ArtReview March 2024 by ArtReview

Setting the scene since 1949

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

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ArtReview vol 76 no 2 March 2024

Your minions are winning Three shapes hover before you, a green circle, a black square and a purple octagon. Do you: a) press the purple octagon and enter the door on your right; b) scarf down the circle and immediately fall into a deep sleep where you dream what’s on page 44; c) affix the black square onto digital archival, acid-free paper and attempt to sell it as an NFT edition, with a press release that references both Malevich and Taylor Swift’s Blackout Tuesday tweet; d) ignore them and just keep reading. Recently ArtReview has been playing a lot of videogames. Actually just one videogame, really. Called Dungeon Keeper, which ArtReview used to play a lot of when it came out in 1997, and which it’s just got back into. It doesn’t know quite why, but it’s something to do with how, in Dungeon Keeper, you play the bad guy. The Dungeon Keeper, that is, whose job it is to destroy and ravage the pretty and green medieval villages aboveground and murder their inhabitants, by building dark and horrible dungeons belowground, thus attracting all kinds of odious and disgusting monsters to work for you in the process. Less world-builder, more world-destroyer, if you like. As Dungeon Keeper you get to slap your minions around to make them work harder, starve your captives to death in your prison, subject them to torture (assisted by a – by today’s standards – dubiously sexist, leather-clad ‘dungeon mistress’), only to send your disgusting mob off to slaughter the local knightin-shining-armour and his buddies, when they finally turn up to flush you out. In other words, you get to behave in a way that’s in every moral and ethical sense completely abhorrent. Hey, look, it was the 1990s, OK? We might want to play out being the bad guy, sneakily sticking our hands in the maiming and slaughtering cookie jar. The attraction is that it’s just that: play. It’s a place to inhabit other selves, to try out alternate realities and exercise the boundaries of the imagination. ArtReview has had many selves

Inner world

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and incarnations it’s tried out over the decades, from its warlock reveals in the D&D days, on to double-crossing its allies in its GoldenEye tournament years and being the bad neighbour in Animal Crossing; and, sure, it has about 20 different identities running online at this moment. Perhaps it’s not that far off the recent games from the oversize Space Opera franchise, where players can choose to play as Dark Side characters, where meek art magazines can pretend they were Born to Be Bad. And then the next day, pretend to actually be good as well – embrace the fiction, eh? If only art was so clearcut in ArtReview: Good Art wins, Bad Art banished. Frolicking in the realm of the imagination, artists evidently like to play games. After all, what else is Conceptual art but one big game? Duchamp’s readymades? Game. Spot the sculpture. Yves Klein’s performances? Game. Paint the bum. Jeff Koon’s vacuum cleaners? Fleece the collector. Carolee Schneemann? Raw chicken striptease. Nowadays, mostly ‘artists playing games’ means spending all night trying to get the Staff of Enfunglement from harplerod503 in ElfenEars X, and not really wanting to share that fact with anyone else – because that’s the null, veg-out time that doesn’t really count, OK? (WORK HARDER, IMP!! I SAID WORK HARDER!!) But games – boardgames, text games, videogames, mind games – do seem to have that unique ability to move between spacing out and making space, allowing for that weird blurring between inner and outer worlds, private time and shared time. Increasingly, the manoeuvres and imaginary worlds of games and gaming are being played out in public, in galleries and museums. That null time is a tool. The inner world becomes a shared world. As dungeon master Gramsci used to say, the personal console is political. Who wins? Who loses? The answer is just around the corner, in that door to the left… a little bit further… that’s it… (locks the dungeon door and walks away, humming). Now go to page 13. ArtReview

Shared world

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Untitled (LP-10), 1986, oil on linen on panel, 48 × 60 × 2" © Estate of Thomas Nozkowski

Thomas Nozkowski Everything in the World

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New York pacegallery.com

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Art Observed

The Interview Yto Barrada by Jenny Wu 28

Puzzling Patterns by Dawn Chan 38 No Fun to Be Had by Martin Herbert 40

Writing Practice by Adam Thirlwell 36

page 40 Mark Dion, Delirious Toys, 2024 (installation view, Museum Nikolaikirche, Berlin). Photo: Michael Setzpfandt. © Stadtmuseum Berlin

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Art Featured

Resident Aliens by Tiffany Funk 44

Naam Tsabar by Cassie Packard 68

Weird Hope Engines Project by David Blandy and Jamie Sutcliffe 51

N. Dash by Ross Simonini 72

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley by Daniel Culpan 61

page 61 Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, GAPE, 2022, vinyl on acrylic panel, 122 × 122 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 82 14th Shanghai Biennale, by Mark Rappolt Lewis Brander, by Tom Morton Eric Croes, by Digby Warde-Aldam Louis Osmosis, by Jenny Wu Paul Pfeiffer, by Claudia Ross Andrew Black, by J.J. Charlesworth Antje Majewski, by Martin Herbert Deimantas Narkevičius, by Thomas McMullan Meredith Monk, by Emily May Sitting on Chrome, by Marv Recinto Nidhal Chamekh, by Alexander Leissle Ana Hernandez and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, by Allison K. Young Douglas Gordon, by Fi Churchman Joanna Hedva, by Cat Kron A Model, by J.J. Charlesworth Taipei Biennial, by Adeline Chia Evil Does Not Exist, by Yuwen Jiang

Philosophy of the Home, by Emanuele Coccia, reviewed by Clara Young My grandfather turned into a tiger… and other illusions, by Pao Houa Her, reviewed by David Terrien Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, by Laleh Khalili, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Art Exposed, by Julian Spalding, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Ray’s a Laugh, by Richard Billingham, reviewed by Fi Churchman FROM THE ARCHIVES 114

page 88 Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (30), 2015, Fujiflex digital c-print, 122 × 178 cm. Private collection

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sharjahart.org

THE CASABLANCA ART SCHOOL:

Mohammed Chabâa, Untitled, 1977. Image courtesy of Mohammed Chabâa Estate

Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde (1962–1987)

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24 February 16 June 2024 Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

This exhibition is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Tate St Ives in collaboration with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

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NYU Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates nyuad-artgallery.org

FEB. 22—JUN. 9, 2024 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Art Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). The last decade has seen major artist commissions, book publications, and historic research exhibitions from across the globe, all while training a future generation of cultural practitioners. To mark this decade, the Art Gallery presents an exhibition that tests the mutability of the exhibition format itself. Scan the QR code for developments In Real Time.

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matt connors finding aid 08 mar – 02 JUn 2024 WitH: cLaricE cLiff, gUY dE cointEt, roBErt cUmming, dEondrE daVis, masaHisa fUKasE, JoE giLmorE, LUigi gHirri, daan Van goLdEn, Jan grooVEr, miYoKo ito, sUZannE JacKson, marK armiJo mcKnigHt, BoB LaW, sioBHan LiddELL, cHristodoULos PanaYiotoU, matt PaWEsKi, cora PongracZ, KYE PottEr, rYan PrEciado, PatricK ProcKtEr, BarBara t smitH, and masaomi YasUnaga.

goLdsmitHs cca, London sE14 imagE: matt connors, PiEta, 2019. coUrtEsY tHE artist and aLEXandEr V. PEtaLas.

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Art Observed

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Photo: Benoit Peverelli

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ArtReview

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The Interview by Jenny Wu

Yto Barrada

“I have a very Oulipo way of working. I give myself a constraint, and then I have total freedom in the margins”

Born in Paris and raised in Tangier, Yto Barrada has, in two decades, gone from being a student of political science at the Sorbonne, as well as her family’s historian and archivist, to a prolific producer of photographs, prints, sculptures, films, artist books and para-institutional projects. Her solo exhibition at Pace in London, Bite the Hand, opens in March and comes on the heels of presentations at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Festival d’Automne in Paris and the Barbican in London. She simultaneously runs two nonprofits, both in Tangier: the arthouse theatre Cinémathèque de Tanger and The Mothership, a dye garden and artist residency. I don’t recall when I was first introduced to Barrada’s work, but it was probably during

a slide lecture – that’s how firmly canonised she already is. It might have been a lesson on postcolonialism, borders and migration, considering how she crystallises stories of transience and lost time at the boundaries of the Global North and South into poignant and surreal images seldom seen in history books. Committed as Barrada is to building intentional communities and excavating minor histories, the ethos of her multilimbed practice comes as a necessary rejoinder to the kind of symbolic and hierarchical nation-building she’s critiqued, for instance, by photographing the Route de l’Unité (Unity Road), a volunteerbuilt public works project in Morocco’s Rif Mountains that sits empty despite its patriotic aplomb, and publishing the artist book

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A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners (2014), a Swiftian account of Potemkin towns where gardeners are encouraged to tie fruits to tree branches in advance of official visits. These days at The Mothership, Barrada is cultivating a sanctuary for indigenous plants that are vanishing amid Tangier’s urban development. Her care for the natural world spills over into her roles as a champion and curator of late artists and thinkers, including Luis Barragán, Fernand Deligny and Bettina Grossman. When making space for the stories, wisdom and learning of her living collaborators, Barrada is like an Oulipo poet: constantly setting up what she calls constraints – I call them structures of support – for freedom in play and education to coalesce.

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A Witch Practice ARTREVIEW What’s been on your mind, Yto? YTO BARRADA I have all these temporalities that are sometimes wrestling with each other – the demands of deadlines, family responsibilities and the two nonprofits I work for – and I’m terribly slow. When there’s an important deadline, it’s my contradictory nature to be very productive on something off-centre, to go into deep research on something peripheral. Nowadays I produce by walking. No pen, no computer. That’s one of my forms of resistance. AR Your work dwells in the poetry of the peripheral, both in the sense of a fine detail won from the rabbit holes of research and in the sense of geopolitical centres and margins. YB Back home in Tangier, civilisation means what would be considered here in New York ‘losing time’. Talking to strangers, inquiring about the health of elders. Activities that are central to life in a community.

AR They seem to inform the feminist ethos of The Mothership.

I can get the roots out. The roots are what yield colours.

YB The Mothership is an extension of my home and my practice. It’s a farmhouse centred around a dye garden. Gardening is also a way of being indulgent with time and with results. You learn that you don’t have a lot of power because there are droughts, cycles, soil that’s different from one year to another, seeds and plants that behave differently when you move them, decay. I wrote a little note for you –

AR Tell me more about the process. Do you always extract dye from the roots?

[Yto goes to the back of her studio and returns with a green Post-it. The note reads, ‘L’inadéquation.’] YB ‘Inadequate.’ It’s the time of plants and the time of education. When you plant a garden, you want it to bloom during workshops and colour walks, you want the bright yellows to grow in the right place at the right volume, but of course nothing goes exactly the way you want. We’ve learned to adapt. Many of the indigenous plants that I’ve reintroduced to the dye garden take four or five years before

YB Sometimes you make colour with the roots, sometimes the bark, sometimes the leaf. From dyes you make pigments, and from pigments you make paint. It’s a continuous process where everything is reused, and everything has a function. AR Where does a novice begin? YB When you start as a dyer, you forage. It’s a haptic experience. In the beginning I had this book with different recipes, and I went home to Tangier, where I have a friend who’s a botanist, and I gave him the book and said, “Tell me where I can buy these plants.” Then he toured my garden, and he said, “You already have seventy-five percent of them.” That’s how the responsibility of cultivating the dye garden came about. The gallerist Seth Siegelaub wrote beautifully

Flowers from The Mothership dye garden in Tangier. © The Mothership, Tangier

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Route de l’Unité (Unity Road), 2001/2011, C-print, 80 × 80 cm. © the artist

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about textile being this construction at the crossroads of the history of labour and the history of architecture. He saw in textiles the beauty of those intersections. AR And you see dyes that way as well? YB Dyeing is like a witch practice of learning recipes, discovering old recipes that are lost and asking people to teach you what they know. I collect educational materials. Some of my books are samplers, notebooks from weavers, Japanese books and schoolgirl embroidery books.

Authoring the Accidental AR Do people gift you books when they hear you’re researching something? YB No, I get them from the streets, bookshops, everywhere. I’m a big junk person. I’ll pick up anything. Especially in Brooklyn, the streets are wonderful. And books are a great form for both space and time.

AR They immerse you in a different temporality. YB The making of them also allows for a different kind of sequencing. It allows for less efficiency. You have books, but you also have people with oral knowledge. In Morocco there are isolated communities still using dyes. They use them in cosmetics, or they dye their hair with pomegranate skin. AR Oral history and storytelling are important to your work. In your film Tree Identification for Beginners [2017], for instance, you narrate your mother’s memories of visiting America with Operation Crossroads Africa. For that film, you corroborated her memories with state papers and then turned the official records back into a voiceover. Do you ever find oral stories unreliable? YB The way I remember things, the unreliable narratives, are part of oral history. There’s a great book called The Art of Memory by Frances Yates about how epic stories were remembered. The theory is that it’s a construction, like a building, and each story is a different room, so you have to picture it as an incredible

architecture. Each story in the epic was placed in a different room. AR Is your photography a form of archiving? YB When you print a photograph, the techniques you employ to supposedly make it last a hundred years are full of vanity. Though I think about the durability of colours, and that led me to my film A Day is Not a Day [2021]. It’s about facilities in Florida and Arizona that accelerate the weathering process of colours. AR How did you hear about these facilities? YB I was in a natural-dye workshop in Paris with a textile conservator. She said she’d tested her recipe with a Xenotest, where they can show you what 20 years of fading looks like in an hour. I called a facility, and we looked at the budget, and at $3 an hour [of ageing] it was something like $7,000 [for 20 years]. But the person who ran the facility said, “You can film it.” Years later, in 16mm, I filmed a weather-accelerating machine. AR How do you decide which images to include in your work?

A Day is Not a Day (still), 2022, two-channel film installation, 16mm film, colour, sound, 2 × 18 min (loop). © the artist

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Tree Identification for Beginners (still), 2017, 16mm film, colour, sound, 36 min. © the artist

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Exterior of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, Tangier. © Cinémathèque de Tanger

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YB Some images just stick. I think it takes working on other things meanwhile, paying attention to chance. One of the two printers at The Arm, a letterpress shop in Brooklyn that I work with, said, “Authoring the accidental, that’s what we do.” One of my schools of thought comes from the experimental group in Paris called Oulipo. For me, they are the big masters, so I have a very Oulipo way of working. I give myself a constraint, and then I have total freedom in the margins.

A Learning Archive AR The Strait of Gibraltar is visible from The Mothership’s dye garden. The strait was the subject of your first major photographic series, A Life Full of Holes [1998–2004]. Location-wise, your work seems to have come full circle. Meanwhile, so much of the world has changed. YB With climate change and with Tangier’s coast being developed, my place has turned into a sanctuary. The plants and trees

that are disappearing all around us are preserved there. AR You run an artist residency there as well. YB We had residents come last spring and summer, and now we’re preparing for the next season. We’re building a botanical archive, a learning archive. We print phytograms, we print on film with plants, and now we have a printing press at the Cinémathèque de Tanger, the independent cinema I cofounded in 2006. A Risograph machine. So we’re starting some publications. We also study seed preservation. [Artist] Vivien Sansour has been doing that. So has Jumana Manna, who had a show recently at [MoMA] PS1. AR Right, Sansour founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, and Manna’s show at PS1 included her film t [2018], about ICARDA’s gene bank, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. YB In Morocco there are also artists interested in the fishing trade, monsters in the Strait of Gibraltar and land sovereignty. Our first

resident, Noureddine Ezarraf, was working on what he called a form of Berber futurism. He made dyes with madder and pomegranate skin, and he started making his own crayons with a meat grinder. Last summer we had [Parliament-Funkadelic’s] George Clinton come for his eighty-second birthday. During COVID he’d started painting. I discovered he was colourblind, so I made some paint for him with madder and insects from the garden. He worked hard and painted late into the night. AR You’re there in the summertime? YB I’m there every two months. My parents live right next door, and the garden needs me. Bite the Hand, a solo exhibition of work by Yto Barrada, is on view at Pace London, 20 March – 11 May; Barrada’s outdoor sculpture installation Le Grand Soir opens at MoMA PS1, New York, on 25 April Jenny Wu is a writer and educator based in New York

A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners (still), 2014, 16mm film, colour, sound 4 min 3 sec (loop). © the artist all artwork images Courtesy Pace, London; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg & Beirut; and Galerie Polaris, Paris

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The show that ran this winter at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, on Picasso and Gertrude Stein has kept me thinking, not so much for its overt attempt to link what the two of them were up to – because, really, is it possible to make so much of a friendship? – but more because it helped put pressure on the idea of the portrait, by which I mean the portrait as literature and as art. Picasso began his version of Stein’s portrait in a painting he started in 1905 and completed in 1906, having smeared out the original head and replaced it with a kind of archaic mask. And, wrote Stein in 1938 in one of her texts called Picasso, ‘I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.’ But of course, immediately, in this delicate Steinian sentence with its multiple ‘I’ and ‘me’ and multiple tenses, we have a problem. It might seem that accuracy is what we want from a portrait, but in that case who is the judge of a portrait’s accuracy? And maybe more importantly, to what, exactly, is a portrait accurate – a self, a person, a person’s sense of their own self? And how might that change over time? And also: if a portrait is trying to embody something as abstract as a self, then maybe the ideal portrait doesn’t exist in paint but in words? There’s a beautiful book edited by Emil Cioran, Anthology of the Portrait (1996), that offers up a series of paragraphs and pages mostly from the eighteenth century, in which writers tried to make portraits of their contemporaries. These portraits were often acidic and vicious, which is one of the book’s pleasures, but the other is that Cioran managed to find many moments of double focus – where a portrait by X of Y could be balanced by Y’s own portrait of X. In his introduction, Cioran pointed out that while a person making a portrait ‘could often be unfair, he could never be untrue’. That’s one philosophical truth of the portrait, but maybe his anthology itself reveals another: portraits are always a continuous practice of process. It was shortly after Stein had her portrait painted by Picasso that she herself took over the apparently old-fashioned genre of the portrait in words. Instead of acidic description, she came up with patterns of repetition, like this text called ‘Picasso’ from 1909: ‘This one was one who was working. This one was one being one having something being coming out of him. This one was one going on having something come out of him. This one was one going on working. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working.’ Stein herself wanted to believe that she and Picasso were doing the same thing:

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Writing Practice Iv. Portrait

Is paint the ideal medium for portraiture, asks Adam Thirlwell, or does it take words to convey something as abstract as the self?

Hanne Darboven, Quartett >88<, 1990, set of six offset prints with mounted photographs and book in red linen portfolio box, sheets 42 × 31 cm each; portfolio box 44 × 32 × 6 cm. Photo: Felix Krebs. © Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

‘Pablo is doing abstract portraits in painting. I am trying to do abstract portraits in my medium, words.’ But I’m not sure that abstraction is the right word for what she’s doing. Another preoccupation in Stein’s longer text from 1938 about Picasso is an anxiety about the contemporary. She wants to be as contemporary as possible, and thinks that the most contemporary were Picasso in art and herself in literature. ‘One must never forget that the reality of the twentieth century is not the reality of the nineteenth century, not at all and Picasso was the only one in painting who felt it…’ And then: ‘I was alone at this time in understanding him, perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature…’ It’s partly just charming for its insistence on being as urgently modern as possible, but it’s also a hint that a self might be more bound up in processes of time and ageing than a single portrait could allow. Her writing practice in her own portraits was all improvisation and process, a kind of constant rhythm of insistences, of difference within iteration, so that a portrait wouldn’t set up anything so oldfashioned as a correspondence between a portrait and its subject, but more what she called a ‘word relation’. And this still seems contemporary to me, certainly more contemporary than a single painting. I think there’s an idea now that the human self has changed because of our many recent techniques of digital surveillance and self-display. It’s as if the truly contemporary self is both a surface and also a type. But I think that only describes one aspect of the equation. There’s something in Stein’s portraits that seems to imply that a portrait has to be a process, it has to include the passage of time, both of the self it might be describing and of the work that becomes a portrait; and it’s simultaneously a multiple process, where a portrait is as much a record of the act of looking as it is of being looked at, just as Cioran hinted in his existential/eighteenthcentury anthology. In Composition as Explanation, published by The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in 1926, Stein wrote: ‘The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.’ It’s why one of my favourite other versions of Stein is the photo of a sculpture of Stein (made by Jo Davidson in 1920–22) that Hanne Darboven used in her Quartett >88< (1990) series – a photo pasted onto a diary page scribbled with a rhythmic organisation of words and abstract patterns. It’s a portrait, for sure, but not so much of either Stein or Darboven as of a continuous moment of living. Adam Thirlwell is a novelist based in London

ArtReview

22/02/2024 10:12

َ ‫ما بعــد‬ ‫ الغـيث‬AFTER

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

‫ بينــايل الدرعيـة‬RAIN ‫للف ــن المعاص ــر‬ February ٢٠٢٤ 20 – 24 May 2024

JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

biennale.org.sa

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The Witness was released nearly eight years ago now, in 2016. A labour-of-love project that took designer Jonathan Blow seven years to complete, the cult puzzle-based videogame found immediate success. You could describe it as a series of grid-based puzzles, hidden throughout a resplendent, technicolour island devoid of inhabitants, but littered with the remains of their society. Beyond the occasional birdcalls, or the crunching of gravel underfoot, The Witness’s world – its magenta trees, clearblue lakes, bright autumnal foliage – is mostly silent. Blazing direct sunlight floods everything. It’s all virtual, of course. Nonetheless, it feels dazzling and wakeful, while somehow also intensifying the ominousness of unknown threats possibly lurking in wait. Visual mazelike puzzles – functioning like door codes – appear on locked gates and entryways barring entry to abandoned shipyards, treehouses and river locks. What technology remains is still functional: gates will still unlock with a satisfying thunk when puzzles are solved; screens glitch and crackle, then power up. In The Washington Post, Christopher Byrd described the game as ‘daunting, confounding, maddening, and beautiful – altogether, in that order’, and the game made many ‘best-of’ lists in ensuing years. The classic 1993 island-based game Myst was a source of inspiration for The Witness, and indeed both games are very much part of a lineage of similar offerings. In this genre, a player is dropped into some sort of a contained area – more often than not, it is an island with distractingly stunning views and mysterious traces of previous human life. Given very little information, players find themselves trying to overcome disorientation and a grow-

ing sense of loneliness, while left to their own devices: exploring, poking around, solving puzzles of increasing complexity. Since almost no overt help is offered by the game, the epiphanies that gradually pile up feel exhilaratingly like one’s own. That exhilaration powered me and a friend through the game in one sitting, on an

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Puzzling Patterns

In the silent instruction of videogame The Witness, Dawn Chan recognises a parallel search for meaning in abstract art

The Witness (gameplay screenshots), 2016. Courtesy Steam

olive-green Ikea sofa that became our base camp. There, snacks and notebooks, and paper and pencils, and laptops, and eventually piles and piles of paper – sketches of grids and routes – accumulated around us. One could say we ‘binged’ the game in one day. But bingeing isn’t quite the right word, because playing The Witness isn’t anything like eating a family-size bag of Cheetos, in disregard of stomach pain. The Witness feels a lot more like inching forward on a tightrope so shaky that you can’t bring yourself even to look up and see how much further you have to go. All the while, a slow euphoria sets in – a disbelief: ‘Since when did we know how to walk on tightropes?’ So why revisit The Witness, eight years later? By magazine standards, it is unusual, maybe even a little suspect, to write about something released so long ago, without a round-number anniversary, or a death (God forbid) marking the occasion. No such thing here. I’m coming back to The Witness because it has taken me this long – having encountered the game but then also having visited a good many abstract painting shows in the near-decade since – fully to realise how much these two things have become entangled in my experiencing of both. Like many others, I don’t necessarily love the more controversial opinions Blow occasionally shares on social media. I sometimes even strongly disagree. Yet some of Blow’s interviews have also helped me understand why his work has felt so meaningful. In one, he has talked about how the gaming industry’s creators often merely copy cinematic conventions (such as cut scenes) in a way that is ‘missing something basic’. He has also explained, ‘I want to make games for people who read Gravity’s Rainbow.’ While I’ve never read Thomas Pynchon’s tome, what I can say is that Blow did make a game for people who look at Carmen Herrera and Mary Heilmann, Stanley Whitney and Sol LeWitt. Obvious surface connections between The Witness and many of these artists’ works will immediately hit viewers. Grid-based schema. Maplike spatial systems. It’s worth nodding at all that overlap, as much as it’s worth acknowledging, more broadly, a long lineage of discourse comparing abstraction to play. You can’t pick out five essays on abstraction without one of them framing its methodologies in either rule- or game-based terms. Curator and art historian

ArtReview

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Kirk Varnedoe pulled no punches, saying: ‘Abstract art is a symbolic game, and it is akin to all human games: you have to get into it, risk and all, and this takes a certain act of faith.’ In many of the art-as-games discussions, the artist is often framed as the gamer. (Take Thomas Schütte, for example: “I try to keep it as a game, and not as work. You have rules, you follow the rules and you break the rules. I’m exhausted at the end of the day, but I try to keep it as a fun operation.”) Less common, but the one I want to nudge further into the foreground here, are the perspectives that see the audience as the gamer, even when the art isn’t explicitly dubbed ‘interactive’. What The Witness leans hard into is its strategy of teaching players a nonverbal visual language and a growing fluency with that yields access to more and more parts of a virtual world. The game remains near-absolute in its oracular silence. Zero prompts, zero pop-up instructions. (Not to spoil things, but there are occasional voices intoning certain messages; however they largely don’t help you progress through the game.) The very first thing players encounter, when beginning in a narrow tunnel cut off by a locked door, is a panel marked with a straight flat line. Tracing one’s on-screen cursor from one end of it to the other – from point A to point B – results in the clank of a mechanism unlocking. With the first puzzle finished, the door swings open. A new tunnel presents itself. The next puzzle appears – this time, a little different. Point A to point B is now a rightangled zigzagging pattern: a simple staircase. This is where the game really gets going. It’s when you realise that you’ll be learning a language broadly dictated by patterns of iteration and successive difference, baby steps that become ever more complex. Solving puzzles permits passage down mountain cores, onto boats, across hanging bridges connecting abandoned treehouses. Rather than prompts and explanations, the game’s insistent wordlessness means that the player is forced to look, closely, for nonverbal meaning. The repetition of three shapes, and then a subtle change of hue in the fourth – does that mean something? The apple tree near one puzzle panel – does that mean something? Often, references to other games pop up. As Peter Halley built on Josef Albers’s nested rectangles, so too does The Witness build on the recognisable visual forms of its predecessors, whether hedge mazes or Tetris’s permutations. But most intriguing to me is that the game’s wordlessness means there is technically no overt confirmation, ever, that a player has ‘won’ or ‘lost’ anything – or even advanced to the next stage. And this is where The Witness and similar games move away from the realm

Stanley Whitney, Elephant Memory, 2014, oil on linen, 244 × 244 cm. Photo: Dawn Blackman. © the artist. Courtesy Stanley Whitney Studio, Bridgehampton

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of gamers-as-schoolchildren – getting ‘levelled up’, or getting trophies and gold stars and pats on the head – and closer towards an experience of viewing art (and in particular, geometric abstraction indebted to Minimalist legacies). Because, for a long time in The Witness (I won’t spoil various later stages), the only in-game rewards are access to further exploration – opportunities to notice more. (In that sense it’s not quite an open-exploration sandbox game either.) What kept me progressing through the game felt surprisingly close to what keeps me moving onward through, say, a Jennie C. Jones retrospective. If we acknowledge by now a general recognition that our bodies in space – jostled by weekend crowds or posing in selfies next to artwork – inform our exhibition viewing, then the euphoria that sometimes underlies the exploration of space in parallel to the exploration of resonances between artworks, is something The Witness seems to recognise. The game seemed to see whatever part of me both propels me from painting to painting and compels me to consistently embarrass myself by ambling down gallery staircases, or into backroom storage and coat closets, always half-hoping the exhibition continues into the next room. ‘Are video games art?’ is the tired question that nags at the root of most art-writing about video games, and the one that seems to get eyerolls from contemporary art aficionados, inured already to things like found objects, social practice, relational art and Maurizio Cattelan’s bananas. While a debate around whether or not The Witness is ‘art’ seems uninteresting, what has me intrigued is that The Witness and similar games are startlingly proximate to a kind of thinking and looking that happens at certain exhibitions. I suspect that this closeness is a first glimpse into a whole next level of permeability between two genres. And while that permeability has only been barely explored, it hints at new forms of creative expression that most of us can’t quite picture yet, but maybe those with the right kind of prescience will pursue. Dawn Chan is a writer and curator based in New York

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‘This can’t be art, there’s too much fun!’ So runs the headline of a recent article in The Guardian, paraphrasing the Israeli-born artist Doron Langberg speaking about his hedonistic ‘New Queer Intimist’ paintings, the latest of which compress a big night out: sweaty dancefloors, nude men in bed, beachy comedowns. ‘The only thing missing’, the article’s author asserts, ‘is the music’. Well yes, but also the sex, the drugs, the feeling of sand on skin at sunrise. The paintings are pleasurable as paintings, but the fun was someone else’s. That Langberg’s work is being presented at Victoria Miro, London, made me think in turn of an earlier show there: Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation Too Late (2008), the glittery leftovers of a real party held before the show opened. That Guardian headline was, in a way, on the money, because art has a strange, distanced relationship to ‘fun’. It’s to be refracted, referenced, but not experienced; something, that is, to be taken seriously. I remember, sometime towards the end of the 1990s, being at cross-purposes with an interviewee, the Scottish artist Kerry Stewart – then semifamous for sculptures of pregnant schoolgirls, sleeping nuns, etc. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, we were exasperating each other while trying to do our jobs, and finally she burst out, apropos her art, “But don’t you think it’s funny?” That had not occurred to me, as a golden key to her work or anyone else’s. I quite liked William Wegman’s deadpan photographs of his dressed-up Weimaraners, but the fact that they were amusing – and that he made purchasable calendars of them – seemed to disqualify them as ‘serious’ art, a risk David Shrigley also blithely runs. I liked standup comedians who sneaked seriousness into humour, but I hadn’t noticed it working the other way around. At least not in visual art. Meanwhile, I was talking to Stewart in the heyday of relational aesthetics, and while plenty of artists were concurrently (and derivatively, if you knew your first-wave Conceptualism) presenting art as a sociable situation, these never felt very enjoyable unless there was food involved – and even then it might depend on who was cooking it. Art’s relationship to enjoyment seemed then, and still seems now, primarily to involve bracketing it as a concept and losing something vital in transition: like certain alcoholic drinks crossing water, like an art band trying to make good music. Off the clock – at the bar, at the club, at someone’s flat afterwards – artworld people are very

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No Fun to Be Had

Art tends to treat enjoyment as something to be dissected and analysed. Or, more plainly, as something bad. Does that mean, asks Martin Herbert, that it’s a pleasurefree zone? capable of having fun, sometimes notoriously so. In a gallery, not so much. Outside of the famously cringey sight of art folk dancing to DJs, which someone should really produce a YouTube supercut of, we’re seemingly chary of a good time because art, pace Langberg, isn’t supposed to dabble in lightness. Also because if we have to do something to have said fun we might get it wrong and embarrass ourselves, lose the circumspect froideur this milieu still prizes as an attitude. (The solemnity of contemporary art has, in recent times, been Doron Langberg, Basement, 2023, oil on linen, diptych, 244 × 203 cm (each panel), 244 × 406 cm (overall). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

capitalised on by the likes of teamLab and Meow Wolf, whose immersive, entertainment-centric installations for larger audiences don’t get the balance right either, tending to displace the art quotient.) When participatory fun is on the table, an artist must make sure it’s near impossible to misinterpret, as in Paola Pivi’s slide for the first Frieze art fair, Untitled (Slope) (2003), or Jeremy Deller’s bouncy-castle Stonehenge, Sacrilege (2012). And then, of course, we should ponder what those works are really saying, about bread and circuses and heritage or whatever, because we’re intellectuals. Like the Bible says, when we become adults, we put away childish things; and if we get them out again, we analyse them, tap their semiotic resonances, put them under glass. In Berlin right now, for example, the American artist Mark Dion has a display up at the Museum Nikolaikirche, Delirious Toys (2023), for which he researched the 70,000-work toy collection of the Berlin City Museum. The resulting installation, though ostensibly inspired by Dion’s own seven-year-old son’s freeform mixing of his dinosaur toys with astronauts, etc, is a plethora of old toys, freed from the usual taxonomies and chronologies of toy museums, that asks us to ‘take a critical look’ at how human attitudes to the world are encoded in the playthings that shape young minds, and how rigid thinking might be escaped. And, of course, these historical artefacts are not to be toyed with, by you or your little ’uns. In April, meanwhile, in the same city, an 11-week ‘artistic amusement park’ entitled Radical Playgrounds opens in the parking lot of the Gropius Bau. This programme, organised by the capable Polish curator Joanna Warsza and German architect Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius – no artist list as yet – appears to draw on highminded theorisations of play as a mode of togetherness that breaks down barriers and conventions, while also sounding highly au courant: ‘You are invited’, the advance blurb reads, ‘to dig in a decolonial sandpit, sit on an indigenous swing or spin on an entropic carousel.’ This will be a place, the organisers say, where we are ‘free to try things out and make mistakes safely’. Perhaps it’ll transpire that, as The Guardian might mistype it, ‘this can’t be fun, there’s too much art!’ But here’s another reminder that contemporary art, having gamely annexed almost everything else, has territory left to claim or to build: a space where art and fun-and-games somehow, miraculously, don’t cancel each other out. Are we having fun yet? If not, there’s still work to do.

ArtReview

22/02/2024 10:14

APRIL 11–14

THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART CHICAGO

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04—07

Art & Craft

Discover the list of 136 galleries of Art Paris 2024

OFFICIAL PREMIUM PARTNER

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Art Featured

I’m prepared to love everybody I meet 43

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Resident Aliens by Tiffany Funk

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ArtReview

22/02/2024 12:30

What happens when wildly popular videogames make a run at the gatekeepers of the artworld?

March 2024

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above Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002, handmade hacked Super Mario Bros. cartridge, Nintendo NES videogame system, artist software. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London preceding pages In the Pause Between the Ringing, 2019 (game still), game by Studio Oleomingus

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In March 2009, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) appeared on mutations in The Last of Us television (2023–) and videogame (2013) the cover of Artforum, signalling that videogames had finally ‘made it’ series, as well as the eldritch trappings of games like Elden Ring (2022) into art discourse proper. All Arcangel had to do was jettison almost and Death Stranding (2019). every element (ground, trees, powerups, monsters and Mario himself) Though its recognisable imagery offers an entry point for a videothat had earned the original Super Mario Brothers cartridge a ‘Nintendo game-enthused audience, the game and its installations reference a Seal of Approval’ to make it into a video edition. While there were messy bibliography of Brazilian critical race theory and pedagogy, all earlier and arguably more provocative Mario hacks, such as Myfanwy strained through Avatar-flavoured issues of ‘extractivism’. Yet ironAshmore’s Super Mario Trilogy (2000–04) – an existential-nightmare ically, while the undeniably dazzling imagery of Third World’s envimodification of the game in which Mario lives and dies without ronment bears little resemblance to Arcangel’s Clouds, the ‘play-toearn’ format of Massan’s downloadable the performance-enhancing drugs that game is another kind of capitulation. allow him to reach the level-ending While videogames by established flag – Arcangel’s Clouds are benign and Ashmore’s central decision to delete artists had already found their boring, more Abstract Expressionist Mario’s powerups, leaving the characway into the white cube, a more ter vulnerable and lost in a world of colour-field than side-scroller. This comparison – Arcangel’s versus plumbing and pitfalls, contrasts sharpinclusive form of games as art ly with the function of Third World’s reAshmore’s Mario – offers a provocative began popping up in alternative grettable ‘Mint Your Memory’ feature, lens through which to play recent highgallery spaces during the 2000s where players were able to create Web3 profile videogame artworks. One such work, Gabriel Massan’s Third World: The tokens powered by cryptocurrency Bottom Dimension (2023), a free-to-play downloadable videogame made Tezos by capturing screenshots within the game. Despite the proliffor the Serpentine’s 2023 exhibition of the same name, marked a signi- eration of such ‘play-to-earn’ gimmicks in the casual gaming genre, ficant moment in the history of videogame art. Not so much because of the press release of Third World boasted the minting as a novel form of its content, but more in its high-profile participation in the ‘play-to- audience participation, an augmented-reality twist in Funfun’s – and earn’ gaming genre as conspicuous cultural capitalism. The game thus the player’s – in-game collecting quest. features a playable character named Funfun (Yoruba for ‘white’) – It is Funfun’s ‘employer’, the company with the too-on-the-nose a hybrid robot-organic construct navigating a dynamically shifting name ‘Digital Worlds Exploitation’, that narratively provides the alien landscape. The Unreal Engine-generated habitats of fungi and in-game equipment to take these screen captures (or ‘memories’). rock grow, morph and decay much like so many pop-cultural dysto- But this real-world introduction of these memories as minted NFTs pian landscapes, nodding to such sublime horrors as the DNA-altering for the player to share (#ThirdWorld) undermines an otherwise ‘shimmer’ in Alex Garland’s film Annihilation (2018), the fungal well-meaning, though pedantic, narrative of transmutation and

Cory Arcangel, /roʊ'deIoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD, 2017–21, custom-built high-performance computer rig, custom-built Deep-Q Learning RPG playing software bot with system sounds by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), Kim Kardashian: Hollywood casual free-to-play roleplaying Android game, Android phone, amplifier & speakers, various cables. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London

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redemption. In addition, the social justice-coded marketing behind Videogame art has a long history of modifying popular titles in this crypto element unconvincingly proposes that Tezos’s blockchain this genre, offering accessible and engaging contemporary critique for technology is ‘energy-efficient’ (at least compared to the reprehensibly otherwise difficult and divisive subject matter. Kent Sheely’s Counterpower-hungry dominant blockchain model of Bitcoin). Regardless of Strike mod, dust2_dust (2013), for example, erases all figural represenits alternative pedagogies and ecological resource depletion narra- tation from play, but leaves weaponry intact: gone are all playable tive, the same old arbiters of taste and influence still call the shots. characters and nonplayable characters, as we witness disembodied, In this case, Third World trades blue-chip gallerists and their wealthy bobbing and weaving guns, spreading pools and sprays of blood, collectors for an arguably more ethically challenged techno-cabal of and the sounds of gunshots and cries of agony. After the shock of its crypto-anarchists. absurdity wanes, the piece begins to relate more to how drone warThe convergence of videofare and forms of technologically Even barring playable elements, games and art raises broader mediated violence erase signiquestions about universalism fiers of human suffering from a videogame installation can hold the unique versus intersectionality, interpopular media. power of generating nonlinear, rhizomatic activity and performance in art Until recently, Sheely’s dust2_ narratives in the service of voicing spaces, and the ethical standard dust and similar ‘game perforof access and equity. Journalist mances’, such as screen recordthe lived realities of the disempowered Bianca Bosker’s new book, Get ings, playable modifications of in the Picture – published 20 years after Arcangel’s Clouds debuted at popular games, web-based emulators and Machinima (animations the 2004 Whitney Biennial – catalogues her insights from five years made using videogame toolkits), lived in spaces between screenings spent embedded in the New York art scene. It becomes apparent that and game-specific festivals. While videogames by established artists what is still at issue is who is allowed into – or otherwise left out of – had already found their way into the white cube – Bill Viola’s The Night the artworld. Bosker cites how gatekeeping language emphasises Journey (2007) comes to mind – a more inclusive form of games as a deep knowledge of rarefied historical and cultural context, and art began popping up in alternative gallery spaces during the midprioritises those ‘in the know’, the connoisseurs and gallerists whose to late 2000s. Unlike the conventional art galleries Bosker describes, financial stability depends upon exclusivity. Videogames, by contrast, venues like Killscreen (Los Angeles), Babycastles (New York) and VGA are wildly popular worldwide. Consider the Gallery (Chicago), and festivals like Now Play Gabriel Massan, The Bottom Dimension Agents Report lasting popularity of tactical first-person This (London), Bit Bash (Chicago), Vector – Inaugural Awareness, 2023, minted memory captured shooters such as the Counter-Strike (2000–) (Toronto), A Maze (Berlin) and EyeMyth during the gameplay of Third World: The Bottom Dimension, (various locations in India) popularised work and Call of Duty (2003–) franchises, which 2023, by Gabriel Massan & collaborators. by artists from historically marginalised have earned billions of dollars in revenue. © the artist and Serpentine Galleries, London

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Kent Sheely, dust2_dust (stills), 2013, digital video, 5 min 31 sec.Courtesy the artist

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communities and regions. A few short years later, these same independent videogame arts organisations began facilitating videogame art retrospectives in established museums, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 2018 exhibition Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt. One of the V&A’s commissioned works for the exhibition, In the Pause between the Ringing (2019), by the India-based Studio Oleomingus, is a meditation on the turbulent history of telephone mining in British India. Its innovative gameplay combines the formats of interactive fiction, audio drama and exploratory games. Unlike Third World, the beautiful but surreal imagery of Ringing’s oversize telephones and brilliantly coloured colonial architecture provides ambiguous narrative cues through its sound design rather than narration or dialogue. Instead of scrambling towards future technological innovation, Dhruv Jani, founder of Oleomingus, described in a talk at the 2019 EyeMyth in Mumbai how the very building blocks of our digital age, hypertext and interactive fiction (aka the text adventure genre, the earliest form of videogame interactivity), provide the opportunity to radically rewrite, overwrite and interject into dominant narratives that perpetuate human suffering from the past into the present: “Hypertext, in its purest form,” Jani argued, “is the first methodical repudiation of the tyranny of the printed word… Especially when history and often immediate history is being ruthlessly deployed to create rigid boundaries, efface people and places, and to prop up governments based on the written word, the linear page, the archaic printed ideal.” Even barring playable elements, a videogame installation can hold the unique power of generating nonlinear, rhizomatic narratives in the service of voicing the lived realities of the disempowered. Sondra Perry’s digital installation IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection (2017) echoes videogame developer EA Sports’ aggressive game tagline ‘It’s in the Game’ to emphasise how black bodies

are represented in videogames. The installation tells how Sandy Perry, Sondra’s twin brother, was a college basketball player whose physical likeness and statistics were sold by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to EA Sports for use in the 2009 and 2010 NCAA videogames without his knowledge or consent. Despite a class action lawsuit, none of the players featured in the game were ever paid by the NCAA, who claimed that the players had been given compensation through a free education and thus had no legal standing. The anecdote serves as a disturbing, unresolved funhouse-mirror version of Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017), where black bodies are literally hijacked by wealthy white patrons. Perry’s video documents Sandy navigating a team-selection screen in the game while he describes his close friendships with the men whose likenesses continue to be exploited. As the artworld grapples with issues of elitism and exclusivity, its continued emphasis on technologically novel forms of interactivity – such as the integration of NFTs and blockchain technology – simply introduces exclusivity in another form, and botches the opportunity to consider how increasingly accessible videogame toolkits offer otherwise alienated communities a chance to participate in, and perhaps redefine, the artworld. While those of us who feel strongly about the potential of videogames residing in art galleries are still wrestling with what constitutes meaningful interactivity in digital art, this emphasis on gimmicks and bleeding-edge methods risks overshadowing the genuine potential of videogames to engage audiences in meaningful conversations about complex and uncomfortable subjects. As the resident alien in the gallery, the videogame artwork needn’t fit in before it finds its appropriately alien audience. ar Tiffany Funk is an artist, theorist and researcher based in Chicago

In the Pause Between the Ringing (game still), 2019, game by Studio Oleomingus

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22/02/2024 12:31

WEIRD HOPE ENGINEs, OR, A CHOKING DUST... RED, CLOTTED AND AWFUL. 51

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A Solo Journalling Roleplaying Game by David Blandy & Jamie Sutcliffe

Introduction

The Story So Far...

Weird Hope Engines, or, A Choking Dust... Red, Clotted and Awful is a solo adventure game inspired by the science fictions of Charlie Jane Anders, Clark Ashton Smith, Bruno Jasieński, Graham McNeill, Nnedi Okorafor and Alice Sheldon, alongside the game designs of Emily Allen, Chris Bissette, Zedeck Siew and Tim Hutchings.

In the closing years of the twenty-first century, science fiction had lost any ethical orientation. Its foremost scribes ‒ once the concept engineers of cognitive estrangement ‒ had fallen en masse into the employ of astronautical entrepreneurs, their ambitious ideas furnishing the imaginaries of an accelerated imperial exodus.

Playing the game is a simple exercise in solitary storytelling. You’ll need a single six-sided dice ‒ referred to throughout the text as ‘1d6’ ‒ and a way of recording your results. This could be a pen and paper, but you might also consider logging your own voice notes as you track your progress. The aim of the game is to use the provided narrative prompts and tables to generate your own route through a tale of interplanetary migration, unearthly encounters and industrial malpractice.

Over the next few millennia Earth’s ecosystem collapsed. New stars were colonised, new wars fought and new business ventures pursued in deepest space.

There is no way of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ this game. The only metrics of success we offer are narrative serendipity, dramatic texture and the free play of chance.

Your story takes place in the years following a significant insurrection on a nearby planet... a rock formerly known for its red dust. Scions of industry once held the planetary government hostage here, but now the old system has collapsed, leaving in its wake a radical instability in which old orthodoxies and new ideas fight to establish new ways of being. You have managed to gain access to a ‘coffin ship’ ship departing Earth. You bring nothing with you besides hope for a new life of relative stability.

Safety Tools This game oscillates between aspirations of hope and expressions of despair, and includes frequent references to isolation, illness, imperialism and extinction. While some of these themes may arise from the text itself, it’s also likely that they could emerge from the player’s own contributions. Play safe, and if the progress of your story doesn’t feel right, scrap it.

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Children Of The Non-Gravitational Field You journey into the inky depths of space, resigned to months interned in this vast machine. Migration changes you, the extended period of interstellar travel taking its toll on your body. Roll 1d6 on the following table and record your condition. How does it alter your perception of your new home? How does it change the way you relate to others?

1 Augur Of The Flattened Orbs Prolonged

exposure to microgravity environments results in acute Space Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome (SANS). Intracranial pressure and the abundance of headward fluid have collapsed your optic nerves into your retinas, your eyeballs compressing in their sockets over time. Many doctors view this as a condition to be treated. You, however, know it be a ‘new way of seeing’.

2 Claustronaught Your comfort with confined spaces has been conditioned by extensive periods of stasis in astronautical steerage. Where others were driven crazy by the cramped conditions, you learned to love nook, niche and recess. You long to be cradled by manufactured apertures, you yearn to inhabit the geologic cavities of the planetary underdark. 3 Calendrical Radiant Cosmic radiation permeates your body, suffusing you with an atomic curse. Your days are now structured by regular blood tests and paranoiacally administered doses of potassium iodide. Now where did you leave those tablets?

4 The Scrag Wastrel Your skeleton has crumbled

like an over-refrigerated cheese. Unnaturally rapid bone density depletion requires you to be mindful of your movements and environment. How do you choreograph your body to avoid sprains, cracks and breakages? Does this status imbue you with a new sensitivity to the world around you?

5 Tankus Maximus The chronic depletion of muscle mass you experienced in transit inspires in you an obsessive relationship with weight gain and muscle retention. Resveratrol, creatine and synthetic protein supplements litter both your bunk and body. Cautious whispers among the crew refer to you as ‘The Tank’. 6 The Snot Grot Welcome to mucus town. Chronic

nasal congestion alters the tone of your voice, depletes your sensitivity to odours and leads to a sponsorship contract with a leading pharmaceutical brand. You join a support-groupturned-secret-society of other human beings contending with the overproduction of face waste.

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Six Unequal Names For A Paradise Of Extraction Although your ancestors spoke so simply and hopefully of building new worlds, you know from experience that such worlds aren’t so easily won, much less inhabited. In this future it appears that status still dictates what world you are ‘reborn’ to. Each arrival on the new planet comes to know it by a different name according to an arcane schema of economic and social identity markers. All of these worlds coexist, but status largely dictates that one of them will likely envelop you more than the others. Roll 1d6 on the following table and record your landing site. What alignments will you maintain? What borders will you cross? What worlds will you seek to abolish?

1 Ares, The Martial Sump World A towering Mechanarium built upon abyssal fissures of caustic military discharge. Here, mention of any hoped-for peace or purity is forcibly quelled in smog-racked throats long before it can be uttered.

2 Old Barsoom, The Broken World

A planet caught in the endless cycle of death and rebirth, where human life fertilises the rampant red weed of an erroneous geoengineering project. An avaricious cabal of lobbyists and interplanetary cronies stymie all attempts to balance Old Barsoom’s ecosystems.

3 Ma’adim, Or, The Cranial Observatory

This planet is riven by deep vales and chthonic sluiceways. Aerial impressions liken it to a large spherical cerebrum, its gyric folds ossified in rivulets of red rock and dust. Dwellers of the planet’s valleys have turned their sharpened views of the celestial drama above into a new religion of folkish oddness, soil worship and crazed topographies.

4 Tiamat, The Scales Of The Empire

The surface of this planet is cloaked by colossal suspension districts, floating platelets providing homes for many differing communities of labourers. The suspension districts are policed by the Reparation Corps of Marduk (RCM), elite enforcement squads that collect tithes on behalf of the scions of interplanetary industry.

5 Marduk, The Foundry World This planet

is home to the captains of mining, manufacturing and resource extraction. Intergenerational oligarchies educated in private school systems maintain a tight grip on planetary hierarchies via eldritch and opaque taxation systems.

6 Aquakuh, Arcane College Of The Blind Idiot Technomancers Students of the

advanced technological campus Aquakuh are enraptured by a faith in technology that verges on delusion. Their ‘planetary intelligence’ places all intellectual and material resources in the service of an expansionist agenda that seeks to develop new evolutions in jet-propulsion and astronautical biogenetics.

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A Journey Takes Place... You begin to explore this new world, venturing out into its unstable environs. Roll 1d6 to determine your destination. What do you do here? Roll again to explore further…

1 A Crystal Cavern, dark ooze dripping through the

glittering shards, the sharp smell of ammonia tinged with jasmine. Entering further, the ooze drips onto your skin, a sharp cold pain followed by euphoria. You don’t remember how you left the cave, but you wake on your back gazing at the stars.

4 The Wreckage Of A Hulking Craft, halfburied in the swirling dust. Inside, pristine beyond the longsealed airlock, a relic of the spacefaring age.

5 A Shimmering Field of crystalline flowers, pitted

with openings into the earth. Each opening is a reinforced window down into subterranean complex, where crowds can be seen bustling to and fro.

6 A Large Hangar, the remnants of a hub for a monorail

system. The dilapidated trains, rusted to the crumbling track, are occupied, the prime real estate in a sprawling shantytown.

2 A Vast Opal Obelisk towers above, steam rising

from serrated vents, its sheer sides punctuated by a single triangular opening. Inside is deathly silence and an abandoned hive city, seemingly left in haste, plates piled with food now turned to dust. Deep within, you find a sealed door.

3 A Great Lake of shimmering mercury, scaled worms

breaking the surface to feast on flocks of nano drones feeding on the static. In the centre, a reflective sphere, hovering, a slit window revealing a family inspecting scientific instruments.

...And A New Resource Is Discovered... Roll 1d6 in the environment below to identify it. Is it valuable to you? What uses might it be put to?

3 Breathable Chitin 4 Regenerative Proteins 5 Calming Gas 6 Whispering Molluscs 1 Flesh-Metal 2 Eating Clouds 55

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B. Terrain What covers the surface of this place? 1 Vast Ocean 2 Verdant Grasslands 3 Misty Valleys 4 Ominous Forests 5 Deep Caverns 6 Opalescent Dusts

...Leading To Further Exploration...

1 Cracked Earth 2 Great Mountains 3 Sweeping Desert 4 Jagged Rocks 5 Profound Jungle 6 Murky Swamps

The new resource precipitates further exploration of this world, into the depths of its earthen strata and far across its unknown surfaces. What do you find there? Roll 1d6 three times on each of the tables below to find out. Combine your results in whatever way you see fit. If ‘Something Else’ is mentioned, imagine what that might be. How does your presence change this place?

1 Rolling Hills 2 Boggy Marshland 3 Snowy Highlands 4 Great Canyons 5 Endless Cities 6 Something Else

A. Atmosphere

C. Ecosystem

What is above or around you?

What signs of life do you find here?

1 Twin Moons 2 Blazing Sun 3 Bitter Cold 4 Endless Rain 5 Drifting Mists 6 Orange Glow

1 Vivid Flowers 2 Odd Critters 3 Lumbering Beasts 4 Constant Chittering 5 Distant Bellows 6 Creeping Fungi

1 Howling Winds 2 Gentle Breeze 3 Toxic Fumes 4 Sheet Lightning 5 Pillars Of Flame 6 Billowing Clouds

1 Large Footprints 2 Noisome Stench 3 Intricate Hives 4 Gargantuan Carcasses 5 Intense Scents 6 Shed Skins

1 Multichromatic Haze 2 Eerie Stillness 3 Roiling Gases 4 Stifling Humidity 5 Shimmering Aurora 6 Something Else

1 Delicate Nests 2 Great Flocks 3 Buzzing Swarms 4 Huge Herds 5 Glowing Moss 6 Something Else

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D. People

f. Settlements

Who lives here?

What have they built?

1 Large 2 Small 3 Rough Coated 4 Smooth 5 Lithe 6 Ponderous

1 Simple Huts 2 Intricate Treehouses 3 Labyrinthine Burrows 4 Magnificent Citadels 5 Sculpted Crystal 6 Heaving Cities

1 Reptilian 2 Mammalian 3 Vegetal 4 Fungal 5 Amphibian 6 Piscine

1 Spherical Dwellings 2 Cuboid Architectures 3 Fractal Forms 4 Organic Biomes 5 Elevated Dwellings 6 Dusty Bioshells

...and how do they relate to each other?

1 Stone Bastions 2 Modular Buildings 3 Weed-Covered Domes 4 Grown Biostructures 5 Metal Configurations 6 Something Else

1 Psychically 2 With Gestures 3 Vocally 4 By Touch 5 Musically 6 Something Else

e. Society

g. A Complicated Legacy

What is central to their culture?

What remains of a previous Empire?

1 Noise 2 Quietude 3 Eating 4 Drinking 5 Dancing 6 Singing

1 A Language 2 A Custom 3 A Plant 4 A Creature 5 A Machine 6 A Technology

1 Playing 2 Fighting 3 Storytelling 4 Debating 5 Creating 6 Cooking

1 A Foodstuff 2 A Belief 3 A Social Structure 4 A Bureaucracy 5 A Drink 6 An Object

1 Painting 2 Looking 3 Reading 4 Building 5 Burrowing 6 Bathing

1 A City 2 A Communication Device 3 A Ruin 4 A Mine 5 An Altered Climate 6 Something Else

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Catastrophists Of The Red Dust Your memories are precious to this new society. The Catastrophists of the Red Dust work covertly to metabolise human testimony into the living history of a powderchoked body politic. Roll 1d6 against the following table. Describe your recollection of the event to your appointed Catastrophist.

1 You once witnessed the cataclysmic disintegration

of Firmamentum 4, a Geostationary Orbital Docking Platform (GODP)

suspended 36,000 kilometres above Terra Cimmeria. For 4.5 hours its debris irradiated the heavens before cascading to the planet’s surface, its horror the source of an unanticipated beauty. You couldn’t take your eyes off it. What did you see that night?

2 The Vomisa Rights Charter of 2222 established that no

manufactured service personnel should die alone. You recall your first time sitting through the power-down of a cherished colleague. What words of comfort and gratitude did you speak as their energy diminished?

3 You remember the tremulous anticipation of planet-

fall. Did you dust the oxidised iron from your boots or leave it in place as a trophy of your first steps on this planet’s sands?

4 A Pilgrimage to the Ignominious Crypt. You remember your

first journey to the Tomb of the Founders, a now desecrated charnel house in which the remains of once-revered technologists were enshrined. The Tomb lies empty now, its contents scattered to the unforgiving sands by insurrectionists, its walls a palimpsest of embittered scribblings. What words did you contribute to its tarnished walls?

5 The Hogs of Marduk are a community of hardy porcine breeds bioengineered for the new agricultural projects of planetary sustainability. You’ll never forget the first time you gazed upon the slurry fields of Tyrrhena Terra, its million augmented sties receding into the dust hazed distance. What were you thinking when you first laid eyes on the Tyrrhenian swine? 6 You were drawn through the dust storms of the fathom-

less wastes to the hidden halls of an ancient catacomb, the only remnant of a past

world. The walls were marked with sigils and maps, perhaps marking time, perhaps marking space. The faces engraved and the scenes portrayed still haunt you. Deep below, down sheer walls of cold dark stone, there is a silence so profound, it calls you within. You are not sure exactly what you found, but you know that one day you must return.

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The Start Of Your Ending The settlement, enriched by your memories, becomes established, grows and develops. But eventually something happens that brings about an extreme change. How long does it take to get to this point? Roll 1d6 on each table to find out how your story ends.

1 A calamitous civil war…

1 …overturns social order…

2 An irresolvable societal schism…

2 …sparks a revolution…

3 The discovery of a new technology…

3 …compels the powerful to flee…

4 A beautiful new idea…

4 …ossifies status in elaborate ritual…

5 A novel airborne virus…

5 …precipitates a military coup…

6 The arrival of a symbiotic alien species…

6 …inspires a new religion…

C. 1 …leading to 1,000 years of stability. 2 …ushering in a time of fully automated communism.

3 …and all trappings of the old world fall into ruin.

4 …and all is silence. 5 …and within a decade the community evolves into a weirdhopetopia.

6 …and the world ends in a cloud of dust. 59

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Played

by Daniel Culpan

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s videogame installations ask us to confront our own demons, leaving us – ‘the players’ – questioning who we even are

March 2024

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above The Rebirthing Room, 2024 (installation view, Studio Voltaire, London). Photo: Sarah Rainer. Courtesy the artist and Studio Voltaire, London preceding page Get Home Safe, 2023 (installation view, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah). Courtesy the artist and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

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above The Rebirthing Room, 2024 (installation view, Studio Voltaire, London). Photo: Sarah Rainer. Courtesy the artist and Studio Voltaire, London

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Enter the darkness. There, treelike pillars are studded with cruci- beauty bloom and pullulate across the game’s interface: microbelike fixes and decorated in fabrics depicting videogame graphics. Red text neon spores; banks of crackling static like those emitted by an old is emblazoned across a back wall, mimicking script on a computer TV; scorched-earth palm-fronds inside a digital Heart of Darkness screen: ‘This space is for those this country has failed to keep safe… (1899), in which society’s colonising outside forces are vividly maniThis is a pro-Black, pro-trans space.’ An adjacent television, flanked fested within. by two red telephones, supplies instructions for the impending expeIf a game controller or VR headset operates as an extension of rience, in which visitors are ‘given a chance to be transformed’. ourselves, a kind of prosthetic body, then the question follows: do we Welcome to The Rebirthing Room (2024), the latest iteration of invent technology, or does technology invent us? Indeed, there are Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s project to archive the Black trans experi- moments when the game closes the gap between artifice and reality. ence using videogame animation, sound, sculpture and performance. Frequently, these simulations jar and glitch to reproduce a kind of The game and surrounding installation expands the artist’s prac- physical sensation within the player, mirroring what’s dramatised tice of using technology to fuse lived testimony and fictional narra- within the game: a shudder, perhaps, or a brief, pinching moment of tive. The game itself is operated by a controller (dubbed an ‘anchor’) panic or confusion. Yet, though the game promises ‘rebirth’, its fixed fixed to the floor in the centre of the room. The controller resembles a limits – how else could these demons manifest, and in what other hooded figure holding rosary beads, becoming a kind of proxy for the ways could they be defeated by the player? – define the audience player within the game’s first-person perspective. Positioned behind as ‘played’ as much as ‘player’. For example, consider the ‘success’ the figure, with hands on each side of the attached controls, the player message received after vanquishing ‘addiction’: ‘You need to wake is then guided through a projection-mapped environment beamed the fuck up… Fix your own problems. Admit the cravings.’ Talk about upon three screens that wrap around the gallery walls, each ‘level’ a hollow victory. determined by the player’s choices. The The Rebirthing Room develops one of result is an experience that, as a whole, the recurring themes of BrathwaiteShirley’s work: how the digital is no falls somewhere between personal quest longer separate from reality, but emand collective ritual. The Rebirthing Room allows the bedded within it. The interactive player to choose from six demons that games available on Brathwaite-Shirley’s they will attempt to conquer: anxiety, own website explore this blurring of self-doubt, fear of failure, intolerance, textures between IRL and online. In addiction and low self-esteem. The Blacktransrevolution.com (2023) the player images that pulse onscreen are satumust choose a ‘new gospel’ for the rated and blocky, echoing the graphics revolution. Contradictory, jarring catof 1990s RPGs. We hear sad drones and egories populate the screen: ‘Nonbinary / War / Pro life’, ‘Unable / Lesbian / vocoders. After I selected ‘self-doubt’, script ticker-taped across the screen, Faith’, ‘Ableism/ Ancestors / Boycott’. narrating a voice of internal judgeClicking the cursor in time with the ment ‘that tells you you’re nothing, prompts, you must gather followers you’re useless, you’re disappointing’. and ‘reassert your position as leader’. The interface is buffeted as if by actual In order to help the audience putatively physical blows, recalling the beat-’emdefeat their worst nightmares, the game’s narrative replays various pre-scripted scenarios of ‘trauma’ up style of Tekken (1994–). There’s the ambience of a horror film: (‘Inside you is a MONSTER’ appears onscreen in bold red letters) – gaping fangs and washes of blood-red. leaving the player little room but to submit. Blacktransarchive.com (2020) adopts a simlarly bold strategy. It flips The mission: using the buttons, players must train a searchlight heteronormative assumptions about gender identity, posing a more on a series of swarming demons. If you ‘win’, you’re given a self-trans- troubling question directly to the player: who do you think you are? formational homily. Lose – as I did – and ‘the monster climbs back into The artist has commented that they “don’t like passive artworks”, your body’, the narration tells us, feeding on ‘your negative percep- preferring instead to make the audience “feel a bit responsible for what tion of yourself’. A final, damning injunction lingers in blood-red they see”. The player is made to confirm their own identity: whether letters: ‘Come back when you want to deal with it’. These journeys they’re Black trans or cis. At the beginning of the game, we’re told that both puncture the fantasy of videogaming as a zone of autonomous it exists to “store and centre Black trans people”. The imagery that play (these ‘individual’ choices remain hard-coded, part of the game’s cascades across the interface is fantastical, elaborate: stars shrinking rigid inbuilt logic) and underline an intriguing tension through- and malfunctioning over corallike digital fragments. out The Rebirthing Room: in order to elude one set of presuppositions The terms of this virtual realm are clear: “You must agree to centre about identity, the game nonetheless enforces its own. Black trans people and use your privileges to help them. This is not a The force of Brathwaite-Shirley’s audiovisual world is incarnated place where we make you feel better!” The kind of ‘trans panic’ whipped through a push–pull aesthetic: images that up by tabloids and populist politicians is Blacktransrevolution.com are both hypnotic and minatory, with a diturned on its head: “Danger: a cis person has aka I Can’t Follow You Anymore, 2023 rectness of address that can feel like a hairentered the environment”. Warnings flash up (gameplay screenshot), interactive videogame. raising therapy session. Strange forms of against ‘trans tourism’; additional security is Courtesy the artist

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Blacktransrevolution.com aka I Can’t Follow You Anymore, 2023 (gameplay screenshots), interactive videogame. Courtesy the artist

March 2024

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Thou Shalt Not Assume (Daemon Babies), 2023 (roleplaying performance event and installation view, Helsinki Biennial, 2023). Courtesy the artist

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announced to protect the game’s virtual residents. “Please let me be”: a Room, we see redacted portraits of Black trans people, their features melancholic, autotuned voice pleads. It’s here that Brathwaite-Shirley blocked out like those of victims or witnesses in crime reconstruction cleverly manipulates virtual reality – creating a world that feels ‘real’ videos. The notion of what it means to ‘cross’ – passing from shame to and may be based on actual experience, but remains a product of the self-validation, secrecy to acceptance – agitates and buzzes through artist’s imagination – in order to hold a mirror up to the audience’s the artist’s work. ethical boundaries. Engaging with Blacktransarchive.com, you’re left At the Helsinki Biennial last year, I encountered some of their sculpwondering about whether it is better to be coerced into doing the right tures as part of an installation on the island of Vallisaari. In Thou Shall thing, or to remain instinctively free to do wrong. And most crucially, Not Assume (2023), a series of humanlike figures with cloth-bound heads and elongated bodies were scattered across five different lowhat does either choice say about you? The power – and failure – of language to define the self is a motif cations: some in pairs or threes, others standing on piles of logs as of Brathwaite-Shirley’s output. In Get if ready for a sacrificial pyre. QR codes Brathwaite-Shirley’s audiovisual Home Safe (2022), an immersive instalallowed viewers to listen to the stories of these characters online: their pillation shown at David Kordansky world is incarnated through a grimage to ‘pass from one way of livGallery in Los Angeles in 2022, the push–pull aesthetic: images that are ing to another’ in order to ‘begin life artist explored how numbers and letboth hypnotic and minatory, with anew’. Fantasy becomes a political ters could be used to ‘capture and store Black trans information’. Using ASCII tool: a means of ‘acting out’ and ina directness of address that can feel habiting potential other selves, other code, Brathwaite-Shirley created a kind like a hair-raising therapy session of haptic record of their navigating the lives, forcing us to question the received world in a Black trans body, based around the fear of being attacked wisdom about what is natural. when walking home at night. The show created an immersive enviTaken to its logical extreme, Brathwaite-Shirley’s work disturbs ronment of screens, sounds and surfaces, including holograms – based the very concept of that prized unit of neoliberalism: the ‘individual’. on the movements of three different Black trans people – translated In the realm of online gameplay, questions of agency and subjeconto 3D-animated characters and then transcribed into the charac- tion, predetermination and freedom, are constantly negotiated ters and numbers of ASCII text. These were used to create portraits of and enacted. How can we be sure if a desire is ever our own? Do we gender-nonconforming pioneers, such as activist Marsha P. Johnson; really know ourselves as much as we care to believe? Finally, playing Mary Jones, New York’s first recorded transgender person; and writer our chosen but carefully coded roles – in life as in virtual reality – Janet Mock. In Brathwaite-Shirley’s work, words take on the symbolic the concept of fixed identity itself becomes blurry. In one sense or work of representation, while also constantly glitching and failing, another, we’re all in transition. Come back when you want to deal full of misspellings, halting audio and broken speech. In The Rebirthing with it. ar Room, the solecism ‘familier’ flares onscreen, blending ‘family’ into ‘outlier’: a painful Freudian slip. Language starts to seem less a system Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s The Rebirthing Room of sense-making than a net that’s permanently being slipped. is on view at Studio Voltaire, London, through 28 April In constructing a trans genealogy, Brathwaite-Shirley inevitably shines a light on its erasures from the official record. In The Rebirthing Daniel Culpan is a writer based in London

Get Home Safe, 2022 (installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022). Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles & New York

March 2024

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Play with Me Naama Tsabar’s ‘deviant’ musical instruments invite chance and collaboration into the hallowed spaces of art by Cassie Packard

Melody of Certain Damage #14, 2021, broken electric guitar, strings, microphone, screws, dimensions variable. Photo: Zaire Aranguren / The Bass, Miami Beach. Courtesy the artist and Spinello Projects, Miami

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Often repurposing parts of existing instruments, Naama Tsabar are wont to proscribe due to some combination of concern about builds new ones: sculptures and architectural interventions, sized to archival (or financial) damage and an industry-wide opticalcentrism. her body, that act as experimental vectors for sound and performance. Scholars Constance Classen and David Howes have described how the Presented in shows just as likely to generate an LP as an exhibition rise of the public art museum in the nineteenth century engendered catalogue (Perimeters, her 2021 exhibit at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum, new etiquette prohibiting touch, geared towards working-class visiyielded a hybrid vinyl-catalogue), these works oscillate between tors; this dovetailed with Western frameworks that deemed touch object and event as they are activated by gallerygoers, the artist and an ‘uncivilised’ sense and elevated sight for its connections to scientific ideology and capitalist display. Tsabar is among the artists today her collaborators. When I visit Tsabar at her Brooklyn studio, the Tel Aviv-born – many of whom are interested in challenging sensory or social hierarartist is reconfiguring arrangements of deconstructed violin and viola chies – whose work questions this dogma. bows that hang from nails in the drywall – the beginnings of a new proThe first piece by Tsabar that I ever touched – while touring ject, she tells me. Moving with the a private collection several years ago, followed by encounters at Kasmin in dexterity of a lawless archetier, she Instead of witnessing the break, sketches in space, exploring different New York and Shulamit Nazarian we inhabit the brokenness, striving in Los Angeles – hailed from her visual compositions as she reposito make new sounds, languages and ongoing Melodies of Certain Damage tions the bows on the nails or adjusts series (2018–), the least abstract of the sliding mechanisms that tighten systems out of what arrived in pieces the five bodies of work that will be and slacken the hair. “I’ve been looking for bows where the horsehair is synthetic or sourced humanely, on view in Berlin. The artist smashes an electric guitar in her studio rather than being a byproduct of butchering,” she says as she experi- and allows the fallen pieces to form a map; then, she screws the fragments. “The violence inherent to the tools that we use to make music ments to the floor or a platform and restrings the instrument accordreally makes you think about classical music in a different way.” ingly. Tsabar’s use of chance operations to guide her decision-making In her work, Tsabar, whose first institutional solo exhibition in chimes with the legacy of avant-garde musician John Cage, who Germany opens at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin this March, eschews famously composed music using the I Ching during the 1950s. or subverts various violences in music. The artist, who got her start in Guitar-smashing, the orgasmic crescendo of concerts, has become a punk band, is attuned to the historical marginalisation of women a shorthand for rockstar machismo, but it also has roots in avant-garde musicians in genres like punk and rock, the devaluation of ancillary thinking about artmaking in a destructive society. Tsabar engages with or supportive labour in the industry at large and an endemic emphasis both legacies, subverting the first as she draws out the second. The on mastery and hierarchy at the expense of experimentation and Who’s Pete Townshend, who in 1964 became the first rock musician to break a guitar onstage, was inspired by artist collaboration. Her art imagines otherwise. Gustav Metzger’s notion of ‘auto-destructive Tsabar’s handsome performance objects, Melody of Certain Damage, 2021 (performance view, Perimeters, 2021, The Bass, Miami Beach). art’, coined in 1959 to describe public art that which often feature readily activatable muComposed and performed by Ale Campos, Fielded, contained the seeds of its own destruction sical strings, demand to be played with, to be Gabriela Burdsall, Gabrielle Sheerer, Lee Muze, to attack the ‘capitalist values and the drive touched. They encourage a generative mode Naama Tsabar, Robbi Robsta and Sarah Strauss. of sensory engagement that art institutions Photo: Michael Del Riego. Courtesy The Bass, Miami Beach to nuclear annihilation’. In 1966 Metzger

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top Inversions, 2020 (performance view, Inversions, 2020, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles). Courtesy the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles above Untitled, 2018, Canson etching rag mounted to Dibond, 59 × 88 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Kasmin, New York

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Their interiors, which are lined with the red maple used in violins, convened the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, at which Raphael Montañez Ortiz, an artist-activist interested in destruction’s are fitted with hidden microphones so they can be activated with song healing and decolonial potential, decimated a piano used by composer and speech, or alternatively, equipped with guitar, bass and piano Fran Landesman and recorded the accompanying sounds. Also in strings or motion sensors so they can be activated by touch or moveattendance was Fluxus artist and classically trained musician Nam ment. For the latter Inversions, gallerygoers can move hands or other June Paik, who in 1962 smashed a violin onstage: an irreverent mode of body parts (Tsabar has used her head) within the cavity to blend etheplaying the instrument that broke with musical convention as it fore- real sound files featuring women vocalists Rose Blanshei and Wolf grounded the instrument’s frangibility, and thus music’s objecthood. Weston as well as Brood X Cicadas (the males buzz, while the females When gallerygoers encounter the Melodies, the destructive act click). These periodical cicadas, which Tsabar recorded in 2021, spend has already occurred. Instead of witnessing the break, we inhabit the 17 years underground before surfacing en masse; the artist is interbrokenness, striving to make new sounds, languages and systems ested in the little singers’ collective rhythms, as well as the strategic out of what arrived in pieces. To play these erstwhile guitars, viewer- concealment that enables them to thrive. Beauty, she suggests, is one participants assume intimate and vulnerable postures, kneeling, such strategy. “In Western society, it has historically been something of squatting or even lying down as they meet the constellated construc- an anomaly to hear women’s voices in public spaces,” says Tsabar. “But tions with their bodies; most pluck the strings with their fingers, under the veil of melody, which I associate with structure and beauty, though some performers have also used guitar picks, percussion their voices could sound.” mallets and bottles. Like Tsabar’s other deviant instruments, the One of the longest-running series in the show, the Work on Felt Melodies invite necessarily amateur, intuitive and ‘failed’ modes of (2012–) pieces deploy their own forms of concealment as well as music-making (and, for that matter, exhibition-going). The intrinsic tactical pseudomorphism. Hung on the wall or laid on the floor, they value ascribed to such experiences by her practice chimes with Jack are made of large expanses of industrial felt that have been slit or Halberstam’s assertion, in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), that ‘under layered and affixed with strings. While they reference Robert Morris’s certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, cut felt sculptures of the late 1960s, which yoked Minimalism’s focus unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more coop- on materiality to an interest in the body, Tsabar’s Felts contain hidden erative, more surprising ways of being in the world’. carbon fibre that, in concert with the piano strings, enables them to be played via plucking and pulling, “You don’t have to be ‘good’ at your Viewer-participants assume the latter of which modulates pitch by instrument in order to play it and form making the work more curved or flat. something with other people,” Tsabar intimate and vulnerable postures, As this move presumably takes a swipe remarks. At Hamburger Bahnhof, as with kneeling, squatting or even lying previous exhibitions, she will organise at the male-dominated art-historical down as they meet the constellated a temporary band with her longtime canon, it also helps usher Tsabar’s sonic collaborators (vocalist Lindsay Powell social-practice project into all manner constructions with their bodies and drummer-architect Sarah Strauss) of art spaces. That isn’t to say that the and local musicians and dancers, all of whom are women and non- visual is immaterial to her work; to the contrary, visual composition binary. Historical precedent for avant-garde musical improvisation by frequently informs and precedes sound, as with the Felts, which grow a shifting pool of feminist and queer women, not all of whom are trained out of paper maquettes. musicians, was set by the marvellously outré Feminist Improvising Not all of the works in the Berlin exhibition are playable. Twilight Group (1977–82), which incorporated feminist consciousness-raising (Gaffer Wall) (2006–) is a museum wall sheathed in the black tape used into their workshops. In Tsabar’s framework, participants meet for to inconspicuously hold cables in place onstage. As a monument to workshops where they improvise with the show’s instruments; once the invisible and frequently collective labour integral to many forms they have articulated a shared vocabulary, they collaboratively write of creative production, the swathed support structure prompts rumiand ritualistically perform a composition that vacillates between nation on the various concrete ways in which artists and art institextured atonality and swells of harmony. “It’s magic,” says Tsabar of tutions might endeavour to make such labour visible, such as Josh the process. The performances continue after she has departed; her Kline’s practice of listing his fabricators, and what benefits such visihope is that the communities they catalyse do, too. bility confers. The final suite of works in the show, Metronomes (2018–), The inaugural performance will activate every work in the show is likewise unactivatable, comprising pairs of sneakers whose soles, – pieces on the floor and walls, and embedded within the gallery’s gradually sculpted by wear, are embedded with metronomes timed to architecture – so the whole space throbs with sound, like a cathe- a human heartbeat. Titled after the period during which Tsabar wore dral with the organ piping. To make the Inversions (2020–), Tsabar them (for example, September 1 2018 – January 15 2021 [2018–21]), these cuts holes directly into the museum’s walls. The gesture conjures up shoes-turned-kinetic-sculptures allude to the time-based medium of Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts’ of the 1970s, in which the artist a human body that trudges, labours, performs, lives and dies. They sliced open structures doomed to demolition to create sculptures and paint a picture of an artist almost never off the clock, but equally, critique the social conditions underlying the buildings’ decrepitude; one for whom art is necessarily in every step. ar Tsabar’s ‘cuts’ might be seen as critiquing museological drives towards stasis and containment. But these seductive cavities, whose triangular, A solo show of Naama Tsabar’s work can be seen at semicircular and lozengelike shapes are informed by her research into Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, from 22 March to 22 September the evolution of sound holes, feel more akin to confessionals in their Cassie Packard is a writer based in New York summons to intimacy and function as sonic chambers.

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Down to Earth by Ross Simonini

IN_23, 2023, earth, cardboard corners, enamel, oil, jute, 236 × 122 cm

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N. Dash’s own brand of conceptual naturalism draws a line between the natural world and human ideals

SD_23, 2023, earth, acrylic, canvas, silkscreen ink, jute, 213 × 157 cm

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VO_23, 2023, earth, acrylic, rock, silkscreen ink, jute, 163 × 150 cm

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In the Swiss countryside, there is an ancient Roman quarry that is said unlike making adobe‚ the primary architectural element of the to restore the body’s health and induce altered states of consciousness. American Southwest and one of the world’s oldest construction mateThis place is now named the Emma Kunz Grotto, after the healer- rials. Just like this exhibition, an adobe house surrounds you with its artist who discovered its electromagnetic properties. Kunz (1892– minerals, hugging you, like Kunz’s cave. 1963) made hundreds of drawings on graph paper using a pendulum, I saw N. Dash’s first exhibition, in 2012, at Untitled, a sincea device for reading Earth’s vibrations. These works suggest kaleido- shuttered gallery in New York City. Back then the artist left the tawny scopic seismographs, but to the artist they were tools for divining the grounds of the works exposed: raw canvas and dirt played the many imbalances of her patients, which she shades of a coffee-coloured rainbow. then rebalanced using the grotto. Seeing N. Dash’s work there for the first An alchemical mixing with paint, Today the Zentrum Emma Kunz runs time, it looked like a fresh contribution to ink, acrylic and oil, as if the the grotto, displaying drawings and selthe history of umber art, from Rembrandt artist were suggesting some ling bags of the site’s charged clay, which to Walter De Maria to Ana Mendieta to can be applied to the skin as an emollient Antoni Tàpies. Kunz, too, grounded her new kind of hybrid anthro-soil visions in terra firma hues, working on or eaten as a tonic: Kunz mixed it into the soil in her garden, then swung her pendulum to stimulate the growth tan paper and scribbled sepia backgrounds. Atop this, her botanic, of new plants. bifurcating patterns pop with the contrast of flowers against loam. Last September I visited this mysterious cave and stretched out In the last decade N. Dash’s colours have also bloomed from mud, on a flat boulder for the suggested therapeutic period of 30 minutes. and New Mexico (the artist’s onetime home) seems responsible. and (This is what Kunz did to energetically recharge herself.) On emerging Water contains the muted green of local sage and the cobalt of the Rio I felt intoxicated, disembodied and exhausted, as did my travelling Grande. One wall of deep and dark-toned works suggests the highcompanions. When we drifted back to the Zentrum for a final look desert night, oil-painted and screen-printed in a spectrum of violets at the drawings, Kunz’s pendulous lines now appeared to be slowly and sidereal glints. Another wall of sun-faded colours renders an thrumming, and so did the world around them. This woozy feeling arid afternoon, cracked and bleached. For one work, layered rosette patterns of cyan and solar-yellow stimulate the same kind of psychepersisted all day and only lifted the following morning. Shortly after this journey I went to New Mexico to see and Water, delic, visual buzz as lichen on a boulder, or as the hypnotic forms of an exhibition by N. Dash at Site Santa Fe. Once I was in the presence a Kunz drawing. In all these works, the mud is almost fully occluded of N. Dash’s paintings, I understood that my experience in the grotto by colours, and is only revealed as it seeps from the edges, like tar had been the right preface to this work, which also seemed to evoke oozing up through the sandstone. vibrations through its subtle marks and colours. Like Switzerland, Here, at the surface, the paint and soil marry into a single terresNew Mexico is a wonderland of minerals, clay and art, and I would trial substance. This is an alchemical mixing with paint, ink, acrylic come to find a tacit relationship between two artists, underscored and oil, as if the artist were suggesting some new kind of hybrid by their shared collaboration with earth. anthro-soil. A network of marled fissures and errant marks complicate N. Dash’s work begins literally with earth: a thin layer of it spread these surfaces, turning fields of colour into weathered patches of the on jute like a paste. This substrate is then hung on the wall as a paint- planet’s crust. I think of this as ambient landscape painting, which is ing, raising the ground to eye level as if the artist were tilting the world underscored by how N. Dash spreads actual landscaping throughout 90 degrees. Here the viewer can visually meet the ignored material the space: a reptilian stone sits at the threshold, and another is wedged at our feet, which is, in fact, the most between two canvases, as if holding the important substance of our lives: our whole piece together. food is grown from it, our bodies are Likewise, Kunz’s mandala abstracmade of its fruits and when we die we tions are ambient portrait paintings, without a hint of human resemblance. will sink back into it. Looking closely at this soil, I could see its full complexity: For each drawing, she would lay the paper the deep brown glistened with mica on the table before her patient, and in a and a whole constellation of particsingle session document their humming ulate hues. Atop this layer, the artist essence. She was not some misanthroppaints, prints, carves and sculpturally ic, cave-dwelling environmentalist, worintervenes, until the character of each shipping Earth while reviling humanity; work is born. she was a visionary who sought to find the most basic natural forces within The exhibition title and Water, seems to be in dialogue with the artevery individual. ist’s previous exhibition title, earth, in N. Dash’s works also refuse the ideo2022 at SMAK, in Ghent. It’s as if this logical purity of nature, free of human show were completing a phrase, contouch. Almost every work contains hujoining the two elements that create man artefacts – plastic netting, cardthe primary material of all N. Dash’s board packing-corners, Styrofoam blocks, VO_23 (detail), 2023, earth, work: mud. The process of mixing up the mud plastic water bottles – much of it the deacrylic, rock, silkscreen ink, jute, tritus of a functioning artist’s studio. In – harvested locally in New Mexico – is not 163 × 150 cm

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VG_23 (detail), 2023, earth, acrylic, silkscreen ink, waterbottles, jute, 137 × 107 × 13 cm

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conversation, N. Dash refers to these elements as “provisional archi- throughout the day, during conversations, walking down the street tecture”, bits of material that seem to turn canvases into structural and at home alone. It’s one way of recording the many varied vibraforms. As I looked upon the paintings I began to think of them tions of human touch – what the artist thinks of as “information, both as the panels of some speculative adobe monolith, standing alone, material and immaterial”. in a desert of the future. For me, N. Dash’s resistance to language is a means of drawing For me, this kind of imaginative play is essential to engaging with attention to these ineffable, etheric aspects of the work. The artist is these paintings, since the artist presents objects with little indication accumulating a swatch of stored, potential energy, and once the fabric of process or identity. Dash’s exhibitions are often self-titled, explan- is nearly eroded, the remnants are photographed and printed onto the atory text is limited or entirely forgone; work. What results is that same concenpronouns are avoided; and individual trated energy, now fully kinetic, looking N. Dash’s works refuse works are untitled or tagged with seemlike expanding celestial nebulae. These the ideological purity of nature, images capture the great illusion of ingly random numbers and letters, as free of human touch abstraction – the way a plume of clouds if the artist were an archaeologist, cataor craggy hillside can, for a moment, loguing discoveries with an index. Even the artist’s name withholds, suggesting punctuation – a breath resemble an impossible form of life. This is how an intimate, fingerbetween thoughts – a hovering horizon. size gesture transforms into a vast, open landscape. A dash is also, of course, a line, and line is essential to N. Dash’s In many ways and Water points to the land surrounding the show, work. These are paintings but the artist also considers them draw- a place of dryness, limited resources and artists. There is a strong ings, if unconventional ones. Here, N. Dash shares Kunz’s innovative lineage of artists who have lived and worked in New Mexico – Agnes approach of producing lines without the pressure of a brush or pencil. Martin, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Meredith Monk, Mei-mei Instead, both artists use a kind of sculptural line in space: a taut string. Berssenbrugge and Emmi Whitehorse – and their work, like N. While the older artist harnessed the planet’s gravity and swinging Dash’s, plays out the relationship between the natural world and the momentum, N. Dash buries string into the painting, as if marking ideals of the human mind: a kind of conceptual naturalism. the territory of an excavation site. N. Dash does not cite Kunz as an It’s like what happens when a house appears in a formerly influence on any of these choices, but the subtle resonances between untouched wilderness. An explosion of contrasts is ignited: harmony the artists grows naturally out of their shared fascination with earth. and dissonance, creation and erasure, grid and grass. When we look N. Dash feels that “receptivity to certain frequencies” is where the at this scene, all these polarities must be held together, at once – and work begins, a statement that could have come from Kunz. In a rare the more we look, the more fraught and beautiful it becomes, as if the revelation of process, N. Dash discusses the origin of the silkscreen entire drama of human history could be told in the simple meeting of images on many of the works: holding a small square of fabric, the dirt and line. ar artist rubs at it, repeatedly, daily, until it disintegrates into a nest of fibres, or strings, or even, as it were, lines. This process happens Ross Simonini is a Los Angeles-based writer, artist and musician

Untitled (detail), 2021. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin; Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp all but one image Courtesy the artist and Site Santa Fe

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Simone Fattal Zhou Siwei Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo 22.6. – 8.9.2024

Tishan Hsu

1.12.2023 – 11.2.2024

Charlie Prodger Agency of Singular Investigations 1.12.2023 – 25.2.2024

SLIME kuratiert von Joshua Simon 16.2. – 18.2.2024 (on-site) 16.2. – 30.6.2024 (on-line)

Katrin Hornek Imran Perretta Zach Blas

8.3. – 9.6.2024

Forms of the Shadow kuratiert von Sunjung Kim 20.9. – 17.11.2024

Yuki Okumura Ali Cherri Beatriz Santiago Muñoz 28.11.2024 – Frühjahr 2025

Beethovenfries Gustav Klimt

Permanent ausgestellt www.secession.at

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OCEAN HIGHWAY N e w YorK - Pa ri s - ST BARTS

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Lee Ka-sing, photograph from A Floral Transformation, 1996, 12 x 14 in, as published in A Floral Transformation, 2024. Courtesy of Lee Ka-sing.

ANOTHER DAY IN HONG KONG 18 MAR–31 AUG 2024 ASIA ART ARCHIVE An exhibition that reconstructs one day from Hong Kong’s art history, with new works by six groups of artists and art collectives.

Asia Art Archive 11/F Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong T. +852 2844 1112 E. info@aaa.org.hk

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AsiaArtArchive aaa.org.hk Opening hours Monday-Saturday, 10am-6pm

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14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema Power Station of Art, Shanghai 9 November – 31 March Apparently – at least according to his catalogue text – back in what was then the Soviet Union and the 1970s, the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s chief curator, artist, e-flux founder and by-nowUS-based Anton Vidokle grew up in a world of space-themed merchandise and next to something called ‘the Cosmos Kino’ (that last bit means cinema in Russian). But while there’s a sprinkling of barefaced nostalgia throughout this show (among it a tribute to the RussianAmerican conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, who died last year), it is generally rooted in more lofty, less sentimental thinking: the cosmos (rather than humanity) as the origin of all things, both material and immaterial; taking a cue from German philosopher and biennale-catalogue-contributor Alexander Kluge, the cosmos as a form of ur-cinema, an index of all events, recorded by the glittering light traces they leave behind; and the early-twentieth-century Russian philosophical movement cosmism, a precursor of transhumanism, which according to one of its founding thinkers (Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov) centred on a move ‘to regulate the forces of nature, to defeat death and bring ancestors

back to life, so that they too would participate in the general resurrection’. This last is the subject of a number of Vidokle’s artworks. As structuring concepts for an exhibition, there is of course a risk that all these flights of fancy will produce something akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’, which the celebrated Argentine author imagined would contain every possible book that could ever be written. Here we have works that deal with nearly all the pressing issues of our artistic moment: among them, Afrofuturism, indigenous traditions, gender and colonialism. Spiralling down the inside of the Power Station’s chimney (it used to be an actual power station) is a series of lightboxes by Jonas Staal (Exo-Ecologies, 2023, its title emblazoned on a giant red banner that fills up and lurks in the chimney shaft like a rocket in a silo) that index the nonhumans – among them guinea pigs, monkeys, mice, rats and fruit flies – that have been catapulted into outer space in the name of human expansionism. There is Nolan Oswald Dennis’s Black Liberation Zodiac: Khunuseti (2017–23), a roomsize installation featuring wallpapered astral-maps onto which

Ancient Greek designations of the stars have been replaced with black liberation iconography. (The Pleiades, for example, become the Khunuseti, a designation given to the constellation by the Nama people of Southern Africa and referring to the daughters of the sky god Tsui // Goab.) That work, in turn, finds echoes (and this biennial is full of them) in Tavares Strachan’s series of ceramic sculptures and painted ‘selfportraits’ linking iconography from African culture to further astral charts and the iconography of space exploration. Among the new works, there is He Zike’s video Random Access (2023), which centres, by way of a taxi journey in the aftermath of a data-cloud malfunction, on big data, our dependency on digital storage systems and the changing perception of time that results. There is Eastern philosophy influencing the West in the late Michel Seuphor’s interpretation of the 64 Hexagrammes du Yi-King (1986/2023), a series of black-and-white serigraphs depicting abstract geometric structures of the type that have long been a favourite of Western interior designers. There is Minjeong An’s Self-Portrait (2007)

Trevor Paglen, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4), Orbital Reflector (Scale Model) and Orbital Reflector (Triangle Variation #4) Scale Model, all 2015–18 (installation view, 14th Shanghai Biennale, 2023). © Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Courtesy the artist; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; and Pace, New York

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diagram, a digital print that transposes personal details (moles, scars), general anatomy and auras onto what appears to be a blueprint for a robot; and Ivory Coast-born American Ouattara Watts’s more freestyle and expressionistic diagrampaintings from the Corruptions Impunity series (2011), which nod both to the artist’s African roots and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Pretty soon you do get the impression that everything is cosmic. And, of course, it literally is. But it’s to the curators’ credit (Vidokle is joined by Xiang Zairong, Hallie Ayres, Ben Eastham and Lukas Brasiskis) that this well-structured (in nine chapters) and tightly wound (without ever totally becoming labyrinthine) show never collapses into a state of total Babel, despite its spiral galaxies of drawings and projections covering the walls, ceilings and corridors of this vast space. It all begins however, with two gigantic lumps of interstellar fancy designed by American Trevor Paglen that dominate the cavernous main hall of the Power Station of Art: Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4), and Orbital Reflector (Triangle Variation #4) Scale Model (both works 2015–18). In 2019 an orbital deployment of a version of the latter failed as a result of a US government shutdown. Paglen’s idea was that if space is being exploited by commerce, science and the military, then why not add a purely aesthetic, or sweetly innocent,

aspect to it also? A big artistic signature in the sky (‘they are shiny and look much bigger than they actually are’, Paglen said of the objects in an interview), designed to last a couple of months before burning up harmlessly in the Earth’s atmosphere. Here, the objects are full of fantastic promise but empty of function, which comes across like a lecture about purposelessness in Kantian aesthetics and the very definition of space junk. (In this respect the work has an intriguing relationship with Brazilian Clarissa Tossin’s Future Geography series, 2021–, in which strips of amazon.com packaging are interlaced with NASA imagery of deep space using geographic Amazon-inspired weaving techniques). Despite the presence of two workbenches full of notes, drawings and moodboards, it’s the sculptures’ shiny seductive qualities that come to the fore. You’re transported, via shiny materiality and retro space-age form, from the space of a redundant power station into what might be the deck of the Death Star in Star Wars. It would be easy to label the above superficial. But given that there’s a large room dedicated to film adaptations of Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris (1961) towards the end of the show, perhaps this is simply part of this exhibition-cum-movie’s script. (Musician Sun Ra is the subject of another ‘tribute’ room.) Alongside movie clips and various editions

of Lem’s book, the former includes Deimantas Narkevičius’s video Revisiting Solaris (2007), in which he works with actor Donatas Banionis to reprise the lead role from Andrei Tarkovsky’s celebrated 1972 version but with an ending closer to Lem’s original story. All of which largely glosses over the fact that Lem, by his own admission, wasn’t writing science fiction because he wanted to, but because the restrictions and ideological pressure under which he wrote (in Communist Poland) meant that he had to locate his discourse in the relative safety of outer space. Given the current international popularity of Chinese science fiction and authors such as Cixin Liu, you leave the room wondering whether something similar is going on in China now. But you’re not encouraged to do that, and Liu and Chinese sci-fi are largely, and oddly, absent here. Nevertheless you can’t escape the fact that Asian countries (China prominent among them) are increasingly active in space exploration today, at the same time as various new kinds of Cold War (and actual war) dominate terrestrial space. What you’re left with by the end of this show is a sense that it’s the mess of conflicting and overlapping ideologies down here that really map its territory, more than any kind of cosmic wonder. And the rather forlorn hope that we don’t export all that junk with us to outer space. Mark Rappolt

Tavares Strachan, Self Portrait (Space Helmet), 2023, ceramic, 90 × 60 × 60 cm (installation view, 14th Shanghai Biennale, 2023). © Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin, Paris

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Lewis Brander Recent Paintings Vardaxoglou, London 24 January – 2 March While the titles Lewis Brander gives to his paintings indicate that they depict the sky looming over the cities of London and Athens, when seen from a distance these works might easily be mistaken for monochromes. Take London (2019–23), a small and heady rectangle of absinthe-green, which only reveals its motif when we get close enough to the canvas to note a muted horizon line and the way the British artist employs the subtlest of tonal modulations to suggest the play of sunlight on diffuse, barely-there clouds. If these are paintings that demand slow, careful looking, then they also take a long time to produce: according to their dates, this might be up to five years. A gallery text states that while Brander sometimes lays down a few initial marks on his canvases en plein air, these works are mostly painted in his studio, from memory. A sky is a complex composition, and one that rearranges itself from one moment to the next. It follows that what the artist captures are not fleeting sense impressions, but their long mental afterlife: the way they grow, or decay, or become abstracted over time.

Towards the bottom edge of Korakis Hill (2022–23) his terracotta pigment appears to run out, while in Primrose Hill (2022–23) – a dusky painting of the view over the British capital from one of its highest points – the city’s every building seems to have vanished, as though we’ve been returned to prehistory, or fast-forwarded to a posthuman future. Both Periclean Athens and Victorian London could stake a claim to be the most advanced metropolises of their respective eras. Looking at these locations today, Brander sees gorgeously polluted skyscapes, beneath which everything that was once solid has now melted into air. Are these paintings, then, about civilisational decline and fall, and if so, to what degree are they marked by a nostalgia for a lost, surely irrecoverable world? For an artist born in 1995, there’s much that is curiously retrograde in Brander’s painterly address. There are elements of J.M.W. Turner’s light-strafed romanticism and of James McNeill Whistler’s misty urban sublime, traces of Brice Marden’s fields of fine-tuned colour and of Howard Hodgkin’s heat-hazed,

near-abstract landscapes. It’s also notable that Brander titled his exhibition Recent Paintings, as though he wasn’t a young Goldsmiths graduate with the contemporary artworld in his sights but some fusty Royal Academician showing at a Cork Street ‘picture seller’ circa the release of The Beatles’ first LP. In flirting with such outmoded, even deliberately fogeyish signifiers, he seems to be inviting us to think about what sets him apart from the average Sunday dauber. This is risky. Context matters, but quality matters more. Nostalgic or not, his canvases deliver. The View Towards Piraeus (2020–23) resembles a sheet of battered and faintly bloodstained yellow-green metal. Contemplating this work, I’m reminded both of the smog that often shrouds present-day Athens and of how Homer described the Mediterranean skies not as blue, but rather bronze. At his best, Brander employs landscape as a method of drawing disparate moments – even histories – together into a single image. What he paints is not only space, but also time. Tom Morton

The View Towards Piraeus, 2020–23, oil on flax, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vardaxoglou Gallery, London

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Eric Croes Comme un vieux tatouage Almine Rech, Paris 11 January – 24 February ‘Ceramic withstands time so well,’ the Belgian artist Eric Croes has explained of his chosen medium. ‘I sometimes imagine that my sculptures will be found in thousands of years and that they could prove to be a real mystery for archaeologists.’ Indeed they might. His sculptures are three-dimensional exquisite corpses formed of hybrid representational images shaped in clay, frequently stacked atop each other in totemic columns and more often than not accessorised with cartoonish details. A typical piece in the new work constituting Comme un vieux tatouage (Like an Old Tattoo) might incorporate an iratelooking pre-Columbian deity sprouting crabs and candles from his shoulders (Green South Kensington, all works 2024); or a devilish lucha libre mask supported by an infant’s torso and a coin slot inset into its cranium (Red Tozeur). Surfaces are pricked with perforations, mouths purse into cute Os, eyes twinkle mischievously. You could reasonably class Croes’s weird and wacky art in the context of a wider trend for madcap ceramics. Yet while some notable

contemporary artists working in the medium – Lindsey Mendick, for instance, or Leilah Babirye – have exploited its associations with the domestic and the decorative to grotesque and sometimes subversive effect, Croes aspires neither to make the skin crawl nor, perceptibly at least, to make any political point. Instead, he pursues a cheerful exploration of the cultural-historical connotations of ceramic art, trawling the archaeological museums and sites of Europe, Japan and South America for imagery to add to his pictorial lexicon. Here, a baize-lined vitrine containing a number of passport-size sketchbooks gives us a glimpse of his magpie approach to collecting references, and how they eventually take shape in clay. Depicting mythical figures, animals and objects, Croes’s doodles are executed with a pleasing line that is one part David Shrigley to two parts Matt Groening. The artist renders many of these drawings into solid form with impressive fidelity, while others, whether by accident or design, have undergone considerable mutation

in the course of the arduous process, losing the signifiers that broadcast their origins while gaining others from sources altogether different. Croes evidently enjoys playing with cultural registers and with the particularities of a medium that’s long sat to one side of fine art. Often, the results are rewardingly daft. Totem Blue Fisherman is a vertical collision of found imagery, pitting an emoji satsuma above, inter alia, an Ensor-esque fright mask and what look like a Tiki-bar god and a Cycladic sheep’s head; the sum effect evokes the psychedelic animations of 1970s stop-motion tyro Bruce Bickford. Other instances – notably Yellow Petit Palais – inspire no such comparison, the whimsical juxtapositions therein (a top-hatted dandy astride a cute Easter hen, for instance) crossing a line between winsome and weird. Nevertheless, it’s easy to forget that, until quite recently, it was still a rarity to see anything that sailed this close to ‘folk art’ in a conventional gallery space. It’s just as difficult to dislike Croes’s egalitarian, mix-n-match approach. Digby Warde-Aldam

Totem Blue Fisherman, 2024, glazed ceramic, concrete and steel, 195 × 47 × 47 cm. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech, Paris

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Louis Osmosis Queues Kapp Kapp, New York 20 January – 9 March Rows of stanchions fill Kapp Kapp, guiding viewers past 17 artworks – readymade assemblages, 3D-printed sculptures and site-specific interventions – installed along the gallery’s walls. While congested queues might trigger restlessness and resentment, a serpentine configuration of stanchions and belts standing empty, as this one does during the gallery’s weekday lulls, exudes an aura of deluded optimism tinted with deadpan humour, a trademark of the work of Brooklyn-born interdisciplinary artist Louis Osmosis. The exhibition can be traversed in either direction. Viewed in ‘chronological’ order, which requires walking from the back storage room up towards the gallery’s entrance, it tells a sad tale of middle-class American striving beginning from conception, represented by a group of anthropomorphic sperm sculptures. The largest of these cartoonish flagellates is made of papier-mâché and titled Big Mascot (Ragamuffin) (all works 2024). Beside it are six 3D-printed Small Mascots the size of collectible figurines. Faceless, they are differentiated by their headgear – a propeller beanie, a horned helmet and a conical Asian sunhat among them. The irreverence of these sculptures comes as no surprise given Osmosis’s previous solo show at Kapp Kapp, in which he exhibited a kawaii humansize papier-mâché cockroach named Companion (Hachikō) (2022). Next to the Small Mascots is Incubator, a rectangular aperture in the gallery’s wall. Instead of a view – of an infant, eggs or something in the vein of Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1966) – the window contains a double-sided mirror that, in most lighting conditions, simply reflects the face of the person peering into it. Childhood is represented by Chair with Pipe, a vintage floral-patterned highchair whose seat and tray table are penetrated by a long steel pipe. This work’s conceit, as well as its title, pay homage to the American sculptor Robert Gober, who drove pipes through objects including an armchair and a statue of the Virgin Mary. Next to the highchair stands another sculpture, Smokin’ Tiki. Here, an acrylic tube holds up a riot shield with a lit cigarette doodled on its surface. The sculpture’s title hints at the deadly ‘Unite

the Right’ rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, during which American white nationalists brandished tiki torches and clashed with police. Read together, the two sculptures tell the story of a baby raised by a volatile conservative parent. Nearby, two Content House assemblages stand in for the entrepreneurial and interpersonal endeavours of young adulthood. The ‘content house’, a residence in which social-media influencers cohabitate and collaborate, is pictured here as an amalgam of boxes and fabric. In Content House, for Los Angeles, a wedding gown spills out from a shelf beneath a pile of PVC pipes, while in Content House, for New York, yellowed nylon cascades from a stack of boxes including a quaint, half-empty Valentine’s gift set. Despite their titles, Osmosis’s Content House assemblages do not foreground digital technology, nor do they contain specific references to the influencer economy. Instead, they adopt the visual language of late-1960s Italian Arte Povera, whose artists made use of preindustrial materials like soil, rocks and fabric to critique modernism and technology. In a sense rebranding the principles of Arte Povera for a contemporary audience, Osmosis undercuts the visual abundance and sensorial stimulation associated with the phrase ‘content house’ with the mute vernacular artefacts of an analogue past. Continually thwarting expectations, Queues accelerates through the trials of adulthood and homeownership, encapsulated in three Foreclosure sculptures – bundles of papier-mâché ‘firewood’ mounted on a watermarked photo of the Statue of Liberty – towards its final work, Score, for Ellipsis & Roundtable, a readymade comprising a foldable electronic keyboard, a muttering AM radio and three Mylar balloons floating like the melancholy decor of a retirement party. According to the press release, these decorations reference the deflated black balloons the artist Pope.L scattered throughout his 2013 exhibition Forlesen at The Renaissance Society, in Chicago. In a 2023 talk Osmosis cited Pope.L’s polemic on the commodification of live performance art, ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’ (2011), as a major influence on his practice. ‘Let’s say live

facing page, top Zip-Liiiiiine, 2024, stuffed toy, gravel, stanchions, 318 × 104 × 18 cm. Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy Kapp Kapp, New York

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performance art is some kind of canary in the coal mine,’ Pope.L writes. ‘What is its death trying to tell us? Or more interestingly, its middle years, what are they trying to tell us about a form that lives and dies on liveness?… After life, we, performance artists, should sell what? Tacos? Medical supplies for diabetes?’ The late artist concludes, ‘the next product for us, performance artists, to sell is the soul’. The central conundrum of Osmosis’s show – while it does not include performance art – extends from Pope.L’s proposition: having surrendered their souls to an attention economy that not only instantaneously commodifies liveness and authentic experience but also propagates political extremism and disinformation, what should artists today sell? Without a clear answer, Queues comes across as a deeply self-aware, self-critical and even self-sabotaging show that leaves the viewer with a sense of what scholar Ackbar Abbas terms déjà disparu – ‘the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés’. Indeed, when viewed in reverse chronological order, from entrance to storage room, the American life that Queues depicts issues from a state of obsolescence, encapsulated in Score, for Ellipsis & Roundtable. From there, we age in reverse, each failure – the foreclosed home, the discarded wedding dress – further infantilising us. Traverse the room more than once, and the beginning and end of life start to loop and become indistinguishable. In lieu of progress and emotional growth, that which insinuates itself in Queues is a vague nostalgia for a fabled time when the stanchions of capitalist striving were packed, when a spot in line, even in the back, was worth fighting for. Ultimately, the viewer gets the sense that Osmosis’s casual indifference is a pose, one that betrays a great tenderness towards vernacular histories and his artistic progenitors – hence, the domestic paraphernalia, the pointed references to social dysfunction and the intergenerational homages. This makes the dreariness of the scene at hand not only bearable to behold but also surprisingly endearing, in spite of itself. Jenny Wu

facing page, bottom Small Mascot (Butterface), 2024, 3D-printed plastic, paper, shellac, adhesive, 38 × 15 × 13 cm. Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy Kapp Kapp, New York

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Paul Pfeiffer Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 12 November – 16 June Paul Pfeiffer is not afraid of grandiosity. Neither was Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, who, introducing a screening of his 1956 biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (which dramatised Moses leading the enslaved Jews out of Egypt), informed the audience that they were about to view ‘the story of the birth of freedom’. At first glance, the sweeping title may seem out of step with Pfeiffer’s multimedia artwork, which investigates mass culture – particularly spectator sports – and its subsequent mediation in film, television and advertising. But Pfeiffer’s artworks tell a tale of spiritual bondage, one both created and witnessed by the camera’s lens. In video, photography and sculpture, Pfeiffer reveals

the eerie religiosity of contemporary media, unveiling the structures that sustain spectacular entertainment today. Editing techniques lend Pfeiffer’s found footage a mystical air, resulting in artworks that both replicate and critique the thrall of mass culture. In Caryatid (2003), Pfeiffer alters a video of an NHL Stanley Cup celebration by erasing the athlete holding the silver trophy aloft, so that the award defies gravity as it bobs in front of a crowd. The floating trophy matches the colour of Pfeiffer’s chosen display: a 23cm silver-plated television. The film series The Long Count (2000–01) employs a similar trick, transforming the bodies of Muhammad Ali and three famous opponents – Sonny

Liston, George Foreman and Joe Frazier – into transparent plasmalike spectres that swirl within a boxing ring surrounded by a large audience. Pfeiffer presents these films on small screens that protrude on silver rods wallmounted just above head height, demanding that the viewer strain and bend to discern the action onscreen. Here, television subordinates its spectators and athletes: both must physically change in order to see – or be (partially) seen by – its screens. Mechanisms of image reproduction are fateful devices, ones that simultaneously exalt and destroy their original subjects. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse photographic series (2001–18) shows solitary basketball players

The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle), 2001, video (colour, silent, 2 min 51 sec), painted 5.6-inch LCD monitor and metal armature, 13 × 16 × 91 cm. Photo: Luke A. Walker. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid; Perrotin, Paris; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

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in monumental form, their often-airborne bodies adopting the postures of worshippers ascending to meet the divine. The large colour photographs’ titling refers them to the New Testament’s Book of Revelations, making them both signifiers of oncoming death – the ‘horsemen’ – and faceless victims of its wrath. Media technology creates this apocalyptic scenario: Pfeiffer edits out the numbers and names on players’ jerseys, turning athletes into symbols of biblical proportion; TV monitors, flashbulbs and stadium lights further excise their individuality. In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07) (2002), a basketballer raises his hands as though receiving the Last Judgment – but where his face should be is only the blown-out brightness of an arena’s big screen. Sporting events are also a global export, the product of an invisible system of labour and trade that fuels its power. The Saints (2007) explores this international supply chain:

the 17-channel audio installation features the reactions of 1,000 Filipinos hired to watch a recording of England’s defeat of Germany in the 1966 World Cup final. The sound of their emphatic cheers echoes throughout the museum; when I arrived at the installation’s entryway, the noise was so loud I was halfexpecting to find a live match – instead, a huge empty room greets the visitor, wall-mounted white speakers projecting the audio across the vacant space. Pfeiffer, who was raised between the Philippines and the US, uses The Saints to reveal the illusions associated with fandom: the homogeneity of team devotees, for example, and their nationalist investments in the World Cup. The emotionality of Pfeiffer’s audience shows both the unseen work behind mass cultural entertainment and how the drama of such events is – or can be – manufactured. Following the awe of the aural installation, Pfeiffer shows its secret source: in an adjacent

space, a two-channel video projection displays the original game alongside the paid, roaring crowd, sitting inside a movie theatre in Manila. What is absent from Pfeiffer’s work is often just as important as what is present. His remixed examinations of mass culture have that in common with other theological enquiries: these installations, films and photographs explore communal events that, with television’s help, adopt a near-religious character. In this context, the artist’s overlarge gestures – a title referencing biblical descriptions of Jesus’s birth, for example, for a video of an NBA game edited to remove all players (John 3:16, 2000) – seem appropriate, not ironic. Pfeiffer’s dissections of entertainment illuminate the ways spectacles come to feel magical, a process that obscures or eliminates the people that form their images. When Pfeiffer pulls back the curtain, a camera lies in wait. Claudia Ross

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07), 2002, digital duraflex print, 122 × 152 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid; Perrotin, Paris; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

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Andrew Black On Clogger Lane LUX, London 19 January – 10 March The scrawled red overtitles that open On Clogger Lane read, ‘Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it’. Andrew Black’s hypnotic hourlong video essay exists in a lineage of British artist film that seeks to memorialise the past and ward against forgetting, from Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space (1997) to the films of Duncan Campbell or Elizabeth Price; the unearthing of documentary sources, the recording of oral history, in the service of a more mythological sense of its subject. For while social history appears as the immediate content of Black’s film, there are altogether stranger and less certain questions that run below that surface: of the fragility of memory, of the way that the past might no longer make sense to us and how forgetting is a political choice made by those in the present. The locations we see in On Clogger Lane are in the landscape of North Yorkshire, a region of rugged hills, heathlands and moors, a place of enduring community and cultural tradition long romanticised in British culture. It opens with amateur archaeologists examining large grey stones found on a sunny heath, scraping chalk into indentations in the stones to reveal what might be a symbol – some primitive figure or astrological sign, or… what exactly? It might be a sign from the deep past, or it might be a projection of what the archaeologists want to see. Unearthing what lies beneath the surface becomes On Clogger Lane’s obsessive motif: accounts of the building of water reservoirs in the last century and the consequent flooding of entire villages; the black-and-white archive

image of a church half-submerged, and a woman explaining how earlier generations of her family lie in graves now deep underwater, segue into conversations about the social histories of those buried. As a group clear the brush from an abandoned graveyard, local-history experts recount these stories of working-class Britain; of poor women committed to asylums, of adolescents brought from the big cities, whose excavated remains showed signs of injuries from working in local mills. But everything is now ‘at the bottom of the reservoir’, the blood-red titles repeatedly tell us, while archival footage turns our attention to quarries and quarrying. Under Black’s documentary attention lies a tenebrous, coldly woozy soundtrack of drones and cymbals that interjects a weird intensity: to the sound of ponderous gong chimes we see quarry faces dynamited, black rockfaces ballooning from inside, as if called to destroy themselves by nothing more than the gong’s reverberation. As the film unspools, it becomes clear that submersion, burial and excavation, as both present-day acts and metaphors for knowing history, become merged. One layer of water or rock or earth offers up glimpses of moments of human history, but all these are swallowed up by the ‘deep time’ (as one interviewee puts it) of the land. In the film’s second half, the relatively objective tone begins to fracture into something more paranoid, as the stories turn to myths of witchcraft and hidden forces. This brings us to the surreal view of RAF Menwith Hill listening station, with its array of white ‘golf-ball’ domes used by the US for surveillance, and

whose activities (including telecoms eavesdropping) have long caused controversy. We hear from veteran women peace campaigners of the 1980s, now elderly, who took inspiration from the Greenham Common antinuclear missiles campaign in their own protests against the US presence at Menwith Hill. But there’s a sense of anachronism to these reminders of (relatively) recent history, as if the more Black tries to rescue these testimonies, the more their reality seems to recede, becoming something alien. “There’s very little protest about it nowadays,” says onetime campaigner Anne, ruefully. This melancholy and disconnect drifts through On Clogger Lane, as Black introduces uncanny synthesised choral voices, one singing the thirteenth-century Middle English verse ‘Foweles in the Frith’, another the twelfthcentury French poem ‘Ja Nus Hons Pris’, both lyrics wistful reflections on loss and despair. Closing with a shot of Black himself marking out two carved symbols of concentric circles found on a heathland rock, with Menwith Hill’s domes in the distance, On Clogger Lane is full of surfaces and subterranean opacity, in which history seems doomed to disappear. It’s all the more striking for treating the documentary image itself as a kind of decaying matter – locations and people are seen receding back through a history of the medium – from clean digital, to striated, jittering analogue video, to cracked and disintegrating cine film. Retrieving the layered truths of a place, the film seems to suggest, may no longer help us make sense of our moment in time, however much we look back. J.J. Charlesworth

On Clogger Lane (still), 2022, video, 60 min. Courtesy the artist

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On Clogger Lane (still), 2022, video, 60 min. Courtesy the artist

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Antje Majewski the man who disappeared (amerika) Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 27 January – 24 February Plenty of painters have recently used generative AI programs as compositional aids or agents of chance. Meanwhile, numerous tech-savvy commentators have noted that such services, in drawing on and recombining a vast data pool of existing art by human makers without permission or recompense, constitute part of today’s digital colonialism, the goldrush for data. Artists have been slow to dovetail these phenomena, perhaps lest they appear to be colonisers themselves. But in the paintings, video and documentary materials that comprise the man who disappeared (amerika), Antje Majewski boldly goes there. Following a residency at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles (which might have prompted her to consider her own relationship to the American West), the German artist uncovered letters – included here – from her great-greatgreat granduncle. This man, an artist called Georg Pflugradt, migrated from Leipzig in the mid-nineteenth century, fetching up first in New York and then making the arduous crossing to California detailed in his epistles. On a centrally positioned monitor in the main space is A Journey in Reverse (all works 2023), a video that inverts Pflugradt’s journey, a symbolic undoing perhaps. Majewski’s ancestor

journeyed west in the hopeful first year of the California gold rush (1848–55): though his letters focus on hunger, thirst and rough trails, and end with him warning future prospectors away unless they like fighting, it’s hard to imagine he went there to surf. While reading his words aloud, Majewski mordantly films places on the way from the West Coast to the East, showing what crisscrossing America looks like today: fenced-up cattle, ugly big-box stores, nostalgic monuments to pioneer-era writers like Willa Cather. Alongside this, and before the show transitions into ancillary displays of maps of the United States, books on the history of the American West and sketchbooks of her watercolours, Majewski offers up six affectless, AI-assisted figurative oil paintings – landscapes, seascapes, portraits – collectively titled Unreliable Images. These seemingly strive to reanimate Pflugradt and his milieu. The subtitles suggest AI ‘prompts’: one canvas, of a girl in a demure dress and headscarf behind whom a town nestles in a landscape, is titled Unreliable Images (1849: a painting of a young girl from a fine Mormon family, background shows historic Salt Lake City in 1849; painter is a German migrant). A portrait of a bearded, tramplike man surrounded by cooking pots and pails – the work’s subtitle is too long to reproduce

here – suggests Majewski, with help, conjuring her worn-out forebear in 1850. Pflugradt, his missives suggest, eventually did okay, setting up small businesses on the West Coast, but he’d likely hoped to strike it bigger. In using extractive tech – generating images from a digital mechanism that draws on authored images of the American West and its settlers – Majewski symbolically aligns herself with her enterprising ancestor; the painted results, somewhere between creepy and inert, are edged with self-criticality and feel like illustrative supports to the video. As demonstrations of AI’s impact on painting, they are, paradoxically, boldly weak. Majewski apparently doesn’t possess any more letters from Pflugradt, whose life – as the show’s title suggests – now constitutes glimmers in a void. Her show, then, whose title mirrors that of Franz Kafka’s incomplete novel (published 1927), is in part about gaps in knowledge, applied on a variety of scales: from family history (and German white-settler history) to who in California right now is mining and profiting from our data. Pflugradt didn’t unearth any gold; Majewski, particularly in these paintings, appears to have ensured that she didn’t either. Martin Herbert

Unreliable Images (German immigrant after walking from Salt Lake City through the Death Valley to Los Angeles, 1850, gold rush, ill, tramp, cooking pots dangling from belt), 2023, oil and coloured rabbit glue on linen, 140 × 130 cm. © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

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Deimantas Narkevičius The Fifer Maureen Paley, London 12 January – 18 February Birdsong calls out from the gloom, from a dark gallery wedged to one side of Maureen Paley’s L-shaped space. But it’s the brighter gallery that draws first, towards both the oldest and the newest of Deimantas Narkevičius’s works on show here. The former is Europa 54° 54’ – 25° 19’ (1997), a film in which the sixty-year-old Lithuanian artist documents a roadtrip into the countryside around Vilnius: post-Cold War crowds and tower blocks give way to fields, until he reaches a boulder atop a hill, a plaque fixed to the stone declaring it to be the geographic centre of Europe. “It could have been anywhere in Europe,” he dryly states of the hill, its trees, the wind, in a voiceover. Set opposite the film is a wall of enlarged Polaroid prints, Akmenys Po Du (1–17) (2023), a series of isolated boulders in green pastures, described in the gallery text as stones that feature in pagan legends, all located in Lithuania. On one pair of boulders perch wooden shrines. The shrines shown opposite the plaque, the centre of Europe opposite the sites of fairytales. In bringing these works together, Narkevičius draws a clear line, through juxtaposition, between folkloric traditions, the local and the continental. He is an artist long interested in geopolitical anchors, their dropping and raising;

during the 2000s, for example, he made films documenting the removal of Soviet-era statuary in Lithuania. Here, in the juxtaposition of the film’s boulder with those in the Polaroids, the stone with its plaque is rendered a folk artefact without a coherent story. In fact, the centre of Europe is contested, with towns in Belarus and Hungary among others claiming the geographic title, depending on how the borders of the continent are defined. The centre depends on the limit, and these works are notably being shown at a time when the edge of Europe is the least stable it has been in a generation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, its reverberations for former Soviet states, further destabilises the meaning these points of reference ascribe to the land. In line with this destabilisation, the birdsong heard from the other gallery, it transpires, isn’t birdsong at all. Rather, it is a flute mimicking the playful, longing melodies of a nightingale that is captured fluttering in and out of a small holographic screen. This is part of an installation, The Fifer (2019), which also encompasses a bronze cast of a flute’s internal cavities, and a pair of photographs. The first of these is an archival interior image of a soldier playing a flute in a dark room, silhouetted by the light of an icy window, the second a digitally produced

collage that reconstructs the same scene from an exterior perspective. A fifer, it is worth emphasising, is a military role, a flautist who sounds signals for changes in troop formation. Édouard Manet has an 1866 painting of the same name. In it, a young fifer is depicted against an inscrutable flattened background, his true size and significance hard to place, and this seems an uncoincidental reference for a work that similarly dislocates the signal from the source. The holographic bird, the bronze cast and the reconstructed photograph each form a tenuous coordination to the flute’s sound. The meaning of the melody, however, whether a call for companionship or an impending invasion, is left uncertain. It is an altogether more slippery set of signifiers than the first room, less specifically geopolitical than mythological in its blurring of human and animal, as if it were a missing passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE). Yet, again, through the military association of the fifer, there is the spectre of destabilising forces. Throughout these works, Narkevičius shows that a reaching for fact, for symbolic solidity, often fails to result in a comforting coherence. It is a potent reminder, at the current historical moment, that points of stability are often a fiction. Thomas McMullan

The Fifer (detail), 2019, HD video (colour, sound, looped), holographic screen, archival black and white photograph (source: Central State Archive of Lithuania), digitally produced b/w photograph, bronze cast object. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

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Meredith Monk Calling Haus der Kunst, Munich 10 November – 3 March Meredith Monk’s practice is synonymous with sound. During her six-decade career, the American artist has used her voice as an instrument, stretching its expressive potential without using recognisable words or language, often layering it polyphonically with the voices of others. Her interdisciplinary practice, however, is less well known. Influenced by her childhood studying eurhythmics – a technique teaching rhythm, structure and musical expression through movement – and an interdisciplinary degree at Sarah Lawrence College, Monk often positions her compositions in conversation with theatre, film and dance, creating immersive gesamtkunstwerks in the process. Drawing attention to her genre-defying practice is a key motivation behind her retrospective Calling (the other

half of which is concurrently on view at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam). In Munich, Monk’s most familiar, multilayered musical works are deferred until the final room’s immersive listening environments. There, for example, Dolmen Music (1981), from an album of the same name, her fourth, plays through a circle of headphones that dangle above silver flooring, the circular setup evoking how Monk’s performers originally performed it. Though light and noises seep in distractingly from the rest of the show, Dolmen Music’s cacophony of powerful, vibratory, overlapping and multidirectional voices, from cricketlike chirps to deep-voiced monastic scales, still impresses. It’s a perfect example of Monk’s pioneering use of unintelligibility to transcend language barriers and express

universal human experiences; here lamentation and grief come to mind. That sound’s relationship to space and the human body has always been a keen focus of Monk’s is evident in Calling’s first room, which displays various experimental works from 1966 to 1979 that embrace choreographic and site-specific elements. A standout is a 1977 video of Monk’s multidisciplinary company The House performing Quarry in New York: in an opera meditating on the Second World War and recurring cycles of intolerance through history, Quarry’s ‘March’ section sees the cast execute athletic lunges and militarily precise reaches, their aggressive chants bringing to mind fascist rallies. This choreographic intricacy is emblematic of Monk’s polymathy, and how the danced sections of her works are

Quarry, 1975, dir Meredith Monk (camera and cut: David Gearey), 5 min 15 sec (looped). Courtesy the artist and The House Foundation for the Arts, New York

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just as important and developed as the sung. Before she and the likes of her sometime collaborator Merce Cunningham, choreography was often seen as secondary and responsive to audible stimulation. Yet in works like Quarry, sound and movement are equal forces that arise from the human body. Like her languageless compositions, Monk’s choreography reveals the body’s endless potential for nonverbal communication. Elsewhere in the first room, innovative curatorial setups reflect Monk’s experimental spirit while evoking some of her most seminal works. Juice: a theatre cantata in three installations (1969) is represented through an installation hidden behind a wall of horizontal logs. Peering through the gaps between them reveals the cast’s red combat boots atop a bed of woodchips. Above hang metal keys used in the work, while behind are documentary images from its three iterations: at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, in Barnard College’s Minor Latham Playhouse and in Monk’s loft

in Lower Manhattan. A wall text explains how performing Juice in sequentially smaller locations didn’t just cement Monk as a pioneer of site-specific works; it also helped her create ‘a dialogue between how space affects images and time’. Each iteration reimagined the relationship between performers and the audience. What was incrementally lost in monumentalism (eg a live horse at the Guggenheim became a toy replica in later versions) was made up for in intimacy. As I observe the scene presented in Calling, smell the fragrant woodchips and listen to a recording of the original cantata on headphones, this Juice feels like peak intimacy – the performance takes place in the viewer’s mind, assembled via connected traces and remnants. That closeness is reinforced by Calling’s second room, a replica of Monk’s live/work loft in New York. Surrounding a central piano and four-track tape recorder, the walls are lined with shelved books, handwritten notes, personal photographs with the likes of Björk,

John Cage and the Dalai Lama, and examples of Monk’s unique approach to movement and voice notation in which large, gestural pencil strokes (as opposed to codified musical notes) represent her scores. Interacting with Singing Suitcases (1998/2003) series, battered trunks that release a vocal composition when opened, feels like rummaging through boxes in the artist’s apartment, uncovering the past. Such echoes paint a vivid portrait of Monk as a person and artist, yet the full picture of her output (and a clear chronology of it) remains just out of reach. Numerous videos – some performance documentations, others filmic artworks created for screen – help viewers judge the success of their detective work, yet many may induce longing if you weren’t around to witness Monk’s original live performances. It’s a positive melancholy, however: by presenting ‘monuments’ to performance rather than attempting to substitute for it, Calling exhibits a radical acceptance of the artform’s ephemeral nature. Emily May

Calling Juice, 1969/1998 (installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2023). Photo: Fritz Beck. Courtesy the artist and Haus der Kunst, Munich

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Mario Ayala, rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales Sitting on Chrome San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 5 August – 19 February This three-person exhibition comes at an auspicious time. In October of last year, California’s governor signed a bill into law that would lift the state’s lowrider ban and welcome cruising back on the streets by the beginning of 2024. These customised cars, often with bold colours, lowered bodies and custom enhancements, have been a touchstone of Chicano cultural identity since the 1940s, starting out in the barrios of East Los Angeles. However, in what is generally seen to be a racially targeted move, multiple bans across the state, some introduced as early as 1958, made lowriders and cruising illegal. Despite this, these hot rods’ artistic and cultural influence has, over the years, grown into a nationwide subculture. Here, however, Guadalupe Rosales, Mario Ayala and rafa esparza consider the lowrider in the context of their native California. For Rosales, memories are the starting point of the lowrider history she believes isn’t being ‘preserved in institutions’. ‘Drifting on a Memory’ (a dedication to Gypsy Rose) (2023), an installation set into the wall and viewed through a window, seems best to articulate the personal and collective significance of this lifestyle. Lush blue velvet borders the exterior frame, while the inside is lined on all sides with tufted pink velvet. A disco ball and set of dice hang from the ceiling above pink silk roses and a blue bandana that are laid on the base. Here, Rosales recreates the marvellously bold interior of the

most famous lowrider, Gypsy Rose, for museum audiences. The visual vivacity paired with its humble rose offering for the car’s late owner and creator, Jesse Valadez, makes ‘Drifting on Memory’ feel authentically personal. Ayala’s Reunion (2021) is a delightfully eccentric self-portrait that depicts the artist gradually transforming into a cockroach, replicating a cover from the popular children’s book series Animorphs (1996–2001) and calling to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) and racial stereotypes of La Cucaracha. A painterly recreation of Diego Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931) frames Ayala’s transformation, referencing the literal backdrop of and measure for Ayala’s arts education at the now-shut San Francisco Art Institute (in a promotional video, he explains crits were held in front of the painting), while burritos wrapped in aluminium foil, skateboard wheels and BuzzBallz (a single-serve sugary alcoholic drink) seem to dance over Rivera’s mural. Ayala’s use of irony throughout Reunion – in the wacky cockroach transformation and floating foodstuffs – playfully subverts the weight of prejudice against Mexican Americans by foregrounding the insect’s resilience. While Rosales’s and Ayala’s works play on memory, esparza’s seem to look to the future. In Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022), a modified blue bicycle, with gold gauntlets grasping the front wheel’s hubs and pink and orange legcasings on the back, is affixed to the base of

a coin-operated children’s ride. Though static in the middle of the room, the sculpture is activated during performances (also present as video recordings), when a bare-chested esparza slips his arms and legs into these encasements to become himself a vehicle, ridden by another performer who sits atop him. As I watch the hybrid esparza-vehicle bounce with a performer on his back, the movement evocative of the hydraulic modifications lowriders would install in their cars to sidestep the law, he seems to become a cyborg that physically and metaphorically carries a community, much like the lowrider has done in LA. The work also makes me recall Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), in which she discusses the radical possibilities of technological and organic hybridity. Considered against this, esparza’s Corpo RanfLA seems to emphasise the unspecified potential the lowrider has always had, with its mechanical enhancements and expressions of creativity, to service the community. I must admit, car culture does not interest me. However, Sitting on Chrome’s boldness, nostalgia, authenticity and fun are a testament to Chicano culture’s resilience and creative prosperity. In their 2020 paper, scholars Alejandro Gradilla and Juan José Bustamante argue that the lowrider can be understood as a site of resistance to ‘contest cultural exclusion from white art spaces’. Where better to do that than in a museum of modern art. Marv Recinto

rafa esparza, Corpo RanfLA Terra Cruiser, 2022, performance. Photo: Cruz Ortiz. Courtesy the artist

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Mario Ayala, Reunion, 2021, acrylic paint on canvas, 224 × 173 cm. Courtesy Ever Gold Projects, San Francisco

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Nidhal Chamekh Et si Carthage? Selma Feriani, Tunis 25 January – 24 March In the middle of Selma Feriani’s new space in Tunis (she has been operating in the Sidi Bou Said district since 2013), 250 × 200 cm sheets of paper hang from black scaffolding and are covered with monochrome ink-and-graphite drawings, transfers and annotations. This is the Tunisian artist Nidhal Chamekh’s Et si Carthage? – which takes its cue from the philosopher Édouard Glissant, who posited in his thinking and writing, ‘What if Carthage had not been destroyed?’ – operating in a speculative space between the rubble of the past and an alternative view of the present. Indeed, the ruins of the ancient civilisation of Carthage (razed by Roman conquest in 146 BCE) still punctuate the city’s contemporary landscape. Chamekh’s iconography in these works on paper is various: blueprint designs of monolithic Roman structures and weaponry sit beside defaced photographs of early-twentieth-century European generals, pixelated documentary stills and museum-catalogue images of North African artefacts; Chamekh’s own spare commentaries accompany them like annotations, and offer a linguistic record of Tunis’s imperial history: Arabic, French, Italian and Latin. Gestural graphite strokes slash across the paper like vehicle skidmarks. Decapitated, dismantled or loose fragments of mock-Roman statues

– all sculpted by Chamekh – collect beneath the scaffold structures, while others sit atop museum shipping containers. Between the images derived from Ancient Rome are those from North and West Africa; presented in tandem and conflict with one another, they act as analogies for the respective positions of conqueror and conquered. There is something cathartic at play in the violent iconoclasm Chamekh mounts: here, an Ivorian mask seems to squash a Hellenic bust, there, black scaffold poles impale the torsos of his white-plaster sculptures. Beside a diagram of a disassembled rifle in the work on paper Et si Carthage? #4 (2023), a contemporary photograph of a white man posing before a dead elephant is labelled ‘hunter’, his face circled and a triangle marked above his head as if by facial recognition software or for a videogame character – Chamekh utilising the visual language of military invasion and border control on white transgressors. Elsewhere, deviations from the main space are less contributions and more constellations: in a side room, smaller works collage sketches and photographs to form composite figures on rectangular wire grids, compressed versions of the main space’s ambition; Chamekh’s research materials, archival photographs and documents are

presented on the gallery’s mezzanine, each item connected by orderly, rhizomatic black lines; the display of video research – including clips from the 1959 Italian film Hannibal and an interview with Glissant – screening in the basement feels like an exercise in filling space. For a show based on a conditional proposition, it’s unclear what Chamekh is really trying to do with Glissant’s speculative idea. In the absence of any compelling vision of the future, Et si Carthage? is at its best when the present day interrupts Chamekh’s array of ancient imagery. In another work on paper (Et si Carthage? #2, 2023), a transfer print of a lifeboat vest emerges from behind a graphite sketch of a Graeco-Romanstyle statue. Across the room, an Ikea-like diagram of a small wooden boat is printed matterof-factly onto another scaffolded work on paper. After all, just 80km east of Tunis lies Diyar al Hajjaj, a small town and regular throughpass for Tunisians making the treacherous journey across the water to the Italian island of Pantelleria, and thus to Europe. Most are sent back by the Italian government; a few slip through the legal cracks; hundreds never reach any shore again. Chamekh’s metaversal concept may look to reappraise or reimagine, but instead highlights something else: thousands of people with real dreams of another life. Alexander Leissle

Crouching Venus with tabla, 2024, plaster, tabla, wooden mask and steel, 270 × 90 × 100. Courtesy the artist and Selma Feriani, Tunis

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Ana Hernandez Color of Clouds Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste Break Stuff Other Plans, New Orleans 12 January – 10 March On a chilly evening in January, the newest gallery on the New Orleans art scene inaugurated its programme with a performance intended to ‘break in’ the space itself. Alone in the gallery (but witnessed by a rapt audience looking in through its windows), sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste played a few notes on his alto saxophone and upright bass, before subsequently smashing both instruments to pieces against the concrete floor. The resulting sculptural assemblages – in which fragments of bass, wood and string were gathered, just partially visible, into canvas gris-gris bags (a nod to the city’s Afro-syncretic cultures), or arranged in sparse compositions within inky pools of poured black silicone (for the artist’s S.L.A.B. series, 2024) – were a few days later on view at the official opening of Other Plans. Titled Break Stuff, Toussaint-Baptiste’s exhibition considers the generative power of destruction and anger. Validating the collective rage many of us have felt in the face of mounting global conflicts and worsening social tensions, Break Stuff raises questions about the impotence of art in a time of crisis – or, conversely, the imperative that today’s art be more risk-taking and unfiltered than ever. The artist takes inspiration from metal and rock music (genres wherein performers have frequently wrecked their instruments on stage), the revolutionary

rule-breaking of jazz, which originated here from the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade, and the many acts of artistic iconoclasm throughout avant-garde art history, demonstrating that we should transform our tools and traditions when they fail to build the world we envision. Partly inspired by Edouard Glissant’s notions of opacity and Créolité, as the artist explained to poet Kortney Morrow in an interview about this exhibition, these reconfigured sculptures pay homage to cultural forms that have emerged from rupture. Shown concurrently are wall-mounted works on canvas and wood by New Orleansbased artist Ana Hernandez, whose exhibition Color of Clouds is likewise guided by a vision of radical futurity and decentring. Hung from slotted wooden bars, Hernandez’s paintings read more like tapestries or scrolls: unprimed and unstretched, their canvas edges have been laboriously hand-frayed into loose fringes and twists. Each composition features a grid of squares and pinwheels in seemingly randomised sequences of black, grey, yellow and red: patterns and hues that, for the precolonial peoples of Michoacán, Mexico (to which Hernandez traces her own ancestry), corresponded to cardinal directions and celestial bodies. Hernandez has long been intrigued by organising systems like languages and maps,

which reflect and reinforce sociocultural values. Indeed, within the grids of works like HUMANITY and POWER (we are) (both 2023) are encoded patterns representing their titular words using the binary forms of American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). Utilising a colour palette based on Indigenous Michoacán cosmology, Hernandez hopes to symbolically subvert ‘binary’ thinking and biased conceptions about language; many precolonial societies, for instance, expressed history and cultural knowledge using visual systems, from Incan quipus to Yoruba adire cloth, the patterns of which seem to echo in the canvas twists and segmented geometries of Hernandez’s paintings. Elsewhere, her series of mixed-media constructions titled We Are (O, C, H, N, Ca, P) (2023) emits a spacier vibe. Intrigued by the interstellar ‘Arecibo’ radio message transmitted into space in 1974, which contained coded data about Earth’s galactic position and the human genome, Hernandez hammered metal nails and tiny bits of mirrored glass into slabs of black-painted wood, spelling ASCII configurations for the atomic numbers of six elements found in the human body: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and so on. As the viewer passes by, the works catch flickers of light, and shimmer like stars. Allison K. Young

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, I will lay down my bones and burdens amongst the rocks and roots and desire be in denial of the allure of history’s desire of me, pts 1 & 2 (still), 2024, video. © the artist. Courtesy Other Plans, New Orleans

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Douglas Gordon All I need is a little bit of everything Gagosian, London 1 February – 15 March A logophile’s wet dream, All I need is a little bit of everything features sentences arranged like so much concrete poetry, set in different typefaces and operating in different languages, pasted, carved and spray painted across the gallery’s interior and exterior walls, or installed as scrawling neons that illuminate entire rooms in single blocks of colour. The entryway is bathed in a sickly pink glow emitted by a red neon sentence written in Japanese (It’s Coming, 2002). On an adjacent wall, the Pepto-Bismol-tinted words I am the author of my own addictions (2010) are gouged into the wall, plaster dust littering the floor below. As one of the opening works, it’s a bold acknowledgement of personal accountability; a prompt for viewers to check themselves against. Gordon has, for more than three decades, made work that’s suffused with existential angst (think of his light and wall text installation From God to Nothing, 1996, not presented here, in which the artist lists a lot of things he fears, or Film Noir, 1995, which is shown here, and records a fly stuck to a tabletop by its wings, that struggles to free itself but eventually dies – a short meditation on sadism, guilt, death and morality). And in that respect, All I need… risks feeling a little tired – with several sentences melancholically wondering where does it hurt… (2019) or how much can I take? (2020), while awash with neon lights that evoke in the rooms the atmosphere of an empty nightclub. But the show is saved by the collective visual impact of 46 such missives assaulting nearly every eyeline – which makes it impossible to escape the glare of his plaintive words, putting in

the mind of the viewer thoughts like: How free can we really be? (2017). Still, there’s a sense of artworks being recycled (both in form and subject matter), which to be fair to Gordon, has been a regular feature of his practice; and perhaps it also alludes to a wider point about how our lives, and the way we choose to live them, are shaped by the stacking of our experiences. In his recent video 2023EastWestGirlsBoys (2023), a closeup of the artist’s bloodshot eye fills the entire frame, with neon words like ‘stud’, ‘majestic’, ‘strip’, ‘non-stop’ and ‘naked’ replicated from Soho shop signs beamed across the pupil and iris between each slow-motion blink. It’s a coda, perhaps, to Phantom (2011), his collaboration with musician Rufus Wainwright, which films a closeup of the artist’s slowly weeping eye painted with glossy black makeup. Unlike Phantom, however, 2023EastWestGirlsBoys is a soundless video, in which words – instead of music or literal tears – are tasked with the job of summoning an emotional response from the viewer. A sort of Hitchcockian double-voyeurism emerges from the closeup filming of the artist’s eye that looks out at the viewer (through the mechanical eye of a camera lens) as they observe and perhaps recognise some of their own impulses and desires reflected in those neon words. Phantom and Film Noir are included in Gordon’s Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now (1999–2024), a haphazard oval-shaped installation that takes up the gallery’s largest space and features 109 televisions and monitors stacked above one another

on crates, emitting a cacophony of noise and imagery. The installation is simply an amalgamation of Gordon’s past works; but it can also be interpreted as a self-portrait of the artist. Walking around its circumference feels a bit like peering into Gordon’s psyche, bringing to mind the cliché about life flashing past before you die. There’s also an odd sort of disconnect between Pretty much every film and video work… and the sentences sprawling across the previous gallery rooms – allowing the exhibition to settle into the strange space of inference between image, word and translation. Spend enough time in All I need and the experience starts to get a little trippy – like the moment, in a nightclub, when you realise that trying to communicate with one another using words is futile, and at some point (depending on what substance you’ve exposed yourself to) it all turns into nonsense anyway, so you may as well just enjoy the lights and music. There’s a seemingly small moment of respite from the mounting sense of introspective claustrophobia that All I need induces in the form of Afterturner (2000). On the far side of Pretty much every film and video work, two peepholes (one above the other) are drilled into the wall of the gallery; looking through, your eye makes quick adjustments between words that are pasted onto the window, and the world outside. But just as a glimmer of freedom is presented before you, the words ‘Bad is good… Good is bad’ come into focus – a reminder that we can’t ever really escape the confusing, and at times contradictory internal worlds we build around ourselves. Fi Churchman

Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now., 1999–24, 109 screens showing 94 film- and videoworks, dimensions variable. Photo: Lucy Dawkins. © Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024. Courtesy Gagosian, London

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Johanna Hedva If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead Joan, Los Angeles 11 November – 3 February Where do crip theory, AI-generative technology and goth subculture converge? Johanna Hedva, whose work harnesses these disparate subjects, might reply: in their relevance to a subversion of the ‘normative’ body. The prolific multidisciplinary artist’s contributions to fiction, theory, music and visual art are all the more impressive because of the cluster of debilitating comorbid maladies with which they are afflicted. Hedva published ‘Sick Woman Theory’ in 2016 as a radical call for protest by the subjugated and oppressed – pointedly not contingent on a neurotypical or able body. If You’re Reading This… showcases the Angeleno native’s abiding preoccupations – with agency of the differently abled or bodied foremost, but also death, astrology, the cosmos, S/M sex and AI as a tool for disembodied, perhaps even otherworldly artistic production. In a walkthrough, Joan’s curator Suzy Halajian explained that the show’s press release is itself a collaboration between her own initial draft and the literary AI program Hedva fed it through. The resulting text asserts things like, ‘Hedva is more sexually frustrated than we can imagine but they are dying so this just makes them a little bit more like us.’ This phantom wordsmith leaves the point where prompt ends and the ghost in the machine finds its own voice compellingly ambiguous.

The show is organised around a central sculptural work, The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth) (all works 2023), which comprises a circular grey carpet 4.5m in diameter, above which hangs a mouthblown clear glass orb filled with a sludge of black ink and soot, the viscosity of which is such that a spindly stream trickles continuously from a small opening at the orb’s base for the entirety of the exhibition. The piece has technical difficulties, with the goop clogging at random. It remains unclear how oozing colloid matter might inform our understanding of horology even if it works as planned. But if the vessel’s conceptual premise is thin, I can attest that, like a lava lamp, its unctuous discharge leaves visitors mesmerised. Surrounding The Clock… are three large mixed-media wall works, titled (respectively) Bigger, Harder and Deeper, their supports – Neoprene, paper and silk – held up by blackhandled knives driven through the materials and into the walls. The contents adhered to or scrawled on these supports, which include hair, a list of the submission poses in jujitsu, urethral sound wands, a cock cage and the artist’s blood, probe the corollary between pain and pleasure, and external and internal constraints therein. The trio are surrounded by multichannel soundworks that sample recordings from various cosmological events including a sonification

of the vibrations of the sun and a field recording of an aurora borealis here on Earth. Hedva’s aesthetic is unabashedly mired in the melodramatic and murky trappings of goth, but their curatorial approach is gratifyingly legible. In lieu of a checklist, the show is accompanied by an ‘accessibility handout’, which, in addition to listing the (extremely specific) materials in each piece, provides personal details and context that describes the objects’ relevance for the artist. As an art critic who has difficulty parsing visual information sans text, I hadn’t really considered the ableism implicit in the phrasing of a standard checklist – with its expectation that gallerygoers ought to be able to pick up the frequently meagre breadcrumbs of information listed in order to decode a given body of work. The outwardfacing energy of this show is so emphatically ‘dark’, bordering on the farcical, that I initially wrote it off. But on a second visit, this time aided by the handout, I was better able to follow Hedva’s train of thought. The world Hedva signals towards is dense with sensory experiences, and one needn’t get too caught up in whether the vessels for their exchange aligns with our own tastes. One can, rather, experience this show by ambulating, by listening, by reading or simply by attending to the pulsating rhythm of the heart on Hedva’s sleeve. Cat Kron

In the centre of the room is a sculpture called The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth), 2023. It is made with mouthblown glass in the shape of a sort of alien organ, with three large hooks piercing the top. It hangs from the ceiling by chains. It drips silicone oil mixed with pigment. The shape of the glass, the size of the two holes at its end and the concoction of the goo have been calculated and made by hand, so that the rate the goo drains out of the glass will last exactly the duration of the exhibition. There is a large circle of carpet on which the goo falls. Photo: Evan Walsh

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A Model Mudam Luxembourg 9 February – 8 September What’s a museum for? It’s a question that’s been exercising art’s collecting institutions increasingly in recent years, as they try to respond to criticisms coming from all angles of their supposed power and privilege. A Model, a threestage project mounted by Mudam’s recently appointed director Bettina Steinbrügge, opened with Rayyane Tabet’s standalone installation ‘prelude’ late last year, a work now joined by this second, whole-museum exhibition, which mixes selections from the museum’s collection with other works, all of which variously highlight the implicit parameters of the museum – what can and can’t be here, and why. It will be joined by a third exhibition, Epilogue by Jason Dodge, in April. A Model ostensibly takes its inspiration and namesake from the 1968 exhibition Modellen at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Modellen, created by Danish artist and activist Palle Nielsen, filled Moderna Museet’s spaces with a zone of climbing and play structures (something like latter-day adventure playgrounds) and

activities, focused on children. In tune with the radical ideas of the 1960s (Nielsen was already building ‘illegal playgrounds’) Modellen was meant as a challenge to the orthodoxies of the museum. But while video and photo documentation of Modellen is tucked along one of Mudam’s upstairs corridors, nothing quite as playful has taken hold of the museum here. A Model is more about acknowledging the many criticisms of the contemporary art museum, while still managing to demonstrate what makes visiting it worth the trip. Exemplary here is Tabet’s Prelude section, deftly intervening in the museum’s glassand-steel-atrium dominated architecture. Net curtains line each side of the windowed bridge that connects to an odd octagonal turret-gallery, whose skylights Tabet tinted deep blue. Drawn from Mudam’s collection is an ensemble of sanatorium furniture, designed by legendary Finnish modernist Alvar Aalto for his Paimio Sanatorium, a landmark of window-filled modernism. Nothing explains these except the

accompanying ‘guidebook’, in which Tabet traces poetic, happenstance connections between disparate objects and people: turning on the motif of glass and windows, it winds from MUDAM’s inauguration in 2006, the sanatorium’s origins, his grandparents’ married life in Beirut in the 50s (new synthetic net curtains for their home), the Six-Day War of 1967 (Arab homes painting their windows blue during curfew), to the devastating Beirut port explosion in 2020, which killed and injured thousands and left shattered glass everywhere. In the gallery below, a hundred glass water jugs are presented on racks – made from glass recovered from Beirut after the blast. Such visual-literary poetics are at home in the Western art institution while conjuring its possible connections to the wider world. Other works query the museum less politely: Oscar Murillo’s semicircular forum of wooden bleachers (collective conscience, 2015–) occupy the main atrium, populated with crudely modelled lifesize mannequins, who sit alongside visitors as we watch the show’s screening

Rayanne Tabet, Six Nights, 2023, coloured vinyl on glass, six metal structures each engraved with a specific date and time of the night from 5 to 10 June, 1967, modified car headlights, blue enamel paint. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

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programme. This humorous intervention rebuffs the decorum and exclusivity of the public art gallery, its class (and racial) distinctions. It’s characteristic of the postcolonial attention that, very self-consciously, runs through A Model. Anna Boghiguian’s evocative story-drawings, both on paper and on hanging cutouts that make up The Silk Road (2020–21), unravel the history of women’s labour in nineteenth-century silk production, while nearby Daniela Ortiz’s illustrationlike paintings The Rebellion of the Roots (France) (2021) present an altogether more bloody and unforgiving view of the rebellions of colonised people. Meanwhile in the video programme, the Western museum as repository of empire becomes the location for Sophia Al-Maria’s riotous and hallucinatory TIGER STRIKE RED (2022), its ethnically diverse cast of interlopers exploring and critiquing the Victoria & Albert Museum, intercut with fragments of old Empire-nostalgic British films such as Lawrence of Arabia that show us how distant the old Western century seems to today’s concerns. In the rethinking of the contemporary museum, it’s no surprise that the past’s influence on the present should be continually renegotiated. Generations of feminist art intersect with an extensive presentation of

work from the 1970s by the Italian Tomaso Binga, in a gallery which also includes Nora Turato’s 2019 video someone ought to tell you what it’s really all about. Binga was the pseudonym and male alter ego of Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, who ‘renounced’ her female identity in a gesture towards the male-dominated artworld of the period. For both artists, both language and the female body become sites of confrontation: the gallery is wallpapered with a decorative motif in which appears Binga’s repeated autograph, while in other works on paper the artist’s extensive use of typescript and handwriting consider the authenticity (or otherwise) of the ‘self’; in Turato’s video she delivers an increasingly unhinged monologue amalgamating news and social media memes. Turato’s video apparently draws on John Cassavetes’s 1977 Opening Night (another study of a female actress’s mental breakdown), but if anything, someone ought… suggests the pessimistic conclusion that not that much has changed for women, even if the technologies that manipulate selfhood have become more sophisticated. What can the museum do? Here it can stage the problems of our moment, by relating artworks of the past to those of the present. How, though, can it reflect on the fractures of the present in

a way that might allow the coming together of an increasingly fragmented public? The presence here of Isaac Julien’s extraordinary multiscreen video installation Once Again... (Statues Never Die) (2022) dazzles even as it stages the history of racism and colonialism, and the two-way encounter of African art and Western modernism, through that other modernist moment of the Harlem Renaissance. Through its fictionalised dialogue between the African American philosopher and critic Alain Locke and collector Albert C. Barnes, and its dreamlike scenes among the ethnographic collections of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the modernist works in the galleries of the Barnes Foundation, Once Again… moves constantly between questions of artistic appropriation and the politics of restitution. But its final sequences – counterposing contemporary sculptures by Matthew Angelo Harrison (comprising African statuettes cast into clear resin blocks) with busts of black subjects by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé (in a ‘classical’ style), and with Locke striding finally into the dark void of an unlit gallery – hint that out of these long histories of conflict something positively new might still take shape. Though what this will look like the museum can’t reveal. J.J. Charlesworth

Oscar Murillo, collective conscience, 2015–, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Mareike Tocha. Courtesy Mudam Luxembourg

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Taipei Biennial 2023 Small World Taipei Fine Arts Museum 18 November – 24 March During the late 1950s and through the 1960s, French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio travelled his country’s northwestern coast, photographing the derelict bunkers of the Nazi fortification system known as the Atlantic Wall. Built to repel Allied forces attacking Germanoccupied Europe, these ‘heavy grey masses with sad angles and no openings’ became the subject of a book, Bunker Archaeology (1975), which theorised the phenomenological aspects and territorial impact of these monuments. Virilio also exhibited his photographs, and a few of these giclee prints are included in the Taipei Biennial. The hulking Third Reich monuments, lying half-obscured in the ground, slanting into the sand or overtaken by rising grass, are reminiscent of another type of bunker: those of doomsday preppers who build secret vaults against the apocalypse. Taiwan knows something about living precariously. The territory has been bracing itself for a Mainland Chinese attack for decades, and purportedly has more than 100,000 air raid shelters. Amid this longstanding local mood of insecurity, as well as more general global anxieties of social division, this edition of the biennial is themed around Small World, the curators writing that the phrase ‘suggests both a promise and a threat: a promise of greater control over one’s own life, and a threat of isolation from a larger community’. They add: ‘Our world can become smaller as we grow closer to one another, but also as we grow apart. This “Small World” takes place within such a suspended state.’ Is the urge to shelter in place from the big, scary world necessarily in tension with connecting with it? They are not mutually exclusive, and the biennial quite easily overcomes this artificial dichotomy by invoking various independent music scenes as examples of self-organising safe spaces that welcome difference and diversity. Take nonprofit record label Yes No Wave Music from Yogyakarta – which ran several listening sessions in November – and the inspiring and generous

variety of music in its roster. During one such session, the label’s owner, Woto Wibowo (aka Wok the Rock), played a mix of doom folk, trance and heavy metal, as well as ballads by Dialita, an all-women choir comprising survivors of Indonesia’s anticommunist purges of 1965, who performed the songs they had composed in jail to encourage each other or to celebrate special occasions. Putting the Small World theme aside, what the biennial consistently manages to do, through the work of over 58 artists, is to refresh our limited, habitual perceptions of the world through the subversion of various opposites and dialectics: this can play out in manipulations of scale – for example in Nadim Abbas’s installation of rectangular blocks of sand and steel arranged in connected pathways, which looks like a microchip or circuit board blown up very big, or a miniature of a secret underground military facility (Pilgrim in the Microworld, 2023). Sometimes, the ‘natural order’ is inverted: Kim Beom reverses nature documentary footage of a cheetah chasing an antelope, so that the prey is now in fierce pursuit of the predator (Spectacle, 2010). Meanwhile, gender binaries are rejected in Terre Thaemlitz’s sharing session, in which the transgender artist plays Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning (2012), a videoessay that draws parallels between religious dogma and binary classifications of gender categories. The work also questions essentialisms underlying sexual reassignment surgeries, and ends with toe-curling, uncensored footage of a real vaginoplasty operation. This ontological slipperiness also extends to the boundaries between human and machine. The usual grievances against smart technologies and algorithms rationalising us into flat, inhuman cyborgs, defined by our monetisable user habits, get overturned in What Is Your Favourite Primitive? (2023) by Li Yi-Fan. In the manically paced video, the artist uses 3Danimated figures to create larger-than-life avatars of himself to discuss the nature of animation, time and space in videogames,

facing page, top Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017–, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

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and the possibility of extending our lives through cryonics. All characters are versions of the same figure – a bald, gurning man voiced by the artist in lisping Mandarin – who gets shot, beaten, resuscitated, sodomised by a flying hammer and so on, all the while waxing lyrical about technical, existential and libidinous problems (‘Can you get sexually assaulted in the virtual world?’). But Li’s work strikes a rare note of rebellious glee in this biennial. Overall, amid all the subversions of scale and orders, the energy is muted and melancholic, which seems like an honest admission of what facing the world at large feels like for everyone. Yang Yooyun’s hazy triptych of paintings – depicting a cratered moon looming absurdly low and huge behind a satellite tower (Tower, 2013), a malign black orb crushing an old brick building due for demolition and redevelopment (Fantasy, 2012), a sleeping woman with an arm thrown over her eyes (Censorship, 2021) – captures the mood of dread and indifference towards the evils of capitalism. In Riar Rizaldi’s soporific radio play The Right to Do Nothing (2021), sleep and trance provide escape from exploitative labour arrangements. In this work, an Indonesian migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong conveys in ASMR-level whispers her experience of a strange world where you got paid to do nothing. It is later revealed that she had entered into a trance state induced by Jathilan dance, a form of ritualistic Javanese movement. While those anaesthetised feelings of exhaustion and escapism are true, I find a lighter truth in Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s sonic installation, a maze made of inflatable PVC walls that blow up and collapse at different times (Not Exactly [Whatever the New Key Is], 2017–). Resembling a living organism, the black bouncy walls enact a cycle of buoyancy and deflation but settle in neither; you feel empathy for both the alternating states of softness and tautness, relaxation and strength. These walls, unlike the Atlantic Wall, are designed to be collapsible. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Arthur Ou, Viewfinder (Emmanuelle), 2021, gelatin silver print, 36 × 28 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Ryusuke Hamaguchi Evil Does Not Exist Feature film on general release The latest feature by Ryusuke Hamaguchi – director of the critically-acclaimed, awardwinning Drive My Car (2021) – starts with meditative, long shots of peaceful mountain living, the camera lens panning forest canopies and following protagonist Takumi as he goes about his daily chores. A rather taciturn character, he saws and cuts logs, collects stream-water for a local restaurant and teaches his daughter Hana to identify trees and spot traces left by deer. Not much happens besides the wholesome activities of what anthropologist Anna Tsing would call ‘the arts of noticing’ the interconnections between the multispecies world that surrounds us. At the end of the day Hana falls asleep. A montage replays or reinvents scenes she sees in the woods. She witnesses deer in her dream. Hana’s search for deer brackets the entire film, but alongside this idyllic quest is a more

unsettling story turning on a proposal to develop a glamping site nearby Takumi’s hut. This business venture – hastily put together by a talent agency in order to claim post-pandemic project funds – is adamantly opposed by the mountain’s villagers. At a presentation by two of the company staff, Takahashi and Mayuzimi, the villagers raise concerns about water pollution and campfires, and poke holes in the proposal’s flawed logistics. The staff – being mere talent agents – get nervous when questioned over decisions they neither have the knowledge to defend nor the power to influence, and Takahashi’s jaunty, business-like manner of speech starts to be characterised by stumbles and fumbles. Here, Hamaguchi masterfully captures the tensions between the company staff and the locals through his characters’ seemingly

banal handling of objects like microphones – passed among the audience, eagerly picked up or fretfully put down by the company staff, or avoided altogether by one resolute cynic. On the one hand, these subtleties embed the clashes of two value systems in the formalities of dialogues and performance of authority; on the other they set out how such formalities can be resisted by refusing to engage in the designated way. Evil Does Not Exist feels like a fable recording the clash between capitalist extraction and ecological wellbeing, where a local morality – valuing the purity of water, ecological balance and a social pact that holds upstreamers accountable for their environmental impacts – meets competition over resources, scalability and the transformation of ‘empty spaces’ into raw materials for economic progress.

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With camerawork that zooms in on the traces of nuanced desires and the pushes and pulls within and between people, as well as on how thoughts manifest as bodily reactions and habitual reflexes, Hamaguchi breaks down the myth of capitalist progress. He shows the individual, modular interactions that maintain the capitalist machine on a daily basis, but also how easily it breaks apart because of that. Despite wanting to finish her task, Mayuzimi sympathises with the locals and challenges her colleagues (“the locals are not so stupid as you think”, she warns at one point); meanwhile, after spending time in the forest helping Takumi collect water, Takahashi decides to quit the job and take a break from his urban life altogether. Towards the end Hana disappears into the woods and, after an anxious search by the villagers that sees a switch of gears and genres (the movie becomes more like a thriller), she is found, by Takumi and Takahashi, sitting in the middle of a meadow next to two deer. The ending has echoes of the tale of Princess

Kaguya in the medieval Japanese story The Tale of Bamboo Cutter, who ascends to the moon and forgets about any attachments to the earthly world and its greed and corruption. In this sense, the plot’s sudden, abrupt abandonment of the glamping storyline and Hana’s Kaguyalike departure speaks to the larger sense of unease and pathos – outside of capitalism’s expansionist mission – of those who remain. We might say Hamaguchi presents a capitalism that’s provincialised rather than hegemonic, and that the pitfalls of life belie our precarious existence on a deeper level. But the larger sense of enigma in the film remains unexplained. Takumi’s guarding of forest ethics, Takahashi’s soul searching and Hana’s dedicated quest for deer feel like disconnected dots, arbitrary and haphazard. Nor does the film reveal the story behind Hana’s absent mother, who seems to have passed away but whose pictures are seen around Hana and her dad’s woodside cabin. Despite its didactic title, Evil Does Not Exist sustains a feeling of indeterminacy. The film

developed out of a musical collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi, with whom Hamaguchi worked for Drive My Car, which perhaps explains some of the plot’s disassembled feeling. Some of the footage was initially shot as a short (Gift, 2023), to accompany Ishibashi’s live performances. Here, Ishibashi’s score lingers eerily over Hamaguchi’s forests scenes like a spectre, and is often dissonant, which perhaps echoes the idea of a contaminated symbiosis. But such an abstract, experimental method does not necessarily work when Hamaguchi’s scripts are often so specific and grounded in concrete, daily matters. In this sense the film’s evocation of music and ecological drama feel manneristic. What it does present is a picture, of how forest lives and urban lives are finely entangled, how the ideological margins of each remain fluid, and how, by examining the everyday practices of being with nature and capitalism, we might escape monolithic, linear thinking – be it preaching of progress or doom – over a deeply confusing and precarious world. Yuwen Jiang

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Books Philosophy of the Home by Emanuele Coccia My friend Sabine used to rent her apartment to a musician who once asked if he could move the bathtub to the middle of the living room. If the owner had been the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, the musician might now be having a sociable soak in front of the fire, among books and cushions and friends. Better that, Coccia thinks, than to bathe in a sanitary closet of tiles and tub where, behind locked door, we conventionally scrub our bits, probably fondle them and likely first gave them real thought. The bathroom – private, privates – is where our formative eroticism almost, or tragically, parted ways with convivial pleasures. But if they interchanged with living rooms, it might, Coccia writes, ‘free gender… free homes from the logic of confinement that every bathroom embodies… making it the space in which each body intersects with other bodies, and is intersected by them’. There is a lot of intersection in this book. And penetration. Mostly from a normalising state and numbing capitalism. They have bored straight through us in this waning capitalist era and turned us into submissive, abused, dissatisfied, homogeneous beings. In Philosophy of the Home, Coccia walks us through our late-capitalist predicament, going from room to room. His short book takes on the insubstantialities of identity, equality and

Penguin, £10.99 (softcover)

the ‘soul of the world’ through the infinitely more graspable entity of our homes sweet homes. But how sweet, really, is home? After all, it is the last redoubt of the tyrant head of household and his violence, a topic Coccia does not touch. What he does discuss in his manifesto is home as a private, protected shell within which we concoct ourselves and to which we repair from the stings and blows of state, society and market capitalism. But, practically speaking, our homes can no longer defend us from the external world: they are too networked into television, telephone, the post, the internet, the internet of things! Are our infinitely penetrable Swiss-cheese shelters the best we can hope for? Coccia does not rebuff or mourn Home – other than its bathrooms – but recasts it as the alembic of our best selves. In loving the family dog we become capable of animism. In the seconds before we fully wake up under the duvet we glimpse an ongoing greater-thanus consciousness. In fabricating our identities, our souls leak out into our bric-à-brac and circulate. The kitchen symbolises love and transubstantiation ‘in which the dividing lines between things and people are suspended and the contrast between humans and nonhumans is inverted into a joyous fusion’. Coccia’s home blenderises its occupants, objects and influences, and lobs them into the

‘soul of the world’. This is the mighty river of the collective psyche in which swim the selves and souls inhabiting the ceramic pores of our vases and the woollen strands of cardigans that have strayed beyond our home walls, taking us with them. It is the flowing connected self-consciousnesses stream-fed by our autofictional TikTok videos and Instagram posts. Coccia’s book is packaged as musings about the home, but really it is a paean to the hyperreality-producing ‘factory of reality’ that is social media. Coccia enthuses that, together, we are grinding out the great ‘collective, open-ended novel’. To those who fret about our penetrations, Coccia rhapsodises about the ‘psychomorphic machines’ of our networked human existence that are dynamiting the home as we know it, and collapsing selves, homes, consciousnesses, realities, into one big pie in the sky. ‘The home has lost all spatial and geographic determination’, he intones, ‘and has assumed planetary dimensions.’ Coccia would have that this is life’s next big step, vaulting us to dizzying heights of psychic collectivity. But the utter confounding of internal and external Coccia maps out in Google-Earthing home straight to planet may relieve us of ever having to go out our front doors again. And what good does that do us? Clara Young

My grandfather turned into a tiger… and other illusions by Pao Houa Her Aperture, $60 / £50 (softcover) The photographs collected in this monograph by Minnesota-based Hmong-American artist Pao Houa Her are drawn from six series of works, 80 photos in all, made between 2012 and 2022 (the title series is from 2016–17). Assembled here interleaved with one another and at varying scales, in full colour and in black-and-white, they resonate in ways that are no doubt more nuanced than within each individual series, and yet in the wholeness of the combined works perhaps also more summary: a portrait of uprootedness and the measures taken to survive in new soil.

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The photos shift between formal and candid portraits, and scenes in which nature – forced to pose as well – appears to protest and fidget. The settings recall family photographs: aunts and sisters, nephews, cousins, grandmothers and uncles dressed in uniform, traditional dress, positioned before lurid photo-studio backdrops or natural beauty spots in both the US and Laos and elsewhere; or posed more casually, some in North American gardens, lounges and utility rooms, where nature, both real and imitation (plastic flowers, plants) is roped into the frame, frequently dominating the image, or promising

to. Landscapes from the Mount Shasta series (2021–21) read as images of saplings being prepared for a reforesting project (they are in fact marijuana plants, a crop often cultivated by Hmong immigrants in California). Many of the portraits occupy an in-between space: the subject is sitting for a third party, for a different photographer or intention, captured by Her, for her purposes. One pores over the details in the background: for clues as to where these photos were taken; as to what is natural and what is illusion; and as to how the two combine in the same space. David Terrien

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Chronicle of an Hour and a Half by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari Life in provincial villages can be far more sinister than that afforded by the relative anonymity of city dwelling. People know everything about everyone; old hurts and jealousies simmer just below civility; and there is nowhere to run. Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari’s debut novel is set in Vaiga, one such too-small village in Kerala. A rumour of a matriarch being slapped that offends the honour of her sons mingles with news of an affair between Reyhana, whose mucholder husband works in the distant Gulf desert, and Burhan, a strapping young man. The rumour starts tentatively, and then spreads like wildfire over WhatsApp. Rain has been falling for six days: the weather is a premonition, making the day ‘as dark as any dark night’. A host of characters – a matriarch with five strong but useless sons and an equally useless, impotent husband; Reyhana, the voluptuous mother of two; the Imam forced into indignity because he is not paid a salary and has to have his meals at different houses by turn; the nonbelieving Arabic teacher at the mosque, and others – are going about their ordinary lives on a very wet holy Friday afternoon. The rumour builds over the following hour and a half, propelled by a man whose wife had left him for someone else a few years prior, and seems to be seeking revenge against his wife’s lover for the humiliation he still faces in the village.

Context, Rs 599 (hardcover)

There is no real surprise, at least for those of us living in the daily dystopia of Hindutvaled India, about the inevitable violence that is to come. A throwaway remark by one of the villagers, of having seen Reyhana’s father-in-law apparently slap Burhan’s mother, merges with news of the two lovers being together right then, in broad daylight. The two-headed rumour, aided by social media, sparks a self-righteous anger among the village men that is really hypocrisy by another name, for many among them would have gladly slept with Reyhana if they had had a chance; most are just jealous of Burhan. The perceived dishonour to the matriarch and the audacity of the lonely wife become something of a personal insult to each man in the mob. The process of how this evolves is what Kannanari draws out in increasingly breathless, frightening detail. His cyclical sentences, with frequent repetitions of a scene, a setting or a dialogue (for instance, ‘Ippa was coughing. Ippa was coughing and not talking’) is a common device used in some of India’s regional-language literature to emphasise a point, but is perhaps rarer in English. The hyperbole that this creates mimics the rhythm of oral storytelling and helps whip up a sense of frenzy. You know where this is headed; there is dread, but at the same time there is an excitement, a curiosity about the

way people organise and pass on (mis)information via videos, constant updates and photos, all forwarded over WhatsApp. It’s as though we too are part of the mob, unable to look away, unwittingly participating in herd violence. Under the last ten years of a far-rightwing government there have been many horrific incidents in India triggered by rumours. While the news media might present a culminating event, it is less focused on the path fake news takes before it becomes the cannibalising monster claiming its next (always minority) victim. There’s a term for it in post-truth India – WhatsApp University – that describes the misinformation spread via the app, mocking those who rely on fake news as the primary source for their majoritarian arguments. In this political climate and during a crucial election year in India, Chronicle… makes for a sobering read. Even more so following the 2024 Global Risk Report, released by the World Economic Forum, in which the country and its nearly one billion voters were ranked at the highest in a list of those nations facing disinformation and misinformation leading up to general elections. Kannanari’s book doesn’t explicitly address the reasons why minorities are prosecuted or murdered in the country today, sticking instead to the ostensibly safer realm of the personal. The chronicle is nevertheless bonechilling. Deepa Bhasthi

The Corporeal Life of Seafaring by Laleh Khalili Mack, £14 (softcover) It’s currently estimated that around 80 percent of the world’s goods by tonnage are transported by sea. In her last book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020), Laleh Khalili argued that shipping is central to the fabric of global capitalism; in this essay-length publication she seeks to move from systems to people and bodies as a measurement of the economic, social, racial, political and ultimately human implications of all this. Bodies that often go unnoticed because, weirdly, as the amount of goods being transported by boat has risen, the number of humans required to keep those goods flowing has fallen. The Titanic, the largest steamship of its era (it sunk in 1912), had 280 engineers alone working in shifts belowdecks; a supertanker today might have 20 to 35 crew in total.

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Writing a decade ago, academic Vivek Bald defined early-twentieth-century seamen as ‘semicaptive and hyperexploited but globally mobile’. Khalili, drawing on both research and her own experience of commercial seafaring, suggests that today any real sense of that mobility has evaporated. Ports are now further away from city centres and offer nothing to do; unloading and loading times are shorter; ‘periods of liberty’ have consequently been reduced. All of which, combined with a splash of internet sociability (replacing maritime companionship), has led ship’s crews into more effective states of confinement. Boredom, loneliness, depression and suicide are some of the ways in which this affects the human face of maritime capitalism. Khalili asserts that the recent history of seafaring has anticipated not just the sweatshop of today

but the gig economy, the normalisation of extractivism and other tenets of our current phase of capitalism. To that can be added ingrained colonial hierarchies and racial prejudice; open registers through which ships can be registered to a country without having any connection to that country; and, related to both, ‘relational inequalities’ in working conditions (‘European workers’, writes Khalili, ‘form an aristocracy of labour’, with better working and general rights than non-European colleagues). All this is not to say that no one enjoys seafaring or that it does not come with moments of solidarity and companionship; Khalili is careful to point out that, at times, it does. Rather, this book shines a light on how, as ever, the bodies of some are consumed in order to fulfil the desires of others. Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

23/02/2024 10:51

Art Exposed by Julian Spalding ‘When I went to art college conceptualism was already in 1966, beginning to sweep the board. It struck me as fatuous, pretentious, quasiintellectualism from the start.’ Onetime museum director and writer Julian Spalding doesn’t mince words, and now, in his seventies, he’s still battling for an idea of art that understands making and crafting – rather than writing and theorising – as the main source of visual art’s value. Art Exposed is a memoir of a career running museums during the 1980s and 90s, and then as a broadcaster and critic, told in an ABCD of recollections of artists Spalding has encountered professionally (H is for David Hockney, B is for David Bowie) or officially (Q is for the Queen, T is for Mrs Thatcher), or otherwise still has an axe to grind with – D is for Marcel Duchamp, S is for (former Tate director, and now Arts Council England chair) Nicholas Serota. For those who were still in babygrows during the 90s, Art Exposed offers a view of a British artworld that doesn’t really exist anymore, but Spalding’s engaging, rambling and digressionfilled recollections – about forgotten artists, deceased politicians and all-too-enduring cultural bureaucrats – conjure a period in history when the public value of visual art was hotly contested; in which a tangle of issues – craft versus concept, the old medium of painting against the emerging new media, the influence

Pallas Athene, £17.99 (softcover)

of the art market and the role of the museum, popular versus elite taste – define a debate over how the public gallery might address a national culture. In this pre-Tate Modern artworld, Spalding recounts Bowie visiting him unannounced: ‘He’d come to see me because he knew about my stand against conceptual art. He agreed with me.’ It seems strange that one of the giants of postmodern pop should have been getting into painting, but then their shared suspicions were really to do with why this new kind of art was starting to turn up everywhere, and what it meant for the value of the artist, the artwork and its public. In Spalding’s recounting of a similar conversation with Hockney, the painter observes dryly, ‘It’s a very un-Duchampian thing to do to re-do Duchamp’. Duchamp, Spalding argues, ‘had great appeal to egalitarians, by… destroying [art’s] exclusivity and making it accessible to everyone’. But ‘it also undermined any attempt to make value judgements about quality in art… Outside observers, curators like me, let alone Joe Public, didn’t have a say.’ Spalding’s decades-long feud with the British artworld ‘establishment’ (alongside other frequently dismissed grumpy old men such as onetime editor of ArtReview David Lee) is really always about a different point – who gets to decide? It might seem ridiculous to read

Spalding (at various times head of museums in Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow) plead himself as the ‘outsider’, but then his form of curatorial populism, and his own working-class South London origins, find him eventually faced with where the real power lies: interviewed for director of the V&A, by former foreign secretary Lord Carington, he’s told curtly, ‘we don’t want anyone with ideas, you know’. Speaking to outgoing Tate director Alan Bowness (educated at Cambridge and the Courtauld), ahead of Spalding’s interview for the Tate top job (for which Cambridge-and-Courtauld educated Serota is also shortlisted), Bowness turns and matter-of-factly points out, ‘You do realise this is Nick’s job, don’t you?’ So Spalding is no great fan of Serota, itself no new revelation. But the personal snipes – Serota’s alleged mirthlessness and petty snubs (never being invited to the Tate once Serota took over, Spalding complains) – are hints of the bigger shifts in the public institutions of art in the last two decades: a fixation with power, managerial opacity, the avoidance of public debate. Still, according to Art Exposed, Spalding managed to enjoy himself, inspired by artists and the task of making museums that ordinary people would themselves enjoy; more than can be said, perhaps, of some of his contemporaries. J.J. Charlesworth

Ray’s a Laugh by Richard Billingham Mack, £60 (hardcover) Ray looks adrift in his own world. He’s frequently pictured holding a bottle, pint or wine glass, or can of alcohol; frequently sitting, gazing off in some direction, slumped against walls, or lying on the floor of his home. Ray first entered public consciousness when he appeared in the artist – his son – Richard Billingham’s photographic series Ray’s a Laugh, originally published as a photobook in 1996. Ray’s a Laugh is a starkly intimate portrayal of the artist’s family life, at home in Cradley Heath, west of Birmingham; it also pictures his mother, Liz, brother Jason and their pets. The images (some newly published here) oscillate between bleak desolation and glimmers of tenderness. Photographs of Billingham’s home environment, with its stained walls and the detritus of daily life

(soiled clothing, a bottle of Baby Bio beside a dead cactus, so many vases of fake flowers, a Bisto pot filled with pens), portray a home that suffers from neglect, but which, at the same time, is filled with considered touches: a yellow bedspread, an antique oil lamp, the prints hanging on their walls (including Dalí’s Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937), all the small things the family values. It is filthy and falling apart but loved. Amid this claustrophobic domesticity, Billingham finds respite from the chaos: a rainbow arching over the town, a bird perched on a branch. His use of colour and black-and-white photography also serves as a narrative device. An overexposed Liz and Ray, in a rare embrace, blazes in yellow and orange, contrasting with the sombre reality

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presented in monochrome. These blackand-white images, of Ray slumped by his bed, or clutching a bottle of vermouth, reveal something of the despair and loneliness of alcoholism that colour can’t convey. But Billingham also captures instances of joy and care: a grinning Liz feeding a newborn kitten, Ray cradling his grandchild, the family’s prized mugs hanging on a wall, a wobbly homemade cake. Ray’s a Laugh is not just a document of a family’s struggle with poverty and addiction, but a complex and deeply human narrative of what it is to be trapped in cycles of love, neglect and selfdestruction. Billingham’s work challenges the viewer to look beyond the surface, finding beauty and dignity where society often chooses not to look. Fi Churchman

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Art credit

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On the cover Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I CAN’T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE / BLACKTRANSREVOLUTION.com (FACE OF LIES PATHWAY RENDER), 2023, interactive videogame commissioned by Factory International. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 25, 43 and 81 are by Omar Sharif

March 2024

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from the archives David Whittaker on the networked revolution The year is 1997, and the internet has commenced its infiltration into every aspect of human life. Writing in these pages back then, artist David Whittaker set out to ‘surf the cyberspace’ and take stock of art’s entanglement with this newly ubiquitous technology… Ok, so it’s the new sensation, something that will change the way we work, rest and play. People have said it may become the 20th century’s most important legacy, more influential even than electricity and printing. It’s unhealthy for your kids because they spend too much time with it and unhealthy for you because you don’t spend enough. So what has the internet got to do with art? Can you exhibit art on this thing? Can it be used for selling? Can it become a museum, a gallery, a talking shop? Since about 1993, when the net’s rate of growth went ballistic, it’s been used for all these things and more. What everyman still wants to know, however, is whether all this stuff is any good. Or is it just another trendy technology dreamed up by the eggheads? Well, the answer’s yes. On both counts. Sorry, but stick with me. Contradictory though such a statement may appear, the net is already big enough to encompass the dichotomy. Within 20 minutes, no less, you realise why directories and search mechanisms are the most important tools for getting any benefit from being online, simply because there’s so much garbage out there that finding what you need is a proper needle-in-a-haystack job. With this haystack, though, even if you’re only interested in 1% of what’s available, that’s more than you can read in the rest of your life. Bearing in mind the 1% ratio also applies to web sites ostensibly about art, most major museums now have an online presence, so do a lot of the larger dealers and galleries. Academic institutions are also part of the net’s backbone while magazines and journals originating in print have quickly been pasted-up, being careful not to undermine the cover price of the handheld version. One of the most innovative areas is that of new organisations born on the net, and designed from the outset to exploit its characteristics: ‘e-zines’ are magazines that never existed in print, and as well as offering some acute and intelligent writing, they’re less likely to suffer from the ‘lets-just-hang-the-paper-pagesonline’ problem of bad layout. Mailing lists are basically loose communities scattered over many countries, swapping ideas and comments; global brainstorming if you like. Artists’ ‘homepages’

are an increasing, quite competitive sector, though it’s not surprising quality varies when most of them are created by lecture-avoiding students, on their universities’ sites, rather than the artists themselves. Mind you, it’s easy to imagine cantankerous old daubers like Cézanne and Van Gogh having trouble grappling with a PC. There’s also a multitude of specialist interest projects, from Roman art to Renaissance literature, the relationship between Picasso and Jungian psychology, and the connection between commercial British TV and a notoriously controversial annual art prize. By now a certain thought might have occurred: there’s not much talk about paintings here. Very true. It’s not that representation of all the classics aren’t there somewhere, from Primaticcio to Pollock, Hockney to Hirst. Or even that the ‘death of painting’ really has happened this time, from a combination of smart installations and electronic data. No, if there’s one unquestionable fact about the net, it’s that it does for paintings what Mad Cow Disease did for the Sunday roast. The beautiful and life-affirming can be reduced to something with no more consequence, layers of meaning or magic than a road sign: a pointer to help decide if you’re going in the right direction. Besides, when it comes to buying art, who’s daft enough to fork out for a 6 × 4 in acrylic-on-linen they’ve only ever seen as a 6 × 4 cm fuzzy-light-on-glass? Hence ‘online galleries’ are little more than catalogues. Give me oil! Rough canvas! Brushstrokes, pentimenti, impasto, drips and splatters, cigarette butts and elephant dung! Any sign of life, ambiguity, anything but these oh-so-flat, oh-so-regular pixels! The net may be good for a million different things, but if there’s one benefit of every ‘user’, it’s to make them go to a real-life gallery, or their real-life front room, and look at some real-life art as soon as possible! This text was originally published in the October 1997 issue of Art Review

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