ArtReview April 2021 by ArtReview

With one eye on the future since 1949

What just happened?

Future visions, nfts and how to navigate a technocapitalist world

Mend e s Wood DM

Male Nudes: a salon from 1800 to 2021 Maaike Schoorel Varda Caivano April – May 2021 Mendes Wood DM São Paulo Sofia Borges Rebecca Sharp March – April 2021 Mendes Wood DM Brussels ‘At the Luss House’ May – July 2021 Mendes Wood DM New York Image: Maaike Schoorel, studio visit, 2021

ArtReview vol 73 no 2 April 2021

The n-word, the s-word and the f-word nft nft nft nft nft nft nft… That’s been the main content of ArtReview’s inbox this past month. So what better time to look into the whole subject of art’s mixed and stuttering relationship to technology? It beats hanging around and waiting for a vaccine, after all. A wise man once said, ‘All artists make mistakes that become their style…’ He was referring to Ai-Da, the ‘world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist’, whose portraiture is composed of fragmented lines made using camera ‘eyes’ that scan a person’s features. Ai-Da, who has the face of a woman, wears frilly frocks and hums while drawing with robotic arms, and who was created by gallerist Aidan Meller (plus teams of scientists from Oxford and Leeds universities, but they’re not from the artworld, so who cares), is slated to have a solo exhibition at London’s Design Museum later this year. ‘… And sometimes that style is shit,’ the wise man went on to conclude. Perhaps he was a comedian. But for more on that (Ai-Da, not shit – ArtReview does its best to make its magazine a shitfree zone), you’ll have to wait for another issue. Nevertheless, ArtReview’s been wondering whether that wise man might also reach the same assessment about the artworld’s current source of craze

Dog days

and bewilderment: Beeple’s digital art series everydays, sold as a nonfungible token at Christie’s for a modest $69,346,250. After all, the artist (Mike Winkelmann) himself proclaims, ‘Most of my work is complete fucking garbage, but this old shit is reallllllly fucking bad’. In the absence of comedians, ArtReview asked J.J. Charlesworth to break down what the nft craze is all about. And whether, shit or not, it’s going to have any effect on the wider artworld around it, or is simply another symptom of our rapidly evolving socioeconomic future. But that’s not the only way art is dealing with a world in which technology and capitalism have fused into an all-embracing whole. Martin Herbert looks at how Pakui Hardware’s explorations of new technologies affect the way we perceive and think of the human body. Elsewhere you can explore Mika Tajima’s attempts to embody the complexities of this technocapitalist moment, Lu Yang’s mashups of the virtual and the real, and Alia Ali’s investigations of alternative futures for the people of Yemen through a fusion of space travel, digital technology and a deep dive into the nation’s past. Nothing fungible about any of that. ArtReview

Better days

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Marina Perez Simão Tudo é e não é April 1 – 24, 2021 New York @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

FANNY GICQUEL do you feel the same February 27, 2021 — May 15, 2021 Hua International Berlin Potsdamer Str. 81B, 10785 Berlin

RAFAEL DOMENECH imperfect fragments of an uncertain whole April 24, 2021 — June 19, 2021 Hua International Beijing D08-3, 798 East Road, 798 Art District, Beijing

hua-international.com

Art Observed

The Interview Win McCarthy by Ross Simonini 18

Architecture, Colonialism and Politics in India by Deepa Bhasthi 29

Living with Art by Ben Eastham 26

A History of Freedom in Singapore and Malaysia by Adeline Chia 32

page 18 Win McCarthy’s studio, Brooklyn, 2018. Courtesy the artist

Art Featured

The Rise of the nft by J.J. Charlesworth 36

Alia Ali by Nadia Beard 58

Pakui Hardware by Martin Herbert 42

Grid Structure by Gu Guanghui 62

Mika Tajima by Mark Rappolt 52

page 52 Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy (Bioweaving Mill Brain Aneurysm Stent, Full Width, Red, Quad), 2020, cotton, wool acoustic baffling felt and white oak, 186 × 141 × 6 cm. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee, London & Hong Kong

Help bring Sun & Sea to Luckenwalde and choose your reward www.kickstarter.com/projects/e-werk/bringthesun

@ewerk_luckenwalde

Art Reviewed

comment, exhibitions & books 74 David Goldblatt, by Yinka Elujoba Kresiah Mukwazhi, by Moritz Scheper Keith Farquhar and Sara MacKillop, by Pádraic E. Moore Maria Lassnig’s self-suppressed films, by Juliet Jacques Skylines with Flying People 4, by Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trâ`n Neïl Beloufa, by Louise Darblay Amelie von Wulffen, by Phoebe Blatton Glauco Rodrigues and Jaider Esbell, by Oliver Basciano Art for Air, by Max Crosbie-Jones Christian Boltanski, by Tomas Weber Cornelia Baltes, by Martin Herbert Age of You, by Nadine Khalil

Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal & Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, by Marina Warner, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Avasthe, by U.R. Ananthamurthy, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi Luchita Hurtado, by Hans Ulrich Obrist, reviewed by Louise Darblay See/Saw, by Geoff Dyer, reviewed by Fi Churchman Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion, by Harry Sword, reviewed by En Liang Khong Empireland, by Sathnam Sanghera, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, by Keller Easterling, reviewed by David Terrien back page 106

page 88 Kawita Vatanajyankur, My Mother and I (Vacuum iii) (still), 2021, 4k video. Courtesy the artist

17–20.06.2021

July 2021

Art Observed

Should not seek to please 17

Win McCarthy. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Win McCarthy

“I cling to the idea that art can be good (anything other than bad), despite everything”

I spoke to Win McCarthy a few moments after he’d come out of a nap in his studio, which is in Red Hook, Brooklyn, just across the highway from the neighbourhood where he was raised. He rented the space long ago, cheaply, through a connection he’d made playing local baseball as a kid. It’s an old warehouse with industrial decor and bad drywall, and “sometimes you can’t totally tell the difference between what’s the wall and what’s the work”, he tells me. In 2019 McCarthy had a show titled Apartment Life at Svetlana, in New York’s Chinatown, depicting his experience of being shaped by the city’s living conditions and fishbowl privacy. The exhibition included well-used items from McCarthy’s home (linens, bathroom mirror, toothpaste, keys) and a refrigerator stocked with foods representing his personal diet: rice cakes, a stick of butter, a can of Coke. ‘Containers and their contents,’ as McCarthy describes the work in his press release. These contents were coated

in all their natural grime and schmutz, presented with a kind of alien uncertainty, as if McCarthy were recreating an urban habitat he had never truly called home, without a trace of sentiment. For McCarthy, a life spent in stacked boxes has developed a ripping anxiety within him, which is often the subject of the following interview. Much of his work seems to be a form of documenting this anxiety through an increasingly expanding range of media: photographs of the city, lyrical text scrawled on the work and architectural schematics that suggest confinement. His sculptural work pays particular attention to the body, with moulds of McCarthy’s head and feet, stuffed dummies and other ominous human-shaped forms. His shows take an almost novelistic approach to his autobiography, making quiet references to all the nooks of his daily experience. At the time of this interview, however, McCarthy was at a kind of fulcrum in his work, turning towards

April 2021

some new, not yet fully understood stage, which includes baby doll heads and his father’s old suit. Several times throughout our conversation McCarthy requested that we stop speaking about a particular topic, and we did, for a moment; but in all of these cases he quickly resumed speaking about that very subject at length, with depth. In general he has an experimental relationship with his public profile, as he is nowhere to be found on social media, and what follows is his first published interview. His work sustains this tension with its viewer, pushing and pulling, resisting your attention with its coy gestures, then telling you its most vulnerable secrets. The more I look at his sculpture, the more I get the sense of being engaged in a subtle psychological game with its maker. Speaking to McCarthy on the phone, in the midst of the pandemic, gave this feeling a personality.

Apartment Life and Contents, 2019, dollhouse parts, Plexiglas, moulded plastic, food containers, 132 × 74 × 79 cm. Courtesy Svetlana, New York

ArtReview

Art Is Not Net Positive ross simonini Where are you? win mccarthy In my studio. rs What’s it like in there? wm It’s kinda like… pretty big, for New York actually. It’s got wood-raftered ceilings, it’s got tons of conduit on the ceiling that no longer has cable in it from ad hoc electrical jobs that have been done in the past… I’m just walking around in here, looking around. Should I keep going? rs In an email, you told me that you wanted to read this interview in its raw state. Why? Is that related to the rawness of the work?

rs Is the embarrassment ever so bad that you consider not showing? wm Oh no, I like it. I enjoy it actually. I think it’s like, it’s a paradoxical thing, because you have to reveal yourself to discover anything real about yourself. So it’s just a part of the process. rs What’s your relationship to your body? Do you have a lot of body awareness? wm Hmm, no? I think. Um, I guess, no, not really. I kind of – this is a hard question. I guess I should just talk about the work, rather than myself. rs Well, you can see why I asked that, right? It’s in the work.

wm I mean, now I don’t even think raw would be the word. I thought, I would be interested to read a transcript that has all the ums, and the likes in it. Things like that. Coughs, dogs barking. I think it comes from the experience of being an artist always being both narcissistic and humiliating. Um. And recognising that you’ll have to suffer to enjoy both of those things. And from early on, I kind of decided that there would have to be a certain amount of self-scrutiny in it, self-ridicule, for it to uh, for it to work for me. I don’t know if that always comes through in the work per se, but uh, somehow doing the interview where it’s just a transcript, you know, something that isn’t too cleaned up or self-serving… we don’t know each other, so we don’t know what our rapport is going to be like, what the exchange is like, but I think it might be nice that, if this is an awkward conversation, that it can just be that.

rs So this idea you were mentioning, about interviews being narcissistic and humiliating. Is this how you feel about exhibiting work too? wm Yeah, I do always feel that way. rs Do you get that classic, postshow feeling of letdown? wm I actually don’t really. I get more of a feeling of disassociation, where I look at the work, and even though it was made with a certain amount of deliberation, and intention, I somehow have no memory of how it happened. Almost as if it happened to me rather than was something I willed into existence. Like it’s… all the agency disappears. But I guess that’s because you can’t take it back.

rs Sure, and it does make sense looking at the work, which is mostly heads. And when there are bodies, they are made of tiny sticks, or have no legs, or are just underdeveloped. wm God, I’m actually more anxious about this whole process than I expected to be. rs How much is anxiety a driving force in your life? wm I think it is. I think it definitely is. rs I mean, anxiety is one of these words that is so overused it’s hard to know what people even mean by it. What do you mean? wm Well, I’m interested in the physical manifestations of it. I mean I think it’s really cool that it’s not a physically tangible thing, but it has such a huge impact on how things happen. And for me, I have been thinking a lot recently about how much time I spend trying not to think about the things that set off the anxiety, but those things tend to be the big existential questions, which is complicated because that’s pretty much precisely what art tends to be about. So in a strange way I’ve always felt I have to keep my work in the periphery of my mind. Like not look directly at it. Um. And there is a fearfulness. That becomes something you manage. rs I think the tricky part is how much you identify with your anxiety…

rs Embrace the awkwardness. wm And I think it fits with the work too. Like you said.

and sort of subjugated the body into being a container, into this thing that has to carry around a confused and overburdened mind. Does that make any sense?

wm Yeah, I feel aware of both – mind and body – but I have a difficult time achieving any sense of unity. It’s a mind–body problem. It’s the difference between seeing and describing, kind of… I mean, I know you said body. But somehow I’m talking about mind, which never feels very grounded. A big theme of the work has been having to live in both – the physical and the intellectual – which I think of too as the world of anxiety. Um. And then trying to reconcile the two. A lot of the work thinks of the body as a shelf, as a storage space. But I think I’ve probably overvalued my neurotic qualities, O one, o none, o no one, o you, 2020, paper, laserprints, tape, c-print, construction adhesive, glass, 61 × 46 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

April 2021

wm Yeah, I mean, totally. I think for a long time I thought, and you know my work is pretty focused on identity as well, and for a long time I really thought anxiety and depression were who I was. That was what was unique about me, um, but my idea about that is changing now. rs So that’s no longer the subject? wm No, not the thing itself, um, I think there’ll always be a baseline. My studio is full of baby dolls now. Baby dolls that are wearing, like, suit jackets, and shirts, and ties. There are lots of shoeboxes in here now too. So now there are baby dolls in shoeboxes. I was thinking about shoebox apartments, so I thought I could just stack them up and they could be apartment buildings made of shoeboxes. rs Do you think about where you’re headed as an artist? wm I guess I don’t know what I want, I guess I don’t know how I want all this to go… what’s the best-case scenario? Not to sound cynical, but

this is a really fraught thing. It took me a long time to realise that art wasn’t net-good. And I mean that politically, socially, personally, I mean, obviously, financially. You know, for a long time I thought it was net-positive. And now I cling to the idea that art can be good (anything other than bad), despite everything. rs Where did that understanding come from? Was it an attrition of not-goodness? wm Yeah, I mean, and then just a sense of the hubris of it, of pretence. I remember having early experiences in museums where, where the wall text next to the work requires you to really extend the benefit of the doubt to accept the way these things are talked about, and mythologised and made a part of history. What they ostensibly mean. And there was a period where I was writing on my work a lot, and it came from that. I thought I’d just write what the work was, on the work. Really being a bad sport. There was something pretty cynical about that, I think.

It Almost Can’t Be True rs Do you have another job? wm I do. rs Is it worth discussing? wm Hmm. I’m not sure if I want to talk about it. rs ok. You don’t have to say what it is… wm ok, I’ve actually always had a job, except for a brief period where I quit to do this show

at Off Vendome in the city. I quit my job before the show, because, you know, I thought it was a big deal, and then I made like $14,000 from it and literally never thought I was going to work again. And then of course I was completely broke a few months later and started doing odd jobs and then kind of miraculously landed a really reliable, flexible, consistent job. Which has been great. It’s been nice to have that. The brief period where I was, you know, a professional artist was like, extremely unproductive. I was just so guilty about coming to the studio and lying on the couch all day. It’s never been something I can just show up to, clock in to. There isn’t enough busywork. So I work. It’s really good for me to have to show up for somebody else. I’m really not good at doing that for myself. rs How do you like to engage with art? wm Yeah, I mean, I like to read about it. I actually really like to look at pictures of it on my phone. Weirdly. My friend has a gallery in Queens called Gandt. Really been enjoying going there. rs Do you read about art? wm I like reading about it anecdotally. I mean, I read this Walter Benjamin biography at the beginning of quarantine. There’s a story about him going to stay with Brecht in Denmark, and apparently he really loved this whole street of tattoo shops in Copenhagen, and he bought a sheet of flash off of a tattoo artist, and this is probably late 1930s, early 40s, during his exile, and it was on vellum, or like transparency paper, and apparently he kept it with him for his whole

Apartment Life, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy Svetlana, New York

ArtReview

life, and he was itinerant for all of those years, moving all over Europe, and this sheet of tattoos was with him the whole time. I like reading about it anecdotally like that. Historical, personal accounts of art. Running into art; recognising art. rs As you said, writing is everywhere in your work – is this something that happens as regularly as making the art? wm Just as infrequently, yeah, but sort of equal. In the beginning, I felt like I made work really intuitively, and that frightened me. Because my whole understanding of art was as an analytical process. So it was always a retroactive way of giving myself permission to make something. You realise that you have to make it as an intuitive person, and you look at it as an analytical one, and the writing was a way to reconcile those things. Why I have to make these things distinct is another question. So the writing would happen a lot, and I always wrote in sort of a poetic voice, because that seemed instructive for the works. I wanted them to be more of the world of poetry. I actually went into undergrad thinking I was going to study poetry. Things went a different direction. rs What poetry were you reading in college? wm The only poem that I can think of that I really loved in college was this poem called ‘Index’ by Paul Violi. And it’s written, or structured, as an index for a biography of an artist, actually. A painter in the seventeenth century, I think. He goes crazy at some point,

Mr. Innocent, 2020, doll, hanger, suit jacket, men’s shirt, nail, 120 × 70 × 10 cm. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

April 2021

Apartment Life, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy Svetlana, New York

ArtReview

he’s arrested at some point. There’s one section called ‘Arrest and Bewilderment’, and then he’s a poet too, so little pieces of verse are in the index too. And at the very end, on his deathbed, he writes, ‘I think I am about to snow’. With poetry, I love that you can see the whole thing all at once, which I guess is funny because I’m admitting I don’t read poems generally that are longer than a page. But yeah, I love that they have a shape. You can look at them.

Discovering the Medium rs You said you work ‘infrequently’. Do you just casually grab moments throughout your life to write and make art?

rs There’s this kind of despair from that mode of living. Is that… wm Yeah, it’s a kind of fatigue, um, of feeling like a big part of life is contorting yourself around things that you can’t change. Always adapting, never having firm footing or a totality of understanding about, like, pretty much everything – including who you are in all of it. So yeah, there is a despair in that, there is a futility in that, but like, that’s kinda what it’s all about, right? [laughs] The struggle against futility? rs Do you think of art as a form of communication of these feelings?

wm Yeah, I mean, I don’t have a schedule. I probably should. But no, when I write I write a whole poem. It may end up in fragments in the work in some way later. I write with the understanding that one line might get pulled out and blown up. And there is something in the work, we were talking about bodies earlier, thinking about body as a group of constituent parts – like, hands fingers toes, knees eyes nose whatever – that you think of a sentence the same way – grammar, parts of speech, you know – so I’ve always liked using these organising structures – be it the inside of a fridge, or an architectural plan. rs The show Apartment Life made me think that you feel oppressed by the buildings around you. Does it feel that way?

wm Yeah.

wm I think so? I’m trying to think of the art I like… I love the unspeakable thing, the feeling of a chill. You know you get that with a [Rosemarie] Trockel piece, where it almost can’t be true. rs Who else does that for you? wm Umm, Lutz Bacher. There’s this book she wrote called Shit for Brains. She wrote it like, in a fury right after her husband died. And it’s supposed to be a novel but it’s really all sorts of different things and types of writing. But she wrote it on 8 ½ × 11 paper, just like with a few words on each page. Then she’d flip to the next page and it is so immediate and raw you could say, but she gets to this place in the middle that I always think about and it’s just one page, and you know she’s writing in big letters barely with

punctuation in it, and she just writes, ‘I wish I had known I could write this way all along’. And then flips to the next page and it’s back to, um, and you have this chill that you’ve witnessed her inside the medium, discovering the medium, and then it goes from a moment of her intuiting it to recognition that this thing has happened to her and it’s new and strange – maybe like the death of her husband. I always feel like it’s the fulcrum of that book. rs With both of those artists, I think that chill comes from individual works but also from their whole body of work, taken together, how every work relates to each other… wm Yeah. rs …how each object almost rejects the previous one. Is that how you see your work? wm It’s a cumulative process, adding to the pile, and you feel the resonance of all those things behind you. I definitely try to work that way, and it’s cool, back to the identity thing, you work so hard to grow and to change – a lot of the work is about the fatigue of that very thing too – and you think you change, but it’s frustrating when you realise you are right back asking the same questions. You switch mediums, you pick a different starting point, and it’s that same big glaring central question. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

City Standing Up (detail), 2019, blanket, containers, blown glass, tempered glass, butter, food containers, 31 × 201 × 119 cm. Courtesy Svetlana, New York

April 2021

For the past six months I have been living in somebody else’s apartment. I came to Athens in the late summer for a brief escape from London, where I am, in the language of artists’ biographies, ‘based’. (Artists never live in a city but are ‘based’ in it. Bankable artists are advised to base themselves ‘between’ New York and an ‘emerging city’, which would locate them on that small continent of plastic waste now drifting across the Atlantic. Which, some more cynical writer might say, is the best place for them.) When the second wave arrived, the couple from whom I’m letting the place preferred not to return to locked-down Athens and I preferred not to return to locked-down London (weather, ‘variants’, Brexit, etc). And so I have remained, with only a small selection of fraying summer clothes, my laptop and their books for company. The limbo in which I have passed the lockdowns is not my own, which is to its aesthetic advantage. The light-filled apartment’s walls are painted in complementary pastel colours – watermelon, mint, cerulean – and hung with framed posters, prints and drawings that I take to be gifts from artist-friends. The spare bedroom has a French window that gives onto a fifth-floor balcony overlooking the museum marking the edge of a district whose transformation from self-governing community into anarcho-hipster tourist

Critic in Captivity

Can you overthink the art you find in a spare room? Ben Eastham thinks not

ArtReview

destination for inadequately kempt middleclass teenagers from Barcelona has been at least temporarily interrupted by the pandemic. (Let’s not interrogate my sociological role in this.) Clashes with the police still happen, and I have learned to recognise the bright ‘pop’ of teargas canisters before their acrid smoke drifts up on the breeze. I tell you this not to sharpen my radical edge but to confess my own privileged ignorance: with no grasp of the language, I am largely oblivious to what’s happening on the streets below. That I am a conspicuously Western European white man in a neighbourhood that has made a political point of welcoming North African immigrant communities is, to be clear, a key factor in this sense of my own insulation from the violence meted out by riot police. Illuminated by the light through that window, on the wall facing the bed, hangs a painting in oil on linen, roughly a metre square, within a two-centimetre wooden frame. The image is split roughly in half by a horizontal line separating a patchwork field of blue from an olive-and-ochre ground interrupted by a single explosion. The roughly gridded structure, aerial vantage and series of layered horizontal planes call to mind both Richard Diebenkorn and a pixelated military surveillance image, but the unavoidable allusion is to David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967), the composition of which

it replicates precisely (to the point that an exposed pencil line in the bottom corner reads like the spectre of its shivering diving board). The orange flame and billowing black smoke of the explosion stands in for the champagne ‘pop’ of a dive into the swimming pool. The lockdown here is strict, with a nightly curfew, and so I have spent a lot of time looking at this painting. It is the first thing I see when the sun wakes me through the window; it is the last thing I see before I turn out the lights. It is in my field of vision when I’m reading in bed and, as now, when I’m writing from it. I have come to realise, and this might be an unwise admission for an art critic, that I have never before lived with a painting. The houses in which I grew up did not have paintings in them, though I remember a reproduction of a stylised Chinese landscape behind a television and a poster advertising a Belgian beer by means of a scantily clad woman in a bathroom. I have accumulated some prints and drawings gifted to me by artists, typically in thanks or exchange for some writing, and I recall now that these include a small painted abstraction burdened with so painful an association that I haven’t been able to look at it for years. But it is certain that I have spent more time looking at the painting on a spare bedroom wall than I have any other, and certainly much more than any of the great paintings that I would hang in my desert island lean-to. I have only seen those masterpieces in relatively brief periods of intense attention, snatched from the bustle of museum crowds. My relationship to the painting on the bedroom wall is different. My sense is that it has impressed its patterns upon my vision, like the ghost of an image allowed to linger for too long on a computer screen. I have become unconsciously attuned to the rhythms of its colours, which are also uncannily close to those in which the spare bedroom is painted: the cornflower blue of the sky matching the doors of the fitted wardrobe on my left; the coral pink of a passage in the bottom left corner echoing the bookshelves; the caramel brown of the horizon line reading like a reflection of the painted wall behind my bed. Those correlations reinforce the painting’s integration into a world circumscribed by the room’s walls. I don’t know who painted it. One of the artists to whom the house belongs is a painter, but this doesn’t obviously resemble any work

above View from the spare room in the author’s borrowed Athens apartment facing page The spare room

April 2021

of hers I’ve seen. And while the correspondence of colours with the interior design supports the attribution, I’m reluctant to write to her and ask. I am jealous of the painting’s anonymity because it has enriched my experience of it. Not knowing the details of its maker’s life, the context in which it was produced, I am restricted to what I can glean from the work. I don’t know the title – I entertain myself by dreaming up puns that figure the painting as an oblique commentary on my own situation – and I don’t know how it relates to the rest of his, her or their oeuvre. I have relished this uncertainty when any such questions can normally be answered by reference to the vast library of images and texts we carry around in our pockets. Indeed, looking at this painting has alerted me to how rare it is to spend time with a work of art independently from the supporting information that governs how we attribute value. When you look at a painting in a museum, you know that it has been judged to be of art-historical significance by a panel of specialists. You can disagree with that judgement, but you’re still pitting your own opinion against the received scholarship, which is, for anyone who doesn’t totally disdain the principle of expertise and might not have the critical vocabulary to articulate their disagreement, at least a little intimidating. When you look at a painting in a commercial gallery, you know that it has been determined by the market to have a financial value, which is typically presented

as corresponding to its historical status, and again the viewer is led to the conclusion that it must be important, even if it looks like shit. Unlike spare bedrooms, museums and galleries are designed to engineer your critical consent. You are not allowed to forget that you have entered a consecrated space that guarantees the quasi-spiritual value of the material contained within it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I wouldn’t have known as a teenager that Piet Mondrian was any good unless the Tate Modern had existed to tell me, and libraries existed so that I could work out why afterwards – but it can be hard to escape. When you look at a painting on the wall of your bedroom, you are liberated from these subtle instruments of coercion. I didn’t waste any time wondering whether this painting was good or bad relative to the value assigned to it by those authorities because I was too preoccupied with working out how to move a breeze through the space when the temperature hit 40 degrees, and so it instead

above View from the spare room

ArtReview

was able to insinuate itself into my consciousness. It is, nonmetaphorically, part of the furniture. I don’t have to go outside to see it. I don’t have to enter a physical or intellectual space that is pointedly separate from that in which I live. This has had profound effects on my relationship with it as a work of art. A manufactured paradox might help to illustrate this collapse of inside and outside. Jacques Derrida’s statement that ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ was famously (‘famously’) mistranslated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘there is nothing outside the text’. I haven’t read Of Grammatology (1967) – I am inclined to be suspicious of anyone who says they have – but I’m going to reproduce and then further misrepresent Spivak’s version to suit my own purpose (which kind of creative misreading is what I faintly remember Derrida advocating anyway). That there is ‘nothing outside the painting’ could be taken to mean that my relationship to it is not determined by external data like the artist’s biography, its historical context, its provenance and so on. The ‘meaning’ of the painting is thus perfectly self-contained. Yet the same sentence could be read in the opposite direction (to the same end). If there is nothing outside the painting, then everything must be inside it. The ‘meaning’ of the painting is radically open. Within the parameters of its world is the whole world. Derrideans, please resist the urge to write in. I’ve abused that phrase because its paradox has come to stand in for my own contradictory sense of alienation from the world and radical entanglement with it (as a vector through which a blithe virus can move). Similarly, spending so long with a painting means I can no longer imagine its meaning as independent from my world. I recognise that it is independent from me, but the value it has attained for me is entirely predicated on the circumstances of my long engagement with it. What I read to be its satirical take on Hockney’s paean to the gated Hollywood lifestyle and the insulation of the artworld also serves as allegory for my own sequestered existence. From the safety of my fifth-floor balcony I have spent nights watching armed police storm the campus of Athens Polytechnic. If I level my gaze, I can see the Parthenon. I met a curator last week who told me that a homemade bomb had gone off on her street. I walk through protests, but I don’t know what they’re protesting against and I can’t ask. Back in East London, the British government has built a vast morgue in the park outside the house in which I was lodging. I carry on writing about art. The world of this painting is also my world. I’ve become unhealthily attached to it. All of which is to say that works of art are for living with.

Roughly 16 months from now, in August 2022, when India celebrates her 75th year of Independence from British colonial rule, the nation is expected to have a new triangleshaped Parliament building in New Delhi. It is to be built adjacent to the current Parliament, a circular structure marrying Palladian classicism with Indian subcontinental influences that was designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens, with Herbert Baker, in 1912–13 and constructed during the 1920s. By 2024 several new government buildings are expected to be completed along a threekilometre stretch from the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of India’s president, on Raisina Hill to India Gate. Together, the works in this Central Vista project will not only change the way central New Delhi looks but will seek to dismantle the history of Lutyens’s Delhi. During a period when a variety of movements are reexamining troubling histories in both former colonies and the global north, the treatment of India’s architectural legacy raises many questions: how to read the past, how a forward-looking nation can deal with colonial trauma, what constitutes a country’s heritage; and the larger questions of what gets preserved and why, and what gets erased, destroyed or rewritten, and by whom. Lutyens was tasked with designing a capital city that would reflect the imperial ideal of the British Empire. While he did not think very highly of Indian styles,

Symbolic Gestures

How can India renew itself without properly coming to terms with its past, asks Deepa Bhasthi

dismissing them as contradictory to the essence of fine architecture, he did employ several features that had been in use in India for centuries to adapt his buildings to the local weather, among them a water feature at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, an element of architecture influenced by Mughal styles. It is worth noting here that Lutyens was not the only foreigner to be tasked with building a new capital in India. Roughly four decades later, newly independent India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru would invite Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh, a joint capital for the two neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana. The current rightwing, Narendra Modiled Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) government has increasingly been using a language of symbolism to drive its public-relations agenda. It’s a campaign for which 2024 is a significant year on two counts: Modi will go to the polls to seek a third term as prime minister, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), the ideological parent body of the bjp, will enter its 100th year of existence. Perhaps with that in mind, it has presented the very expensive and (given the pandemic of which we are in the midst) rather ill-timed Central Vista works as a ‘redevelopment’ project that will represent ‘the values and aspirations of a New India’, ‘rooted in the Indian Culture and social milieu…’ If Modi is able to orchestrate

top Jaipur Column at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi. Photo: Creative Commons above Rendering of the Central Vista development. © hcp Design, Planning and Management Pvt Ltd

the completion of this remodelling of the city – the project includes a swanky new house for the pm – the boost to his personality cult, as the sage, fatherly leader (emphasised also in the long white beard he is growing) who knows what is best for his nation, might prove to be significant in an election year. While the case for building more room for an expanding post-Independence national government has been made for some time now (and under the auspices of previous governments as well), the timing and the manner in which the Central Vista project was finalised have been much criticised in architectural, conservational and civil-society circles since the scheme was announced in late 2019. Modi has sought to blunt criticism by announcing that the old Parliament building, including the North and South Blocks designed by Herbert Baker and that now house the Secretariats, will be converted into museums that, it is rather vaguely promised, will showcase displays celebrating ‘India at 75’ and ‘The Making of India’. The current Parliament is, with no little irony, to be converted into a ‘Museum of Indian Democracy’. Naturally all this comes at a cost: the budget for the project starts at inr 20,000 crore (10 million = 1 crore) of taxpayer money, an amount that might, according to critics of the scheme, be far better utilised battling the pandemic, rising unemployment, Delhi’s severe pollution levels or a dozen other problems facing the country. They argue,

furthermore, that the principle of adaptive reuse should be applied to the existing Parliament building. And yet, despite the fact that opposition to the scheme is widespread, there is no stopping the Central Vista project now. In Delhi, land-use laws have already been hurriedly modified and public-interest litigations questioning the project quashed. With a go-ahead from the Supreme Court, the bhoomi pooja, a ceremony conducted before starting a build, has now been performed.

top Rendering of the Central Vista development. © hcp Design, Planning and Management Pvt Ltd above Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh. Photo: Creative Commons

ArtReview

something that finds a prominent place in the public narrative of India’s cultural wealth. Even as debate for, but mostly against, the Central Vista project was raging, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad invited designs to build new student dorms on campus, at the cost of demolishing older buildings designed by modernist architect Louis Kahn. After much international outcry, the proposal was dropped; Kahn’s influential aesthetic is safe, for now. It is without doubt that buildings like Rashtrapati Bhavan and others of its ilk in the vicinity, as also others in cities across India, are imposing symbols of the country’s traumatic colonial past. The ideals around which they were designed are certainly not representative of an independent country. But deciding the fate of heritage structures that belong to the whole nation surely cannot be arbitrarily taken, without seeking public opinion, and without conservation being duly considered. It is tempting to close one’s eyes to history and wish away the pain of colonisation and its deep-rooted impact on everyday lives. But the legacy to be carried forward by Indians, as a nation, will be better served if the complexity of this history is understood alongside an acknowledgement that these buildings too are part of India’s very recent past and need to be conserved and learned from. The willingness with which parts of history that a section of people don’t like are slowly being erased is but a dangerous act of manipulation against the larger populace. If anything, it is only paving the way for a future characterised by further, newer trauma.

The Hindu ritual, photographs of which have been widely disseminated over mass media, is a troubling spectacle in a constitutionally secular nation, though this blurring of state and religion has become par for the course under the current government’s Hindutva agenda. In need of urgent deliberation now is the question of what gets to be chosen as heritage and culture in today’s India, and where one places imperial architecture within these politics of choice. Architecture in India has rarely been accorded the same attention and importance as the other artforms. Except for centuriesold forts and temples, and perhaps the mild exoticisation of indigenous, rural architecture, the notion that buildings might stand as witnesses to a country’s evolution is not

top Edwin Lutyens. Photo: Creative Commons above Parliament House, New Delhi, 1926

April 2021

In 2019 Singapore announced a yearlong bicentennial celebration of Stamford Raffles’s landing on the island to set up a British colony on behalf of the East India Company. Critics asked, quite rightly, why commemorate the start of colonialism? The government’s take was that colonialism had been both good and bad, but more crucially, that without it today’s Singapore – affluent city-state, populated by many races whose immigrant ancestors were drawn to the thriving entrepôt – would not exist. Yup, it’s the twenty-first century, where colonial hangovers and teleological narratives refuse to die. Thankfully a new book on the subject, Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History (Ethos Books, 2021), edited by Alfian Sa’at, Faris Joraimi and Sai Siew Min, covers a wider ground than the bicentennial, and for that matter, colonialism in general. In its place we have ‘merdeka history’, described by the editors as ‘an open and fearless culture of historical reckoning’. Merdeka is Malay for ‘freedom’, a term used as a rallying cry in independence struggles in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Harnessing the emancipatory possibilities of this word, this book not only unseats imperial narratives but also embraces perspectives from various historical margins and freedom movements, using a range of methodologies, from a relatively straightforward thesis tracing anticolonial sentiments in Malay literature by Azhar Ibrahim, to a more meandering, storytelling format, such as Hong Lysa’s episodic account tracing the uses of the word ‘merdeka’ through the 1950s and 60s. More inspiringly, it connects us to traditions of struggle in Singapore and the region, which contributes to the writing of a deeper, more nuanced people’s history. One of the book’s editors, Alfian Sa’at, wrote Merdeka (2019), a multilingual play on Singapore’s colonial legacy. At the end of the book is an illuminating selection of source texts used in the production, including the seminal anti-Raffles tract by Tim Hannigan, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (2012). Most moving is an interview with S Lakshmi, a Singapore-based doctor who was asked by the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose to form the all-women Rani of Jhansi Regiment in Southeast Asia. In a matter-of-fact tone, she talks about recruiting young civilian women, married women and entire families who went to fight for the Indian National Army in the jungles of Burma. Older women who couldn’t fight did the cooking. ‘They put on the uniform and all that… They came to Burma. They went with us into the jungle and till the end, they stayed with us.’

reckonings

Decolonise history? What useful form might that take, asks Adeline Chia

Given the book’s hybrid identity – part history book, part art criticism, part inspirational archive of stories – it is best to situate it in a larger revisionist movement in Singapore that spans art, film and theatre. Unlike most mainstream historical writing in Singapore, it abandons ‘objectivity’ – as the so-called supraperspective is always someone’s perspective – in favour of a more openly activist stance. One of the book’s running themes is how we should stop thinking in terms of the coloniser’s logic, replicated in books such as 200 Years of Singapore and United Kingdom, edited by Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large Tommy Koh and British High Commissioner to Singapore Scott Wightman. In it, British colonial rule was (in)famously described as ‘60 per cent good and 40 per cent bad’. But, as one of the book’s editors, historian Sai Siew Min, argues in her wideranging essay, the ‘balance sheet’ approach to colonialism replicates imperial logic. What has been considered ‘beneficial’, she writes, ‘flowed above Bust of Stamford Raffles at Raffles Hotel, Singapore

April 2021

from the coloniser’s resolution of problems created by his colonial ambitions and interests in the first place’. What would a completely decolonised methodology look like? Fellow editor Faris Joraimi makes two points. First, that the story of Singapore be told in a way ‘that engages with the ecology of the Malay world, of which Singapore was part, and how colonialism radically transformed it’. Instead of using colonial arrival as a starting point for Singapore history, he proposes that we plug Singapore back into the Malay ecosystem that was disrupted by European intrusion. Second, he recovers a sense of indigenous agency by tracing an understudied anticolonial and anti-Raffles strand of political consciousness in Malay art and literature over the years. Renouncing Raffles does valuable intellectual labour in offering new, non-Eurocentric frameworks for the writing of Singapore history. But what about its relevance to public life? Sa’at, in the opening conversation with playwright Neo Hai Bin, says, ‘Unless we are attentive to the scars colonialism has left behind, we really run the risk of being an imperial entity ourselves’. He cites Singapore’s sand extraction from other countries and its treatment of cheap migrant labour. Adding to that, one might include the acquisitive practices of the National Gallery Singapore, which proudly claims to own the largest collection of Southeast Asian modern art. And of course, as Hong Lysa and other dissenters have argued, the ruling People’s Action Party has governed in a neocolonial way, inheriting and even elaborating on many of the paternalistic practices of the British administration. How can such neocolonial tendencies be checked? Historical contextualisation and scholarship like that in Renouncing Raffles can raise awareness, and you could argue that the book is in itself a mode of political action because it widens the space for discourse. Its multidisciplinary quality, connecting advocacy with art, theatre and history within its pages and beyond, is also an advantage. At the end of his essay, as per other historic toppling of problematic statues, Joraimi proposes a ceremonial removal of the two Raffles figures ‘to reflect on what it means to be no longer beholden to colonial narrative’. Sa’at picks up the theme in his Q&A with Singapore artist Jimmy Ong, who says ‘[he] is trying to devise that ritual… that not only addresses the physical object, but also the internal psyche’, which shows that resistance can come in different forms and with creative consequences.

Lina’s MASP — Edited with texts by A. Pedrosa, G. Giufrida — Texts by A. Jakobsen, B. Bergdoll, E. Rossetti, G. Wisnik, H. Maringoni, J. Pires, L. Bo Bardi, L. Furlan, L. Nadalutti, M. Grinover, M. Ferraz, M. Suzuki, O. de Oliveira, R. Anelli, R. Rochlitz, S. Feldman, S. Rubino, S. Oksman, Z. Lima — Portuguese/English, MASP, 2019, 348p

Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat — Edited with texts by A. Pedrosa, J. Cuy, J. González, T. Toledo — Texts by A. Risério, B. Colomina, D. Joelsons, E. Meyer, G. Giufrida, G. Wisnik, J. Hall, L. Bo Bardi, L. Castañeda, M. Wigley, V. Mendes — Portuguese and English, MASP Delmonico Prestel, 2019, 352p

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand celebrates the Golden Lion awarded by the Biennale di Venezia to Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), the ItalianBrazilian architect who designed the museum’s building, inagurated in 1968. “Her career as a designer, editor, curator, and activist reminds us of the role of the architect as convener and importantly as the builder of collective visions”, said Hashim Sarkis, curator of the Biennale Architettura 2021. In recent years, MASP has reconstrcuted and revisited several projects of Bo Bardi at the museum, publishing three books on her, available through loja@masp.org.br

Concrete and Crystal: MASP’s Collection on Lina Bo Bardi’s Easels —Edited with texts by A. Pedrosa, L. Proença — Texts by A. Miyoshi, G. Campagnol, G. Latorraca, K. Barbosa, L. Bo Bardi, M. Corullon, O. de Oliveira, R. Anelli, R. Buergel, S. Caffey, Z. Lima — Portuguese/English, MASP Cobogó, 2015, 320p

Av. Paulista, 1578

São Paulo, Brazil

masp.org.br

@masp

Subject Object Verb Season 2 Episode 2 Listen now Ross Simonini with Tschabalala Self artreview.com/podcasts

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Art Featured

Should not hide the wounds in our bodies 35

Haha artworld go brrr by J.J. Charlesworth

Why the explosive arrival of the nonfungible token (nft) is giving contemporary art’s elders the shivers 36

Money is a great way to concentrate human attention. As I write, a of its own cultural values and social role. As Martin Herbert perceplarge jpeg, albeit one made up of 5,000 individual jpegs, has been tively notes on artreview.com, ‘such cultural moments are worth auctioned by Christie’s for $69,346,250. This is everydays: the first dwelling on, in part because they illuminate whether you have a gate5000 days (2007–20), by videomaker, illustrator and, now, feted artist keeper mentality or not’. ‘The hard thing to determine’, Herbert goes Beeple – otherwise known as Mike Winkelmann. Winkelmann first on, ‘is whether you’re trying to maintain some perceived standard, shot to fame (or at least to mainstream artworld attention, since he had or if you’ve become traditionalist, or if, more simply, you’re a snob.’ many nonartworld fans and Instagram followers already) following Herbert is no snob (full disclosure: we ArtReview people occasionthe auction of a collection of his ‘everydays’ – surrealistic, sometimes ally hang out), but the instinct to defend art against a kind of cultural comic, often boorishly zeitgeisty cgi images that Winkelmann has incursion from the world of pop and the popular is a recurring motif been producing and posting once a day, every day, since 1 May 2007 – in the critical coverage of nft. In a fierce polemic against the rise of at an online auction last December. Run through the online platform the meme culture that nft has come to represent, Spike magazine’s Nifty Gateway, Beeple’s sale rang up $3.5 million. But now that he’s Dean Kissick also notes that ‘the old gatekeepers have been losing their power for a while now’. For Kissick, as for Herbert, this is no hit the upper echelons of art retail, that seems like peanuts. Beeple’s shock success follows an explosion of interest in the good thing, since ‘much of today’s culture is a poor-quality remake of market for collectible art that has opened up around nonfungible something better and more compelling’. Turning his fire on Beeple’s tokens (nfts) – blockchain and cryptocurrency’s answer to the unique ‘images of images’, Kissick evokes the ‘collective-hallucinatory firmaart object. Through nft trading platforms like Nifty Gateway and ment in which tired art, recycled pop, bad taste, political spectacle, Super Rare, artistic hopefuls are able to sell artworks backed by what and hyper-speculation swirl and coalesce into modern life’. are, effectively, tradable digital editioning rights. Technically, pretty Kissick hits on an important point: rounding on how the successes much anything digital can be bought and sold as a ‘tokenised’ nft of pop-culture artists like kaws and Beeple ‘lead a triumphant procesasset, and in recent weeks, all manner of digital artefacts have made sion of popular things’, he notes that ‘as someone who grew up hating headlines: a gif of Nyan Cat, the annoying 8-bit retro flying cat, sold popular things, who turned to art as a child because I felt alienated for $588,000 (in cryptocurrency equivalent); Twitter founder Jack by popular culture, my classmates, the country I was growing up in, Dorsey is auctioning the first ever tweet (‘just setting up my twttr’), society, and so forth, I can’t feel happy about that’. with bids currently standing at $2.5m; while synthpop star (and tech For decades, and for many of ‘us’, contemporary art has presented oligarch Elon Musk’s partner) Grimes itself as a kind of refuge from the What really seems to disconcert ‘our’ sold a collection of digital images and apparent iniquities and stupidities of ‘popular culture’ – a place where councgi videos for $5.8m. current artworld is the sense that a ternormative values, politics and idenThe artworld is torn by the spectacle form of largely unregulated, diy mass tities could stake a claim to a degree of these pop-cultural baubles suddenly culture has spawned beyond the reach of cultural autonomy, somewhere we transforming what had until now been might argue over what makes good art, considered aesthetically thin air into or control of cultural gatekeepers millions. The commercial artworld, batand even cultivate something like ‘taste’. tered by a year of covid-19 disruptions and preoccupied with how Contemporary art shares space with counternormative subculture to monetise art objects that are hard to show and sell (more so in an like indie music, independent film and literature, while aligning itself era of shuttered galleries and art fairs), has found itself forced to turn to a spectrum of radical political subcultures – a place to take a posito the digital world to maintain the visibility of its wares. Yet count- tion against mainstream, conservative, consumerist, ‘normie’ values. less video programmes, online art-fairs and viewing rooms have not Yet contemporary art has, unlike many other subcultures, also really cracked the serious problems facing a global artworld that is developed an often-contradictory relationship with the oligarchical grounded until further notice. And the flaring up of nfts presents rich, and with the exclusivity and elitism that comes with it. One of the a seductive solution to two key art-market issues: it offers the prom- paradoxes of this is that while art has tended to align itself against mass ised land of a secure, yet very liquid medium of financial exchange, and populist culture, it is a ‘subculture’ that has nevertheless become coupled with an inviolable guarantee of uniqueness and scarcity for the culture of the elite. In recent years, the artworld’s otherwise privithe objects traded through it. Savvy auctioneers like Christie’s, of leged institutional world has taken to heart issues of social justice and environmental and ethical responsibility that characterise ‘progrescourse, jumped in when they spotted an opportunity (aka money). But the artworld’s critical conscience has been less enthusiastic; sive’ culture – a position that often pits it against the interests and what are these cultural artefacts that now seem to have overtaken the values of the less-privileged sections of mainstream society, from the attention of the media, of auctioneers and of collectors with such ease? ‘squeezed middle’, disenfranchised working-class voters and others And with the market for collectible digital artefacts now invading the whose cultural perspectives differ sharply from these preoccupations. artworld, what does this mean for contemporary art’s commercial and This is not irrelevant to artworld resentments towards nft institutional gatekeepers, and even art criticism? After all, to this critic, ‘culture’. In his downbeat assessment of why the artworld should not Beeple’s and Grimes’s images suck (and, to be fair, Beeple himself has invest too much (financially or culturally) in the lure of nfts, Artnet’s described much of his imagery as ‘crap’). But we’ll come to that. Tim Schneider finds fault over issues of diversity and inequality; the ‘crypto-wealthy’ are ‘predominantly white and Some of the immediate critical responses facing page male’, chides Schneider, quoting one female to the nft and Beeple craze are illuminating, Beeple, everydays: the first 5000 days, 2007–20, artist who suggests that nfts show ‘us in real because they suggest something of the doubt that minted 16 February 2021, nft (jpg), time what disaffected white bros trafficking in now wracks contemporary art’s understanding 21,069 × 21,069 pixels. Courtesy Christie’s

April 2021

meme culture looks like’; for good measure, Schneider scolds the the orgy of financial liquidity that has characterised the decade since ecological impacts of blockchain, since ‘the vast majority of existing the financial crisis of 2008 – the period which, even then, saw huge [nft] platforms run on the Ethereum blockchain, which by some esti- art sales at auction – and that has now reached a critical point in the mates now matches the annual energy burn of Ecuador’. wake of covid-19. According to the ubs Global Art Market report, art ‘White bro’ culture, carbon emissions, popular art and popu- sales rose from $57 billion in 2010 to $64.1bn in 2019. Many commenlist tropes – these land awkwardly with a contemporary artworld tators have noted the effects of ‘quantitative easing’ (qe) policies in that now tends to gravitate towards progressive politics and minori- propping up the fortunes of the stock market and the superrich; as tarian culture, and has developed an institutional distrust of any- the banks printed money to shore up economies after the crash, that thing popular or populist. But by complete accident, the nft money has gone into asset bubbles while real economies have staghas produced a space in which subcultural forms of visual mass- nated. But by the mid-2000s, a phenomenon was emerging that took culture can be monetised by the ‘little’ people. What really seems to as its target the apparently unstoppable devaluation of fiat currendisconcert ‘our’ current artworld is the sense that a form of large- cies that is the hallmark of qe. That phenomenon was cryptocurrency. ly unregulated, diy mass culture has spawned beyond the reach or Writing for ArtReview in 2017 about the relationship between the control of cultural gatekeepers. While concentration of value in the top end of Cryptocurrency, nfts and art have com- the art market, I noted that there was blockchain frameworks might hermore money chasing fewer objects. ald equality and decentralisation – and bined at a moment when fiat currency ‘In those circumstances,’ I suggested, allowing marginalised groups to reis worthless, wages are dead and the ‘liquidity may start to flow elsewhere, claim control of their own cultural economies – they can easily go the future holds no promise worth saving for into even more exotic forms of assets, other way. The opportunity to access as demand for other older assets grows an easy-to-work form of art-object certification and a platform for and their prices rise. One of those seems to be cryptocurrency… the primary and secondary market sales is too good for the art market to first cryptocurrency, bitcoin, has seen a massive rise in its market resist. And while this might threaten established market players and value. At the start of 2017 it was trading around $750. In October its institutions, this might also do nothing more than transfer power to price soared to over $5,000. Investment funds are piling in.’ a different group of monied interests and influencers. One should be As I write now, bitcoin is trading around $56,000, after a meteunder no illusion that while commercial nft platforms may have oric rise during 2020. Meanwhile, Ether, the cryptocurrency of the been taken up by individual creatives, these high-profile sales are Etherium blockchain that mostly underpins nfts, has also exploded being talked up by those pushing for the adoption of cryptocurrency in value. Starting 2020 at $132, it is now trading at around $1,750, the largest part of that rise occurring since mid-December, or around as an alternative to the old system of fiat money. The artworld’s love–hate response to the craze for nft only prop- the time of Beeple’s high-profile auction on Nifty Gateway. erly makes sense if a wider economic background is acknowledged, A popular internet meme of 2020 features an outraged bowtied since at its heart lies the artworld’s disavowal of its own complicity in figure who insists to another figure (representing the us Federal

ArtReview

facing page Chris Torres, Nyan Cat, 2021, nft (gif), 12 frames, 1400 × 1400 pixels

above Grimes × Mac, Rokoko Monolith, 2020, nft (jpeg), digital artwork, 2645 × 4000 pixels

April 2021

above Beeple, Space Exploration, 26 December 2020

facing page Wojak comics meme, ‘Money Printer Go Brrr’, first tweeted 9 March 2020 by @femalelandlords

ArtReview

Reserve) that he can’t just ‘artificially inflate the economy by creating catastrophe. While Beeple may play up something of the ‘disaffected money’. To which the Fed character, next to a printer busily printing white bro’ (Beeple’s online ‘disclaimer’ to his work reads, ‘Most of dollars, grins, ‘haha money printer go brrrrr’. Billions have been my work is complete fucking garbage, but this old shit is reallllllly minted by central banks to support the incomes of people suffering fucking bad’), the Beeple imaginary is analogous to the disaffections the economic effects of the lockdown response to covid-19. But and ethical commitments of mainstream liberal culture: everydays printing money means that interest rates for fiat currency are effec- from 2020 include grotesque satires of Donald Trump (Shut this mf Up, tively zero. In those circumstances, it’s not hard to see the attraction of 2 November), among paeans to Black Lives Matter (Endless Memorials, moving fiat currency into cryptocurrency, or flipping virtual artworks 3 June), lgbt rights (Progress, 15 June) and mockeries of middlethat might increase rapidly in value, as Beeple’s crossroads did in class white racism (Karen Attack, 18 June). What dominates, though, February, when it was resold for $6.6m, from an original sale of $66.6k. are dystopian visions of consumerist excess (Vibe City, 11 October) Cryptocurrency, nfts and visual art have, without the artworld quite and ecological disaster (Fuck Earth, 12 June). late capitalism (23 grasping it, combined at a moment when fiat currency has, in essence, March) depicts a deer wandering among the ransacked shelves of become worthless, wages are dead and there is no reason for most an abandoned convenience store. It is the image of a future without people. For her part, Grimes’s series people to save for a future that seems utterly without promise. The market for nfts threatens to dislo- WarNymph features imploded halluThis makes 2020 the year of covidcate the spectacular fusion of elite inter- cinations mixing baroque, medievalism and techno-futurism, centred 19, the year of cryptocurrency and the est and mass-cultural visibility that the on a winged cherub. WarNymph, in year of a popularised, mass-cultural Nifty’s curatorial blurb, ‘explores the form of the scarcity-based art market. artworld has come to take for granted fluidity of identity in the virtual age: Art’s commercial market has always been based on a mixture of real scarcity and contractually manu- the ability to create, augment, and splinter ourselves into unlimfactured scarcity, jealously guarded by a complicated structure of ited avatars, create boundless worlds, and build rich, complex lore’. institutional and cultural arbiters. covid-19, meanwhile, has accel- Grimes, of course, is contributing a percentage of sales to Carbon 180, erated the trend towards the virtualisation of cultural goods, while an ngo working to reduce carbon emissions. monetisation – making a living – has become a pressing preoccupaBy now, much contemporary art shares with much meme culture tion for increasingly unemployed artists and creatives everywhere. this apocalyptic-utopian vision of ecodisaster and a fragmented, postThe market for nfts threatens to dislocate the spectacular fusion of human subjectivity. These are little more than dreams to comfort a elite interest and mass-cultural visibility that the artworld has come culture that can, in reality, see no future for itself. So, inasmuch as to take for granted. there is little in this more mass-cultural imaginary for contemporary The emergence of nfts is a tale of late capitalism. A moment in art to disagree with, the question becomes what, if anything, might which material prosperity and security for most people has dissolved, distinguish the artworld from this bigger culture of celebrity, virtual in a system that, unable to meet people’s needs, has dematerialised money and fantasies of an end to all this. Maybe little does. In which value. The cultural imaginary of this world is made of images of case, maybe it will soon dissolve, or turn into something else. ar

April 2021

The Long View Whether biopower is a good frontier or a bad one, Pakui Hardware are here to remind us that we’ve crossed into unknown territory by Martin Herbert

In the summer of 2019, Lithuanian artist duo Pakui Hardware set amorphous ‘quantified self’ movement, individuals are increasingly up a spacious installation titled Underbelly in Leipzig’s Museum der conditioned – via all kinds of self-tracking apps and wearables, and Bildenden Künste (mdbk). You walked in beneath a translucent online networks that ask people for health data in return for medical membrane studded with holes, eight of which contained large, ther- advice – to see their bodies as inseparable from technologies. The moformed plastic shapes that looked like transparent rowboats. latter, in turn, serve the interests of Big Data and the general drive to In these, as you could see if you looked into them or if you climbed harvest and monetise vast amounts of information on what we are ladders to poke your head through other holes, were coloured-glass doing in order to predict and determine what we will do in the future. renderings of organlike shapes and silicone arteries that gave the In the pseudo-medical hybrids that populate their installations impression they were being ‘grown’ in giant Petri dishes. Black, spore- of the last three years in particular, Pakui Hardware cast a cold eye like shapes within them turned out to be chia seeds: these organs- on all this: it’s here and it will warp further, they postulate – reasonwithout-bodies (to invert Gilles Deleuze) were apparently mainlining ably, since if one country bans a procedure on ethical grounds, it superfood energies. The whole had the feel of a reveal in any one of creates an impetus for other, more mercenary states to allow it. Pakui Hardware’s simulated, attenua continuum of science-fiction films – from the industrial cannibalism ated laboratories, while chilly, suggest Via the amorphous ‘quantified self’ of Soylent Green (1973) to the human that there’s perhaps nothing much movement, individuals are increasingly batteries of The Matrix (1999) to the to be done except articulate present conditioned to see their bodies organ-donating clones of Never Let Me and near-future conditions, increase Go (2010) – in which human bodies are awareness – which might be a political as inseparable from technologies repurposed to serve new agendas. act in itself, if you unstrap your Fitbit But Neringa Černiauskaite· and Ugnius Gelguda, who have afterwards – and try to take a long, balanced view. Sometimes, as in the worked together as Pakui Hardware since 2014, aren’t interested installation Extrakorporal (2018–20), its organic glass forms serve as part in pat dystopian positions. Their adopted name conjoins a refer- of ritual assemblages, wall-mounted or ceiling-hung works in which ence to the mythological Hawaiian runner Pakui – who supposedly animal furs dangle and droop while the glassworks serve as ersatz could circle the island of Oahu six times a day – with a nod towards heads or stomachs. These suggest that the desire to exceed the body’s the means to augment oneself beyond ‘standard’ corporeal limits. bounds goes back to shamanism, and is thus ‘natural’ – the questioning This kind of process, you’ve surely noticed, is already taking place: of where the natural ends being a key part of the artists’ inquiry. the next decade is likely to be a rocketing era of interventionism in For example, these glass shapes also mimic the form of the horseterms of the human body, one that stands to cleave the human race shoe crab, whose blood can be extracted to detect toxins and that has into new breeds of genetic haves and have-nots, from designer babies lately been used in making covid-19 vaccines. Ingenuity in exceeding to tailored organs to, if Yuval Noah Harari’s 2016 book Homo Deus is to human bounds and preserving and extending life, such works be trusted, something like immortality for the lucky few. At present, suggest, is adaptable to whatever technologies exist at the time; and though, biopower is the latest front in capitalist extraction. Via the just as psychotropics are making a comeback in treating depression,

ArtReview

preceding pages, facing page and above Underbelly, 2019 (installation views, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, 2019). Photos: Punctum / Alexander Schmidt and Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy the artists and Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid

April 2021

Extrakorporal, 2019 (installation view, moco, Montpellier, 2019). Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy the artists and Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid

ArtReview

Extrakorporal, 2018 (installation view, Bielefelder Kunstverein, 2018). Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy mo Museum, Vilnius

April 2021

above and facing page Absent Touch, 2020 (installation views, Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin, 2020). Photos: Trevor Good and Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy the artists and Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid

ArtReview

ptsd and more, future science may well be a combination of modern While the show was still open, I noticed posters going up around the and ancient approaches. German capital – taking advantage of a pandemic-pressured healthThis sense of bodily mutability as intellectual territory for art care system – advertising the convenience of getting consultations (as well as a battleground for science, morality, human rights) has and prescriptions online. Why bother schlepping to a doctor when increasingly come to the fore in recent years: witness, for example, this is more convenient and safer, was the gist. Of course, someone last year’s group show at ngbk Berlin Radical Passivity: Politics of the is making money from virtualised and quantified healthcare, and Flesh, which, like Pakui Hardware’s own work, makes an aesthetic someone – the patient – is perhaps being cared for less, even as technoconnection between the present day and Postminimalism, with its cratic hype increasingly insinuates that, as with self-driving cars, ais sense of the body as a mortal, drooping, flawed chamber as well as can diagnose better than overstressed human doctors. Absent Touch, as a site of various kinds of politics. In that exhibition, while the focus is the artists’ wont, extrapolated this into a hallucinatory future. was partly on the contemporary fluxions of gender identity, works The refusal to judge whether something problematic in the by Paul Thek and Lee Lozano appeared; Pakui Hardware, though, world is good or bad is, of course, an artistic strategy going back to prefer to invoke Eva Hesse, Lynda Andy Warhol at least, and in the Benglis and Alina Szapocznikow as Pakui Hardware’s simulated, attenuated grander tradition of art asking queswell as lesser-known figures such laboratories suggest that there’s perhaps tions, and thus stimulating thought, as Joachim Bandau. ‘Flesh’, in this rather than delivering answers and nothing much to be done except articusense, is a container; what’s inside it shutting thought down. It’s notable that a lot of Pakui Hardware’s art is – lab-grown organs, say, or the brain – late present and near-future conditions literally suspended – from the ceiling is mutable, changeable. In Absent Touch (2020), their solo show at Berlin’s Carlier / Gebauer, – because it is also conceptually so; it presents an aesthetics of entanthe artists set up something of a dreamlike operating room denuded glement in which positives of scientific progress – life extension, say of doctors or, indeed, humans, except for the occasional hand-holding – are indivisible from the negatives of neoliberal biopower and the forceps – like an echo of former times – on a set of photographs. In lure of scientism. In February, American scientists announced that the centre of the room, on three gurneylike structures, were sculpted they’d developed a wearable, a ring or bracelet containing thermodrapery-shaped forms, variously white, flesh-coloured and deep black, electric chips, that allows human bodies to work as, yes, batteries for covered with inverted ‘dishes’ similar to those in Underbelly, beneath other hardware. What do you think of that? Amid all their equivocal which was more sporelike chia. On top of said dishes, meanwhile, medicinal scenarios, Pakui Hardware argue most persuasively for the were smaller, unnerving hybrids of glass – shaped somewhat like preservation of one organ for as long as possible: your brain. ar leeches – that sometimes themselves toted surgical instruments. The backdrop here was the spectre of ‘remote care’, which encompasses Pakui Hardware: Virtual Care is on view at Baltic, Gateshead, May – 3 October surgery by robots, diagnosis by ai ‘doctors’, etc.

April 2021

ArtReview

Illusions of Control The sleek, abstract surfaces of Mika Tajima’s work disguise a very human disruption by Mark Rappolt

At first glance, Mika Tajima’s art seems innocent enough. Bubblelike soon as current regulations permit. An irony that’s not gone unnoglass sculptures that speak elegantly to solidity and transparency. ticed by the artist, but perhaps gives added impetus to the themes of Jacquard-woven canvases sporting abstract geometric patterns. her research. Abstract paintings in which rhythmic bands of colour fade in and out Beneath its apparently banal and knowable surface, Tajima’s of each other. A large rose-quartz rock-crystal that might have come work is complex. An attempt to give form to myriad invisible forces, straight out of a geomancer’s warehouse. They give off vibes of light- some benevolent, some malicious, some that, in terms of their direcness, breath, meditation and wellbeing. The sort of objects you might tion, remain unclear, that shape our lives today. In that sense it’s our imagine decorating a young executive’s apartment. A smorgasbord lived experience given physical form. And that that form, while solid of worldly culture. Things designed to make you feel good about and material, is ultimately abstract also tells you something about the yourself. And in that sense, a narcissist’s playground. But in a world nature of lived experience today. in which looking after ourselves (for the sake of everyone else) is the The Art d’Ameublement paintings are subtitled with a geographic location. In the case of those on show in London, they are the prime directive, what could be wrong with that? What you see is an illusion. And not just in the sense that names of islands that are impossible to inhabit – fantasy islands: most art and contemporary culture is such. The glass sculptures Art d’Ameublement (Isla Juan Bautista) (2020), for example, bands of (from the artist’s recent, ongoing Anima series, 2020–) and the rock red-orange, white and turquoise; Art d’Ameublement (Karake) (2020), (the latest addition to the Pranayama series, begun in 2017, its title purple-pink, deep red and pale orange. Colours that look like pleasing mood tones in the abstract, evoking the yogic practice of breath an ambience, but take on a more control) are studded with brass valves Tajima’s work is an attempt to toxic, artificial tone in the knowledge – suggestive of punctures in a body give form to myriad invisible forces, of the industrial roots of their artithat is apparently whole and the pressome benevolent, some malicious ence of a contained energy, a pressure fice and when viewed in relation to a particular locale. There is, indeed, that requires the occasional release lest these objects explode. The gradated paintings (the Art d’Ameublement a tension in place, no more so than in a time when backgrounds are series – titled after Erik Satie’s 1917 ‘furniture music’, a precursor to virtual and travel is more a journey through memory or imagination ambient music) are encased in clear acrylic boxes, a type of prophy- than a voyage from place to place. lactic, with the paint sprayed onto the inside, and captured, as it were, Similarly, the Negative Entropy works derive from audio fieldmidair. The patterns on the woven canvases (from the longstanding recordings of a variety of industrial and postindustrial sites, group Negative Entropy series, 2012–) look like charts, measurements – a record- meditation sessions and prework calisthenics on construction sites. ing of some sort of dataset prepped up for analysis. Everyone alive Sites that harness and focus energy productively, sites that generate today (or at least the subset of everyone that reads this magazine) a regular sound pattern, and in which, as the artist points out, “any aberrations are the product of human intervention”. A map of a knows that big data is bad, a form of control. “Over the last several years I’ve been really focusing on the psychic world in which humanity is disruptive or accidental rather than the infrastructure of control and the infrastructures that have shaped standard or the norm. “They weave in where humanity comes into our lives and really manipulate or influence us and our desires and play amid the landscape of machine life and digital life that is overthe way that we live in the world now,” the artist explains. A selection taking our actual life,” Tajima continues. “There is part of that that can’t be fully captured or known beyond that of these works has been assembled for an exhifacing page bition titled Regulation in London this month. which is quantifiable. The textile works speak to Art d’Ameublement (Isla Juan Bautista), 2020, It’s been on hold for a while, to be installed as what can be hidden within this quantified life.” spray enamel, thermoformed petg, 183 × 137 cm

April 2021

At which point her dog begins to bark, over the top of our conver- newness and unknownness. So something like the Pranayama series sation, as if to make the point. It’s noticeable too that the works are or Anima series, where it’s thinking about energy regulation of the staged to capture a mixture of duty (or labour) and desire (for health body, is really embracing that unknown aspect and trying to aid it to and wellbeing) that are increasingly fused in what we are encouraged heal us. The idea of knowing how the body’s energy flows represent to believe makes up for a productive life these days. And in work or in a willingness to allow the unknown to exist. There’s possibility with play, the only life is now a productive one. A world of energy regula- these technocapitalist companies that want to know and change us tion and energy exchange. It’s a world (prepandemic at least) that is and sell us things, there is still the possibility that technology could dominated by an overabundance of positivity – not least the require- be used in a way that would help and aid us. Just as there is with other regulatory practices, such as ment to feel good – by overproduction meditation, acupuncture or the workand by overcommunication, in which, In work or in play, the only life is ings of Buddhism.” In part that optias the philosopher Byung-Chul Han now a productive one. A world of energy mism is communicated through the puts it, we are left in a state of being regulation and energy exchange ‘too alive to die and too dead to live’. work’s physical and material presence, “There’s a sense in which this its almost quaintly prosaic qualities new-age mindset and a lot of this self-care that is being sold to us is and, in a world currently fetishising bitcoin and nfts, its resistance being really integrated into technocapitalism and the way that Silicon to that famous line from The Communist Manifesto (1848): ‘All that is Valley has bought into this way of life,” Tajima continues. “Google solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’. As well as, more poetihaving meditation rooms and indoor rock climbing so you can focus cally, through its admission of glitches in the system, escape valves, your issues and go back to being a good coder: all these practices that ambivalent outcomes and cyborg futures. ar become ways of further ensnaring us.” And yet Tajima’s output is not without hope. “I want to pose posRegulation, a solo show of work by Mika Tajima, is on view at Simon Lee, London, from 12 April to 8 May sibility within all of that regulation,” she suggests. “Within all of that

preceding pages Negative Entropy (tae, Cryopump, Pink, Full Width, Hex), 2020, cotton, wool acoustic baffling felt and white oak, 142 × 279 × 8 cm

ArtReview

above Pranayama (Monolith, E, Rose Quartz) (detail), 2020, rose quartz, cast bronze jet nozzles, 91 × 56 × 63 cm.

all images Courtesy Simon Lee, London & Hong Kong

above Anima 6, 2020, glass, cast bronze jet nozzle, 48 × 51 × 36 cm

April 2021

Star Gazing by Nadia Beard

The latest work by Alia Ali examines how displaced cultures might envision brighter futures

ArtReview

Born to a Bosnian mother and Yemeni father who emigrated to music – while also drawing on references from further back in time the us, Alia Ali draws on a question that often concerns diasporic and space, to weave archive footage, mythology and storytelling communities: how to identify with your heritage when physically in order to address the question of the country’s future. Against a separated from the nation, or nations, in which it was born. But in jarringly fluorescent digital backdrop, we see a live spider moving the case of Yemen it is a question that is perhaps more urgent than across a web while a voice – Ali’s – recounts (in English and Arabic) it might otherwise be. “Where is the place for Yemen when the land the legend of Queen Bilqis. is being erased?” Ali asks during a Skype conversation between the In contrast to the biblical version of the legend, in which Queen two of us last summer. In 2019 the un described Yemen as the site Bilqis of Sheba travels across Arabia to lavish King Solomon of Israel of the world’s worst manmade huwith splendid gifts, in the Yemeni “Talking to Yemenis in the diaspora, telling, Solomon crosses the contimanitarian crisis. An ongoing civil war, us-backed Saudi bombing camnent and is granted an audience with I realised the story of the Red Star that the queen on the condition that he paigns, food and medicine blockades, we’re told as children is something bring her a gift of equal size to her cholera and widespread famine have, we all share. I thought this was profound: power. His gift is the Red Star. in concert, brought a suffering population ever closer to death. But such Back in the installation, the the idea that there could be something atrocities too rarely transcend such collected sounds from a 1997 expedicosmic that pulls us together” reports to register in our collective tion to Mars accompany a cnn news imagination. When they do and we are confronted by the sheer enor- report of three Yemenis who that year sued nasa for their incursion mity of the situation, it can be difficult to imagine – as Ali prompts us of the planet – the Red Star – that they say their country has owned for to do – a different future for Yemen. But it is precisely this that is the 3,000 years. Towards the end, we hear the voice of a Yemeni refugee focus of her latest work, titled The Red Star (2020). who recounts his last sight of Yemen as he left on a boat that delivered The 13-minute video installation is a psychedelic, multimedia him from the current civil war to the United States. vision of Yemen that pulls together contemporary imagery recognisAli’s Bosnian relatives were forced to flee during the Bosnian able to Yemenis – footage of traditional Yemeni dancing, the back- genocide of 1995, and while some of her Yemeni family, with whom streets of Sana’a’s Old Town, the lively sounds of strumming oud she most closely identifies, remain in Yemen, those who left before

facing page The Red Star, 2020 (installation view, Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, 2020). Photo: Ian Byers-Gambers

April 2021

above Mahjar (still), 2020–22, video, 14 min

the start of the war in 2014 have been unable to return. “What is it that makes a Yemeni?” Ali asks during another of our interviews. From the summer into the autumn, against the backdrop of the worsening pandemic and spiralling of American politics, Ali and I speak several times over Skype – Ali from her home in Los Angeles; me from London – as we discuss her art and the role fantasy might have in imagining a different world. The urgent issue diasporic Yemenis face is that much of their homeland is being destroyed. In the face of that, Ali says, they must look beyond the physical to other aspects of their shared heritage in order to construct a Yemeni identity. “Talking to Yemenis in the diaspora, I realised the story of the Red Star that we’re told as children is something we all share. I thought this was profound: the idea that there could be something cosmic that pulls us together.” If the attempted colonial erasure of Africa’s past gave rise to Afrofuturism, Ali’s The Red Star might be thought of as a kind of Yemeni-futurism: present reality is dominated by an oppressive force; any thoughts of a future must be reimagined shorn of these. It’s a kind of futurism that would distinguish itself from the lens of Arab Futurism, which, Ali says, flattens the particularities of life in cultures and communities across Arabia. “In Afrofuturism, Sun Ra

started thinking about another planet. To him there was no more room or potential for future generations of the African diaspora to imagine themselves because of the baggage of colonialism and imperialism. Because of the trauma, you’re sort of paralysed. You ask yourself: where else do you see yourself?” “Happy Arabia. It’s known for being the land of plentiful; in architecture, jewellery, textiles, salt, coffee, honey, frankincense, myrrh,” the narrator, Ali, says in the video as a spider dangles from a web. The arachnid, Ali says, is the incarnation of one of the Quran’s most quietly influential figures, who once saved the Prophet from a mob by weaving a web across the door of the cave in which he sought refuge. No one could have entered the cave and left the cobweb intact, his pursuers surmised. It is through Ali-the-spider that we learn the disastrous consequences of Queen Bilqis’s acceptance of King Solomon’s gift; the gift of the Red Star led to the march of organised religions across the Arabian Peninsula and thus, Yemenis believe, precipitated the subjugation of Yemen’s people by foreign invaders. No assessment of modern Yemen would be complete without acknowledging the involvement of the United States and Saudi Arabia in its plight. Subtly, Ali makes their consistent, oppressive presence

Mahjar (still), 2020–22, video, 14 min

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known: through snippets of the American national anthem; through photos of Yemeni artefacts on display in American museums; through fireworks exploding over footage of Sana’a’s Old City. In one of Ali’s earlier video installations, from 2018, the artist is filmed standing on Capitol Hill reading out the names of Yemenis whose lives have been lost during the war; it was made to coincide with a us Senate vote on whether or not to stop the supply of arms to Saudi Arabia. The 17-minute video, spliced with photos, starts with the Saudi-led airstrike that killed at least 26 children onboard a bus in Dhahyan earlier that year. “I wanted to name the victims but also the culprits; the weapons-manufacturing companies, the lobbyists,” Ali says. Her latest work is the inverse of this. Rather than an explicit presentation of their crimes, in The Red Star (which also nods to the fact that between 1969 and 1990, the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen, as it was then known, was the only socialist state in the Arab world), Yemen’s invaders are merely inferred. There is a kind of defiant self-determinism at play here: by the oblique reference, Ali recognises the hand foreign powers have had in shaping Yemen but chooses not to dwell on it as a part of what it means to be Yemeni, instead giving space to the elements of traditions and histories that present Yemeni culture as dignified and joyful.

This is necessary when language can work as much to obscure as to elucidate. “During the Iraq War, language became propagandised,” Ali says. “I grew up seeing how language can be used as a weapon and how it and other things – the camera, translation – can be used against cultures. If you type madrassa into Google [in Roman letters] you’ll often see it as a training camp for terrorists, but it’s the only word we have for ‘school’.” Like many Muslims and Arabs in post-9/11 America, Ali’s immigrant family felt the newly strengthened hand of Islamophobia; two weeks after the attack, her father was illegally fired from his job. Arabic, the language with which Ali would communicate with her father, ceased to be spoken in their home. To be American, the family was forced to cut its links to its past. “I wanted to make a work that was above all for Yemenis… Yemenis watching this can think: ‘Oh, we come from something bigger, a place that had projected beautiful things for us, and what we’re living right now is the projection of our colonisers’.” It is an act of aspiration and puts on the table the notion that Yemen, and indeed any community at risk of erasure, could still have a future, one shaped not by outside oppression but the imagination of those who will live it. ar

Conflict Is More Profitable Than Peace (still), 2019, video, 22 min

Nadia Beard is a journalist and pianist based in Tbilisi

all images © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Peter Sillem, Frankfurt

April 2021

Grid Structure by Gu Guanghui

Ninghai County in Zhejiang Province, China, is my hometown, where I work for the Archives of the Bureau of Urban Construction.

I often go to construction sites to record changes in the built environment, as well as the lives and daily routines of the construction workers.

These photographs show just a few of the residential projects under construction here. These new developments – products of high-speed urbanisation – are attractive to high-end enterprises, and revitalise and modernise China’s cities.

However, while there is an argument that rapid urbanisation allows towns and villages on the periphery of major cities to benefit from social and economic development, the lack of investment and construction in rural areas leads to an imbalance.

It widens the gap between urban centres and the rest of the country, which is further exacerbated by the siphonic effect on the populations of surrounding rural areas.

Young people seek work in major urban areas; their migration, largely for economic reasons, hollows out villages in the countryside and creates a vicious circle.

This sense of dislocation is mirrored in the demolition of older buildings and districts in the cities – the people who live there cannot find their roots, and without these, it’s as if they float, unsettled, unstable, in a strange city.

I use drone photography to explore the development of this urban infrastructure – hydroelectric and photovoltaic power stations and high-speed railways – as well as small towns, rural life, farmland and wildlife, with this perspective in mind.

Gu Guanghui is a photographer based in Ninghai County, Zhejiang Province, China. He is a finalist in Sony World Photography Awards 2021: Professional Competition. Winners will be announced on 15 April

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Art Reviewed

The shameful moments in our lives 73

David Goldblatt Strange Instrument Pace Gallery, New York 26 February – 27 March Two photographs embody the little oddities that characterise Strange Instrument, an exhibition of 45 works by the late South African photographer David Goldblatt. Consider the first: a hand peeking out of a blanketed body at a trading store. The date is 1975. The place is Hlobani, in Transkei, in the southeast of his country. Imagine David Goldblatt the photographer, in the market, searching for an image. He sees a man covered by a blanket. What he finds immediately strange is not the blanketed body inside a store, but the folds around the man’s palm, how his fingers catch the light. The second, George and Sarah Manyane, 3153 Emdeni Extension, from August 1972, is two images rolled into one: a woman on the left, folded onto a chair barely containing her frame, and a man on the right, standing at a doorpost, his turtleneck bulging from beneath his suit like a bandage around his neck. The woman, far in the background, is as immense as the man in the foreground. What is the white material spread in front of her feet? And the man – why is his last button undone? Both figures have their arms in similar positions, but they share something else – a slight bend in their postures, as if the rotation of Earth itself was causing them to sway. The photographs in Strange Instrument demonstrate the intensity of a deliberate eye recording life over a period of three decades. The earliest work in the show is from 1962 and the latest is from 1990 – the same year the

antiapartheid fighter Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Zanele Muholi, one of Africa’s most famous living photographers, must have been thinking about Goldblatt’s way of seeing while curating the show. Muholi and Goldblatt had a close relationship after meeting at Market Photo Workshop, a contemporary photography community in Johannesburg cofounded by Goldblatt. He became their mentor, and in turn they came to learn a lot from him. One understands Muholi’s choices for the show better with this information, since the photographs are mostly taken between the 1970s and 80s, covering the period of their childhood. Muholi’s influence is also felt in how they organised the photographs into 22 categories with titles like ‘On Nurturing’, ‘On Textured’, ‘On Poverty’, placed alongside Goldblatt’s original captions, which are mostly descriptive. In an Art21 interview aired a few months after he died, in 2018, Goldblatt declared: “The camera is a strange instrument. It demands, first of all, that you see coherently.” But what kind of coherence did Goldblatt attempt to articulate? Although he resisted describing himself as an activist or his work as being political – a luxury no Black artist in the country at the time would have been able to afford – Goldblatt, born in Gauteng Province in 1930, did most of his work in apartheid South Africa. His grandparents had arrived in the country from Lithuania during the late 1890s after fleeing persecution aimed at Jews, so he himself

ArtReview

belonged to a lineage of the oppressed. A fear of Afrikaners was instilled in him during the Second World War, when the pro-German, anti-Jewish Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag was active. Yet for him what seemed most important was first to exist simply as an artist accurately documenting the times. The works in the show cut through private and public life, enumerating the joy and sadness of the cities, streets, rooms, offices, parks and landscape. Muholi must be aware of the incredible access Goldblatt – because he was a white South African – had to these spaces, but that in itself raises the question of whether or not Goldblatt himself thought about it. In the Art21 interview, Goldblatt gives hints as to his understanding of racial tensions not only as a South African but also as an artist looking at it critically. Publishers would look at his images, photographs of white and Black people in sometimes intimate positions, and ask, ‘But where is the apartheid?’ “To me it was embedded deep in the grain of those photographs,” he said. In one of the most striking pictures in the show, a Black girl sucking her thumb stands behind a white man, both of them with contemplative eyes, looking at the camera. Without the tension that pervades the image, they could be mistaken for father and child. But the tension is the crux of the photograph: more fascinating than the operations of the camera as an instrument are the associations it makes possible. Yinka Elujoba

facing page David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument, 2021 (installation view). Courtesy Pace Gallery

above George and Sarah Manyane, 3153 Emdeni Extension, August 1972, gelatin silver hand print, 26 cm × 26 cm. © David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

April 2021

Kresiah Mukwazhi Mukando Jan Kaps, Cologne 4 December – 13 February Kresiah Mukwazhi’s exhibition Mukando is dominated by the Zimbabwean artist’s roughly assembled, sometimes painted textile works, wall-based as well as suspended. Figuration repeatedly dissolves into the individual fabric pieces that make up the completed cloths. Not everything that glitters is gold (all works 2020) is a wild pastiche suggesting a female figure with lasciviously spread legs, a pink cushion pressed into the pubic area. The voyeuristic feel correlates with the fabrics used: petticoat material, sequined fabrics, leopard print for the woman’s silhouette. Zviratidzo zvenguva (Shona for Signs of the Times), however – colourwise dominated by bluish petticoat on mattress fabric and showing a woman’s torso, an area painted white replacing her head – encodes the account of a friend, a sex worker who was, according to the artist, almost suffocated with a plastic bag in an attack by a punter. Here, Mukwazhi pushes

the ambivalent reality of Zimbabwe’s nightclubs in our faces: the country’s economy, corroded by corruption, forces a high percentage of women into prostitution, where they are increasingly exposed to male violence and exploitation. Yet Mukwazhi portrays these women as powerful seductresses playing with men’s gazes. In her art, animal prints undergo a transformation from garish workwear to representing the very skin of the women themselves, such that the exaltation of the prostitute as feline predator here isn’t utterly uncoupled from precarity. And, seemingly, beauty and brutality enmesh even further. Many of the fabrics used – eg petticoats, and the pompoms used in strip clubs – attract and tempt, yet these textiles are riddled with rips, dirt, traces of invasive dyes. In addition they feature a Bollywoodesque kind of ornamentation that is historically rather uncommon in Zimbabwe, but became

more common as the African continent was flooded with cheap textiles originating in South Asia. Mukwazhi thereby incorporates into her art the very macroeconomic processes that force many Zimbabweans into sex work. Giving in to fatalism concerning this painful economic decline would be justifiable; instead the artist shifts the focus – via the exhibition title – to the possibility of empowerment and self-organisation. Mukando is a self-governed and trust-based savings society, through which sex workers and others on the fringes of local society help each other financially, organise and support one another. By analogy, Mukwazhi’s works additionally reveal themselves as embodiments of the social fabric; blending pragmatism and pathos, she turns a heap of scraps into a dazzling whole. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

Kudyiswa uchishamirira, 2020, petticoat material, canvas, sequin fabric, cotton fabrics, paint, acrylic, puff, chalk, 218 × 194 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne

ArtReview

Keith Farquhar & Sara MacKillop Barbecue 2 Office Baroque, Antwerp 13 February – 13 March Office Baroque’s domestic setting (it’s located in an apartment in a residential district) provides an apposite backdrop to this doubleheader of works by two British artists made over the past year from immediately available quotidian components. While there are no explicit allusions to pandemia in here, the exhibition, produced by the artists in dialogue, inevitably reads like a meditation upon ennui, physical confinement and the resultant psychological privations. The supporting walls of Sara MacKillop’s small sculptural ‘houses’ are made from file holders, while the ‘roofs’ are assembled from 2021 wall calendars. These works have a spontaneous, haphazard appearance and look as though they may have been built in order

to stave off boredom. The pastel-hued calendars are distinctly kitsch, decorated with stock images of puppies and kittens. One is emblazoned with the mawkish phrase ‘We didn’t realise we were making memories, we were just having fun’, which has accrued a certain unintentional pathos in light of present circumstances. Keith Farquhar’s figurative sculptures made from found clothing have become synonymous with the artist since the early 2000s. All the garments featured here are mounted on found (and sometimes misshapen) pieces of board, which function as framing devices and lend the works an immediate pictorial character. In Falling and Laughing (2021, the title presumably a nod to Orange Juice’s debut single from 1980)

a child’s one-piece cowboy costume is stapled upside-down to a jagged panel whose outline conjures an alpine scene. This costume, in turn, resonates with Farquhar’s three commanding sculptures (all titled Barbecue, 2020) made from doors onto which have been hung cursorily constructed bows, lacking arrows. While evoking a childhood world of Cowboys and Indians, the viability of these objects as functional weapons lends them a sinister edge. These could be the more rustic, improvisatory pieces of hardware in a prepper’s arsenal; viewed in this domiciliary atmosphere, they call to mind the opening lines of J.G. Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come (2006), in which he observes, characteristically, that ‘the suburbs dream of violence’. Pádraic E. Moore

Keith Farquar, Barbecue, 2020, household paint on found door, wood, nylon cord, robe hook, 198 × 69 × 4 cm. Photo: Pieter Huybrechts. Courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Antwerp

April 2021

The release of Maria Lassnig’s self-suppressed films allows old works to create new connections by Juliet Jacques Best known as a painter, and especially for her innovative self-portraits, Austrian artist Maria Lassnig spent the 1970s in New York. During that time, she worked extensively in moving image, completing several works, including the animated Selfportrait (1971) and Couples (1972), and joining the Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc collective with Carolee Schneemann and others. She left New York in 1980, when she received an invitation to teach at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna – which, to her astonishment, met her demand that she be paid the same as her new colleague, Joseph Beuys; she was a chair at the school until 1997, and kept painting for the rest of her life. After Lassnig died, in 2014, aged ninetyfour, two former students, filmmakers Mara Mattuschka and Hans Werner Poschauko, revisited some of the unfinished 8mm and 16mm short films that had sat in a trunk since her return from New York, and that she had not wanted screened again during her lifetime but was willing to let others complete after her death. Finished using Lassnig’s notes and Mattuschka and Poschauko’s intuitions, final cuts and colour corrections, 19 of these works have been released on DVD as Film Works by the Austrian Film Museum. They come with a book that includes reminiscences from Schneemann, Paul McCarthy, Ulrike Ottinger and others, an interview with Mattuschka and Poschauko about the restorations, an article on Lassnig’s sadly unrealised Anti-War Film, in which she planned to address violence and conflict from the ancient era to the present, Lassnig’s essay ‘Animation as a Form of Art’ (1973), scans and transcriptions of her notes and drawings, and an extensive filmography that includes these newly available works. Poschauko tells us that once Lassnig returned to Vienna, she broke off all contacts in New York. She also distanced herself from the feminist movement that had so interested her there, not wanting to be ‘pigeonholed’ as a woman and using the male form of artist (Künstler, rather than Künstlerin) to describe herself in German. The members of Women/ Artist/Filmmakers, Inc shared few stylistic or political principles, making these works hard

to place within that context, but Schneemann remembered them fondly, calling them ‘charming, ironic, shifting between static images and density in motion… always colourful with a subtle, brutal gender appetite towards erotic happiness’. Indeed, the Film Works are more outward-looking than her intimate, introspective self-portraits and animations – perhaps because, as Lassnig is quoted here as saying, in film, the ‘eyes of the painter are half-replaced by a machine that makes its own demands’. Several of them are from Lassnig’s Soul Sisters series, made between 1972 and 1979, where she created portraits of her friends Alice, Bärbl and Hilde. As with the rest of the collection, they are prefaced with an explanation of their format, length, whether they were a rough or final cut, and what is used to soundtrack them – in these instances, works by Anton Webern and George Frideric Handel. Lassnig uses English-language voiceovers for Alice and Bärbl, speaking in sympathy with two women struggling in their relationships: Alice, an Icelandic artist who moved to New York, couldn’t keep up with her many boyfriends and disappeared “like a comet”; “typical Austrian woman” Bärbl was frustrated with a partner she rarely saw, and felt she might rather be alone. In their detached view of sexuality and creative use of the naked body – Alice, blindfolded, pins the names of her lovers and their defining qualities to the wall, and then to herself – these films recall Lassnig’s younger compatriot valie export. But there is no distancing of the viewer from the subject through experimentation with 16mm form, as with many works by the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, or structural filmmakers such as Kurt Kren. Besides export, whose films are generally far more confrontational, it’s hard to discern many influences on Lassnig, but easier to see how her approach inspired Austrian artists such as Mattuschka, Ursula Pürrer and Ashley Hans Scheirl, whose portraits of themselves and their friends during the 1980s share a similar playfulness. Autumn Thoughts (c. 1975) is, like Black Dancer (1974), concerned with movement as a way of conveying personality, displaying the influence

facing page, top Maria Lassnig, Bärbl (film still), 1974/79. © Maria Lassnig Foundation

of Maya Deren – often cited as the founder of us avant-garde film, and one of the only women included in histories of its development before the 1970s. In just two minutes, Autumn Thoughts efficiently contrasts a melancholic, middleaged woman (Lassnig) gazing into water with a youthful male dancer, quickening the film’s tempo and blurring its frames to emphasise the divides between young and old, suggesting in the cutting between the two figures that while men see (heterosexual) relationships as a source of energy, for women they can be exhausting. Other films engage with the media in wryly amusing ways. Francis Ford Coppola shot parts of The Godfather: Part II (1974) near Lassnig’s studio, so she joined them on set, capturing the 1920s ‘Little Italy’ that Coppola had recreated in the East Village, calling her piece Godfather i, ii, iii. Her use of double exposure gives the sense of two time periods happening simultaneously, while a lens that shifts in and out of focus reminds viewers that they’re watching a film – but it’s only when Lassnig catches an important moment in Coppola’s narrative that we realise we’re watching a ‘drama’. Moonlanding/Janus Head (1971–72) combines found footage of a nasa mission (it’s not clear which), figure skating and American football with Lassnig’s own material. Again, she uses multiple exposures for dramatic effect, suggesting this bombardment of images and stimuli can be invigorating rather than overwhelming, and capitalising on the shared sense of wonder at the televised broadcasts from the Moon. The centrepiece, and longest film of the collection, also shown as a work in progress during Lassnig’s lifetime and then left unfinished, is The Princess and the Shepherd. A Fairytale (1976–78). Lassnig examines the gendered tropes and clichés of the genre without overbearing cynicism, mocking its male archetypes with the subtle brutality that Schneemann highlighted in her recollections. Its conclusion, with the princess opting for a simple life over social expectations, is perhaps unsurprising from an artist who always valued honest self-expression and personal independence above all else.

facing page, bottom Maria Lassnig, Kopf (Head) (film still), mid-1970s. © Maria Lassnig Foundation

ArtReview

April 2021

Skylines with Flying People 4 Kinh Storage, Van Phuc Village, Hanoi 1 November – 31 January On an early winter’s day, two members of The Appendix Group – a collective of performance artists who here act as exhibition curators – lead me to a warehouse on the outskirts of Hanoi to view Skylines with Flying People 4. This is the fourth series in a programme initiated in 2010 by Nhà Sàn Collective, its name referencing a verse by the late poet Trâ`n Dâ`n. The experience of being in the physical presence of some 20 artworks jolts me from a digital-data-haunted slump. Never before has the digital documentation of art been so necessary and useful as it is now, even though it completely alters our perception of an artwork’s form. Just over a year ago, the digitisation of art functioned as mere simulation, a temporary replication existing mostly for research. Now, digitised data routinely replaces its physical entity. From individual artworks to entire exhibitions to the ‘viewing rooms’ promoted by art fairs, art has become pure data, to be digitally reproduced and looped on our screens. This shift has helped maintain the trading of art as a commodity: artworks travel directly from studio to warehouse without the need for in-person viewing. In Skylines 4, The Appendix Group does not conceal the commodified nature of art, and in fact explores that very subject in its selection and display of artworks. Vũ Ðú’c Toàn and ~ Nguyên Huy An, two of the group’s six members, invited artists to participate under a set of strict rules: each artwork has to be displayed within a securely locked storage compartment measuring 130cm on a side. Exhibitiongoers can only visit

in small groups, with prior registration mandatory. The Appendix Group and a stockkeeper lead the 90-minute tour, where stealth is key to avoiding raising the suspicions of the warehouse owner. Much like an art tour, the viewer looks at the works while listening to explanations from the curator. At the same time, on security cameras, the warehouse owner sees a group of clients assessing goods for purchase: a link in the chain of production–commerce. ‘The client’ is a shell that shields ‘the guerrilla art viewer’, pushing those on the art tours into a voluntary performance – one in which, according to the curatorial statement, ‘a skyline is revealed where oppression prevails’. If Trâ`n Dâ`n’s original verse ‘skylines without flying people’ is a reference to the days when the poet and his peers in the ? Nhân Văn Giai Phâm movement were muffled by house arrest, Nhà Sàn Collective and The Appendix Group’s change of preposition to ‘with’ reflects the more hopeful spirit of current times, when art events may find ways to transcend the fear of censorship. Care and custody are at the heart of The ~ Appendix Group’s approach here. In Nguyên Văn Phúc’s The leaves of thorny bamboo and the spatial shift (2020), we are witnessing, we are told by our guides, a deep affection between friends – that is, between the curators who proposed the materialisation of the artwork and the artist whose unrealised and forgotten idea it was. The work itself explores themes of care and custody: the artist has collected bamboo leaves from around Hanoi’s Ho Chi

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Minh Mausoleum – a risky endeavour given the constant, watchful eye of soldiers guarding the national symbol – and placed them in a glass box, which he has then sealed shut. While Uncle Ho’s corpse lies intact within its glass coffin inside the mausoleum, the green bamboo leaves emit vapour, wilt, disintegrate and grow mouldy in their box inside the warehouse storage unit. Elsewhere in the exhibition, duties of care and custody have required that The Appendix Group sacrifice aspects of artworks, such as those that viewers without prior knowledge of an artist’s practice would have found difficult to appreciate given the setting’s spatial and lighting limitations. In one case, the artist Tru’o’ng Quê´ Chi decided to change her work after the exhibition had opened, leaving only an intangible strip of light in her locker. The ~ exhibition office, located at Nguyên Huy An’s studio, has kept an archive of the printed email exchange between Quê´ Chi and The Appendix Group regarding the thinking behind this change. It brings to mind many such exchanges between artist and curator, not least the letter written by Kai Althoff to Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, presented at Documenta 13 in a room that was empty apart from the wind, in which he requested to withdraw from the exhibition. The Appendix Group is both caring for and guarding, an arduous task that is difficult to fulfil; one will never reach the finish line on the flight towards the skyline. Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trâ`n Translated from the Vietnamese by Thái Hà

~ facing page Nguyên Văn Phúc, The leaves of thorny bamboo and the spatial shift, 2020, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi

~ above Nguyên Kim Tô´ Lan, Untitled (‘Which Life Did We Love Each Other’), Hanoi version, 2020, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

April 2021

In art a cure for cynicism: the hallucinatory world of Neïl Beloufa by Louise Darblay “Everybody keep calm. He’s having a hallucination,” chants the computerised voice in the jingle of Neïl Beloufa’s weirdly prophetic miniseries Screen Talk. “And so are you,” it wraps up. Originally shot in 2014 as a satirical speculative-fiction during the h1n1 crisis, the work tells the story of a world in the throes of a mysterious hallucination-inducing pandemic, where people stay at home and chat via Skype (it’s the pre-Zoom era, after all), the media spread fear and misinformation, and a bunch of opportunistic epidemiologists compete to find a cure for the virus. So, naturally, when reality caught up with fiction the FrenchAlgerian artist couldn’t resist reviving the project, which he recast as a series of miniepisodes integrated within a zany interactive web-based platform. Reminiscent of app games with levels and a progress map, it requires the viewer to complete apparently silly games and quizzes to move to the next episode and earn points. And, as we all know, points make ‘prizes’ (more about that later). The whole experience is delightfully hysterical and, as with any good satire, provides something that feels cruelly lacking during this crisis: a cathartic moment of comic-relief in a general climate of anxiety and boredom. Screen Talk, the platform, was released last year, but I have found myself giggling anew as I navigate the revamped, glitchier and more mobile-friendly version (think 1990s web-design meets Candy Crush) that Beloufa has developed on the occasion of his current survey at Milan’s Pirelli Hangar Bicocca. In both versions, the setup of the story remains vaudevillesque: we follow two incompetent and egocentric doctors who brandish their Ivy League degrees and throw out gibberish percentages about the validity

of their cure to an uninformed and increasingly paranoid committee; one of them, Dr Martin, has placed his wife in quarantine in their flat, referring to her as ‘patient zero’ (“Trust me, I’m a doctor… you’ll be this century’s martyr”) and pretending that he’s in a distant lab, when in reality he’s in the same building, with his collaborator and lover, Dr Suki; Martin’s son, Preston, is struggling with depression after failing his medical exams and getting dumped by his long-distance girlfriend; Martin’s wife is chain-smoking and binge-watching rom-coms while trying to save her son from failure and being abused emotionally by her own mother. Beyond the prophetic storyline, what makes Screen Talk so refreshing is that it feels like a creative and critical attempt to engage with the digital sphere. Ironically, the artist has long been intrigued by the way we interact with the ever-growing flow of digital images and information, and found himself trying to translate these virtual dynamics into physical space: his 2018 Palais de Tokyo show saw him create a scenography device, where works of art, documents, images, artefacts, reproductions and objects are constantly shifting along robotic rails according to an algorithmic programme, in a vertiginous reappraisal of questions of hierarchy and authority. Similarly, in his Pirelli Hangar Bicocca survey, three ‘hosts’ speak to the visitor, competing for their attention like algorithms, acting out the abstract, often hidden online mechanisms tampering with our choices. Screen Talk, on the other hand, was conceived for the internet (as opposed to treating it as a repository of lesser versions of the real thing) without sacrificing ambition or criticality (as opposed to, well, meme art). The result is a playful

facing page Neïl Beloufa, Screen Talk (screengrabs), 2020, online production and distribution platform adapted from the video Home is Whenever I’m With You, 2014

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awareness of the language and rituals of the world Screen Talk inhabits, which leads us to question (not without cynicism) our own participation in it: after Preston gets dumped, we’re asked to play ‘expunge your ex’, deleting all pics of him from his girlfriend’s Instagram account; a captcha game asks you to spell out ‘buy stuff’, ‘hallucinations’ and ‘eat shit’; another game asks you to match a character with a targeted popup ad based on their recent search history. Elsewhere, you’ll have to find Dr Martin’s login code for a ‘Screentalk’ page that looks suspiciously like a Netflix one: as the artworld slowly transitions online, the parallel with the streaming giant and its monopoly over the film industry raises further questions about what the online production and distribution of art might look like, and how we might imagine a more decentralised ecosystem that allows for more diversity. All the while, the players accumulate tokens (Sand Stocks), to be exchanged for nfts designed by Beloufa and integrated using The Sandbox, which allows players to monetise their gaming experience on the Ethereum blockchain. As my dopamine levels threatened to drop dramatically, I headed to the shop to spend my well-earned 14,000 sand (that’s how much two hours of my online attention are worth), and splashed some of it on one of the print-and-assembleat-home ‘artist editions’ on offer (I am to receive it by email, along with a digital certificate secured by Verisart technology). The resulting image is Beloufa’s ultimate twist: a very real, smallscale paper model of a computer propped up on a desk, a mise en abyme of sorts, to be assembled with my own hands like some existential homework. Irony truly is a cure to our cynical world…

April 2021

Amelie von Wulffen kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 17 March – 24 May Amelie von Wulffen’s first institutional solo show in Berlin should have opened last December, but at the time of writing, in early March 2021, it remains behind closed doors due to the pandemic. Having wangled a private appointment, I feel perversely self-conscious in the silent space, recognising that as miserable as the situation is, there’s an accidental consonance in the fact that one of Germany’s most selfconfronting artists – meaning the nation’s self as much as her own – one who forefronts the bathos and paranoia of these selves as they meet in her work, has been kept in this tomblike state. Born two decades after the end of the Second World War, von Wulffen grew up keenly aware of ‘the silence’, a manifestation of the trauma, guilt and erasure that followed the fall of the Third Reich. As attested to by recent scandals such as the systematic failure to link far-right terrorism, namely the National Socialist Underground, to a decade-long series of racist murders, this condition is by no means ‘historical’, and von Wulffen wrestles with it in a relentless and queasy manner. The exhibition’s design is sensitive to the intensity of von Wulffen’s territory, while seemingly mindful of how works resonate with the emotions and political implications of the past year. It begins in an antechamber dedicated to Die graue Partizipation (2001), graphite drawings made from the artist’s own snapshots of clubs and concerts. The scenes are experienced at eye level, communicating the bustle and intimacy of moments in which she’d been present, yet their silvery, apparitional quality is disquieting, conversely suggesting that it is the artist/ observer who is the ghost, passing through real life. Today, they resonate with a wistfulness for ‘normality’ that is countered by an intensified

paranoia about social spaces, asking, ‘Do you really want to return to normal?’ With approximately 250 works from the mid-1990s to 2020 on show, comics, collages and claymation follow, including watercolours of anthropomorphised fruits, tools and other improbable receptacles for banal yet often cruel human exchanges. Von Wulffen’s preoccupation with repression, violence and sickly nostalgia culminates more explicitly in the ‘grand hall’, where the limitless scope of human projection is also expressed, not least – with a wry nod to Capitalist Realism – in the recurring motif of an ice-cream menu, which in no subtle way suggests an index of desire through which children are essentially taught to ‘suck dick’ (in one painting, a gnomelike figure flashes its huge phallus between the Cornettos and Magnums). Von Wulffen’s paintings gobble up and spit out ‘völkisch’ Romanticism, the enduring picturesque of Mitteleuropa and her own teenage iconography, with the movements or motifs of few German ‘masters’ escaping her scope or equivalating touch. An untitled painting from 2016, its surface daubed with a treacly fake-aging effect, depicts a flaming infant staggering through ruins towards bottles of alcohol. It manages simultaneously to harness the satirical grotesquery of Otto Dix and to send it up. The ‘shit’-smeared walls of the central installation allude to von Wulffen’s personal (and typically female) role of caring for sick parents, yet manage to lampoon the spiritual gesturalism of Anselm Kiefer. This space, structurally defined by fabricated walls that loosely contain it, shows works made within this last, most peculiar year. They largely address her elderly parents’ decline, but pertinently summon familial, ecological and cultural

facing page Untitled, 2020, oil on canvas. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

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crises in unison. The floor hosts a number of wooden boxes, painted with seascapes, planets or Bavarian timber interiors. (In the latter, an old man festers in a cot.) The crates accommodate an array of figurines fashioned from seashells (unabashedly sourced from eBay) and other ‘found’ rustic elements. Hippieish makeshift stalls in which everything can be repacked and moved out again, obviously suggesting the casket and the commodity, they also recall the creepy tableaux occasionally glimpsed in windows of old Berlin apartments and bars: dusty trinkets on a paltry stage, still somehow invested with a bereft kind of communicative possibility. Windows feature plentifully in von Wulffen’s work, often out of reach or as escape hatches, in tension with her formal insistence on the surface, where the viewer often feels emotionally detained, implicit in ‘the grand facade’. One painting shows her framed by a landscape in full painter’s smock, laughably confident, the image of the ‘dead dad’ behind her. It seems to dare you to care. Contemplating this exhibition, I’m reminded of the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker. In ‘Nausea’ (1990): ‘a girl crosses herself / before the menu-board leaning against the inn’s door/ to louse / this dirty figure of my soul […] the dog with the snake’s gaze / mirror up the stairs in a dream’. Mayröcker said, ‘I live in pictures […] I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language.’ These recent works of von Wulffen’s, where reckoning with a parent’s death and its significance to broader lineages play out, make one curious as to how she in turn will climb further into her pictures, and thus her own language. Phoebe Blatton

April 2021

Glauco Rodrigues Acontece que Somos Canibais Bergamin & Gomide, São Paulo 4 February – 5 March Jaider Esbell Ruku Galeria Millan, São Paulo 20 February – 20 March In 1962 Glauco Rodrigues was invited to a residency programme in Rome. When the artist returned home to Brazil two years later, he found the country a very different place to the one he had left. The leftwing leadership of João Goulart had been deposed in a violent coup, replaced by an increasingly authoritarian military dictatorship, and the good times Rodrigues had known previously – the glamorous Brazil of Modernism, Bossa Nova and Cinema Novo – was receding into the shadows. It was at this point the artist decided to embark on a history of his country, producing dozens of paintings over the following three decades in acrylic, oil and ink on both canvas and card. Thirty of the Tropicália-inflected works hang at Bergamin & Gomide, where the walls have been painted in the yellow, green and blue of the Brazilian flag. They boast the alluring style of contemporaneous travel advertising and an equally cheering palette (Rodrigues also designed album covers for the likes of Neguinho da Beija-Flor and João Bosco, a few of which are displayed on the gallery’s reception desk). These are paintings that revel in tongue-incheek clichés: there are copious images of beaches, samba dancers, football and parrots. One textile work, hung as a banner from the ceiling, reads ‘yes we have bananas’, the first word in English, the rest in Portuguese. On canvas, Rodrigues’s compositions are like modern-day history paintings, with multiple figures, scenes and narratives present within any one frame. But among the exoticised symbols of Brazil nestle darker elements. In a still life of yellow flowers, a skull peeps from behind the petals; in another work small vignettes featuring people sunbathing are interspersed with scenes of slaughter. The acrylic on canvas D’après Almeida Júnior (1981) features a portrait of a worker resting with his axe, painted in the heroic realism beloved by the nineteenthcentury Brazilian artist Almeida Júnior. Yet in Rodrigues’s appropriation of the older artist’s style, his subject, topless, doleful in yellow shorts, is depicted against the green silhouette of Brazil: a hint perhaps of the environmental

destruction that fuelled the Brazilian boom times. In the triptych Retrato de Henriette Amado (1970), the titular Brazilian radical pedagogue and proponent of emancipatory education is pictured surrounded by political figures from the military regime, men to whom she was ideologically opposed. The works in Acontece que Somos Canibais (We happen to be cannibals) come together as an encyclopaedic study of Brazilian culture and twentieth-century history (not least how Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ has loomed large in its postcolonial identity). One enduring motif is the indigenous figure, hardly surprising given that the dictatorship oversaw the genocide of an estimated 8,000 of this land’s original owners. Na Floresta (1981) features an indigenous man holding a toad; looking over his shoulder, menacing, is a soldier. Persona (1974) shows a man in a suit, his face half out of frame. Behind him, pushed to the background, is an Amerindian man in traditional clothes. The plight of the indigenous has been raised by leftwing Brazilian artists for several generations, but rarely have artists from those communities been given a platform to represent themselves. This is gradually changing: the last Videobrasil festival, in 2019, featured seven indigenous artists and collectives; Pinacoteca de São Paulo is currently hosting Véxoa, a survey of work around indigenous issues; and in 2019 Sandra Benites’s hire by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo marked the first time an indigenous person took a curatorial position at a Brazilian museum. Among the artists who have emerged through this tardy institutional recognition is Jaider Esbell. The Makuxi artist and activist will feature at the next Bienal de São Paulo and currently has a solo show at Galleria Millan in the city. The open frontage of Galleria Millan allows the wind to gust through several ceiling-hung cotton sheets featuring a series of semiabstract compositions made in natural plant dyes. Collectively they are titled Jenipapal (2020) – there are ten in total – and typical is O cajado do Pajé, in which the titular walking

facing page, below Jaider Esbell, The descent of the shaman Jenipapo from the kingdom of medicines, 2021, acrylic and Posca pen on canvas, 112 × 160 × 6 cm. Photo: Filipe Berndt. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Millan, São Paulo

facing page, above Glauco Rodrigues, Persona (from the Accuratissima Brasiliae Tabula series), 1974, acrylic on canvas on hardboard, 65 × 54 cm. Courtesy Bergamin & Gomide, São Paulo

stick is extravagantly decorated with a series of chickens. In Kono’ (Chuva) a face emerges from the complex grid of parallel brushstrokes bordered by a series of fish pictograms. The raw surface of Era’tî is mostly covered with puddles of the murky yellow and brown dyes, a linedrawn ox-type animal attracting the eye to the top right corner. As well as works on paper and further wall-hung unframed cotton paintings, Esbell’s show presents a series of works on canvas, the acrylic paint overlaid with thick pen marks. These are highly detailed, richly coloured and, from a Eurocentric point of view, surreal in their combination of figurative elements. In his curatorial statement, however, Esbell notes the subject is a tree known as the Jenipapo, a ‘fruit-technology and one of my grandmothers’: what I comprehend as dreamlike is, within Makuxi cosmology, no less real than anything one can touch and see. In A descida do pajé Jenipapo do reino das medicinas (2021) a boat floats along a river, the prow and stern morphing into monstrous heads with sharp teeth. A trunk grows from the centre of this vessel, its foliage convulsing the sky into green, orange and blue swirling light. In another painting, O anúncio do diluvio (2020), a bird’s face stares straight out at the viewer, its plumage merging into the foliage and sky in the background, its scale out of all proportion to the coiling snake, sharp-eared mammal and pink-beaked bird that flank it. If Rodrigues’s project was to chart Brazil’s coloniser history, then Esbell’s is to map the land against which the white man waged war. The artist invokes the concept of txaísmo in his practice, a manner of charting indigenous lands that is not derived from Western models of geography or cartography but instead includes the visual, psychological and spiritual space of a territory. At a time when indigenous land in Brazil is once again under attack from a militaristic and would-be authoritarian government, providing space for artists from that culture to speak, not as victims, but as guides to possible new ways of living with the world, seems essential. Oliver Basciano

ArtReview

April 2021

Art for Air Various venues, Chiang Mai 14 February – 30 April ‘Chiang Mai is a disaster zone,’ reads a fivemetre-high banner by Piyarat Piyapongwiwat, hung from a courtyard balustrade at the Chiang Mai City Arts & Cultural Centre, beside the wood furniture and parasols where tourists – the few that remain – enjoy refreshments on hot, sticky afternoons. This simple work can be forgiven for seeming abrupt and melodramatic – Piyapongwiwat has a point. Well before the pandemic presented its own unique threat to our respiratory tracts, the citizens of Chiang Mai were already blighted by one of the invisible byproducts of its age-old traditions and runaway success: pm2.5 particles. Recent years have seen the seasonal smoke from fires lit by farmers and hilltribes, as they look to clear crop stubble or fallen leaves, being joined by ultrafine particulate matter from cars, factories, construction, who knows what. As a result, a thick pall of smog blankets the province for much of the year; whirring air purifiers have become a fixture in many homes; a destination long seen as fortifying on account of its thick mountain

terrain and ‘Lanna’ culture now consistently ranks among the world’s most polluted places. Who is to blame for turning a charmed city into a cautionary tale destined for the Anthropocene-age textbooks? An animation by the Breathe Council – a young, civil-society clean air movement that funded this awarenessraising group exhibition – points the finger at everyone, but also throws up a shocker of a statistic: 80–90 percent of the smoke is caused by controlled fires in conserved forests and national reserves. Perhaps that is why a good proportion of Art for Air’s 80-plus artworks are dotted around the city’s iconic Three Kings Monument, right on the doorstep of municipal government: the organisers clearly want them, even more than the people, to pull their fingers out. “Artists shouldn’t have to create art for clean air. We pay our taxes!”, an exasperated curator told me when I flew up from Bangkok – yes, I’m to blame, too – in late February. Many works give dramatic vent to such commonly encountered admixtures of anger, confusion and frustration.

In a public square, steps from the unperturbed statues of ancient kings, director Kamin Lertchaiprasert has placed a rotten tree root, sections of its bark carved to reveal a family of elephants and a human skeleton. A tree shoot sprouts from the skeleton, beside a charred lifesize sculpture of a masked Greta Thunberg – an inspiration, naturally – holding up a sign bearing her slogan: ‘Our house is on fire’. Plonked nearby are many other crude yet effective works, such as Wannawit Patteep’s giant sculpture of a furry palm civet that became a cause célèbre when, in April last year, it was found blinded and burnt, spluttering from smoke inhalation, on a mountain road. The indignation continues at every turn: in flags emblazoned with skull-faced corn ears; in four performance videos by Kawita Vatanajyankur, in which she plays the role of dust-clogged human hoover with gusto; and, at Dreamspace Gallery, in a glut of popping street art starring everything from firefighting birds to soot-stained babies.

Kamin Lertchaiprasert, One Breath, 2021 (installation view, Chiang Mai). Courtesy the artist and Art for Air, Chiang Mai

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It would be easy to be sniffy about such one-dimensional fare – visceral art that signposts the ‘dead air’ problem but says little about the structural weaknesses (the city’s neoliberal expansion? The premodern order underpinning it? A bit of both?) behind it – but then I don’t live in a city where the political has engulfed the personal so completely, where the farming industry and vested interests have trumped public health to the extent that I must consider leaving it for good, or failing that, face early death. Moreover, nuances are teased out elsewhere in this citywide, 12-venue show, courtesy of the many research-based works flecked throughout. Piyapongwiwat’s banner references the contentiousness of the official ‘disaster zone’ designation (under which government departments gain access to deep emergency coffers, yet businesses, especially those tied to tourism, suffer). Nearby, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s parabolic solar cooking stove, used to feed the public during the opening-weekend

festivities, invokes the broad banner of yang yuen (sustainability), one of many actionable ways to reduce the burning. At the Chiang Mai Historical Centre, Sutthirat Supaparinya’s Light Me Softly (2020), a photo series comprising night shots of urban Chiang Mai, floodlit country roads and blazing forest fires, suggests the blame belongs to everyone, city slickers as well as country folk. Sanitas Pradittasnee’s installation Turning the Cycle (2021) – displayed at the hangarlike Jing Jai Warehouse, alongside impressionistic works by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among notable others – broaches the ongoing dialogue between hilltribes and technocrats. Resembling a campfire, this circular curtain of white, black, orange and red thread blends fire-management data with the weaving techniques of the Karen tribe and hints at rigid power structures with a circle of stone millet seeds, neatly arranged in concentric patterns on the floor. And of the videoworks, the immediacy and pessimism

of Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s contribution, at Gallery Seescape, stands out: a silhouetted girl nonchalantly plays with her phone throughout, as wisps of smoke slowly clog the screen, and sweet birdsong is replaced by cacophonous sirens, then hollering protesters. Money well spent? Clearly, scaling workable solutions to the smog problem and achieving buy-in at all levels is what’s really needed at this stage. But while Art for Air may only trace the contours of an intractable problem, and for the benefit of an audience who already live and breathe that problem, its inclusivity and conviviality also arguably set out the right ethos. Without wishing to sound naively optimistic, a multipronged and multistakeholder approach that puts ego and status aside, that draws upon hard science, local wisdom, lived experience and no small amount of outrage – as its organisers and ragtag lineup of Thai artists have done – is surely Chiang Mai’s best hope for averting disaster? Max Crosbie-Jones

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Food menu (solar cooking), 2021, stainless steel solar cookers, rice pots, Chiang Mai. Courtesy the artist and Art for Air, Chiang Mai

April 2021

Christian Boltanski Après Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris 20 January – 13 March Après is Christian Boltanski’s first French solo show since his 2020 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, and the title refers to that exhibition but also to mortality, not least his own. ‘When you are asked to make a retrospective,’ he told The Brooklyn Rail last year, ‘it basically means you’re dead!’ Well, sort of. But the present has also provided Boltanski – who has long engaged with mass death, mourning, memorial and trauma – with a new catastrophe, and the result is among his most interesting work. Les Linges (all works 2020) primarily comprises ten laundry trolleys that are not quite long enough to serve as gurneys. On each rests a large, almost biomorphic form covered with folds of white cotton cloth, referencing the expressive functions of drapery in art history while evoking death at its most anonymous and medicalised. Above them,

a white strip-light cable suspended from the ceiling looks like an infection-rate graph or a vital-signs monitor. On the walls, meanwhile, flash black-and-white projections of children’s faces (Les Esprits). In the basement are four large sheets arranged in the shape of a cross, on which looping videos of bucolic screensaver clichés are projected: deer in a meadow, a sunset, a snowy forest, a flock of birds (Les Disparus). The videos initially appear to be flickering; on closer inspection, the glitches are nearsubliminal images of twentieth-century cruelty – among them images of the Shoah and the Vietnam War – ungraspably flashing up. In a crypt set up in what would have been the wine cellar of the apartment building that houses the gallery, three glass cases have been filled with white cloth; a mirror translucently

reflects my face in the darkness (Les Vitrines), like a shrine to, or a reliquary of, the viewer. The timeliness of this show, which is composed largely of pieces made during lockdown, could risk coming across as starkly impulsive, overly on the nose – we’re not yet après covid-19, after all. Refraining from addressing the pandemic directly, however, Boltanski successfully absorbs it into his material vocabulary and sweeping approach to trauma and history. Present time is subsumed into the last century of horrors that forms his central concern. Plus, during the pandemic, ordinary mourning rituals were prohibited in many countries and funeral ceremonies were banned. Many were forced to say goodbye to their loved ones on a video call. It feels important to linger among Boltanski’s strange, disquieting memorials. Tomas Weber

Les Disparus, 2020, four-channel video installation, sound, continuous loop. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

ArtReview

Cornelia Baltes Eigenbrötler Eigen + Art Lab, Berlin 5 March – 10 April According to the exhibition checklist, Cornelia Baltes’s Eigenbrötler (or ‘Loner’) comprises eight paintings – some on the wall, some suspended and double-sided – and three murals; but actually navigating it gives you the impression of being in the midst of one big, spatialised painting. The German-born, Slade-educated artist’s aesthetic is outwardly reductive, favouring restful, slow-modulating colour gradients topped with thick, confident, almost cartoonish gestural marks that can recall closeup scribbles or, more fancily, high modernism. You’ll glimpse allusions here to Robert Motherwell’s midcentury Elegy to the Spanish Republic canvases and, in the opening painting – an obliquely semicircular form in Persian blue cradled in an elbow of pink – to

Ellsworth Kelly. But that painting sits against a larger abstract mural, a buttery expanse of unmodulated yellow upon white, the contours of which line up with shapes in the painting, making it clear that Baltes is proposing a playful conversation between pictorial elements, and questioning where a painting might end, or not end. Looking around, you see colours and forms continually articulated and then picked up elsewhere, winking across the room, usually a little tweaked in transit. The white-andyellow palette broadly recurs in a painting tucked round the corner, whose addition of a thickly black-lined squiggle in turn recurs, modulated, in other canvases. Head to a far corner of the second room and look back, and

the space turns into a minisymphony of cool blues and juicy oranges. Individually the canvases are enjoyable enough in a quick-hit way, a melange of high abstraction and Pop minimalism. But it’s when you feel like you’re composing yourself – taking a step to the left or right, backward or forwards, so a new set of planes aligns and the colours high-five each other – that they take off. In this manner, Baltes manages to fold relational art and the networked painting that peaked a decade ago into her taxonomy of styles. It’s not the most taxing approach in the world but it’s not lightweight either, just easeful and exceptionally convivial, and at this present juncture, a balm. Before you know it, you’re out on the floor, doing her dance. Martin Herbert

Mina, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 230 × 170 cm. Courtesy the artist and Eigen + Art Lab, Berlin

April 2021

Age of You Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai 28 January – 24 August This is Ground Control to Major Tom You’ve really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare Space Oddity, David Bowie’s intergalactic dream of the great beyond, was released in 1969, nine days before Apollo 11 completed the first manned lunar landing, and featured a fictional astronaut (Major Tom) and alter ego who would reappear in later works by the British musician. That split between embodiment and disembodiment remains prescient, and today, data visualisation projects like Oddityviz, which has deconstructed different aspects of the song (including the melody, lyrics, structures and emotions) into infographics that appear both as animations that live online and as engravings on ten custommade records, serve as an example of the dichotomy between the digital and the physical. This translation of persona into data is what anchors Age of You in its incarnation as an exhibition. Curated by Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basar, it posits an ‘Extreme Self’ – the individual multiplied and commodified, in digital artefacts and virtual afterlives. ‘Anyone over 40 knows what classic individuality felt like. Now it’s almost a handicap,’ reads a statement accompanying an image of Jarvis Cocker, a ‘selfie’ by the singer-turned-artist, fragmented through a mirror (Hong Kong Mirror, 2018). It gestures towards our splintered selves, disseminated in so many different guises online. Pierre Huyghe offers a deep (and dark) image of a facial reconstruction that sits somewhere between mask and machine (Self-portrait, 2019). Both works are suspended on vinyl boards, a series of which structure the narrative arc of the show. Age of You ruminates on the idea that, for those of us with access to it, our immersion in the internet has irrevocably transformed our emotions and thoughts; and, ultimately, questions whether or not a world outside or apart from the internet still exists. ‘A dematerialized parallel of you already exists out there in the cloud…,’ reads a vinyl board, one of a series of aphoristic texts authored by the curators. Nearby, and as if to map ‘us’ out as sources of state surveillance, a wallpaper work by Yuri Pattison uses predictive ai technology to create nonrepeating lines of eye emojis, like

a seemingly benign panopticon. Is there still potential for individual agency in a time of mass manipulation, when we are part of a pervasive network of corporate extraction, stats and views? While the exhibition’s premise is that we already exist in the future – where there are far more algorithms directing our behavior than glitches impeding us – the exhibition’s structure looks more like our analogue past. The vinyl boards, hung as ‘artworks’ and arranged like a maze of floating jpegs, are spreads from the curators’ latest book, The Extreme Self (a sequel to their 2015 publication, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present). Perhaps they gesture towards the vertical scroll of the online page, but their materiality suggests otherwise. And the images on show – produced in a manner that suggests low-res printouts and sourced from over 70 artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers and electronic musicians – seem less compelling than the textual elements. Here the true ‘images’ are book pages, which may, in their memetic form, reflect the ways in which online statements are flattened into images, but there is no sense of their potential virality. You’re simply left (intentionally or not) with a sense of how quickly the internet meme can feel dated as a format. This is a show meant to be read. By interrogating the ways in which we can read an exhibition, Age of You posits that the radical shifts in our reality supersede our ability to apprehend them in language. There’s a ricocheting between the book, the exhibition that extracts from it, and back. There’s a ripple effect outside this exhibition, too – The Age of Earthquakes, for example, inspired The Extreme Present, an evocative 2019 exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch. Even with the largely monotone installation, there are different layers of authorship: from the omniscient coauthored ‘memes’ to selected quotes from comment feeds sourced via Instagram (@_deepdiving_ writes, ‘Is 2020 over yet?’). The act of narration gathers force in Victoria Sin’s 2018 videowork Illocutionary Utterances, which depicts self-projection, drag and sweat. But the real performative stunner is Trevor Paglen’s video Behold These Glorious Times! (2017), which shows time-lapse grids that pair facial expressions with movement

ArtReview

– ominous signs of automated emotion, machine learning and big data. And despite the scarcity of 3d works in this show, a few works stand out in their exploitation of materiality. There’s a dramatic photographic sculpture of crumpled, double-sided prints draped on metal scaffolding, for example: Crowd Landscape (2021), by Satoshi Fujiwara, juxtaposes the heightened energy of human gatherings with harsh closeups of aging skin, blemishes and facial hair. Overlaid faces are altered to the very boundaries of recognition. Stephanie Saade’s series Digiprint (2019), largescale photographs of finger-smudged phone screens, reflects the dark mirrors of our smartphones and perhaps a need to disappear even as we leave traces everywhere. Less abstract is Raja’a Khalid’s online history-page listing barre classes featured on the Physique 57 mindbody app, presented here on a hanging board. An image of an animated avatar by Cécile B. Evans (Haku, Hyperlinks or it didn’t Happen, 2014) questions whether our data should be given the legal rights enjoyed by natural persons, while Sara Cwynar delves brilliantly into the lives of objects in her video Soft Film (2016), an acid-coloured universe of online acquisitions. “Technologians are our magicians and wizards now,” Basar boldly tells me during a walkthrough. And yet there is a lingering sense that this exhibition focuses more on residues and artifacts in static moments divorced from the immersive pull of technology, in order to show its impact. In the last ‘chapter’ of the show, Bowie’s face is presented as a backlit death mask bought from a makeup artist on eBay. The singer died in 2016, the year that Cambridge Analytica’s instrumentalisation of personal data in the Brexit and Trump campaigns would come to light – a turning point in our relatively short history of online mediation, which Basar calls a moment of innocence lost. “I think Bowie saw all this coming and he checked out,” he comments. As technological selves, wherein we are both ubiquitous and dissolute in our presence, it seems the only real death is in digital obsolescence. The show culminates with a manhole emoji made vertical, appearing like a giant opening in the wall. It lends an optical effect of the darkness you could step through, if you dared leave Major Tom’s capsule. Nadine Khalil

both images Age of You, 2021 (installation views). Photos: Daniela Baptista. Courtesy Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai

April 2021

This feels new: Lu Yang conjures physical presence through a screen by Sarah Forman Shanghai-based Lu Yang is not a performance artist. Lu Yang is not a video artist, a videogame artist, a digital artist. If you take them at their word, Lu Yang is not an artist at all. But the culminating attention from ‘global’ institutions over the last five years suggests most people think otherwise. Their inclusion in exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Société in Berlin, M Woods in Beijing and the Tampa Museum of Art, among many, many others, suggests that museums and galleries have more than caught on to the appeal of the jarring moving images depicting Lu’s likeness dying onscreen: impaled on trees, severed by weightlifting machines or eaten by crocodiles. And it’s equally obvious that Lu’s use of manga and anime influences to destabilise notions of gender, sexuality, nationality and the connection between the spiritual and the biological have unchecked relevance in today’s artistic landscape. The relationship with mukokuseki – or statelessness – often found in the genres translates seamlessly to the digital through anonymous customisable avatars, as is true for other forms of identity politics, but the parallels between what the Japanese aesthetic symbolises and a much larger conversation about how ‘the West’ fetishises the arts in Asia does not go unnoticed either. On top of that, this creator has become an important figure

in the historiography of contemporary Chinese art, classed by Asia Art Archive as one of the notable graduates from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and heralded for years by art critic Barbara Pollack as the face of ‘brand new art from China’. Lu’s work is also the focus of an entire upcoming special-edition journal on ArtHist.net. The accolades, scholarly attention, media coverage and prestigious awards – including the 2019 bmw Art Journey in partnership with Art Basel – would suggest that Lu Yang is, in fact, an artist. Lu’s most recently realised work, Delusional World (2020), is coming round to their way of seeing things. An extension of previous multimedia moving-image works – Delusional Mandala (2015) and Delusional Crime and Punishment (2016) – Delusional World was originally intended to be a large outdoor motion-capture performance at Federation Square in Melbourne in February 2020. But falling in the early days of covid-19, when little to nothing was known about the fast-spreading virus, the project shut down before it got going. Fast-forward to November and in partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (acmi), curator Mathew Spisbah, Chronus Art Centre (cac) in Shanghai, Meta Objects in Hong Kong and a host of Australian cultural organisations, dozens of creatives and technicians came

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together to bring its new form as a livestreamed event to fruition. The live-motion capture performance was held in a room at cac, with Lu behind the computer, dancer Qin Ran on the floor, a large led screen behind him and an audience in front, captured by two dynamic webcams producing the stream that culminated in a 39-minute video now hosted on the acmi website. It’s nothing short of a production, Qin fitted with a Noitom motion-tracking suit that maps his movements onto alternating 3d avatars sporting Lu’s facial likeness. The score, by longtime collaborator GameFace, is intense and demanding, the heavy trap music eerily interspersed with clips of Nancy Sinatra crooning Bang Bang. In front of occasionally candy-coloured, hellish backdrops designed by the artist Extreme John, the avatar dances. It stumbles, recovers and rediscovers its body over and over again in controlled, fluid movements, punctuated by shoulder popping and robotic gestures, as other genderless humanoid forms undulate, twitch and then die around it: when everything around you is burning, just keep dancing. Delusional World is rich in its imagery, from checkerboard floors, carnival rides and floating wheelchairs to plantlike objects made of mutated biological materials. The central avatar

April 2021

all images Delusional World, 2020, live-streamed motion capture performance at cac, Shanghai, featuring Qin Ran, music by GameFace and designs by Extreme John, 39 min 26 sec. Courtesy the artist and acmi, Melbourne

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controlled by Qin Ran alternates between having clear gendered features and complete androgyny, going from a 20-armed figure to one without a torso and sporting pigtails for legs, to another with an exposed ribcage and no internal organs. And that’s just to describe a few. Whatever it has, whatever it lacks, it continues to move in conjuring gestures, a part of, but unchanged by, its fluctuating environment and form. The avatar’s statelessness and its unstable environment are separate from the physical body controlling it, in an unsettling expression of an increasingly familiar corporeal dualism. I relate to the avatar, fractured, in flux, forced to continue on when the world is falling apart around me, and I envy the real body taking up so much space, the body that dances so freely on the floor of cac in Shanghai. But I do not envy the audience present for the performance. In its making, the documentary product (the video of the performance) is a separate object made for an audience living an involuntary reality. Lu is a user, an inhabitant of the internet by choice. As a result of the pandemic, Lu has seen the rest of the world forced into a mode of existence that was for Lu a decision, knowing that for many of us, it isn’t. “It’s completely different to make the choice to live online, and to be forced to live online,” they say. It’s in this context, with this removal of physical agency, that the production of Delusional World offers the rest of us an opportunity to make peace with our notreally-so-new reality. Forced to experience nearly everything through a screen, like the rest of us I’ve been

worn down by the promise of online art exhibitions and livestreamed performances, mediated communication that was designed to be something it can’t. Even digitally native programming – as important as it is – is generally only granted a fixed amount of my attention. What doesn’t fall flat asks more than I’m able to give most days. But watching Qin Ran, the cuts from physical space to screen captures, being able to see how the work is made and experience its frenetic energy through unadulterated visual assault met me somewhere I didn’t know I was. Its production, the transparency of the stream and the various tools used to bring it to an audience scattered across continents realise a need for something that we’re missing, an understanding of the world and our bodies’ relationship to technology that is made both for those present and for those absent – there is real dancing, there are real people, and they can’t see what we do on the other side of our computer screens. They might have something we don’t, but the same goes for us. They had to make a choice, and as much as the physical audience may have experienced something closer to the original blueprint for Delusional World, one can’t help but feel that it wasn’t made for them. Delusional World offers a physiological experience akin to presence that’s difficult to come by these days. The screen had my full, uninterrupted attention, something I’ve struggled to give for some time now. In some ways, Lu feels more like a dystopian chaplain or technological translator, ideas

April 2021

and functions that ‘artists’ can but don’t always connote. Like so many other labels, discrete identifications don’t encapsulate their totality, and can often get in the way of being able to see the nuance and reach of the work that comes with them. When asked if faith is a kind of performance, Lu responds, “I feel that faith is a kind of choice. You’re choosing your own approach and philosophy to answer the myths of the universe… faith acts as our own personal bridge to truth and freedom, but as long as you can reach that place, you don’t need those bridges.” Despite vaccine rollouts and promises of a return to ‘normalcy’, 2021 thus far has not proved a stable bridge to a better future. Whether this split-audience model for making will hold for Lu’s upcoming live-motion capture performance at the Garage Museum, Moscow, is unclear, and the same is true for their solo shows at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, and the aros Aarhus Art Museum. But I’m happy to put my faith in Lu Yang and in work that meets us where we are, stuck inside, online, in our bodies and looking for glimpses of a distant, physical reality. For now I’m going to have to keep on dancing. Words from Lu Yang translated by Stephanie Boote Work by Lu Yang will be on view at Asia Society Triennial: Part 2, New York, through 27 June; solo exhibitions include doku – digital alaya, at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, 23 April – 12 June, and Lu Yang at aros Aarhus Art Museum, 4 December – 24 April

Books

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal Chatto & Windus, £14.99 (hardcover)

Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir by Marina Warner William Collins, £16.99 (hardcover)

Midway through his new book, a series of fictional letters written to the historical figure of Moïse de Camondo, an Ottoman-born banker and art collector who settled in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century, Edmund de Waal quotes Proust. The novelist was writing on the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, an eighteenth-century painter celebrated for his still lifes. Camondo owned several works by the French artist. Proust claims that the artist’s brilliance lay in ‘the expression of the most intimate things in his life, and the deepest meaning there is in objects, it is to our life that his work appeals; as it is our life that it reaches out to touch, gradually leading our perceptions towards objects, close to the heart of things’. It is a philosophy – that through their treasured possessions we might know a person, their hopes and fears, what makes them tick – to which de Waal has long pegged his writing. Letters to Camondo acts as something of a sequel to de Waal’s bestselling The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), in which, through a beloved family Japanese netsuke collection, the author portrayed the Parisian life of his ancestors, the Ephrussi family, during the anti-Semitic fever of the Dreyfus affair, and the escape of another set of relatives from Nazi-occupied Vienna three decades later (the tiny sculptures were the few possessions they managed to conceal from the ss). Camondo arrived in Paris in 1869, aged nine, from Constantinople, and, in 1911, built a mansion in the 8th arrondissement, on the street Léon Ephrussi had also made his home. ‘I’m a little embarrassed by how much time I’ve spent in the rue de Monceau, how many days I’ve spent reading about it, haunting it,’ de Waal writes. That Camondo’s life followed a similar trajectory to that of the Ephrussi family makes the motivations behind

de Waal’s new work obvious. Both represented rich banking dynasties, and both were patrons whose wealth, consequent social status and artistic taste did nothing to protect them from anti-Semitism in their newfound home: Moïse’s daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren were captured in Nazi-occupied France and murdered at Auschwitz. Yet despite the tragedy that hangs over the family tale, de Waal’s ability to conjure up the personality of a character long dead through his possessions is a joy. ‘Your house is a place where everything is something else. It is a baroque riposte against truth to materials; here one material segues into another, your hand touches gold on the arms of the chair on which you sit. There are plaques of porcelain set into the furniture. This is an interior as performance,’ he writes of Camondo’s new home, a demonstration of an exile’s eagerness to ‘assimilate’. When de Waal continues – ‘There are spaces here, silences, one thing becoming another, one person becoming another. Doors to slip through, slip away’ – a moving picture of the Jewish condition in Europe, always ready for flight once the scapegoating begins again, is made starkly apparent. Critic and folklorist Marina Warner’s ‘unreliable memoir’ (its self-professed unreliability apparent, for example, in the recounting of conversations from memory) is also structured through treasured objects inherited from her parents. But they are of a different order to those that draw the attention of de Waal: the famous paintings and elegant furniture are replaced by more mundane objects – photographs documenting her parent’s courtship (her father an English serviceman stationed in Italy, her mother a local woman more than ten years his junior); her mother’s old brogues, symbolic of her

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attempts to fit in to a new family and an alien country. When her parents went to Egypt to open the first branch of bookseller wh Smith in the region (‘It’s clear the king knows the country’s got to be educated, and we’re the ones to do it,’ her father apparently said of Faruq of Egypt), this colonial enterprise is told through an old bookplate, a map and silver picture frame. As well as charting family dramas, the objects recall Nasser’s revolution in 1952, which took place six months after the ‘Black Saturday’ riots in which the bookshop and many other European businesses and buildings were looted and burnt, the locals apparently ‘pushed beyond the limits of their biddability’. De Waal’s interest in the objects we own stems from the inherited trauma of his family’s loss of everything at the hands of the Nazi regime (and the slow rebuilding of their life thereafter) and a frequently articulated commitment to restitution in all its forms. However beguiling Warner’s ‘inventory’, and enjoyable her oft-lyrical prose, the tension, or wider context, is largely shut out of her account (though ‘colonial assumptions of the British in Egypt’ make Warner ‘flinch’). She breezily mentions that her father, during the Second World War, had picked up ‘a piece of the entablature of the temple at Leptis Magna’ in Libya while part of the drive to reinforce the Allied occupation of Tobruk against its siege by Axis forces. ‘It was used as a doorstop at home for years and now does the same job in my sitting room.’ In de Waal’s hands objects stand for much bigger truths, of questions of loss and injustice; the opposite happens here. The Leptis Magna stone, looted from its cultural, historical and social context, reduced to bourgeois decoration, has all life and nuance drained from it. Oliver Basciano

April 2021

Avasthe by U.R. Ananthamurthy, translated by Narayan Hegde Harper Perennial India, Rs499 (hardcover) The prime minister must be stopped. Human rights are eroded and corruption is systemic. Democracy is turning to dictatorship. Urgent manoeuvring by businessmen with vested interests and party workers with ideological and political ambitions seeks to block the pm’s party from gaining further footholds. Meanwhile, an ideologue, not yet fifty years old and bedridden following a stroke, looks back on his life and choices… This political tale, told in the late U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Avasthe (a word that refers, variously, to the state of being, the order of life as the body ages and the effect of time), was first published in Kannada in 1978, just after the Emergency, Indian pm Indira Gandhi’s 21-month suspension of civil liberties and freedom of the press, had ended. The first English translation comes at a time when constitutional rights and freedoms in India are being chipped away by a rightwing government. Ananthamurthy (1932– 2014) is widely recognised as one of the greatest of twentieth-century Kannada writers. Novelist, poet, and essayist, he was one of the most vocal critics of religious fundamentalism and uppercaste Hindu hegemony in Indian politics. Both his cult-classic novel Samskara (1965) and Avasthe criticise societal evils like caste, poverty and ill treatment of women without simplifying the complexity of the issue with easy resolutions. Krishnappa Gowda, Avasthe’s newly paralysed protagonist, is dependent on the

care of a wife he scorns, a rich well-wisher and some hangers-on. Once a revolutionary leader of peasants in Karnataka, he now awaits an undignified death. He spends his time dictating stories from his past to an impressionable and idealistic young party member as a means of making sense of his present immobility, reminiscing about his youth and wondering if he has stayed true to his beliefs. These memories are broadly based on the life, and early death, of Shantaveri Gopala Gowda, a pioneering socialist leader in Karnataka. Gowda is best remembered for organising the Kagodu Satyagraha, a 1951 peasant revolt seeking land reforms that drew the attention of national socialist leaders, including Ram Manohar Lohia, whose brand of socialism influenced both Gowda and Ananthamurthy extensively. Krishnappa Gowda’s thoughts take the reader through his life, from a childhood spent in his village tending cattle and swimming with friends, to a period of short-tempered rebellion in college, where the politics he will practise for the rest of his life starts to take form. He falls into something like love with a fellow student named Gowri, desiring her and hating himself for the sense of dependency he feels towards her. People pass in and out of his memories: benefactors, a saint who has forsaken society, a revolutionary whose death in police custody leads to Gowda’s own ill treatment, lovers and people who benefit

from his power. We hear how the revolt against the village landlords propelled him into national politics. Though he always believed revolution to be the only way to reverse the country’s deterioration, his daily existence reflected the mundane realities of a life in politics – budgets, public projects, bribery, favours, promotions, transfers, etc. Even as people pressured him to do something for them, for the party, to become the chief minister and so on, they wanted his idealised image as a revolutionary leader to remain intact. ‘We want you to remain a great man – untouched by the politics around you,’ he is told. Looking back, he is haunted by the question of whether he has kept his integrity, whether his accepting a more comfortable home to recuperate in, a car, even his hope that becoming the cm might rejuvenate his wasting body, are precisely the corruptions he has fought all his life. Avasthe’s highly nuanced portrayal of a political man’s self-examination explores the role of the individual in public thought and how to live with a political consciousness while retaining the ability to love. As with all of Ananthamurthy’s works, there are no simple answers. The translation arrives at about the right time too, for perhaps a wider readership of Avasthe will broaden the meaning of patriot in this fractured country today, while keeping integrity, humanity and love for each other’s diversity intact. Deepa Bhasthi

Luchita Hurtado by Hans Ulrich Obrist Hauser & Wirth Publishers, £45 (hardcover) By the time the artworld caught up with Venezuelan artist Luchita Hurtado, she was ninety-seven. Two years later she was dead. But in that space of time her work was propelled onto the international scene through solo shows at London’s Serpentine Galleries, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hauser & Wirth’s international network of gallery spaces (the artist having joined its roster after her London retrospective). And yet Hurtado had been, for almost a century, very much a part of the artworld, rubbing shoulders with some of the leading figures of twentiethcentury avant-gardes in 1930s New York, Mexico City during the late 1940s and California later. Man Ray took her portrait; Duchamp gave her a foot massage; Frida Kahlo was a friend; she

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had tea chats with Agnes Martin; and met the likes of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro when she joined la’s Council of Women Artists. The work she produced throughout her life traces some of those influences (the Surrealists, perhaps more evidently; she notably shared their taste for Pre-Columbian objects, which she collected), and yet the breadth of her output and radical experimentation suggest that there was a freedom to be gained away from the heart of the culture industry. It is, however, her extraordinary life to which this book pays tribute: this is a portrait, rather than a monograph, sketched out by way of archival photographs of her family, travels and collections shown alongside her artworks, and conversations with Obrist (the Serpentine show’s

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curator) in which she shares gossip (Diego Rivera was ‘too much of a clown’, Alexander Calder ‘a great dancer’) and reminisces about her life as an artist, mother, wife and, as she calls it, ‘planetarian’ (Obrist considers her an early proponent of ecological art). The sense of intimacy stretches to the book’s beautiful design: a tipped-in photograph of her as a young woman, printed on thicker paper, sticks out from the gutter like a misplaced family photo; flower drawings printed on translucent paper evoke pressings found in the artist’s diaries. But proximity comes at a price: Obrist, an overt admirer, lacks the critical distance to lead Luchita beyond the shiny veneer of life events and celebrity encounters. Something lost for something found. Louise Darblay

See/Saw by Geoff Dyer Canongate, £25 (hardcover) In this sequel to his awardwinning The Ongoing Moment (2006), Geoff Dyer offers observations on works by 50 photographers (notably just eight of whom are women). The essays, previously published in artist catalogues, newspapers and publications like Aperture during the past decade, are organised by the date of each text’s opening photograph, and thus we are left to infer that there is some sort of history of the medium at play. The range is ostensibly broad, but a glance at the contents page reveals omissions of artists that many would consider part of the canon – among them Walker Evans and Diane Arbus. Yet while their work is not subject to Dyer’s analysis, Evans and Arbus are mentioned so frequently that they attain a sort of omniscient presence over a collection of essays that tell us more about the author’s personal taste than they do about the history of the medium. See/Saw is divided into three chapters: ‘Encounters’, where Dyer flexes his knowledge of the history of photography and builds his personal canon; ‘Exposures’, snapshotlike texts drawn in part from his regular photo series in The New Republic and focusing more closely on photographs selected from news media; and ‘Writers’, a sort of extended acknowledgements page for three authors – Roland Barthes, Michael Fried and John Berger. (Susan Sontag makes the occasional appearance.) To an extent, then, this is about reading and writing about photographs.

When it comes to writing, Barthes’s influence (including in the title) is most apparent. The theorist’s ideas about photography and time in Camera Lucida (1980) – the subject of the photograph as something ‘irrefutably present, and yet already deferred’ – pervade Dyer’s essays. Elsewhere it’s Evans whom Dyer uses as a crutch, as in a text on Lee Friedlander’s American Monuments (1976), in which he observes that ‘misgivings about a few [monuments] make us newly attentive to the many’. Given that the essay was published just after riots in Charlottesville, sparked by the planned removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, had resulted in the injury of dozens of people and the death of a woman run down by a white supremacist, Dyer’s approach seems bizarrely mild-mannered. Referencing a 1936 photograph of a statue by Evans, the same one Friedlander would document for this series, Dyer’s evaluation sticks to safe ground, parking American Monuments in traditions and genealogies. More saw than see – and dangerously close to unravelling his earlier observations, in an essay on Eugène Atget, that statues ‘may be rooted in a past time but, because they remain at large in the world, that time lives on in them’. Similarly, in a text on Philadelphia-based Zoe Strauss, Dyer relies heavily on referencing better-known photographers (Evans again, William Eggleston and Nan Goldin) and only

allows brief flashes of his evident descriptive talent: ‘In-your-face portraits: faces that looked as worn-out as old rugs, others full of confidence and a beauty rendered more intense by the way that what they were confident of was that the beauty wouldn’t last.’ Dyer’s texts work best when he focuses on the connections between art history and photography. Through Alvin Langdon Coburn’s early-1900s photographs, images that were ‘slightly blurred, hazy, with an emphasis less on documentation than atmosphere and mood’, Dyer traces the aesthetics of Photo-Secession and pictorialism as relatives of Impressionism. Later he draws comparisons between Gary Knight’s photos of us soldiers, specifically a photo taken at Dyala Bridge, Iraq, in the aftermath of an artillery attack in 2003, to nineteenth-century history paintings: there is, Dyer writes, ‘a kind of double stillness: the stunned stillness that comes after battle and the stillness of an oil painting, a stillness that does not stop time but contains it’. In general, then, See/Saw gives the impression of a writer who is predisposed towards looking over his shoulder at traditions surrounding photography, rather than locating them in the present. But perhaps that’s also the function of the slash in the book’s title: to remind us that photographs always have a way of making us lean into the past. Fi Churchman

Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion by Harry Sword White Rabbit Books, £20 (hardcover) From Byzantine chant to avant-metal, why have we always been so attracted to the pull of slow, sustained sound? Monolithic Undertow searches for our relationship to drone music: an epic playlist that begins in the womb, then crisscrosses an exhaustive thread across the lo-fi Vedantic cassettes of Alice Coltrane, the ‘true British blues’ of Black Sabbath, infrasonic weaponry and the gritty doom-clouds of The Velvet Underground. What could it all mean? ‘In the form of ringing reverberation of psalms, the deep bass of the organ,’ Harry Sword writes, the drone ‘maximises the intention of belief’, evoking astral worlds beyond. Imagine the shrieks of Ancient Greece’s aulos pipes, with their suggestions of derangement, creating a ceaseless drone that accompanied the orgiastic

activities of Dionysian rites. Or the sonic frequencies of a Neolithic subterranean necropolis discovered on the island of Malta, brought to life by archaeoacoustics. Descending into the resonant bowels of its Oracle Room, Sword envisions the kind of sound rituals that might have played out millennia ago. Soon you begin hearing the drone everywhere. In his account of how the 1960s Western rock aristocracy rushed to incorporate the sitar drone in their music, Sword drifts into a description of mind-warping psychedelics. And indeed, what is acid but its own drone, Sword argues, describing the sonic consequences of consuming lsd – the ways in which it begins to shift the brain’s workings: ‘Acid disrupts the frontal cortex that affects our

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perception of sound... Time becomes blurred, sounds echoing and bleeding into one another.’ It’s a pity that Monolithic Undertow’s quest for sonic nirvana doesn’t encompass the ways in which the drone has seeped through online musicmaking. (Look up the anonymous YouTuber who stretched out a Justin Bieber hit – U Smile 800% Slower, 2010 – turning candied pop into a grandiose ambient-drone blockbuster.) But Sword is too engrossed in the in-real-life shock of what this stuff does to you: the wall of sound that hits when Sunn O))) blasts a guitar chord through distortion pedals, or mainlining hydroponic weed while stumbling through a wailing Bongripper set. It’s the ultimate folk music, Sword concludes, ‘a potent audio tool of personal liberation’. En Liang Khong

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Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera Viking, £18.99 (hardcover) Empireland sets out to measure to what extent contemporary Britain remains shaped by the legacies of Empire and colonialism, and to what extent that influence is acknowledged in Britain today. The answer to the second is simple: generally speaking, it isn’t. Despite, as Sathnam Sanghera points out, recent waves of statue-toppling, institutional renaming and corporate apologies in the uk. The answer to the first is more complex. Sanghera, a Cambridge-educated journalist of Sikh Punjabi heritage born in Wolverhampton, concedes that he is approaching his subject – surprisingly given his ethnic background; unsurprisingly given his British education – as something of a novice. For large parts of the book this allows him to project himself as a sort of everyman offering up a reader’s digest of colonial history (a synthesis of sources readily available, as the author points out, to those who chose to look for them) and the various atrocities (slavery included) it encompasses. Yet what makes this book truly interesting – and without doubt allows the author to develop a more complex understanding of the effects of Empire on Britain today than his everyman persona would suggest – is Sanghera’s inclusion, and seemingly honest assessment,

of his personal position, as a British Sikh, within all this. To put it very crudely, he has one foot in each of the camps of coloniser and colonised. Proud of being British, yet subject to a fair degree of ‘Paki bashing’. ‘I can’t help feeling that I’m on a similar journey [to that undertaken by India’s Harrow- and Cambridge-educated first prime-minister, Jawaharlal Nehru], that in embarking on this project I’m making an effort to decolonise myself,’ Sanghera confesses. So while Empireland traces the ‘toxic mixture of nostalgia and amnesia’ that allows the rhetoric and psychology of the imperial British mind, its distrust of experts and cleverness, its attitude of exceptionalism and, of course, its blindness to its enduring racism (both casual and institutional) to persist, in some ways unchanged since the Empire’s heyday (and which has led, in Sanghera’s view, to Brexit, among other things), it doesn’t shy away from examining the extent to which some colonised peoples (Sikhs among them) collaborated with their colonisers, or enabled the Empire, casually at times, to expand. It takes a measured approach in its analysis of the economic benefits Britain gained from its colonies. And attempts to untangle actions of Empire that were to one degree a result

of unchecked individual impulses and to another the result of structural imperatives. Amid all this, Sanghera reserves his biggest critique for Britain’s education system, which neither incorporates any serious study of Britain’s imperial past, nor reflects the inclusive, multiracial society that Britain today so likes to project. ‘The most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a radically diverse student body, that our people were there too,’ the author asserts while reflecting on his time at Wolverhampton Grammar School. Indeed, had he been made aware of the long history of ethnic minorities who were present and active in Britain’s social and political life before and during the centuries of Empire, Sanghera speculates, ‘instead of being fed the idea that my family and I were some kind of novel social experiment, interlopers in a white country, it would have made a huge difference to my sense of belonging’. And perhaps this point is key to Empireland: a serious reflection on Britain’s actions and relations to Empire might end up being an effective way of building things up as well as tearing things down. Mark Rappolt

Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World by Keller Easterling Verso, £14.99 (hardcover) A slim, sly handbook that rethinks ways of addressing the planet’s most intractable problems, Medium Design is Yale-based architect Keller Easterling’s argument for a worldview that seeks complications rather than solutions. Expanded from an essay published in 2018, it bears signs of having been formulated in the cauldron of early-Trump: an insurgent energy and imagination crackle beneath the surface. But far from joining an ideological camp, Easterling explores weaknesses in the modern, post-Enlightenment mind that leave it vulnerable to the ‘closed-loop, binary’ appeal of, among other things, party politics (or ‘political superbugs’, as she refers to the strategies of would-be authoritarians on the right and left), categorical certainty and all-encompassing solutions, and that has resulted in profound polarisation and

paralysis when it comes to addressing inequality, migration pressures and climate change. The longing for ideological coherence, she writes, and the narratives of war and collapse that accompany it, are a tired and damaging cultural addiction we must break. Medium design is Easterling’s proposal (she’s careful not to call it a solution) for acting on the world with a nonmodern mind. It is aimed at all of us, not just designers (she argues that we are all designers), and describes a semifocused way of looking that takes in ‘objects’ (these could be human, corporate, infrastructural, economic), their latent potentials and the spatial field in which they exist, and then seeks to set in motion or alter their interplay. At its simplest, picture a game of pool in which the player is the designer,

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the balls the objects and the baize the medium. At its most complex (and ambitious), imagine reframing migration as an expedition or adventure, a ‘form of cosmopolitan mobility’. As farfetched as this last may appear in isolation, Easterling comprehensively walks us through possible techniques and effects of medium design, proclaiming the adaptability and resilience that arise from complication, interdependence, misdirection, redundancy, contradiction and failure. Perhaps least convincing here – and yet most essential to Easterling’s argument – is the power of new narratives to replace old. But what other choice do we have, she seems to be asking; we couldn’t possibly make things worse. For all that, this a hopeful and thrilling text. David Terrien

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover

Words on the spine and on pages 17, 35 and 73 are from Nawal El Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis, 1999

Beeple, Space Exploration, 26 December 2020, from everydays: the first 5000 days, 2007–20, minted 16 February 2021, nft (jpeg). Courtesy Christie’s

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So, this whole back-page thing means I’m a bad guy. Like, I know that, man. We’re promised an opportunity to explain ourselves, to tell the story of how things really went down, but in the end we’re only here to be held up as objects of ridicule. Clowns. Scary clowns, perhaps, but clowns nonetheless. It’s bullshit, man. Like everything you humans do. You know, all I ever wanted to be was colonised. That was my game, my play. Man’s red flower, being able to walk into town, I wanna be like you (hoo, hoo) and all that jazz. I lived in the ruins of an ancient human civilisation, a slum. I guess some cat thought that summarised both my aspirations and my downfall. Aspiring to live like a human, but having to make do with your leftovers, your failures, your primitive past. Although, in a way, I am your primitive past, cuz. And you kept me in the jungle because you’re ashamed of it. I exist to fulfil your fantasies of superiority, like all your victims do. And the only reason you went to all that trouble to anthropomorphise me, lend me Louis Prima’s voice, was just to demonstrate that I was something other than you. Something worse. Of course, I was something of a success in my own way. I did create my own civilisation, organised the other apes into a hierarchy, with me at the top. Taught them the importance of having a boss (I learned that from you), and a structure, and not carrying on, willy-nilly, in their disorganised, flea-picking, savage jungle ways. They were backwards, man, sooo primitive. I had to take them in hand, to bring them music and rhythm and culture, and a little less of the ooh oohing. To organise my monkey minions. You see, I was kind of like you already, man. I’d reached the top and had to stop, but I was prepared for the next step! To cross the species boundary, to betray my own kind. Big fan of Donna Haraway by the way – that chick is out there, man, she puts my thoughts into words, helped me get rid of all my betrayal baggage. She’s like everything I’d hoped Mowgli would be. It’s scary, man. Maybe I was just born in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, I wasn’t even in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories. I may be indigenous, but I can’t even pretend to be original. Disney made me up. That cat Kipling was probably too busy struggling under his ‘white man’s burden’, as he later put it, to think about inventing me. Whingeing about having to send his ‘sons into exile’ in order

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In an ongoing series of articles in which the great colonialists explain themselves, King Louie looks into the difference between victim and executioner

‘to serve their captives’ needs’ and dispensing ‘wisdom’ to the natives. A captor and a servant? A master and a slave? It doesn’t make any sense. Ridiculous. Or not, because in a way that’s my story, man. There’s Kipling, encouraging the us to go off and ‘civilise’ the crazy people of the Philippines, to get into the whole Empire game (that’s why he wrote ‘The White Man’s Burden’, man). And there’s me. Handsome, clever, not crazy, long, powerful arms that were perfectly suited for sharing burdens and just waiting for the white man to come. ok, may be Mowgli wasn’t quite white. Sort of orangeybrown, as I recall. But you know, when you live in a jungle in India, needs must. But Disney just had to keep me down. They build you up so they can knock you down. On the one hand I’m King of the Apes, leader, organiser, cofounder and master of the great ape army; on the other I can’t tell the difference between an ape and a grey-blue bear (not indigenous) with stumpy arms and claws and wearing a banana on his head, a coconut on his mouth and a skimpy grass skirt (that last, man, for reasons that were never really clear to me, but knowing you guys, there was probably some sort of sexism involved). And talking about that, did you ever see any female apes in my troop? No, I don’t think so. The first act of the colonialist is to stop the natives breeding. It happened to the Sami people in Scandinavia, the Uyghurs in China and it also happened to me. No one in The Jungle Book had any genitals to speak of. Except maybe Mowgli, the human, but God knows what he was hiding under his mankini. But hey, you contemporary art cats would have celebrated me. I’d have been the great curator – of the ruins, man; of the primate culture; the indigenous creatures of the jungle – you people would have asked me about my indigenous customs, invited me to colonise your minds with them, examined how I had constructed a society that lived in harmony with nature, that took only what it needed, even if I needed a lot, adopted my ape terminology for your own curatorial projects and escorted me on tours to teach you how to decolonise your Natural History Museums and collections of Asian artefacts. But Disney taught me that you’d only be doing that to feel pleased about yourselves. To hide your weaknesses, your own impotence. I’d be your curatorial mankini. Jeez – I’m tired of you fools. Anyone got a light?