ArtReview December 2019 by ArtReview

Tracking things down since 1949

Wild Life

Vivian Suter

LONDON

Richard Deacon Deep State

MARK BRADFORD CERBERUS

2 OCTOBER – 21 DECEMBER 2019 LONDON WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

THE PATH TO THE RIVE R BE LONGS TO ANIMAL S , 2019, MIXE D ME DIA ON CANVAS , 168.9 × 22 .89 CM / 66 ½ × 90 IN © MARK BR ADFORD, PHOTO: JOSHUA WHITE

LONDON

Tony Cragg Stacks

Adriano Costa

Henry Taylor

Otobong Nkanga

Alvaro Barrington

Iulia Nistor

Paloma Bosquê

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

Kishio Suga

Patricia Leite

Anna Bella Geiger

Leticia Ramos

Paulo Monteiro

Antonio Obá

Lucas Arruda

Paulo Nazareth

Celso Renato

Luiz Roque

Paulo Nimer Pjota

Dadamaino

Mariana Castillo Deball

Roberto Winter

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Marina Perez Simão

Rubem Valentim

Deyson Gilbert

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Rosana Paulino

Fernando Marques Penteado

Michael Dean

Runo Lagomarsino

Francesca Woodman

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Sofia Borges

Francesco João

Neïl Beloufa

Solange Pessoa

Giangiacomo Rossetti

Nina Canell

Sonia Gomes

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info@mendeswooddm.com

ArtReview vol 71 no 9 December 2019

It’s complicated As ArtReview lies awake at night, trying to forget about the Power 100 and the endless questions concerning disruption and decolonisation that it’s had to answer despite having addressed them in its previous letter, which it transpires no one reads, it has found itself soothed by listening to a bbc radio programme in which amateur gardeners put questions to an expert panel. Last week Queenie Saul was irritated by a pomegranate tree that, after 20 years, continued to bear tiny fruit. Contrary to Bob Flowerdew’s aggressive insinuations, she had watered it properly. The only conclusion was that it just produced really small pomegranates. You’ll learn, Queenie, that this is the nature of your tree. Its nighttime refuge in gardening programmes is a symptom of ArtReview’s recent fantasies of retreat from the (art)world. It’s not a new impulse: in Candide, Voltaire advises that instead of trying to effect change in society we should be content to ‘cultivate our garden’. The problem is that ArtReview doesn’t have a garden. Besides which, gardens require borders, with which ArtReview has issues. Internal borders that legislate against accidental cross-pollination – you don’t want your sage getting mixed up, sexually speaking, with your rosemary (ArtReview is not an expert, but you know what it means) – and external borders that prevent the invasion of nonnative species. As a big swinging dick in the European Enlightenment, Voltaire also liked roping things off, conceptually speaking. So it’s no coincidence that this enthusiastic gardener was also a contributor to the dick-swingingest of the Age of Reason’s projects, the Encyclopédie (modest subtitle: ‘a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts’), nor, perhaps, that he spent a lot of time calling on European leaders to exterminate their Turkish neighbours (dick-move, Voltaire).

Pull

A garden, like an encyclopaedia, is not a reflection of nature but a means of enforcing artificial and essentialist categories upon it. Nature is under no obligation to recognise or conform to them. Bad luck, Queenie! The infinitely complicated factors contributing to your pomegranate tree’s tendency to bear small fruit cannot be reduced to how dutifully you water it or summarised in a popular 30-minute radio programme, you anthropocentric, plant-exploiting, universalist botanist colonialist! Queenie is annoyed because she, like Voltaire, is working from the assumption that humans can exercise perfect control over a bounded space. This is an ethical position put forward against the utopianism of thinkers like Leibniz, lampooned in Candide. But what Leibniz actually wrote is that the world is built of an infinite number of substances, which, while each programmed to act in a predictable way, interact in ways that are not predictable (or are only predictable to God, which is the same thing). ArtReview is losing you. Let’s just say that Leibniz was right. The world is complicated and can’t be neatly divided into self-sufficient territories (physical or conceptual): it can only be understood as a whole (which is to say it can’t be understood, except by… you got it). You can spend however long you want pruning your apple tree, but then a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and it’s away in a tornado. Or an industrialised country spends decades pumping toxins into the air, resulting in an unanticipated atmospheric process that melts ice caps, which means that your apple tree is now under two metres of water, irrespective of whether you’ve been following the advice of said radio programme. Everything is interlinked in complex ways, and perfect separation is an illusion. Which raises questions, of course, for the status of art as a sphere of human endeavour bracketed off from the world. What’s certain is that art can no longer be a place of retreat or insulation from reality, any more than a garden can. It’s all tangled up and the borders are being exposed as fictions. Our control is limited. Live with it, Queenie. ArtReview

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Leo Villareal November 22, 2019 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; January 18, 2020 London

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28 NOV 2019 — 31 MAY 2020

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MMCA GWACHEON GALLERY 3‚4‚5‚6

Art Previewed Breakfast with... Saad Qureshi 20

Sounding Off The end of club culture by Patrick Langley 30

Tall Tales Art history’s ghosts by Ben Street 24

The Interview Dawn Kasper by Ross Simonini 32

Weighing Words Criticism is cheap by Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières 26

Coming Up Ten shows to see this month by Martin Herbert 38

Money Up Front Ethical conflicts in Norway by Juliet Jacques 28

Art Featured Vivian Suter by Oliver Basciano 48

Cecilia Vicuña by Lucy Mercer 68

Herbarium of Artificial Flowers – A Poppy Flower Selection Project by Alberto Baraya 59

Tim Walker by Fi Churchman 76

page 38 Liza Lou, Kitchen, 1991–96, beads, plaster, wood and found objects, 244 × 335 × 427 cm. © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (as seen in Making Knowing: Craft in Art 1950–2019)

December 2019

Art Reviewed Song Dong, by Valentina Bin Lari Pittman, by Jonathan Griffin Tala Madani, by Cat Kron Embodiment, by Rahel Aima Kameelah Janan Rasheed, by Megan N. Liberty Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods, by Gaby Cepeda

exhibitions 86 The New moma, by Siona Wilson Torbjørn Rødland, by Mike Watson Kaari Upson, by Raimar Stange Weight of Abundance, by Max L. Feldman Marcel Broodthaers, by Martin Herbert Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology, by John Quin Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, by Hans Carlsson Art Encounters Biennial 2019, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Limp, by Rahel Aima Jesús Rafael Soto, by David Trigg The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, by Tom Jeffreys Lucy McKenzie, by Matthew Turner Christina Quarles, by Skye Sherwin Anna Maria Maiolino, by Rosanna Mclaughlin 21st Contemporary Art Biennial sesc_Videobrasil, by Oliver Basciano

books 112 The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner, reviewed by Ben Eastham Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production, by Dave Beech, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Grandma, I Want a Penis, by Dusadee Huntrakul, reviewed by Adeline Chia In Print: a roundup of new releases, reviewed by Louise Darblay back page 118

page 104 Omar Mismar, Schmitt, You and Me (still), 2012–17, video, 54 min (loop). Courtesy the artist (as seen in 21st Contemporary Art Biennial sesc_Videobrasil)

ArtReview

Breakfast with

Saad Qureshi A vegetarian Yorkshire feast Some days I don’t have time before leaving for the studio, but several times a week I like to cook breakfast for my family

Parathas, chickpeas in a tomato sauce (quite aromatic, with chilli, cumin, turmeric and coriander), fried eggs

Yoghurt goes really well with all of this, washed down with English Breakfast Tea

Being vegetarian, I take pleasure in shopping for veg at Wild Honey on Magdalen Road, near my home in Oxford, or at Willowbrook Farm

We have vegetables sautéed in olive oil. Here we have tomatoes, asparagus, avocado, mushrooms and potatoes

The British artist has a solo show at the former chapel in Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, England, opening in the new year. For Something About Paradise (4 January – 15 March), he interviewed people of faith, as well as atheists and agnostics, all over Britain, asking them what they thought Paradise looks like and using their responses to build a series of models that he refers to as ‘mindscapes’

ArtReview

FEATURED AT SINGAPORE ART WEEK 2020

YINKA SHONIBARE CBE: JUSTICE FOR ALL Come and meet Yinka Shonibare CBE’s multi-coloured batik-clad Lady Justice, while she resides at Singapore’s

Old Parliament House. All are welcome; justice is for all. 13-30 JANUARY 2020 THE ARTS HOUSE 1 OLD PARLIAMENT LANE SINGAPORE

PRESENTED BY:

COLLECTORS’ SHOW 2020: MATERIAL AGENDAS

The third edition of this arresting exhibition brings together the works of 19 inﬂuential artists from across 12 private collections around the world, many shown in Singapore for the ﬁrst time. 10-19 JANUARY 2020 SCHOOL OF THE ARTS SINGAPORE (SOTA), SOTA GALLERY, 1 ZUBIR SAID DRIVE, SINGAPORE

ORGANISED BY:

ImpartAwards #ImpartCollectorsShow

Image credit: Ruud van Empel, Theatre #6, Edition 2/7, 2011. C-print, archival pigment print, face-mounted to plexiglas and ﬂush-mounted, 100 x 300cm. Private collection. Photograph by Colin Wan.

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Art Previewed

Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll only kill you too 23

Agesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus, LaocoĂśn and His Sons (detail), c. first century bce â&#x20AC;&#x201C; first century ce, marble, dimensions variable. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen / Creative Commons

ArtReview

Tall Tales

Ben Street witnesses the rise of the living dead

A winter morning in Rome in 1506. A group of people – scholars, clergymen, art collectors, artists – are gathered in a vineyard not far from the Colosseum, at the base of the Oppian Hill. The site, owned by Felice de Fredis, has become a temporary archaeological dig, and chunks of carved stone are being pulled, one by one, out of the earth and laid in piles on the cold ground. As the pieces are cleaned and gradually assembled, it becomes apparent that they form one large ancient sculpture, one that many in the group had read about but never imagined seeing in reality. This was surely the Laocoön mentioned by Roman historian Pliny the Elder (who attributes it to the sculptors Agesander, Athenodorus and Polydorus, working in Rhodes between the first century bce and the first century ce), a depiction of the eponymous Trojan priest and his two sons being killed by snakes. Having warned his fellow citizens about the wooden horse filled with armed Greeks entering Troy, the priest was cursed by Greek-supporting Athena, and the serpents crushed him and his sons to death. Everyone who saw the sculpture – first this group, then artists and collectors across the city and beyond – became themselves ensnared in its coils. Artists, as though possessed by the work, made copies and variants almost immediately;

collectors scrambled literally to possess it. De Fredis, who sold the sculpture to the pope shortly after finding it (it remains in the Vatican collection to this day), even had it mentioned on his tombstone. Here lies Felice de Fredis, it reads, who earned immortality for his discovery of the almost-breathing effigy of Laocoön. To a Roman of de Fredis’s time, the ground beneath your feet could be the source of untold riches. Ancient texts described works of art waiting to be recovered, provided you were willing to dig deep. Reading the growing market for antiquities, some artists of the time carved classical fakes, artificially aged them by dousing them with urine and buried them in the earth, only to stage an excavation some time later and sell them as authentic. Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was part of that group in de Fredis’s vineyard, had done just that only a few years before. His Sleeping Cupid (1496), now lost, had been sold to a cardinal as a genuine antique, but the revelation of its inauthenticity launched his career in Rome rather than sinking it. In an art market engorged with fragments of found classical sculpture, themselves often copies of lost Greek art, the demarcation of ancient and modern was mostly moot. The classical had become not a period signifier, as it would be in conventional art history, but an index of

December 2019

a work of art’s virtuosity and desirability. Even the Laocoön they dug up that day is probably a copy of an original Greek bronze, long melted down to make cannons or coins or even other sculptures. It emerged from the earth an object already haunted by another. If the excavation of something buried confers the ring of unsullied authenticity upon it – that sleeping cupid, plucked from the earth like a newborn – there’s an element of horror that comes along with it too. Many ghost stories pit modernity against an ancient intelligence by treating the literal disturbance of the soil as a means for the repressed to return. In M.R. James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925), a young treasure-hunter unearths a buried Anglo-Saxon crown and is hounded by supernatural spirits; desperately he attempts to rebury it, with fatal consequences. Laocoön’s own is a horror story, as is, perhaps, the story of its excavation that winter day in Rome, which set in train a succession of artistic hauntings otherwise known as ‘the history of art’. The disembodied heads of the priest and his sons, screaming in agony, must have seemed like the cursed images they turned out to be, or as the humanist poet Eurialo d’Ascoli put it in 1539, ‘If they are stones then how can we hear the grief that comes out? … If they are stone, why do they scream all the time?’

The critical scope of Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), to whom we owe the first recognition of artists such as Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, the Postimpressionists and French avant-gardes through to Surrealism, is currently being celebrated by two major French institutions – the Musée d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie and the Musée du Quai Branly. Féneon wrote little, but as an editor (he edited Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce), curator, anarchist and friend of artists, he was nevertheless able to produce the critical environment necessary for these artists to be seen, contextualised and understood. This is the fundamental work of criticism: not to judge art from a position of superior authority but, more complexly, to produce the critical horizon within which the artwork becomes intelligible. Critical discourse establishes the space within which the artwork can realise its full potential. That discourse is firstly that which takes place in art periodicals and catalogues. It is critical discourse that allows the artwork’s identification, recognition and inclusion in the artworld. This social function is all the more important because globalisation, decolonial and postcolonial questions and feminist, queer and trans revolutions have torn up the old critical maps and brought new ways of conceiving and practising art. This transformation

Weighing Words

Criticism is cheap, especially in France, say Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières. And here’s why that’s such a problem

Félix Vallotton, Félix Fénéon à La Revue Blanche, 1896, oil on cardboard, 52 × 66 cm. © akg-images / Erich Lessing 20

ArtReview

is so truly international that, in the space of three decades, art criticism has completely reinvented itself in its methods and arguments, drawing its resources from philosophy, anthropology, the humanities, social sciences and ‘hard’ science, as much as from activist texts and militant actions. The corpus of critical texts has been greatly enriched, testifying to ‘conversations’ taking place across five continents, freed from the traditional demarcations of art and nonart, while increasingly taking into account many visual aspects of political and social phenomena. Criticism is no longer simply a question of establishing genealogies or frameworks; it’s a question of accompanying those dynamics that demand the ongoing reconstruction of critical language. Critical tools are never fixed, but need to be continuously reconfigured. This is a far cry from the ‘sovereign judgments’, rankings, comparative evaluations and other kinds of taxonomies imposed on artists, which are still often imagined as the normal function of the ‘influential’ critic. In a globalised, neoliberal world, even supranational megagalleries understand this. Those exquisite publications devoted to the artists they represent are no longer only luxurious objects but are replete with an impeccable scholarship that the galleries are ready to finance. Museums,

like universities, are the guarantors of these new standards, their editorial rigour an essential part of the artworld ecosystem. But French public institutions haven’t understood this. Rather than being part of this ecosystem, they present themselves as models of excellence, while excusing themselves from the responsibility of properly paying those on whom they call to write their publications. For example, the Centre Pompidou, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris currently pay between €40 and €46 per page (roughly 250 words). For each essay – about a month’s work – writers can expect a fee well below the minimum monthly wage, which, in France, means they cannot qualify for social security for artists and authors. To turn intellectual work (an ensemble of competences including research, writing, graphic design, curating) into an ever more shrinkable item on your budget sheet (where shipment, insurance values and pr are not reduced) is to mark it out as superfluous. As a result, you end up excluding yourself, in effect, from transnational relations of power. A work cannot be seen, let alone exported, without critical validation. The agents of this validation are neither the auction prices nor the purchases of famous collectors, contrary to what some believe. What ensures the reception of artworks is that they are shown, scrutinised, analysed, commented on; that they gradually enter into the conversations of their generation and of following generations. An artwork that has no value other than market value cannot go down in history. It should come as no surprise, then, that French artists have almost disappeared from major international exhibitions (including Documenta), as well as from the few dozen biennials that really matter around the world (with Venice, built around national pavilions, being the exception). This absence is not due to a ‘decline of the French scene’ but to the suppression of all points of critical mediation that are essential to the international accreditation without which an artist, a group or a collective cannot become visible outside of France. Those whom we might cite as counterexamples (such as – for example – Pierre Huyghe or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) are those who, by contrast, have been able to acquire a strong critical ‘passport’. The precarity of intellectuals in the artworld is all the more obscene given the amount of money that flows through it. It gives the impression that criticism is not a livelihood but a bourgeois pastime (or one for bourgeois women, according to a well-established sexist tradition), a luxury. The terrain thus appears

to be booby-trapped for future generations of critics, on which new generations of artists will rely. It is not enough to lament the much discussed ‘end of art criticism’. It is necessary to take stock of its crushing effect on French society: it is the reduction to silence of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals that is at stake here. Some of them have taken matters into their own hands (for instance W.A.G.E. in the United States, Wages for Wages Against in Switzerland, ‘les vagues‘ or La Buse in France). More important, as in the theatre circuit (which seems to know better – at least in France – how to make these voices heard), these are collectives that not only demand to be able to make a living from their work, but have been able to associate these demands with that of a better representation of women, racialised people, trans and nonbinary people or disabled people. And this issue – the fight against all discrimination – is inseparable from the critical horizon for which we are fighting.

Pierre Bonnard, La Revue Blanche, 1891, lithograph in four colours, 80 × 60 cm. © Bibliothèque nationale de France

December 2019

Elisabeth Lebovici is an art historian, journalist and critic, and Patricia Falguières is a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, both based in Paris. This text was originally published in French in Libération

Is it ‘artwashing’ for the state to fund a biennial raising awareness of the climate crisis, even when that money comes in large part from the extraction of fossil fuels? Devoted to the ‘expanded moving image in public space’ and hosted in the Norwegian city of Stavanger, the 2019 edition of Screen City Biennial was titled Ecologies – Lost, Found and Continued. This raises the question – given that the oil industry transformed Norway from one of the poorest nations in Europe into one of the richest, and brought prosperity to this historically workingclass port – of the ethics of its engagement with themes of ecological collapse and extinction. Rather than disguise the tensions between subject and site, curators Daniela Arriado and Vanina Saracino chose to highlight them. At Stavanger Airport, Tuomas A. Laitinen’s augmented reality work Tentacle Tongue (2019) drew attention to the fact that the recent proliferation of biennials has relied in large part upon the cheap international flights (including the one that brought me to Stavanger) that make it possible for even relatively small exhibitions to draw an international audience. The positioning of Andrew Norman Wilson’s video Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) in the Norwegian Oil Museum – at the exit from a permanent exhibition about the environmental impact of the industry – felt particularly pointed. Drawing formal parallels between the sucking of mosquitoes (as transmitters of diseases), syringes (in the context of drug addiction) and oil pumps, Wilson provides a poetic counterpoint to the museum’s frank but faltering consideration of how the industry may become more sustainable. Its placement meant

Money Up Front

Juliet Jacques on the importance of staging ethical conflicts without pretending to resolve them

top Vincent Carelli, O Espírito da tv (still), 1990, video, 18 min. © the artist. Courtesy Videobrasil, São Paulo above Oliver Ressler, Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: The zad, 2017, hd video, 36 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

the work was also likely to receive a larger local audience – and thus move beyond the signalling of virtuous intentions to an international artworld – than attended the screening programmes at which most of the films and videos included in the biennial were shown. These were staged in the city’s Odeon rather than in Stavanger Art Museum, presumably in an effort to avoid preaching solely to the converted. Again, the programming suggested a preoccupation with how artists could engage with the environmental crisis while also colluding with its architects. Vincent Carelli’s O Espírito da tv (1990) shows people from Brazil’s indigenous Waiãpi group discussing the impact of seeing themselves on tv, less than 20 years after settlers first contacted them. Carelli used no narration and kept editing to a minimum, letting his interviewees bring up the issues around cultural appropriation and neocolonialism that are structured into ethnographic filmmaking, remaining aware that such work cannot resolve them. I felt the contradictions most strongly in Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez’s Tidal Pulse ii (2019), a soundwork commissioned to accompany a cruise of the fjords around Stavanger. Listened to through headphones, the work was extraordinary: a three-hour combination of ambient music, sounds sampled from the ship and interviews with artists, locals and oil workers, investigating the biennial’s ethical tensions in far greater depth than any other contribution. This was reinforced by the work’s real-life backdrop as seen from the ship, which stretched the ‘expanded cinema’ concept to its limit by replacing the representation of the landscape with its reality. But the impact of Ramírez’s work was restricted by two factors. Firstly, the nature of the commission meant that it was only likely to reach a relatively small number of festival-goers; secondly, it armed listeners with information about the

environmental and cultural impact of the oil industry, but offered little idea of what could be done, politically, with this knowledge. Austrian filmmaker Oliver Ressler’s two documentary films of Camps for Climate Action – at which activists gather to organise direct action against polluters – offered a model for wider impact and more direct action. Not only did the artist, whose work has always combined radical politics and formal experimentalism, gain the participants’ trust by making it clear that his aesthetic principles were subordinate to their politics, he has made the works available for online distribution under a Creative Commons license (as well as showing at biennials). Artists who really want to agitate for change, Ressler suggested, should put themselves at the service of activism rather than demand that activists concern themselves with art. It is significant in the context of current debates around the oil industry and ‘artwashing’ that this biennial is funded by a state that invested the profits generated by the oil boom in advancing social-democratic principles. This did not and could not resolve the fundamental tension between the biennial’s theme and its site. But the fact that this is publicly funded (and introduced with a speech by the city’s new left-leaning mayor) does at least establish a link between artists and political representatives.

If that can apply pressure on the people who might, ultimately, push towards the government-level action necessary to address the climate crisis, then there is value in staging the contradictions inherent to any collision between ‘moving images’ and ‘public space’, or art and the world. Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London

top Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016, hd video, sound, 8 min 30 sec. Courtesy the artist above Enrique Ramírez, Tidal Pulse ii, 2019, site-responsive sound performance. Courtesy the artist

December 2019

I haven’t been dancing in over a year. As I’ve grown older, and as the comedowns that once lasted an afternoon have come to extend for days, my desire to flex my avuncular moves in public has dwindled (although I should confess that decamping to a writer’s residency in the Canadian Rockies for three months has, perhaps, accelerated the process). But – to dress up the symptoms of my ageing in artspeak – I might also say that my recent absence from the dancefloor reflects a shift in my relation to the social dynamics of contemporary art. The closest I’ve been to a dj booth recently was karaoke night at Bruno’s Bar & Grill here in Banff. The bruised alliteration of that phrase captures the mood of the place: thick-necked, bearded Canadians in trucker caps nursing ipas at the bar, gloomily refusing to acknowledge the singers busting lungs on the makeshift stage behind them. I watched as Justin – a local celebrity who moonlights as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant – launched into a monotone rendition of Everybody Knows (1975) by Leonard Cohen. By most musical metrics it was an appalling performance, but an oddly affecting one. I thought of Andy Kaufman’s deadpan Dadaism, minus the startlingly convincing Elvis impersonations. “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich,” sang Justin. I cheered him on. Much of my dancing until recently took place at gallery afterparties, at which, inevitably, an artist would be dj’ing. Those parties appear in retrospect as just another part of the entertainmentindustrial complex: less an escape from the stresses of professional life than a networking session with free beats (the dj rarely got paid) and free booze. Artists of previous generations formed bands; now they spin records. I grew accustomed to the artist-as-amateur-dj archetypes: the ‘kooky’ artist whose cheesy tunes induced flashbacks to dancefloors at weddings; the cheerfully inept

Sounding Off

Patrick Langley laments art’s move on club culture

Terre Thaemlitz aka dj Sprinkles. Photo: Johnathan F. Lee

ArtReview

enthusiast whose every mix was a musical car crash; the postironic hipster who dropped Hotline Bling (2016) five times; the white bro who spun grime to look street. At their worst, these parties collapsed the distinction between clubbing and networking, leisure and labour, sucked the fun out of dancing with friends. As Cohen wrote and Justin interpreted: “Everybody knows the deal is rotten”. Artists can also be very good djs, as Juliana Huxtable proved via a memorably jagged set at an afterparty a few years ago. But the few who are equally skilled in both fields can be ambivalent about operating across the different economies of clubs and galleries. In a recent interview, Huxtable (the cofounder of ‘nightlife gender project’ Shock Value) described moving from Texas to New York, where the clubs were ‘way more diverse than any other self-identified creative, left-of-centre space, you know?’ In clubs ‘there are trans women older than me who I can look up to’; which begs the question of whether art spaces, for all their declared commitments to diversity, can offer the same sense of community and connection. I’ve seen the trans artist, composer and deep house producer Terre Thaemlitz perform as dj Sprinkles so many times that my memories have collapsed into a blur. She is clear-eyed about the compromises artists who dj are forced to make, and says she works as Sprinkles out of economic necessity. I’ve had more fun dancing to Sprinkles’s sets than anyone else’s, but I’m also acutely conscious of having seen her in clubs with a different (whiter, straighter) clientele than the sex worker-friendly, hiv/aids-activist venues in which she found a community after moving to New York during the 1980s (because those are the clubs that can afford to pay the airfare over from Japan, where she now lives). And I’m equally conscious of my unearned nostalgia for a midtown Manhattan scene kept alive in Thaemlitz’s words – she has been critical of the gentrification of those underground scenes and spaces – and her record choices – as a remembrance of dancefloors past. Echoing Huxtable, Thaemlitz has made clear that the euphoria of clubbing is secondary to its community, specifically the ‘intergenerational trans scene’ in which knowledge – how to stay safe, access hormones – is passed on. In her track Ball’r (Madonna-Free Zone) (2008), Sprinkles rails against Madonna’s “decontextualised, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, regenderized pop reflection” of voguing in her 1990 record. The aforementioned forms of support and exchange are lost when club cultures are transposed into art spaces, when subculture is transformed into karaoke. “Everybody knows the scene is dead,” Justin sang. Patrick Langley is a critic and novelist based in London

London Art Fair Islington N1 0QH

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EXCEPTIONAL MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

Dawn Kasper in the opening performance ofÂ The Wolf and The Head on Fire, 2019, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Dawn Kasper

“We’re so caught up with vision in art. We can’t take on sound. We can’t touch. You get too close to art and an alarm starts to beep at you”

Dawn Kasper and I met nine years ago while I was living inside an installation. My band had created a ‘temporary village’ at Human Resources Los Angeles, a gallery Kasper was then corunning, and we were sleeping and performing music inside it daily. This was a hazy, exhausting time, and I remember few specifics of the encounter, except for Kasper’s physical presence: all eyes – wide open and roving – with an ebullient, radiating energy that encouraged us to keep going. Soon after, I saw her presence take its performative form in an apartment in Lower Manhattan. For half an hour, a small crowd watched as she frantically fumbled with a massive, unwieldy sheet of paper, attempting to pin it to the wall while she delivered an ecstatic stream of a lecture. It was enthralling. Kasper works in myriad forms and disciplines, but intimacy and vulnerability are threaded into everything she does. Early performance works titled The Evil Series or Death Scenes (2001–07) involved her playing

dead in various environments, captured in brutal photographs that still shock me when I look at them. She’s perhaps best known for her ongoing Nomadic Studio Practice (2008–), in which she moved her entire studio contents to the 2012 Whitney Biennial and, five years later, to the 57th Venice Biennale, continuing to make her daily work (painting, drawing, etc) in full public view. As viewers shuffle through she chats with them, or uses loud music to make it clear she’s not in a talking mood. Sound has often been a key component in Kasper’s work, and recent performances have grown increasingly musical. The physical materials of her installations are those of a concert: cables, guitars, chairs and old recording devices, which contain sonic documents of her life, friends and previous performances. During the last few years she’s also begun creating sound sculptures: Cluster (2016) is a collection of cymbals activated by motors and triggered by motion sensors as viewers wander through the space.

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As usually happens with music, Kasper often collaborates, both with visual artists (such as painter Lucy Dodd) and musicians (such as harpist Zeena Parkins), and in 2012 I was lucky enough to work with her at an exhibition she curated in Manhattan. This past May, at Portikus, a contemporary exhibition space attached to Frankfurt’s Städelschule, she staged an entire series of sound performances, each with a different collaborator and all within the exhibition. A few months after this show, Kasper came over to my home in New York, which was the first time we’d seen each other in six years. In that period she had made her way from Los Angeles to Manhattan to the quiet town of Kingston in upstate New York, where she now lives. Her hair had grown long and thick, with a few electric streaks of silver that gave the depth of age to her physicality. We took a moment to acknowledge the passing of time, and then we picked up the conversation where we had left it.

Belly moments rs Your recent show at Portikus is based on a myth. Can you recount it? dk The title of the exhibition was The Wolf and The Head on Fire. It’s from a fable of Aesop’s called ‘The Wolf and the Kid’: a young billy goat runs away from the herd and meets a wolf. The kid stalls the wolf, asks the wolf to play him a dinner song on the flute. rs A dinner song? dk A common song that you play before you eat, apparently. And as he plays this song, the herd hears the song being played, and they come to scare away the wolf and save the kid. The story is about distraction. The wolf and the kid both needed to stay their course. And I thought of that as a warning, because all these tales and myths are warnings of some kind. My therapist, who is kind of like a witchy mom, once told me that I have a wolf inside of me, so I’d been thinking about that while I was preparing for the Portikus show. I was very overwhelmed with work and teaching, and for several months I felt like I was stuck in the belly of a whale. rs Like Pinocchio. dk Joseph Campbell talks about how different religions are using the same stories over and over. Grimm’s fairytales, or Aesop’s, for example. rs Everyone’s life has a ‘belly’ moment.

rs How so? dk Well, I’m not trying to play the victim, but we all suffer, to some extent, and we have the power to lean into that suffering. But I don’t think society has space to talk about this, especially around something like mental health. So for me sound as repetition is very cleansing, a way to get into that kind of suffering. rs Mantra. dk Perfect example. These are literally waves in the air that we feel. The giant truck that goes by, we may not see it, but we still take it on, physically. Or when someone yells at you, it seeps into your consciousness beyond the words they are saying. Or maybe you’re just hanging out with friends, having tea, but there’s this whole other level of sensing going on. And in a way this second chance at life has been due to that awareness of sound. I feel like I’m awake. And I asked for it. I asked to let go of the traumatic experiences that weren’t serving me anymore. And I figured out that

“I’m not trying to suggest that I’m manipulating people, but you can activate a certain awareness in the brain by repeating certain sounds, like footsteps” it’s okay. And it’s not a big deal to keep moving. Art can address that kind of threshold of the senses.

dk Exactly. I was having a hard time balancing my life and wanted to create an environment of sound in this work to help locate my path again. I’m fascinated with how sound and the repetition of sound can reactivate your synapses, how it can reprogramme you, though I’m not suggesting that we are all programmed.

dk Prayer, chanting, ringing bells to call the angels.

rs Have you had that experience of being reactivated?

rs And you work with all those: you just showed a bell sculpture at Portikus, right?

dk Yes. Yes.

dk Yeah, I hung about 40 to 50 bells from the ceiling so that people could interact with them. I wanted the work to be more personal in this way. I had contact microphones and speakers on the bells, which makes everything sound like guitars.

rs What happened? dk Through the power of voice and singing. It’s like laughing yoga, how you just go somewhere and laugh. It’s a release. But singing is my practice. By singing certain songs, they call in a certain level of awareness. rs Like dinner songs. dk Yes! The Aesop’s fable for me is about rising above distraction, because right now I actually feel like I’m getting a second chance at life.

rs There’s a reason sound is central to so many spiritual traditions. It’s a form of sonic communication that is not our mundane verbal language.

rs I like your idea of sound clusters. Sound is so messy, which is why exhibiting it can be tricky. It leaks into the next room. It’s not tidy and contained like a painting. facing page, top The Wolf and The Head on Fire, 2019 (installation view, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main) facing page, bottom The Wolf and The Head on Fire, 2019 performance with James Krone

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dk Sound is not received well in museums. Sound affects us all too much. I always notice this being in a city, where sound is all around us. It’s the same in galleries. But honestly I’m having a difficult awareness with art and contemporary art and fine art, and how it’s perceived. How it changes the perception of sound, specifically in this entertainment way. rs Because that’s reducing it? dk Because art has an ability to heal, to offer a platform for people to learn deeply and become aware on a community level. There’s no right or wrong. Contemporary art has an ability to transcend commodification and consumer culture, but it’s still stuck in that place in the 1980s. I still value Warhol and Koons, who paved the way for this kind of thinking, but, for example, in an art fair, the sound just becomes entertainment, which diffuses the sincerity. That’s just what happens. Music and art become entertainment and icons that get pushed to the front. rs The stage. dk I’m thinking of Patti Smith and the New York Dolls. Or how the Velvet Underground activated Warhol’s paintings.

Screamo bands rs You were in punk band when you were younger, right? dk I grew up near Washington, dc, in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. I’d go to see Fugazi, my friends and I would skip high school and go see them on the Mall. That’s how you got your political information as a kid. You didn’t watch Reagan on the tv. That was my voice. I wrote angsty poetry and sang in screamo bands. (At the time, emo was different.) I became obsessed with Sonic Youth and Kim Gordon, and tried to play bass. It was a lot of fun. But I always thought of art and sound as very different, even though there’s this whole tradition of art bands, like Ariel Pink, who just sang and used boomboxes, NewVillager, Lightning Bolt, Gang Gang Dance and Charlemagne Palestine. rs Did you work on sound in grad school? dk Yeah, because I wrote. It was a kind of concrete poetry. And my early videowork was a kind of visual music. Like Fantasia. Or Jennifer Steinkamp, who made interactive videos of plants. I thought of it as a soundtrack. That’s how it started. It came from Brecht and John Cage. But a lot of my performance in the beginning was about regurgitating my

December 2019

ArtReview

questions onto the audience, whereas now I’m trying to take responsibility for my questions. I want to be forthright about how I’m searching. rs You studied with Paul McCarthy, who has a sound component to his work that isn’t often discussed. dk We’re so caught up with vision in art. We can’t take on sound. We can’t touch. You get too close to art and an alarm starts to beep at you. I had a friend experience McCarthy’s ws (2013) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and they told me that first they had a visual experience, but there was so much going on, so they closed their eyes and had a totally different experience. It was like Disneyland. You hear something different than what you see. There’s a kind of consciousness that can be reached with such overwhelming stimulation. We can’t consciously take it on. Mike Kelley also worked with sound a lot. I saw his show at the Pompidou a few years ago, and the whole first section was sound sculptures. And Mike and Paul were in Extended Organ; Paul plays various sounds and noises. It’s kind of industrial noise. He’ll play a chainsaw or a grinder on a cymbal or he runs recordings through amps.

Deep listening rs Your soundwork uses a lot of your recordings. Where do those come from? dk I tend to, wherever I go, wherever I perform, make a lot of recordings. So, for example, at the Venice Biennale I installed an artist studio and I went every day and made sounds. And people came into the room and they enter into the recordings. Sound is just something you can work with and it’s not that expensive and it’s everywhere. And it’s casual. You can have someone over to the house and make some recordings and see what happens.

rs Smartphones makes recording so egalitarian. Do you use that much? dk Yeah. Garage Band is amazing and I do use an Ableton mini. But I haven’t used phones in an exhibition yet because I value the clunky equipment and tapes that deteriorate. I have a collection of various tape recorders that allow me to slow down and speed up recordings. I like vhs tapes and deck-to-deck editing. I want to show the timeline of technology. I like how it’s faulty. I want to reuse sounds over and over. When I was young, I worked with Jason Rhoades, who would reuse his materials in installations, kind of repurposing. And I always think about Hitchcock, who would make cameos in his films. It’s this usage of repetition as a material. That repetition is why I’m interested in performance. Bottom line. Having that thread. Showing the passage of time is a form of storytelling. Performatively speaking, you can also utilise sound to structure an environment. facing page, top The Wolf and The Head on Fire, 2019, performance with Mariechen Danz facing page, bottom The Wolf and The Head on Fire, 2019, performance with Jeff Preiss above The Wolf and The Head on Fire, 2019, performance with Dawn Kasper all images Photos: Diana Pfammatter. Courtesy the artist and David Lewis Gallery, New York

December 2019

I’m not trying to suggest that I’m manipulating people, but in this way you can activate a certain awareness in the brain by repeating certain sounds, like footsteps. We all know shopping centres and restaurants use sound in this way. Starbucks will play their Christmas cd and it’s available at the counter, but meanwhile there’s a certain time signature or tempo that encourages people to get in and out at a certain time. I’ve heard that bodegas in the city play a certain tone that only teenagers can hear. It annoys them, so they go away. Sound can be used like this, and so can the absence of sound. rs You’re always travelling and amassing sounds, and your work has for a long time been about nomadism, but now you have a nice, quiet home in upstate New York. dk I love travelling in cities, but I have to have a bubble around me for protection, to protect the sensitive bits from all the stress and anxiety and sounds. But I like quiet. When I was driving here, I sat in quiet so that I could hear my thoughts. Living upstate is very helpful. I have a community and have a singing group up there. I play a lot of music. I’m renting a house and want to do some listening sessions. Pauline Oliveros used to live up there and had her Deep Listening Institute up there. I’m not far from Woodstock, either. There’s a history up there. I’ve been also literally unpacking all my sounds, my cassettes, and sorting through them. But I actually came there searching for healing. A lot of people come there to heal – Kingston is a magical healing hub. It’s eagles and hawks and farms and birds and falcons and water. Joseph Campbell talks about how we are trying to return to paradise, and upstate New York is, for me, about as close to paradise as it gets. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

Christian Boltanski, Les Écrans, 1999. Photo: Mariusz Michalski. © Adagp, Paris, 2019. Courtesy Archives Christian Boltanski

Judy Chicago, Smoke Bodies from Women and Smoke, 1972, fireworks performance in the California Desert. Photo: Through the Flower Archives. © the artist / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

3 Betty Woodman, Still Life #11, 1990, glazed and polychromed ceramic, 89 × 26 × 19 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

ArtReview

Coming Up by Martin Herbert

Used clothing; immortals; opioid-mongers; nascent technologies; crash-pad vibes; stream-of-consciousness-referencing curating; and Nefertiti-referencing assemblages

Centre Pompidou, Paris, through 16 March

It’s a decade now since 1 Christian Boltanski filled Paris’s vast Grand Palais with Personnes (2010), piles of used clothing and the sound of human heartbeats, the latter part of an audio archive that the French artist is compiling to eventually have stored on a distant Japanese island. And it’s 35 years since the mortalityand-memory obsessed Boltanski had his first show at the Centre Pompidou. During that time, as this 50-work show will illuminate, he’s moved from plangent memorials using manipulated, individually lit photographs – particularly Jewish children during the 1930s – to become a maestro of largescale installations both unsettling and absurd. He’s also become his own archivist, having sold Tasmanian collector David Walsh the rights, in 2009, to a 24-hour live feed of his studio until the artist’s death. Boltanski’s controlling instincts extend to this self-designed retrospective, which the institution calls a ‘vast journey into the heart of his work’ and which ticks off a myriad of emblematic pieces, from the desolate memorabilia of Vitrine de référence (1971) to the three-

screen Misterios (2017), documenting an installation of three giant trumpets in Patagonia that use the wind to mimic whale song. Why whales? Boltanski reckons these ancient, enduring creatures might have the answers to life’s largest questions; humans Baltic Centre for certainly don’t. Contemporary Art, Gateshead, through At the age of 19 April 2 eighty, Judy Chicago 3 is finally getting a retrospective in the uk. To be fair, the artist who took a new surname from her hometown has never been forgotten, thanks to her immortal The Dinner Party (1979). This hugely significant feminist artwork serves – excuse the pun – as a history of significant women in civilisation via 39 place settings on embroidered runners, memorialising figures from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Georgia O’Keeffe and, having toured extensively, has apparently been seen by some 15 million people. The rest of Chicago’s oeuvre, though, is rather less known. Baltic’s show traces its 50-year span, from her feminist Land art during the late 60s and early performative works in the desert – Chicago became a teacher at CalArts during the early 70s – to The End: A Meditation

December 2019

on Death and Extinction (2013–16), an exploration of mortality expressed primarily via some 40 porcelain and glass works corresponding to the five stages of grief. Recent decades have seen craft aesthetics like Chicago’s appearing to swing repeatedly back into fashion in reaction to hands-off, fabricated artmaking, but that’s the short version of a longer story. The Whitney’s Making Whitney Knowing: Craft in Art 1950–2019 argues Museum, for a seven-decade continuum of artists New York, knitting, potting, beading, glassmaking through etc, with a myriad of rationales, not January 2021 least the desire to undercut machismo, reclaim the vernacular and mess with perceived standards concerning what constitutes art. This rubric, articulated through some 80 works by 60 artists, makes for some surprising bedfellows – the bed is covered, obviously, with a handmade quilt – from Eva Hesse to Mike Kelley, Liza Lou to Robert Rauschenberg. It also recasts craft as a form of subversion, linked to queer aesthetics and feminism but also abstraction and popular culture. Meanwhile, and as the title’s dates suggest, in order to avoid presenting a history

lesson but rather offer up a living tradition, the aspect of vr, it’s argued, is similar to the surreshow is craftily augmented by new commissions alist game of the exquisite corpse, in which from, inter alia, Shan Goshorn, Simone Leigh multiple makers are involved in the creation and Erin Jane Nelson. of something – there, on paper, here with At the other end of the spectrum, meansilly-looking goggles on. Roll up, anyway, and while, there’s virtual experience soaring sea levels with Abramović’s Phi Centre, Montreal, reality, still knocking on through 19 January ‘troubling yet poetic’ Rising (2018), immerse the artworld’s door. As yourself in a bad-trip Western via McCarthy’s Coach Stage Stage Coach (2017) and travel into 4 showcased in Cadavre exquis, a range of artists in recent years have taken up the still-nascent outer space with Gormley, if that’s your thing. technology, from figures you might expect (Meanwhile, I’m off to get Marian Goodman, (Olafur Eliasson) to those you mightn’t (hello, a job doing voiceovers for London, through Antony Gormley), much of it boosted by the film trailers.) 11 January Daniel Birnbaum-helmed startup Acute Art. Of late, Nan Goldin’s 5 To the aforementioned artists’ names, this show abilities as an activist against opioid-mongers adds figures including Paul McCarthy, Laurie the Sackler family – and the art institutions Anderson, Marina Abramović and Koo Jeong A, that facilitate their artwashing – has threatened and a curatorial conceit that links high- and to eclipse her artistic career. In the midst of low-tech. The choose-your-own-adventure her campaigning, though, she joined Marian

Goodman Gallery, and her first show there, Sirens, is a reminder of Goldin’s greatness behind the camera. But it also serves as an extension of her cause. Alongside a mix of historical works including a reedit of her superb The Other Side (1994–2019), the exhibition showcases her new digital slideshow, Memory Lost (2019), ‘recounting a life lived through the lens of drug addiction’, and a seeming counterpart to her legendary 1985 slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Which would seem like plenty, but the show also includes a new, three-screen video installation, Salome (2019), adopting the Biblical story to emphasise wider themes of seduction, temptation and revenge, and a cooldown selection of sky and landscape photos, a counterpoint to the ravages documented elsewhere. In 1977 the jazz musicians Abdullah Ibrahim and Max Roach made a record called Streams of

4 Marina Abramović, Rising, 2018, virtual reality. Courtesy the artist and Acute Art, London

5 Nan Goldin, Memory Lost, 2019. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery New York, Paris & London

ArtReview

7 Ernesto Neto, Celula Nave. It happens in the body of time, where truth dances, 2004, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

6 Adama Jalloh, from the series Love Story, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy the artist

8 Isa Genzken, Schauspieler ii, 4 (detail), 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Peder Lund, Oslo

MALBA, Buenos Aires, through 16 February

Consciousness, remarking as they did so that they the African artworld, including hoped one day it’d lend its name to a photogBouchra Khalili, Guy Woueté, raphy biennale in Mali. That moment has now Badr El Hammami, Theaster come: the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters, Gates and The Otolith Group. 6 Limber up. An Ernesto Neto artwork under artistic director 7 Various venues, generally asks for your participation – he’s Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Bamako, through one of the major proponents, even anticipaNdikung and a team of 31 January tors, of relational aesthetics, though his work curators, uses the record’s might also recall the crash-pad vibes of fellow title as a jumping-off point to consider lensBrazilian Hélio Oiticica and neoconcrete based media as, indeed, a stream of consciousart in general – and this retrospective, Soplo, ness, any photograph being merely a momentary is 60 works strong. Neto’s art often invites you outcropping of a continuous inner voicing. to climb into tunnels or recline in hammockBeyond that, the idea of a ‘stream’ is also applied like crocheted shapes, touch stocking fabric here to Africa, its diasporas and its cultures: ‘the and whiff the spices he inserts into his art. flux of ideas, peoples, cultures that flow across The institution asserts that this is not just and along with rivers like the Niger, Congo, Nile chillout art: Neto, they claim, is interested or Mississippi’. Expect articulations on these in the relationship between the individual themes from some 85 photographic artists from

December 2019

and the collective, as modelled by the groups of viewers engaging with his art. This establishes a space, potentially at least, for ritual, and Neto wants to stress the spiritual aspects of bodily awareness. Related to that, one room in the show showcases Neto’s recent work with the political and spiritual leaders of the Huni Kuin peoples, indigenous Brazilians and Peruvians who live on the banks of the Peder Lund, Oslo, countries’ rivers. through 15 February Has Isa Genzken 8 ever had an exhibition in Norway, you ask? Well, last month I’d have said no, but now… anyway, enough blather, the storied German artist is descending on Oslo with, apparently, work from her major phases since the 1980s, including her half-architecture, half-abstraction ‘New Buildings’ maquettes, Nefertiti-referencing

assemblages, and – of course – paint-doused mannequins that eerily undercut consumerist urges. As ever with Genzken, the structures of advanced capitalism provide a jumpingoff point for art that at once feels critical but also reroutes the energies of what it analyses. That said, you never know with her whether you’re going to get a lively display or an oddly static one: fingers crossed that this show, which features ‘five major sculptural works, as well as two outstanding wall works’, is one of the former. But enough artists with decades of activity behind them. How about South London some with, like, hours of activity behind them instead. Gallery, 5 December 9 Every year, Bloomberg – 24 February New Contemporaries filters the best recent uk fine art graduates through the subjective scrim of guest

selectors, this time Ben Rivers, Rana Begum and Sonia Boyce. And, as you might expect, a show that takes the measure of young British art in the twenty-first century is less defined by a guiding style than heterogeneity: the inclusions here range from Paul Jex’s pointed deconstructions of the language of The Guardian’s artist obituaries – noting how many times Anthony Caro’s name was mentioned in his partner’s obit – to Jan Agha’s paintings of angry-faced cartoonish figures, to Annie Mackinnon’s video in which a naked middleaged man in a plastic bag with compost in it, an outfit seemingly responding in some way to climate change, opines to camera that he ‘think[s] the fashion industry is a pile of shit’. Ren Hang 10 C/O Berlin, didn’t live to 7 December see his 30th year – 29 February – depressive,

he died by suicide in 2017 – but by the time of his death he’d already achieved plenty. Within the censorious context of contemporary China, Ren’s photography gravitated to gay erotica, which won him the support of fellow iconoclast Ai Weiwei (who included him in the memorably titled 2013 show Fuck Off 2 The Sequel). His work is characterised by beauty and abstraction, bending the bodies of his sitters into unlikely, near-unintelligible shapes in a manner recalling Edward Weston, and mixing iconographic references to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Leda and the Swan, etc. Ren mixed his artmaking with editorial spreads for high fashion – not least Gucci – and managed to straddle the two by, as Ai pointed out, vouchsafing emptiness and superficiality. At c/o Berlin, a comprehensive retrospective featuring some 150 works explores his bittersweet legacy, its title aptly a tender signoff: Love, Ren Hang.

9 Annie Mackinnon, Compost Daddy, 2018. Courtesy the artist and New Contemporaries, London

10 Ren Hang, Untitled 39, 2012. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

ArtReview

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Participating Galleries Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Altman Siegel Applicat-Prazan Alfonso Artiaco B Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Ruth Benzacar Bergamin & Gomide Berggruen Fondation Beyeler Blum & Poe Peter Blum Boers-Li Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Luciana Brito Ben Brown Gavin Brown Buchholz C Canada Cardi Casa Triângulo David Castillo Ceysson & Bénétière Cheim & Read Clearing James Cohan Sadie Coles HQ Continua Paula Cooper Corbett vs. Dempsey Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel D DAN DC Moore Massimo De Carlo Di Donna

E Andrew Edlin frank elbaz Essex Street F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman G Gaga Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Gladstone Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Garth Greenan Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra Kavi Gupta H Hammer Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Max Hetzler High Art Hirschl & Adler Rhona Hoffman Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens hunt kastner I Ingleby Taka Ishii J Alison Jacques rodolphe janssen Catriona Jeffries Annely Juda K Kalfayan Casey Kaplan

Karma Kasmin kaufmann repetto Kayne Griffin Corcoran Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Peter Kilchmann Tina Kim Kohn David Kordansky Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Kukje kurimanzutto

N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Francis M. Naumann Leandro Navarro neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake

L Labor Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Leme Lévy Gorvy Lisson Luhring Augustine

P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Parra & Romero Franklin Parrasch Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber Proyectos Monclova

M Magazzino Mai 36 Maisterravalbuena Jorge Mara - La Ruche Matthew Marks Marlborough Mary-Anne Martin Philip Martin Jaqueline Martins Barbara Mathes Mazzoleni Miles McEnery Greta Meert Anthony Meier Menconi + Schoelkopf Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mnuchin Modern Art The Modern Institute mor charpentier

O Nathalie Obadia OMR

R Ratio 3 Almine Rech Regen Projects Revolver Roberts Projects Nara Roesler Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Michael Rosenfeld Lia Rumma S Salon 94 SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Thomas Schulte Marc Selwyn Jack Shainman Sicardi Ayers Bacino Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Jessica Silverman

Simões de Assis Skarstedt Fredric Snitzer Société Sperone Westwater Sprüth Magers Nils Stærk Christian Stein Stevenson Luisa Strina T Templon Thomas Tilton Tornabuoni Travesía Cuatro V Van de Weghe Van Doren Waxter Vedovi Vermelho Vielmetter W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube Z Zeno X David Zwirner Nova Antenna Space Barro blank Carlos/Ishikawa Central Fine Chapter NY Company Anat Ebgi Thomas Erben James Fuentes Ghebaly Mariane Ibrahim Isla Flotante JTT David Lewis Josh Lilley Linn Lühn Edouard Malingue moniquemeloche Morán Morán Nanzuka

Jérôme Poggi ROH Projects Anita Schwartz Tiwani Contemporary Positions Sabrina Amrani Christian Andersen Bendana-Pinel Maria Bernheim Callicoon Commonwealth and Council Cooper Cole Document Agustina Ferreyra M+B Madragoa Magician Space Project Native Informant Marilia Razuk Edition Cristea Roberts Crown Point Gemini G.E.L. Carolina Nitsch Pace Prints Paragon Polígrafa Susan Sheehan STPI Two Palms ULAE Survey 10 Chancery Lane acb Almeida e Dale Nicelle Beauchene Tibor de Nagy espaivisor Eric Firestone Hackett Mill Hales Pippy Houldsworth Instituto de visión Mitterrand Parker Louis Stern Venus Over Manhattan waldengallery

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And hang you on a gibbet 47

Forces of Nature by Oliver Basciano Portrait by Juan Brenner

How the Guatemala-based Swiss painter Vivian Suter learned to work with nature and cede control

When the storm came after lunch at Vivian Suter’s home in Panajachel, Her work from before the hurricane occasionally contained I assumed that, though heavy, it was standard for the dog days of geometric patterns reminiscent of the Mayan textiles still frequently Guatemala’s rainy season. Perhaps the deluge would stop in an hour: seen worn on the streets in town, but she says the influence was a short, sharp downpour, leaving the air refreshed. Later that night, as never intended. For the most part they were highly wrought abstracthe rain continued and torrents streamed ankle-deep down the main tions, made with roughly handled, heavily laden brushstrokes. street of the tiny town, the drains failing to contain them, it became Occasionally the use of green makes the connection to the surroundings of their production explicit, but in truth all the works, in their clear that this was not normal. Arriving back at Suter’s house from my hotel the next morning, tangled, dense composition, depict – if anything – the former coffee she pointed to a large rock at the bottom of the steep path leading up to plantation that constitutes Suter’s garden. In 2005, as she desperately the hut and veranda where she paints. The boulder hadn’t been there tried to clean the muck from her canvases, Suter began to realise that the day before; dislodged by the rain, it had evidently rolled down fighting nature was futile. Not only must she accept it as a pervasive through the garden’s tangled ferns, coffee plants and spineless yuccas, part of life in rural Guatemala, however harsh, she further imagined passing under the fig and mango trees, banana and fishtail palms to that these lush surroundings could actually become an active agent rest on a small patch of lawn by the in her artmaking. From that point on, Not only must she accept nature as a back door. Suter looked concerned. rather than trying vainly to protect It was, she said, a small but frightpervasive part of life in rural Guatemala, her paintings from the elements, she’d leave them in the garden to ening reminder of the 2005 landslide however harsh, she further imagined that gather detritus across their surfaces: that had devastated the building she these lush surroundings could actually stores her work in. an invitation to the rain, falling leaves Over 1,500 people are thought to become an active agent in her artmaking and fauna to do their worst upon the have died in Guatemala alone when canvases (even, in one case, a possum Hurricane Stan hit Central America 14 years ago. While thankful that peeing on a painting). It was a resolution that would, in time, bring she and her family were safe – Suter then shared her home with her recognition from museums and galleries internationally and, if it son, who now lives across the lake, and her mother, Elizabeth Wild, hasn’t brought the artist in from the cold, has certainly tempered her also an artist – seeing her studio destroyed was a personal tragedy. reclusion in the Guatemalan heat. She had been working here for 20 years, having decamped from Suter, born in Buenos Aires but raised in Basel from the age of Switzerland, where her career had started, and with barely a market, twelve, crossed into Guatemala from Mexico aged thirty-three in so that piles upon piles of canvases were swamped in mud and rubble. December 1982. The Mexicans she had met along the way had warned Suter had told me this story the day before, the rain yet to come, while her obliquely that Guatemala was no place for a Swiss backpacker, sitting in the sun by her favourite tree outside a house crowded with however adventurous. The civil war between the us-installed miliantiques, paintings, photos and books. She’s shy, quietly spoken and tary dictatorship and leftist-Mayan rebels had reached its gruesome pauses at this point in the narrative: the memories are obviously still pinnacle, with state-sponsored disappearances reaching the scale raw. The event led to a crisis, she says, a questioning of her work; the of genocide. Yet the Mexicans were vague, Suter ill-informed, and life choices she had made, even. Why, lacking an audience, had she she took the bus south. She never planned to come to Panajachel come here to make art? either: she had arrived on the western shore of Lake Atitlán intending

preceding pages Vivan Suter in her garden, Panajachel, Guatemala. Photo: Juan Brenner

above Untitled, undated, acrylic on canvas, 170 × 204 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Stampa, Basel; and Gaga, Mexico City

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to travel onwards, but it was getting dark and she was told that taking She admits that she has, on occasion, forgotten a work, only to discover a bus at night was dangerous. She jumped off here, 115km by road from it weeks later, rotting away. In the last stage of the artworks’ journey, Guatemala City. The town was slowly becoming a stop on the hippie they’re carried to the lower studio, a whitewashed barn with corrutrail south from the us and is today speckled with tourist shops and gated transparent plastic skylights, in which they are stored. It was hostels – Juan, the photographer accompanying me on this trip, tells this building that was almost swallowed by the hurricane-induced me that this is where he and his friends used to come to party as errant landslide 14 years ago. teenagers – but back then it remained barely developed. In Suter’s Suter is prolific in her production, and although she now shows and telling of the story it was not the two ramshackle streets that make sells with increasingly regularity, there are still hundreds of canvases up the bulk of this place that enchanted her, nor the lake or the three in this second building, all removed from their frames as she now volcanoes that tower over its shoreline, but a particular tree, a mata- prefers to exhibit them. Some are hung, pegged in parallel, a spacepalo, the strangler fig. (It’s the one I sat under to interview her: the fruit saving device she’s since employed frequently as a mode of installaprovides food for the bats that come out after dark.) She stayed first tion: first at the joint show she and her mother had at Kunsthalle Basel at a local hotel, and then bought the former coffee plantation. (It still in 2014, and at the São Paulo Bienal the same year, and most recently provides a modest harvest; in Suter’s in this past summer’s exhibition at The memories are obviously still raw. Boston’s Institute of Contemporary kitchen are two big sacks of beans.) Art. Others are simply heaped on the She knows every inch of the garThe event led to a crisis, she says, a floor. Her compositions are much den that surrounds her house and her questioning of her work; the life choices lighter now, swirling brushstrokes mother’s home next door (they have she had made, even. Why, lacking an separate entrances from the same often with a paler palette. Occasionally barely tarmacked side street, but audience, had she come here to make art? there is the hint of figuration. Suter a narrow path through the underpoints to one work that, in thick red growth links the two). Suter produces her paintings on the veranda and blue strokes against an unpainted background, depicts one of the of the small hut that, before the trees grew too tall, offered a view of three dogs that accompany her at every step of the painting process, the volcanoes. She first prepares the canvases, stapling them roughly and whose wayward pawprints sometimes traverse a painting. The to a wood frame, then applying a coat of paint. She might leave these amount of detritus stuck to their surface varies wildly: one work, hung out overnight before picking up her brush. On my first visit, one up, has barely a mark across its wash of pastel green. Another, among blank canvas, resting against the side of the building on the earth, had the piles of canvases, is laden with leaves, twigs and dirt, stuck rocka faint splatter of mud along the bottom. Returning the next day, after hard to the water-stained blue and brown painted material. the rain, the dirt had sprayed higher and a small snail was trailing Suter is currently preparing for an incursion into London: an exhiacross the cream surface. Suter paints until late at night, employing bition at Camden Arts Centre, and a commission from the city’s Art a battery-operated light if necessary, using tins of household paint on the Underground programme. The latter is a more complex opershe buys from a diy shop in town. These she mixes with glue and, ation, working with larger-sized canvases that will hang from the occasionally, powder paint from Guatemala City. The canvases are ceiling of Stratford tube station. For the institutional show, however, then carried down the hill, brushing past the undergrowth as they the curators were given free rein to choose the paintings, all part of go, and left out faceup for a few nights under the forest canopy. the artist’s desire to relinquish as much control over her artmaking

following pages Vivian Suter, 2019 (installation view). Photo: David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

above Nisyros, 2017 (installation view, Filopappou Hill, Pikionis Paths and Pavilion, Athens). Photo: Stathis Mamalakis.Courtesy Documenta 14, Athens

December 2019

preceding pages Vivian Suter ‘intrépida’ featuring Elisabeth Wild ‘Fantasías 2’, 2014 (installation view, Kunsthalle Basel). Courtesy the artist, Galerie Stampa, Basel and Gaga, Mexico City

top Vivian Suter, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Mel Taing. © the artist. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

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above Vivian Suter, 2019 (installation view). Photo: David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

as possible: after all, she says, it’s only chance that brought her here, botanical matter and microorganisms on canvas) alongside contribuand made this work possible, in the first place. Not only can she not tions from environmental groups, activists, scientists and designers, predict what exactly will happen to the paintings when left overnight as well as artists. While conversant in art history and theory – books – I ask her if she can now anticipate what will happen if she places a on art, antiques and crafts pile up across an array of surfaces in her canvas in a particular spot; she says she avoids thinking like that – house – Suter is not one for academic references. Instead she has the but when painting, she will also occasionally move the stretcher into same laissez-faire attitude to how her work is interpreted – and how a narrow outside space between the studio wall and some thick under- Wu, Manacorda, Szymczyk and others have used it to weave particular curatorial narratives – that has guided her work since the hurrigrowth to purposely restrict her own room to manoeuvre her brush. It might seem, reading the artist’s cv and the recent rash of high- cane, happy for the paintings to be contextualised as others see fit. profile exhibitions after years in which she barely exhibited at all, Indeed, she often changes the subject when I push to talk about the work conceptually, turning the that her career has trodden the same She often changes the subject when I conversation instead towards its weary line of so many female artists, overlooked until later in life. But this push to talk about the work conceptually, production or how a certain development relates to her own biography. isn’t exactly how the story goes. In her turning the conversation instead towards This way of thinking about her own twenties, Suter enjoyed precocious its production or how a certain developart recalls Robert Smithson’s introsuccess. She was given her first show at the age of twenty-two at Basel’s duction to the Land works he dubbed ment relates to her own biography Stampa gallery, having several exhi‘abstract geology’. In his essay ‘A bitions there and at the Kunstsammlung Thun and Istituto Svizzero Sedimentation of the Mind’ (1968), Smithson poetically noted that in Rome. In 1978 she was included in the exhibition 6 Artists from Basel ‘the earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disinat the city’s Kunsthalle, and it was the exhibition pamphlet for this tegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional that curator Adam Szymczyk came across while going through the and real, somehow trade places with each other… One’s mind and museum’s archives upon becoming its director in 2004. Szymczyk the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away recognised five of the names, but Suter was a mystery. Discovering her abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decomwhereabouts, he asked her, in 2011, to take part in a restaging of the pose into stones of unknowing.’ show (with the addition of six current younger artists from the Swiss It is perhaps pertinent for us to think of Suter’s work as a kind of city). Under his patronage, Suter and her mother went on to have the psychic embrace between nature and artist, in which both operate as two-person show at the institution and to participate in Szymczyk’s coauthors of the paintings (as is the case in Smithson’s iconic Land Documenta 14 in 2017. It’s the type of attention that drove Suter to works, not least the constant evolution of Spiral Jetty, 1970). In his 1968 leave Switzerland in the first place. She tells me that she enjoyed text Smithson notes how all art materials are a part of nature, the making the work, but back then she couldn’t stand the necessary raw materials merely refined through industry. In Suter’s work the socialising needed to build a career. She had sold well, however, and only thing separating the paint from the diy shop and the detritus her family had money from her father’s success in the textile industry from the garden work is a certain level of human interaction in the in Argentina (he offloaded the business in 1962), so she could afford, former’s manufacture. In their intermingling on the surface of her canvases, the paintings point to the precarity at least initially, to duck out of the European of human dominion over nature, offering artworld. Yet Suter tells me that, as the years Suter’s give-and-take relationship with her and decades passed, she became frustrated garden as a blueprint for how we might live about the lack of attention. The contested relationship between huwith the planet. ar manity and the rest of nature is as old as Eden, but the increased recent interest in Suter’s Work by Vivian Suter can be seen at the Museum work has run parallel to discussions around of Contemporary Art, North Miami, through the so-called Anthropocene. Suter exhibited 29 March; at Tate Liverpool, 13 December – at this year’s Taipei Biennial, which curators 3 May, and at Camden Arts Centre, London, Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda titled Post16 January – 5 April. A yearlong commission Nature, showing her installation Lala Mountain from Art on the Underground for Stratford (2019; oil, acrylic, pigments, fish glue, earth, station, London, opens 18 June

above Detail of one of Vivian Suter’s paintings. Photo: Oliver Basciano

December 2019

Herbarium of Artificial Flowers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Poppy Flower Selection by Alberto Baraya

December 2019

Bernardo Provenzano has been dead for three years now. U Tratturi, or the Tractor, nicknamed for the manner in which he mowed down his victims, was one of the chiefs of the Cosa Nostra mafia until his death aged eighty-three. In July 2016, under police guard, his ashes were buried in the family tomb at a cemetery in Corleone, Sicily. Two years later the Colombian artist Alberto Baraya visited the grave during a fieldtrip in preparation for his forthcoming participation in Manifesta 12. He soon found what he was looking for: on the grave, a typically ornate polishedmarble affair in the Italian Catholic tradition, was a small posy of what Baraya recognised as yellow jasmine. Yet, despite its appearance, this was not Gelsemium sempervirens, native to subtropical and tropical America, but a simulacrum in plastic, wire and cloth, manufactured in China. For 17 years Baraya has been collecting specimens of artificial flowers – styling himself a viajero, a traveller or explorer – to build his Herbarium of Artificial Plants, a collection imitating the cataloguing of flora amassed during botanical missions of the colonial era. Each of Baraya’s specimens is likewise mounted, dated and annotated with details of where the artificial flower was collected, and where it was made (China’s Guangdong province dominates the

us$1.64 billion industry). There is wry commentary in Barayo’s ongoing project on the nature of colonialism – as much as the Americas were occupied at the point of the lance, they were also socially and culturally dominated by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travellers who took part in scientific missions, bringing specimens back for the public (and their own private) herbariums and gardens in the Old World. Baraya writes that his methodology entails ‘extracting data from reality – from social, geographical and political spaces – under the pretext of a study of artificial botany’. The artist will research the context in which the flowers were found – detailing the stories surrounding his specimens in handwritten notes on paper or board mounts. One can also draw out questions concerning a changing global economy and new colonial orders in the fact that China dominates the industry; ecological narratives attending to the natural world and its aping in the use of a material so toxic and artificial as plastic; and questions of taste and class (‘Plastic plants’, Grady Clay, editor of the magazine Landscape Architecture sniffed to The New York Times in 1964 ‘are piddling pieces of cosmetics. People want to see the real stuff. Plastic plants are a useful

addition for those who are not more inventive than to employ them’). Baraya’s artist project for ArtReview, Herbarium of Artificial Flowers – A Poppy Flower Selection, pursues just one of many possible narratives that the artist is able to cultivate within his growing collection. Baraya recently embarked on a new body of work, separate from the herbarium: a series of paintings featuring the animals collected by Colombian drugs-baron Pablo Escobar for the private zoo he built at his mansion east of Medellín – which Escobar not coincidentally called Hacienda Nápoles – and which has, since the gangster’s death, caused untold problems for local authorities, particularly in the form of the now-wild 50-strong hippo population. The trade in heroin accounted for the bulk of Provenzano and the Costa Nostra’s business too, and taking his cue from the fake flowers left on the Italian drug peddler’s grave, as well as the devastating history of the trade in his own country, Baraya has dug into his archives to assemble examples of artificial poppies gathered during his various expeditions around the world. Together they provide a portrait of humanity’s attitude to the natural world as an economic resource, one that also, in this case, causes so much human misery. Oliver Basciano

page 64 Jasmine Provenzano – Sicily expedition, 2017, found object, ‘Made in China’, plastic, wire and cloth yellow jasmine – Gelsomino

Toto Salvatore Riina (Corleone, 1930 – Parma, 2017) was also known as La Belva (The Beast) on account of his 26 life sentences for homicide committed during bloody mafia wars. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra has trafficked heroin since the 1970s

Defence Minister D. Juan Manuel Santos said at a press conference shortly after this specimen was found, “The poppy crops that we had inventoried and that the police had been able to identify are finished”

page 66 Poppy – New York expedition, 2018, found object, ‘Made in China’, plastic, wire and cloth poppy – Papaver somniferum

page 68 Poppy– New York expedition, 2018, found object, ‘Made in China’, plastic, wire and cloth poppy – Papaver somniferum

In its natural version, the flower produces alkaloids that can be processed into opioids

Another garden, where wild poppies can grow

Here lie the remains of B. Provenzano, alongside those of his family, reads the inscription on the tomb where this specimen was found. B. Provenzano (Corleone, 1933 – Milan, 2016), called U Tratturi (The Tractor) for his determination to shoot and kill, was in hiding from 1963 until 2006. At the time of his arrest he was the top leader in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra page 65 Peonia Riina – Sicily expedition, 2017, found object, ‘Made in China’, plastic, wire and cloth peony – Paeoniaceae (lactifolia?) When I arrived in Sicily, Toto Riina had just died. These peonies are here to tell his story.

page 67 Santos poppy – Bogotá expedition, 2012, found object, ‘Made in China’, plastic, wire, silk poppy – Papaver somniferum

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page 69 Poppy – Machu Picchu expedition, 2013, found object ‘Made in China’, plastic, wire, fabric or silk, pigments and mineral texture City and hill of Huaina Picchu, artificial bunch in the Ñusta Gateway to the Temple of the Sun

Find out whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really in charge artreview.com/power100

The Erotic Socialism of Cecilia Vicuña by Lucy Mercer

We are sitting on mats beneath an undulating slate roof, a struc- Chilean capital). A supporter of Allende’s Popular Unity governture that forms this year’s Serpentine Pavilion commission, to watch ment, she founded Tribu No as one of her first actions. This small Chilean artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña’s performance Clit Nest group of young artists and writers – including Julio Cortázar – dedi(2019). Hisses and whispers echo from speakers, the source of which, cated itself to resistance, liberation and ‘collective joy’ (her term, it transpires, is the artist herself as she winds her way through the predating Segal’s use). As well as writing and picture-making, Tribu audience. Singing, muttering, reciting and making jokes as well as No performed cryptic rituals, played games and enacted (occasionthese more indeterminate articulations, she throws long, soft spools ally naked) happenings – all guided by Vicuña’s ‘No Manifesto’ – as of neon-pink-dyed vicuña wool (her namesake and an animal sacred a method of refusing the prevailing colonial and neoliberal global to indigenous Andean cultures) into the crowd before wrapping us in order. Having exhibited her surreal mural-style figurative paintings thick pink squares of the same wool so we become clits ourselves – a inspired by indigenous aesthetics – featuring, among others, recurring hallucinatory nudes of Janis Joplin collective organism, a potential orgasm. Vicuña has steadfastly adhered to the The atmosphere is mysterious and at and Joe Cocker against brightly coloured times humorous. We have come here dreamlike forests – Vicuña moved to utopian possibilities of collective acLondon in 1972 to study at the Slade tonight, she says, to change the world. tion and a connected society, not only School of Fine Art. She felt she could not This bold claim is consistent with the in terms of practical outcome but of preoccupations of a career that stretches (and never did) return to Chile, instead becoming a central force behind Artists back to the late 1960s, and begs a quesan enhanced feeling and sensuality tion that feels, in 2019, at once timely for Democracy – a movement that assemand exhausted: what kind of art might contribute to a global uprising bled a large occupation in Trafalgar Square in protest against the coup for political and ecological justice? Vicuña’s answer seems to be that – before moving to Bogotá. ‘What can art, and the art world, do in the utopian possibilities of collective action should be understood Chile and beyond?’ she wrote in a recent statement about the renewed not only through practical political outcomes but also in terms of protests. ‘Spread the awareness of the violence that distorts informaenhanced feeling and sensuality. With its cavelike setting, Clit Nest tion, language, and images, the “tools” of our trade. The art world could be seen as a continuation of Abstract Hut, a cane-built enclosure can stand for transparency to empower our ability to discern purpose filled with paintings alluding to political and environmental crises and intent. Otherwise the mad destruction of the land and people’s that was exhibited as part of the Arts Festival for Democracy held at rights, along with the right to question what is true as it is happening the Royal College of Art in 1974: Vicuña said at the time that ‘socialism in Chile, will continue to spread like wildfire to all nations.’ One of the most important works from her earlier period, the banhas to be warm and erotic’. Her vision is not unlike that espoused in Lynne Segal’s recent book Radical Happiness: ner Chile Salutes Vietnam! (1975), against a backdrop facing page Moments of Collective Joy (2017): an expansion of the of red flowers and green ferns, depicts a Mapuche Pueblo de altares (detail), 1990–2019, site-specific Indian woman and a Vietnamese guerrilla woman possibilities of what liberation can be. installation including 60 Precarios shown in Cecilia Vicuña, 2019, Witte de With Center Now in her seventies, Vicuña was born in exchanging a rifle and a red book emblazoned with for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Santiago and has lived in exile – primarily in New a reference to Ho Chi Minh’s August Revolution. Photo: Kristien Daem. Courtesy the artist Despite the strength or boldness of its symYork – since the death of President Salvador following pages bolic expression, the image is strangely delicate Allende during General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 Clit Nest, 2019, performance, and spectral. Her political leanings were equally military coup (at the time of writing, renewed cos × Serpentine Park Nights, London. apparent in a series of paintings titled Homage to protests against inequality are sweeping the Photo: Hugo Glendinning

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December 2019

Vietnam, exhibited at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño in out, is the problematisation of genre or canon itself: Vicuña’s work Bogotá in 1977. Exile also prompted Vicuña to explore different media sits adjacent to, but nonetheless defies categorisation as, Surrealism, and activities, producing films and getting involved in theatrical Conceptual art, participatory art, arte povera and avant-gardism in design, working with indigenous communities and, most fruitfully, the Western sense. developing performance poetry (while committed to the free circuPaintings from the early 1970s such as Sueño, Janis Joe (Janis Joplin lation of oral poetry compared to its written equivalent – she calls it and Joe Cocker) and the Heroes of the Revolution portrait series (these last, “the other poetry” – she has published a dozen books and edited a reassembled in 2017 for Documenta 14, feature collage-esque and volume of Mapuche poetry). She also started to produce the installa- indigenised portraits of Marx, Allende, Castro and Lenin) are inspired tions that she dubs “spatial poetics”, incorporating weaving, banners by the seventeenth-century mestizo paintings that appropriated and sculpture, mostly notably in the form of quipus, great drapes of colonial Spanish iconography in the flat style of ex-voto paintings to vibrantly coloured knotted wool hung from the ceiling. portray indigenous deities, or Pachamamas. Vicuña tells me that these Yet it is only in recent years that her work has been more “clumsy” or “bad” paintings were celebrated at the time because they widely recognised and exhibited institutionally, with a retrospec- offered a “narrative decolonisation of art images” (by which she means tive at Witte de With in Rotterdam just closing and the final stop a move away from European art history) that emerged in tandem with of a travelling us survey show opening at the Museum of Contem- social movements all over the world. “After the military coup the same porary Art, North Miami. One reason for this is due to increased paintings became forgotten. The same paintings…” she says, with no curatorial attention to feminist and indigenous little wonderment. She sees the recent interest in Janis Joe (Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker), projects – mending holes in art history, as with the her work as a sort of cyclical return. “Now there is 1971, oil on canvas, 200 × 220 cm. restoration of Leonora Carrington, whose surrealist another uprising, different in orientation – climate Photo: Kristien Daem. paintings inspired the young Vicuña. Another, as justice and protecting the survival of humanity. This Courtesy Witte de With Center for the Dutch exhibition’s informative catalogue points engagement is what gives the paintings meanings. Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

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But is this, maybe, an illusion?” I ask her what might be illusory. garbage), they likewise offered no clear delineation between ‘nature’ “The wishful thinking on our part that uprising can really have the and ‘culture’, while addressing the idea of disposability enshrined by effect that we need, and that it can come through us.” the environmentally ruinous logic of late capitalism. She considers Extinction Rebellion to be a game-changer, if I ask her if she ever gets tired of reaching out to people through “people really join in, not just intellectuals but the whole of society”. collective action, performance and collaboration, and wants instead This sort of radical openness to communicative possibility – with the to withdraw. Her response indicates that she considers herself not nonhuman as much as the human – that retains nuance (and a Marxist an ex nihilo creator but a channeller – vicuña wool after all is symbolgenealogy) is characteristic of Vicuña’s work. ‘Wishful thinking’ ically associated with a thread of running water, the stream of life. brings to mind her precarios, spatial metaphors or multidimensional “The work has an agency. I am in the service of what the work wants poems that are assemblages of found objects that she first produced and needs. I am the listener. I am attending to the process. I want in 1966 and continues to make now, such as the spindly Árbol de vida to reach people. The work is a musical sound that is repelling or (Tree of Life, 1983) in which tiny threads secure seashells, bundles of attracting to people. The process is completely autonomous […] wool and other fragments to branches drooping towards and then People are hungry for something that comes from a place of quesrising high above the ground, or Cementerio (Cemetery, 1982), in which tioning – a feeling, not manipulation or control.” two wooden fragments reminiscent of a stalagmite and a stalacIn contrast to recent ecophilosophy that focuses on matetite are placed upright on a wooden plinth alongside a small bone. rial objects as having a form of agency, the work here is a springLong before xr, Vicuña was preoccupied with ecological precarity in board to encounter not another material object but a ‘sensual possicreating works that would be washed away by the sea: bility’. Hence the importance of participating in a Cecilia Vicuña, 2019 (installation view, performance – be it the Tribu No happenings or the rather than Land art’s forced marks, such assemblages Witte de With Center for Clit Nest – that must be manifested in an ephemeral – like suggestions, thoughts and wishes – disinteContemporary Art, Rotterdam). Photo: Kristien Daem grated and disappeared. Composed of basuritas (little and unstructured way. Flexibly referential language

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this and facing page Clit Nest, 2019, performance, cos Ă&#x2014; Serpentine Park Nights, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

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is multilingual and mestizo, sounds we may recognise but only menstrual-red woollen threads flow downwards from a suspended know emotively. This concept reminds me of composer La Monte circle (also shown at Documenta 14), I ask Vicuña why she chose the Young’s manifesto ‘Dream Music’, published in the 1971 ‘Psychedelic clitoris as the focus of Clit Nest. The clit, she says down the phoneline Issue’ of Aspen magazine, in which he describes an indigenous and – another quipu? – is “the organ that humanity has that exists exclucontinuous sound taken up by different musicians and students to sively for joy […] the clit is that by which the body is guided, an invibecome a real living organism, ‘one with a capacity to propel itself tation towards plenitude and joy”. From a scientific viewpoint this isn’t factually correct (the clitoris does play a role in assisting reproby its own momentum’. If this is one metaphysical aspect of Vicuña’s spatial poetics, then duction), so does it risk seeming reductive and biologically essenher weaving, like the bright pink quipu (‘knot’ in Quechua) hanging tialising? Julia Bryan-Wilson has written that ‘Vicuña to me is not down in labialike folds in the centre of the Serpentine Pavilion, an essentialising artist; she does not make claims about a specifiand a motif of her practice dating back to the 1960s, is another. cally female gendered body that is discrete or that she polices in any Vicuña’s quipus are completed by participants in rituals involving these way. But it is still unusual, in 2017, to go to an international exhibiobjects, and by the visitors to exhibitions who must negotiate them. tion like Documenta and see a piece that is about menstruation front and centre.’ I recall the mystical iconogThey are, if you like, created by weaving “Now there is another uprising raphy of an early painting, Leoparda de constructs as intangible and virtual as they are material. Always constructed of Ojitos (1976), in which that Andean moundifferent in orientation – climate threaded and knotted cords, quipus allude tain cat, covered with eyes, exposes its justice and protecting the survival vagina. Vicuña wrote of the painting that to a Quechua cosmology that connects all of humanity. This engagement is ‘one could think that it is the “eyes of beings through imaginary lines to the summit of a mountain (the origin of what gives the paintings meanings” instinct” that open when we allow ourwater), as well as an Incan method for selves to be carried away by a form of administration (like early Babylonian clay tablets): a form of record- knowledge that is richer and deeper than rationality’. Maybe to keeping turned into narrative device for cultural memory. Yet Inca appreciate the work the viewer has to share Vicuña’s faith in the possicivilisation is also confusingly, given the artist’s correlation of indi- bility of channelling collective joy as an event that begins in, and is geneity with colonial resistance, another language of empire. inseparable from, the interconnected body. And in terms of being In this sense Vicuña’s quipus as an appropriation are, as the critic Lucy beyond rationality, her practice is also – to return to environments – Lippard has noted, more indigenous-looking than specifically indig- one that relies on indeterminacy, a quality of entangled environments enous. A hazy memory that takes a general nonnative ignorance as too. I might not have felt that I was changing the world during the to what is indigenous as a ground for possibility: in this indetermi- performance of Clit Nest, but I was, it turns out, being attuned to nate space we are all immigrants, as Vicuña writes in a 2016 essay, something – an optimism? ar ‘Language Is Migrant’. Though her associations between quipu and the gendered female Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen is at the Museum of Contemporary body also appear in works such as Quipu Womb (2017), in which Art, North Miami, through 29 March

December 2019

Tim Walker Chaos and Control by Fi Churchman

Michael Clark painted half black, London, 2016. Fashion: Alexandre McQueen

ArtReview

“Life is chaos – we all know that,” says photographer Tim Walker as realised by longtime collaborator and set designer Shona Heath). we sit at the large dining table in his East London studio. The prin- Think Cate Blanchett standing in a moonscape surrounded by dead ciple is illustrated by a pile of books on the table including both tree trunks, strapped into a pair of skis, outfitted in a Comme des Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works (2016) and a handmade version Garçons dress with hair styled by Julien d’Ys. The photographer of Walker’s latest photobook, Shoot for the Moon (2019). He opens the himself is quiet and unassuming. latter (he couldn’t wait for the book to be published, he explains) and “Photographers are trying to make sense of this world, put a frame begins to flick through. around it,” he continues, drawing a rectangle in the air, “so that they “Those parallel worlds,” he says, gesturing towards the photo- can garden within the walls and make everything look pretty… but they graphs of fantastical sets for which he is know that outside those walls it’s wilder“As a photographer you’re trying famous, “are very meticulously put toness. As a photographer you’re trying to gether, but they don’t work if that’s all take screenshots of life and show that it to take screenshots of life and resonates with your sense of what is beauthey are. It becomes very stiff and predictshow that it resonates with your able. What I always look for is to create tiful. But the decisive moment is chaotic.” sense of what is beautiful. But the world and then for the wind to rip Walker cites as inspirations Richard through the set and for everything to fall Avedon, Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn and the decisive moment is chaotic” Helmut Newton, and he’s keen to underdown, or for someone to walk in who isn’t meant to be there, or for the person you’re photographing to turn stand what it is that makes some fashion photography, in his words, around to look at something. It’s where something went wrong that “transcend its commerce”. He gives the example of Horst’s photo The makes the photograph stronger and more telling.” Mainbocher Corset (1939), which the photographer took the evening Walker began his career at the age of twenty-five when he was before leaving Paris for New York in anticipation of the city’s invagiven his first shoot in Vogue – to which he has contributed regu- sion by Nazi forces. “The way she holds her arm up as she looks down, larly since – and remains best known for his photographic work in with the lace trailing behind her. I think, as a photographer reading fashion magazines including W Magazine, i-d, Vanity Fair and Another another photographer’s work, that he would have started the shoot in Man. His subjects include models and celebrities from the worlds of profile, and then maybe he pulled the camera back and realised all the film, music, literature, art and theatre, styled lace and shadow and light were falling a certain in couture and positioned within the ‘parallel way – that’s what makes the picture. And you Jenkin Van Zyl at Padbury Court, London, 2016 worlds’ of his unrestrained imagination (often couldn’t recreate the urgency of that moment.”

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It seems, then, that the photographer’s self-awareness when making House in 2013, the exhibition at the v&a includes props from the the image is among the things that makes it possible for the image to fashion shoot. This time, however, Shona Heath has also completely transformed the interior of the main gallery spaces, so that the exhi‘transcend’ its status as fashion advertisement. It’s hard not to be swept up by Walker’s enthusiastic romanticism bition moves from bright white walls that appear to be melting from (also apparent in the title of another photobook, Wonderful Things, the top, to the architecture of a Gothic church complete with a skelwhich accompanies his current exhibition at London’s v&a museum). etal vaulted ceiling; from a kitschy pink domestic interior and an Particularly when he talks about how he found a way to articulate his ultraviolet garden to rounded walls padded with fabric. Walker’s own “visions of beauty” through his camera – tiny scenes from Bosch’s photographs seem to move beyond the frame in which they are shot, Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), for example, recreated with inviting the viewer into those parallel worlds and inspiring the sensaalabaster figures reclining in translucent balls surrounded by giant tion of moving through flickering, waking dreams. spiky flowers, fruits and pearls. But the Walker stops at a photograph in Michael Clark “stopped to have a sense remains that the static images he Shoot for the Moon of choreographer and presents are still only fragments of the break and lit a cigarette, and was just dancer Michael Clark, taken in 2016, in worlds he conjures in his mind. So it’s which one vertical half of his body is standing there [front on, against a revealing that, alongside photography, painted black. The plan was to photoblack background]. You weren’t meant graph the subject in profile, against a Walker has also made short films and videos. From his earliest, independently to see that, but it became the picture” white backdrop, Walker says, but then Clark “stopped to have a break and lit a made The Lost Explorer (2010) – inspired by Patrick McGrath’s 1988 short story collection Blood and Water and cigarette, and was just standing there [front on, against a black backOther Tales – to collaborations like The Mechanical Man of the Moon (2014, ground]. You weren’t meant to see that, but it became the picture.” for Vogue Italia) and a video for Björk’s Blissing Me from her 2017 album These moments of chaos, both accidental (in the sense of being Utopia, the medium allows him to expand his imaginary worlds. unscripted) and conscious (in the sense that Walker chooses to take For Wonderful Things, Walker was invited to explore the v&a’s collec- the shot at that instant), are characteristic of his most successful tions and produce a series of photographs that respond to objects work. Take, for example, a pair of models dressed as geishas operand artworks in the museum (including a stained-glass window, an ating Japanese-developed Gen h-4 flying machines: the already embroidered casket and a photographic reproduction of the elev- absurd scene that combines highly embroidered traditional Japanese enth-century Bayeux Tapestry). As with two previous solo exhibi- kimonos with new technology against the backdrop of an industrial tions, also in London, at the Design Museum in 2008 and Somerset landscape is made more so by the geisha on the right, whose smile

above Gareth Pugh, London, 2013. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

facing page James Spencer, London, 2018

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following pages Mari Hirao and Yui Yamamoto operating Gen hâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;4 flying machines, Nagano, Japan, 2016. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

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Eddie Redmayne, inspired by David Hockney’s painting ‘The Room, Tarzana’, Los Angeles, 2014. Fashion: Loewe

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and wave offset the severe gaze of her partner. “If I’d said to her, do teract? He pauses. “It’s a medicine for when human behaviour lets you a funny grin and wave at the camera, it wouldn’t have worked. It was down, or human actions are disappointing. When you’re seeing a lot of just so truthful. She felt momentarily ridiculous in an entirely ridicu- the questionable sad aspects of humanity: the mean, vain and consumlous situation and she authenticated that photograph for me,” Walker erist. But without that darkness, you can’t experience the light.” explains. “I’m not selling anything but a ‘dream’. I’m hyperaware of Walker’s exhibition features a series titled Soldiers of Tomorrow consumer society. [I know that] when I’m making pictures like these, (2018). Based on a photo reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, the only reason a photograph like this ends up in a magazine is because it depicts models sitting, kneeling or standing. The walls of the room the model happens to be wearing couture. But it’s also absurd.” suggest the patterns of medieval gambesons or, more sinisterly, the Is the truth that Walker seeks to be found in such cracks in the padded cells of psychiatric hospitals. They’re dressed in a combinafacade? The artist says he learned how to tion of soft textiles studded through with “If I’d said to her, do a funny grin extract a performance from Avedon, for steel nails, or wrapped in bandages, or whom he worked as an assistant after and wave at the camera, it wouldn’t wearing knitted balaclavas and headwear, graduating in 1994, but that he has disand shot with a fisheye lens that adds have worked. She felt momentarily to the warped sense of reality. Another covered through his own practice that ridiculous… and she authenticated series, Box of Delights (2018), is inspired by a the successful photograph is “either the first picture, or the one after four hours of seventeenth-century embroidered casket that photograph for me” shooting.” Whether it’s Eddie Redmayne at the museum, which is displayed alongchannelling a bumblebee, a heat-exhausted model sitting hunched side the photographs in a specially constructed, wallpapered room over the edge of a ufo during a break, or the disembodied hand of designed by Heath. Covered in satin, silk and metal thread, it contains someone behind the scenes straying into the photo, the ruptures in an intricate garden scene with tiny apple trees and carved figures. The photographs show, through a hole in a fake brick wall, disemthe artifice elevate the best of Walker’s constructions. I ask him about his need to construct fantasies and alternate bodied arms reaching out to a man in white long johns. He stands in worlds. He quietly replies, “I find it reassuring for its darkness, or its an artificial garden of green velvet and giant flowers, surrounded by strength, or its acute ‘prettiness’.” And then I ask him what he needs grotesque versions of the casket’s carved figures. from his photographs: “Truth. I need the truth.” Later he says wryly Both series depict a fabricated world in which chaos can be that “fiction needs truth in it – in something that’s so fake”, looking contained. Warfare is confined to padded cells; a young man’s desire down at a photo of the artist to a garden. These are spaces of Setsuko Klossowska de Rola holdmanaged disruption. “If you can’t ing an oval mirror, its face turned see a utopia in our existence,” the away from her. If that’s the case, photographer states, “why can’t why does he so consistently look you make one?” ar for the ‘beautiful’, or as he also translates it, the ‘odd’, ‘fantasWonderful Things is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, tical’ and ‘fun’ – as opposed to London, through 8 March; other photographers, who take Wonderful People is on show as their subject quotidian life? at Michael Hoppen Gallery, “It’s medicinal,” he replies. And London, through 25 January what does this medicine coun-

Setsuko Klossowska de Rola and mirror, Le Grand Chalet, Rossinière, Switzerland, 2015 all images © Tim Walker Studio, London

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What can we do? 85

The New moma Museum of Modern Art, New York from 21 October The Museum of Modern Art has long been seen as the artworld bastion of white male privilege. Its formalist story of modern art, as Carol Duncan argued in her 1989 essay ‘The moma’s Hot Mamas’, presents a male spiritual quest fought out over the nude – often fragmented – bodies of lower-class women (models, prostitutes and lovers). It took a sizeable donation from a wealthy woman patron earmarked specifically for spending on exhibitions of women’s work for moma, in 2009, to present the first solo show by a female painter, Marlene Dumas, in 30 years. The museum’s historical record on racial diversity is just as awful. But not anymore, it seems. The new moma loudly asserts that it has put all this in the past. The two modest solo exhibitions for the inaugural rehang are both by black artists. A long-overdue presentation of early work by the African American Betye Saar, best known for assemblage (but here we also discover her roots in printmaking), and an exhibition of paintings by the Nairobi-born Michael Armitage. The permanent collection – presented in the familiar three temporal chunks, 1880s–1940s, 1940s–1970s, 1970s–present – has been reshaped to foreground many more works by women artists and to gesture beyond a Euro/us-centric narrative. And a temporary exhibition of contemporary art, Surrounds: 11 Installations, includes artists from all the world’s continents. It sometimes feels like the curators

were shadowed by an equal-opportunities committee prodding them to include the correct quotas of this or that demographic. But given the institution’s record, something seriously needed to shift. How these changes are implemented is not always successful, but on balance, it’s stimulating to see fresh and less familiar works in dialogue with the canonical. The effect of the architectural renovation feels very much like the old moma with more room to breathe. The surprise views out onto the city now also include open-air rest stops and interior viewing areas to sit and take in the layers of Midtown architecture. The major overhaul, however, is in the display of the works and the flow of the exhibition narrative. Curators from all the divisions of moma collaborated to rethink the presentation of the permanent collection. The separate galleries dedicated to photography, book arts, architecture, design and prints and drawings have been overtaken to present a massive integrated permanent collection. A theatrical lighting rig has been built in one of the postwar galleries, suggesting that performance will also feature in exhibitions. But not yet. The sound sculptures by David Tudor currently occupying this space operate as conventional objects, while the eruption of live bodies in the dead museum remains to be seen. The most daring changes to the integrated permanent collection are in the 1880s–1940s

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section, where Alfred Barr’s formalist narrative long defined a linear evolution for modern art. We are no longer corralled into a single route from one gallery to the next – Cubism leads to Futurism, to Constructivism, etc – but at a certain crucial point in the interwar period the galleries divide, opening up a choice of alternative paths. As a rhetorical device, this works well in the 1880s–1940s, whereas in the 1940s– 1970s spaces it seems more random, confused, suggesting a bland pluralism. The smaller contemporary segment, for its part, is less freighted by historical narratives of chronological progress, making the choice of different routes seem much more natural. The 1880s–1940s galleries have been reshaped in the most conceptually rigorous and imaginative way, and a call to think history differently is also signalled in select interruptions by postwar work, mostly by women. We first encounter this in the gallery dedicated to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Hanging the African-American artist Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die (1967) in this gallery was a high-stakes bet that paid off. Ringgold’s blood-splattered scene of urban violence, showing white and black men and women, infant boys and girls, with limbs crisscrossed and entwined against a gridded grey ground, is a provocative and generative counterpoint to the moma masterpiece. The fate of Picasso’s 1907 painting as modernist landmark

facing page Betye Saar, Lo, The Mystique City, 1965, etching with embossing, 47 Ă&#x2014; 50 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

top Paris 1920s (Gallery 514), 2019 (installation view). Photo: Jonathan Muzikar. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

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above Readymade in Paris and New York (Gallery 508), 2019 (installation view). Photo: Denis Doorly. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

above Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman – The Shape of Shape, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

facing page Around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Gallery 503), 2019 (installation view). Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

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is almost wholly indebted to the museum. Its first-ever public display was at moma when it opened in 1929. Since taking up a defining place in the museum’s modernist narrative, Les Demoiselles has generated reams of pages of analysis that jostle to reconcile the painting’s conflicting registers of sexual, pictorial and postcolonial meaning. While Ringgold’s American People has a closer affinity with Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which was on long-term loan to moma from 1939 to 81, it holds its own in the gallery and generates productive questions about how we encounter artworks in new ways at different historical moments. In the gallery dedicated to Picasso’s great rival, simply titled ‘Henri Matisse’, a repetition of this contrapuntal historical move is less successful. Although Alma Woodsey Thomas’s Fiery Sunset (1973) offers an important continuity with the colourist preoccupations of Matisse’s work during the early 1900s, the awkward corner position and relatively modest scale finds Thomas’s painting visually diminished and its presence limited to pedestrian notions of influence. The most significant shift in the master narrative of modern art happens before we encounter these gestures of feminist backtalk. We move from the Postimpressionist beginnings of Modernism into a gallery dedicated to early photography and film before arriving at Cubism. This is an important addition to the museum’s larger narrative, and it is one of the most successfully curated individual galleries.

The two acknowledged ‘fathers’ of photography, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, are displaced in favour of the offbeat British French pairing of Anna Atkins and Hippolyte Bayard. The former produced the first photobook using the cyanotype process, and the latter’s salt-print method became widely used, but his personal success was overshadowed by the showmanship and acumen of Daguerre. This gallery is not so much a didactic account of the story of photography’s invention as a demonstration of the expansive and pervasive cultural impact of its heterogeneous deployment and use. The moving image does not lend itself as easily to exhibition display, and the inclusion of segments from two early films, an ‘actuality film’, Interior N.Y. Subway, 14th street to 42nd street, from 1905 (a year after the subway opened) and the earliest existing film featuring AfricanAmerican actors, the 1914 Lime Kiln Club Field Day (with famous blackface performer Bert Williams), can only really operate as placeholders for a complex yet untold story. Both film and photography have their own heterogeneous histories and they therefore remain subordinated here – or play colourful cameo roles – in a narrative where painting and sculpture are still the lead protagonists. While the anxious placement of wall plans to map routes through the 1940s–1970s galleries signals a less confident conceptual understanding of the new spatial flow, in the 1880s –1940s gallery, the segue back to the alternative

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path is beautifully resolved. This breach in art historical logic is definitively scrambled by a packed one-room temporary ‘Artist’s Choice’ exhibition by the painter Amy Sillman. Titled The Shape of Shape, and combining a broad selection of works from across the whole collection according to an abstract formal category, it allows for playful juxtapositions of typically unrelated works in a layered three-dimensional arrangement. Breaking with conventional methods of display, with multiple images on the wall and others propped up on a two-tier platform in front, the display’s effect is of a stylised storage area or a nineteenthcentury gentleman-collector’s study. As such it echoes the creative labour involved in rehanging the collection we have just encountered, including the confrontations with establishment masculinity. It also declares that the notion of formal affinities between works is not the sole property of a conservative masculine past but is how many artists think and make. When I asked around prior to visiting the museum to write this review, the consensus among my art historical colleagues seemed to be that moma had abandoned art history. I do not think this is the case. The political present is indeed palpably felt in this earnest rebranding of the museum as a cultural statement against the ideology and values of Trump. At the same time, it is also a serious reckoning with its own institutional history of discrimination, with its own past. It will be interesting to see where moma goes from here. Siona Wilson

Torbjørn Rødland Fifth Honeymoon Kiasma, Helsinki 13 September – 5 January The strength of Torbjørn Rødland’s Fifth Honeymoon resides in the artist’s deft avoidance of a particular genre or thematic foundation, leaving a range of interpretative pathways open to the viewer. The 35 photographic works and one video blend esotericism, abstraction and symbolism via still lifes, landscapes and duo portraits. As befits the work’s implicit mystic underpinnings, they feel koanlike, the viewer’s response saying as much about themselves as it does about the artist. There are threads, nevertheless. Motifs are repeated, including marriage, rings, tarot cards, pairings of people and the number five, which – according to Rødland’s own previous statements – has special significance for the artist. The chromogenic print Ace of Cups (2017) depicts a chalice brimming with water. Referencing the Ace of Cups tarot card (symbolising passion and strong emotion), the cup fills the picture, yet appears located outdoors. The pool of water it stands in is infused with a bright natural light; again, one might be thrown back – amid swaying aesthetic pleasure – on one’s own preconceptions about the validity of the tarot. Elsewhere, a series of three black-and-white silver gelatin prints, collectively titled Painbody

(2015–18), employ double exposure, overlaying patterns featuring Christian crosses and paisley motifs onto a nude female body. The result is a rich tonal abstraction that encompasses the female figure, merging it with the design. Referencing Eckhart Tolle’s theory of the ‘pain-body’ – a kind of negative emotional state people carry with them, marked by memories and experiences – the works suggest an inseparability between the model and the symbols overlaid upon her. The tendency to point to spirituality via a luscious physicality continues throughout the show. Midlife Dilemma (2015) is one of several works depicting unequal or unusual pairings of models. In it, we see a muscular, bare-chested young man gripping a suited elderly man by the collar while turning his own gaze to the camera. Rødland has suggested that his age fell exactly between that of the two models at the time of shooting: the photo conveys the entwinement of opposites – a preoccupation of Eastern mysticism – though intergenerational aggression is strongly suggested. Rødland’s first videowork in 11 years, the five-minute Between Fork and Ladder (2018), cuts together scenes of Californian and Norwegian landscapes and a log fire, accompanied by

Painbody no. 1, 2015–18, c-print, 110 × 140 cm. Courtesy Standard (Oslo) and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

ArtReview

a female Japanese voiceover evocative of Japanese anime. The voice reads quotes from the American mystic Ken Wilber, with English subtitles: ‘This is a soul for whom the personal has gone flat / This is a soul on the brink of the transpersonal…’ Partway through the video, a boy in his early teens appears and, with scissors, cuts images of Pepe the Frog – a cartoon figure coopted by the far right in meme imagery, and more recently by the democracy movement in Hong Kong – from torn fabric wrapped around the tree branch he sits upon. As he does so, he sings a melancholic song: “What are you supposed to do / When everything is up to you? / The world’s been bright / The world starts spinning out.” The song reaches a point of high bravura coinciding with the boy holding aloft what appears to be an oversize dining fork as he sings, “Is it better to accept the loss, or fight the war at any cost?” Could the video be a message of defiance in the face of malign political forces? A spiritual riddle? Or simply a documentation of teen angst? What seems clear, near-paradoxically, is that against our prescriptive era Rødland wants art to be a space held open, in which the prompts are the artist’s but the journey is the viewer’s. Mike Watson

Kaari Upson Door, Open, Shut Kunstverein Hannover 7 September – 17 November The house as metaphor for the relationship between a female inner world and a male outer one – written into art history by Louise Bourgeois’s drawing Femme Maison (1946–47) – is a leitmotif of Kaari Upson’s survey Door, Open, Shut. The first sculpture encountered is the Californian artist’s Balcony (2011), a latex cast of balcony railings from her longstanding thematic fixation, the burneddown house of a man called ‘Larry’. Larry – notice the phonetic similarity to Kaari – is a fictional character based on a deceased neighbour of her parents’ in San Bernardino, a person Upson never met. Her multipart series The Larry Project (2007–12) explores her interest in Larry’s life and sexual preferences. Employing an approach conceptually neighbouring that of Sophie Calle, Upson laces her research with fiction and filters it through various media. Here, her imagination has been captured by a dead person, reminiscent of the spectral Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The next room shows the film In Search of the Perfect Double (2016–17), in which Upson, changing tack a little, traces her own biography. She’s trying to reconstruct her friend Kristine’s long-gone childhood home as meticulously as possible. Since the house was mass-produced, she searches for houses of the same type and

compares them to the ‘original’ house; she does so, in this oppressive proposal, by passing through the rooms, touching the walls with her hands in a manner reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s videos – and frequently bumping her head on the ceiling, recalling through sheer physicality a place of early childhood memories and impressions. She nevertheless fails to find the ‘perfect double’. The kunstverein’s main space shows the pair of 2012 sculptures Mirrored Staircase Inversion (San Bernardino). To create these, Upson dug a hole on Larry’s property in the shape of her memory of his stairs, in order to build a cast negative imprint using a mixture of dirt and latex. The work is reminiscent of Land art – its title like one of Robert Smithson’s, though its use of sculptural negative space again looks back to Nauman – and at the same time part of her preoccupation with Larry, whose original house is interesting to Upson since it was modelled, by its owner, on Hugh Hefner’s legendary Playboy mansion and thus enables her to question collective male fantasies. (The stairs were a copy of the ones leading up to Hefner’s private rooms.) The show closes with House Worry (2019), a version of which was also shown at this year’s Venice Biennale. The video alludes to the psycho-

trashy aesthetics of Paul McCarthy, a known idol of Upson’s, but charges his aesthetic with her own unique narration. Here the artist and her aforementioned friend Kristine act as each other, appearing identical and different at the same time. Their roleplay, which hints at so-called family constellation therapy, is staged in a lifesize puppet house they played with as children. One of them crawls out of the fireplace, the other one sits on the table; together they sit on a rocking chair, dressed in sexynurse costumes, discussing (among other things) their experiences of puberty. In Upson’s psychonarrations, modified appropriation and her own invention lose their ostensible contrariety, comparable to the relationship between a collective cultural memory and individual perception. The narratives in Door, Open, Shut present a bold yet sensitive mix of psychology and fiction, research and acting out: a psychotic tour de force in which the sometimes-deserted, other times lively spaces and the people performing in them are charged with an emotional strength that repels and fascinates. Here the doors of reception, as it were, are continually and excitingly being open and shut. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

House Worry (still), 2019, video, sound, 9 min 6 sec. Courtesy the artist; Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London & Hong Kong; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

December 2019

Weight of Abundance Zeller van Almsick, Vienna 13 September – 21 November The theme of this year’s ‘Curated by’ festival, during which Vienna’s galleries invite international curators to make exhibitions, is a gift for Àngels Miralda. With the tripleheader Weight of Abundance, she interprets the given theme of ‘circulation’ through what Karl Marx called the ‘circulation of commodities’. This, Marx explains in Capital (1867), is ‘the startingpoint for capital’, wherein money is not just the way value and prices are measured, or the medium through which things are bought and sold, but the means of acquiring more money as an end in itself, backed by social power. Under Miralda’s auspices, each artist gets one room in the gallery space for their take on this. Eli Cortiñas pries into the secret lives of commodities and their relation to power. Three works from her collage series From an Ethnological Museum Revisited (2018) show indefinable objects made from different parts of ancient artefacts (bits of statues, pottery, jewellery) grafted onto modern goods. The video Walls Have Feelings (2019), meanwhile, juxtaposes archive clips of dictators, factory workers, police brutality and John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988) with fragments, read by an actor, from the writings of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Silvia Federici, Achille Mbembe, Zygmunt Bauman and Frantz Fanon.

The piece is clear and cluttered at the same time, sending out mixed messages in different voices, all presented as if they are saying the same thing. Levelling the authors’ different approaches ends up emptily commanding us to resist the forces of manipulation – whoever and wherever they are – like a simple reversal of those slogans demanding obedience from They Live. Débora Delmar is more concerned with the grim toil on which the joy of new purchases depends. The five objects in the l.u.x.u.r.y. Time series (2019) are shoebox lids bearing the name of luxury brands (Versace, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Gucci), on which clock mechanisms are mounted. It turns out, however, that these logoed shoeboxes aren’t genuine at all, just knockoffs found in Beijing’s Chaowai Market. There is a joke in there somewhere. The target is the ‘consumer’. But which one? It could be the audience for contemporary art, or the one whose desires are spurred, if not created, by the lustre of brandnames and logos. It could be both at once. After all, just looking at Delmar’s phony trinkets shows up the viewer’s own symbolic capital, since they will either know the products are just simulacra – imitations of an idea of luxury – or not. Delmar’s Commercial Space series (2019) brings

us right back to materialist critique. These twill jackets, printed with images of luxury department stores and hung on mannequins – the endpoint of the cycle of production and consumption – remind us first that luxury goods are made by the hands and sweat of real workers (often on the same production lines as clothing destined for discount stores), and secondly that the textile industry is capitalism at its most brutalising. Nicolás Lamas’s contribution mostly consists of 23 curious sculptures made from mangled consumer goods – old sneakers filled with straw or cactuses, a glass jar containing the remains of a human skull placed inside a laptop’s motherboard, plastic toolboxes with animal bones where the hammers and screwdrivers should be – displayed on an installation of metal shelving units. It’s like a mausoleum for faded desires. The issue is, then, not just how to narrate culture. Rather, by showing us the battered corpses of commodities, Lamas interprets circulation in terms of natural cycles of life and death. He asks if libidinal investments meet the same fate as the things we once wanted so badly, not only growing grey and less supple, but dying and putrefying. Max L. Feldman

Nicolás Lamas, Before disappearing #1, 2019, mixed media, 9 × 10 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Zeller van Almsick, Vienna

ArtReview

Marcel Broodthaers Soleil Politique m kha, Antwerp 4 October – 19 January In 1972, four years before his untimely death, Marcel Broodthaers took an educational diagram of the sun and planets and modified it, lightly yet monumentally. He erased Earth, and next to the word ‘Soleil’ in the sun’s centre he wrote, in his elegant cursive, ‘politique’. The result, part of the larger work Soleil Politique et fig.1 fig.2 fig.12.fig.O fig.A, is economical codejamming, both implicatory and oblique. m kha’s massive survey uses it as a title to imply that Broodthaers’s practice always had political undertones, yet one could also argue that this artwork, and the show, remind us that although he quit writing poetry in 1964 after a decade of scribing, he never abandoned poetics. Or one could combine those readings and say that Broodthaers asked how poetry, filtered through art, might serve political ends related to the anarchic undoing of constraining systems. That unfastening extends to the curating here. The show is open-plan and there’s no clear chronology, recalling the artist’s own comment on one of his films, in a 1968 interview: ‘a rebus that you have to want to decipher’. Gazing around near the entrance, we encounter works such as Monument Public no 4 (1963), a precarious mix of Funk art and Pop involving a wobbly stack of egg cartons on a makeshift shelf, under which sit a Warholian cardboard box

for a ‘us Astronaut Space Helmet’ and 1966’s Grande casserole de moules, an overflowing black pot of mussels. Mussels and eggs would recur for years, along with the artist’s own initials, as he fashioned an artistic identity that drew knowingly and wittily on both his native Belgium’s cuisine and the iconography of fellow countryman René Magritte – who appears in the giant print Magritte (1967) reading a Broodthaers exhibition pamphlet. All those shells, though, also suggest containment and, by extension, societal malaise. One modest relief, Le Problème noir en Belgique (The Black Problem in Belgium, 1963–64), features plaster eggs doused in black ink upon a copy of the newspaper Le Soir, whose headline pointedly concerns the Congo. By 1968 Broodthaers had lit upon the museum as a locus for his concerns, beginning his multipart project Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, an imaginary museum favouring invented categories, shown in fragments. Its artefacts are scattered through the show’s later stages: handmade signs used in making documented performances on the beach, grids of postcard reproductions of paintings chosen according to quixotic rules, wry vacuum-formed plastic signs for various ‘departments’. These bridge more explicit

engagements with language, such as the vacuumformed, cleanly graphic quartet Les quatre pipes (1969), which surrounds Magrittean pipes with alphabets going quietly haywire. Outside of this, in his last years Broodthaers made slowly-clicking slide projections, featuring (again) his own initials or details of artworks, and largescale installations such as, here, Un Jardin d’Hiver II (1974), a parody of a nineteenthcentury palm court featuring Kentia palms, a film projection set in a then-modern museum and suggesting surveillance, and framed illustrations of exotic wildlife harking back to colonialism. This works well as a sardonic oasis in the middle of a large room. Unfortunately the brilliant Décor: A Conquest from the same year – a surreal but allusive array of cannons, a floral cannonball, a rearing snake, racked weaponry, modern garden furniture – is shunted into an annex with a huge circular light overhead that shoves itself into the art. Striking, sure, but the wrong flavour of nonsense. That’s quibbling, though: Soleil Politique is a cornucopia of pointed disorder that informs both brain and gut that things don’t have to be as they are. In that regard, though yellowing in places, Broodthaers’s oeuvre appears largely impervious to time, and this retrospective feels like one giant, decadesspanning work. Martin Herbert

Red Saucepan with Mussel Shells, 1965, metal saucepan, red paint, mussel shells. © m kha, Antwerp. Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels

December 2019

Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology Moderna Museet, Stockholm 12 October – 12 January A rant in Sweden: who could resist? This exhibition, featuring 19 artists and collectives, is inspired by a 2004 Ursula K. Le Guin text in which she responds to a reviewer’s criticism that she avoids ‘technology’ in her stories, a word she disliked when used solely to imply the latest gadgetry. Le Guin was keen to argue that ‘technology’ and ‘hi-tech’ are not synonymous. The potential for an art-laden diatribe on this theme is vast; the catalogue admits ruefully that we encounter a ‘rich and multifaceted exhibition that is not easily encapsulated in a foreword’. The show’s title itself comes from its centrepiece: Mud Muse (1968–71), an atypical Robert Rauschenberg sculpture in the Moderna Museet’s collection. A large rectangular vat, filled with slurry, it belches like an Icelandic hot spring, as gloopy geysers plop away to a soundtrack of high-frequency noises provided by a linked tape machine. Rauschenberg made the work in collaboration with engineers from an industrial conglomerate. Similarly, the artist group Primer works with a water purification company called Aquaporin. Primer displays the firm’s first prototype machine to manufacture biomimetic – synthesised, rather than natural – membranes, but it is hard to consider a single outmoded

machine as art. Quite what Primer does outside of encouraging ‘discourse’ at Aquaporin is unclear. Elsewhere, Jenna Sutela’s I Magma (2019) is a row of handblown, fluid-filled human heads with blobs of coloured lava slopping around inside. The work, linked to a machinelearning programme analysing the material’s movements, was apparently inspired by an idea at Sun Microsystems to use lava lamps to generate and study randomness. Squint and you might also take them as an ironic update of Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time) (c. 1920), implying today’s minds are full of gunk. There are more dummies: Suzanne Treister brings in a set of fantasy avatars working for an imaginary military research institute operating in the future. One of this series of mannequins, Rosalind Brodsky’s Electronic Time Travelling Costume to go to London in the 1960s (1997), wears a groovy purple creation bound by a hippy flower-power belt. Treister, an early booster for the internet, soon became disillusioned by its quick corporatisation, and a note of paranoia crept into her work. Now she seems more interested in who controls such technology. Her newer hexen 2.0 diagrams (2009–11) look like an obscure collaboration between Robert

Jenna Sutela, I Magma, 2019. Photo: Albin Dahlström. © the artist

ArtReview

Crumb and a Nobel physics laureate. Treister has worked with the team at cern and, in another shout-out to times past, admires how scientists still use low-tech blackboards. Even older tech features in Nalini Malani’s short black-and-white film Taboo (1973), in which women workers from a community in Rajasthan are seen using a preweaving process because they are forbidden to touch looms. Staying with weaving and technological shifts, Charlotte Johannesson trained on a Jacquard machine but then swapped to computer to make woolly images like 1983’s Original Computer Graphics Art (Victoria Benedictsson). (As computers improved, she tired of doing that and moved – backwards or forwards? – to working with papier-mâché.) Bran Ferren once said that ‘Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet’, prompting a parallel thought: does Mud Muses actually work as a rant about technology? Or is this highfalutin show itself just hard work, all too much toil and trouble? Some of its arguments appear overly complex, and the catalogue frequently wilfully obscurantist. Maybe, as Le Guin would have it, ‘the hard stuff’s inside, hidden – like bones, as opposed to an exoskeleton’. But outside of that, the intended meaning of some of the works here is as clear as, oh, you know. John Quin

Part of the Labyrinth: Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Various venues, Gothenburg 7 September – 17 November Part of the Labyrinth is itself multipart; the same theme will stretch over a second edition of the biennial in 2021. That one biennial is in this case actually two, separated yet the same, is, according to curator Lisa Rosendahl’s exhibition statement, aligned with the idea of ‘entanglement’ as a way of thinking about the world in terms of mutual and interconnected relationships, rather than as a range of rationally separated entities. This idea also links to Gothenburg’s own history: the holistic worldview was, according to Rosendahl, defeated in Europe by the work of seventeenth-century philosophers such as René Descartes in the same period that Gothenburg was established. Part of the Labyrinth relates this philosophical scope to some very local narratives. Knud Stampe’s stunning largescale ink-drawing triptych Väggteckning (1970–71), which has long hung in the union clubhouse of the Swedish Ball Bearing Factory, is now on display at Göteborgs Konsthall. Its multitude of 5mm-ink-pen lines advertise its lengthy gestation, monotonous labour comparable to Stampe’s depressedlooking factory workers, depicted here surreally out of context against the drawing’s white background. Väggteckning is presented in a small, tightly installed room that creates both intimacy and distance between viewers and the art, the works’ display suggesting a museological

installation. This doubleness reminds us that art, and the white cube, can alienate as well as evoke ‘entanglement’. Next to Stampe’s work, Rikke Luther’s Concrete Nature (2018–19) is a documentary-style video revolving around concrete, a material made since antiquity but manufactured on an industrial scale from the nineteenth century, later enabling the buildings of the European and American welfare states. This political project, Luther suggests, charged concrete with ideological agency, since it enabled modern largescale premises for housing political and social institutions (municipal centres, healthcare institutions, housing projects) intended to distribute wealth and guarantee social security. Another work by the artist at the Natural History Museum, The Planetary Sand Bank (2019), is a triptych of screenprinted canvases mimicking the pedagogical aesthetic of its host venue, explaining the legal and political forces in play when extracting sand, and the process’s environmental effects. Luther’s two works deal with potentiality and progressiveness, and, simultaneously, the devastating consequences of the same modernity. At Röda Sten Konsthall, contrariwise, there’s a more utopian tone. For example: Åsa Elzén’s Transcripts of a Fallow (2019), a ‘transcript’ of the large carpet Fallow, created by Maja and Amelie Fjaestad in 1919–20 for the Fogelstad Group.

The latter promoted progressive ideas of feminism, design, farming and ecology, the concept of ‘lying fallow’ standing for sustainability: to let rest, reuse and coexist with nature rather than live from it. Elzén’s piece connects historiography with the practical knowledge of handicraft and agricultural traditions. A similar interest in earthly time underwrites Susanne Kriemann’s Canopy, canopy (2018), an installation made from fabric coloured by plants and soil gathered near an abandoned German uranium mine. There, the plants catalyse and clean the poisoned earth. Here, their radioactivity makes the fabric change colour during the exhibition, like a developing photo. The link to photography as industrialised technology based on resource extraction – articulated in Kriemann’s previous works – is, however, lost here. What remains functions more as a metaphor for photography. Sometimes, then, the works in the biennial fall into the trap of simplification, not doing justice to art’s entangling capabilities. More often, though, they both uncover a contradictory modernity – one that prompts us to dream of a better world while simultaneously destroying the planet’s fabric – and give historical examples of alternative models for rethinking man in an ecological and social context, suggesting how to act in order not to forget that we are always, already, part of the labyrinth. Hans Carlsson

Knud Stampe, Väggteckning, 1970–71, ink on paper, 600 × 200 cm Courtesy skf Verkstadsklubb, Gothenburg

December 2019

Art Encounters Biennial 2019 Various venues, Timișoara 20 September – 27 October Staged in the small but significant Romanian city of Timișoara, historic capital of the longcontested Banat region, the third edition of Art Encounters is framed as a yearlong project rather than a traditional biennial. Emphasising local engagement at the expense of international press, a range of workshops, lectures and screenings were held in the weeks and months before the exhibition even opened. Further thwarting any reduction to neat, easily communicable messages, it is not a thematic exhibition; instead, curators Maria Lind and Anca Rujoiu reference the work of locally born author Herta Müller, comparing the biennial to a confluence of distinct but still inseparable ‘winds’. Its largest iteration to date, the biennial features the work of 80 international artists, including around 20 – among them Agnieszka Polska, Ahmet Ögüt, Michael Beutler and Céline Condorelli – commissioned to make new work. Unfurling across the city, artworks are installed in railway alleyways and university concourses, on streets, billboards and shopfronts, along with other venues – such as the Corneliu Miklosi Public Transport Museum, the Banat National Museum and the Communist Consumer Museum – more accustomed to the display of objects, if not exactly of contemporary art. This demonstrates the curators’ explicit desire to use preexisting sites as a way of resisting the city’s gentrification. Still, it remains hard not to think that, like most biennials, it represents part of a strategy to do exactly this. Nonetheless, this curatorial approach gives the exhibition an oddly atmospheric quality, as though the city has been very subtly infiltrated. Its image printed on marketing materials, as an artwork and in shopfronts, Polska’s Wayward Pigeon (2019) – representing an ideal if nonexistent carrier pigeon – seems to recur constantly, like an omnipresent whack-amole. In the upper level of the Banat National Museum (housed in the Maria Therezia Bastion,

the reconditioned medieval battlements used to ward off repeated Ottoman attacks), Condorelli’s installation Collection Show (2019) is similarly covert, rooted in the selection of preexisting things. Brightly coloured octagonal display stands collecting items sourced from locally held collections of art, communist paraphernalia and regional textiles, the installation is considered and affecting, while simultaneously implying the placeless and infinitely transferable character of much biennial art. A considerable amount of strong, mainly filmic work is housed outside the old city centre at the Youth House, the striking postwar behemoth that was once the headquarters of the Timiș Communist Youth Union and is now home to, among other things, a coworking space. Fictional but filmed in a documentary style, Ane Hjort Guttu’s Time Passes (2015) presents an uncanny depiction of youth’s unwieldy idealism and indignation, demonstrating the problem of empathy as a rationale for making art. Down in the building’s labyrinthine basement, Every Good Body Dances (2019), a new commission by the young Singaporean artist Kray Chen, consists of a single take showing local folk musicians performing the same song in a range of tempos, from frenetic to funereal: a poignant, abridged take on one of many disappearing worlds. Observing a man carefully transporting Dagestani heritage over an elevated tightrope two paintings at a time, Taus Makhacheva’s cinematic Tightrope, Dagestan (2015) shows something of the tenacity required to prevent losing them entirely. Polska’s mercurial pigeon appears once again, this time digitally printed on a semitranslucent sheath floating above the central concourse of the Public Transport Museum. Surrounding this cavernous central space – also inhabited by strong sculptural works by Beutler and Bella Rune – are a number of adjacent rooms again mostly showing films. Examining the genesis and eventual failure

facing page, bottom Taus Makhacheva, Tightrope, Dagestan (still), 2015, video, colour, sound, 58 min 10 sec. Courtesy Art Encounters Foundation, Timișoara

facing page, top Work by Bella Rune and Agnieszka Polska at the Corneliu Miklosi Public Transport Museum, Timișoara, 2019 Photo: Adrian Câtu. Courtesy Art Encounters Foundation, Timișoara

of the Non-Aligned Movement, Naeem Mohaiemen’s film-length Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) undermines the naturalisation process underscoring the contemporary status quo. Originally commissioned for Documenta 14 (2017), the film feels resonant in Timișoara: in December 1989, the city was the first part of Romania to declare itself free of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s particularly brutal variant of socialism. At that moment, the apparent inevitability of authoritarianism revealed its contingency. Romania could be something else entirely, or it could be the same as everywhere else. This decision appears ongoing. Timișoara is clearly changing, with Art Encounters and its 2021 European City of Culture status in particular serving to accelerate this process. In the wake of the country’s 2007 entry into the eu, multinationals are favouring the city as a production and processing centre, while also touting it as a tech hub, thanks in no small part to comparatively cheap labour and a remarkably strong broadband connection. This emergent connectivity also implies the country’s role in affairs it previously could neither see nor name – things that simply arrive, seemingly on the wind. In a tunnel at the city’s northern train station, the Romanian artist Dan Acostioaiei’s mosaic Seas under Deserts (2019) reworks a postcard sent by the artist’s father from Syria during the 1970s, when posted in the country as a cartographer. Showing two smiling women in casually traditional attire, the mural communicates a sense of peaceful antiquity. ‘Souvenir de Syrie’, reads the bold red inscription across its top. Installed in a site emblematic of the city’s strengthening link to the wider world, however, the mural also highlights the inconvenient underside of connectivity. Precisely when freedoms of movement are increasing in Romania, they are reducing elsewhere. Bodies, like winds, hit impasses, or are only permitted to move in one way. Rebecca O’ Dwyer

ArtReview

December 2019

Limp Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna 13 September – 31 October In Michael Curran’s 1994 film Amami Se Vuoi, the artist lies down naked on a table. He smokes a cigarette gauntly, and asks someone offscreen to cue the titular ballad. Another man, muscled and clothed this time, leans over him and proceeds to methodically spit into his mouth until the song ends. Details register blurrily and woozily: arm hair in the light, a ball necklace reminding the viewer that gravity still exists even as Curran strains upwards. Watching this short feels like being surprised by bits of eggshell in your soft-boiled egg. Tenderness, violence, followed by nervy duende. The men are enacting a fantasy culled from Jean Genet’s 1946 novel Miracle of the Rose, previously editorialised in the closing scenes of Todd Haynes’s 1991 film Poison. While both interpretations share a certain ecstatic quality, a sense of transcendence via transgression, Curran’s is quieter, and far less exuberant. How does it end? Biceps straightens himself out of frame, leaving Bony with a half erection. It’s one of the most extraordinary works I’ve ever seen. Limp, curated by Paul Clinton (as part of Vienna’s ‘Curated by’ festival) and featuring seven artists or collectives, is full of such moments of interrupted circulation that deftly circumvent both sentiment and cheap thrills. To the treacly liberal adage that ‘love is love’,

it offers the noncommittal titles of Curran’s aforementioned work (which translates as ‘love me if you want’), and disappointment (1994/2019), a fleece printed with a portrait of a man flung over a chair. At its core is the pertinent question of whether framing queer imagery as transgressive operates to silo sexual minorities. Or does it keep the straights safely out? This tension is made literal in Richard John Jones’s The Nightmare Having A Nightmare (After Ingo Swann) (2017), which greets the viewer at the show’s outset. Banners featuring bareassed men, and the odd upside-down cross or American flag, are tied to a steel scaffolding structure draped with camouflage netting. The banners are bordered by thin strips featuring phrases repeating like ticker tape, such as ‘without a reflection I cease to exist’. Crucially, the libidinal frustration extends to the artists too. If Jones’s structure suggests the frisson of public voyeurism, Liz Rosenfeld’s video liz/james/stillholes (2005/2017) on a nearby wall provides some contrast. The artist tries to cruise porn-shop glory holes, is denied on account of being a woman but tries to sneak in anyway, opining on gender with her interlocutor and the differences between lesbian and gay culture along the way. “Judith Butler is sitting in the car with me right now! Judith!”

Richard John Jones, The Nightmare Having A Nightmare (After Ingo Swann), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna & Rome

ArtReview

she shrieks playfully at one point, before grousing that “gay men are so afraid of their culture being taken away from them”. Perhaps we all understand – at least on some level – that representation is not the same thing as reparation or transformative justice, and that neoliberalism has all but neutered its radical potential. But while the mainstream might have snatched culture, there’s always history, seen here in some early General Idea works, and a compelling vitrine of queer-theory texts. Still, the works in this show are sexy without ever becoming a spectacle. Even when they gently mock these boundaries through humour, as with the smorgasbord of winky beefcakes in Robert Blanchon’s supercut let’s just kiss + say goodbye (1995), it’s all innuendo and no action. Projected large against one gallery wall, the video features a parade of masculine archetypescum-fantasies: doctor, sailor, cowboy, guy-nextdoor and so on. Each encounter is cut short. Coupled with the schmaltzy soundtrack, it serves as a sobering reminder of the aids epidemic, which casts its long shadow over the show as a whole. But viewed today in the age of streaming services, it equally suggests scrolling or flipping through categories of porn. Just horny and bored; nothing to see here. Rahel Aima

Soto. The Fourth Dimension Guggenheim Bilbao 18 October– 9 February Those unfamiliar with Jesús Rafael Soto may be intrigued to learn that his works have been known to induce vertigo and dizziness. Considering that the Venezuelan-born artist, who died in 2005, is regarded as fundamental to the development of kinetic art, it is even more surprising to discover that his reliefs and sculptures rarely move; their shimmering, vibrating and rippling is illusory, generated by the viewer’s own movements in tandem with the artist’s perceptual ruses. In Bilbao the full scope of Soto’s output is covered by this generous 60work retrospective, which tracks his ocular investigations over five decades. With so many Sotos crammed into a single space, the giddying show leaves you sensing that the French critic Jean Clay was on to something when he claimed, in the first issue of 1960s art magazine Robho, that ‘Kineticism is not about “things that move”, but the awareness of the instability of the real’. Soto’s association with kineticism stemmed from his inclusion in the pivotal 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement, at Galerie Denise René in Paris. Yet, wary of labels, he resisted being identified with any movement. His small wall-based works from this period are more closely aligned to Op art (though he refused to participate in moma’s fabled 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye). Take

the dazzling concentric patterns of La Spiral (The Spiral, 1955), or the fluttering geometries of Structure cinétique (Kinetic Structure, 1955), which utilise interference patterns on Perspex overlays to create disorienting visual effects. Soto ran and ran with this concept, achieving similar outcomes with assorted combinations of wires, rods and threads set against striated supports. Fundamental to all these propositions is the interplay of lines – a simple conceit resulting in considerable optical complexity. The denouncement of Op art and kineticism as frivolous was of little consequence to Soto, whose practice thrived on intellectual rigour. As he explained in 1974: ‘Art should evolve with the same seriousness as philosophy, mathematics, and scientific research’. And yet, as retinal fatigue sets in, there’s a niggling feeling that perhaps Soto’s dissenters were right. Nowhere is this felt more than in his seductive walk-in sculptures begun in 1967, which he called Penetrables. The experience of walking through the curtain of suspended rods in Penetrable blanco y amarillo (White and Yellow Penetrable, 1968) feels as hollow as the Perspex cube into which you are led. The initial radicalism of these works has evidently faded over the decades.

Conversely, Soto’s attempt to represent movement, vibration, light, space and time – or at least the relationships between them – reached its pinnacle with his Progressions and Virtual Volumes series. Floor-based sculptures such as Doble progresión azul y negra (Blue and Black Double Progression, 1975) and Duomo centro rosso (Red Centre Dome, 1997) appear to dematerialise as ascending and descending rods mingle in a hallucinatory sequence of flickering undulations. In 1965 Soto attached small black-and-white squares to a column of pinstriped rectangles. As you approach the wall-based work, the protruding shapes shimmer and vibrate. Soto repeated this stratagem on varying scales, culminating in 1996 with a huge version incorporating differently coloured squares. In contrast to the visual befuddlement experienced elsewhere, the appearance of movement in these untitled works is slight and genuinely startling. As you sway, marvelling at the optical effect, you begin to become acutely aware of your own embodied condition – every quiver and micromovement. John Cage taught us that there is no such thing as silence; similarly, Soto’s most affecting works reveal the elusiveness of stillness and the ubiquity of motion. David Trigg

La Spiral, from the Sotomagie series, 1955, colour silkscreen on Plexiglas, 34 × 34 × 18 cm. © the artist/adagp, Paris / vegap, Bilbao, 2019

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The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow 28 June – 1 December The rhetoric of environmental emergency can be adopted not only by artists or activists calling for systemic change but also by the politicians and multinational conglomerates intent on preventing it. In declaring ‘ecology as the new politics’, then, exactly what kind of politics are Garage mca curators Snejana Krasteva and Ekaterina Lazareva advocating? And what kind of ecology? The Coming World is a wide-ranging exhibition, maybe too wide. It takes over the entire museum, its galleries and atrium, and even sprawls outside, into Gorky Park. Hoardings have been emblazoned with stirring quotations by artists and thinkers. Allora & Calzadilla have scattered yellow artificial flowers across the concrete outside Garage. Yet in offering such a multiplicity of responses, words like ‘politics’ and ‘ecology’ begin to lose their specificity. Upstairs, the exhibition is divided into discrete sections. Behind a closed door, an introductory gallery gives a haphazard tour of nature and aesthetics. This is least interesting when it treads familiar art-historical terrain (not another Dutch landscape!) and strongest

when favouring the idiosyncratic. A blackand-white documentary photograph of three men holding their noses is powerful in its silliness. It shows an action by Gnezdo, a short-lived satirical art collective of the Soviet era. The title is a neat summary: A Minute of Not Breathing to Protect the Environment (1977). Across Garage’s main gallery, water is a central concern in the works of Hans Haacke, Tita Salina, Allan Sekula and others. Like Gnezdo, Critical Art Ensemble’s Environmental Triage (2018–19) stands out for the complex ramifications of its simple idea and for probing the limits of individual agency. The work presents samples from four water sources, each facing different problems: Moscow tap water; Moskva River; the Volga; and Lake Baikal, an icon of Russian natural beauty threatened by industry and development. There is a short text on each, and in a nod to Haacke, visitors are encouraged to vote for the one most important to them. But what does participating actually achieve? To me, visiting oligarchic Russia from Brexit Britain, this impotent performance of democratic choice is quietly devastating.

The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, 2019 (installation view, featuring work by Sergei Kishchenko). Courtesy Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

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The exhibition’s boldest curatorial gambit is its least successful. Housed within an architectural structure whose curves nod to 1960s space aesthetics, ‘Profiles of the Future’ is a series of capsules each given over to a single artist. The result is a procession of works by Patricia Piccinini, Pamela Rosenkranz, Tomás Saraceno and more. Where most rooms contain a single piece, Sergei Kishchenko presents a small solo show that includes blown-up photographs of seeds, sculptures made from tufa limestone reminiscent of Palaeolithic Venus figurines – their toes sunk into plinths of earth – and video. The works have developed out of the artist’s long engagement with agriculture and the politics of reproduction: here, seeds, crops and fertility cults. Kishchenko’s is the richest, most intriguing contribution to this section of the exhibition. The curators aimed, according to the exhibition guide, to present ‘various scenarios for possible action’, but in creating a linear walkway in which no work speaks to any other, there is an inexorable sense – Kishchenko aside – that we are simply trudging onwards, with barely time to pause. Such a sense of inevitability is no basis for a politics of action. Tom Jeffreys

Lucy McKenzie Giving Up The Shadows On My Face Cabinet, London 10 October – 7 December Aspects of life normally annexed from shopping – one’s private thoughts and health data, for example – are rapidly being subsumed into the marketplace. Not to mention that the experience of some commercial art galleries is increasingly difficult to distinguish from that of the department store. For her exhibition at Cabinet, Lucy McKenzie adopts anachronistic styles – propaganda murals and trompe l’oeil paintings – to foreground the similarities between consumerism and totalitarianism. The show takes the form of an uncanny, sparsely stocked showroom, with realist paintings of erotic photobooks and bespoke vases and chairs replacing mass-produced commodities. Here, however, the array of consumables are mostly flattened, as trompe l’oeil images in the painted tabletop surfaces that display them, suggesting, perhaps, how standardised goods are more a superficial manifestation of an immaterial desire than meaningful physical possessions. The glazed surface of Quodlibet lxvii (Dressmaking) (2017–19) – a modernist dining table bookended by two similarly styled chairs – displays images of dressmaking patterns and tools for women’s clothing. The implication is that fashion, particularly for women (the show includes

the female form from multiple angles), constructs and enforces a flattened ideal onto three-dimensional people: bodies regimented to suit a capitalist production line. McKenzie takes outmoded, decorative and commercial artforms and pits them against the contemporary fetish for novelty and uniqueness. At the centre of the gallery stand two reconstructions of Soviet-era window displays (Arcade 1 and Arcade 2, both 2019). Their usual function, as the first point of visual contact with the shopper, is to promote an orthodoxy of aesthetic aspirations amidst crowds passing by on the street, and to make generic commodities appear unique. But here, on closer inspection, all their marble surfaces – based on those found in the fascistclassical architecture of Benito Mussolini’s eur district of Rome – have been handpainted, and the plastic mannequin, which bears a passing resemblance to the artist, is a one-off. The fantasy of originality and uniqueness in shopfronts here becomes a reality. Continuing the theme of bodily discipline, within the opposite wall, and seen only through apertures cut into it, is a reproduction in oil paint of the mural on display in the central reading room of the Russian State Library in Moscow (Giving Up The Shadows On My Face, 2019).

In the same way that mass-produced items attempt to homogenise desire for products and clothes, the original mural, in showing the idealised body and its relationship to others, is evidence of Soviet Russia’s predilection for eradicating the individual in favour of the collective. In McKenzie’s version of the mural, however, she has depicted the repressed sexuality of characters who caress each other and explore the flesh under their clothes, and by extension their private lives away from the Soviet regime (and perhaps even consumerism’s impersonal ideals). Although the characters appear to have been in some sense liberated, the frame through which they are viewed is a mechanism of control, cutting and ordering the scene. The body is objectified, sold and exploited through the frame that can be seen in the shopfront and most explicitly in the pornographic books painted into Quodlibet lxvi (2019). In contemporary capitalist society, individuals are both consumers and consumed, the difference effaced through the sale and micromanagement of private information. Even if we are identikit in this respect, at least we are yet to give up, counter to the show’s title, the shadows on our faces. Matthew Turner

Giving Up The Shadows On My Face, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London

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Christina Quarles Hepworth Wakefield 19 October – 19 January The figures that Christina Quarles begins by drawing straight to canvas are a fragmented, refracted, everchanging jumble. These outlines are fleshed out into painted limbs that stretch and twist with a soft spaghetti ease: boobs dangle or jut at right angles while butt cheeks bloom into radiant red suns. Skin dissolves into ribs, muscle and guts. Faces are rarely more than spectral smudges, but there’s a particular emphasis on heavily outlined, cartoonish hands and feet: the ends of our bodies most clearly visible to ourselves. These are nudes conjured from the inside out. The immediate impression in the Los Angeles-based painter’s first institutional show in the uk is of categories collapsing in an orgy of body parts. Quarles’s titles both reinforce and undermine this, playing on the slippages in puns and misapprehensions like Carefully Taut (2019), Let Us In Too (Tha Light) (2018) or By Tha Skin of Our Tooth (2019), with its muddle of singular and plural, and bleed between flesh and bone. The ecstatic blurring of Quarles’s paintings is underpinned by the artist’s experience

as the light-skinned, queer, cis-gendered daughter of a black father and white mother, with all of the readings and misreadings of her identity that entails. Set against brash, upbeat chequerboard, harlequin, dogtooth and spotty 2d backgrounds, Quarles’s bodies are cut up and interrupted by abruptly shifting planes and perspectives. Cut to Ribbons (2019), for instance, references the swimming pool paintings of David Hockney, a selection of whose work from the 1960s can be seen in the adjoining galleries. Slicing across what could be a many-limbed single figure or two embracing bodies with one head are three planes of blue: a solid bold bar of acrylic, an expressive wash and finally the twirling whiteon-blue ribbons familiar from Hockney. If the anything-goes physicality of Quarles’s figures suggests freedom, the world they inhabit has clear zones and boundaries, not least the edge of the canvas itself, against which they often lean or push. It’s also a world that draws attention to its own construction, with Quarles using contrasting painterly techniques and references

Let Us In Too (Tha Light), 2018. Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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to establish her own hybrid art-historical lineage. Textured brushstrokes, thick smooth skins of shiny paint, stencilled patterns and airy spray coexist in a single painting, or figure. Nods to other artists stack up, from the young Hockney’s knowing play with abstraction and figuration to Maria Lassnig’s body-focused self-portraits. Quarles turns the push-and-pull between liberated queer subjectivity and externally imposed norms into an entanglement of bodies and environments. This tension between how we create ourselves and how others shape us, independence and dependence, affects the relationships between the figures themselves, too. In her delicate, droll line drawings, lovers with mingling outlines pine for one another (‘aint no sunshine when she gone’ reads the writing on one midriff) while attempting to establish boundaries. Hold Up (2019), for examples, evokes both the setting of limits (I need my space!) and mutual support. It’s a contradiction that speaks to how identity is formed and maintained, which Quarles articulates with wit and insight. Skye Sherwin

Anna Maria Maiolino Making Love Revolutionary Whitechapel Gallery, London 25 September – 12 January Eggs are plentiful in Anna Maria Maiolino’s first uk retrospective. They are rolled across a table by two men in latex gloves for the film + - = - (Mais Menos Igual Menos) (1976), a discomfiting activity somewhere between a medical examination and a sport. They cover a pavement on which a blindfolded woman walks for the performance Entrevidas (Between Lives, 1981). They are photographed at the tops of stairwells, on the seats of chairs and resting between thighs. Imperiled but never broken, Maiolino’s egg reads variously as a symbol of the fragility of life under an oppressive regime, motherhood, female reproduction and the claims made upon it by men. Born in Italy in 1942, Maiolino moved with her family to Venezuela when she was twelve years old, and then on to Brazil. Entrevidas was performed in Rio de Janeiro in the final years of the military dictatorship (the first free elections for the national legislature since the 1964 coup were held in 1982). Documentary photographs of the event read like a picto-

graphic formula for the tense political atmosphere: eggs + pavement + legs = treading on eggshells. Not everything on show is as amenable to translation. This survey covers five decades of an often sibylline and introverted practice. In the downstairs gallery, painted shapes displayed in frames fill a wall like rudimentary hieroglyphs. Elsewhere, experiments with paper turn into private diagrams and drawings spiral into asemic writing. As I wander the rooms I feel like I’m looking at a draft alphabet for a language I cannot decode. At times this results in a kind of affective muteness, enhanced by Maiolino’s inexpressive style, which gives little away. Yet the muteness has its politics. In the central image of the photographic triptych É o que sobra (What Is Left Over, 1974), the artist holds a pair of scissors around her tongue. During the Brazilian dictatorship, critics of the regime were routinely murdered. Speak, the photograph seems to say, and you may be brutally silenced. The sentiment resonates

today: President Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018 following a racist, misogynist and homophobic campaign, has openly praised the former dictatorship’s use of torture. Despite the invocation of love in the exhibition’s title, and its promise of revolution, I find the emotional register forlorn, the atmosphere one of entrapment. At the entrance to the gallery is the site-specific installation Until Now (2019), one of a number of works in clay Maiolino has been making since the 1990s. Long strands of rolled, unfired terracotta are piled up like rusty chains. Their blankness, and their multiplication, call to mind a particularly abject sort of drudgery. One work in particular suggests a desire to flee. In the etching Escape Angle (1971), a black outline of a square is missing its bottom right corner. In this art of hidden meanings, a simple square could represent many things: a house, a country, a body, a prison, a shell. Through the gap, an almost-invisible shape oozes out, white on white. Rosanna Mclaughlin

Untitled, from the series A Life Line – Photopoemaction, 1981. Photo: Henri Virgil Stahl. Courtesy the artist

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21st Contemporary Art Biennial sesc_Videobrasil Imagined Communities sesc 24 de Maio, São Paulo 9 October – 2 February Imagined Communities, the 21st edition of Videobrasil, takes its title from a 1983 book by Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson that describes nationality, ‘nation-ness’ and nationalism as ‘cultural artefacts of a particular kind’. For the curators of this film-festivalturned-art-biennial, with its admirable and longstanding focus on artists from the ‘global south’, they are artefacts long-past their sellby date. Instead, at sesc’s new downtown arts centre, and in the accompanying cinema programme, the viewer is presented with examples or propositions for postnational communities (‘in the minds of each’ such group, to borrow Anderson’s words concerning national identity, ‘lives the image of their communion’), as well as, in the case of the seven indigenous artists and collectives, those identities forged prior to the colonial imposition of a nation state. A video by Brazilian artists Paulo Mendel and Vitor Grunvald stands out. Domingo (Sunday, 2018) documents a group of young gay and trans friends living in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of São Paulo. Cans of cheap beer in hand, at times deploying Pajubá, the Brazilian Portuguese gay cryptolect, they joke and mess around on the streets. As an impromptu party gathers, these charismatic characters decide to end their weekend by attending a protest against then-president Michel Temer in the centre of the city (“I want to show up on tv, fag,” one boy says to another). For most of its 25-minute duration, the work hinges on the dialogue between subjects, but as it draws to a close, we lose track of the kids amidst volleys of teargas deployed by the police as the protest turns into a riot. On the wall behind Mendel and Grunvald’s video, playing across two monitors in the centre of the gallery, is Syrian-born Hrair Sarkissian’s Execution

Squares (2008). To the right hangs Ojibwe painter Jim Denomie’s Off the Reservation (or Minnesota Nice) (2012). The former consists of a series of large-format photographs of empty crossroads and public spaces in Aleppo, Latakia and Damascus, all of which have been the sites of public hangings. Denomie’s work is a vast painting depicting the 1862 battle between United States armed forces and the Dakota people, who had revolted against starvation and enforced poverty. In response, 38 Dakota were hung in Mankato, Minnesota (the largest mass execution in the history of the us). All of these works demonstrate the extent to which the state will act in order to protect its sovereignty. Likewise demonstrating the fealty demanded by the nationstate is Roney Freitas and Isael Maxakali’s Grin (2016). Shown as part of the daily film programme (screened in a makeshift auditorium; while previous editions of Videobrasil were held at one of sesc’s much more spacious arts venues across town, as well as in a local cinema, this edition felt cramped at times, and the audiovisual quality suffered), the 40-minute film tells the story of the Guarda Rural Indigena, a military platoon made up of men from the Maxakali tribe forcibly conscripted during the early 1970s (and made to police and subjugate their own people) by the Brazilian military dictatorship. Though the curators happily allow the exhibition a freedom to go off on tangents concerning nature (Paul Rosero Contreras’s excellent Dark Paradise: Humans in Galapagos, 2016–19, which mixes magical realism with pointed questions concerning the ecology of the titular islands) and urbanism (Georges Senga’s photographs of Congolese houses at the centre of inheritance disputes, alongside his pictures of houses in Brazil marked for sale), among other subjects, it is identity

facing page, top Roney Freitas and Isael Maxakali, Grin (video still), 2016, video, 41 min. Courtesy the artist

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politics that underpins much of the show. This is unsurprising given that the exhibition takes place in a country experiencing the white heat of a culture war, in which, when the new culture secretary, Roberto Alvim, says things such as, ‘Like the Crusaders, we are fighting barbarian invasions against the principles and values of our JudeoChristian civilization’, it is impossible not to take sides, however destructive the polarisation of society may be. Intractable division lies at the heart of Omar Mismar’s Schmitt, You and Me (2016–17), which consists of the owner and the manager of a gun shop in Skowhegan, Maine, reading aloud ‘The Concept of the Political’, a 1932 essay by rightwing philosopher Carl Schmitt. Clocking in at just under an hour, this might not sound like the most entertaining of prospects, but what unfolds is a slow, humane portrait of two white working-class guys struggling through this dense treatise on the nature of power. At times commenting uncomfortably on the text in relation to North America’s current divisive relationship with the Arab world (Mismar is from Lebanon), Schmitt’s claim that community is formed through the identity of an enemy seems not far off the mark in these divisive times. There’s an unexpected warmth between the subjects and filmmakers that undercuts the German’s philosophy however: a suggestion, at the risk of sounding like a glib, happyclappy liberal, that we might have more in common than divides us (these connections are only imagined, remember). Of course, the other perspective, to quote a resident of a tiny underpopulated South Korean island profiled in Ellie Kyungran Heo’s filmwork Island (2015) as hordes of daytrippers descend on his remote idyll, is to shrug, “Ugh, human beings”. Take your choice. Oliver Basciano

facing page, bottom Paul Rosero Contreras, Dark Paradise: Humans in Galapagos, 2016–19, two-channel video installation. Photo: Everton Ballardin

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Song Dong Same Bed Different Dreams Pace Gallery, London 1 October – 5 November “Cool jacket, looks edible!”, a cashier complimented me a few days ago. Edibility is a quality increasingly associated with enticing things and ideas, such as rampant modernisation, development and – apparently – our outfits. The sugar-coated promises of urban regeneration can be destructive, though. Riding on this admonition, Song Dong’s survey opened at Pace during ‘Frieze week’ with an iteration of the project Eating the City, touring since 2003, which invites the audience to consume a cityscape made of confectionery. Cities are fragile palimpsests, and when the old ways are lost, there is no turning back. Connoisseur of sweets that I am, I made my way through a hoard of smartphonewielding art students and collectors in Italian suits to the real delicacy: the sour apple belts – my enjoyment of these went unopposed, since the punters seemed more excited by the thrill of destruction than by gluttony. Few things unleash Eros and Thanatos – if not straight iconoclastic impulses – like a combination of participative art, ravenous Instagram feeds and biscuits within a white-cube environment. Song’s practice is not all candies and gimmicks, though. The Beijing artist, raised during the Cultural Revolution and graduating in fine art the year of the Tiananmen Square protests, has the ability to comment with candid poetic immediacy on the cultural and political context

of his homeland, while also speaking to universal themes. The appeal and limitation of Song’s practice lies in the transposition of quotidian observations into wider meanings, through a generous use of digestible visual metaphors. Some might find this clarity moving, refreshing and effective. Others may find it easy, verging on banal; one doesn’t exclude the other. For example, in the Mandala series (2015), approximative renditions of Buddhist mandalas are traced using seeds and spices, as a celebration of the everyday; Writing Time with Water Beijing (1995), the photographic documentation of a performance in which Song writes the time on asphalt with brush and water, is an attempt to capture a fleeting moment and a remark on the impossibility of defining time; the video Broken Mirror (1999), in which the artist points a camera at a small glass mirror before smashing it with a hammer and revealing the street scene hidden by the glass (including the puzzled expressions of passersby), hints again at the rapid change of the Chinese urban landscape; the Sketch series (2015), consisting of enlarged copies of found shards of porcelain, with the original fragments’ measurements noted in blue glaze, is a prosaic commentary on the beauty of waste and the unprofitable. In 2005 Song Dong started touring the Waste Not series, a collaboration with his mother in which they organised her entire accumula-

tion of possessions as a series of installations. Simply laid out, folded or piled up were used toothpaste tubes, plastic bags, bottle caps, wrecked furniture and more and more and more. Song Dong sees the wu jin qi yong mentality (translated as ‘waste not’ in English) not just as a characteristic of his mother’s morals and psychology, but of a whole generation of Chinese people, maybe a way to hold on to the past while coping with future uncertainty through the comfort of material hoarding. This ability to comment on social issues starting from the familial and the personal seems watered down in his serialised later works, such as the centrepiece of this exhibition, the installation Same Bed Different Dreams No. 3 (2018), which gives the show its title. Visitors can peep through the shiny reflective surfaces of Song’s signature combinations of salvaged windowpanes enclosing found crockery, hanging lights and knickknacks arranged on a double bed. Here, photogenic sentimentality turns the symbolic resistance of a collection of garbage into a polished, collectible artwork. Without the radical tenderness, this sanitised version is unconvincing as the vortex of Song’s first survey in the uk. Same Bed Different Dreams No.3 seems to suck the energy out of the earlier works in order to corroborate its own value, as if the cherry on top had swallowed the whole cake. Valentina Bin

Eating the City London (detail), 2019, mixed media, performance, dimensions variable. Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London

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Lari Pittman Declaration of Independence Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 29 September – 5 January You sense his ambition right from the get-go. Not career ambition, necessarily – though that must have been a part of it, and would even have been a political position for a queer Latino painter in 1980s Los Angeles – but an ambition to cover more ground in a single painting than had hitherto seemed possible, or desirable. Lari Pittman’s sweeping retrospective survey Declaration of Independence opens with an early work conveniently (presciently?) titled Birthplace (1984). At that time, Pittman was already up and running, eight years out of CalArts, where he had been influenced by the Feminist Art Program run by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. (As a man, he was not officially eligible to enrol.) Birthplace, compared to Pittman’s subsequent candied treats, is a relatively wholegrain offering: on cork veneer, abstracted tangles of foliage contribute to what is probably the closest Pittman has ever come to making a landscape. Elsewhere in the painting are the germinating seeds of much of what came after: sharp lines in Pittman’s unmistakable calligraphic hand; masked and sprayed silhouettes; decorated, appropriated folk art (including parts of a carved and painted chair); areas of gross impasto; pictures within the

picture – including one work on paper, framed and stuck in a corner of the canvas, then decorated some more. Birthplace is not an easy painting to like – I’m not sure I do – but, somewhat to my surprise, it casts the 30-plus years of work that follows not as a compendium of detached, calculated gestures of ironic appropriation, quotation and pastiche (this is an artist, remember, who came of age with the Pictures Generation), but rather as the inevitable unfurling of a selfhood that was authentically whole from the beginning. Pittman has talked a lot over the years about the construction of the queer public self – about coding and drag, about ‘fixing up’ and ‘dolling up’. As Declaration of Independence makes abundantly clear, even when he was dolling up his paintings during the late 80s and early 90s with references from the world at large – credit-card logos or Victorian silhouettes, for example – he was able to convincingly integrate them in an interior vision that was entirely his own. While Pittman’s work has long been characterised by its unpatronising accessibility and winning sense of humour, Declaration of Independence is not an easy show. The most extensive presentation of his work to date

and the biggest of any the Hammer has ever staged, the exhibition – as with every single one of his paintings or drawings – is overwhelmingly full of information. Overwhelming but never overbearing. By the part of the (chronological) hang pertaining to the mid2000s, I had surrendered myself to the pleasant sensation of being washed along on the currents of Pittman’s psyche. Responding to the surrealist ‘inscapes’ of Roberto Matta, it was at this period in his career when still lifes began to feature more frequently in his paintings, and a muted, more cohesive palette allowed diverse motifs to blend rather than clash and squabble among themselves. For me, the highlight of the exhibition was – fittingly – an exhibition in itself: a room given over to Pittman’s drawings, hung salon-style against a painted blue trellis, emulating a similar installation, Orangerie, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, in 2010. If at times encountering Pittman’s work en masse can feel excessive, this selective overview of bracingly varied works on paper – none less ambitious than any of his paintings – vividly illustrated just how much ground Pittman has managed to cover. Jonathan Griffin

How Sweet the Day After This and That, Deep Sleep Is Truly Welcomed, 1988, acrylic, enamel and five framed works on paper on wood, three panels, 244 × 488 cm (overall). © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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Tala Madani Shit Moms David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 7 September – 19 October Shit, even for the most anal among us, is a powerful lede. Thus Shit Moms, Tala Madani’s second show at David Kordansky, commands our attention even as it makes explicit its impishly manipulative premise, a grotesque disavowal of common decency, the sort that filmmaker John Waters might thrill to. Madani’s exhibition of mostly oils on linen and a few animated shorts prominently features diapered putti, both male and female. The infants are coupled with golemlike maternal female figures composed of sludgy refuse who accompany them in various acts of childish horseplay turned abject. Madani is at her most acute when rendering these babies, their unsteady stances and protruding tummies delineated as tenderly as those of a Titian Christ. Yet it’s not the infants – who in the paintings Shit Mom (Quads), Shit Mom (Disco Babies) and Shit Mom (Dream Riders) (all works 2019) appear unabashedly fascinated by excrement, much as they frequently seem in life – to whom Madani invites our simultaneous empathy and disgust, but rather their female caregivers. Just as she courted female revulsion at the grotesquely enlarged and flaccid penises of the adult men shown in

earlier works, here she plays on a genderspecific fear: the possibility of being a bad mother. A theme that has seen an upsurge of late in memoirs (part of what Parul Sehgal described in The New York Times last year as a ‘sudden flurry of fascination’ with mothers, especially at their most insecure and least sufficient), motherhood is here painted at its nightmarish nadir. Unsupervised babies roam what look like squatters’ dens, huddle in unlit warehouses or, most damningly, endure the caresses of mothers so squalid that, rather than wiping their offspring’s shit away, their touches leave brown smears. These scenes of digested matriarchs are somewhat abruptly intercut by largescale diptychs invoking the theme of cinema. As in Madani’s show at 303 Gallery in New York last year, depictions of projectors dominate the two largest paintings on view at Kordansky. In Corner Projection (Panic) a projector throwing a blurred vision of fleeing childlike bodies onto an adjacent panel is safely confined within the borders of the film screen. Meanwhile, in Corner Projection (Time), viewers appear to run from the projection much like the 1895 audience who purportedly fled the theatre when the Lumière

Shit Mom (Dream Riders), 2019, oil on linen, 196 × 203 × 2 cm. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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brothers debuted their footage of a train appearing to be headed straight for their seats. In the last century of cinematic advances, filmmakers’ initial attempts to elicit physical responses from their viewers has been replaced by appeals to psychological triggers. Thinking about this show, I kept coming back to a scene from 1996’s Trainspotting in which the hapless Spud, a member of a crew of Scottish heroin addicts, emerges at his girlfriend’s family’s breakfast table after having discovered that he has shat the bed, and his subsequent mortification when her mother wrests the dirty sheet from him, splattering shit over the entire family in the process. The scene’s impact lies less in its graphic obscenity than its underlying pathos of having soiled someone’s mother. One has to remind oneself that (unlike with Waters, who notoriously did in fact make performers eat faeces) it’s only a movie. Madani invites a visceral response from her viewer. But her invocation of fictive cinema, and the distancing it provides, leads one to wonder if these works are meant as a sincere commentary on our maternal fears and hangups (both primal and evergreen) or as a mockery of them in life and art alike. Cat Kron

Pope.L, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Cheyenne Julien & Tschabalala Self: Embodiment Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 12 September – 26 October Embodiment is a group show about the representation of bodies and how melanin translates to pigment: how to represent black, indigenous and other people of colour in a manner that exceeds visual depiction alone and speaks to identity, ancestry and broader sociopolitical issues. Questions of colour are most overt in four small drawings from Pope.L’s ongoing textbased series Skin Sets, each of which takes the format of ‘x people are y’. The aphorisms (Green People Are The Sky Above The City, 2010) and racialised stereotypes are matter-of-fact yet bear a curious generosity all the same. They are annotated with scribbles – ‘I’m talking about a continent of flesh, ya know!’, ‘the sun on retainer’ – that suffuse the reader with the sensation of sudden heat. In a much larger, earlier painting by Pope.L titled Gold People Shit In Their Vale (1995), legibility gives way to sage, grey, fuchsia and marigold, a palette that suggests a cactus in bloom. Occasionally the mixed-media drawings are terribly poignant, as with Blue People Are An Underwater Airport (2011), which invokes both the horrors of the Middle Passage and the popular Afrofuturist mythology of a black Atlantis – a hidden underwater city and space of liberation

populated by the descendants of those who were thrown overboard from slave ships. By eschewing figuration for language, Pope.L seems to suggest that it’s more interesting – more fun even – not to depict the body at all. But the younger artists in the show provide exuberant evidence to the contrary. In Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s trio of largescale figurative paintings, a pair of men are seen shopping for watches, boots and rings. Chase is particularly known for his intimate and sometimes explicit depictions of queer black men, but here the figures are seen out in the world, in multiple overlapping perspectives. The display cases in particular suggest a kind of ‘Rubik’s cubism’ in which segments and details of the painting have been swapped or rotated. In one painting a man is seen with pecs on his back as he peruses flashy gold timepieces; in another he has genitalia where a bellybutton might be, his formerly green skin now shades of brown. There’s more fragmentation in Tschabalala Self’s collaged paintings constructing black women’s bodies from neatly sewn fabric appliqués. In the aptly named Chop (2016), bodies are intimated through an assemblage of extremities: heads wearing manic grins,

breasts and a grasping arm, each body part in a different skin tone. Coupled with Self’s practice of incorporating excess bits of fabric from old works into new paintings, there’s a sense of identity as an amalgamation of everyone who has come before, an epigenetic predicated on admiration and strength instead of trauma. A number of dreamy self-portraits by Cheyenne Julien deploy colour to striking effect. She paints herself softly rounded and strong, whether having an out-of-body experience in the tub, looking down at her own supine body or sitting naked on the bed afterwards. Especially notable are the hot pink carpet and green soft furnishings of Can’t Go Out, Can’t Stay In (2019), which seem to glow so intensely that they are reflected in a pinkened shoulder, a smear of turquoise at the hairline. The work captures, with wry precision, the paralysing tension between the two selves that you could be – between the self-containment of staying with the soft furnishings inside and the siren call of joining the people lounging in the grass outside the open windows. Nearby, in Chase’s watch-shopping expedition, orange signs reading ‘out’ and ‘in’ propose that these options are one and the same. Rahel Aima

Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Watch Shopping, 2019, spraypaint, acrylic paint, marker, glitter, oil stick and pen on canvas, 183 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist; Company Gallery, New York; and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed An Opening Brooklyn Historical Society, New York 7 September – 30 June Artist and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s multidisciplinary practice engages with both the histories of institutions and the narratives they house. Her material is history, and she mines library stacks, archives and vernacular photography for her black-and-white collage installations that paste fragments of photocopied images and texts into the corners of rooms and across walls. As a black Muslim woman, Rasheed’s work often focuses on the absence and constraint of these identities and histories. ‘How do I create environments and opportunities that invite a nuanced, rigorous, ongoing engagement with histories that have been flattened and singular?’ Rasheed asked herself in the broadsheet published to accompany her installation at the New Museum in New York last year, which included publications related to the history of black alternative educational institutions and publishing in Oakland. Her current installation at the Brooklyn Historical Society, An Opening – a translation of the title of the first chapter of the Qur’an – uses the society’s ‘Muslims in Brooklyn’ oral histories archive (comprising over 90 personal accounts collected during 2018 and 2019)

as source material. The small gallery’s bright teal walls are scattered with framed inkjet prints, hung at varying levels, with scraps of collaged papers affixed directly to the wall, tucked into corners, lined up in rows and stacked at the edges of frames. Together, the prints and wall collages read like concrete poetry: ‘transatlantic almost misplaced the words’; ‘one feels the urgency’; ‘she read unfamiliar “terminology”’. Language fills the room, running across corners and forcing viewers to move with the words as well as read them. The prints similarly abstract language, with excerpted photocopied words and lines of instructional books dancing around the edges of geometric shapes. More Pronounced (2019) shows a central black triangle against a white background, resembling a geometry lesson. It doesn’t include a mathematical formula, but instead the oddly spaced text ‘8. more pronounced’ and ‘life’. The suggested instructional quality of the prints and wall texts – heightened by the knowledge that Rasheed is involved in education and curriculum building – lends the gallery an immersive classroom atmosphere. Visitors carry an iPhone with headphones through which they can hear selections, triggered by the artwork they’re facing, from the

Manage History, 2019, archival inkjet print, 2019, 92 × 61 cm. Courtesy the artist

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oral history archive. “They get gifts because we do extra gifts for other children as well; you don’t have to be Muslim,” one woman explains about the Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr celebrations as viewers look at More Pronounced. The range of stories and voices included in the exhibition reaches beyond the one-dimensional presentation of a religious and cultural community. The link between the audio and visual texts is nonlinear, with some words echoing in both, like the print that reads, ‘messy / words / happened first’ in a corner of the room where one hears a young man explaining, “Because we’re messy. You know, some of us don’t practice.” But most are tangentially linked, if at all – the audio clips weaving in and out of each other. Standing in the centre of the gallery, you hear multiple clips at once, a chorus of ‘ums’ and distant voices as the phone swings. Hearing them together rather than reading them, or even listening in a library, allows for unexpected connections. The installation offers and demands openness: visitors are asked to put on these headphones and to immerse themselves in a culture that may not be theirs, and to be open to a nonlinear way of listening, reading and learning. Megan N. Liberty

Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods Estancia femsa / Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City 21 September – 15 December Almost four years after its first exhibition, Estancia femsa / Casa Luis Barragán has cemented its spot as one of the few venues in the city where curators can be adventurous. The place demands it by virtue of being both not a white cube and at the same time a once-lived-in house designed decades ago – in what many, unesco included, consider a timeless example of Mexican modernism – by its creator, the venerated late Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Curators are granted permission to experiment with the house and its hallowed objects, continuously invoking and banishing the late architect’s ghost. For Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods, American curator Elena Filipovic was allowed to swap every art and art-adjacent object within the home for current, contemporary pieces by 16 international artists – guided by the question ‘what would Luis Barragán collect?’ if he were alive today and in the mood for shaking things up. The swaps kept a few ambiguous rules in mind: that the new works be related to the original works either formally or conceptually; that they occupy roughly the same space and be of the same scale; and that they not disturb the visitor’s experience of the house. Filipovic’s

words in the show’s brochure assure us that the new objects reflect on the previous works’ ‘operational value’ within the very deliberate architecture, while not actually shattering the visitor’s impression of Barragán’s intentions. This is a bit tenuous. There is no way that every art object picked by Barragán for his own home could be replaced without jarring. But some of these encounters, however clashing, do work. Where Barragán hung a large eighteenthcentury painting of the Annunciation in his bedroom, in front of his bed, there now hangs Sons of Cush (2016), a striking image by American photographer Deana Lawson. In its centre, a black man, a father, sits holding his baby and staring straight at the spectator. He is surrounded by framed family portraits, a genealogical tree of the African region going back to the Garden of Eden and an anonymous hand holding a stack of banknotes. Also in Barragán’s room, an ivory crucifix is substituted with Lawsons’s Adorah (2008), a tiny print of a dead foetus resting on the white satin interior of its coffin. These work by their smart substitution of the Catholic divine with human godliness: family and sacrifice intertwined. Danai

Anesiadou’s vacuum-packed objects, found at different places around the house, are also a highlight. Works like Deal with It Across All Levels and All Dimensions (2019), in which a plastic bag emptied of air flattens a plastic burger, Chinese rice noodles and a cast-iron skillet into a mishmash of textiles and golden accessories, manage to welcome the clutter and chaos of Mexico City that Barragán struggled to keep out. The last room on the tour, Barragán’s spacious studio, contains all of the architect’s original possessions, and the revelations it holds mirror the feeling of getting an exam back after grading, when one confronts the errors in one’s assumptions. The system of art-equivalences imposes a constant mental math – try to remember what might have been in a given spot, think of what it shares in common with the new – which seems like it might be fun for a curator, but less so for a regular visitor who has paid 400 pesos and booked way in advance to be awed by Barragán’s well-advertised Great Taste. Perhaps the exhibition’s grave mistake is the assumption that its visitors will come for the art, and not just to bask in the presence of the famous ghost. Gaby Cepeda

Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods, 2019 (installation view, featuring work by Deana Lawson and Danai Anesiadou). Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Estancia femsa / Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City

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Books The Topeka School by Ben Lerner, Granta, £16.99 (hardcover) In the opening line of Ben Lerner’s third novel, a young man imagines ‘shattering the mirror’ in a police interrogation room. Darren is unable properly to understand what is being asked of him, or to communicate his version of the events that have resulted in his being taken into custody. The story’s beginning – perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much it owes to psychoanalytic principles of identity formation – is also its end. Its middle describes the social conditions that lead (inexorably, it seems to the forewarned reader) to the performance of a violent act by an alienated American citizen. The scene closely resembles the first in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published in 1996, a year before The Topeka School is set, and long established as Gen X’s masterpiece of toxic masculinity, millennial anxiety and linguistic genius. It’s a lineage traceable back to Hamlet, and Lerner’s novel also revolves around the existential crises of a privileged and gifted adolescent white teenager with parental issues. The protagonist, Adam Gordon, will be familiar to readers of Lerner’s acclaimed Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014), but it is his less entitled peer Darren who here suffers the consequences of being ostracised from society. The Topeka School is delivered in chapters mediated through four characters: in addition to Darren and Adam are Adam’s parents, Jonathan and Jane, two clinical psychologists at a progressive psychiatric foundation in the American Midwest. The structure establishes a shared space inhabited by competing interpretations of the same events, which is to say a society. The exclusion of Darren from that space – he suffers from learning disabilities, is bullied at school – lends the story its nagging dread. Recalling Benjy’s passages in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (Hamlet again!), Darren’s difference is signposted by the italics through which his experience is recounted. Adam, by contrast, is a brilliant high school debater, and thus written into conventional roman text. He specialises in a debating technique known as ‘the spread’. Less a form of reasoning than a ‘glossolalic ritual’, the spread has as its aim the verbal communication of the most information possible in order to overwhelm with data, like a ddos attack. These ‘types of disclosure were designed to conceal’, disconnecting language from the real world and, in the political field, rhetoric from policy.

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Readers won’t have to work hard to draw parallels to our contemporary media landscape. Adam’s linguistic facility is also – via his success in ‘rap battles’ at eye-wateringly obnoxious frat parties – translated directly into the kind of cultural capital that makes it possible for him to keep a girlfriend and stay in with the cool kids, despite his outstanding nerdiness. Rap is here figured as another form of speech uncoupled from the culture that generates its meaning, and Lerner (a great comic writer) plays on the spectacle of young white men in the American Midwest so unselfconsciously appropriating slangs, postures and gang signs. Yet Adam’s articulacy does not diminish his angst; indeed, his ability to deliver convincing interpretations of opposite sides of the same argument seems only to exacerbate it. Arguing with his parents, he slams doors, punches holes in the walls. Language is not a limpid vessel but an internally contradicted field, generating paradoxes that its speaker is unable to resolve. His psychotherapist parents are nonetheless convinced that ‘as long as there was language, there was processing’. Yet Jonathan made his reputation by discovering the phenomenon of ‘speech shadowing’, in which repeated phrases devolve into nonsense without the speaker’s being aware of it, and is preoccupied by a short story in which the protagonist learns to communicate with animals, which he relates to his own disorientating experience of taking lsd. Language is forever breaking down in situations of stress – when Adam is dumped, he babbles incomprehensibly down the phone – is treacherous, is weaponised. As Darren repeats to himself like a mantra, ‘May break my bones but words. Bounces off me sticks to you.’ The various distances from which the characters are narrated – from indirect third person to a more journalistic register – reflects on the difficulties of presuming to speak for others, and by extension in generating the connections between consciousness upon which communities depend. Jane’s account begins with a ‘false memory’ that illustrates how the thinking subject can be tricked by the (linguistic) constructs of her own mind. She, like Jonathan, speaks in the first person, in a tone resembling the edited transcript of an interview with Adam. If the portrayal of the mother can seem hagiographic compared to the surgical precision with which Adam’s and Jonathan’s neuroses are dissected, there are other occasions on which

ArtReview

the reader might feel that punches are being pulled. It’s hard to ignore Lerner’s reluctance to report directly the misogynist, racist and homophobic language in which young white American men speak (and rap), for instance. On the one hand, this feels like pussyfooting; on the other, it exercises a restraint that maintains the novel as a democratic space governed by rules around what can be said, in which different voices can be heard. Indeed, The Topeka School advances an unmistakably American model of political discourse, apparent as much in the polyvocal poetry of Walt Whitman as the moral philosophy of John Rawls. Fiction and nonfiction are, as those twin influences suggest, entangled. Lerner’s mother is a clinical psychologist who, like Jane, has written several bestselling books and worked alongside her husband (at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas). To hoary questions about the separation of real life from art and the author’s responsibility to both, the only answer is, ‘hey, who cares?’ Or, as a perhaps more faithful reflection of the novel’s tone, ‘hey, who cares, given that truth is a linguistic concept we superimpose onto the world to order it?’ Or maybe, ‘hey, who cares, given that truth is a fictional construct that serves the function of allowing us to communicate across the void separating one person from another, without which we are doomed to the lonely contemplation of our own mortality’. Because there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The broken mirror of that opening scene implies the kind of breakdown in language that drove Hamlet to madness (and might even, at an admittedly long stretch, nod to Foster Wallace’s short story ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’, 2004, and Richard Rorty’s 1979 treatise of the same name). But where its literary predecessors framed the breakdown of language as final and irrecoverable (‘the rest is silence’), The Topeka School ’s closing chapter puts forward the possibility that different subject positions might join in something like temporary but workable consensus. In a coda to the central narrative, the adult Adam attends a demonstration with his wife and their young daughter and participates in the ‘human microphone’ that communicates messages across crowds by repeating phrases in union. Whether this final image of embodied and vocalised solidarity does more than sugarcoat the more brutal truths about language and society delivered by this exceptional novel is for the reader to decide. Ben Eastham

The beginning of the story is also its end December 2019

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Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production by Dave Beech Pluto Press, £19.99 (softcover) Postcapitalism – what shape human society takes after capitalism – has been the central preoccupation of anticapitalists even since before Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848). But if ‘communism’ is out of favour among today’s anticapitalists, ‘postcapitalism’ has taken its place, popularised (in the uk at least) by authors such as Aaron Bastani, Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. In an era in which capitalism seems only to work people harder and for dwindling reward, the clamour for some sense of what could replace it has gained new momentum. The site of work, labour and production is increasingly thematised in contemporary art: in calls for artists wages, or in socially engaged practices that deal with alternative ways to produce art collectively or emphasise art’s social ‘usefulness’. But as Marxist critic Dave Beech argues, while today’s art is ‘replete with critical practices’, it ‘typically lacks a clear understanding of the difference between resisting the existing social system and superseding it’. In Art and Postcapitalism, Beech examines art’s relation to work in the light of contemporary postcapitalist thought about a future in which machines do the work, leaving humanity to a life of leisure. To do so, Beech retraces the history of leftwing debates about work under capitalism, alongside art’s historical questioning of artistic labour: in the distinction of crafts from the fine arts; and of the avant-garde’s rebellious association with worker and machine – the complicated story of art’s simultaneous ‘complicity with, and hostility to, capitalism’. Beech understands that ‘what matters for postcapitalism is not the elimination of a certain

kind of work (e.g. factory production) but the elimination of a certain social relation (capitallabour)’. It’s not the character of the work people do, but that capitalism demands work not for the human value of what is produced but for the surplus that can be extracted (‘value production’) for the capitalist. Art has long been marked by contradictions on the site of labour: between free creativity and commercial necessity, mechanical and intellectual work, and the artist’s torn loyalty between patron and popular audience. Beech convincingly retells the way in which the ‘liberal arts’ of the Enlightenment took shape precisely as a rejection of artisanal, repetitive craft labour, while tracing the mutations of this into the nineteenth-century romantic celebration of the artist’s indifference to commerce, the descendant of which Beech finds in the cultivated, knowing idleness of Duchamp. Beech perceptively criticises those who demand the status of ‘worker’ in the cultural industries of neoliberalism; while he sympathises with campaigns like w.a.g.e., Beech makes no friends by pointing out, correctly, that ‘the artist’s wage is more accurately understood… as wealth justified by the status of art’. Beech rightly challenges the naivety of ‘accelerationist’ leftists like Srnicek, Williams and others in their belief that postcapitalism might be defined by ubiquitous automation, since this could equally be true of near-future capitalism, and takes shots at the bizarrely influential posthuman nihilism of ‘rightwing’ accelerationist thinker Nick Land, who prefers to believe that automation will not so much abolish human work as abolish humans altogether.

Nevertheless, the weakness of Beech’s argument lies partly in its confusion over what people have invested, historically, in the idea of art (and a society after capitalism) as a space for self-directed action and self-determination – in other words, freedom. If Beech rails against the aristocratic privilege that is supposed to lurk in Oscar Wilde’s celebration of aestheticised labour – that ‘it is mentally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure’ – he cuts himself off from the popular aspiration not to be forced to work while wishing for material plenty. It’s perhaps why, throughout his lopsided assault on aesthetic labour, Beech studiously avoids one of Marx’s more celebrated lines, in The German Ideology (1932): communist society ‘makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind’. What Beech misses in concluding that ‘art is not the prototype of labour freed from value production’ is that art is an individuated, partial realisation of self-determination, in a world in which self-determination is impossible. The true test of postcapitalism (communism, in fact) isn’t merely the abolition of value production, but the democratisation of control over material production by everyone in society, to suit their collective and individual interests. This is neither work nor idleness, narrowly defined, but the creative self-determination of the whole of a society by and for its members – an ‘ongoing work in progress’, or the biggest Gesamtkunstwerk of them all. J.J. Charlesworth

Grandma, I Want a Penis by Dusadee Huntrakul Bangkok City City Gallery, thb 500 (hardcover) This charming tale is based on the true story of Thai artist Dusadee Huntrakul’s wife, Pat. As a child with two brothers who played ‘pee pee fencing’, she badgered her grandmother to buy her a penis from the market ‘to attach to [her] vagina’. Her grandma would tell her that the penis stall was closed or that her purchase had been left in a rickshaw. Eventually her brothers stopped their game and Pat forgot her request. ‘Thirty-six years later, in front of the Bull Rock Cave in Brno, Czech Republic, I get a call,’ the narrator, presumably Pat, continues. ‘A last

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call from grandma before she dies.’ Pat’s husband sees her grandma’s ghost that night. ‘She comes from the balcony and out through the front door.’ And nine months later… The resultant family made this book. It would be both easy and boring to slap a Freudian reading on this. The narrative, coauthored by the couple and having the simple, irresistible lines of a perfect dinner-party anecdote, is matched by playful pencil illustrations drawn by the couple, their one-year-old son, Prinn, and a friend’s five-year-old boy, Max. It isn’t

ArtReview

always possible to tell the precise authorship, but there are the obvious kiddie dicks, and the more elegant, faux-naive drawings of biomorphic figures with assorted genitalia done by an adult hand. All in all, it manages to be both a credible children’s book and an artist book. It is published on the occasion of They Talk, an exhibition of Huntrakul’s recent ceramic sculptures at Bangkok City City Gallery. If you missed the show, this is a perfect stockingstuffer for your artworld friends – and their kids. Adeline Chia

In print A holiday gift guide for those who like to read between the lines ArtReview is something of an expert in giftgiving, especially when it comes to presents loaded with a subliminal message it would never dare to confront the receiver with directly. This year, that gift might well be Rosanna Mclaughlin’s Double-Tracking (Little Island Press, £10.99), which ArtReview is thinking would be perfect for some of its ‘friends’ in the artworld. Combining essays, profiles and fiction, Double-Tracking takes it cue from a term coined by Tom Wolfe during the 1970s, which points to the artworld’s – and more widely, the bourgeoisie’s – conflicted and duplicitous relationship to privilege. ‘To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, Maldon Sea Salt of the earth, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows their way around the silverware,’ Mclaughlin writes with an eye for the contradictions. Tracing a lineage for this manufactured ‘authenticity’, her stinging prose moves between the poverty fantasies of Marie-Antoinette, the ‘worker look’ in the designs of Margaret Howell and a gallerist ‘wrestling’ with his own privilege. It’s a cathartic reading experience. ArtReview hopes you’ll also find yourself. For friends or perhaps art-student relatives eager to get acquainted with London’s art ‘ecosystem’ (snakepit always seemed to ArtReview like a better analogy), Hettie Judah’s Art London (acc Art Books, £15) is an essential guide to all the spaces showing, producing and selling art in the capital’s neighbourhoods. Layered (like a Christmas trifle) with history and stuffed (like a turkey) with quirky anecdotes, it maps the evolution of an artistic landscape: from William Blake’s Lambeth house to Groovy Bob’s Duke Street Gallery, from Gustav Metzger’s first experiments in autodestructive art in Chelsea (of all places) to Leigh Bowery’s Soho club nights (dress code: ‘as though your life depends

on it, or don’t bother’). For better or worse, London keeps changing, so don’t wait for next Christmas to get your hands on it. Also packed (like pigs-in-blankets) with juicy anecdotes is Dave Haslam’s We the Youth (Cōnfingō, £7), an account of Keith Haring’s experience of the underground club culture of 1970s and 80s New York. Stories of legendary parties such as the 1984 New Year’s Eve ‘Party of Life’ at the infamous Paradise Garage, where Haring invited Madonna to perform, should be sufficient to overcome the rather bland prose and excite the imagination of those nostalgic for a time when these clubs hadn’t been totally coopted by the mainstream (classic double-tracker talk). Dogs are iconic motifs of Haring’s art, their anthropomorphism – they dance, dj, laugh – speaking to humans’ tendency to project their own behaviour onto our animal companions. At least that’s how ArtReview is choosing to see it, so as to create a frictionless segue into the next item on this Christmas wishlist: On Dogs: An Anthology (Notting Hills Editions, £14.99). Introduced by Tracey Ullman, this elegant, pocketsize tribute to our most loyal friends is realised in excerpts from novels, poems and literary theory. Charming inclusions like Lord Byron’s epitaph for a Newfoundland and John Steinbeck’s accounts of his travels with his poodle (‘he is a fraud and I know it… five minutes after I had left Charley he had found new friends and made his arrangements for his comfort’) are balanced with texts that take the dog’s perspective: Buck’s return to his nature in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), for example, and Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narration of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, the aptly named Flush. In combination with essays by the likes of feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the anthology also raises questions about ‘canine design’ and their new status as pets rather than hunters or shepherds: ‘To supply his wants, and “love” him, is not enough,’ Gilman writes. ‘No live thing can be happy unless it is free to do what it is built for.’ Something to, err, chew on. Paradigmatic shifts are also key to decolonial studies, and Giselle Beiguelman’s Agosto 01 (sesc – Serviço Social do Comércio, free) exemplifies how Brazilian artists are challenging dominant art-historical narratives. Commissioned for Meta-Arquivo 1964–1985, a show at São Paulo’s sesc Belenzinho that asked artists to consider the role of archives in building national identity, it proposes the first Portuguese translation of Hal

Foster’s influential essay ‘An Archival Impulse’ (originally published in October, Autumn 2004) with a notable difference: where Foster references Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant and Tacita Dean to discuss the use of archival research and the materialisation of archives in art, Beiguelman substitutes a younger generation of Brazilian artists, respectively Bruno Moreschi, Bianca Turner and Tiago Sant’ana. In a country faced with censorship, colonial legacies and authoritarian bans, Beiguelman and this exhibition seem to say, the archival impulse appears as survival strategy. It’s been six years since London’s Delfina Foundation launched its research programme on the Politics of Food (Delfina Foundation & Sternberg Press, £20) through 90 artist residencies that encompassed workshops, talks, performance – and dinners. The best contributions to this volume attest to food as a signifier through which it is possible to map structures of power (political, economic, cultural): holiday-themed highlights include artist collective Cooking Sections and their dissection of Christmas pudding as colonial symbol (‘the most English of dishes made from the most un-English of ingredients’) and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s guide to turning flat industrial ‘nowhere’ cheese into the tasty, smelly kind – which might just be the perfect way to impress your French belle-famille. If that doesn’t cut it, then arm yourself with Dalí’s Tarot (Taschen, £50), a reissue of the deck commissioned from the surrealist for use as a prop in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973; it never made the final cut, allegedly on account of Dalí’s exorbitant fees). Packaged in a lush velvet box with a how-to guide to tarot, Dalí’s images remix Christian and mythical iconography from the art-historical canon (including, rather immodestly, his own work) into Delphic compositions. Now that you are holding all the cards (tada!) in the poker game of passive-aggression that is the interfamilial exchange of gifts, ArtReview will leave you with another kind of illumination: Blaze (Art/Books, £30) pairs recent work by abstract photographer Garry Fabian Miller with a poem by Alice Oswald. Responding to Midwinter Blaze, a series of Cibachrome prints evoking the phases of a lunar eclipse with the artist’s enveloping colour gradients, Oswald writes: ‘all this is only angles only circles / and I could well by falling / drop through different hours / to where the sun still flying draws the cold / first inkling of an evening from the earth / into the air still crimson turning gold.’ Louise Darblay

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Can be devoured in a single sitting

Courtesy Saad Qureshi (see page 24)

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Art and photography credits

Text credits

on the cover Vivian Suter photographed by Juan Brenner

Words on the spine and on pages 23, 47 and 85 are from ‘bb’, The Little Grey Men (1942)

on page 113 Illustration by João Fazenda

December 2019

117

Have you ever tried getting an ape out of a tree? You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is. You’ve shot the wretched beast eight times, and still the ruddy thing keeps dancing about. Then, when it finally bleeds out, it conspires not to fall. Just stuck up there, fractured limbs akimbo, but still somehow clinging on to a branch. It’s a particularly bloody kind of hell for a naturalist like me. And what use is the Orang to the British Museum then, I ask you. No respectable institution wants to display the miserable remains of a rotten corpse (although I understand that a chap called Damien Hirst has made a career out of making that respectable). I know how important museums are to you people today: I’m told you just elected the manager of one of them as the most powerful person in your ‘artworld’. Whatever that is. And that you’re always babbling on about museums validating that world and the economics of your trading system. In my day we did the same with monkeys, insects, birds and lepidoptera. They tell me that you people are a bit sniffy about global travel these days. It was different in my time, mainly because it was people like me who invented the world. The real one – the one you keep forgetting about – not the artworld, not the ‘world wide web’. We invented it by going out to experience it, not by using Google. That’s how I invented Darwinism. Before Darwin. You people have a tendency to think small. I always thought big. I’d already helped invent this world (the Wallace Line, which I – obviously – discovered, marks the spot where Asian species end and Australasian species begin, unless of course you’re coming at it the other way round). People called me the ‘father of biogeography’ after that. But once you’ve helped humans know where they come from and animals know where they belong, where do you go from there? I don’t mean to brag, but I had my eyes on life on Mars when I wrote Man’s Place in the Universe. Sixtyseven years before that Bowie fellow btw. But I’m told today’s people are fretting about their own planet, and that some of you might have forgotten that I was the first one to raise concerns about mankind’s impact on the natural environment. So, besides thinking big, I also thought ahead of time. I’m timeless. Of course, thinking universally and timelessly doesn’t come cheap. And unlike Mr D, I didn’t have a family fortune behind me. Hence the business with selling apes and other specimens (I was pretty good with insects and suchlike, and generally had a cask of arak to hand for preserving

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Back Page

Monkey Business

Alfred Russel Wallace, photographed in Singapore in 1862

ArtReview

any targets of opportunity). The editors tell me that one of your contributors is interpreting such practices as some sort of bid to establish territorial ownership of people and places (in an article about some amateur botanist earlier in this issue): know the land, own the land or some such thing. Poppycock! I bring light where there is darkness. (And I’m referring to mental enlightenment rather than skin tones, before you people throw that at me.) And btw, wasn’t I the first president of the Land Nationalisation Society, which argued against the private ownership of arable land, proposing instead that it be used in whatever way amounted to the greatest good for the greatest number of people? As long as they were British people of course. I was in favour of women’s suffrage and banning the military use of aviation (we’d just invented that) too. It seems to me that I should be on your power list. When I died The New York Times described me as ‘the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionised and evolutionised the thought of the century’. Anyway, back to the money, because that’s what the editor tells me Artnet (or maybe it was the artworld, I wasn’t so clear about the difference, but I do recall that angling somehow came into the picture) is all about. (I read something recently in which one of the art-fisherpeople was squealing about how your recent power list failed to acknowledge art fairs as the economic backbone of the artworld: that’s like mistaking clowns for curators; although that also seems to me to be something that could be approached the other way around.) Anyway, after an aborted attempt to win a wife over a chessboard (I let her win, she let me down – a lesson learned), I married Annie Mitten, like the glove that’s not a glove. But it wasn’t the haberdashery connection that ‘lured’ me in; rather it was old Mitten, the father – a celebrated expert on mosses (with some money). You can’t beat a nonvascular bryophyte (as any collector knows), or indeed anything that reproduces by spores. Obviously, Mitten the younger and I had to do it the traditional way. ‘Hand in glove’, as I used to joke with her. But I can assure you that most of our dirty talk concerned hornwort and the like. So, what to do about the ape? Either the whole tree has to come down or one of the natives has to go up to fetch it. If you’re very lucky the ape falls to the ground overnight. In the end it’s simply a matter of time. And manpower. Where the hell is my boy Bujon? ar

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