notice, for example, that much of this issue looks forward to the delights of the Venice Biennale. Its curator, the American Ralph Rugoff, points out that ‘art does not exercise its forces in the domain of politics’, yet of course he has to contend with political constructs – the tricksy realities of real life – such as statehood, given that half the event is organised by countries with their own pavilions. Cue earnestness from the art commentariat about how outmoded the format of the national pavilion is and isn’t it all a bit embarrassing that we’re stuck with these buildings bearing the names of countries given we’re supposed to be groovy freewheeling internationalists. ArtReview cannot help but notice that much of this dialogue comes from people situated in big powerful countries who frankly have every justification for being embarrassed about nationhood given that their nations’ histories are one long slog of warmongering, empire-building and pillaging. By contrast, judging from the interviews ArtReview has conducted, the smaller, newer and less-powerful countries on the world stage welcome the spotlight. As Alban Muja, representing Kosovo, puts it: ‘for a young country, it is important’. It is important too if your culture is an oppressed one, as the
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work of Inuit artist collective Isuma, which is being shown at the Canadian pavilion and appears on the cover of this issue, demonstrates. The danger is that if art does not keep half an eye on real life it will be used to cover a multitude of sins (btw questions of looking – really making sure you concentrate – come up in the work of William Eggleston, profiled within, whose photography proves formalism is political too; conversely Carl Hegemann, recalling his days working with Christoph Schlingensief, points out that the late German provocateur’s aesthetics were inseparable from his activism). ArtReview was reminded of this on a recent day trip out of São Paulo. Some friends, well-meaning but foolish, had suggested it visit an ‘artists’ town’, Embu, an hour’s drive away. ArtReview, trusting but equally idiotic, agreed, only to find that the whole place, rebranded Embu das Artes, was an ersatz confection of traditional crafts and self-conscious bohemia. It was only as it was about to leave that ArtReview discovered – entirely by chance – that this cutesy nonsense hid a particularly horrible reality. Not only did the town have a deputy secretary who is a swine even by Brazilian political standards, it also is the last resting place of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who terrorised Auschwitz and hid out in the local area into old age. One last story. Same message, but back in Italy. In 1917 weirdo Italian fascist lothario Gabriele D’Annunzio had taken a lady for a private audience with celebrated organist Goffredo Giarda, who was practicing a Frescobaldi toccata in Palazzo Pisani on Venice’s Grand Canal. At this point the Allies started bombing the city. To calm the couple’s nerves D’Annunzio instructed Giarda to continue playing, repeating the same composition over and over again to mask the explosions all around them. As the raid came to an end, and the couple stepped out, D’Annunzio saw that his living quarters across the water had been destroyed. However much you might want to shut life out of art, it’ll always barge its way back in.
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Prabhavathi Meppayil Recent Works 26 April – 25 May 2019
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KO ON S DUCHAMP APPEARANCE STRIPPED BARE 19.MAY.–29.SEP.2019
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Jeff Koons. Rabbit, 1986. Stainless steel. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Partial gift of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, 2000.21. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago. © Jeff Koons
Shirley “Shirley Tse.” Stake Stakehold “Stakeholders.” Hong Kong Hong Kong in “Hong Kong in Venice.” 11 May 11 May–24 11 May–24 Nov 11 May–24 Nov 2019. Curated by 「謝淑妮：與事者， 香港在威尼斯」 Christina Li 由李綺敏策劃 2019年5月11日至11月24日
Coordinator in Venice: PDG Arte Communcations, artecommunications.com
Ryan Gander Some Other Life April 26 – June 15, 2019
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CASTELLO 4209, SAN MARCO STATION: S. ZACCARIA. NEXT TO THE PALAZZO DUCALE HOURS: 10 AM-6 PM (CLOSED MONDAYS, EXCEPT 13 MAY, 2 SEP, 18 NOV) | PREVIEW: 10 AM-8 PM 8-9-10 MAY 2019
Art Previewed Previews by Martin Herbert 37
Venice Previewed by Ben Eastham 44
Art Featured Isuma by Mark Rappolt 62
Merchants of Venice by Bernard Denvir, J.P. Hodin, Michael Shepherd, Charles Spencer 78
Christoph Schlingensief by Carl Hegemann 68
William Eggleston by Fi Churchman 90
Franz West by Rosanna Mclaughlin 74
page 74 Franz West, Untitled, 1972, gouache on paper, 14 × 21 cm. © Estate Franz West & Archiv Franz West. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York, London & Hong Kong
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Art Reviewed
Exhibitions 102
Books 112
Arahmaiani, by Mark Rappolt Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now, by Ben Eastham Jacqueline de Jong, by Martin Herbert David Salle, by David Terrien Rose English, by Louise Darblay Jews, Money, Myth, by J.J. Charlesworth New Media and Conceptualism in the 1970s, by Oliver Basciano
In Land: Writings around Land Art and its Legacies, by Ben Tufnell A place that exists only in moonlight, by Katie Paterson The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, by Nancy Fraser Whip-hot & Grippy, by Heather Phillipson Behind the Headlines 118
page 104 Formafantasma, Ore Streams Cubicle 2, 2017, mixed media, 75 × 168 × 75 cm (desk) and 135 × 120 × 120 cm (screen). Photo: DR. © the artists. Courtesy Giustini / Stagetti, Rome
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ArtReview
BEAUTY WORLD
2 – 5 May 2019
Vigo Gallery @ Frieze New York
Randalls Island Park
Focus
C44
#vigogallery vigogallery.com
Derrick Adams
Style Vaiation 9
2019
Acrylic paint and graphite on digital photograph inkjet on watercolour paper
177·8 × 111·8 cm
70 × 44 inches
54⅜ × 41 inches 138 × 104 cm Monoprint acrylic on calendared Belgian linen 2019
Adam And Eve | Pain Relief Ibrahim El-Salahi
Ibrahim El-Salahi Pain Relief 7 June – 18 July 2019 Vigo Gallery @ Saatchi Gallery Duke of York’s HQ King’s Road Chelsea London SW3 4RY
Lower floor Salon
#vigogallery vigogallery.com
INVASOR
PHI presents:
May 6 — July 6 Ca’ Rezzonico Gallery
RENATA MORALES
During the 58th Venice Biennale
phi.ca
Art Previewed
The gasps of the dying, the sound of one thrown overboard 35
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Previewed Yes, this month the 58th Venice Biennale opens, but we needn’t talk about that here. Someone else is doing it a few pages further on. Spare a thought, though, for the other biennials in its shadow this month, and bear in mind that by ‘biennial’ we’re employing not the strict onceevery-two-years meaning but the now-accepted usage ‘big show that happens every few years’. 1 The Oslo Biennial, or osloBIENNALEN, as it styles itself, runs for five years (making it technically a quinquennial) and unfolds in stages across the city’s public spaces. It’s not clear when that unfolding stops, but this year 26 projects by artists based in the city and elsewhere will be unveiled, selected by curators Eva GonzálezSancho Bodero and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk
and by figures including Jonas Dahlberg, Lisa Tan, Knut Åsdam, Julien Bismuth and Marianne Heier. ‘The works could have a non-tangible format,’ Eeg-Tverbakk told The Art Newspaper in 2018. We’ll wait and see what that means, but what’s known is that while the biennial will be augmented by the usual mix of workshops, concerts, symposia, performances, etc, in other ways its staggered structure might offer some kind of antidote to the biennial fatigue that tends to set in even before Venice has opened. Somewhat less in need of spotlighting is 2 the Whitney Biennial, which tends to suck up a bit of the discursive oxygen whenever it lands and this year has already garnered its fair share of attention, not all of it good. Curated by Jane
Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, the 79th edition – it was launched in 1932, so the maths ask for investigation – features 75 artists ranging from Olga Balema to the (now) late Barbara Hammer, Josh Kline to Diane Simpson, including a greater number of practitioners under forty, as well as a larger percentage of women, than usual. Still, it has been targeted by activist orgs. W.A.G.E. asked artists to withdraw unless the museum properly compensated them (the museum appears to have complied). Other groups such as Decolonize This Place called for the resignation of museum vice-chairman Warren Kanders, whose company, Safariland, manufactures body armour for law-enforcement agencies and the tear gas used on asylum seekers at Mexico’s
1 Marianne Heier, whose work And Their Spirits Live On, 2019, will be performed at the former Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, in May. Photo: Lia Ronchi. Courtesy the artist and the osloBiennalen
2 Barbara Hammer, History Lessons (still), 2000, 16mm film, colour, sound, 66 min 51 sec. Courtesy the artist
May 2019
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border. And Michael Rakowitz pulled out in as a figure who, partly encouraged by Clement protest at Kanders’s continued presence. In short, Greenberg when he moved to the US, didn’t the 1993 edition’s classification as ‘the’ political reject Abstract Expressionism or Colour Field art in favour of Pop but continued to move Whitney Biennial clearly needs rethinking. 3 between their poles; nor has he allowed himself Tate Britain’s retrospective for Frank Bowling, who was included in the Whitney to be typecast as a Caribbean artist, although, Biennial back in 1971, is likely to be quite as he’s admitted, he sometimes played into this. the ride. Covering six decades of the GuyanaThese days his resistance to one approach not born, shapeshifting painter’s work, it tracks only looks prescient, it’ll also likely make for myriad, restless moves that have nevertheless a fascinating, stem-twisting journey through been anchored by vivid colour, from still-potent the ensuing rooms of this victory lap. Pop (as a contemporary of David Hockney and Colour has likewise been the beating heart R.B. Kitaj at the Royal College of Art) to lyric 4 of Bernard Frize’s work, though he’s treated fusions of abstraction and figuration, including it in a much more analytic manner. Frize, who assured experiments with poured paint and began working during the 1970s when painting gauzy surfaces resembling geography. Bowling, was on the skids, has tended to use rules and who’s now eighty-five, retrospectively scans systems, from pulling skins of dried paint out
of cans and appliquéing them onto canvas, to – lately – employing teams of assistants to simultaneously ‘perform’ his paintings, pulling brushes in a kind of dance to create bands of colour that mix where they crisscross wet-inwet. Elsewhere, though, he’s folded in figurative elements and established a sideline in photography. The Pompidou’s retrospective, tracking back through the last 40 years via some 60 works, promises both to tickle the brain and irradiate the eyes, while doubling down on how very French it is by relating Frize’s art to the legendarily constraint-driven literary group, the Oulipo. Why make your own sculpture when you can source and spotlight objects from Hollywood 5 prop houses? That’s been Dora Budor’s modus operandi, as the Croatian artist has repurposed
3 Frank Bowling, Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To & From Brighton, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 189 × 123 cm. © the artist / D ACS 2019. Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, London & New York
4 Bernard Frize, Article japonais, 1985, lacquer, oil and resin on canvas, 99 × 80 × 3 cm. © Adagp, Paris 2019. Courtesy the artist
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5 Dora Budor, Ephemerol, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy Ramiken Crucible, New York
5 Dora Budor, The Preserving Machine, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy Baltic Triennial 13
prosthetic cyborg body parts and architectural cinematic setting that touches on the inexorable merging of the natural and the manmade. models used in Batman Returns, The Fifth Element, etc, though she’s also used dystopian sci-fi Budor isn’t the only artist using airborne and atmospheric materials these days, of course: environments as plain inspiration, as in Year Without a Summer (Judd) (2017), wherein artificial 6 a key innovator in that regard is Anicka Yi, who’s collaborated with biologists and chemists ash fell gently onto a Donald Judd bench from a confetti dispenser. The same year, for the and who might still be best known for works Pirandello-inspired Manicomio!, Budor set loose like You Can Call Me F (2015), where she cultivated the ‘smell’ of feminism by growing bacterial six actors playing characters played by Leonardo swabs from 100 women in agar jellies. A work DiCaprio among the booths of New York’s Frieze art fair. If Budor’s work can be conceived as a like that, and a later work in which she created kind of psychological test-space in which cinema a scent intended to hybridise the smells of ants and reality, fiction and fact merge, that appears and Asian-American women, found her creating atmospheric analogies for cultural anxieties. set to continue in I am Gong at Kunsthalle Basel, where she plans to use sound, pollution, dust But the Seoul-born, New York-based Yi could – the allergy-prone beware – and ‘environmental also be seen as elevating the status of bacteria data from dissonant temporalities’ to create a and positing a holistic interplay between the
May 2019
human and the natural world, and in her current show, We Have Never Been Individual, she elevates kelp, the largest biomass on Earth and one with a multiplicity of uses, in a sequence of glowing spherical sculptures with algae stretched around them, the ensemble lit by green and gold light. Another series creates ‘aquascapes’ out of microalgae and cyanobacteria, the ancient basis of all life on the planet; a third fashions sculptures from fossilised remains of animals and plants. Across the sequences, there’s an interplay of the hominid, the organic and the technological, in which – to revert to the gallery’s take – ‘the modern mythology of the human proves to be an outdated disguise for something at once smaller, greater, and more complex than we had imagined’.
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8 Filipa César, Quantum Creole (film still), 2019, installation featuring video, 16mm and 3D animation. Courtesy the artist
9 Camille Henrot, Tuesday (video still), 2017, HD video, colour, sound, 20 min 50 sec. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris & London; König Galerie, Berlin & London; and Metro Pictures, New York
7
each one slightly different – sync perfectly Yngve Holen’s practice is, on one level, easily describable. He takes parts of industrial with art collectors’ desires for things that objects and arrays them cleanly across galleries other collectors have. But the sociologically in serial format, abstracting and formalising minded Holen, who studied at the hyperthem – part of a CT scanner, Boeing ‘Dreamliner’ networked Städelschule, is no doubt well windows or car headlights or rims. Generally, aware of that, and would probably claim it as though, these machined and modern things part of his work’s chilly, of-the-moment affect. have a relation to the body, or a human subject, In her 2017 film Spell Reel, the Berlin-based who’s not there: the headlights ersatz eyes; the 8 Portuguese artist/filmmaker Filipa César looked at the midcentury war of independence customised rims of SUVs suggesting an owner who wants to show off their status. (Often there’s on the former Portuguese colony of Guineaanother layer, as when Holen fabricates rims in Bissau, crediting the film to collective authorwood to point to recent trends in architecture, ship on the basis of the different voices she or clads his CT scanner casings in fetishistic wove into the narrative. The rivers region of the Guinea of Cape Verde (a historical site materials.) Talking of which, a churl might of slave-trading) and collectivism recur in her suggest that the Norwegian-German artist’s displays – lots of approximately the same thing, newer project, Quantum Creole, in which the
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plans of multinationals to establish an ‘ultraliberal free-trade zone’ in the Bissagos Islands are interwoven with the development of punchcard technology for textile production, which in turn was foundational for computing. César explores this under the sign of creolisation, connecting the weaving of subversive messages into textiles, creole reappropriation of colonists’ language and the modern versions of colonial power that arise under neoliberalism. And if that weren’t enough to grapple with, expect the essay film/installation to (appropriately) mingle visual modes, from video to 16mm to 3D animation. Camille Henrot has spent a few years out9 running her 2013 breakout video Grosse Fatigue, a rapid-fire history of the world’s creation told
through images from Washington, DC’s footage of horses being groomed and Brazilian jujitsu combat. For Henrot, this struggling Smithsonian Institution, online borrowings gives rise to a sense of ‘almost’ – perhaps beand a Last Poets-style poem-cum-oratory. cause the result could have gone the other way. Like much of her work, that one dealt with To find out how that relates to the quintessence navigating swathes of information in order of Tuesday, a sort of stranded, neither-thisto get closer to – if never quite arrive at – some nor-that day, hustle along to Koenig. (They’re kind of truth. Lately, she’s investigated another closed on Mondays, btw.) overarching, only halfway-logical system: her 10 Last but far from least, Bosco Sodi’s 3D film Saturday (2017) explored Seventh-day Atlantes (2019) is, by the numbers, a modernAdventism and the observance of the Sabbath, day epic. Inaugurated recently on the Oaxacan and now she zooms in on another day of the coast of Mexico, it’s a synthesis of Land art and week. The film Tuesday (2019), to be shown here alongside a series of ambiguously anthropomorMinimalism laced with entropy: a grid of 64 phic sculptures, locates moments of sensuality, cubes each consisting of 1,600 bricks handmade by Sodi and local craftsmen – over 102,000 bricks, tenderness and power struggle in interweaved
weighing more than 700 tons – and is intended, like some ancient monument, as a kind of observatory for watching the change of the seasons. But it also points to a longer metric of change, as part of its sculptural syntax is the weeds and other flora that will grow up around it, and the way it will inevitably erode. So while you can walk around it and note the variations in each cube, which have come, apparently, from the bricks being fired in a traditional brick kiln with wood, jacaranda seeds and coconut shells, one might also muse on eternity: on art that’ll outlive us all – if it isn’t washed away – and, like the rest of us, will probably never look better than it does today. Martin Herbert
10 Bosco Sodi, Atlantes, 2019, clay, 64 pieces, 214 × 214 × 214 cm (each). Photo: Sergio López. Courtesy the artist
1 osloBiennalen various venues, Oslo 25 May – 2024
4 Bernard Frize Centre Pompidou, Paris 29 May – 26 August
8 Filipa César Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon 31 May – 2 September
2 Whitney Biennial 2019 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 17 May – 22 September
5 Dora Budor Kunsthalle Basel 24 May – 11 August
9 Camille Henrot König Galerie, Berlin 27 April – 26 May
3 Frank Bowling Tate Britain, London 31 May – 26 August
6 Anicka Yi Gladstone Gallery, Brussels 23 April – 15 June
10 Bosco Sodi Oaxacan coast, Mexico ongoing
7 Yngve Holen Modern Art Helmut Row, London 24 May – 27 July
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Venice Previewed
Austrian Pavilion Renate Bertlmann, Zärtliche Berührungen (Tender Touches), 1976/2009, digital print mounted on Dibond, 97 × 96 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Steinek, Vienna, and Richard Saltoun, London
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The diehard politicos among ArtReview’s readers might have noticed that the pillars of Western liberal democracy are beginning, let’s say, to creak a little. Those of you who aren’t too busy stockpiling canned goods and toilet paper to pontificate about the crisis of the nation state might also have identified links to wider discussions around truth, identity and representation. The upshot is a popular imaginary dominated by enclosures, fortifications and tariffs, and a public discourse characterised by the welcome profusion of marginal voices and the less welcome proliferation of what might generously be called ‘unconventional perspectives’ on the news. One of the aims (at least in ArtReview’s HO) of the Venice Biennale is to illustrate how culture intersects with the historical moment, so while the curator of this edition’s International Art Exhibition, Ralph Rugoff, has stated that ‘art does not exercise its forces in the domain of politics’, his title nevertheless seems to hint at the more insidious ways in which representations can shape the world in which we live. The phrase May You Live in Interesting Times came into circulation in the English language as a prototypical piece of ‘fake news’, a supposedly Chinese curse that came to exemplify the gnomic wisdom of an exoticised East. Which, of course, says more about the Orientalists who invented the saying than the culture they purported to describe and against which sections of the West has defined itself. The implication seems to be that not only actions but also expressions, interpretations and (mis)translations have consequences. So among the (exclusively living) artists that Rugoff has selected, it’s no surprise to see a number – including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ed Atkins and Hito Steyerl – who explore the way in which words and images materialise in the world. That each of the relatively small list of 79 artists will present separate and contrasting displays at the Arsenale and Giardini also invites the viewer to consider how context shapes the reception of a work. Which is grist to the mill of Stan Douglas and Jimmie Durham, who have for decades interrogated mediated identities, while photographers Rula Halawani and Zanele Muholi document sections of their societies (in Palestine and South Africa, respectively) as a means by which to catalyse change in them. The prevailing anxiety around the relationship between the represented and real might even seem to play out in the quiddity of sculptures by artists including Handiwirman Saputra or Nabuqi: there is something reassuring, in these paranoid-conspiratorial times, in the impression that something is unarguably and irreducibly what it is. The breakdown of established definitions – and the categories they help to delineate –
is also reflected in the preponderance of unreliable narrators, alter egos and slippery pseudonyms in the various national pavilions. This is territory familiar to France’s Laure Prouvost, an artist based for so long in England that her interviews in either language – in both cases conducted in an idiosyncratic franglais – might almost be interchangeable. Revolving around farfetched storylines that conflate biography and history, reality and fiction, her work is at once whimsical and antiauthoritarian. Mistranslation serving here not as a means of asserting control but of eluding it. Also playing on the power vested in names, the artist formerly known as Natascha Sadr Haghighian will represent Germany under the Germanified moniker of Natascha Süder Happelmann. While drawing attention to historic causes for changes of name among immigrant communities, the intention more broadly seems to be to redistribute the authority conferred by the fetish for single authorship and in doing so to establish the conditions for
Some of the Biennale’s more straightforward critiques of the nation state can seem misguided, like mistaking the infrastructure for the ideology, or bewilderingly overdue, as if it had only recently become apparent that colonialism happened a more collective approach to the production of art. ArtReview can’t really imagine what this will look like, in part because it was distracted at the press conference by the fact that Happelmann’s spokesperson was sporting what appeared to be a large papier-mâché stone on her head. In recent years, no country more than Greece has had a – what’s the word – ‘complicated’ relationship with Germany on political, economic and cultural levels, so it’s interesting that Panos Charalambous, Eva Stefani and Zafos Xagoraris have also chosen a conspicuously Teutonic name for the fictional character around whom their group show will, if ArtReview understands correctly, be based. ‘Mr Stigl’ is described in the press release as a ‘fantastical hero of an unknown story whose poetics take us to the periphery of official history, but also of reality’. And where better to escape the real world than Venice. If you really want to get confused about the place of the nation state in a globalised and intricately networked world, of course,
May 2019
you need to speak to Great Britain. So it seems appropriate that a sovereign state that is actually four separate countries, only half of which voted to leave the European Union, has opted for Cathy Wilkes, an Irish artist born in the United Kingdom who previously represented Scotland at the 2015 Venice Biennale, this being the same Scotland that may soon devolve from the United Kingdom, feasibly after Wilkes’s native Northern Ireland has been absorbed into the Republic of Ireland (which is itself showing, incidentally, the London-based Eva Rothschild, whose posters for the Remain campaign adorned ArtReview’s windows during the ill-fated 2016 referendum) and thus back into the European Union, presuming the United Kingdom ever leaves (at time of going to press, ArtReview has not the first idea what’s going on). Which lends itself to a maybe too-neat comparison with the tendency of Wilkes’s sculptures and installations to run across the boundaries separating works of art from their surrounding environments, encouraging the visitor to cross or disregard them. But ArtReview is trying to squeeze in as many pavilions as possible here, so you should maybe give it a break. In defiance of the increasingly outmoded ideal of nationhood that the Venice Biennale was founded to advance and to which Great Britain is so bizarrely attached, Ghana has chosen to focus instead on the diaspora as carrier of culture and identity. Featuring Felicia Abban, John Akomfrah, El Anatsui, Lynette Boakye-Yiadom, Ibrahim Mahama and Selasi Awusi Sosu in a pavilion designed by the London-based architect David Adjaye, with the late Okwui Enwezor having served as a ‘strategic advisor’ on the project, it seems possible that the pavilion might go some way to fulfilling its stated promise to look beyond the current ‘“postcolonial” moment into one we have yet to envision’. If the implication of a diaspora is that a nation extends beyond its geographical borders, then Ghana Freedom (the pavilion’s exhibition is named after a song celebrating the country’s independence) suggests that identity is at once a more fluid and a more resilient concept than essentialists on both sides of the culture wars would allow. In the light of which, some of the Biennale’s more straightforward critiques of the nation state can seem misguided, a little like mistaking the infrastructure for the ideology, or bewilderingly overdue, as if it had only recently become apparent that colonialism happened. Finland’s insufferably titled Miracle Workers Collective told ArtReview that they were “surprised” that “anyone still thinks the nation state is a viable experiment in the organisation of humanity”. To express said surprise, they have dedicated themselves to “rearticulating the idea of a contemporary art exhibition” at Venice,
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presumably on the principle that no one thought to do that before. Among those who might be surprised that anyone is only now questioning the validity of the ideas on which the nation state was founded might be the inhabitants of Chile, which has enlisted Voluspa Jarpa to interrogate the brutal histories and enduring legacies of European imperialism in South America. Those legacies are frighteningly apparent in the recent political upheaval in Brazil, where a new regime justifies discriminatory policies by appeal to ‘old-fashioned’ values. So Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca’s representation of identity as a performance, here expressed through a video installation exploring the dance phenomenon known as swingueira, feels like a political statement. ArtReview was, incidentally, about to call swingueira and its associated scene a ‘subculture’ until it did some Internet research and realised that many more Brazilians participate in swingueira each week than are likely even to have heard about the Venice Biennale. Popular culture also inspires South Africa’s pavilion, a group show with a title alluding to the song (Something Inside) So Strong by Labi Siffre, recorded in 1987 as a protest against apartheid. Featuring Dineo Seshee Bopape, Tracey Rose and Mawande Ka Zenzile, it promises a ‘critical engagement with South Africa’s collective past, present and future’ through forms including performance and dance. The implication is that a democratic postcolonial nation state must address the horrors of the past if it is to serve its more positive function as protector of its citizens against violence and guarantor of their human rights. Which lesson is reiterated by Kosovo, for whose pavilion Alban Muja will show a video installation that tells the stories of three children who fled the war-torn country in 1999. He told ArtReview that the project is about “addressing the past in the now in order to tell a story in a human way without focusing on guilt”, and “the power of narrative in times of conflict and after”. The past also haunts the work of Dane Mitchell, whose citywide soundwork will play ‘an automated broadcast of the vast lists of things which have disappeared or become extinct’. Transmitted by cell-phone towers positioned across Venice and disguised as trees, a work devoted to what has been lost feels especially freighted in the wake of the terrorist attack against a mosque in Christchurch. Speaking to ArtReview, Mitchell acknowledged the unexpected burden conferred by the eruption of far-right extremism in a country celebrated for its tolerance, noting that while “there is a timeliness and a universality to the concerns my work addresses… I’m certainly from somewhere – I’m Pakeha from New
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Zealand Aotearoa”. That local and universal concerns need not be mutually exclusive is the principle upon which, it might be argued, the Biennale depends. The relationship between global shifts in political opinion and their local expressions was described recently by Liz Kim, who wrote in ArtReview Asia that ‘nowhere in the world has the #MeToo movement had a more tangible impact than in South Korea’. Which teed up curator Hyunjin Kim to announce that three female artists will challenge the hierarchies of gender and power exposed by revelations in public life under the title History Has Failed Us, but No Matter (taken from Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel Pachinko). In using performance, film and video to reimagine East Asia’s historical narratives ‘through the lens of gender diversity’, Hwayeon Nam, siren eun young jung and Jane Jin Kaisen are following the lead of a number of historically neglected female artists now gaining wider recognition. Among them is the combative Renate Bertlmann, who
ArtReview can’t really imagine what this will look like, in part because it was distracted at the press conference by the fact that Happelmann’s spokesperson was sporting what appeared to be a large papier-mâché stone on her head told ArtReview that she is looking forward to “conquering” Austria’s pavilion. Situated in the sixteenth-century Palazzo delle Prigioni (‘Prisons’), Taiwan’s Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 takes its name from the standard metric volume of cells and uses ten case-histories of incarceration ‘due to gender, sexual, and racial nonconformity’ – among them Casanova, Foucault and de Sade – to explore histories of confinement and control. A combination of video, installation and computer programming will create a ‘maze’ of branching narratives through which the visitor will have to navigate their own path, aiming, according to curator Paul B. Preciado, to ‘invent new ways of feeling and desiring’ and undermining normative assumptions about what is ‘natural’ and what is constructed. The meaninglessness of any distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ is also reflected in the fact that we now live in the Anthropocene. Meditating on the series of climate change-driven catastrophes suffered
ArtReview
by Japan in recent years, Motoyuki Shitamichi’s Cosmo-Eggs takes for a starting point the ‘tsunami stones’ he first encountered in Okinawa in 2015. These rocks are imagined as repositories of memory ‘like public squares or monuments’, according to the artist, who is working with composer Taro Yasuno, anthropologist Toshiaki Ishikura and architect Fuminori Nousaku to create an environment conducive to their contemplation. In his ecstatic prose poems Roger Caillois famously called stones ‘l’orée du songe’ (the shore of dreaming); Shitamichi’s are likely to prompt more sober reflections on the world in which we live. How we relate to and imagine our disintegrating physical landscape is also the subject of Mark Justiniani’s project for the Philippine Pavilion. Island Weather will explore the different ways that the island ‘can be perceived and imagined: by evoking its geophysical characteristics, reflecting on how humans regard it as a place of origin, refuge, respite, or a location that may refer to the nation itself’. Shaped by themes of travel, colonialism, acts of seeing and frameworks of truth, the pavilion will showcase the longstanding interest of the artist – who has worked with activist groups and artist initiatives including ABAY (Artista ng Bayan) and the collective Sanggawa – in how perception shapes our understanding of reality. The histories of maritime exploration, empire and trade also shape Naiza Khan’s project for the Pakistan Pavilion. In a new work titled Manora Field Notes, the artist will delve into the history of the island of Manora, located off the coast of Karachi. The role of culture in nation-building, meanwhile, finds a more direct expression in India’s first pavilion since 2011 (and only its second ever), which will be devoted to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. The curatorial team from Kiran Nadar Museum of Art promise that Our Time for a Future Caring, featuring work by seven artists including Atul Dodiya and Jitish Kallat, will use the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth as an opportunity to reflect upon teachings that are ‘difficult to ignore in an increasingly violent and intolerant world’. Hope and despair might be · expected to commingle in lnci Eviner’s installation for Turkey’s pavilion, which is addressed to the suffering caused by the displacement of populations from their native land. Aspiring to ‘evoke the sense of a search for the missing, the erased and that which is elsewhere’, the artist will fill the space with architectural elements that guide visitors towards encounters with displaced people and objects. Few countries in the developed world are as hostile in their policies towards undocumented migrants as Australia, and so Angelica Mesiti’s promises to use harmony, disharmony and polyphony as metaphors for the coexistence
Chilean Pavilion Voluspa Jarpa, Subaltern Portraits Gallery: Women of Vienna 3, from the series Altered Views, 2019. Courtesy the artist
German Pavilion Berlin press presentation of the project by Natascha Süder Happelmann (Natascha Sadr Haghighian) for the Venice Biennale, October 2018. Photo: Stefan Fischer
May 2019
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of different voices in a civil society might be understood as an oblique form of protest. The artist, who has previously used large-screen videoworks to reflect on nonverbal communication from whistling to dance, describes ASSEMBLY as a ‘poetic, nuanced’ call for greater tolerance of difference. The pavilion is one of several at the Biennale to use sound as a means of addressing politics (an approach by analogy that is likely to be shared, if her recent work is a guide, by sculptor Shirley Tse’s new site-specific installation for the Hong Kong Pavilion). At the Singapore Pavilion, for example, Song-Ming Ang will use the history of musical pedagogy to reflect upon the entanglement of culture and national identity in a recently independent country, while E. Jantsankhorol is building a makeshift recording studio that will allow artists including Carsten Nicolai to record and install sounds inspired by throat singing – which originated in Mongolia – over the course of the Biennale. Despite which, the prize for this year’s most difficult-to-envisionfor-critics-trying-to-write-a-blind-preview pavilion goes to Indonesia on the strength of a press release announcing that Handiwirman
Saputra and Syagini Ratna Wulan are creating an immersive installation featuring ‘a functioning Ferris wheel that visitors can ride, a smoking room and 400 lockers’. At the end of days spent traipsing round a sinking city and avoiding eye contact with other members of the artworld, that sounds like a dream. On the subject of which, not that ArtReview is struggling at this point to find segues, artist Driant Zeneli dedicates Albania’s pavilion to the dwindling percentage of the world’s population who ‘still believe in dreams’, presuming that he means the type of dreams that end in the fulfilment of professional and romantic aspirations and not those in which you are hiding from a parasitic alien in the loading bay of a rusting spacecraft and only end when your concerned partner shakes you awake. A video installation telling the story of ‘five teenagers who find a cosmic sphere inside a factory in northeast Albania’ could go either way, in fairness, and it doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine that the recent resurgence of interest in science fiction, in the artworld and in the wider culture might be related to a heightened anxiety about our real-world futures. Danica
Dakić, of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is another whose work will explore the relationship between past and future, utopia and dystopia. Which brings us, purely by coincidence, to the United States. The selection of Martin Puryear begs the question of whether a sculptor whose work has often made oblique or coded reference to histories of resistance will use the stage to comment more directly on the political situation in his homeland. Yet for all that these are ‘interesting times’, the degree and explicitness of the work’s engagement remains the artist’s prerogative, and Rugoff’s stated desire to separate art from the realm of politics might be intended as a means of preserving rather than diminishing its power to effect change. By resisting the temptation to align it with a political position, he leaves open the possibility that art can change how we think about the world in ways that aren’t presently accounted for. Which, if you’re only in Venice for the Bellinis, the yacht parties and the social climbing, might sound hopelessly naive. But if that is the case, then you’re probably not interested in seeing anything you don’t already know about anyway. Ben Eastham
Albanian Pavilion Driant Zeneli, Maybe the cosmos is not so extraordinary, 2019, two-channel video installation. © the artist and Prometeogallery by Ida Pisani, Milan
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ArtReview
Interview
Matias Faldbakken by Ross Simonini
“I make things all the time, but I have a hard time calling it work” 50
ArtReview
Matias Faldbakken is an artist of relentless contradiction. He produces by destroying. He works hard to reject the very idea of labour. He critiques culture and its institutions by contributing to them both. His conflict runs in an infinte loop. Faldbakken was raised in Norway, his mother an artist and his father a celebrated writer. He studied art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the National Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, but he began his artistic career as a writer. In the past, he’s said he did this “in spite of [his] dad’s writing” and, to distinguish himself from him, used the pseudonym Abo Rasul for his first three novels, The Cocka Hola Company (2001), Macht und Rebel (2003) and Unfun (2008). These books, known as the Scandinavian Misanthropy trilogy, are dark critiques of a twisted Nordic culture, characterised by sneering hipsterism, indulgent violence and consumerism. These novels have been perhaps more popular in Europe than his artwork, though his first English-translated novel has just released in America, where he is better known as an artist. Unlike those of many artist-writers, Faldbakken’s books are literary, which is to say, he writes novels that deal with narrative and characters. He consciously works in the tradition of literature, rather than the vast, nebulous category of ‘artist writings’. Most recently, he published The Waiter (aka The Hills) (2017), his first novel under his own name, which takes a somewhat quieter, gentler approach to his
disdain for abundance. He considers all his books “easy to read” and populist, which is his way of sliding his subversion into the mainstream. Faldbakken’s visual work, on the other hand, wears its rebellious impulse on the surface, and tends toward a kind of dingy Minimalism: a garbage bag taped to the wall (eg Untitled (Garbage Bag Grey #6, 2010); a framed cardboard box, a room of old gas cans; a tower of pizza boxes (eg Pizza Box Tower #01) (2014). This work, unlike his writing, requires the niche context of the white-walled artworld to rub against, to fulfill its critique of capitalistic production. And yet its maker clearly has an appreciation for mundane, repetitive labour – tiling, for instance – and repeatedly fetishises the materials of construction, from concrete to rebar to piping. One of Faldbakken’s often-repeated, iconic gestures is a row of metal gym lockers, which have been wrapped in lever straps and crushed with immense force. The work is both a dramatic celebration of aggressive masculinity and a negation of that very impulse. He describes this “intervention” as a way of vandalising his own work, but then again, he often says he hates vandalism, especially graffiti. In this way, his visual work consistently resists the clear reading that his ‘easy’ fiction above Untitled (Locker Sculpture #06), 2017, metal lockers and lever straps. Photo: Christian Øen. Courtesy Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo facing page Matias Faldbakken. Photo: Ivar Kvaal
May 2019
encourages. In conversation, Faldbakken likes to use words like “foggy” and “fuzzy” to describe his artistic thought, which is perhaps his way of refusing the reductive tendency of intellectualisms. His objects are objects, not vehicles for ideas. He prefers to negate than state, undercutting himself at every step. Over time, the contradictions accrete, and he piles them up like art. Ross Simonini You are undeniably productive, but your work repeatedly points to an inner conflict with labour. What’s your relationship with productivity these days? Matias Faldbakken I’ve said that my work operates in the space between being operative and inoperative, or in the gap between being productive and nonproductive. That all of the stuff I’ve made has been some sort of production of reticence; I’ve put my reticence on display. The works should be productive refusals. It’s all negative production, sort of, the works are products of negative sentiments, it’s negativity tuned to a productive key. Imaginative dissent. Iconophilia and iconophobia combined. Etc. I guess it all started with a personal dislike that morphed into a more existential concern: from a young age I dreaded the idea of getting a job – being conventionally productive seemed utterly meaningless at the time. I figured art (drawing, really) could be a way out. It was essentially an escapist choice. Over time this has resulted in a lot of obsessing around what kind of
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contribution ‘art work’ is. And further, how grotesque the sanctioned ideas of ‘productivity’ and ‘growth’ inherently are. RS Do you work as little as possible? MF I make things all the time, but I have a hard time calling it work. It’s not exactly labour. I’m fortunate to have arrived at a position where I can define, more or less, my everyday. I’m trying to take this position seriously. That is, to use it to the best of my abilities, maximise the potential, whatever the potential of such a position may be. I’m serious about it, not as work, but as a life choice made partly in opposition to the idea of work. I don’t really get people who want art activity to be treated like a profession. ‘Profession’ is what you abandon when you become an artist.
When I turned twenty-eight I got my first kid and now I live together with three of them (sixteen, fourteen and seven years old) and my fiancée. I’ve pretty much had kids in the house for twenty-five years or so… I’m guessing that I would have lived more abroad if I didn’t have kids. Plus been less dictated by the rhythm of the school- and work-life calendar. But who knows about discipline and stuff like that without the structure that kids force upon you? You have to cough up money for the basics when you have children. I’ve always insisted on earning
MF Around 1999 or 2000. I had a part time job at this anarchic art school in Oslo for a little while after my studies and used my spare time to write my first book, The Cocka Hola Company. RS Do you live your life according to the negativity expressed in your work? MF I’m a pretty conscientious guy. But in my work I’ve tried to figure out why and how an approach fuelled by ‘going against’ has seemed the most natural and also the most effective, honest, energising and also entertaining for me. I guess parts of my output might look bleak as a result of this. Whatever politics is in there is set to a tragic tune; there’s an optics of the tragic.
RS How did you come to use a pseudonym for your early writing, but not your art?
RS Do you generally compartmentalise art and life?
RS Has family life and children changed your work in any profound ways? MF I’ve always had kids around, so I don’t really know what work life is like without. When I was nineteen or twenty and started my studies, I moved in with a woman and her three-year-old son right away. I lived with them until he was ten and I was twenty-seven.
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RS The press release for your show last year at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Effects of Good Government in the Pit, calls you ‘famous’. Do you feel famous? Is fame an element you address in your work? MF No, I don’t feel famous. I’m not famous. I’m thinking out loud here but there is no such thing as true, spectacular ‘fame’ on the art scene. The kind of fantastic orbit that people who really sacrifice themselves (including their physical bodies and faces) to the screen are launched into – the inexplicable circuit that merges overexposure and mystery – doesn’t really exist for artists or writers. Put the biggest art star next to a dull celebrity, like, say, Bruno Mars, and you’ll see, you can’t compare them. I’ve been interested in how ideas disseminate into a wider public, so I’ve always kept an eye on the entertainment industry. What catches the popular mind and what doesn’t? How do some fringe ideas become (pop-)cultural juggernauts?
RS When did you begin to live entirely off of your art and writing?
MF I guess I’m never really working and never really not working either. It’s a liquid state. I’m always open to ideas (to work with) and always open not to work (with those ideas).
thing runs deep. I thought a lot about this when I was recently overseeing the English translation of The Hills: the Norwegian language is one tool, one material, and English is another. It was like trying to make the same sculpture in concrete and then in iron – and then pretend it’s the same piece. The basic components are not the same and you end up with two different products. In that regard I guess my sensibilities are ‘Norwegian’, because I will never get as close to English or any other language.
by making art or writing, not getting a job. Perhaps this can explain something of your productivity question too. Also: in all my books, there is a theme of children. That would perhaps not have been there without kids always running around. RS Do you feel distinctly Norwegian in your sensibility? MF I live in Norway and pretty much always have done. I’m never a tourist here, I feel like a tourist everywhere else. That might just be a matter of habit, though. I guess the language
ArtReview
MF The pseudonym was practical: my dad is a well-known writer in Norway, and when I sent my first manuscript to the publishing houses I did it anonymously, to get a neutral evaluation. I decided to stick to the fake name when the first novel was published in 2001, so the reviewers wouldn’t compare my book to his or something. But after a few months a tabloid paper figured out my identity and it’s been in the open since. Still, I stuck to the name for the next two novels since they all formed a trilogy, they were one thing. This latest one, The Hills (or The Waiter, in English), is freestanding and there was no use for a fake name there.
above and facing page Effect Of Good Government In the Pit, 2017 (installation views). Photo: Christian Øen. Courtesy Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
May 2019
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top Untitled (Flat Box # 20), 2012, blue electrical tape on cardboard box, 84 × 93 cm (framed) above Rod of Hunger/ Rod of Watt, 2012, various editions of Samuel Beckett’s Watt and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, metal rods and screws, dimensions variable both images Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London, New York & Hong Kong
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RS Would you describe yourself as ‘a sensitive,’ like the titular character in The Waiter? MF Ha ha, yes, sure. RS Are artists usually ‘sensitives’? MF I have no idea about other artists. Some seem really torn, but so do taxi drivers and my accountant. RS Are you interested in using fiction as a vessel for personal philosophies?
was to write a comedy where you could hardly see the fun. It was in effect trolling in book form before the idea of the troll became a political reality. Plus, the books are not ‘well’ written, so they might just look like crap for a serious literary editor. RS What do you mean when you say they weren’t well-written? MF Syntax, composition, rhythm, flow, structure, technique, all kinds of traditional
MF I’m interested in both fiction writing and art production as ways of thinking through practical means, through material, through the retina, through hands-on activity. Writing is also hands-on, even though it’s situated in an immaterial realm; you have to get at it, almost physically, and drag some vague ‘vision’ down onto the paper. Philosophy, I’m not sure. That’s an academic discipline I don’t know too much about. I went to art school in the 90s, so in effect: no education. RS Another way of asking that same question: is art an effective way to critique culture? MF I’m not that into art being specifically about the art industry. That seems like a zero-sum game. But as a field of imaginative dissent, I think the art zone (still) has potential. A space for new forms of thought. A place for the creation of concepts – visual, material, verbal, productive or not – that go against the grain. Knotty ideas that won’t immediately float anywhere else. RS Did you choose The Waiter to be your first book in English or did it just happen? MF It just happened. English is a narrow market for translated literature; the other books weren’t bought. They did a test translation of Unfun into English but it was cancelled as soon as they read it. The publishing house said it was due to copyright problems (appropriation, quoting without source, etc) plus defamationof-character difficulties (I used some real-life characters as fictional figures). But I suspect that the English and American markets were already more sensitive to certain issues than central Europe was at the time. The trilogy is a medley of insensitivities towards today’s trigger topics; race, trauma, gender, identity, abuse, stereotypes, sexism, etc. One of the approaches in the trilogy
be some verbal spark for a work, there is never a ‘story’. I don’t see my works as metaphors, either. The things are things, the images are things, the stories become things, too. RS After years of working this way, what kind of relationship are you trying to create between the verbal and the aesthetic? MF I don’t feel like there’s much of a relationship, on a practical level. I’m making visual and verbal stuff in spite of each other in the studio, not because of each other. The one work mode pollutes the other rather than enriches or ‘pollinates’. The way I’m often just inventing randomly while writing doesn’t work well for me as a visual artist. When making art I try to hand myself a simplified, clear task: ‘Squeeze lockers with ratchet straps’ or ‘tile an untileable object’ or ‘draw that one motif until it’s exhausted’. Then the visual result, the aesthetics, is a product of that premise. But on the other hand, this system for producing is totally stained by free-range fiction invention. I don’t have much of a plan when I’m writing. I’m taking ideas and building them out and messing them up instead of trying to unravel and clarify. I’m switching to one method of working when I’m sick of the other. I’m trying to keep things urgent that way. To avoid routine and mannerisms that quickly arise when you get too comfortable with one way of making things. But I’m running the risk of incoherency and self-sabotage. RS Do you consider literature and art to be expressions of a similar compulsion?
craft concerns that are still very important for editors and critics – and readers, I guess – were truly disregarded in those first three books. RS Is your visual art a kind of fiction? MF Tricky question. I don’t think I see it as fiction. The artworks I’m most happy with are the ones where some (verbal) principle is inseparable from the physical execution and the visual look, the aesthetics. Although there can Untitled (Garbage Bag Grey #1), 2010, marker pencil on grey plastic bag, 135 × 88 × 5 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London, New York & Hong Kong
May 2019
MF For me they are. The same urge to grasp stuff and cough up ideas lies behind both. Although they are different instruments that sometimes blunt each other. RS So then, do ideas generally present themselves as inherently visual or literary? Or will either do? MF As I’ve chosen to split my output, I have a hope that there is a basic separation somewhere deep down, between, say, verbal ideas and visual ones. But, weirdly, the more I work like this, and the closer I look, the harder it is to find that divide. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California
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MY ART GUIDES VENICE MEETING POINT Main Cultural Partner MMCA, Korea supported by SBS Foundation Project Partner König Galerie
Lounge Partner Audemars Piguet
MAY 7–11, 2019 N AV Y O F F I C E R ’ S C LU B ARSENALE, VENICE Access upon RSVP at myartguides.com/venicemeetingpoint
VOLVME 0 ALAN MICHELSON & NADIA MYRE Curated by DR. MAX CAROCCI Organized by ZUECCA PROJECTS
Opening May 9 - 12:00 pm Exhibition May 10 - June 30, 2019 10:00 am - 06:00 pm Closed on Monday Fondamenta Sant’Anna 994, Venice
zueccaprojects.org
Art Featured
The baying of a woman giving birth‌ the scraping of fingernails groping for throats 59
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States of flux At the Canadian Pavilion, Inuit artist collective Isuma disputes the ideas of nationhood and representation on which the Venice Biennale was founded by Mark Rappolt
May 2019
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“We are often told the Inuit way isn’t written down,” says Paul Quassa, Canada’s government had effectively destroyed their traditional cradling an antique-looking comb in his hands. “It may not be in subsistence culture.) This, incidentally, is the United Nations’ Interwords, but these pictures show us who we are.” As he says this (in national Year of Indigenous Languages. Inuktitut, not in English), Quassa holds the comb to camera. On it is What the person who carved the comb did in terms of preserving carved a scene describing a traditional hunt for a bowhead whale. He’s Inuit culture all those years before, Isuma – which means ‘to think’, speaking as three of his fellow Inuits are on trial for illegally killing or an idea – does today using television, film and the Internet. a bowhead and distributing its meat to the community. It’s the first Their online archive IsumaTV contains a complete archive of over 7,000 Igloolik video productions, in 75 languages, made since 1985. time a bowhead whale has been killed by Inuit hunters in 23 years. The scene is from Arviq! (Bowhead) (2002), a documentary film Isuma’s film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), was the first feature to be written, directed and acted in by Isuma, an artist collective and Arviq! describes the culture of an Inuktitut. A retelling of a legendary Canada’s first Inuit production comInuit family saga that has been paspany, founded in 1990, in Igloolik, indigenous people, the crises it contends sed down through the oral tradition Nunavut, in northern Canada. Quassa with and the different outlook it has (as was the majority of Inuit knowlwas Inuit chief negotiator of the in relation to ideas of community, Nunavut Land Claims Agreement edge), it was directed by one of the col(the largest aboriginal land claim setlective’s founders, Zacharias Kunuk sovereignty, ecology and environment tlement in Canada’s history) that con(the others being Paul Apak Angilirq cluded in 1993, a three-time mayor of Igloolik and a prominent and Norman Cohn, who are among the film’s producers) and won the campaigner in Canada’s reconciliation process in the wake of historic Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. Arviq! looks at the government abuse of indigenous peoples. He was also part of the role the bowhead played in Inuit culture and at how, from the sevenproject team for Isuma’s 2012 Digital Indigenous Democracies project, teenth to the twentieth centuries Europeans began to overfish the which uses a combination of tradition and technology to improve whales, whose bodies they used to fashion everything from corsets to communication and Internet access in Inuit communities in order carriage springs (generally luxuries rather than essentials), making to enhance the means by which they can bring their transparent, their fortunes and leaving the bowhead so endangered that in 1971 consensus-driven decision-making and traditions of environmental hunting it was banned, the longstanding relationship between the stewardship to bear on the political issues that affect them (princi- local animal and the native people terminally interrupted. The ban pally the Baffinland Mine Project, an open-pit iron mine on Baffin was broken in 1994, after an Inuit elder, Noah Piugattuk (then in his Island, Nunavut, which was expected to triple the area’s GDP, and nineties), announced on radio that the one thing he would wish to do pays royalties to the Qikiqtani Inuit Association), while at the same before he died was once more to taste Muktuk, the fat of the bowhead time preserving their language. (In 1928, when the first residential whale. A group of hunters from Igloolik killed and butchered a dying school for Inuit opened, the principal language was English, and the whale in order to fulfil his wishes. But that tells only half the tale, government continued to press its dominance following the Second as the butchery and distribution of the whale’s parts is a communal World War with the suggestion that learning it was key to Inuit event with a festival atmosphere, with families having travelled people, often among the poorest in the country, finding employ- long distances to attend. It speaks not just to a desire to give the ment in Canada, ignoring the fact that Inuits needed to find employ- elders a last taste of a flavour with which they had grown up and are ment, in the main, because European settlers and the policies of now denied, but also to allow younger generations to sample a piece
preceding pages Mallik (Jacky Qrunnut) and Japati (Gouchrard Uttak) scouting for a dogteam above The dogteam on location of One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk
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Benjamin Kunuk on the set of One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk
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Inuit elder Noah Piugattuk (Apayata Kotierk) with Boss (Kim Bodnia), an agent of the Canadian government
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of their heritage from which they have been forcibly divorced (though, that’s not to say that every Inuit likes the taste of Muktuk: some of those who travelled to the event state that they have no desire to taste it at all). “No one owns the whales,” says one of the attendees, arguing that therefore no one can ban their hunting. The idea that banning the hunting of the whale implies an ownership of the whale (and thus a continuation of colonial relation of the world to property and commerce) introduces a series of further questions about legislating over areas that constitute a tradition, a culture and an identity, who has the right to do so and how they might do it. And as a result of these (or as a partial acknowledgment of them), the Canadian government agreed that the Inuit, as a people, could kill one whale every two years. The final part of Arviq! looks at the first of these authorised hunts (and the media circus that surrounded it), in which the whale, despite being harpooned with buoys (equipment supplied by the government, in part a result of the loss of traditional knowledge) to float it, sunk to the bottom of the sea, resurfacing only once the meat had spoiled and the resultant gases had floated the beast. The Muktuk, at least, remained edible. Like much of Isuma’s output, Arviq! describes the culture of an indigenous people, the crises it contends with – primarily in the face of that culture’s orchestrated destruction – and the different outlook it has in relation to ideas of community, sovereignty, ecology and environment. Moreover, although it describes a local situation, it speaks to key global issues that affect both indigenous (current estimates put the world’s population of indigenous peoples at around 370 million) and non-indigenous people around the world today. One might look, for example, to recent and violent disputes between the Baka people of Southwest Cameroon and the World Wildlife Fund (which funds the policing of the national park in the southwest of the country, which covers indigenous lands) over what constitutes hunting and what constitutes poaching (a memorandum of understanding, between representatives of the indigenous people and the Ministry of Forestry, granting the Baka greater access rights and more influence over the management of the parks was signed in February).
Isuma’s process will continue when it represents Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale, marking the first time an indigenous collective has done so. The pavilion will feature the debut screening of One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), a 112-minute film documenting a meeting between an agent of the federal government and Piugattuk, the chief of the last family on outpost land (in Kapuivik, north Baffin Island) to move his band, who lived a nomadic life, hunting by dog team, as their ancestors had done for generations before them, to settlement housing. In part it’s a follow-up to Kivitoo: What They Thought About Us (2018), which revisits and examines an incident that took place in 1963, when the inhabitants of Kivitoo were moved by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the nearby town of Qikiqtarjuaq, with the promise that they would be able to return. When they did so they found that their homes and belongings had been destroyed. It’s this familiar strategy – separate the land from the people and then the people from their language – by which a nation asserts its sovereignty by suppressing its indigenous or colonised peoples, that Isuma seek to reverse. In keeping with Isuma’s commitment to fusing tradition and technology, the pavilion will also feature live links to Inuit communities in Nunavut, focused on the proposed expansion of the Baffinland Iron Mine. A 500 percent expansion in volume is due this year, against environmental advice (concerning the impact of greater shipping and road traffic), but with the support of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which deemed that the increased revenues (and its share in them) would act as ‘enablers’ for the indigenous community in a way that more than balanced out any environmental impact. Public hearings on the expansion are due in September and will, presumably, be made even more public by Isuma, much of whose activities will be facilitated by their website rather than the architecture of Canada’s pavilion in the Giardini. But what better place than Venice during the Biennale, with its archaic structures of national pavilions and their hierarchies, to discuss fundamental ideas of place, race, home, community and belonging. ar Work by Isuma is on view at the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini as part of the 58th Venice Biennale, 11 May – 24 November
above Polar bear monitor guards the camp at night all images Production stills from One Day in the Life
of Noah Piugattuk, 2019. Photo: Levi Uttak. © Isuma Distribution International
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Free in theory, dangerous in practice Christoph Schlingensief made art that played with public opinion to expose unacknowledged truths. Today it’s public opinion rather than truth that artists are being forced to acknowledge. Did something go wrong? by Carl Hegemann
Aesthetics is also a theory and praxis of life. But it doesn’t understand life teleologically or functionally… The aesthetic motions and variations of the living body are expressions of an inner principle, a force, but they do not fulfil any function. They are not executed to realise a purpose or to fulfil a function, but unfold without any orientation or direction. Christoph Menke, Am Tag der Krise (On the Day of the Crisis), 2018 In his 1794 epistolary work On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich transgression. Naturally, this was at its most dangerous when it came Schiller claims that art is characterised by its emancipation ‘from all to actions in public space. For only a small part of this environthat is named constraint, whether physical or moral’. That emancipa- ment can be controlled by a director: spatiotemporal aesthetics and tion applies only in the aesthetic ‘realm of play and appearance’ and everyday life, art and non-art, mingle in unpredictable ways. It was not, of course, to everyday life. In other words, according to Schiller, this play with unknown and uncontrollable elements that most interart is allowed to do anything as long as it is purposeless; when it is ested Schlingensief: the unplanned side-effects of his interventions used to conceal tangible interests and strategies, it leaves the realm of became essential. And his most radical action, in terms of form and art and loses all of its privileges. The reality of art, then, is precisely its content, which took place in 2000 under the framework of the Wiener unreality. This leads to a dilemma that affects every engaged art prac- Festwochen, makes this especially clear. tice: either it is ineffective; or it is subject to the socioeconomic rules The action took place on Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz next to the Wiener Staatsoper in the middle of Vienna’s historic city centre. that govern everyday life. Of course there are artists (no doubt many) who do not accept the There, containers were set up (with official approval) to accommodate distinction – that art is either condemned to ineffectiveness or surren- asylum seekers who could be selected by the general public, via phone ders its freedom. They not only want to play within the confines of or the Internet, to be evicted (a nod to the popular TV show Big Brother, the segregated space reserved for art, but also to test its boundaries. which debuted in Holland a year prior). The survivor would win the And it’s easy to come to the conclusion that art is only interesting right to stay in Austria, gaining citizenship by way of marriage. The when artists do just that. More than two decades ago, and in contrast outcasts would be deported. to many recent attempts to make art and theatre become an effective The work followed Schlingensief’s public calls in the name of art part of society, Christoph Schlingensief’s action art explored that terri- (in Germany, freedom of expression in the arts is protected under the tory by allowing artistic freedom to be played out in the social sphere. constitution) for the killing of politicians (among them then German Schlingensief, who died in 2010, did not Chancellor Helmut Kohl, at Documenta in subordinate aesthetic freedom to the funcKassel in 1997; in 2000, then Austrian Chancellor facing page Documentation, including tional systems of society at large; instead he Wolfgang Schüssel, shortly before the Vienna images of asylum seekers ‘competing’ for Austrian citizenship, from Christoph used it to permeate the boundaries of those action; and in 2002, Jürgen Möllemann, Kohl’s Schlingensief’s Bitte liebt Österreich! – Erste systems, thereby generating a different type vice chancellor) and was a response to the swing europäische Koalitionswoche (Please Love Austria! of vitality. Schlingensief’s art was always a to the right in Austrian politics. (The October – First European Coalition Week), 2000, action, game played with limits and their potential 1999 parliamentary elections had ushered in Wiener Festwochen. Photos: Didi Sattmann
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the first ÖVP/FPÖ coalition government – the ÖVP is a conservative would put it). And everyone joined in the game, even politicians and Christian Democratic Party that has been a part of most of Austria’s the press, whether they wanted to or not. It’s also worth noting that governments in the postwar era; the FPÖ is a far-right populist party none of the legal actions against the project were successful; the action originally led by former Nazis, among them SS officers – and made wasn’t forcibly shut down, nor was it interfered with by the police or racism and xenophobia once again acceptable in Austria.) Originally other security services. Here, amid the general public, in a place far titled Tötet Europa! (Kill Europe!), it was later, at the request of the festival removed from art’s usual confines, Schiller’s ‘joyous third realm of director, Luc Bondy, given the more friendly title Bitte liebt Österreich! art’ was able to unfold, although its boundaries were often pierced in violent and threatening ways. Perhaps the deciding factor in this (Please Love Austria!). At the opening of this sarcastic performance, a large banner game-changing aesthetic action was that for seven days and nights it reading ‘Foreigners Out’ was unveiled above the container containing created an in-between world that couldn’t exist anywhere except in a the candidates, to the applause and jubilation of art and theatre fans work that simultaneously adhered to and transcended the boundaattending the event. And so, people who would never identify or be ries of art. The action may not have actually helped a single asylum identified as rightwing extremists cheered the unveiling of a clearly seeker, but it held up a mirror to the reasonable, abyssal and obsesxenophobic statement. Or did they cheer the erection of a banner that sional thoughts of a society and demonstrated that the world is more clearly portrayed Austria, to outsiders at least, in a very bad light? The than simply a means to an end. action as a whole lived on such ambiguous or opaque processes. In many of today’s attempts to break free from the limits of art and Unlike Schlingensief’s earlier works, which largely deployed ‘posi- make work that is effective in the public realm, aesthetic freedom, the tive’ forms of expression, here, the copying and appropriation of right- thing that is specific to art, has fallen by the wayside. Artists submit wing stereotypes took place for an extended period of time. For clar- to the constraints of circumstance. They no longer legitimise their ity’s sake, the organisers of the Wiener Festwochen initially attached art aesthetically, but morally, politically or economically. They say a sign to the container declaring the whole thing to be an antifascist they have entered society and left their ivory tower behind, but they have also abandoned art to make it a art event in the context of the festival. Aesthetic practice does not have mere means to an end. And that is why, This was removed however at the befor many of them, artistic freedom no hest of Schlingensief (who, incidento comply with the letter of the law, tally, had also refused to use art as an longer seems such a relevant topic. and because it does not, art is explicit defence when he was arrested at The only difference now is between often disturbing and unsettling, art that has a monetary value and art Documenta for his banner demanding the death of Helmut Kohl). Instead, the that has a use value. The heterotopic art and not a matter of consensus. action sat on the edge of reality, mixing that Schlingensief stood for is simply But at exactly this point it needs real asylum seekers (equipped with no longer there. If it is, it is viewed with special protection. Art that pleases fake biographies) with actors playing suspicion, and when there are doubts the role of asylum seekers; real politiabout it, it is constrained, removed and everyone is always ‘free’, cians (such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit) with sometimes even forbidden. This might even under the worst dictatorship artists (among them musicians such as be done without any malicious intent Einstürzende Neubauten, writers such as Elfriede Jelinek) and unsus- on the basis of the extra-aesthetic criteria to which art submits. pecting passersby; even a Schlingensief lookalike, through whom the The following might provide an example of this. Last August, as real Schlingensief could push tasteless utterances and politically in- part of the biennale titled Bad News and organised by the Staatstheater correct statements that had been attributed to him. No one involved, Wiesbaden, a four-metre-high gilt statue of Turkish President Recep friend or foe, had any idea how the action would develop. And neither Tayyip Erdoğan was placed in a public square in the German city. It triggered unrest and uncertainty among the friends and enemies did Schlingensief himself. He, for example, suspected that the ‘Foreigners Out’ sign would of this new type of strongman, and among Wiesbaden’s citizens in be destroyed by rightwingers, insulted by such a direct expression of general. As is the case with good works of art, this one could not be one of their goals, but it was leftwing protesters, participants in the clearly defined. It illustrated no clear (political) conviction and was ‘Thursday demonstrations’ against the conservative-fascist govern- highly ambivalent in its pathos. It was both too pompous and ridicment, who stormed the container village and tore down the banner, ulous to be a tribute and yet was not enough of a caricature to be a thus saving their political opponents (who had tried to use legal warning. There was no ‘instruction manual’ that told the viewer how means to have the banner removed) the bother, and removing a highly to interpret the work, which had been installed overnight. During visible blemish on Austria’s good name. All of which completely the next 24 hours, the work caused a stir and open debate among observers, some of whom had very different ideas – both of Erdoğan contradicted the political intentions of those on the left. The week of action against xenophobia was nerve-wracking for and of the statue in front of which they stood. Although city leaders everyone involved. Communicating the social and asocial life of art initially expressed their solidarity with artistic freedom, the local without seriously jeopardising the one or the other required the fire brigade was brought in to dismantle the work 26 hours after its utmost discipline. In spite of everything, the unveiling, without any prior consultation with facing page and overleaf Documentation, whole thing remained an art event, an aesthetic the festival organisers. It was suggested that including container village with ‘Foreigners Out’ public debate about the work might escalate practice that, as opposed to social practice, banner, artist-lookalike and interview with to the point at which people’s safety could no understands ‘life as neither functional nor an asylum seeker, from Schlingensief’s longer be guaranteed. However, the evidence teleological’ (as philosopher Christoph Menke Bitte liebt Österreich! action. Photos: Didi Sattmann
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to support these allegations was thin, and the assertion that ‘knives Österreich! be banned, but unlike in Wiesbaden the project was able were spotted’ near the artwork was swiftly withdrawn. Similarly, to run until its planned end because, despite the scepticism and critithe assumption that Erdoğan-hating Kurds from all over Germany cism, the Wiener Festwochen and the cultural authorities were behind were on their way to Wiesbaden to destroy the golden statue proved Schlingensief and his fellow campaigners. Certainly this had somegroundless. The notion mooted by the festival organisers that even a thing to do with the fact that Schlingensief himself was present all the work of art should be protected – just as are politicians, sportspeople, time, putting his head above the parapet and taking responsibility demonstrators and transports of hazardous materials – by the police for the confusion he was causing. Moreover, he did this with both if necessary, was barely commented on by politicians and ridiculed charisma and humour – qualities to which the increasing instrumenby sections of the press. The fact talisation of art for moral and politThe action may not have actually that the justifications given for the ical purposes may not be conducive. Moreover, it seems to have rapid removal of the artwork were helped a single asylum seeker, but it held been forgotten that aesthetic pracdisparate and proved groundless up a mirror to the reasonable, abyssal under scrutiny was glossed over tice, by definition, does not have to and obsessional thoughts of a society with astonishing indifference by comply with the letter of the law, both the press and the public. and because it does not, art is often and demonstrated that the world disturbing and unsettling, and not Even in the German art magazine is more than simply a means to an end a matter of consensus. But at exactMonopol, for whom a defence of the freedom of art should be fundamental, one finds an attitude that ly this point it needs special protection. Art that pleases everyone is seems to be censor-friendly: ‘Anyone who wants to use art to provoke always ‘free’, even under the worst dictatorship. a society that is in a constant state of agitation has more responsibility On the subject of dictatorship, in a recent publication on contemthan ever before. We really do not need a golden dictator from an porary theatre in China, I read: ‘In the People’s Republic of China there artist who remains anonymous, does not take part in debate and does is no public performance without state authorisation, the criteria for not moderate the dispute.’ The artist’s refusal to speak publicly about which remains vague, which in turn constitutes the essence of censortheir work and to moderate on its behalf so that everyone can under- ship.’ This obviously describes a local phenomenon, but the restriction stand it and read its embedded social meaning apparently legitimises and prohibition of art by means of sacrosanct and inscrutable adminthe intervention of the authorities. With his non-self-explanatory art, istrative acts happens here too. For someone who thinks that the pracor art that did not announce itself as art, Schlingensief would have tice of art as a form of aesthetics is marginal and antiquated, that no chance. For many people a general fear of open or public dispute might not be so bad. But those who have even a little understanding makes this kind of censorship not simply acceptable, but desirable. of the histories of democracy and totalitarianism know what a curtailAnd the fact that art might provide an outlet for the transcendence ment of aesthetic freedom means. If, in times of internal and external threats to democracy, the crisis is dealt of such conflicts is not considered at all. with by the instrumentalisation, marginAmong some art lovers and art magaalisation and control of art, as well as by zine editors, this happens so as not to play vague ‘censorshiplike’ measures, what we into the hands of an already polarised are faced with is, at the very least, a fatal ‘populist society’ and the certainly wellintentioned desire not to allow irresponcase of historical amnesia. ar sible artists to weaken an internally and Carl Hegemann is a writer and dramaexternally endangered democracy. Similar turge who collaborated with Schlingensief allegations were made almost 20 years ago against Schlingensief. There were, of Translated from the German course, demands in Vienna that Bitte liebt by Mark Rappolt
Four-metre statue of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan erected in a public square for the Wiesbaden Biennale, August 2018. Photo: Reuters / Ralph Orlowski
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The Companionable Franz West by Rosanna Mclaughlin
A few months ago I spent an afternoon on the job with a friend who works as a dog walker. I grew up with pets and so consider myself unflappable when it comes to ‘picking up after them’, but that afternoon I experienced the ritual in a new light. By the time we had finished our walk my friend’s waistband was decorated with brightly coloured sacks that swung in time with the rhythm of his hips. Faced with the responsibility of looking after multiple dogs at once, often miles away from the nearest bin, he had devised a pragmatic but unusual solution: tying the poo bags onto the belt loops of his jeans. I found these fetid additions to his outfit oddly compelling, and instead of wrinkling my nose I smiled. I thought of Franz West. West, who died in 2012, was an artist of many virtues. Few could rival his dignity-puncturing collages of meat, porn and unsuspecting figures cut from the pages of magazines – fewer still could give a lump of papier-mâché the air of a drunk attempting a pirouette at the end of a heavy night. Yet to my mind, his most remarkable quality was a capacity to see the joy and universality of shit, and to recognise its efficacy as the basis for public sculpture. Among my favourite of his outdoor works are the Sitzwurst (2000), giant, party-coloured aluminium turd-forms that have made appearances on lawns
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including at Schlosspark, Vienna, and Regent’s Park, London, revealing at a grotesque scale what is usually already lurking in the grass. West’s interests extended up the gut, and to objects that enter the anus as well as those that leave it. In 2009 The Ego and the Id was installed in Central Park, New York, two 6m-tall spiralling frames on which visitors are invited to sit as if perching on lengths of cartoon intestine. And then there is Dorit (2002), currently standing outside Tate Modern, London, a sculpture that looks like an erect string of anal beads painted a shade of piggy flesh West was fond of using. Producing outdoor sculpture is doubtless one of the hardest tasks an artist can take on. The world beyond the gallery can be an unforgiving place: if your idea isn’t overwhelmed by the environment, or irreparably dulled by regulation, chances are the public will come for you. For the outside observer, the spectacle of art going toe-to-toe with the very people on whose behalf it is ostensibly made has offered ample opportunity for schadenfreude. Consider the thefts of Henry Moore sculptures, melted and sold for their value as scrap metal, or the fate of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981), an ominous wall of steel that divided Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan throughout the 1980s, until a judge ordered its removal at the request of local workers disgruntled
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facing page Rrose DRAMA, 2001, lacquered aluminium, dimensions variable. Photo: Matt Greenwood / Tate Photography. © Estate Franz West and Archiv Franz West. Courtesy Peder Lund, Oslo
above The Ego and the Id, 2009, aluminium, steel, lacquer, dimensions variable. Photo: James Ewing. Courtesy Public Art Fund, New York, and the collection of Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann
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by the imposition upon their lunch spot. ‘Is the purpose of art in of Jewish heritage; before the outbreak of war both his parents had public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy been communists. Austria’s postwar implementation of ‘victim theory’ meant even the most ardent Hitler supporters were declared and hope?’, a clerk from a nearby building enquired during the trial. In part, West avoided having his pants pulled down by the public victims of Nazism, and free to resume work as politicians, doctors and because his works suggested that they were already around his ankles. teachers. Unsurprisingly, West was sanguine about his family’s neighNear-literally, in the case of Etude de couleur [Colour Study], a pissoir with bours. ‘Just about everyone had been a Nazi,’ he said. ‘Otherwise why a lake view installed as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1997. If didn’t they run away?’ this makes him sound boorish, in reality his work is an object lesson When West was sixteen, he saw the first public event staged in geniality. Nobody could accuse West of sucking the joy from a park under the umbrella of Viennese Actionism, a body art movement whose performances involved, among or square. Made from bent and welded other things, animal carcasses, body sheet metal, his giant shits, guts and sex His most remarkable quality was fluids, live sex and public whippings. toys have the look of patched up DIY a capacity to see the joy and univerActionism intended to confront the inflatables; a far cry from the statues of sality of shit, and to recognise violence lurking beneath the surface imperial eagles, emperors and military of bourgeois propriety with displays of commanders typical to Vienna, where he it as the basis for public sculpture wanton brutality. West shared Actiongrew up. The impression of lightness is enhanced by the fact that West never attempted to disguise the ism’s interest in bodily material, but not their tactics. He was apparhollowness of his structures – a material honesty that remains ently depressed for weeks after watching Rudolf Schwarzkogler, an unusual in public sculpture, which still tends to rely on looking solid artist best known for wrapping himself in bandages and bleeding and expensive in order to command attention. (Who’s boorish now?) from self-inflicted wounds, mutilate a lamb. West was sceptical of West’s lexicon of dirt emerged from Allied-Occupied Vienna, what he considered the movement’s Catholic tendencies; when he and early encounters with the Austrian avant-garde scene during the used obscene materials, he did so to unite audiences rather than to 1960s. “It was more than dirty – filthy”, he said of the housing project scandalise them. he lived in as a child. During the Second World War, 20 percent of the Shit holds a particular place in the Austrian imagination: Sigmund capital’s housing was lost to bomb damage, but he was referring to Freud considered the decision to let it go key to a child’s psychosexual more than architectural rubble. West was born in 1947, his mother development; Austrian toilets are designed to display rather than
Franz West (installation view, Tate Modern, London, 2019). Photo: Luke Walker
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hide. For his part, West considered it a substance with significant wall posing for the camera. He appears to be naked except for a pair democratic potential. (‘Everybody likes shit anyway,’ as he once put it.) of loafers, a watch and an Adaptive that he is wearing around his waist By utilising the quotidian dirt and involuntary act of creativity we all like an oversized wonky tutu. Gently cocking his head, pointing his have in common, he may have achieved something few have managed: toe and spreading his fingers over the brim of the object, Kobalek finding a form, and a subject, capable of relating to as fractious and looks profoundly silly yet also debonair: he has become one with the sundry an audience as the general public. In this regard, his work is disposition of the Adaptive. an example of what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called During the late 1990s, the art historian Bice Curiger asked West ‘grotesque realism’ in his 1965 study Rabelais and His World: a genre of to describe his approach to making public art. The answer he gave art that focuses on the places through which ‘the world enters the body sums up the philosophy that made him so well suited to the task. ‘[Max] Horkheimer said that he would or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world’. prefer it if life were more intense and art West avoided having his pants Bakhtin considered grotesque realism less interesting – not that there were no pulled down by the public because art, just that art were less meaningful, an expression of solidarity, a celebration his works suggested that they and that’s what I like about public art,’ of life in all its indecorous glory, ideas echoed in West’s bunting-hued, shithe replied. ‘Art that people have hanging were already around his ankles positive public statuary. around, that stands about in spaces with West was a serial collaborator who worked with artists – including other people – that’s the kind of art I want to do.’ For West art was Mike Kelley and Michelangelo Pistoletto – and also enlisted viewers. a perspective to be shared, a way to facilitate togetherness, something One of the most striking things about his work is what good company you’d like to hang around with. He knew that we are all in the gutter, it makes. It shares a joke. It may even offer you a seat. And like the and he set about making it a funnier, friendlier, more communal place kind of friend whose mannerisms you adopt after hanging out with, to be. ar its demeanour is catching. The Adaptives – sculptures West began producing during the 1970s from papier-mâché, plaster and gauze A retrospective of Franz West’s work is on view at Tate Modern, that participants are invited to handle – are an early example of the London, through 2 June conviviality he later gave to public sculpture. In a photograph taken in 1974, the artist Otto Kobalek stands in front of a scruffy concrete Rosanna Mclaughlin is a writer and editor based in London
Franz West (installation view, Tate Modern, London 2019). Photo: Luke Walker
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Merchants of Venice
In 1950 the Venice Biennale turned sixty-five and ArtReview turned one. Society was more permissive back then, and like Aschenbach and Tadzio or Socrates and Phaedrus, it was love at first sight. Except for the times when ArtReview found the biennial displays old, tired and underperforming, and it wasn’t. Ugh. What follows are 30 years of attempts to argue that art is beyond nationality while at the same time spelling out the national characteristics of various works of art; of saying that art isn’t competitive while judging which artworks are the best; and, having once been surprised by ‘the Mexicans’, of being constantly on the lookout for the new Mexicans, wherever they might lurk 76
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25th Venice Biennale, 1950
Hey, good lookin’
top 15 July, 1950 above 26 June, 1954 facing page The British Pavilion, with sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, 1950. © Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia – ASAC
“And what”, asks Posterity, “did you make of the Biennale in 1950?” The abashed critic may well shudder into silence, as confounded as the tipster who failed to spot a Derby winner. For everywhere people are wondering what’s cooking in the art world, and if the answer is to be found anywhere, it must surely be here. What new movements are on foot? What is the successor to Surrealism, to Cubism, to Fauvism, to Romanticism, or what you will? What are the general tendencies? Has abstract art triumphed or lost? Is the supremacy of Picasso over? Are we to have a New Realism? Posterity cocks an attentive ear, and all the historians of the future grin sardonically into their reporter’s notebooks. For here, disregarding the accidents of chance and politics, the complicated skeins of aesthetic rivalry and all the misadventures that perfection is heir to, is at least one kind of cream skimmed from the churn of 22 countries’ visual milk cans. Here must surely be some guide, however haphazard, to the main directions of today. But one needs not a single straw, but 500, to test the direction of the prevailing winds, and unless one lays claim to an aesthetic omniscience (I believe there are people who do), it is impossible to be emphatic about the art of more than four European countries or to say, with a sweeping gesture (as I believe many people do), “Of course the selection of works from Ruritania, my dear, was but miserably inadequate. If only they’d had a stronger selection committee…” Egypt and Eire, Israel and Austria, Holland and Jugoslavia – the rather operatic pavilion bearing the letters URSS stands empty and deserted – are, like all the other countries of the civilised world, full of eager creative spirits all busily engaged in Herculean struggles with matter and vision, all jumping on or off the wagon of European art at one or other of its stopping points in history. One artist has never got over Impressionism, another is busily engaged in an enthusiastic attempt to outPicasso Picasso. In the background are the symbols of recognised achievement – Bonnard, Seurat, Matisse, the Douanier Rousseau, the Cubists, the Fauves and the Futurists – acting as approved standards by which the work of their successors can be reduced to some rough scale of values. Although perhaps in an ideal world it should not be so, artistic excellence does stand revealed as being dependant on artistic awareness. The best paintings and the best sculpture are those which are most completely in the idiom of our time, and it is just not true to say that “there are good things in all schools.” That does not mean, of course, that all the painting in a modern idiom is ipso facto good. The American Pavilion, for instance, is a curious monument to the effects which an unbridled enthusiasm
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for abstraction can have on a sensitive and otherwise balanced artistic personality. Marin might roughly be described as an American fauve, and is in any case an artist of an older generation and more settled reputation. Jackson Pollock, too, is an artist of apparent gifts, but the entire pavilion is redolent of hysteria rather than of enthusiasm, of neurosis rather than of passion. A craving for abstraction can become so strong that it produces something as concrete as a psychiatrist’s casebook. The only other marked national characteristic was the tendency towards Expressionism in the art of the Northern countries. But this was counterbalanced by the fact that Expressionism – if it roughly means a desire to express emotion and feeling through the manipulation of colour and pigment – has assumed a place of great importance in the art of today, no matter where it is practised. The underlying structure of Cubism, which determines the form of most modern paintings, is coming to rely more and more on an emotional overtone to complete its unity, and classicism is fighting a rearguard action against the invasion of a new romanticism. Emphasising, though there should be no need to do so, the fact that nationality is no sure guide to artistic excellence, the achievements of each nation are very much what one might expect. The French are urbane, immensely clever, sure of themselves, at their worst a little mannered; the Italians have great vitality, are digging into their own traditions – Futurism has a marked influence – and are obviously pleased to be back in the cultural swim. The Germans and Austrians are producing work of great interest; the Jugoslavs, the Spaniards and the Egyptians are not. But were I to award a prize to the nation which gave me the most agreeable surprise, Mexico would be the recipient. This may be due merely to previous ignorance, but the work of Tamayo and Siqueiros proved a shock of the most stimulating kind. Bernard Denvir
27th Venice Biennale, 1954
Pale, lucid, with no surprises Art should not, and cannot really be, competitive. But when most of the nations of the world assemble at the Venice Biennale representative samples of their culture, it is difficult not to regard the whole thing as a kind of aesthetic marathon. Not national pride alone made one feel that Britain came off well; praise for the British Pavilion was widespread; admiration for its excellent arrangement, pleased recognition (especially from the impressionist countries) for the works of Francis Bacon, genuine respect for the pale, lucid canvases of Ben Nicholson, which show up admirably in the diffused Venetian light and are
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already bespoke for a more extensive continental tour. There were no surprises – such as that occasioned two years ago by the works of the Mexicans. Of the individual artists showing, either at the great central pavilion, or in the scattered national ones, Miró was most enthusiastically acclaimed, and the award of the first prize for foreign artists to Max Ernst came as something of a surprise to many. The most general unpopularity was achieved by the Roumanians, who showed an unbelievable collection of pompierpropaganda, and by the artist who alone occupied the whole of the Greek Pavilion, Nikos Engonopoulos, a mannerist of the most pronounced kind. Of the ‘new’ artists, in the sense of the artists about whom the generality of critics had heard least, probably the most popular was Mordecai Ardon of Israel, whose works were being shown in the impressive new Israeli Pavilion, which shares with that of Holland, designed by Gerrit Rietveld of Utrecht, the greatest architectural distinction. France, on the whole, though of course the French could never really be failures, did not come off as well as had been expected. The arrangement was untidy, the selection of works destined to represent the Fauves haphazard and the general impression singularly devoid of that ordered grace which we consider so typical of the nation. Japan offered little of interest, and there were no revelations, though one had vaguely expected them, from Viet-Nam. Australia made a highly commendable first appearance with the works of Sidney Nolan, William Dobell and Russell Drysdale, and India too was amongst the newcomers with a highly representative collection which managed nonetheless to exclude the names with which we are the most familiar here in Britain. Apart from Roumania, political alignments meant little, and it is curious that many of the exhibitors were not ‘nationals’ of the pavilions in which they exhibited (Klee in Germany, de Kooning in the USA, Clave in France, etc). Poland (though most of the exhibitors seem to have spent most of their time at Dien Bien Phu) produced graphic work similar to that with which we are acquainted here in the work of Paul Hogarth or Ronald Searle, and America combined both social realism (Ben Shahn) and empirical formalism. This latter art category was most convincingly demonstrated in the work of Ibram Lassaw, The Pillar of Cloud, commissioned by a Rhode Island synagogue. The selection of Shahn’s work was the best to have been seen in Europe, and reveals that he is a more subtle, more adventurous artist than the selection of his works in the Penguin Modern Painters suggests. The organisers of the Biennale, and one cannot but admire the efficiency with which they achieve an incredibly complex and arduous task, had suggested that this year the emphasis should be on fantastic art, and though there was no single exhibition on this theme, several nations tried to emphasise this element in their exhibits (Britain’s presentation of Bacon was a good example). But it was done most successfully by Belgium, which presented an amazing range of work from Momper and Brueghel,
ArtReview
through Wiertz and Ensor to Delvaux, Magritte and Mesens. As a ‘document’ in the history of art, the effect was most impressive and reflected credit on Emile Langui, the organiser of the pavilion. Bernard Denvir
29th Venice Biennale, 1958
Deflated and suspect This exhibition may mark, to the surprise of the many passive adherents of whatever is the latest mode in art, the decline of a movement at the beginning of which Wols had placed himself together with Mathieu, Dubuffet, Michaux, Ossorio and some others: if it is at all possible to speak here of a beginning, since the beginning really lies with the Dadaists and Surrealist Automatism, later sensationally advertised as Art Autre, as Tachism, as the American Action Painting, stemming from it; a pseudo-style in which chance and accident play a larger part than the formative human will, and nature takes over from art. In one word: what Monsieur Tapié stood for has become obviously deflated and suspect. All works of this kind in the present Biennale have shouted it to the beholder: that they are not, and never have been, an art drawing on the subconscious, but a mechanical, often cunning and sometimes even hysterical technique which was at best decorative and on closer inspection inhuman. These characteristics might also be the reason why this year’s Biennale could not decide upon a leading theme such as previously those of Expressionism or Surrealism. Can one imagine what a whole Biennale of Tachism would look like? A foreboding of such a thing certainly was the large exhibition of Abstract Art organised by its Cardinal, Mr. Seuphor, at the Carré Gallery in Paris, 1957. Against this trend of the accidental stands the will to a new figuration – in fact, not as new as all that, because it was always there and no “accident” could kill it, but regaining momentum since the bankruptcy of that contemptible dernier cri in artistic fashions. This may be considered the greatest surprise of the Biennale for the uninformed in matters of artistic essentials. Very sound representatives of this urge for figuration are William Scott and Kenneth Armitage. Amongst the Italians, Alberto Burri, among the Spaniards, Antoni Tàpies, both aiming in a certain sense at animation, the stressing of the sensuous and of the vital: in itself, although achieving it by different means. Édouard Pignon (French Pavilion) strives for it in his most recent work, as does also Paul Rebeyrolle, both decidedly Expressionist Realists. Gerrit Benner tries to reach it along the way trodden by Karel Appel, de Kooning, Asger Jorn and the Greek Yiannis Moralis in a Neo-Classic manner reminiscent of Braque. The examples are many; the purity, however, and the clarity of concept rare. England can pride itself on having in Scott and Armitage two of the most serious representatives of this new revival. J.P. Hodin
top 16 July, 1960 above 11–25 July, 1964
30th Venice Biennale, 1960
33rd Venice Biennale, 1966
Saving face
Crass, classless and free
The Biennale of 1958 was widely criticised for its adjudgment of prizes. Informal art and Action Painting were at their height, the offensive of American art in Europe had just unfolded successfully. There was so much ‘spontaneity’ in all the abstract emotionalism of ‘art autre’ that one could assume with certainty the brevity of its future existence. At this year’s Biennale Tapié made a last effort to save its face. When introducing to a circle of artists, critics and art dealers his recently published volume Morphologie Autre, he spoke of significant informal values in art, the accent being, as he underlined, not on the word informal but on the word significant. The book was not published in France but in Italy, where some painters still paint à la Tapié. This might indicate the centrifugal trend of the movement whose farthest outskirts lie in Japan. The 1960 Venice Biennale proved beyond a doubt that Tachism is at its end. It has faded out into mannerism. It was the most formidable cul de sac into which modern art has ever been manoeuvred. In Kassel, at the Documenta II exhibition of 1959, owing to the massive representation of American art, it still seemed strong, but it proved to be a giant with feet of clay. What will happen now? No one can possibly predict it from this year’s Biennale. Here everything was in balance, no trend dominated. J.P. Hodin
Kasmin proudly announces Biennale Artists; as letter writers in The Times ask about the first cuckoo, is it a record for one gallery to have four artists at Venice? Yes, I suppose it is, especially when the same gallery also has at least two of the Americans. This year at Venice there is Caro, Bernard and Harold Cohen, Richard Smith and Robyn Denny (Harold Cohen is the odd man out with Robert Fraser). Collectively they represent what might be loosely termed a ‘London– New York dialogue’. Certainly all of them reflect the influence of American art and thought, and in most cases they have spent considerable time working or studying in the United States. Smith, in fact, has taken up permanent residence and in a few years may well qualify for the American Pavilion; or indeed by then for what may become an Anglo-American Pavilion. In part the admiration of our younger artists for America seems to lie in the greater freedom of action and expression possible there, or to put it more precisely the greater freedom they think is possible. The inhibitions and frustrations lie within themselves, but are also a reflection of our society. The lack of clearly defined barriers in the States – class, social, educational – and the existence of a body of opinion, genuinely curious or merely permissive, which invites and admires experiment for its own sake, prove irresistible, especially to British painters of working-class origin with a fashionable chip on their shoulders. That the American scene often debases art to nihilistic gimmickry, public relations superficiality or the expendability of household gadgets only seems to make it more attractive. But this is not to deny the seriousness and vitality of the best American artists, the higher standards of imagination and technical skill in comparison with most of their English contemporaries. In the long run their example and influence has had a liberating effect, whatever the standard of the art produced. This transatlantic tie-up must also be related, as I have indicated, to the social revolution in Britain since the war, most explicit in literature, films and magazine journalism. The emergence of a new class-less culture is a parallel phenomenon with the new kind of professionalism, the greater self-assurance and competitiveness in the visual arts, largely as a result of the success of Henry Moore. Charles Spencer
32nd Venice Biennale, 1964
Drowned crickets and noisy critics The large Vanity Fair which we call the Biennale, where some 400 critics from all countries meet at least the same number of exhibiting and nonexhibiting artists of more or less international renown, is this time one of the quieter ones. The positions are fairly established, nothing especially exciting has happened which could compare with the emergence of the modern Spanish School or the Cobra Group’s protest against a far too mechanised and one-dimensional concept of life and living. There are good works and the noise produced by the new Annexe of the American Pavilion or rather the Pop artists there, with the prizewinner Robert Rauschenberg in the lead, is drowned like the chirruping of a cricket by the powerful song of the Canale Grande. In fact nobody takes much notice of this newest of the American crazes and in the circles of French and German critics it is met with derision. J.P. Hodin
May 2019
34th Venice Biennale, 1968
Little rebellious commissars With the art students of the Venice Academy in full revolt implying total occupation of their school building, demonstrating with loud-speakers among
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the holiday crowds of the beautiful Queen of the Lagoon and provoking noisy scuffles with the police at the Piazza San Marco, so that at times no music could be heard – there are usually three orchestras playing at once – and no visitor daring to sit down at the tables of the Caffè Florian or the establishment opposite; with the entrance to the Biennale area itself heavily guarded by carabinieri with guns, by police in their white marine uniforms and pistols; and plain clothes detectives mixing in great numbers among the critics eager to get in for the press opening – this year’s great international art showed a tortured face. There are, and always have been, many reasons for being critical of an institution of this kind, of the way in which it is administered, of the distribution of prizes, etc, but it certainly loomed in no serious critic’s mind (except that of Pierre Restany, who was cute enough to publish for the occasion his ‘Livre Rouge de la Revolution Picturale’, in a format reminding one suspiciously of the tiny red volumes waved threateningly by the destructive adherents of the Maoist cultural revolution) to go as far as the Venetian art students whose placards posted in front of the Academy demanded the complete abolition of bourgeois art. ‘The Biennale of the Police’, they called it; saying, ‘The largest pavilion at the Biennale is the one for the Police’, ‘The Biennale is no culture, it is business’ and other similar slogans which just miss the point. Titian’s paintings were still deeds of cultural importance although they were well paid for, and a Picasso picture which can reach at an auction the sum of £190,000 nevertheless retains its artistic value. But Restany is for the abolition of art altogether – which again is nothing new, for the Antiart slogans of the Dadaists were produced exactly 50 years ago. Wonder what art these little rebellious commissars would produce themselves? J.P. Hodin
35th Venice Biennale, 1970
Ideas bad, works good (except when they’re also bad) The shock which the Biennale of 1968 received from the rebellious artists and students was twofold: moral and political. By proclaiming a vast programme of experimentation for all the arts, their relationship and interpenetration, the organisers thought to have removed the obstacles for this year’s event. They were mistaken. Both from the organisational and the political point of view, the 35th Biennale was challenged most effectively through absenteeism, in spite of the organisers’ willingness to compromise. Many political factors, however, were beyond the reach of their influence.
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ArtReview
In Italy politics and culture seem interconnected to such an extent that each aspect of any cultural activity casts its political shadow. All this is to the disadvantage of institutions such as the Venice Biennale. Again, by radical approach to experimentation, the objective picture of the Biennale, which is to present a cross-section of the arts in the world through its best achievements, has been distorted. A committee of experts consisting of Professor C.G. Argan (Rome), Professor Umbro Apollonio (Venice), Professor René Berger (Lausanne), Professor Gillo Dorfles (Milan) and Dietrich Mahlow (Nuremberg) has decided that the purely technological aspects of present-day art should form the nucleus of the Italian Pavilion. This had its influence on other national pavilions, with the result that only a few of them offered the usual aspect, whereas most of them reflected or paraphrased the trend decided upon by the experts. We can speak, with regret, of an exposition of ideas rather than of a collection of works in Venice. Artistic research through the use of technical or electronic instruments demonstrated clearly that the young artist of today has been replaced by the engineer, the scientist, the mathematician and the architect. Can we still speak of art and of a creative act, when painting machines (Tinguely), designing pendulums and electronic ornamentographs (Radovic), laser, etc, have replaced the human hand? The ideas behind this development are not new and they were demonstrated in a historical show of works by the Russian constructivists, supremacists, geometrists, such as Tatlin, Malevich, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy, the only representative here of the ‘Bauhaus’. In one of the sections of the Italian Pavilion – it is as if we had entered some sort of laboratory – we encounter some modern means of stimulating human perceptive faculties. There is something inhuman about it. The senses of the visitors are confronted by various stimulants, different in kind and quantity, leading as far as irritation and therefore strongly provocative (siren noises, etc). For what purpose, better to understand the phenomena of light, colour and form? There are examples of works by Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp, Man Ray, Mack, Le Parc, von Graevenitz, Flavin, Piene, Munari for the representation of light; Albers, Vasarely for the analysis and the effects of colour; Lily Greenham for polarised light; Eric Olson for optical architecture; Mario Ballocco for chromatic reactivities; Max Bill, Soto, Vjenceslav Richter for concrete forms, etc. In this realm of the ‘visualisation of thought’ the beholder feels like a guinea pig. Intellect is the key word here. What is demonstrated in the majority of the works exhibited at this year’s Biennale is the result of a cold, rational, purely cerebral approach. Aesthetic aspects of new synthetic materials, analytical-aesthetic activities prompted by the computer age, ie by human inventions, not by man’s relationship with nature, with creation, with the enigma of Being. Science and technology
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are dominant. Still, there are exceptions. The Spanish sculptor Manuel Gómez Raba, for instance. In his work there is discernible the love of material (wood combined with plastic) worked upon laboriously and with feeling. In the works of the technological artists, on the other hand, machine-made forms are used. It is an art ‘not touched by human hand’, as hygienic packages of food are advertised, and certainly not touched by the human heart. The degree of ‘hardness’ is high. The personality of the artist has disappeared behind the demands of the age of the second industrial revolution. Can we still speak of art, when contemplating the products of Luis Fernando Benedit (The Biotron, Experimental system for objects, 1970) (Argentine), or Gerhardt Moswitzer’s Little Figure 9, 1965 (Austria), or Jean-Paul Laenen, Infinite Alternative, 1967 (Belgium). Walter Leblanc’s Torsions of Interwoven Fibres, 1968 (Belgium) is as technical an exercise as Roberto Burle Marx’s Solution for a Park in São Paulo, 1970 (Brazil) – a purely architectural venture. Architecture has always been considered the mother of the arts. The modern architect has succeeded in making of art the handmaiden of architecture. There is an aesthetic side to architecture, but translated into the terms of a work of art, it falls short of any human content. Michael Snow’s (Canada) work shows a similar trespassing of filmic attitudes into art. What Georg Karl Pfahler (Germany) aims at in his coloured spatial objects is a good example of hard-edge painting (which is no painting at all), applied to a three-dimensional medium, paraphrasing architecture. Are Peter Stampfli’s Jet-Air compositions, 1970 (Switzerland) more than photographic enlargements of car tyres good for the use of advertising agents, but insufficient as works of art which imply a meaning? Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Cromatic Interferences, 1970, are sensitive but academic repetitions of kinetic experiments well known to the public. But what has not been known of all this stuff for years? One only needs to study certain courses of the Bauhaus from the 1920s to realise how very little has been achieved since then. Not that we demand novelty for novelty’s sake! What we demand is simply: don’t call this art. Tradition in art has been condemned already by the Futurists. The nonart quality of ‘art’ has been proclaimed by the Dadaists. Antiart was established. So be consequent! This is not art. Art is human expression. By the five cerebral wizards of this year’s Biennale the experimental side has been driven to its extreme. There are some aspects other than the technological one and they may be chosen for further Biennale exhibitions. The question is only whether the decision then will be one between art (if it still exists) and nonart, or between one aspect of nonart and another aspect of nonart. It may be that Hegel’s assumption – that we no longer have the absolute need to give expression to content in the form of art, that as far as its highest realisation is concerned, art is for us a thing of the past – has been confirmed. J.P. Hodin
May 2019
37th Venice Biennale, 1976
Dirty, ruined and boring There can surely be no doubt that the art world – indeed the world itself – needs one great bringingtogether of contemporary art, every year or two. The practical questions are two: how to make sure that the art most valuable to mankind is created; and how to make sure that it is shown. This isn’t the place or time to deal with the first question, but the second resolves itself into a matter of committees and places. Since 1895, the Venice Biennale had been that place. But by 1972, the same boring nationalism that ruined the United Nations and the Olympics, and the same boring moneyseeking, power-seeking and mental snobbery that raises false artistic reputations, had calcined and polluted the Biennale as it had Venice itself. No better international fair-ground than Venice had ever been devised; but had its system of sponsorship and funding via permanent national pavilions doomed it to give up its crown to the flexible overnight caravanserai of temporary structures and neutral spaces; at Kassel, or Paris, or anywhere at all? The 1974 Biennale was cancelled, and our British choice, Hockney, had his spectacular in Paris instead. It looked like the end for Venice; but serious committees fought out a reprieve. Renamed the Biennale of Visual Art and Architecture, it has emerged reinvigorated and multifarious; if still rather shaky on selection and discrimination. Appropriately, to Venice and the world, urbi et orbi, a theme, ‘Environment’ with a sub-theme, ‘Participation’ (Ambiente e partecipazione) was chosen. ‘Cultural structures’ also was added to this. This, the various nations have interpreted, or dodged, in a number of ways, in their presentations of individuals or groups; but the range of activities is sociologically valid. In addition to this, Germano Celant selected an ‘Ambiente’ show, in a series of rooms, demonstrating how artists from Puni, Tatlin, Kandinsky and Mondrian to Beuys and Warhol have designed total domestic environments. Across the lagoon, in the ex-Cantieri naval dockyard of the Giudecca, a hospital-corridor shaped plan gives individual cell-space to 86 artists; this ensures – or should ensure – that no contemporary art worth looking at is missed out because of national or theme shows. In practice, it’s a pretty mixed bag, but at least there are some new faces worth meeting; and it proves that any artist worth a public showing can still be given a traditional 10 by 15 metre roomspace, and create in it an atmosphere uniquely his. The other big theme-show in the main Giardini pavilion is a show of the whole artistic history, against the social and political background, of Spain from 1936 to 1976. This follows three threads:
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a recreation of the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of 1936, for which Picasso painted Guernica; the historical story, set out on wooden fencing with photo and word; and around it all, Spanish art of the period is generously set out; though alas, the Picassos are inferior late works except for a couple of paintings. Twenty-five architects – including James Stirling – are shown at the Zattere; Italian architecture during the Fascist regime, at San Lorenzo exchurch. Five graphic designers – Glaser, Davis, Hess, Cieslewicz, Yokoo – are on show at the Museo Correr; Ettore Sottsass has a show there too. The Deutsche Werkbund is shown at the Museum of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro; glass design at San Giorgio; Man Ray photographs at San Giorgio too. The Spanish theme is followed with a war photo show; and the past 40 years of Spanish theatre, music, cinema, poetry and general culture surveyed. From 24 August to 5 September the cinema and television events take place at the Lido. Music arrives on 1 September; Peter Brook’s ‘IK’ theatre company has just passed through. And a permanent archive of modem art has been opened at the Ca’ Corner della Regina. Full documentation of the visual arts and architecture (on show until 10 October) is in the excellent two-volume catalogue, which retails in Venice at 10,000 lire (around £7); though of course the illustrations of installations are of those prior to the show. The most favourable critical response has been gained by Kishin Shinoyama’s series of ravishing large colour photos in the Japanese Pavilion, a serious investigation of the oriental house as living environment. Beuys’s ad hoc work in the German Pavilion, where the peeling walls of four years’ neglect surround a hole through to the water, human bones from the hole, rubble, a monument remembered and a tram-line from childhood, was praised. Richard Long’s rectangular spiral of pink marble stones set in three lines and passing through doorways and rooms of the British Pavilion has had a mixed response. Dani Karavan’s moving environmental architecture is hinted at by his display in the Israeli Pavilion. Romania has a tribute to Brancusi’s park sculpture, by younger sculptors. Of the ‘International Events ’72–’76’ artists at the Cantieri (who include John Davies and Philip Hyde from Britain), the acrid fable-lecture by Dennis Oppenheim, Darcy Lange’s classroom actualities, Charles Simonds and Giancarlo Croce have been well received. But for me, it was two of the Spanish artists who spoke to the heart, of real art and universal: Arroyo, and the young Francesc Torres, asking, in his installations, the great questions of life once again. The Biennale has regained its international status, and one looks forward to its future development with the greatest eagerness. Michael Shepherd
ArtReview
38th Venice Biennale, 1978
Where strangers take you by the hand, and welcome you to wonderland The Venice International Exhibition of Art, now known as the ‘Biennale’, was founded in 1895 and thus provides a unique documentation of international attitudes to the visual arts in the ‘modern’ era. And it has certainly run the gamut of these. It began as a salon in celebration of a newly-united Italy; since then its history has been affected by two world wars, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the postwar rediscovery of the hidden wartime decade of the School of Paris, the rise of the American contribution to art, the expansion of the art market, big prizes and an exhibition style to go with them; but by 1972, the confidence and ego of a generation of artists, acquired during the decade of the swinging, expansive sixties, and toughened, soured or embittered by Korea and Vietnam, bid fair to break through the walls, formal roomspaces, domestic scale and all that the charming permanent pavilions in national hot-weather styles of this Olympic Village stood for. The whole structure of the Biennale was questioned by artists and critics alike; and 1974’s Biennale was cancelled. It was a sad loss; even if Kassel, Basel and Paris had arisen to supersede and specialise the documenting, trade-fair and talent-spotting aspects of Venice between them. Venice is the artworld’s Club Mediterranée: benign Med. weather, a beach not far away, a fabulous setting natural and artificial, chic ‘non-fashion’ fashion (this year, it’s pale khaki cotton and gold chains), beautiful people, opportunities for a gilded or cheapo life-style, drinkies and shady trees away from the shady enterprises. Its architecture – in a world impoverished of anything worthy the name – is not entirely negligible, sometimes exciting, and nationality plus permanence have given it an extraordinary Ideal Home International, multum-inparvo, real, United Nations, quality which it would be a pity to lose, however difficult for national art commissars to work within. Its nationalisms are maddening, interesting, amusing or charming, according to your mood. It is, after all, one of the very few real international occasions of our shaky culture; and it has survived politics, ego, hype and the bullies of art theory – all in large to lethal doses. In Ancient Greece they would say it was blessed by golden Apollo, bright-eyed Athene, wise Minerva and mercurial Hermes; even Russian Mars and Italian Venus got it together for a time. It has, in short – charm. But in 1974 Carlo Ripa di Meana was appointed President of the Biennale, and in two years’ intensive work behind the scenes, he worked a minor miracle: 1976’s Biennale erupted all over Venice, with four
21 July, 1978
themes, Environment, Participation, the documentation of current art, and the cultural history of Spain from 1936–1976. It felt as if the Biennale had at last come of age, and had begun to look beyond personality, nationalism and politics, towards universals. In 1975 di Meana conceived the idea of an ‘in-between’ Biennale of dissident art from all countries – all countries, where, cynical commentators would say, Russia is ‘stirring it’. And, naturally, Russian dissidents themselves, too, would be included… Anyone, from the Romanian Contessa Marietta who looks after the Canadian Pavilion between Biennales – once arrested three times in one night at gunpoint by ‘them’ – could have told him he was facing checkmate on the monster iron chessboard of the Red squares of the Kremlin, when he set off for Moscow. If he persisted, Russia would withdraw for ever (do Marxists believe in eternity, then?) from the Biennale, he was told, taking away with her (unasked) Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Jugoslavia. Di Meana courageously went ahead (against Communist pressures within Venice – the longest Communist-governed city in Italy – and outside it) and put on a show, complete with samizdat novels on toilet tissue and all. So this year, Russia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia have empty, closed pavilions (the gallery of the Russian Black Sea-style villaette had locked grey steel clothes lockers all round the walls when I peeped in; but it turned out not to be a devastating, daring dissident artist’s indictment of the regime after all; just a garde-robe); the Czech Pavilion, designed and lettered confidently in 1926 when Czech brilliance in the visual arts joined the international scene with such flair, makes one of the 20th century’s most poignant visual monuments to a murdered nation. However Romania and Jugoslavia bravely refused to accept this bloc decision; and each have fielded a team of seven artists, whom the Biennale visitors and fellow exhibitors have found artistically praiseworthy and politically unexceptionable (Russian papers please copy this), as well as courageously showing – dare one say – the Stalingrad spirit. Poland, whose pavilion has of recent Biennales been sombrely, dramatically outstanding, and Hungary, whose first recent participation was promising, are both sad losses. So is the nonarrival of the Arabs, whose recent work has been full of promise too, and an interesting contrast to the overconfidence and extrovert serenity – almost aggressive contentment – of the Israeli participants; this year the pavilion is given over to a flock of sheep (Kadishman, studied at St. Martin’s under Caro, lived here for a while) – which turned out to be Italian sheep and not Israeli long-tails. Sha-baa, sha-baa… The number of participating nations has over the history of the Biennale varied from 15 to 37. (The blow-by-blow account can be entertainingly read up in Lawrence Alloway’s history of the Venice Biennale 1895–1968, published in 1969 by Faber). This year
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there are 27 – Iceland participating for the first time, with some witty photos by Sigurdur Gudmundsson. And the Biennale spreads itself again this year – if not so much as last time – beyond the public gardens: across the water in the old salt store near the Zattere boat-stop (bone of contention in a recent conservation v. new swimming-pool dispute), or alternatively reached from the Salute stop or from the main island via the Accademia bridge, are side-exhibitions of concrete poetry, two Italian feminist groups, a collection of 15 Italian photographers, and a substantial architectural exhibition related to the theme of this year’s Biennale, From Nature into Art; from Art into Nature, covering ideal, Utopian, Futurist and naturalist intentions in Italian architecture of this century. The main pavilion houses an instant museum of 20th-century art of all traditions abstract and figurative from Kandinsky and Mondrian to Gilbert and George’s latest work, via some faded stars of past Biennales and many interesting works. An early, ‘unknown’ Bacon of 1947 from an Italian private collection, a screaming head like the Tate’s, surmounted with an officer’s peaked cap, is still powerfully simple. There is a huge Rosenquist mural; the Beuys room from The Basel Art Museum is like the first message out of a devastated country. There are simple wall texts setting each movement in context; given the peace of contemplation from now until the Biennale closes on 15 October, when we of the noisy jet-spraypaint-set have flown away, it may work and illumine – I hope it does; real effort has gone into those texts for a change. The perpetual problem for national commissioners and artists is whether to offer public art or private, or hope that sheer artistic stature provides both. ‘Public’ works include a concrete wall (Staccioli); an aeroplane towing a banner (Nannucci); a bull (Paradiso); Kadishman’s flock of sheep, cut-outs of trees of sheet steel and mirrors on trees; a hole in the ground (Valzon); a tower of Oz-like oversized tin funnels (Conenna); the shadow or a real live monkey in a cage (Pisani); fish smoked in a grass hut (Giezen); and a huge arch of letters, ‘Summa Ars’ (easier said than done…). Of the national pavilions, Britain’s Mark Boyle one-man is an effective choice – as Marina Vaizey describes elsewhere in this issue; public art but on a scale comfortably between domestic and gallery. The most unified pavilion was Japan’s, with a beautiful ‘duet’ of Enokur’s stained marks on canvas and Suga’s split trees perfectly harmonised with the architecture. The Austrian, Rainer, with violent, tense scrawled-over photographs and a film to match, was much praised by fellow artists; I thought it narrow and inappropriate, but I’m told he does something different every show. Australia’s first appearance for 20 years, with a dry, tough, sharp-eyed trio, Owen, Unsworth and Davis, won general praise; Romania, general admiration. The validity of including an Italian photographer (Papa) with his photographs of Indian life, in the Indian Pavilion might be questioned; their stunning
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beauty and humanity, however, made an unexpected point about ‘art and nature’. The Finn, Olavi Lanu, showed some incredible moss- and lichen-covered sculptures, which obviously look even better at home. And the art of contemplation scores in the US Pavilion (Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park’ series and Henry Callahan’s wide-ranging photos), and Canada (sculptor Henry Saxe and relief painter Ron Martin). This Biennale however lacks the balance, the immediacy and relevance provided in 1976 by the assembly of a large number of one-man rooms in the Giudecca given over to younger artists across national affiliations. If this can be restored, the Biennale’s future should be assured; a unique pleasure and visual, informational experience worth the airfare (now £202 at full ‘economy’ price from London…). If not – considering the spectacular decrease in the number of tourists in Venice this year – I would find it hard to recommend a visit for the Biennale alone. But restoration and conservation of Venice continue quietly and brilliantly. Venice should be declared an international city, and administered as such; and the world would have, not a romantic, fading dream of history, but a living, thrilling treasure of body, mind and spirit. Michael Shepherd
39th Venice Biennale, 1980
Fun and sunshine, there’s enough for everyone The 39th Venice Biennale, which continues until 28 September, confirms the increasingly serious intention of this event, the abandonment of much of the carnival aspect. With economic considerations now restricting the international flow of art and its messages, Venice becomes more valuable and worth continuing for this reason; even if some of its thunder has been stolen by Kassel, Basel and Paris, Venice is still the perfect international conference, exhibition and communication centre, a reminder of civilised values, and should be developed as such. Yet, all that said, the current Biennale is as elusive to define as is its theme: The 1970s into the 1980s. This attempted with a retrospective summation of art of the 1970s, in the official selection in the central halls of 46 artists’ work (including Richard Long, Bruce McLean and Kenneth Martin); with a further official selection of 37 video artists (including Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Gilbert and George); across the water at the old salt warehouses (Magazzini del Sale), another official selection of 41 young artists in whose company we are to venture into the 1980s (including Roger Ackling, Tony Cragg and Leonard McComb); and, of course, the 34 participating nations’ choice of one or more artists to fit the theme, in their national pavilions.
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And there are other sideshows: one graceful touch being an exhibition (woefully unsignposted) in the Oriental section of the Museum of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro, of Modern Czechoslovak Art in the Prague Museums, which is partly a tribute to 20 years of direction by Vincent Kramer; and the splendid Kupka much in evidence. In the former Church of San Lorenzo (and thank goodness it’s fun getting lost in Venice) are performances by, and a documentation of, the 16-yearold ‘Centre d’Art Plastique’ from Bordeaux, whose aim is to encourage a good relationship between the public and the visual arts. An unscheduled History of Pop Art exhibition is situated on the Grand Canal beyond the Rialto. A major exhibition of a figure of great current interest, Balthus (you may remember John Russell’s exhibition of his work at the Tate some years back) is in the Scuola Grande di S. Giovanni Evangelista. And later, at the beginning of July, the Correr Museum houses an exhibition of August Strindberg’s art, his photographic experiments and his alchemic researches. First, a brief glimpse at the national pavilions. Britain features 31-year-old sculptor Nicholas Pope (with a new piece like a fence of rough palings) and 34-year-old Tim Head (two new pieces, one mostly mirrored space, the other projected trompe l’oeil plywood partitions). America chose to show a large number of small works mostly on paper, from Stella through Oppenheim to more recently emergent names. Canada showed five video artists and teams; they now get shown on cable and pay-TV; high time that TV here devoted a few off-peak minutes a day to visual experiment in its own medium. The French are uneasy about Biennale showmanship, stronger on visual-plus-verbal, with Sabine Monorye’s human situation paintings (captions listed separately). The Belgians show one of the strongest teams, particularly the interesting portraitist Jan Burssens. The Germans tried putting a single work in a vast space; it needs a Beuys at least to pull that off. The Spaniards support the Belgians with people-painting, as do the Venezuelans, with political overtones. The Portuguese are nowadays like children let out of punishment class, happy in their freedom and experiment. The Dutch show Ger van Elk (seen at Nigel Greenwood regularly) – friendly, ingenious and well-made artistic humour. Scandinavia generally lacks lustre this year – internal crises? The Arabs seem unable to overcome their racial difficulty with time and delivery dates; while the Israelis are still retro-fuelling their national will with memories of prison work camps where blood flows like sewers and sewers run blood. Shyuk. The Poles (Magdalena Abakanowicz) are magnificent and dramatic. The Yugoslavs have again a fluid, soaring, confident rhetoric. The Romanians impress. The Austrians are still caught by tension and selfdestruction. The Hungarians are deeply interesting, and becoming steadily more so, though elusive to define. The Czechs are ingenious and imaginative in glass sculpture and graphics. The Peruvians (particularly Herman Braun, another human portrait painter) and Colombians – in a new pavilion still being built
Cover of the catalogue of the 39th Venice Biennale, 1980
when the Biennale started – are to be followed closely in their developing surprises. And China, a newcomer to the Biennale, shows a mixture of traditional paintings of beautiful things and confident, cheerful, vigorous, chin-up-smile-and-step-out poster art and painted colour photographs. Not art, you say? But there in the central hall are Andy Warhol and Amul Rainer painting on photographs; and American artists copying wallpaper patterns… Finally, Russia is still absent, after the boycott ‘for ever’ announced after the Biennale of Dissidents; but not supported any more in this by the Warsaw Pact countries except East Germany and Bulgaria. Now, what of the central international ’70s and ’80s selections? First the ’70s. Since one piece hardly represents the importance of any of these artists properly (though Beuys is given prior space, and Kenneth Martin is finely selected and shown), it’s probably as meaningful simply to list them? They are: Acconci, Anselmo, Beuys, Blume, Boetti, Boltanski, Broodthaers, Brus, Buren, Byars, Calzolari, Darboven, De Maria, Fabro, Graves, Hesse, Immendorff, Jenney, Judd, Klauke, Mounellis, Le Gac, LeWitt, Long, Lulertz, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Martin, McLean, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Messager, Morris, Nauman, Oppermann, Paolini, Penck, Penone, Polke, Raetz, Rainer, Richter, Ryman, Serra, Sieverding, Thek, Twombly, Warhol, Zoric. Likewise the 1980s, but more so: a disappointingly thin effect, but then, even greater showing problems
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with a single example. Chosen were: Aballea, Ackling, Adrian X, Artschwager, Banninger, Borofsky, Buthe, Castelli, Chia, Clemente, Cragg, Cucchi, De Maria, Disler, Eigenheer, Garet, Geissbuhler, Germana, Hunt, Jaudon, Klinkan, Klophaus, Kushner, Luscher, McComb, Mell, Moskowitz, Ottinger, Paladino, Pezold, Ripps, Robbins, Rothenberg, Schmalix, Schnabel, Smyth, Tatafiore, van Hoek, Winnewisser, Zakanitch and Zucker. Well, none of these looked anything to place one’s trust in for ten years of life; but we’ll see… On this showing, the 1980s in avant-garde art will confirm that there is now in the world a whole new race of sophisticated, inquisitive, private free spirits who call themselves ‘artists’, who are conducting private investigations into the visual aspect of, and ideas around, anything you can think of in the universe. Beside the Biennale ‘young’ selection of even four years ago, they look far less ‘public’. Their art is an acquired taste, which will be fun for the cognoscenti. But the great prize – to capture the human imagination and heart, so deeply that the whole world cannot but respond – is still there to be won. Or don’t we believe in that sort of art any more? Nevertheless, Venice is an invaluable chance to catch up on what the international art establishments have in their wisdom been promoting, and catch the talent which has been establishing itself for about ten years of its professional life. Michael Shepherd
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Looking at pictures with William Eggleston by Fi Churchman
Untitled, c. 1983–86, pigment print
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Untitled, c. 1983–86, pigment print
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Untitled, c. 1983–86, pigment print
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William Eggleston is a man of few words. Dressed in a navy suit with “That’s very nice to hear. Thank you.” Eggleston’s voice sounds a striped bowtie hanging loose around the collar of his white shirt, like a car rolling over gravel, with a clipped Southern accent. a pair of freshly polished leather shoes and a sharp side-parting, the After a moment, he raises his eyebrows. “… as well as some other eighty-year-old Tennessee-born, Mississippi-raised photographer photographers?” who brought colour into art photography in the 1960s still cuts an “Stephen Shore, Lee Friedlander…” elegant, if now fragile, figure. We’re in a hotel room in a ritzy part Eggleston leans back and nods. “Yeah. I consider Lee Friedlander of London, ahead of a show of his work from the 1970s at a high-end the greatest contemporary photographer. He did not shoot in colour gallery in the city. at all. He didn’t have to. They’re brilliant. Every time I’d look at them We sit in silence for a few seconds. I’d think they were in colour anyway. That’s how good he is. We’ve Eggleston’s work shot to prominence in 1976 when the Museum been friends for 40 years, probably.” of Modern Art curator John Szar“What did you mean when kowski invited him to exhibit a you said he didn’t need to shoot in Eggleston is more preoccupied with series of dye-transfer colour images. colour?” structure and composition than the At the exhibition’s opening, the art “Oh because of the way Lee’s people or objects he photographs. He calls critic Hilton Kramer condemned pictures, no matter what format – some are square, some are not – the photographs, writing in The New this ‘photographing democratically’ are organised so brilliantly. I think York Times, that they were ‘perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.’ In 1969, the photographer organised is the right word. There are different places which he had Walker Evans had declared that ‘colour photography is vulgar’, and wanted to illustrate, where the shapes meet or work with each other. although he later retracted the statement (saying in 1974 that he had The result is on a very, very high level of consciousness. I think that bought a colour Polaroid and was ‘feeling wildly with it’), his original says enough.” sentiment reflected the prevailing opinion at that time: that colour I ask him if he’d describe his photographs the same way and he photography was more often associated with advertising than with smiles, saying quietly, “Yes. I wouldn’t mind at all.” art. Eggleston, who had nearly missed the opening of that MoMA show “In your photographs, the shapes in the composition stand out. by falling asleep in his hotel room, has always said that the criticisms Is that something you’re looking out for, something you’re trying never bothered him – that he thought, instead, those critics hadn’t to organise?” really looked at his photographs. The photographer, who grew up on “No,” he says, frowning at his knees. “It’s just there. I don’t look his family’s cotton plantation, has displayed all the clichéd traits of a for it. It just happens. I think with Lee probably something like that maverick; a hard-partier with a penchant for bourbon, cigarettes (Jack happens as well.” Daniel’s Black Label and Natural American Spirit, to be precise) and Eggleston has rejected the term ‘snapshot aesthetic’ – a phrase gun-collecting with no academic training in photography. often attached to street photography in fine art contexts between 1960 Travelling the American South – as he continues to do, though and 1980 – whenever it has been applied to his work. Now he reiterhis son now does much of the driving – Eggleston would find a ates gruffly, “They’re not snapshots. Snapshots are what they sound spot, jump out of the car and begin shooting images of everything like. Mine are carefully conceived and confected works of fine art. They that surrounded him. But for all his seemingly carefree attitude, he couldn’t be more distant from snapshots. If there’s such a thing as has remained insistent on a formal way of looking through his lens, a reverse of a snapshot, that would be my work.” more preoccupied with structure and composition than the people “And why is it important to take photographs of ‘life today’?” or objects he photographs. He calls this ‘photographing democrati“That says it. That’s just what I wanted to say.” He pauses, then cally’, meaning that every element of his pictures carries equal impor- looks directly at me and raises his eyebrows again, “do you think ‘life tance. On the surface, his phototoday’ is not enough?” graphic aesthetic would come to “I’m asking you.” “Number one: I don’t really have inform a particular vernacular that “I think it’s sufficient,” he says anything in mind. Number two: I really describes the American South as comfortably. don’t know when to stop, to be honest” made up of freeway signs, gas staI watch him for a moment as he tions, derelict shop fronts, logos, looks at his hands. Eggleston takes muscle cars, rusted trucks, and more intimate scenes of domesticity time to respond in full; you can see when he’s formulating an answer depicted by diner tables and condiments, a shelf of frayed National in his mind, in the twitches at the corners of his mouth, and the way Geographic magazines, a forest green radiator. Eggleston’s body of he focuses on the middle distance. But now he won’t say any more. work is one of the most significant influences on American visual It strikes me that once he’s found a way to express something – say, culture today, cited by photographers and filmmakers including Nan as wide as the ‘subject’ of his photography – he doesn’t feel the Goldin, Alec Soth, the Coen brothers, David Lynch and Sofia Coppola, need to elaborate, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. its DNA perceptible in the saturated colours of television shows such So I change gear. as True Detective (2014–). “Can I ask how you produce your series? Do you have a general “A few years ago, I did a couple of road trips around America and framework in mind? Do you know when to stop?” I realised that what I was seeing, how I was looking at the places we “Number one: I don’t really have anything in mind.” He chuckles travelled through, was informed by you – among other photogra- to himself. “And number two: I really don’t know when to stop, to phers” I tell him. be honest.”
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After a couple of stalls, it becomes apparent that it doesn’t matter the image and atomising it, looking closer, and still more closely. And how hard you try to ask open questions: there are some ideas that bite then it occurs to me that when he said, in 1988, that he was ‘at war with for Eggleston, and a lot that don’t. the obvious’, perhaps it wasn’t about elevating the everyday, the banal, I try again. “What do you think is the difference between showing into something ‘important’. Perhaps he really is fighting the obvious: photographs on a gallery wall and publishing them in a book?” those parts of his photos that people are most likely to centre on; He pauses. “Oh. I don’t think they have anything to do with each those identifiable cultural markers that suggest a narrative – as when other. A show in a gallery is just a temporary thing. A book is not a bit his work is associated with the American Gothic. Instead, his phototemporary; it’s forever. Let’s open that book there.” He points towards graphs, which are often arranged geometrically – either grid- or flag2 ¼ (1999), which has been lying on the coffee table. like – contain compositional balances, as seen in another picture in “OK.” I lean forward to pick up the book and begin fumbling 2 ¼, in which busts of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert through the expansive pages. Kennedy sit on a bar shelf surrounded “Just anywhere,” he says, unfoldby bottles of bourbon, vodka and rum. “A show in a gallery is just ing it. Flicking through the leaves, Here the grid is formed by the shelves, a temporary thing. A book is not he stops occasionally to consider an wall cladding and ceiling tiles, but a bit temporary: it’s forever” image that contains an upside-down repetitions also occur in the three rusted car, or purple-and-white flowbottles of liquor lined up on the shelf ers growing out of some dusty ground, or a disused Texaco sign lying below the busts; in the square photograph positioned next to a mirror in the rough. As he looks over each photo, developed from the titular of the same shape, and below that, the till with its grid of buttons. You could call him a formalist, if you wanted to put a label on him, 2 ¼ inch – also known as 120 or 6x6cm – film, it seems as though he’s looking at them for the first time. I’m reminded of when he once but here, now, watching Eggleston quietly study his own picture, described his images as ‘photographic dreams’, ones he no longer I think about the way he stresses the word ‘everything’, and wonder whether he is looking at his photographs and trying to understand remembers a short time later. “Here.” He stops at a picture of a windowsill on which sits a used the nature of things on the smallest possible scale. “Do you hope that people see everything in your photographs?” foil pie plate and a plastic spoon. “Hopefully,” he says, “but I don’t think it happens too often.” Diagonal lines created by the windowsill are paralleled a little further in: on the top of the chair’s back, along the edges of what We pause again, before discussing the colour red, which is ubiqappear to be laundrette trolleys, and in the outline of the sharp dark uitous among Eggleston’s photographs. He tells me it’s a powerful shadow carved into the sunlit far wall – the contrast of which is so colour, and that it doesn’t “like” other colours. “Red has power. It severe, it’s impossible to see beyond the black background. Within could be other things too. I can say that right off easily. It’s so powerful the frame, only an ‘R’ can be seen of the scratched-away red wording you don’t really need much of it. There are certain pictures and paintpainted onto the window; the string looping the fabric sides to the ings that are completely of red.” trolley frame, the angle of the spoon and the ridges of the pie plate I think of his photographs of dusty red brick surfaces and painted forming a counterbalancing diagonal momentum. tin roofs, of a red truck shot close up so that it nearly fills the frame We’ve been silent for a while, so I offer a prompt: “You create your (in the silver bumper, a tiny reflection of Eggleston can be recognised) own space with a book.” and, of course, the stark Greenwood, Mississippi (1973) – a photograph of “That’s right,” he nods, “right here, right now, we get to really a ceiling with a bare light bulb trailing white wires which he described study and pay attention to this picture. At a gallery on the wall, one ‘like red blood that’s wet on the wall.’ does not get to spend very much time with it. So we’re experiencing “Including your own.” something with this book that a gallery-goer does not have access to.” “Mhmm,” he nods, with a slight rock back and forth. “That’s so When I ask him what’s the first thing he notices when looking back much true. It’s pure – and I think that constitutes where its power comes from. Pure red does not conat his photographs, Eggleston again tain any other colours. That is not says nothing for a long time. I sit back “The subject could be anything. unique, because other colours, priand watch him, leaving him to think. A picture gives it life. As though if it didn’t Eventually, he answers, “I try to study mary colours, are pure.” exist on the page, it would be less” everything about the thing, from I can’t tell if this talk of ‘purity’ is just about the colour red, or if every angle,” he places his hand vertically across the page, and then, pointing to different sections, “the way Eggleston is also, maybe, talking about himself. He has historically colours work against no colour – those black-and-white areas – which stood apart from his contemporaries both in the sense that he was never is very important. The subject could be anything. A picture gives it life. formally trained and in his resistance towards being categorised: he wasn’t included in ‘groups’ of photographers like those who showed As though if it didn’t exist on the page, it would be less.” He continues, “Say we’re beginning to realise, because we keep in seminal exhibitions such as Szarkowski’s 1967 MoMA exhibition looking at it, that this is really complicated. It’s not a simple thing. New Documents (Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander), or But in a gallery you don’t have the time we’re taking to keep looking William Jenkins’s New Topographics at George Eastman House in 1975, and analysing everything in the frame. It’s simply that we need to do which included Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Bernd and Hilla Becher that. And being in a book allows this.” and Lewis Baltz. When I ask him about this, he simply says: “I don’t We fall silent again, looking at the photograph. As Eggleston’s like their works.” I don’t point out his contradiction on Friedlander, concentration intensifies, it looks as though he’s taking every detail in instead asking him whether he sees himself as an outsider.
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Untitled, c. 1983–86, pigment print
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Untitled, c. 1983–86, pigment print
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“I don’t know…” he says, gazing straight ahead. “I don’t think you have to study to understand the way art works. In fact I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.” And then, in a conspiratorial manner, he grins, nudging me. “It might be better when you figure it out yourself.” We settle into a comfortable silence, and Eggleston returns to the picture of the windowsill on our laps. In another interview a couple of years ago, he spoke about his other interests, in drawing, painting and making music. (In 2017, he released an album of improvisations played on a synth that were recorded on floppy discs and cassette tapes in the 1980s.) At that point, he’d said he might like to start writing, so I ask him whether he ever started. “No,” he shrugs, “things that are images within the field of graphic arts and words do not mix. That’s why I don’t like to put words with my images. They just don’t belong together. I don’t think words are powerful enough to ‘restrict’ any image. But they certainly don’t help being around. I don’t really think there’s any connection,” he continues
earnestly. “It’s often thought by lots of people that there’s every kind of connection in the world – well, they’re wrong. There isn’t. I know I’m right in saying that. I may be laughing right now, but it’s no joke!” I ask him how he thinks his photographs communicate. “Only if you study each one intently and using all of the intellect to decipher the image or observe every single thing that’s going on in it. I have to use the word decipher because, to view them on the surface is like considering them snapshots, which they are not.” He points to the photograph, “This is deeper.” I sit back again, looking at the sun’s reflection in the shine of the foil pie plate. “Do you keep looking at your pictures?” “Yes, absolutely.” ar William Eggleston: 2¼ is on view at David Zwirner, London, through 1 June
Untitled, 1970 – 4 (Dennis Hopper), 1970–74 all images © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner, London, New York & Hong Kong
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Stefan Gritsch Bones n’ Roses CARAVAN 2 / 2019: Moritz Hossli
*Aargauer Kunsthaus 18. 5. – 11. 8. 2019 Aargauerplatz CH–5001 Aarau Tue – Sun 10 am – 5 pm Thur 10 am – 8 pm www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch Jean-Luc Mylayne, N° 524, Février Mars Avril 2007 © Jean-Luc Mylayne, Courtesy Mylène & Jean-Luc Mylayne; Gladstone Gallery, New York, Bruxelles; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London, Los Angeles
Roger Hiorns, A Retrospective View of the Pathway, 2010 – 2015, © courtesy the Roger Hiorns Family.
Jean-Luc Mylayne The Autumn of Paradise
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Art Reviewed
The sneer of the whip‌ the crawling of vermin among tired bodies 97
Arahmaiani The Past Has Not Passed Museum MACAN, Jakarta 17 November – 10 March Given the extent of this survey show (which boasts more than 70 works) and the fact that it features all manner of objects, among them paintings, drawings, installations and documentary videos featuring pharmaceutical products, crockery, flags, machine guns, condoms, coke bottles and soft furnishings (to list just a few), you might be surprised to learn that the creation of discrete art objects is far from central (and often entirely irrelevant) to Arahmaiani’s output. For example, one of the Indonesian artist’s best-known performances, Breaking Words (2004–), appears at MACAN as a pair of white plates sitting atop a dressed table. On each is written a single word: ‘keadilan’ (justice) on one; ‘mother’ on the other. Behind the table is a wall scarred by dinks and dents of the type with which most visitors to white-cube gallery spaces would be unfamiliar. At its base is a rubble of broken crockery.
The work begins as a performance in which members of the public are invited to write words that are important to them on the plates. Once this is done, the artist appears to read the words and then toss the plates at the walls like so many Frisbees. Both public and personal, in essence it’s a game of almost simultaneous assertion and denial of the power of language (which plays a role in many of the artist’s works, among them The Flag Project, 2006–10). The work appears cathartic and simple, the kind of thing a therapist might recommend, and indeed there is an element of the therapeutic to Arahmaiani’s work in general. If all that seems like a heavy burden of significance to lump on a pile of smashed plates (although you could say that that’s what art does, more or less successfully, in general), it’s worth noting that when Arahmaiani performed the same work back in 2006 as part of the Satu
Kali performance symposium in Kuala Lumpur, the festival was shut down by the police and the artist forced to flee the country following claims by an audience member that she had offended Islam, having smashed a plate with the word ‘Allah’ written on it. There’s a sense in which Arahmaiani’s art exists in the context of the ripples it creates, as much as it does in the objects or performances she makes: something to which this exhibition alludes via a minidisplay of the extensive archive of catalogues, press clippings, photographs and video recordings of the artist’s output. And yet that additional aura, of what the artwork does when it’s embedded in society, rather than preserved in a museum, is generally (and perhaps necessarily) absent in this show. Do not Prevent the Fertility of the Mind (1997/2014/2018), for example, is a large wall of illuminated sanitary towels with two photographs of the
Handle without Care (1996–2017), performance at the 2nd AsiaPacific Triennial, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1996. Courtesy the artist
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artist dressed as a nurse and holding a giant, sicklelike IUD contraceptive device in one hand and a pair of surgical scissors in the other (recreating a pose from earlier iterations of the work). In front of it a chemistry flask filled with blood sits atop a white stool covered in what looks like a bridal veil. While this might be a more direct statement of the artist’s feminist ideals, it’s ironic that the more brutal action of smashing plates feels, by comparison, a subtler and more nuanced message of intent. Similarly, a series of paintings from 2008 titled Beyond Good and Evil, in which cartoon characters such as Tom & Jerry, Sylvester and Tweetie Pie act out scenes of American imperialism, fails to truly go beyond the Punch and Judy-like scenarios of the material that has been appropriated. That’s not to say that the artist is not capable of creating standalone objects or installations independent of her performances, as the inclusion here of her best-known work internationally demonstrates. 11 June 2002 (2003) was first shown at the 50th Venice Biennale. The installation comprises a bedroom, decorated in red and white and looking like it was
extracted from an incredibly cutesy Japanese love hotel. The neatly made bedspread, for example, is decorated with hearts; a chair, on which is draped a white bathrobe, appears arranged as if to observe the potential sleeper. Evidence of her presence comes in the form of a pair of discarded tights and underwear. Oddly, there’s a large Coca-Cola machine in the corner. And then you notice that a Koran has been placed neatly on the bedpillow. And a handwritten diary entry and photograph documenting the incident to which the work refers. In the wake of the heightened security following 9/11, the artist was detained overnight by US immigration in Los Angeles during a stopover en route to Canada. During that time a male officer was assigned to supervise her in her hotel room, despite the fact that the artist’s detention revolved around the fact that she is Muslim and that under Islam it is forbidden for unmarried women and men to share a room. Beyond the fact that the work articulates the sense of being identified as something (Muslim) only to have that identity violated, it also speaks to the uncomfortable
relationship between captor and captive on both sides – the photograph pictures Arahmaiani and the immigration official awkwardly standing at airport departures – and, like the artist’s wider body of work, returns global issues to the intimate site of individuals and their bodies. Ultimately, this is an important exhibition that – primarily through the archive materials and their documentation of works such as the installation Nation for Sale (1996), which is also recreated in the exhibition, and Handle Without Care (1996–2017) – leads you to understand why Arahmaiani, through her engagement with issues of gender equality, identity politics, multiculturalism, consumerism, language and religion, has been, since the 1990s, one of the most influential and groundbreaking performance artists from Southeast Asia. Yet it remains the case that her best work in both performance and the creation of objects and installations leaves you wishing you had been there, whether as a witness to a performance or a fly on the wall of a hotel bedroom. Mark Rappolt
11 June 2002, 2003. Courtesy the artist and Museum MACAN, Jakarta
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Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now Fondation Cartier, Paris 4 April – 16 June In seeking out the future of European art, this survey of emerging artists from across the continent finds a generation preoccupied by the past. That all of its 21 artists were born after 1980 – and so came of age in the years following the ‘end of history’, the reunification of Germany and the Maastricht Treaty’s commitment in 1992 to pursue ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ – might go some way to explaining, given how well the utopian spirit of those times is playing out, why they prefer to look backward rather than forward. The catalogue states that research for the show began ‘without any preconceived ideas or guiding principles’, but it’s clear from the first room that some themes soon emerged. Chief among them, as the Ovidian title suggests, is the practice of recycling and renovating found materials and forms: Italian design studio Formafantasma have built a suite of office furniture from electronic waste; Nika Kutateladze has shipped an abandoned wooden house from her native Georgia and reconstructed it in the gallery; the Amsterdam-based artist Tenant of Culture has bundled old rucksacks and windcheaters into normcore sculptures that resemble ragbag art students outside a South London pub. So far, so right-minded: in an age of excessive consumption and catastrophic waste, the onus is on finding creative ways to repurpose existing materials while drawing attention to what has been lost. Yet Marion Verboom’s assembled totem poles are more problematic, given that the cultural hybridisation her hotchpotch of symbols seems to celebrate – in which minority belief systems adapt to dominant ideologies to survive – has historically taken place under different circumstances than this kind of postmodernist free play implies. There are similarly uncomfortable echoes of primitivism in John Skoog’s videowork Federsee (2013), which follows the masked celebrants of a German town festival dating back to the Middle
Ages, and Evgeny Antufiev’s quasi-anthropological artefacts, including a ceramic-and-copper fetish object (Untitled, 2017) that looks as if it has recently been excavated at an archaeological dig. The voguish reverence for arcane or indigenous forms of knowledge that have been crowded out by modernity – including spiritualism, animism or witchcraft – is typically figured as a rejection of the authoritarian structures embedded in established systems of belief. But it also raises questions about the relationship between a pancontinental ‘artworld’ and the ‘local’ traditions and subcultures to which its practitioners are increasingly drawn, and which some might argue are threatened by the homogenising forces of which these artists are – as part of an educated, cosmopolitan and mobile minority – the representatives. That they apply similar methodologies to diverse source materials can be read either as an invigorating cross-pollination of folk and official cultures or as the triumph of a dominant academic style; either way the exhibition succeeds in dramatising some of the tensions between local and international that have recently undermined the European project. Its failure to put forward a compelling vision of progress is equally of the zeitgeist, and Kris Lemsalu’s absurdist rowing boat adrift on a sea of blue balloons feels well attuned to the prevailing hopelessness. Downstairs, the refreshing hint of anarchy introduced by the Estonian artist’s assemblage paintings – in which figures composed of ceramic trainers, unzipped trousers and vagina dentata trample over clichéd images of the American wilderness – is undermined by the grating whimsy of Daniel Abrantes’s A Brief History of Princess X (2016), which describes a wall-text-depth narrative of Brancusi’s phallic sculpture through re-enactment and voiceover. Nonetheless, the video’s lament on the affectations surrounding institutionalised art were confirmed by the woman who sat down next to me and,
in response to the sculpture’s appearance onscreen, sighed with the air of a devotee, ‘Oh, I do love Giacometti, I really, really do.’ The ‘heroic era’ of Modernism also informs Klára Hosnedlová’s stage set, which rewardingly combines a stated indebtedness to the architectural austerity of fellow Moravian Adolf Loos with the historically gendered crafts of embroidery and costumery. Yet Kasper Bosmans’s heraldic paintings and Charlie Billingham’s Regency pastiches had me worrying again about whether the abundant revivalism is indicative of a wider nostalgia for feudal or aristocratic social models, however much the artists affect to ‘play’ with and update the symbology of bygone eras. George Rouy’s artful neoclassical paintings, meanwhile, are unabashed homages to the neoclassical ‘return to order’ in European painting after the end of the First World War, most obviously Picasso’s fulsome and monumental female figures. The cumulative impression is that the possibility of a break from the past – the customary clarion call of young people – is to this generation a frightening prospect. That anxiety manifests in different ways, from Lap-See Lam’s intelligently written and executed fictional video histories of the Chinese diaspora in Stockholm to the moralising condescension of Magnus Andersen’s variations on the work of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, but only Jonathan Vinel’s Martin Pleure (2017) captures the anomie of those who feel disinherited and disenfranchised. The adolescent narrator of this composite of digitally animated scenes from the videogame Grand Theft Auto V (2013) moves through a hostile urban landscape, stealing cars, fighting the police and leaving forlorn voice messages for a girl called Luna and a series of friends, none of whom return his calls. The scenario sets up the lead character to resemble a conventional masculine hero – maverick, self-reliant, individualistic – before revealing him to be in mourning for a lost community. Ben Eastham
facing page, top Jonathan Vinel, Martin pleure, 2017, HD video, colour, sound, 16 min. © the artist and Ecce Films facing page, bottom Kris Lemsalu, So Let us Melt and Make no Noise, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist. Courtesy Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn and Koppe Astner, Glasgow
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Jacqueline de Jong Pinball Wizard: The Work and Life of Jacqueline de Jong Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 9 February – 18 August Pinball Wizard is an unusual retrospective, to say the least: part chronological survey, part group show from the museum’s collection, part sentimental journey. Then again, few artists have the relationship to their host institution that Jacqueline de Jong has to the Stedelijk. Her parents were art collectors and sold works to the museum, and de Jong found employment there as a teen, indexing books and assisting on exhibitions. Evidently it’s thank-you time: while the show opens with de Jong’s juvenilia inspired by Nicolas de Staël, it soon includes works by then-key figures such as Karel Appel (who painted de Jong’s father) and Pierre Alechinsky. This sets the tone for the multitude of ensuing rooms, in which the artist bobs in and out of view, often ceding space to male figures who inspired her. De Jong is perhaps best known for her association with the Situationist International, which seemingly began when, in the late 50s, Guy Debord’s coterie negotiated an ambitious, labyrinthine show at the Stedelijk – which fell through – related to the urban environment. In her early twenties, de Jong would found The Situationist Times, and there’s a small trove of ephemera related to the group here, including vitrined periodicals and a clutch of architectural drawings by Constant. The show, though,
leans much more heavily on de Jong’s larger activities as a painter, where her analyses of society find squelchy pictorial form. She moves through a glutinous abstract phase inspired by Chaim Soutine and Jean Dubuffet (works by whom flank hers), towards – in 1962–65 – a gnarly figuration ‘closely connected to’, as the wall texts put it, the work of figures including Pablo Picasso, R.B. Kitaj and Francis Bacon. Cue, again, loud museum holdings. Nevertheless, some of de Jong’s works here convincingly adumbrate the sexual revolution of the time, not least the pink-heavy, claustrophobic tumble of bodies rubbing together in the proto-Dana Schutz painting Grietjes ontstoken tandvlees (1968), whose title appears to relate to ‘inflamed gums’. Still, the artist and/or institution decide to juxtapose it with works by Mel Ramos, Peter Blake, et al, and the next wall text asserts that her art ‘never stands on its own but is always in conversation with someone or something’. As de Jong drifts into postmodernist times with a series of paintings featuring radically tilted angles (of rooms, of pool tables) and film noir trappings, it’s actually hard to see who she’s ‘conversing’ with, and paintings like the deadpan Gardez-vous à gauche (1981) – where a gumshoe poises to photograph a man who
resembles Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge about to knife the neck of his victim, scan now as refreshingly untethered. In the 90s, de Jong is back to interlocution, or, more generously, building on extant practices. Harvest (After Malevitsj) (1999) revisits Kazimir Malevich’s motif of stooping peasants, turning them into brightly coloured cubist amalgams of geometric forms: again, it looks strikingly contemporary, though that may say more about our stalled cultural moment than it does about de Jong. By this point in the show, if not much earlier, she’s in control of her own fervid pictorial language – a sort of controlled slashing of paint, sumptuously colourist – regardless of the references she nests within it; yet by the end we’re still treated to works by, say, Roberto Matta (Vietnam, 1965). As de Jong is still alive and was presumably a collaborator on this show, this says as much about her as it does about in-house curatorial decisions. On the one hand, this is a generous act, a confession that most art is built on interplay with other art, and makes some sense given de Jong’s intertwining with the Stedelijk. On the other, it bespeaks someone’s lack of confidence that her pinballing art could stand on its own and live in the present. At its best, it does. But here we’re not encouraged to think so. Martin Herbert
Pinball Wizard: The Work and Life of Jacqueline de Jong, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
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David Salle Musicality and Humour Skarstedt, London 5 March – 26 April The New York artist’s 11 largescale paintings on show at Skarstedt’s London space are underlaid by pairings of men and women appropriated from black-and-white 1940s and 50s cartoons. In one of these cropped and blown-up scenarios a husband carries his bride across the threshold of what is presumably their new home, the painting bifurcated by a vertical arrangement of cake rosettes or meringues, on whose far side we glimpse a woman beginning to shed her wedding dress (Grey Honeymoon, 2018–19); elsewhere a man leans across a bar with an air of impatience, speaking forcefully to the bartender as his elegant wife stands mutely by his side, the painting again divided down the middle, this time by a Pierrot-type figure shadowboxing on the canvas of a heart-shaped ring (Foreign Postmark, 2018); a hapless-looking fellow wearing a bathing suit and a walrus moustache, saying something we can’t hear, walks along a beach past a huddle of seals who look out at us with expressions identical to that of the beach walker (Leader of Seals, 2018–19). In each of these there’s
a story, or at least a punchline; but with the caption missing, we’re left to provide the full sight gag, assuming there is one. As much as these paintings point to narrative content without precisely delivering, they revel in shapes, some of them ambiguous and not easily connected. Floating across the surfaces of the black-and-white couples are all manner of colourful objects, from the mundane – red, yellow, blue and green melamine dishes, an airborne parade of teacups and saucers, brooms and dustpans – to the more unusual – the helmet of a diving suit, cuts of meat, the spiked sole of a golf shoe, houseplant tendrils, conical bras. In one work, what looks like a disembodied halter top resolves, when inverted, into the ‘ok’ hand gesture flashed by a caricature Mexican-on-a-donkey from another painting. Shapes, patterns and characters repeat across the works, the orientation or register shifted, cropped, flipped upside-down and otherwise varied in intimations of printing errors, a filmstrip caught in the projector’s sprocket
or, given the exhibition’s title, variations on and repetitions of both musical motifs and humour, here represented in the rich if often suspect seam traditionally extracted from the institution of marriage, its trappings and tedium, promise, repetition and brute endurance. The anchoring image, appearing in six of the paintings, is of a man in a sickbed, attended by a nurse-wife, though it is she who has a thermometer in her mouth; his eyes are closed, sometimes with a smile on his face, other times fully unconscious, but in any case oblivious to whatever needs are expressed in the nursewife’s self-administered care. ‘Whistle while you work’ is a plausible caption for this series: the short phrase, painted across two of the canvases, captures some of the drudgery and forced cheer at the heart of existence. By delighting in the inventive repetition, variation and repurposing of bum notes, tired sentiments and worn-out clichés, these paintings propose a strategy for how we might get through it. David Terrien
The Rain Fell Everywhere, 2018, oil and acrylic on linen, 188 × 264 cm. © the artist / VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Courtesy the artist and Skarstedt, New York & London
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Rose English Form, Feminisms, Femininity Richard Saltoun, London 1 March – 13 April “Quite frankly I don’t know about you but I think it might be useful at this point in the show to sit down and write a review of what has happened so far,” Rose English whispers in an aside to her audience in a recording of the first performance of Plato’s Chair (1983) in Vancouver, projected in the back room of Richard Saltoun. “I don’t really feel things have been going terribly well…” she continues. “Somehow all the elements are not quite coming together into a whole, wouldn’t you agree?” The setup is minimal: a small stage, a chair and a cupboard overflowing with costumes. English delivers a 90-minute monologue interspersed with musical interludes during which she dances to music from Georges Bizet’s opéra-comique Carmen (1875). Oscillating between the confessional, vaudeville entertainment and analytical musings on the conventions and ephemerality of performance both in the art and theatre contexts, Plato’s Chair manages to remain dizzyingly engaging, while never coming to any denouement. Beginning her career during the 1970s in Britain, English combined the worlds of dance, theatre and art in feminist, conceptual and always humorous performances, navigating
seamlessly between those disciplines and their audiences. This show, however, seeks to locate her performances into a broader practice, with the first two rooms focusing on the material objects that often provided their inspiration, as well as other discrete projects. Indeed, English originally trained as a ceramicist, and hooked to the wall in various places throughout the first two galleries are a series of small Niki de Saint Phalle-esque porcelain ballerinas (Porcelain Dancer 1–4, 1973), whose colourful exuberance chimes with English’s collages of baroque interiors in which paintings are replaced with kitschy 1970s baby photographs (the baroque and rococo are referenced everywhere, most notably via nods to François Boucher’s depictions of languorous women, and offers an interesting insight into her style of performance). In the 1973 photography series Studies for a divertissement (another reference to ballet, designating short dance interludes), English channels stereotypes about femininity in pink-hued mises-en-scène of women sporting ceramic cache-sexes or ballerina shoes, hovering between marked irony and a characteristic lightheartedness.
The artist has had very few solo exhibitions in her five-decade career, but she has used them as opportunities to reflect on how one archives and exhibits the ephemeral, in often conceptual presentations (one of her most recent shows, Premonition of the Act, at the Camden Arts Centre in 2016, sought to reverse the view of objects in her works as ‘leftovers’ by presenting material destined to be part of a future performance project). The last room here, dedicated to Plato’s Chair, displays a more straightforwardly archival approach, however, reconstructing the experience of the performance through multiple (but often redundant) perspectives: alongside the video recording of the Vancouver iteration, audio files from other performances of the work are available via CD players, accompanied by diaristic notes and collages, as well as photographs of the performance. Yet if Form, Feminisms, Femininity feels perhaps less experimental conceptually, it is English’s first outing in a commercial gallery. And while the need to translate performance into tangible objects inevitably stems from commercial necessity, it is one inherent to her field – and one that’s not always dealt with so thoughtfully. Louise Darblay
Plato’s Chair, 1983, gelatin silver print documenting the performance in Vancouver, 69 × 69 cm. Photo: Eric Metcalfe. © the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
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Jews, Money, Myth The Jewish Museum, London 19 March – 7 July One of the jokes in Doug Fishbone’s video monologue The Jewish Question (2019) concerns a Jew who is waiting for his friend to come out of a church that is offering $100 for anyone who converts – an offer his friend, a fellow Jew, had eagerly taken up. “So? Did you get the money?”, he asks. To which his newly-baptised friend replies scornfully: “That’s all you people ever think about, isn’t it?” The large part of Jews, Money, Myth comprises historic artefacts, artworks and documents surveying the cultural stereotype of the avaricious and monied Jew, through eight hundred years of European history. (Barring some ancient Judean coinage, the show’s chronology starts around the time of Edward I’s expulsion of English Jews in 1290.) But it’s the contemporary works which offer a jolting insight into the strangely persistent strand of anti-Jewish sentiment that continues to agitate contemporary western culture. That this exhibition can be described as a timely one is depressing. As a show-opener Jeremy Deller’s video collage of clips (Untitled, 2019) gleaned from the news, entertainment and the Internet covers a lot of ground, mixing the satirical provocations of South Park (1997–) and Family Guy’s (1999–) caricaturing-of-caricatures – Peter Griffin trying to prompt Shakespeare’s Lorenzo (in The Merchant of Venice) into explaining to the object of his affection (Shylock’s daughter Jessica) that ‘her people’ ‘control a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth’ – with zero-irony conspiracy theories which insist that Jewish-owned banks caused the subprime crash.
Deller’s work observes how caricature and fiction continuously repeat the Jews-and-Money trope, even when it’s deployed as a twisted form of admiration (American conservatives extolling how Jews are ‘good with money’on cable TV; Donald Trump offering compliments to his Jewish Republican audience about how “everyone in this room is great at negotiating”). For sure, while few in the liberal West openly tout a purely ‘racist’ view of Jews (there are some enduringly shocking examples of nineteenthcentury racist caricatures on show: among them French financier Alphonse James de Rothschild portrayed as a hook-nosed, hairy animal, groping moneybags), the trope of international, string-pulling, financier Jewish interests has never really gone away – Hungarian billionaire George Soros appears in both Deller’s and Fishbone’s culling of Internet memeology. It’s on that point that the show balances; whether such deranged conspiracy theories really have any serious traction, beyond the sweaty imaginings of Internet neo-fascists or confused sections of anti-Israel leftists. Rightwing nationalist outrage at ‘globalisation’ or the rows over anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party are only two aspects of a bigger question: whether ‘legitimate criticism’ of issues of global power and influence – of the financial system, or the state of Israel – are covertly anti-Semitic. It is of course impossible to decrypt a prejudice that deliberately couches itself in rationalisations. But maybe there’s something about the moral ambiguity of money that incites simplistic
explanations. Ryan Gander’s brilliantly slight intervention – a bronze-cast wallet and mobile phone, left as if by some forgetful visitor on a gallery bench (Zooming out, 2015) – reveals the guilt attached to covetousness, sparking the moral dilemma of whether to hand in or to pilfer the valuables. Seen in relation to Rembrandt’s extraordinary, deeply humane depiction of Judas Repentant, Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629) – the abject Judas begging the priests to take back the price of Jesus’s betrayal – one realises something of the power of money to motivate and subvert all principles and good intentions. It’s easier to see money as the obscure machination of a hidden clique than as the systemic expression of power and one’s relation to it. That’s a political, not personal, issue. Though Karl Marx comes in for criticism (in one of the accompanying gallery video docs) for the alleged anti-Semitism of his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844), it’s a pity that the show does not read that complex text more closely. If it had, it would find, in Marx’s shifting logical reversals, that ‘money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations’. What Marx is saying is that while Christian (capitalist) nations live, in practice, according to the economic logic of self-interest – a supposedly ‘Jewish’ moral trait – capitalism cannot admit that it is self-interest, not ‘Christian’ selflessness, on which it thrives. Such a disavowal needs a scapegoat. Money… that’s all us people think about, isn’t it? J.J. Charlesworth
Rembrandt van Rijn, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1629, oil on panel, 79 × 102 cm. © Private Collection. Courtesy The National Gallery, London
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New Media and Conceptualism in the 1970s Galeria Superfície, São Paulo 2 April – 1 June It’s 1975 and Sonia Andrade sits down for a meal of feijoada, the gloopy but delicious black bean stew ubiquitous in Brazil. In the background, over her right shoulder, a TV plays. Ron Ely is mugging to the camera in the 1960s small-screen version of Tarzan. Ignoring the show, Sonia starts to serve her lunch (it’s daytime, the Rio de Janeiro sun streams in from the balcony of her apartment). First she tucks in with a spoon but soon she discards the utensil in favour of her hands, scooping up great mounds of the dark dish and shovelling it into her mouth. She reaches for a bottle of Guaraná Antarctica and tips – no, sprays – it over her head. From thereon this scene, played out in an eightminute video screened on a monitor similar to that in Andrade’s apartment, becomes increasingly anarchic. The artist throws the food over herself, lobs it across the room. Her behaviour, as the camera becomes the target, is wild but demeanour calm. Eventually the lens is all-but obscured by beans and the artwork ends. A brief pause. The same monitor, installed in this small but packed exhibition, flips to a second video by Andrade. It’s a shot of another television, on which Andrade is shown cleaning her teeth. She brushes gently, then more aggressively. Over the two-and-half-minute duration of this second work (also untitled, from 1977), one fears for her gums. There are various points of departure here: formal, structuralist even, questions concerning the screen; questions of consumerism, of consumption. Both works feature the artist’s mouth: Oswald de Andrade’s oft-quoted modernist and counter-colonialist ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (1928) is an obvious go-to (Amerindian resistance is referenced
also in Lotus Lobo’s 1972 lithograph Bienal de Tóquio which features an indigenous man with bow and arrow raised). Yet the most overwhelming impression on seeing these vintage videos back-to-back is their inherent violence. Indeed, acts of aggression, of vandalism and transgression, pervade the entire ground floor of Superfície’s two-storey gallery. Another work by Andrade, Alimentação (Food, 1976) features a chopping board and sizeable knife; in an untitled 1974 wall sculpture by Artur Barrio the artist has garrotted a loaf of bread in half with wire. Iole de Freitas’s photographic diptych Introvert/Penetrate features a woman with a knife stuck in her neck, Regina Silveira’s photographic series Enigma (1981/1999) portrays prosaic objects (a typewriter, a handbag) spliced with the painted silhouette of a tool (a hammer, a saw). That the majority of these works were made during or soon after Brazil’s ‘years of lead’, the six years from 1968 that marked the most brutal phase of the dictatorship, is perhaps unsurprising. State-sponsored torture and execution increased and the government censorship of the press and artistic works stepped up. These are violent works made in violent times. Filmmakers and musicians received the most attention from the security forces, while the opaque nature of Conceptualism provided a cover of safety for artists and the medium became a suitable vehicle for covert resistance. While, for example, mail art originated within the milieu of the 1960s New York Fluxus scene, largely with theoretical concerns privileging the process over the product, within the South American (and, indeed, Soviet) context it was used to congregate global solidarity networks,
facing page, top Sonia Andrade, Alimentação, 1976, wood, knife, paper, plastic bag, dimensions variable. Courtesy Galeria Superfície, São Paulo
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even if the individual works themselves were not overtly political. The upper gallery of Superfície is largely given over to various postal art projects instigated from the early 1970s onwards. Envelope On/Off (1974) features nine A5 contributions, some of which contain sly political messages. One correspondent sent in a musical sheet empty of any score, presumably a reference to censorship. A facsimile by Donato Ferrari features a portrait of the artist captioned (in Portuguese) ‘I am unpredictable’. Among the contributions to Envelope Karimbada 1 (1979) are rubber-ink stamps of three skeletons carrying a fourth. Other works on show here profess a lighter sentiment or are even touched with a certain absurd humour. From 1973 to 1984, Angelo de Aquino sent a form to peers all around the world, asking them to fill in questions concerning their identity – name, address, date of birth etc – with a box ‘reserved for your creation’. The replies ranged from American poet Dick Higgins stapling pictures of his kids and an abstract doodle by Brazilian Ivens Machado to coffee stains sent by Einar Gudmundsson from Iceland and Christo’s taping of a brown piece of paper over the document. This exhibition might, in other circumstances, feel like an art historical curio – interesting certainly, but as academic as its plodding title suggests. However, given the show opened a week after Brazil’s administration ordered the military to commemorate the anniversary of the 1964 coup that heralded the autocratic regime, there is a renewed urgency to much of what is on show here: these old works both reflect the violence endemic in Brazil today and recall the sense of fraternity that could provide a blueprint for survival. Oliver Basciano
facing page, bottom Regina Silveira, Enigma 2, 1981/1999, photograph, 42 × 56 cm. Courtesy Galeria Superfície, São Paulo
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Books
In Land: Writings around Land Art and its Legacies by Ben Tufnell Zero Books, £14.99 / $23.95 (softcover) Art-historical categories, if the historical art they refer to has a lasting impact on what follows, are sooner or later faced with the problem of how they accommodate subsequent generations of artists. So it is with ‘Land art’. As an art-historical term it now usually refers to those developments in American art of the 1960s and 70s which reacted to the critical limits of sculpture to embrace site, construction, architecture and landscape as resources for new ways of thinking about art’s objects and art’s place of experience. Its totemic artists are figures such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss and Charles Simonds. But since their seminal works are over half a century old, and Land art’s influence can be found in younger artists’ work while, at the same time, other artists of the 1960s and 70s outside the US were also working in similar ways, what then, might ‘Land art’ now refer to? Ben Tufnell’s In Land collects writings published in the last two decades, only one of which deals with one of those Americans, a 2012 essay on Holt. Almost all these essays were originally published in catalogues for
exhibitions at public galleries and five were written for the now defunct commercial gallery Haunch of Venison in London (where Tufnell worked). In dealing with artists as varied as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anya Gallaccio, Katie Paterson and Julian Charrière, Tufnell’s texts are also in that genre of art criticism which the catalogue essay tends to encourage – positive, case-making advocacy focused on a particular body of work, situating the artist’s contribution to the lineage of an artistic genre with its own history and key concerns. This doesn’t mean that In Land doesn’t have a cohering critical perspective. For Tufnell, Land art ‘encompasses an attitude to site and experience that goes beyond the object, emphasising landscape and place and often rendering it an active component of the work rather than merely a setting’, in a manner which ‘urges us to examine and re-examine our relationship with the landscape and with nature’. A definite emphasis on the ecological, meditative and quasi-spiritual values pervades Tufnell’s encounters with artists like Long, Fulton, David Nash and Roger Ackling. But in writing about more recent names, Tufnell starts to stretch some of
the limits of a useful (or even recognisable) definition of Land art. Paterson’s universe-inferring conceptual works, for example, are hard to consider as encounters with a tangible environment unencumbered by imaginative preconceptualisation. Meanwhile, the return of many of these artists to the conditions of presentation of the gallery space, more often showing documentation of works whose symbolism outstrips their experiential value as sited interventions (Cai’s The Century with Mushroom Clouds photographic series, 1996, for example), is in many ways a re-domestication of the challenge Land art originally threw down to gallery art. In her much cited 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, Rosalind Krauss argued for a logic to the unravelling of sculpture into Land art and other forms, declaring that ‘Nothing, it would seem, could possibly give to such a motley of effort the right to lay claim to… the category of sculpture. Unless, that is, the category can be made to become almost infinitely malleable.’ That might also be true of any ‘late’ definition of Land art. J.J. Charlesworth
A place that exists only in moonlight by Katie Paterson Kerber Verlag, €30 (hardcover) ‘Printed with cosmic dust’, states the inside back cover of Katie Paterson’s artist book. What sounds like a metaphor or conceptual joke might just be, as is often the case with the Glaswegian artist, a statement of fact. For turning seemingly impossible ideas into disarmingly simple objects is a specialty of Paterson’s, who has spent the last decade making her daydreams come true through collaboration with various scientists. This pocket-sized book serves as an anthology of these ideas presented in haiku format. If familiar with Paterson’s oeuvre it becomes something of a game to try and
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identify the realised projects from the as-yet. She really did make ‘a light bulb / recreating / the moon’s halo’ (2008) for example. ‘A necklace / of carved fossils / threaded era by era’ (2013); ‘a candle scented / by a journey / through space’ (2015); ‘a forest / of unread books / growing for a century’ (2014–2114) also all came (or are coming) to fruition. It turns out – with a little research online – anyone can buy moon dust, meteor fragments and asteroid remnants, yet, like all the ideas contained here, the book’s poetic appeal lies in the abstract potentiality of the idea itself.
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In that sense, this book feels like a tribute to artistic imagination and ideas left unrealised, while acknowledging – at the risk of sounding like a romantic – the power of words when unbounded by physical materialisation. As you reach the end of the book, the poems become increasingly ungraspable, deliciously metaphysical, as if the artist were slowly losing sight of ever needing to realise objects: ‘Gravity / released / one unit at a time’, ‘The universe rewound / and played back / in real time’. Some ideas, perhaps, are just better when they exist solely in the mind. Louise Darblay
May 2019
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The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born by Nancy Fraser Verso, $9.95 / £6.99 (softcover) It is a cliché of motivational speaking that every crisis is an opportunity, if only you can understand the conditions that caused it. By reading the worldwide collapse of trust in the political establishment as an expression of legitimate disenchantment with an unjust system – rather than the lashing out of an irredeemable underclass – critical theorist Nancy Fraser lights a narrow path towards a more hopeful future, in her native United States and beyond. The first step in this brief call-to-arms is to name the ‘hegemonic bloc’ (a phrase, like the book’s title, taken from Antonio Gramsci) that dominated Anglo-American politics up to 2016. Her apparently self-contradictory nomination – ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – describes the unholy alliance of progressive social movements with financialised capitalism, the former serving as sheep’s clothing for a lupine economic programme dedicated to concentrating wealth among a tiny minority. Fraser attacks the shibboleths of that ideological coalition, notably its conflation of ‘equality’
with ‘meritocracy’. Her point is that, by substituting the abolition of social hierarchy for its ‘diversification’, a society built on ‘merit’ rewards only those with the social, cultural and economic capital to – in Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s unhelpful phrase – ‘lean in’. This isn’t a new idea – the term ‘meritocracy’ was coined by British sociologist Michael Young as a critique of the sleights of hand by which an elite maintains power – but Fraser uses it to illustrate how the left has neglected its duty to restructure a rigged economy in favour of achieving slightly more diverse corporate boardrooms. Which isn’t, as she makes clear in a complementary interview with Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara, to diminish recent achievements in the fight for minority recognition but to acknowledge that ‘the structural bases of racism have as much to do with class and political economy as with status and (mis)recognition’. And that these inequalities can only be addressed through the kind of infrastructural change that a generation of politicians obstructed.
These familiar arguments clear the ground for the book’s chief purpose, namely the author’s restatement of faith in the democratic process. If it is clear now that the status quo ante can never be reinstated – ‘the populist cat is out of the bag’ – then Fraser suggests that voters who shifted their allegiance to those who pledged to change it (and here we might cite Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and SYRIZA alongside the ‘strongmen’ of the right) had good reasons for doing so. Which redeems a large part of the electorate from the dustbin of ‘deplorables’ to which a condescending political class has condemned them and opens up the possibility that they might support a coalition of progressive and populist policies, particularly in light of Trump’s failure to deliver on his promises to ‘drain the swamp’ and reversion instead to ‘hyper-reactionary neoliberalism’. Indeed – given how astonishingly divisive his chaotic administration has already proven to be – she posits that this is the only path left for anyone hoping to form a stable majority in the future. Here’s hoping. Ben Eastham
Whip-hot & Grippy by Heather Phillipson Bloodaxe Books, £12 (softcover) Long-time readers of ArtReview will recall a series of columns by Heather Phillipson (newcomers or those looking for a refresher can refer to the magazine’s website) in which the artist’s dog, Marj, featured prominently. It will come as no surprise to them that in this book, Phillipson’s fourth collection of poetry, caninekind appears variously as subject, cipher, guide and symbol. The presence of the hound is most notable in ‘more flinching’, a composition which unfolds over the final 69 pages of this volume (in part written and presented as writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2016). At times tender (‘I’ll make it up to you, darling, in dog biscuits / in the afterlife’), comic/visceral (… Do dogs / need to approach death / and back away from it / like I did when the vet injected / deep pentobarbital & his bowels / ejected across the floor tiles’) and philosophical (describing how humans ‘… perverted them / into a kind of inter-species loyalty / or the usual master-slave hierarchy’),
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this epic plays out in multiple poetic forms, both visual and linguistic. The poet’s other overriding concern is the materiality of the body. This big lump of temporal stuff we are made of. ‘TRUE TO SIZE’ is a litany of analogies to geography, for example: ‘…thighs as mountains / hips as ridges / pubes as forests’. The longer poem ‘CHEERS!’ contains the lines ‘luckily / I’m up for body odours / when other forms of empathy are thinning’. Of course, once humans are reduced to pure physicality, the inter-special barrier looks more precarious – it’s all just flesh and hair after all, or, as Phillipson continues in ‘more flinching’, ‘we are also dogs / leashed to any body / that fetches & fucks us’. One can find a lineage for Phillipson’s poetry in the feminist art canon and the female body as ground zero in the battle against patriarchal oppression. Carolee Schneemann evoked the corporeality of selfhood, particularly female selfhood, with her cat, Kitch, often
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central to the action (in Fuses, 1964–67, the pussy watches Schneemann and her partner have sex). In Beautiful Dog (2014), one of Joan Jonas’s many videoworks featuring her dog, the viewer sees a beachscape unfold from a four-legged perspective captured via Go-Pro (itself recalling the ultra weird passage in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, 1877, narrated from the point of view of a hunting dog). The animal in these artworks, and in Phillipson’s poems, becomes an object of love – a bonded part of the female protagonist – that is neither abusive nor the product of male union. This intermingling in Whip-hot & Grippy (that also regularly evokes animalistic eroticism and mysticism) comes to the zenith in a doublepage spread which, filling every inch of the pages with no border, starts ‘Stubbed toe. Locked door. Walked dog. Poured drink. Locked dog. Walked toe. Poured door. Stubbed dog’, remixing the same set of verbs and nouns repeatedly, creating a barked mantra abundant in taxonomical confusion. Oliver Basciano
Photograph taken at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein
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on the cover Production still from One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, 2019, dir Isuma. Photo: Levi Uttak. © Isuma Distribution International
Words on the spine and on pages 31, 57 and 97 are from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (trans Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard), 1956/95
on pages 109 and 112 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
May 2019
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Behind the headlines On 20 May 1961, Arts News and Review published a review of an exhibition by Rabindranath Tagore, held at the Commonwealth Institute in London to mark the 100th anniversary of the great Bengali polymath’s birth. It was written by George M. Butcher, the magazine’s resident India specialist (also a critic at The Guardian newspaper), who declared it to be ‘one of the most important exhibitions of modern painting to have been seen in London for months’. Bizarrely, 40 of the 49 paintings on view weren’t paintings at all, but rather collotype prints run off by the Ganymed Press, which had started producing highend editions (the majority produced in conjunction with living artists) that same year. Nevertheless Butcher pronounced the reproductions ‘excellent’, before claiming, somewhat strangely given the importance he ascribed to the display, that only ‘two or three’ of the nine original works ‘are of any special quality’. The detail of what that quality might be he left unsaid. Instead, Butcher focused on his key point: that Tagore’s (evidently indescribable) gifts as a painter had been overlooked in a slew of centennial tributes that focused ‘on his manysided talent, his stature as a man, and his role in shaping India’s renaissance’. Tagore had only started painting seriously in 1928, aged sixty-seven, and some 15 years after he had shot to worldwide fame as the first Asian writer (and only the second nonEuropean) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘I am not alone in believing that he was the first really significant modern painter of India,’ Butcher (who had earlier introduced the readers of Arts News and Review to the Visva-Bharati school that Tagore had founded in Santiniketan) added, concluding, ‘and not quite alone in believing that he was her greatest painter so far this century.’ He then offered his only assertion concerning the nature of the artworks themselves:
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that Tagore was to Indian art what Paul Klee was to that of the West. Before capping it all off with something of a retraction, cryptically claiming that the ‘real situation’ of Tagore’s status as a painter ‘is as enigmatic as Tagore’s own line: “The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail”’. To be fair to Butcher, enigmatic is a description that might be appended even to Tagore’s direct comments on his paintings: ‘My pictures are my versification in lines. If, by chance, they are entitled to claim recognition, it must be primarily for some rhythmic significance of form which is ultimate and not for any interpretation of an idea or representation of facts,’ he wrote. And there are no doubt similarities between Tagore’s and Klee’s descriptions of the creative process and its roots in both the unconscious and the mapping of universal energies, similarities that were much discussed in India (extensive comparisons were laid out by the celebrated writer Mulk Raj Anand, in the March 1961 issue of his literary quarterly Marg, for example) at the time of Tagore’s centenary. The relativism deployed by Butcher was not uncommon in Western descriptions of the mystical attractions of both Tagore and his works, and could take many strange turns. Charles Darwin’s granddaughter Frances Cornford recalled after meeting him that ‘I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before’. Taking things a step further, the German writer Kurt Wolff pontificated that Tagore, ‘with his long grayish-white beard and dignity… presented a most impressive figure, so that it seemed a completely natural error when my three-year-old daughter assumed God was paying us a visit, and settled contentedly in the lap of the Lord’. The American arts patron Harriet Monroe, meanwhile, located similar sentiments closer to Tagore’s home, claiming that she felt she was ‘sitting at the lap of the Buddha’. While back in Asia, Yasunari Kawabata, who in 1968 became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, recalled his hero as a man who ‘with his long, bushy hair, long moustaches and beard, standing tall in loose flowing Indian garments and with deep piercing eyes… gave the impression… of some oriental wizard’. The impression of the modern mystic was, of course, as carefully constructed as it was successful. Tagore had peacocklike tendencies, beyond those that Butcher ascribed to the long tail of his many, heavy talents. As befits a writer who fused the modern with the traditional, and whose words make up both the Bangladeshi and Indian national anthems (as well as providing the inspiration for those that make up Sri Lanka’s), Tagore carefully dressed himself in a mix of clothing associated with both Hindu and Muslim cultures (dhootis, chadars, chapkans and jubbas), topped by specially made hats, in ways that distinguished him from those around him while reflecting his more general secular philosophies, both to an audience at home and abroad. ‘I am like a show lion in a circus now!’ he roared to Monroe, following a wardrobe failure on a 1916 tour of the US that had forced him to wear tweed. The English painter William Rothenstein, one of Tagore’s longest-standing friends in London, wrote to humorist Max Beerbohm in 1920, after Tagore had been on another tour of the US: ‘Alas that the strong wine of praise, and the weak wine of worship, should have gone to this good man’s head. It is a misfortune for a poet to be too handsome.’ The last is a sentiment with which Butcher, in his own way, seems to have agreed. ar